Searching For Home

Four years ago, when I first began to write my most popular blog story, “Last Dance in the City of Ruins,” I went looking for images from my old home in Naples, Italy on Google Earth. When I’m searching for inspiration, it helps to stir up old feelings and memories, so I’ll often revisit yearbooks, letters, pictures, social media, and even satellite imagery. It was then that I realized that I didn’t know my address there; in fact, I didn’t even know the name of the street we lived on. In my defense, the names were all in Italian for some reason—which is pretty much Greek to me—so I had no idea where to tell Google to look. Apparently “Parco Aranceto, Naples, Italy” meant nothing to them. It probably didn’t help that I couldn’t spell “Aranceto,” which is Italian for “orange grove.” After that, my Italian repertoire is mostly curse words, which are surprisingly unhelpful.

At that point I started to feel kind of stupid, since I could recite every other address I’d lived at from birth to my present home from memory. Which, for a Military Brat, is really saying something, because there have been twenty-one so far. Undaunted, I zoomed in on a major housing tract in the area called Parco Azzurro, which Google had heard of. It’s where we went to mangiare pizza, swim in the pool, hot-rod on mopeds and skateboards, and generally cause the mischief we wouldn’t dare try in our own neighborhood, little Aranceto. From the front gates of Azzurro I traced my way down the virtual road—one click-and-drag at a time—to the all-ages drinking establishment known as The K-Bar, where most of my friends had their first bouts with alcoholism. I knew I could find my way home from there because I’d done it under cover of darkness more than once, even at a dead run a couple of times. So surely I could click my way there from the comfort of my couch, merely 8,695 miles and 9 time-zones away? 

Turns out, not so much. 

In the foreground, little Aranceto. On the hillside, mighty Parco Azurro, home of all mischief and shenanigans. They seemed much further apart when I was young.

I searched for a good long while, clicking and dragging, zooming and panning, until I realized that if Google doesn’t know it exists, you have to wonder if it still does. What a strange power that gives them. It was with great disappointment I eventually concluded that they had razed the old Parco in favor of a day-spa that seemed to be exactly where I left my old home in 1985. How could it be that the place where I smoked my first cigarette, learned how to brawl, and was initiated into the world of Spin the Bottle should be expunged from the Earth? Was it something I said? Still, as much as I want every single place I’ve ever set my foot to be curated as a museum of my youth and monument to my existence, I begrudgingly understood why little Parco Aranceto might be bulldozed in favor of more modern trappings. 

Unita 8, the seventh place I ever called home, was the left-most unit in the right-most block of townhouses.

Most Italians in the area lived in what we would consider to be gated communities, which were called Parcos. The houses themselves were often quite lavish, architecturally speaking; balconies and rooftop terraces were common in even the most modest homes, while tile, plaster, and stucco were the order of the day throughout. Although you wouldn’t know any of that from the outside, since the government of the day had imposed a bizarre beauty tax on the houses. That sounds kind of stupid, but the Italians also elected a literal pornstar to Parliament, expressly because she was a pornstar, so... Because of this tax, the exteriors were often left to neglect to side-step the collector, but the insides were all the more beautiful; paintings, frescoes, and tile mosaics were regular features in even average homes.

Not so at little Aranceto. The Parco was out in the boonies on the back end of Pozzuoli, itself a laconic suburb on the outskirts of Naples, proper. Instead of individual homes like those in the other Parcos, little Aranceto consisted of two tracts of townhouses containing eight units each, which alternated between two basic layouts. We were surrounded on all sides by agriculture and farming. Our name may have meant orange grove, but we were actually ensconced by apricots, peaches, and an inexplicable thatch of bamboo on three sides. Just over the uphill wall was a farm that raised pigs, run by a diminutive and delightfully imperious granny named Mama Nina, who was equally revered and feared by all. 

While other Parcos had dozens of homes in them and were arranged along a complicated system of roads and cul-de-sacs, Aranceto was a tiny straightaway, just an eighth of a mile long. Which I knew because everyday I would run the length of it eight times to get my mile time down so I didn’t fail PE. Or vomit in front of all the girls at the conclusion of our weekly mile-run on Fridays. You know, theoretically speaking?

This eighth-mile stretch was home to Americans on skateboards, Italians playing soccer, and neighborhood-spanning water-balloon fights

Being out in the middle of nowhere, we had a half-mile walk to and from the bus stop each day, where we were the first pickup in the morning and the last drop-off in the afternoon. Such was our status in the pecking order of more affluent, higher-ranking officers whose families lived in much ritzier Parco Cuma. Not to mention how glamorous the bus stop itself was. Being situated right next to the community dumpster, which served the entire area, meant that each day the stop smelled worse and worse, right up to pick-up day. Even now, any time I hear the words “garbage strike,” a chill goes through me. Not sure why.

Depending on who it was, and whether or not you liked them, it was either the best or the worst feeling in the world to take your seat on the bus and look up the road to see someone running late and booking that half mile so as to not have to get a ride to school with Mom and Dad. The school buses were chartered tour buses, more like a Greyhound than the yellow behemoths used stateside, and the bus drivers were all Italians with little patience for privileged Americanos. So just for fun, they’d take off and leave a straggler who was a hundred steps from making it, mumbling “Pazzo Americano,” as they did.

The road leading to the bus stop had farms on both sides, and the farmers were said to be rabid about trespassers. The barbed-wire fences added verisimilitude to this claim, and of course we all knew that some urban legend friend of a friend had been peppered with bird-shot as he ran across one of the fields on a dare. Aside from the blood-thirsty boogeyman farmers themselves—who actually did kill our cat—the fields were stocked mostly with water buffalo, from which was harvested milk for Mozzarella cheese.

The Bataan Death March to the bus stop each day. Where we stood to wait next to the community garbage dumptster.

Only in retrospect does it seem kind of hinkey that we bought these balls of Mozzarella di buffala—sold in water-filled bags tied off with a rubber-band—from a guy with an igloo cooler bungeed to the back of a Vespa, who cruised around hawking his wares like the ice-cream man. A dozen years later, I discovered that consuming the milk or cheese of a water-buffalo that has eaten poison oak/ivy communicates an immunity to you the eater. So while literally everyone else on a ten-person camping trip got poison oak/ivy from the hike, I walked away scot-free. Thanks, Shady Vespa-Dude!

Despite its inauspicious location and design, the homes in Aranceto were charming and cozy. The whole thing was tiled in Italian Marble, which they, of course, just called “marble.” That sounds fancy here in America, but it was cheap as gravel to them. As a result, the floors were always cool, and laying down in the living room on a hot summer day was almost as good as having air-conditioning, which only the rich had. In the winter those same floors became brutally cold, compelling us to wear thick socks, which in turn were slippery death traps on those marble floors. But if you think I didn’t use the opportunity to perfect my Tom Cruise Risky Business slide, you’re nuts.

Acres of Italian Marble. Sliding down the banister in socks not recommended.

Every bathroom came equipped with a bidet, which I only ever used for its intended purpose once. I will not be taking questions on the subject at this time. In another plumbing irregularity, both of the bathrooms in the house were served by the same twenty-five gallon hot water-heater, which taught me to either bear the wrath of my sister or take military showers of five minutes or less. I learned to choose the latter, a habit I am still in today. Meaning the five minute showers, not avoiding the wrath of my sister. Obviously, I couldn't care less about that anymore.

The bidet on the right became our foot-washing station.

The garden retaining wall was a regular hangout spot.

Being out in the Italian countryside, we didn’t have fireworks for the 4th of July, because the date meant nothing to them. But summer nights were warm as bathwater and we often spent them outside, lounging on the limestone retaining wall around the garden in the front yard, watching heat-lightning dance from cloud to cloud. It was there that I had my first true make-out session with a girl, a dark-haired Italian beauty named Francesca. She spoke barely a word of English and I could only swear in Italian, which was surprisingly unhelpful. But she offered me an unfiltered Fortuna with the tattoo of her lipstick on it, which we smoked together. Somehow, we figured out the rest.

Unfortunately, Francesca was also the cousin of my next-door neighbor and nemesis Diego. She was from Bari, on the east coast, and was only in Pozzuoli for a week-long visit that summer. Diego had an obvious crush on her, quite unrequited on her part. So when he caught she and I necking, he literally tried to split my head open with a shovel right on the spot. It kind of put a damper on the mood, but at least we wound up having some fireworks after all.

If we were lacking in traditional fireworks on our national holiday, there were munitions aplenty on New Year’s Eve. The Italian kids were an aggressive and rambunctious bunch that loved to throw ladyfingers and cherry-bombs at us and each other. In retaliation, my buddy Jon and I went up to my balcony and turned it into a shooter’s nest where we loaded bottlerockets into green glass coke bottles, firing them from our shoulders like a bazooka, and raining terror down on Diego and his minions in the street. Leave it to the Americans to up the ante by weaponizing simple fireworks into surface to surface missiles. What can I say? You mess with the best, you die like the rest.

Since we had a huge orchard just over the wall, legions of fruit bats would spend the summer nights revolving in constant orbit around the street lights, swooping to feast on moths and mosquitoes. One night, I was out on the balcony shaking the perennial cookie crumbs out of my sheets, when the elastic edge of the fitted sheet caught a passing bat in it. I hauled the sheet in, not realizing I had a low-threadcount sack-of-bat in my hands. He burst from the sheet, slammed into my chest and turned and flew back into the sheet, ricocheting and rebounding between my face and chest and the sheet what seemed like millions of times, letting out these awful little chirps that sounded like pure panic. He was panicked and screeching. Get that straight. Him. Definitely not me. Finally I threw the sheet off the balcony just to end the standoff. He was gone by the time I retrieved it, but the grit from the asphalt street made it into my bed. Not really an improvement over cookie crumbs.

When we weren’t busy carpet-bombing the place with bottlerockets and water balloons, we’d engage in various other hijinks. The wall at the end of the Parco made for a great place to play spirited bouts of high-stakes—and often painful—Butts-Up. One of the older kids soldered a half-dozen tin cans together to make a Polish cannon, which today would be known by the more politically correct name of “potato gun.” Suffice it to say that it uses lighter fluid and an open flame to fire potatoes—or in our case, stolen fruit from the orchard—for great distances. Say... an eighth of a mile or so.

All the while, the street resounded with music from American boomboxes. My tape collection included Michael Jackson, of course, but equally as important were the soundtracks from “Breakin’” and “Beat Street.” Anything from the Sugarhill Gang, Newcleus, or Grandmaster Flash, because that’s what you need when you’re putting on a moonwalking clinic. A very sad little moonwalking clinic. Diego and friends may not have known what moonwalking was, but they could still tell we weren’t doing it right. Still can’t, to this day. They’d gather ‘round and call out, “Pazzo Americanos!” Since I just now learned what that means as I was writing this, to them I say, “Vaffanculo, stronzi!”

I’m sure Diego would know just what I mean by that.

Today, you can find Parco Aranceto on Google Earth, because thanks to the beauty of capitalism, they're gentrifying and putting up for sale the townhouses we used to rent. In fact, about half of them are now available on Airbnb. So the interwebs are full of images of the seventh place I ever called home. The orchards that used to surround us are gone, and the farm up the hill seems to be a bigger, more industrialized operation. Thirty-some-odd years later, I doubt Mama Nina is there to turn a blind eye to the drunk Americanos coming and going through her operation at all hours. And I'm guessing Diego has moved on to breaking thumbs for the Mafia, which is why I can't find him on Google. Or at least searching the term "Diego, asshole from Pozzuoli, Italy" returns no usable results, anyway. 

Another thing that searching “Parco Aranceto” will bring up on Google are images from “Last Dance in the City of Ruins,” on my blog, which is nice. In all this searching, I’ve managed to dust off my Italian a bit and finally learned the address of my old home: Strada Provinciale Via Cuma-Licola 174, Unita 8, 80078 Monterusciello NA, Italy.

You may not be able to go home again, but sometimes you can Google it.

After gentrification, this is the image Airbnb shows you. Pretty fancy.

Big Wheel Keep On Turnin'

It is my considered opinion that it’s good to be the King. Much better than not being the King. I spent the first five years of my life not being the King, and it sucked. Then I became the King, and all was well. King of what, you may ask? All. Of. It.

Although you wouldn’t know it to look at me now, parts of my life were spent not being totally awesome at all times. In fact, I grew up wearing Toughskins jeans, Pro-Wings tennis shoes, and various other house-brand garments from Zodys, K-Mart, and Monkey-Wards. My parents probably thought I didn’t know the difference between Izod Lacoste and Sears' Braggin’ Dragon, but I did. Oh, yes I did.

Of course, I wasn’t born knowing the difference, I had to be taught. And who better to teach you to that there’s something wrong with you than all the other kids? There you are,  just walking down the street secure in the knowledge that Mom and Dad are doing right by you, only to discover that they let you out the door thinkin' you ballin’, when in fact your Garanimal-clad ass is subject to ridicule in those streets because of their dereliction. It’s child-abuse, really.

Apparently, real Vans have a distinctive waffle tread on the bottom that the Payless version don’t have. Apparently, real Lego are not interchangeable with Duplo blocks, Lincoln Logs do not play well with Frontier Logs, and real Big-Wheels are not made of metal. All of which I discovered the hard way. Walk outside all atwitter with the excitement of new stuff, only to be met with derision in the street over something so nebulous as a stamp, a brand, or a label on your stuff. How the hell anyone knew which one was the ‘right’ one was beyond me. But it was real easy to tell which was the wrong one, because it was always whatever I had. What are the odds?

Of all the egregious counterfeits I ever tried to pass off as ready for prime-time, nothing compared to my metal big-wheel. The popular (read: name-brand) Big-Wheel was a plastic dragster-style tricycle, with recumbent seating and flashy coloring. Mine was brown metal but had chopper-style handlebars on it, which I thought kicked-ass. It turned out that I was wrong about that. Additionally, being much heavier it didn’t have great off-the-line speed, since the inertia was tough for five-year-old legs to overcome. Meaning that not only was it drab, it was slow. So the length of time it took for me to go from excitement about my uniqueness to humiliation for the exact same reason was quicker than popping a Pop-Tart. 

Once other children have deemed something worthy of mockery, your otherwise beatified parents can offer no redemption. So their explanation of the virtues of an indestructible big-wheel meant nothing to me, because durability implies longevity and the spectrum of time. And as a kid there was no such thing as later on, down the road, or in the long-run. All I had was right now, and right now I didn’t fit in. Taking pity on me, my Dad took the big-wheel to work with him at the Naval Base in Monterey. There he had a couple of Mid-shipmen engineers disassemble and spray-paint it hot-rod purple, complete with shiny metallic flakes, which would obviously make it much faster. It was so badass. 

Or it was, until I took it outside. 

“Ha! Look at your gay big-wheel!” Bryan Verbrugge exclaimed from astride his name-brand Big-Wheel. His twin brother Kevin was the first to join in the chorus of laughter and pointing that spread quickly through the semi-circle of other kids. “Ooooh, so shiny!” Kevin cooed, he with his hornet-like Green-Machine—obviously someone that could never be uncool. I’d literally never heard the word “gay,” but at first blush it didn't seem complimentary.

In that moment, I was filled with a hopeless certainty that I could never escape the inherent unworthiness that seemed to attend my very existence. Suddenly, this black rage boiled over in me and I fired up my gay big-wheel, setting a collision course. Do you have any idea what happens when forty-five pounds of five-year-old astride thirty pounds of steel hits ten pounds of an all-plastic Big-Wheel at full-tilt ramming-speed? The effect was spectacular; the suspension forks and that iconic front wheel folded like a pizza-box struck by a sledgehammer.

Both Bryan and I were equally shocked by the result, although our reactions diverged immediately thereafter. He started to scream bloody murder over his irreparably-mangled toy, while I was exultant with the sudden, shocking recognition of the power I and my unique big-wheel possessed. But the exhilaration of my victory was short lived, because his brother Kevin instantly yelled the two most terrifying words that a five-year-old can hear: "I'm telling!" He flipped a quick one-eighty on his agile Green-Machine and high-tailed it out of there. At first, I was worried that he was going to my house to tell my folks, but when I realized he was headed home to tell his own parents I was truly terrified. I took off after him post-haste, with no plan other than to silence him.

With his head-start and the inertia of my heavier ride, there was no way I could catch up to him. That didn’t stop me from pedaling pell-mell after him, as though my life depended on it. When we hit the downhill slope at the other end of Mervine St. near where he lived, something unexpected began to happen: my big-wheel started to pick up speed. Like, so much speed that my feet couldn’t stay on the furiously revolving pedals and were thrown clear, almost derailing my pursuit. Instead, I tucked them in on the bar between the seat and the suspension forks, gripped those chopper-handlebars for dear life, and let my gay big-wheel do its own thing. The greater weight of my shiny dragster on the downhill straightaway allowed me to overtake Kevin and his fancy plastic Green-Machine. 

He looked back just in time to see me and my sparkly-purple steed bearing down on him. I can only imagine the maniacal look I must’ve been wearing to inspire the terror written on his face. When my front tire drilled his right rear tire he immediately spun out of control and crashed, ass-over-teakettle. Like his twin's before him, Kevin's ride was permanently damaged as well, the plastic rear wheel being badly dented, and thus the Green-Machine was never the same.

Over the next several days I finally got invited to join the other kids’ reindeer games—seemingly impromptu sessions of a newly-developed interest in demolition-derby. But given that me and my gay big-wheel were always the target, it soon became clear that there was nothing spontaneous about it, and these kids might not actually be my friends. They were out to get me. But none of that mattered, because my fabulous purple bulldozer was pure steel, and as long as I kept my feet tucked, I was invulnerable to their paltry plastic attacks. Sadly, they could not say the same. Bitches gotta recognize, the King stands alone.

Eventually word got around to the parents that I was the one destroying all the Big-Wheels in town, at which point my own parents attempted to rein-in the reign of O’B The Terrible by teaching me to ride a bike instead. But it was too late, I was on my path and I been ballin’ ever since.

What can I say? You come at the King, you best not miss.

The Circus Never Leaves Town

They say that you can't actually remember physical pain, your brain won't let you. That what you're actually remembering when you think of that broken bone, sprained ankle, or deep gash is the experience of pain, not pain itself. Your reaction to it, not the thing itself. That seems like a rather fine and pointed distinction to make, and I can't say if it's actually true or not. I can say that I remember a moment when all pain and worry and care for anything in this world left me, and it was literally the best thing that had ever happened to me.

On day 6 (of 10) of trying to pass a kidney stone the size of a BB through a short tube of muscle fiber as small as the eye of a needle, I was pacing in a small circle in the lobby of the urgent care center, just sweating like a hooker in church. To kill time, I was trying to decide whether Metallica or Vivaldi on my iPod would go best with groaning, shaking, and otherwise stifling my screams into more socially acceptable whimpers. It's Vivaldi, in case you're wondering. 

As an unfortunate veteran of passing any number of stones, I was well aware that 6 days was way too long. 1-2 days is pretty average, and usually one prescription will do the job of covering up the agony of a jagged mass of calculus and ethylene-glycol tumbling and clawing its way through you innards. For the record, I was already done with my third bottle of OxyContin, having been accused of prescription shopping with lessening degrees of subtlety each time I came back with my hand out. No one ever believes me when I say that Vicodin may as well be Flintsones vitamins as far as my body is concerned, so I instill a lot of suspicion when go straight for the Oxy like a junkie snubbing Methadone in favor of the good stuff. Thank God they can do a urinalysis and rule out any junkie chicanery in these cases.

In fairness to my doctor, I have more in common with said junkie than my affect would indicate, and she knows it. I've discussed my addiction issues openly with her from day one. Which also happened to be the day that I discovered I was passing my very first stone, in February of 2002. That's how she came to be my Doctor, in a moment of purest agony. When you get your second scrip for Oxy, the eyebrows go up and the scan of your chart becomes more deliberate. Like Elaine on Seinfeld, I've never actually seen my chart, but I know somewhere in there it must say ADDICT in all caps. Don't trust this motherfucker. So she's cautious about people like me, because she is absolutely the smartest person to ever put their finger in my butt. It's not even close, really. 

My Dentist tried to give me laughing gas once in order to do a rough procedure on my gums. When I said no, she told me that I wouldn't be able to handle it without it. But she checked my chart, presumably saw ADDICT in there somewhere, and then we gave it a white-knuckled whirl anyway. It turns out I actually could handle it, and I took pride in her telling me that my pain-threshold is off the charts. But really, I was just more scared of what would happen if I let myself have the gas than I was of the pain. 

And it turns out I was right to be afraid. Because on Day 6 of the Rock of Gibraltar's migration out of my penis, they gave me a shot of Demerol to hold me over until they could do all kinds of tests to determine why I hadn't passed it on Day 2. And when the sweet tide of that narcotic hit my brain it was literally the best thing that had ever happened to me. Like, seriously, ever. 

Not for the reasons it would be for you. The cessation of that kind of pain—that mothers of three have agreed is worse than childbirth—is one thing. When someone stops stabbing you with a dull knife that is also on fire, it's natural to be relieved. When the miles-long skein of white-hot barbed wire is finally done being pulled through the 12 inches separating your kidney from your pee-pee, it's Ok to be happy about that. But that's not what happens in my brain. Or at least that not all that happens.

On Day 6, I'd been sober over a dozen years, but that inexorable tide of bliss still blew through every single worry, insecurity, injustice, sin, and woe in the entire world like a weapon of mass exultation. When it hit me, it was like it was the only thing that had ever mattered, the only thing that could ever matter. I felt at perfect ease and yet unstoppable. It's kind of like that moment when the buzz of a good scotch or a nice glass of wine hits you at the end of the day, and those first ten minutes you're sober enough to be cogent and tipsy enough to be at your ease. Now combine that with the apex of an orgasm, the afterglow of great sex, and multiply times infinity.

When I'm at that equilibrium, it's like a the most beautiful harmony of confidence, well-being, wholeness, and love. Like nothing matters, but I can do anything. I can feel the world turn under my feet, God is in His Heaven, and everything is perfectly as it ought to be. Why would you ever want to stop feeling that way? Why would you ever take a break from that sense of connection, and being in the groove of some grand purpose? And if a little is good, then more is better, and there's obviously no such thing as too much. Although if there were, it would be just right. Even now, the condition persists, because drugs are not my problem. Reality is my problem, and drugs are the solution. That is addiction.

I've been sober for 18 years, 9 months, 10 days, 17 hours, and 38 minutes, as of this writing, and it still makes me sad sometimes when I think about the utter completion as a person that the shot of Demerol gave me. Like it seriously competes with my Wedding Day as the best moment of my life. And that's my hind-sight perspective, saying from a sober place that it competes with my wedding day. In the moment that euphoric tide washed over me, it wasn't even close. Hands down, the absolute Best. Thing. Ever. That is addiction. 

Two decades of sobriety are no guarantee of anything, because there is no off-switch. No matter how bad the consequences of going back to that world would be for my marriage, my health, and my career, there is still a part of me that has to be restrained from jumping off that cliff. Because falling feels the same as flying, provided you drop from high enough, and every second up to the moment that the terrible impact destroys my life will be a helluva ride. That is addiction. 

George Carlin once said, “Just because the monkey is off your back, doesn't mean the circus has left town.” But that's the thing. The circus never leaves town.