The Church of Lost Souls 3

It could have got sticky with the truck driver and, again, Dad had rubbed my nose in it for good measure. I didn’t know how to reconcile the events of the last hour or so but when the Alfa pulled over I thought my luck had changed. I clambered into the front seat and threw my bag in the back, saying hello. I immediately looked on the dash to check the time and it was just after five o’clock. The youth hostel shut its doors to newcomers at six sharp but I couldn’t exactly say ‘YMCA and make it snappy’.

The driver’s name was Fabrizio. He was a dapper Neapolitan chap, late-twenties and pretty camp in his get-up, so I started firming it up in my mind that he was another gay guy out for some fun. We quickly established that, owing to my poor Italian, English would be our mode of communication, so I told him I had to get to the youth hostel by six.

‘Ah YMCA!’ he said. ‘It not so far but I need visit my mamma. Is on the way, OK?’

He must have checked the time because a few seconds later he said that we might not make it in time but that I was welcome to stay at his for the night if that helped. He could take me to the YMCA the next morning on his way to work.

I smiled awkwardly and must have seemed quite rude when I didn’t answer. It wasn’t just because of what had happened that took me towards suspicion, I’d taken sheets of acid and smoked piles of hash over the last two years. Hitching to Italy meant getting away from the Hastings drug scene, which was systematically exterminating a fair few of us at the time. Being the early eighties, criminal records were happily strewn around the place for minor infringements and even the roach of a joint was enough to convict a person. A record meant jobs were harder to come by and there was hardly any work around anyway. What there was was soul-destroying, warehouses, farms, shops, pubs, clerical duties and pharmaceutical factories, which had sprung up from under Thatcher and provided the community with the lion’s share of the speed knocked out on the street.

The only word I knew for gay in Italian was ‘finocchio’, old-fashioned slang similar to ‘faggot’. I thought of trying to mimic a gay person visually, pouting lips, head slanted and with rolled hand at chest, but that would have seemed strange.

‘You not finocchio, no?’ I beckoned, hoping he wouldn’t slam on the brakes and tell me to get out. Then I’d have nowhere to go unless I stumped up large for a real hotel, which would have depleted my funds by half before I’d even woken up in blinking Naples.

It took a few seconds for Fabrizio to understand. As I imagined the word bouncing around in his head I got ready for him to blow his top. ‘Ah finocchio!’ he said finally, and then he laughed.

Looking at me and smiling kindly, he said, ‘no James, I am not, how you say, gay? No finocchio, OK? I like the girls’. He confirmed this with a huge grin while wagging his index finger.

I said thank you and sorry and we laughed a little and then it went quiet. Veering off the motorway we wound our way up a hill and came to an affluent area full of plush houses. Fabrizio stopped the car on the road outside his mother’s house and told me he’d be cinque minuti.

I was still very unsure of what was going on around me. Such is my penchant for woefully pessimistic thought I hatched a whole host of dreadful stories pertaining to my imminent demise. Those Hammer House of Horrors films don’t help in this kind of situation, big old houses and strangers posing as friends, then bloodshed.

In reality I knew Fabrizio was just a good guy trying to help some young buck but the stories wouldn’t stop coming. Cosa Nostra, Naples, heroin, mamma mafia, sex slavery, truck drivers, etc.

He returned after about ten minutes and excused his delay, talking quickly in Italian. We got back on the road instantly.

In an attempt to dispel any harm done in questioning his sexual orientation, I relayed to Fabrizio the problem with the truck driver at the toll booth, and then told him about the other truck driver I met in the hills above Milan before getting to Rome who took me up to some quarry and got weird so I had to scarper. I was, apart from that, an eighteen year-old art school dropout from the UK who loved travelling.

Fabrizio had had similar experiences in Madrid as a teenager. One guy had come in front of him at a hotel pool as he sunbathed and another proposed oral sex in a toilet at a wedding. Unfortunately, he said, it was a passage of rites.

Brightening up, he told me that life got better after twenty-one, or at least it had for him. He remarked that he’d been into drugs for a while but he was now pretty happy playing around as an art dealer in town.

‘You artist, no?’ he said.

‘I gave it up last year,’ I said.

‘Pity. Maybe you try again.’

By the time we got to his place he’d reaffirmed his sexual orientation three times. We parked on the road and went up to his flat. When we got in he went straight for the phone and started calling around his friends to meet up. He had an inglese boy, si bellissimo! he said, his thumbs up to me to suggest female interest.

I’d be sleeping on the sofa bed in the living room so I put my bag down next to it and got out some trousers, a shirt and a clean pair of socks. Fabrizio gave me a towel and told me I could shower if I wanted to. We’d be leaving in ten minutes so I didn’t bother.

At the entrance on the ground floor I went to open the front door but Fabrizio was at the foot of the stairs, signalling to go through an inner door down to the underground car park.

Suddenly all the fear came back. In my mind something was going to happen. Why else would he want to go down there when his car was parked directly outside?

‘Moto, down the stairs,’ he said, with one hand holding the inner door open.

I pointed to the car in the street. ‘The moto’s there.’

Then he got it. ‘Ah no, that,’ pointing to the car, ‘that auto. Down the stairs, moto,’ he said laughing, revving the imaginary engine of a motorcycle with his right fist and mouthing ‘vroom’.

I felt sick to my pitifully empty stomach when I understood. So ashamed, my tired grimace shivered. I said sorry unconvincingly as we trudged down the stairs and he reassured me there was nothing to worry about. I guessed that he must have wondered whether he’d done the right thing in picking me up at this time.

When we got to the basement he led me over to the motorbike, a MotoGuzzi 850, and presented it with a smile, ‘this my moto!’

We got on and rode into town, weaving in and out of light traffic, going through red lights and up little one-way streets. The heavy growl of the bike and the wind in my helmetless hair allowed me to relax and take in the sights. Naples was a wonderfully dirty old town.

When we pulled up on the side of a hill, I thought I was in heaven.

The place was buzzing with laughter. Duskily lit colours were thrown everywhere from flowers and plants and clothing. The view across Naples took us right down to the port.

Fabrizio motioned towards a café with tables and chairs outside and as we walked over I noticed a girl waving at us. When I saw she was the spit of Maria my eyes popped open.

As we got closer, Fabrizio led the way and held his arms aloft to his friends, who had risen from their seats.

‘This is James from England,’ he said, and so passed introductions. There were three women and two guys but all I could think of was Maria. She was even called Maria!

I was seated next to her and we looked at each other for a second.

‘So how’s Giovanni?’ I asked, super sure that she was Maria.

‘Giovanni?’ said Maria sharply.

‘Si, yes, your boy…Giovanni?’ It was then that I realised she was not my Maria.

This Maria’s face went pale. She consulted Fabrizio, who assured her that I knew nothing about her brother (who I later learnt had recently died on a bike in a crash).

I tried to steady things by telling her about the Giovanni in Rome but I’d weirded her out and the damage was done.

I didn’t drink back then but I did smoke hash. With everyone jabbering on in Italian, if there was ever a time that I was gagging for a joint it was then. I wanted oblivion. In amongst all this love was me, wishing only for hash, the YMCA and German girls my age to hang out with. All I wanted was to eat and sleep and get to the YMCA early doors.

But it was such an awful shame. Here was a man who, if I hadn’t been such a paranoid jerk, would have probably let me stay for as long as I wanted. Here too was a drop dead gorgeous woman screaming for a holiday romance with an English boy. Together with their friends I could have found a job in no time.

But then there was me. Me with my head in the clouds and the world at my feet, aimlessly kicking it around like a burst football.