Excerpts & Imagery from Midnight in Rome

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A Reckless Ride Through After-Hours Rome

Mariano kicked the car into gear and barreled onto Lungotevere. I was unable to tell if he was simply excited about the night’s plans or if the coke was already hitting him, but he was driving even more sporadically than normal. He darted between the other scattered vehicles sharing the road as if they were construction cones fixed to the pavement.

We raced along the Tiber. A traffic light ahead in the distance turned yellow. Mariano opened the gas and downshifted. We had to be going seventy.

The light turned red. We were still thirty meters or so from the intersection which formed a T, requiring a turn either right into Trastevere or a left across the Ponte Sublicio. A van and three scooters slowly pulled from their waiting positions at either side of the dark intersection and began crossing trajectories ahead of us.

Mariano let off the gas, preparing for a left turn, with zero intention of stopping. Our car swallowed the repeating left arrows painted on the street below. We were ten meters from the red light.

The van and scooters were visible, but out of our direct path. The intersection appeared clear.

We shot through the red light, beginning a multi-lane arc, wheels fighting for grip under the centrifugal force caused by our velocity.

That was the first time any of us saw it.

A monstrous two-car tram was rumbling down the tracks lining the Ponte Sublico. It was coming from the left, the same direction we were turning. It was right on top of us.

I could see the helpless expression of the conductor through the webbed glass of Mariano’s windshield. How had none of us seen it? The tram was massive. We must have simply not registered it; the trams were supposed to stop at midnight. I could read the LED display above the conductor’s head.

Deposito. Out of Service.

Isabella and Vittoria screamed. My head cleared; my body relaxed. There was nothing I could do at this point.

Mariano reversed the wheel, aborting the turn, rapidly shifting the weight of the car from right to left and aiming us straight for the stunted marble wall lining the bridge. The ground shook and the car rattled as the tram rolled behind us, inches from our rear bumper. I could not believe it had not hit us.

My eyes shot forward. We had about five meters before we hit the side of the bridge. Mariano spun the wheel left again. The weight of the car shifted left to right.

The front right tire collided with the curb and climbed to the narrow sidewalk, then the rear right tire. The car straightened, my door inches from the stone wall.

Mariano accelerated off the sidewalk back to the cobblestone of the overpass.

Isabella smacked Mariano across the head. Vittoria, smiling, cursed at him. I took a deep breath and shook my head as I watched the lights reflect off the Tiber out my window. Mariano laughed to himself.

We sped down Via Marmorata toward Piramide. It was the same way Mariano drove me home most nights. Maybe I was better off asking Mariano to drop me off at my apartment. Maybe I had better save the drum and bass thing for a different night.

We barreled past the pyramid, its white marble stained black at the edges, its apex thrusting toward the moon. The sight of it had grown comforting over the months. It meant I was almost home, only a few blocks from my front door, a fact that elicited a flooding of relief during long walks back from Trastevere, or rainy-day returns from the center, or cocaine-fueled chauffeur rides down Via Ostiense.

We were two blocks from my turnoff.

I should say something.

One block.

I should tell them to just leave me at my apartment.

We careened past my street.

I reached for my seatbelt. If I was going to see this through, I had better take the few precautions at my disposal.

I pulled the strap over my chest and felt around the seat to my left for the buckle. Nothing. I wedged my hand between the back and bottom cushions. The seat obviously folded down and my buckle was dangling in the trunk space. Nothing. I felt and searched and looked again and again but could not find the buckle for the life of me. Then Mariano yelled while jerking the car into a U-turn.

“Cazzo! Sto andando da Mike!” He was going to my place. He realized he had missed the turn. Thank God.

I must have misunderstood something earlier. I thought I had agreed to go with them but Mariano was driving to my place. I must have nodded in agreement to something I had not understood but which had signified a changing of my plan. I had thought it was strange we were continuing down Via Ostiense, past Testaccio, toward nothing but apartment towers and sleeping storefronts.

Mariano doubled back. We were three blocks from my right turnoff.

This had been a lucky break.

Two blocks.

Chance was putting me out of possible danger tonight.

One block.

I had to start opening my mouth more often.

We rocketed past my turn and the pyramid appeared a second time. It gazed down triumphantly upon us as we circled the piazza below before shooting off on a new direction. It then faded out the rear view and the Coliseum approached in the foreground.

My mind raced over what Mariano had said. Literally he had said I am going to Mike’s place. But I had read the context wrong. I had read the context how I had wanted it to be. He had said he was going to my place, but by mistake, on an erroneously programmed autopilot.

We curved around the rear of the Coliseum. I watched its illuminated features pass by Isabella’s window, a stark yellow glow lining the curved marble of each archway against the black of the night sky behind [...]

--excerpt from www.midnightinrome.com

The Legend of the Trevi: Della Città, D’Amore

A cool winter breeze swept across my ears and the back of my neck. The blunt, square buildings rising from the Piazza di Trevi framed the crisp blue sky above.

People were everywhere—European and American, children and grandparents, couples and tour groups. They peppered the tiered white marble seating radiating outwards from the glittering aqua pool of the piazza’s centerpiece. Some climbed the wide center set of stairs; others descended. Still more wandered the grey cobblestone lane at the water’s edge. Street vendors armed with bubble guns or flashing pins or bouquets of roses moved carelessly between the continually replenishing assembly of prospective customers.

Dwarfing everything and everyone, bursting forth from the northern wall of the humbly sized square, swelled the Trevi Fountain itself. Neptune stood centered between three pairs of multi-sized marble pillars. He was framed by a mammoth façade, also marble, which rose above the roofline of the building to which it was affixed. At Neptune’s feet ran a broadening cascade of fountains, the third emptying an arched sheet of white water into the colossal main pool below. To both his left and right a pair of Tritons wrestled with two winged horses, the scene’s extreme fervor trapped in the frozen stone. Fanning from the three central figures, across the entirety of the fountain’s northern half, spread an amoeba of jagged unfinished marble. Countless runs of water careened off the figures’coarse faces. The perpetual sound of crashing water blended with the steady hum of human voices to fill the piazza with that vibrant buzz only Rome seemed able to craft so effortlessly.

I was on the far side of the fountain, leaning against the uppermost metal railing, gazing down onto the lively sight below. Directly ahead, a family was staging a photograph on the polished marble trim surrounding the shallow bath. The father directed the wife and two young girls to lean together, further, then to hold still.

To their right I noticed a couple. They were young, probably seventeen or eighteen. He was tall, dressed in a plain white T-shirt, a beige visor, loose tan shorts, and sandals. She had her dirty blond hair pulled back, her short-sleeved, red-and-black-striped top cut low in front; her hands dug into the pockets of her white cargo shorts. The pair appeared unaffected by the frigid winter air. They smiled and brushed against one another with a sunny casualness.

There is a phenomenon that happens to me, a visual mind trick. I call it Back to the Future vision. It was in the second film of that trilogy where Marty returned to the site of the plot-pivotal dance from the first film, and, from across the parking lot, he spotted his younger self playing out the actions from the original episode. He watched, captivated, as his past self repeated the exact motions from the previous trip directly before him. That is the best way I can describe the vividness of what happens to me.

I knew that Charlotte, with whom I had made my first trip to Italy back when we were together, could not have been there at the water’s edge below me. But the more timeless, permanent, and unchanged the setting, the more vividly the scenes manifested themselves. And I could see the two of us with stunning clarity, playing out the final afternoon of our Italian vacation together beneath the blazing midsummer sun of four years ago.

An aged, peculiar-looking man approached us at the fountain’s edge, one slow step at a time. His tattered brown suit hung loosely on his boney frame; a worn fedora hat shaded his face, his wooden cane clacked along the cobblestone. I could remember his toothless smile, his leathery, sun-beaten skin. I watched our faces smile politely as he began to speak to us in broken English.

The legend of the Trevi, he had told us, was one of the city and one of love—d’amore—he had reiterated with a fluttering fall of his free hand. Tossing a single coin over one’s shoulder and into the fountain’s churning waters ensured a speedy return a Roma. But the tossing of two coins would not only guarantee a speedy return to the Eternal City, but also the promise of falling in love upon that return.

The man lifted his cap and modestly bowed in conclusion. Charlotte and I laughed and began sifting through our pockets. He then slowly moved away from us and into the denser crowds toward the center of the fountain.

I continued to watch us from my perch. In our palms, we fingered the largest lire coins we could find and counted down from three. Our backs facing the shallow rippling water, we flung our hands to the sky and our bronze coins took to the air. Charlotte spun to watch them fall and spotted the three small splashes where there should have been only two. She hit me in the shoulder and my guilty face matched my playfully hollow excuse.

I blinked, and we were gone. The family next to where I had seen us huddled around their father’s digital camera to view the photos he had taken moments before. My eyes lifted to the rugged marble beyond them. Rough streams of water tumbled down their crude faces, staining the white to brown where they spilled.

My eyes lifted higher, to the more furious of the two winged horses. The triton fought with its bit, struggling at the animal’s weight as it bucked the two of them backwards.

My vision moved higher still and met Neptune. A commanding hand cast downwards in the direction of the thrashing creatures at his feet, his dominant figure orchestrated the scene. I fixed on his resilient marble eyes.

You owe me.

--excerpt from www.midnightinrome.com

Nightlife: A World That Should Not Be

One of my favorite words in the entire English language is nightlife. Maybe you think that is a bland choice. Maybe you would have expected something more dramatic, like illustrious or more tortured, like insatiable. Those are good words too, but nightlife, if you take a moment to really look it over, is a term loaded with implications of modernity and human achievement.

It was relatively recently that life, as far as human beings were concerned, ended at sundown. Life was restricted to the daylight hours. The time for living followed the sun. It told you to rise in the morning and retreat come dusk.

In many parts of the world life is still constrained in this way. But in the parts of the world that I had had the good fortune of living in—the cities of San Francisco, Los Angeles, and, most recently, Rome—the setting of the sun meant less the ending of the day, and more the birth of an entirely separate world.

In major metropolises across the globe, people have achieved control over what was once considered unmanageable on a scale larger than a campfire or row of torches—people have achieved control over light. Today we have windowless casinos where time seems to never move, and we have cities that never sleep. We have harnessed electrical energy and spread it through infinite webs of wiring to lift our four-star hotel elevators and light our expansive and exhaustive networks of roadside streetlamps. We can power masses of audio speakers, which reproduce digitally recorded music played on electric turntables in chic lounges, where people drink and dance and socialize, most oblivious to it all—to the progressive development that went into creating a whole other life for civilized man.

It is a life of neon lights and guest lists, velvet ropes, and colorful cocktails in exquisitely shaped glasses, men and women dressed in the height of fashion who have spent hours preparing themselves to exit from the life of the norm—of the daylight—and enter a second, new life, of the night. It is a life that is an extremely modern phenomenon and one which celebrates human invention and creation. It is the defeat of the darkness, victory over the black. The recapturing of time stolen—time previously rendered useless and reserved for creatures nocturnal. It is an entire world that exists beyond the constraints of the sun. A world that should not be. A second life apart from that which was conceived naturally. A night life.

I liked the word nightlife. I liked the concept. Time repossessed. Defiance of the natural order. But the night is far more than a mere extension of the day. The night is another world. And the energy of this other world—of this night life—is something in itself a bit darker, a bit shadier, a bit more suspicious and mysterious. Even if you do not frequent the see-and-be-seens, even if you do not happen to live in one of the world’s major urban capitals, even if your normal bedtime is quarter past nine after a rented DVD you watched with your two cats, you too have felt the effects, the power, the influence of the night.

Why is it that so many first kisses happen after dark? Is it simple probability? Simply a statistical fact that you go out to Chinese dinner or to the latest Hugh Grant import flick—for her sake, of course—around dusk, and it just so happens to be dark by the time you are back at the front steps of her parents’ house, or are on your third round of liquid courage at the local Irish pub, or are sitting parked in your nineteen-eighties Toyota Camry, the engine off, light jazz trickling from the three functional speakers, the two of you staring anxiously into each other’s eyes instead of the beautiful view of the stars above or ocean below or city ahead in the distance? Is it simply that people have to work during the day and therefore only get to the tantalizing and passionate and tempting at a later hour? Or is it something more?

I remember the period of life when sleepovers at your friends’ houses were a weekly event. It must have been around middle school—sixth to eighth grade, or so. Before that time, there was the stage in elementary school when you were too young to conceptualize such an idea and playtime was cut off well before nine o’clock. There was also the period of high school afterwards, when you outgrew sleepovers at your same-sex friend’s houses—that concept now considered strange and emasculating—and you instead snuck around your neighborhood trying to have scandalous and secretive late-night encounters at a girlfriend’s house, which were achieved by elaborate window escapes and bed stuffing—stunts which were, in retrospect, so obvious and contrived that you must thank your parents for playing along so well with your missions impossible.

But that period there in the middle, sixth to eighth grade or so, where you would call home after delivered pizza and ask if you could spend the night at Charlie Marshall’s and Mom would ask to talk to Mr. Marshall and he would confirm it was a welcome idea and you would set up a pair of sleeping bags in the living room and switch off the overhead lights and just lie there with your best friend—those are some of the most revealing and intimate memories I have from childhood.

Opinions, judgments, beliefs, embarrassments—regarding everything from siblings to girls at school to puberty to sex to the very relationship with the person with whom you were conversing—they just came flowing freely from our consciousness to our tongues as we laid there in the faint illumination of the room’s modest nightlight. Why was none of this ever discussed during the day? Why was it so easy to get these ideas to snowball lying there on the floor in the darkness? Why in the world would we get up the next morning and never discuss some of the issues—really relevant stuff—until the next sleepover or sometimes never discuss it ever again?

Now we are older, more self-conscious, and do more self-editing. But the night still pulls at our subconscious, our subliminal, our secrets dying to get out. Why do candlelit dinners bring people closer together—make them feel as if they are the only ones in existence at that particular place and time? There is something that happens to us when we refuse to exit consciousness and instead push onwards, alive, awake, led by the artificial and man-made long after the sky has extinguished, the horizon faded to black, and the world shrunken to that of the diameter of light thrown from the nearest lamppost, or wax candle, or living-room nightlight.

--excerpt from http://www.midnightinrome.com