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By Root 1162 0

We led a useless Roman life compounded of worries about money, two mild hangovers a day (lunch and dinner), and lots of empty talk and not much sex. The long-aproned ten-year-old boy who worked in the café downstairs would take our order over the phone and climb the six flights to our apartment at ten or eleven in the morning with our caffe lattes and our round, dry buns or cornetti. Sometimes he’d come back two or three times a day, always cheerful and uncomplaining, and take away our empties with a professional smile and a snappy gesture. In this city everyone seemed to be stylish; Phillip told me that people would eat nothing but bread for dinner under bare lightbulbs but step out into the square in a bespoke suit swinging Maserati keys that lacked Maseratis. The white-gloved policeman directing the traffic in front of the Victor Emmanuel monument was exactly that—a symphony director. We might cook some sauceless spaghetti for ourselves and the half-wild cats—until I became convinced that they were missing some essential minerals found only in proper cat food and persuaded Phillip to let me serve it to the animals, and they both died in horrible agonies.

Phillip had no money. Once in a great while he’d be an extra in a movie. His mother was a rich American and his father an Austrian nobleman. Phillip had been raised in Mexico, where he’d been valedictorian of his high school class, though now, just ten years later, his excellent, idiomatic Italian had entirely supplanted his once-fluent Spanish. He spoke American with an accent similar to mine but would grope after even some of the most common English words.

I paid his back bills and bought him meals and paid all the rent. I suppose I was a little bit in love with him, though he didn’t fancy me. His queeny ex-lover, a small, skinny Sardinian, pitied me for being “double-bodied.” I asked my Italian teacher what “double-bodied” in Italian meant. She said that Italians were still so close to their peasant backgrounds that they prized an aristocratic leanness that showed they’d never done any physical labor. American-style muscles, in their eyes, were a shameful reminder of rural origins. I stopped lifting weights but I did go to an exercise class at the Roma Sporting Center near the Piazza Barberini where everyone followed the professore’s instructions, and where jumping jacks were called farfalle, or “butterflies.” Every ten minutes the professore sprayed the air with cologne to disguise the shocking smell of sweat.

The gay scene in Rome at that time was pathetic. A few married men sat in a particular movie theater just off the Corso at a certain hour with their raincoats in their laps and might let you jerk them off. A few foreigners, mostly Romanian refugees, would meet at midnight in the Colosseum. I’d get drunk during those endless dinners in the Piazza Navona and go out cruising; usually I’d end up with another American, a big, handsome black man named Ron. Our racial differences would have kept us apart back home (it was the era of the Black Panthers), but in Rome our shared horniness and nationality united us.

I wrote Richard Howard about all of my shoddy adventures. He admonished me, “Here you are in the central city of Western culture and you’ve managed to turn it into some sort of kicky version of Scranton.”

I thought that the most that could be said was that in Rome I’d re-created my life in New York but in an inferior version. Like a marble statue copied in lard. I’d written a screenplay that no one wanted. I’d seen historic monuments only when other Americans visited me. I’d met Farley Granger through my Italian teacher and written my screenplay for him. I’d invested endless hours in courting Phillip but had slept with him only during one drunken weekend when we had emptied several bottles of vodka and rolled around like animals. I’d killed his two cats. I’d learned to speak a halting, broken Italian. I’d drunk hundreds of liters of white wine, many of them with Diana Artom, a painter and poet who was in love with me even though I kept telling her I was