Last Dance In The City Of Ruins

In 1982, my father was an engineer in the United States Navy. As a result, by the time I was 10, I had lived in three states and attended three different elementary schools, and was actually headed for my fourth. Moving around never seemed like that big a deal because we always lived on or near a military base where all the other kids moved around a lot, too. I guess it’s not weird if everyone is doing it, and there was always someone new coming into class and always someone leaving. We all accepted as normal the thing we had grown up doing, and knew no other way. Everywhere we were, everywhere we went, was just a waystation on the road to the next place we’d be from. A new life, every thousand days. Usually, if you came or left midstream in the school year it was because your Mom or Dad was enlisted, or lower-ranking. The officers with families moved during the Summer, rank having its privileges and all.

The Elliott Family Thunderdome.

That’s what we set off to do in ‘82, taking six weeks to make a huge journey across the entire country along the way to that fourth elementary school. It wasn’t my first trip across the continent. When we were stationed in Virginia and Rhode Island we would drive to Colorado or the West Coast for visits with family in the Summer and at the Holidays. I’ve slept through more States than most people have been in. And we didn’t have any DVD players, game consoles or iPods to pacify us, either. Not even a Walkman. You got whatever would fit in a shoebox to bring with you in the car to keep you occupied. With a long, tall glass of “shut the hell up back there” on the side. And not in a minivan or station wagon, but shoehorned all asses and elbows into a Datsun 710. It was like a damned Thunderdome in there.

But my sister and I figured out early on that getting along was the only way to survive. If you messed around with the “I’m not touching you” routine, you were done for. Anyway, it was kind of like having a built-in friend when you showed up in a new town and a new school, and had to do all the work of unpacking your life again and finding a new place to fit in, so we were allies pretty much from the very beginning.  Mom and Dad never had to do the whole “I’ll turn this car around” bit. We’d been trained like good soldiers, and if there were going to be shenanigans, it would never be in the car, the store, or Church. So in the car we pretty much minded our own business and stuck to our own thing. Me with my Star Wars figures, comic books, and word jumbles, her with her Rubik’s Cube and Barbies. History should record that she was the first person to ever figure out how to take a Rubik’s Cube apart to its component pieces and reassemble it in proper order so you can look smart. That kind of outside-the-box thinking is almost more impressive than actually solving it.

The thing that made the 1982 trip different than the myriad of others was that at the end of this road, we would be in Naples, Italy. So our trip across the country was like a farewell tour to the US of A that began in Long Beach, California and essentially traced a giant N across the continent before depositing us at Logan International in Boston, Mass. Extended stops in Oregon, Colorado, Florida and New Jersey were made to visit friends and family, since our latest assignment would take us out of the country for three years, with no plans to return home in the interim. 

Bella Italia!

I have very fond memories of that trip; sailing across massive seas of rolling wheat in the planes, beautiful bayou sunsets on the gulf, body surfing on Florida beaches, touring the Smithsonian, the Liberty Bell, and all the iconic monuments. I even got to shoot my first gun while we were visiting my Dad’s Academy roommate in New Jersey, because shooting guns is what you do when you’re in Jersey. My eleventh birthday came and went on the road, which meant that I got to choose the restaurants we ate in all of that day. Arby’s, Hardee’s, and Tasty Freeze. They bought me some GI Joe figures, Snake Eyes and Scarlet, which are the best ones. The only downers I recall from the trip were the afternoon thunderstorms that rolled in every day in Florida, the sanitation truck-sized cockroaches in South Carolina, and the biting green horseflies in New Jersey. Although in Jersey's defense, they did have these awesome Fireflies that we caught in jars at night.

With so many epic road-trips under my belt by the time I was ten, this actually marked the first time we had ever flown to get to our new posting. In fact, it was the first flight I had taken since I was a baby, too young to remember. The flight was seventeen hours and would deposit us in a time zone that was nine hours ahead of my old home. Or the last place that I was from, anyway. The military knows that there is a fairly steep learning curve when they station people overseas, especially in non-English speaking lands. So they assign you a host family when you arrive, to help iron out the wrinkles. Show you the ropes, teach local customs and taboos, some phrases in the native tongue, that sort of thing.

Our host family was the Tabors, and they met us at the airport. They rescued us from the awful Hotel Americana with its avocado walls and sweltering rooms, putting us up for a couple of weeks while we found a house and waited for our stuff to arrive from the States. They had a son in my grade, Todd, and a daughter in my sister’s, Laura. They were super cool and taught us things like how to flip the Italian bird—which is with forked fingers like a heavy metal salute—and how to eat a proper Italian Pizza Margherita, with knives and forks like civilized people. Eventually we found our own place on the rural outskirts of Naples in a laconic suburb called Pozzuoli.

Little Aranceto, the seventh place I ever called home. Lucky number seven, indeed.

Italians in the south tend to live in what we would think of as gated communities, called Parcos. Typically there were at least a dozen houses—the large ones had eighty or more—with walls all the way around and a single entry gate. We moved into a particularly small Parco called Aranceto, meaning "orange grove,” although we were actually surrounded by peaches, apricots, and impenetrable thatches of bamboo. The Parco was a mixed community of Italian nationals and mid-rank Navy and Air Force officers. The balance of Italians to Americans was roughly equal, which is probably what kept me alive for the duration. 

In the foreground, little Aranceto. On the hill, mighty Parco Azzurro, home of all mischief and shenanigans.

The international relations were somewhat tense for much of the time that I lived there, both on the national stage as the Italian commies Partito Communista Italiano demonstrated around the base and vied for seats in the Parliament, and in the microcosm of the neighborhoods as our cultures clashed in the mix of our coming of age. It was in this milieu that I made my very first enemy in life, who began as an uneasy friend and wound up trying to split my head open with a shovel.

Ah, Diego Serafina, bello ragazzo pazzo. They say you never forget the first person who tries to murder you.

There is a kind of culture shock that occurs when you actually live in a foreign land, instead of just visiting, which no one can really prepare you for. It’s like everyone is playing by a subtly different set of rules, and the myriad of those differences add up over time. It’s not just the obvious stuff like the language. It didn’t take long to get the gist of what people were saying and begin to learn how to communicate, albeit in rough pidgin and lazy patois. It’s the little things that get you. At restaurants, there’s only mineral water to drink, and there’s no finger food. Everything is eaten with forks and knives and an early dinner is 8:00p. People stand much closer to each other in Italy. Where we give each other at least thirty inches to three feet of space, Italians do with two feet or less when they are talking to each other. And what’s more, seeing two people talking on a street corner you’d think that a fight was about ready to break out, with the way they are gesticulating and going on in animated fashion. They talk louder and with more aggression, especially the men.

Traipsing on history at the Cuma Ruins.

It was hard for a little Star Wars nerd like me to get into the groove with that, since I tended to be very passive and reactive. I’m sure it came across as elitist snobbery to my next door neighbor, Diego. He was my age and spoke fair-to-middling English, since his mom Mena was quite fluent and was teaching him. A sure sign of the ascendancy of American influence. In those halcyon 80’s days, there was definitely a chip of American Exceptionalism riding around on the shoulder of us expats. Reagan was waging a cold war on the commies and Michael Jackson was taking over the world. Our team was kicking ass and we tended to act like everyone should be like us. It didn’t hurt that a lot of them wanted that, too, wearing American fashions and paying a king’s ransom for Nike’s and Levis. As an eleven year old kid, it never even occurred to me that someone like Diego might be offended by us rolling into his neighborhood blaring “Born in the USA” from our boomboxes. Like he might want to have some pride in his country, the same as me. Although, if any of us had actually known what that song meant, I doubt it would have inspired American patriotism or Italian offense. But we didn’t, and so our anthem played loud.

At the time, Diego seemed capricious and insane. He was a nappy-headed boy with eyes like the sea after a storm, athletic and olive-tan the year round. The mix of the brazen and the insecure waged a mercurial war in him. He wanted to play, but in a rough-and-tumble kind of way. The base level of machismo that all the Italian boys operated on was much higher than anything I’d ever experienced. It constantly felt like a fight was ready to break out any second, and they often did, beginning and ending for no discernable reason. I was a wee slip of a lad, barely a hundred pounds, and previous to moving into Diego’s ‘hood, had been in one fight. That pushing and shin-kicking squabble had been over a spot in line at the tether-ball court in fourth grade. I lost. I was given to comic books and Dungeons & Dragons more than sports. These were not things that spoke well of me in their culture, because the World Cup was that year, and the Italians were in it to win it. But I didn’t give a shit about soccer, which was pretty much their only sport, and the streets were filled with kids playing incessantly. So unbeknownst to me, everything about me was an insult to the dignity of Italy, and by extension to Diego.

Get you tickets to the Gun-Show!

It got worse whenever his friends were there, like he had something to prove by pushing an American around. But when a few more American kids were out in the street, everything was hunky-dory. Like most bullies, he didn’t like a fair fight. I could never tell if he liked me, or wanted to kill me. We didn’t have the word ‘frenemy’ back then, but if we had, Diego would have been mine. It’s only in retrospect that I begin to understand the forces that were pulling on him, and how my friends and I must have been unwittingly stoking the fires of his indignity, blithely belittling his culture with our bravado and outsized lives. But at the time, his volatile nature—friendly one day, taking swings at me the next—was hard to deal with. If nothing else, I learned to stand my ground, take a punch, and to start the fight myself if I’m outnumbered.

By the time we’d worked our way up from black eyes and bruises to attempted murder, there was a girl named Francesca between Diego and I. But that’s a different story. Ragazzo pazzo, indeed.

The garden retaining wall where Diego tried to murder me

There were no telephones, no English TV stations, and the plugs were all 220v with three in-line prongs that needed transformers and adapters. No electric clocks worked, because the Italian power grid worked on a fifty cycle minute, as opposed to a sixty cycle minute, which meant that our clocks couldn’t tell what time it was. They gained ten seconds per minute, so the microwave clock was always wrong, to say nothing of the fact that it was the size of a two car garage. Power brownouts were common in the summertime, but so were the fireworks of heat lightning up in the clouds and community-wide water balloon fights in the street.

The City of Pompeii, destroyed by Vesuvius, Naples' very own volcano, in 79 AD.

No Big Macs, no Slurpees, no round doorknobs. But there was an active volcano in town that had once wiped out a civilization. Our Datsun 710 seemed like a limo compared to the Fiat penny racers the Italians all drove. They were called cinquecentos, and they were the precursors of today’s Mini-Cooper, and their diminutive size made it much safer for pedestrians when the drivers hopped up on the sidewalk to get around traffic jams. Of course, there might have been fewer jams if anyone had obeyed any traffic lights. Ever. Maybe they disregarded traffic laws because so few of the streets had lane lines, since they were the cobblestone roads that bore the ruts of all the Roman chariots that used to roll over them.

The juxtaposition of new and unimaginably old made for some interesting overlaps. A daily trip on the school bus took us under the Roman Emperor Domitian’s two-thousand year-old aqueduct, the Arco Felice, and past the mythological entrance to the underworld, Lago d’Averno, the Aeneid’s Gates of Hell. We went to the doomed city of Pompeii—complete with ash encrusted cadavers and gift shop—on a school field-trip, and every day lived in the shadow of the volcano that had ended them. All around Naples, there were various ruins of Roman coliseums that we could ride our bikes to and traipse around in unchaperoned. They were all just open and unguarded, like abandoned businesses. I killed many an afternoon at the Cuma Ruins, drinking Orange Fanta from a pop-top glass bottle and debating with my buddies who the coolest X-Man was, all in the various cells where centuries of saints, martyrs, and gladiators had come to meet their fate. There were always smoke butts and crushed beer cans laying around in the sands, where blood had spilled for the entertainment of the masses. It was a city of ruins.

Imagine hanging out here, unchaperoned. Just putting your feet up, drinking a soda, shooting the breeze like it was nothing.

Saturdays often included trips to the open-air markets that stood in where malls would have in the States. At these flea-market-style bazaars if you didn’t haggle prices with the vendors at their stall, they were likely to take mortal offense and challenge you to a duel of honor. All sales final, of course, because if you found a problem, like the dye from the cheaply-made clothes staining your skin, it wouldn’t matter since, in all likelihood, you’d never see them again. You couldn’t be too surprised, since this was literally where they coined the phrase caveat emptor. Latin for “Buyer beware.” A Sunday drive home from church was never complete without stopping at the gravel lot where the roadside baker set up his tent around the outdoor brick oven and baked bread and pizza all day long. That world was constructed of history itself; every possible surface covered in frescoes, friezes, and mosaics that were creaking with age before America was even born.

The Flavian Amphitheater in downtown Naples.

The Church of San Genarro at night.

Museums and reliquaries were as ubiquitous as 7-11’s back home. Mummified cadavers, Botticelli sketches, and marble statuettes polished liquid smooth were commonplace, the off-hand relics of the empire that fell before the empire that fell while giving birth to my country. All treated like just another roadside attraction, no different than the world’s largest ball of twine we saw on the way through Missouri. Just down the street from our house was a church where the faithful came to see San Gennaro’s blood re-liquefy each year during Holy Week. The church had been built at the spot where his head came to rest after departing his shoulders and rolling down the hill subsequent to his martyrdom and decapitation, which I thought had a certain ghoulish charm. It was considered a bad omen if his blood remained in its dusty coagulation in any given year. I’m sure he would have agreed.

But no matter how strange and wonderful this world was, it paled in comparison to the other new realm I entered soon after our arrival. Junior High.

The Happy Horseshoe in Agnano, nextdoor to the US Naval base. That's Naples American High School, to you.

Since we were overseas, every American kid living in Naples went to one of two schools, Pinetamare Elementary, or Naples American High School. They bused us in from far and wide, the elementary was in the bucolic northern suburb of Lago Patria, but the High School was in Agnano, in the center of the action, next door to the US Naval Base. All of this real estate was leased from the Italian government, so NAHS was a Mussolini-era administrative building that had been retrofitted with lockers, a gym, and a truly disappointing cafeteria. I mean, there we were in the heart of arguably the finest cuisine in the world, and I couldn’t get a decent risotto in the joint to save my life.

The building had three floors and a basement, and was U shaped, which earned it the nickname Happy Horseshoe. The Jr. High and High School were in the same building, but they kept the Jr. High students segregated to the basement until the 8th grade, with upperclassmen on the top floors. With six grades and a population of about eleven hundred, that buffer was probably wise, especially given the age range of twelve to eighteen. If there’s a more volatile window in the human life-cycle, I can’t think of what it is.

During those years we make some of the most pivotal decisions and relationships of our lives. They are the triumphs that define us, the wounds we never forget, and the collective negotiations that assign us the social strata we will operate in, possibly for the rest of our days. The horrendous chemical warfare going on in our bodies should be banned by international law, or at least kept vigil on by Amnesty International as a human rights violation. I mean, pimples prove that the Devil exists and that he hates us. Bra straps, hardons, periods, fashion, music and dancing? Isn’t any of that shit against the Geneva Convention or something? ‘Cause if it ain’t, it oughta be. It’s a wonder any of us survived.

The Summer between 6th and 7th grade is when everything really changed, and life began to be defined by a new set of rules. Unwritten to be sure, but inviolable all the same, and a harbinger in microcosm of the kind of changes that rule the rest of our existence. The kids who became popular from that point on had somehow deciphered this arcane knowledge and had spent the Summer gearing up for it, understanding that it was time to adapt or die. Of course, some of us were a little further behind that curve than others. Some of us thought that you just showed up at the bigger school and went right on with the buddies you already had, but maybe the math got a little harder is all. Turns out that was the least of my worries. The math was the easy part. 

What was hard was that I didn’t get the memo about the Star Wars and GI Joe stuff. That shit was out. I didn’t know not to sit in the front seat of the bus. I didn’t know that the label on my clothes and shoes mattered. Toughskins were gone. Bellbottoms? Dude, it’s 1983! It turns out I needed an actual, defined hairstyle that involved feathering somehow, whatever that meant. Kickball was no longer a game one engaged in, and the fact that I could always be counted on for at least a double from the plate, and was a decent middle-relief pitcher suddenly meant nothing. It was like having my currency devalued overnight, and suddenly I couldn't afford a loaf of bread.

Of course, the only way to learn all of this was the hard way, with relatively calm days breaking up what was otherwise a steady stream of faux pas and mortification. Suddenly, it mattered if I took a shower, or if my socks matched. Apparently there are some colors that do not go together. Clashing? What is this madness you speak of? Whatever you do, don’t be the last guy to learn these lessons. He’s the one who gets left holding the bag of derision and mockery, like the rest of us were just born being cool and this poor bastard was hopeless. Sorry, Howard Griffith. You didn't deserve the status of pariah. There just had to be someone beneath me, so that the pointing and laughter kept rolling right along.

Galactus and Wolverine!

The good news was that, according to the new cool rules, I was allowed to keep the comic books. No one gave you too hard a time at school, and some of the middle management upperclassmen would even steal a couple from me on the sly. They always returned them, which was surprisingly decent, and it let me know that I was slightly less uncool than I’d previously imagined. Still, one had to be circumspect about how much of that they presented in mixed company. The ladies were not necessarily lovin’ Galactus and Wolverine. That was probably the most startling change to have occurred, and it happened overnight: The girls. Through some sleight of hand, a switch had been made, right under my very nose, and I was now compelled to care what they thought. So it might behoove me to keep the comic books out of sight, and perhaps not bring up Captain America any more than was absolutely necessary.

Mini and Tanya, bad-ass chicks!

The girls suddenly seemed different. With some it was obvious. Melissa Israelson had cut her hair to a Joan Jett helmet, and now wanted to be called “Mini.” She was not Punk, she was Nu-Wave. Tanya Treat had died pink and purple stripes into her hair and wore a jacket with a Sex Pistols button on it. She was not Nu-Wave, she was Punk. These overnight transformations were loud, but they both had the chops to pull it off, and those that mocked, or even questioned, were eviscerated with haughty scorn. Still others had changed in more subtle and interesting ways. The kind of bewildering nuance that defied description, but was inescapable nonetheless. Some shift in dimension, a soft geometry of proportion that was so captivating. Heather O’Neil and Erin Carzoli had legs now. I mean, I guess they’d always had legs, but now they had legs, you know? And like some exotic bird that had previously existed only in myth, Kim Weber was rumored to be shaving her legs. Scandalous! It didn’t even matter if it was true.

Heather and Erin with those legs.

In addition to all these perplexing distractions, other forces were exerting themselves, divvying us up into different teams. Previously the teams had been boys vs. girls, or the people you wanted on your dodgeball team in PE, or not. The kids who raised their hands in class and those that didn’t. No longer. Now we had haircuts and de facto uniforms that decided things. We smoked, or we played sports. We had our bands and our fashion to tell people what team we were on now. Journey and Foreigner on one side, Iron Maiden and Judas Priest on the other. Polo and Izod vs. OP and Hang Ten. Jordache vs. Levi. Name brands vs. knockoffs. Geeks to the left, jocks to the right. All these arbitrary forces that were deciding the fate of terrified kids. Mike Cournoyer had been shaving since the 6th grade and was the size of a gorilla, so he fared better than say… a hundred pound comic book nerd. Geeks, freaks, jocks, stoners, metalheads, sluts, dorks, shoprats, and on and on. I looked up one day and realized that my elementary school buddy, Jason Terracio, was now a Metal Neo-Stoner that I didn’t know any more. When did that happen?

My pals Christy S, Heather P, Betsy B, and Ethan M at Castel Nuovo
on the Naples Waterfront.

Of course, these machinations are all pretty standard, and go on in every school on Earth, but they were made more complicated by the fact of our geography and circumstance. Our parents were military and had actual, literal ranks. My Dad was a Lieutenant Commander, essentially middle management.  There were some that were superior rank, but more that were subordinate. And that factored in somehow, because it meant that my Daddy could beat your Daddy up, or at least order him around. It wasn’t any kind of conscious motivation in our little Darwinian melodrama, but it was another layer of complexity that played a significant role for us, rather like race might in a US Public School. The military is one of the most well integrated institutions in the world, so we’d all spent our lives living and playing with whomever fate and the military threw us together with, accepting as normal the thing we had grown up doing, and knew no other way. But we had our unique prejudices and issues nonetheless. 

Spirit Week: Flash n Clash, Toga Day, Punk Day

The military’s rotation of personnel was another significant dimension in our social hierarchy. New families arrived every four to six months—to replace all those that were leaving—and brought with them the things we’d all missed in our absence from the homeland. There was a significant lag between what was happening Stateside and our little world of Piccola Isola d’Americana, so the newcomers came bearing cultural intelligence and mysterious totems of things to come. They brought VHS and Beta with them. They brought skinny ties, parachute pants, neon clothes, and checkered Vans. David Bowie and Flock of Seagulls music (and haircuts) came like smallpox with the missionaries to the New World. Those poor souls that arrived as vanguards of the new were at first mocked viciously by people who were wearing two year-old fashion and haircuts. But when enough people showed up with leather ties and culottes, with crimped hair and mohawks, all the little lemmings lined up to start pegging their pants as the social strata shifted again. 

And it wasn’t just fashion we were late on. The one American radio station only broadcast for a few miles around the base and mostly played adult contemporary, news, and weather. No new music. Movies took almost a year to get to our theater on the base. TV shows only arrived on VHS and Beta tapes which then made the rounds like coveted moonshine batches during prohibition. Remington Steel, the A-Team, and Knight Rider were marvels to us. New music took the form of home-made cassettes with hours of bulk-recorded radio broadcasts from home, or VHS recordings of random MTv videos. And not everything translated. In fact, some things never made it over at all. During that three year absence, I missed the advent of Hulk Hogan and professional wrestling, Square Pegs, and New Coke. So I never figured out where the beef was, or why we were looking for it, and my ambivalence toward Sarah Jessica Parker and the World Wresting Federation continues to this day.

Letters took almost two months to come and go between the States and us, and phone calls had five second lag-times and cost four dollars a minute, which made communication with home impractical. We were pretty much on our own. But that isolation also united us. We were like an embassy far from home, a little island of America. We all adored Bella Italia; the sumptuous food, the museums and history, the gorgeous countryside, and most especially the warmth and generosity of the Italians themselves, a vibrant and lusty people. It was a unique privilege and a life-defining experience to be immersed in that wonderful world. And yet…it was still “The Other.”

Our patriotism and school spirit being contained in the center of a vast foreignness tied us together and eliminated much of the cut-throat viciousness that would ordinarily have been at work in our midst back home. The school and base were considered American Soil by the Department of Defense, and everyone born at the hospital was automatically an American Citizen. Piccola Isola d’Americana, a little island of America.  The only time we ever competed against other Americans was when we played sports against military bases in other parts of Italy. Aviano, Sigonello, Palermo, Vicenza. My blood still boils at the very mention of their names. Gearing up for games was a huge part of our lives together. Our boys may as well have been soldiers going into harm’s way, and we rallied around them with a strange fervency, ferocity even. We had pep rallies, we made banners. There were skits and cheerleading. Things were burned in effigy. And of course there were the dances. God help us, the dances.

The Banana Bus wins the Spirit Week competition for best skit!

The goofy grin all the ladies loved.

Of all the terrors that haunted me in the Thunderdome of Junior High, dancing was second only to being stuffed into a locker. Thankfully the latter didn’t happen much. Owing to some amount of providence and good fortune, I sat a little higher in the ranking than my fashion sense or athletic abilities would otherwise have merited, so I was mostly left in peace. On a spectrum of social Darwinism, I scored high among the nerds, being cuter (pretty eyes and smile, the girls said) than most of those that shared my IQ percentile, but very low amongst the rankings of the popular kids. I had one toe in their world thanks to a combination of lucky associations with guys like Todd Tabor, Jon Fitzsimmons, and Andy Viglucci. Somehow I had managed to not sever those ties in the social flailing and reshuffling of Jr. High. 

Todd had been part of my initial entrance into Italian culture, and although we didn’t wind up being that close in elementary, things had resurrected somewhat in Jr. High. He was a prankster and instigator, but irrepressible fun and loved by everyone. Jon Fitzsimmons moved into my Parco and raised our collective cachet considerably by doing so. Kind of put us on the map. Fitzy had an easy charm and confidence, but was very accepting of everyone, which gave him a populist appeal. He was quite the clothes horse and had singlehandedly introduced us to popped collars, and Polo shirts. Not to mention Hall & Oates. The ladies loved him. Andy Viglucci was another story entirely.

The holy trinity of good times: Viglucci, Fitzy, and Tabor.

Andy and I had somehow been maneuvered into a fight with each other the year before, at Pinetamare Elementary, during his first week in school. I don’t even know how it came to happen, we barely knew each other, but it felt very Machiavellian. Like a bunch of bloodthirsty 6th graders had decided they wanted to see a fight for its own sake and had arranged one through cunning strategy. Fight, fight, fight! Neither of us had wanted to do it. Me, because I already had Diego as my first enemy in the world, and needed no others. Him because it was his first week in a new school in a foreign country. Through a strange confluence of events we wound up at a table in the cafeteria together, leading everybody through the chorus of “Don’t Stop Believing” by Journey. Somehow that little singalong drained the momentum out of our rush to combat, like the Jets and the Sharks working it out in song, saving face for both of us. We wound up being friends instead. No one got me into more trouble than Viglucci; a summer's ban from mopeds and skateboards in general, and a permanent ban from Parco Azzurro in particular.

All of which is why “Don’t Stop Believing” is the greatest song ever written.

So between those friends and my usefulness in science class and certain PE activities, I managed to keep my head above water and not sink down with my nerdly brethren. When it came to baseball and basketball, I couldn’t hit water if I fell out of a boat. But when we played dodgeball my mongoose-like reflexes often made me the last guy standing, and a certain fleetness of foot and strategic guile made me a force to be reckoned with when we played “Steal the Bacon.” It’s bizarre what creates social status in the world, but I had some. Not a lot. But enough that when I asked Lisa Rizzo to dance, she said yes.

The one and only Lisa Rizzo.

Lisa and I shared a couple of classes, and sat right next to each other in Ms. Settembre’s Social Studies class. She was the kind of New Jersey Italian girl that was awesome to know in real life. She was tough as nails, and had that all-knowing "fuhgeddaboudit" accent, but still wore her heart on her sleeve. I knew because I would always pass her notes in class to the guy she had her eye on, a buddy of mine, Ethan Myer. I taught her how to fold the note into that little origami envelope that we actually thought encrypted it somehow. Ms. Settembre was a great teacher, really funny and engaging, but she had no sense of humor about kids passing notes. At all. If she intercepted one, she would read it aloud to the whole class, which was known to be the most mortifying experience possible. Thanks to my subversive instincts, we never got caught once.

The unattainable Betsy.

Lisa had a very inviting way about her, and the kind of warm, brown eyes that made you want to tell her everything. She always laughed a big, open laugh at even the lamest jokes. She was the Marisa Tomei of the Happy Horseshoe, and the first person I ever told about my secret crush on the unattainable Betsy Bina, who sat on the other side of me in Social Studies. Occasionally, Lisa and I would sit through lunch in the Social Studies room talking about Ethan and Betsy. Ms. Settembre liked us pretty well because we actually raised our hands in class and kicked ass at World Capitals, so we got a few more inches of slack than most. Lisa would always try to get me to tell Betsy how I felt, but I never could work up the courage. I would listen and nod as Lisa cajoled me, staring out the window at Vesuvius, the Volcano in town.

A room with a view, one available out almost any school window. Vesuvius towering over us like a beautiful threat.

Ash encrusted.

Whenever I thought about laying my cards on the table with Betsy, I would find myself wishing that Vesuvius would blow its top and bury us in ash like it had Pompeii, to spare me the horror. Naples is pretty active tectonically, and tremors were fairly common. You could always tell when one was coming because the needle of steam that issued from Vesuvius' caldera all day long would stop, and the reek of the Solfatara mud flats would increase dramatically. The longer those conditions persisted, the worse the tremor would be. I was in Ms. DiPaolo’s art class one day when a tremor broke the window, so I could always hope.

At some point Lisa switched tack and started trying to get me to at least go to one of the dances, so I could have a chance to ask Betsy to dance. It was safe and harmless, she assured me. Of course she was also trying to get me to go so that I would bring Ethan along, and then maybe he would ask her to dance. But she was the kind of girl that could multitask in getting what she wanted and still care about you, too. I don’t think I ever took any of her advice, and was poorer for it for sure. She was pretty bummed when she found out neither Ethan or I had plans to go to the big Homecoming dance.

Nerdly Bretheren: JB, Eric B, and Ashley M.

The Naples Wildcats had been successful in demolishing Vicenza Cougars, and we were riding high on school spirit, so it seemed like Ethan and I were the only guys not planning to be in attendance. Even some of my nerdly brethren, James Brush, Eric Buss, and Ashley Marion, were going to be there. Hell, even my estranged Pinetamare Elementary buddy Jason Terracio was going. But I was adamant in my refusal to go. Irrationally so. It was semi-formal, so I would have to come up with a tie and figure out how to tie it. And in the unlikely event that I succeeded in that not inconsiderable task, I would still have to go to a dance and… well, dance. So I was definitely not going.

Fitzy and his all-seeing Mom, Mrs. Fitzy.

I maintained my stubborn vigil, even as I hung out with Fitzy while he got ready to go. That was my mistake. At home, my parents had no idea there even was a dance, so they couldn’t question or encourage. But at Fitzy’s such was not the case. Mrs. Fitzsimmons was the wife of a pastor and a very social lady, so when she found out I wasn't going, she wasn’t having any of it. She informed me that I was going, then walked two doors down and told my parents, picked up a shirt and slacks and came back and handed them to me and told me to get dressed. She had the kind of affable imperiousness that some women have, and she brooked no delay, but somehow you still loved her for making you do the thing you only thought you didn’t want to do. By the time I had dressed, she had one of Fitzy’s knit ties already formed into its noose waiting to lasso me with it. It looked like a burgundy sock, but it matched the clothes she had picked out of my closet. I was lead to the car and driven to the dance in a daze. How had this happened?

When we got to the club house at Carney Park where the Jr. High dance was being held, she turned to me in the back seat and told me that I could hang out and be a wallflower all night if I wanted to, but I had to dance at least one slow dance with a girl if I wanted a ride home. She assured me that she would be checking to see if I had. As a kid, I assumed her omniscience in this matter, as well as her ruthlessness in enforcing the policy. I blanched at that and started frantically rolling through the options in my mind. I couldn’t call my parents, because nobody had a phone, and there was no way I could hoof it six miles home in the dark, because I couldn’t even find my ass with both hands and a flashlight. So in we went, Fitzy at ease and ready to hang out with his friends and all the girls that were hoping he would ask them to dance, me on a suicide mission with an ultimatum hanging over my head. 

Go Wildcats!!

The party people!

There were green and white banners, streamers, and balloons in keeping with the school colors. Folding chairs and tables, the obligatory punch bowl and insufficient lighting. The bored chaperones had already taken up strategic positions and settled in for a long night. The DJ was slapping records down as fast as he could and the unbroken stream of 80’s gems just kept on coming. Def Leppard, The Scorpions, Foreigner, Journey, Pat Benatar, Joan Jett, Duran Duran, REO Speedwagon, Kenny Loggins, Cyndi Lauper, Madonna, Quiet Riot, Twisted Sister, Hall & Oats, The Cars and ZZ Top. At some point there were enough of the right people in attendance— Viglucci, Heather Pearson, Jenifer Knight, Ben House, Christy Sooy, Todd Tabor, Traci Maher, Craig McAllister, Darren Calvert, Kara Milar, all the biggies—to achieve the critical mass to get a party started. We really had a lot of school spirit, and despite the hazing and abuse we were subjected to as Jr. High students, this was something that united us as a school, and was confirmation to us all that we belonged to something. Our big brothers would knock us around and put us down, maybe stuff us into a locker occasionally, sure, but you better believe they would beat the shit out of anyone else that treated us that way. So we danced. 

There was some breakdancing, which was in its infancy then. A lot of white-80’s-flailing. Just watch any John Hughes movie to see what I’m talking about. I joined in on a lot of that, and I wasn’t any worse than anyone else, which I guess is the name of the game in Jr. High. And pretty much everywhere else, come to think of it. How the hell we’re supposed to reconcile the need to fit in and stand out at the same time is beyond me. I spent a bunch of time with friends who had joined the other social rankings and drifted away over the year. With everyone in the common semi-formal uniform, many of the guys in shirt and tie for the first time ever, no one could remember why we weren’t friends anymore. We were again united, if only for that night, in school pride, victory, and relief at crossing some line we had no name for and hadn’t even dreamed existed. 

The slam-dancin' Andre Dames

A guy named Andre Dames was wearing the same tie as me, which was apparently connection enough for him to want to teach me how to slam dance. It’s that airborne chest bump that you see football players do in the endzone today. He and I got that party started, and had the best coordination and highest vertical clearance of anyone. That was all Andre, he could dance and clearly knew what he was doing, but I rode the shit out of those coat tails anyway. I had a blast, and discovered for the first time in my life that the fear of a thing is almost always worse than the actual thing itself.

Even so, I still spent the whole night sitting out every single slow dance. I knew the clock was ticking, but I just watched as my buddy JB danced a slow song with Betsy. He had no idea how I felt, since I’d told no one but Lisa, but that didn’t stop me from wanting to kill him. Eventually everything must come to an end, and as the last song of the night was announced I was filled with panic. I looked around at a room full of people starting to pair up, and felt that old familiar feeling of not wanting to be picked last for a team. I knew I had to make my move because I could just feel the all-seeing gaze of Mrs. Fitzsimmons watching me like the Eye of Sauron. I spotted a small handful of girls that were not being stalked yet and moved toward them.

The first to say no.

I came to Heather MacKay first. We had an uneasy alliance in Math class, owing to our shared hatred of Mr. Arena, and would pass notes for the other and even cheat-sheets sometimes. She seemed like a safe bet, but I’ve never been as nakedly appraised and found wanting in my life, before or since. She looked me up and down, and just shook her head, no. I’m amazed I didn’t spontaneously combust, on the spot. But I was being driven by a real, inexplicable panic and felt like there were only seconds left to redeem myself, so I kept moving.

In fact, only a few seconds had passed when I laid eyes on Lisa for the first time that night. I could see she was scanning the room, just leaned up against the wall, utterly winsome in peach chiffon and taffeta. Obviously, Ethan had not come, but for some reason I almost didn’t ask. She was most of the way to being my buddy’s girl, and we both knew that the other was not the one. But that one beat of hesitation was long enough for her to catch me looking. She smiled an easy smile that said yes before I could even ask, and the whole world changed.

The first to say yes.

Thank goodness she seemed to know what she was doing, because I immediately felt numb from the hair down. My God, I was about to touch a Girl! I walked with her to a not-too-empty spot on the floor and she put her hands on my shoulders like it wasn’t anything, which meant I was supposed to put my hands on her waist. I think I managed to do that without help, and she began to lead us subtly until I could find my footing and rhythm—such as it was—and begin to move in time with her. Her hair was up, which I’d never seen before. We were mere inches from each other, but she was just smiling and talking like we were in Ms. Settembre’s class, hanging out and eating lunch from brown bags at our desks. I wish I could remember a single word she said, but I was busy arriving at astonishing conclusions while Journey sang “Still They Ride.”

Did you know that a woman’s center of gravity is in her hips? That’s why they sway in that beguiling way when they walk. And when they dance. My hands were gingerly resting on her waist, as her hips swayed in 3/4 time, and I marveled at her soft, gracious curves and how utterly, wonderfully different she was than me. At the complete "Otherness" that was Girl. I understood completely how a snake could allow itself to be charmed into harmlessness by such forces. It was as chaste a moment as a thirteen year old boy can have with a beautiful girl in such proximity, and I was totally hooked. I never missed a single school dance from that moment forward.

When I got in the car Mrs. Fitzsimmons took one look at me and smiled. She didn’t even have to ask. I spent the next several days high as a kite on the most potent drug known to man. Often imitated, but never duplicated. When I saw Lisa again on Monday I was still dazed, but somehow knew I had to choose to be smart, and not act on the powerful crush she had generated in me with her kindness and beauty. She wound up being Ethan’s girl for some time to come; eons by Jr. High standards. It was inevitable, so I pushed him toward her and advised her the best I could. He never knew. The crush went away in time, as they are wont to do, but she still saved a dance for me at every school function, and I always took it.

Muldoon, Knight, and Maher. Perennial favorites on the dance-floor, all.

What I came to realize was that those intense feelings were bound up in an inexpressible gratitude to her for endorsing me. For telling the world that I was OK, and not any worse than anyone else. At helping me across what seemed an unbridgeable gulf between childhood and young adulthood. It’s not necessarily a distinct threshold, more a direction that you move. But boy, that first step's a doozy. There were other dances of course, and even Heather MacKay said yes later on. And Erin Carzoli, and Heather O’Neil with those legs. To say nothing of Katie Muldoon, Jennifer Knight, Tracy Maher, and Michelle Miller; perennial favorites on the dance floor, all. I found myself ensorcelled a few more times, although never again with that dizzying intensity.

That easy Italian smile.

That initial deposit of confidence is owed entirely to Lisa Rizzo, and I’d hate to think of what the vig is on a debt like that after all these years. Every interaction with every woman since then owes a little something to that easy Italian smile. And even when I thought they were lost to the sands of time, the legend of both Lisa and Betsy came back to find me through a truly byzantine series of preposterous coincidences over a dozen years later and nine time zones away. But that’s a different story.

I never told Betsy how I felt, which kind of set up the template of martyrdom and broken-heartedness that I lived by for years following.  But in the days that remained, I did work up the nerve to ask her to dance in that city of ruins. She said yes.

A city of ruins: The Necropoli in Pompeii.