Chapter 1 from The Rotten Bridge, A Gypsy Love Story

from The Rotten Bridge by Paul McConnell
1.
I am coming to see YaYa and if you must that is the plot. That is always the plot. I've hung up my rail pass and the keys to my other life and I am drowning in a river of her. But let explain before I lose my breath, while I can still conjure her. Tonight I boarded a boat in defiance of anything sensible. You see a ferocious storm was battering the island and my stomach was doing flips ever since the pizzeria where I had to ask the waitress to turn on the water so I could use the toilet. Even the plumbing was rotten.
Really all the place had going for it was the waitress, the proprietor's daughter, and isn't that how it always goes - a shy girl with a stammer and bad teeth and yet homely good looks that somehow pull you in?
The truth is she reminded me of my sweet Cassi back home. Not her teeth really, or even her looks. Just because. Because I was missing her right then and she used to tell me stories about being an awkward young girl working at a Pizza Hut in Pennsylvania.
In Cassi's stories as an only child she is stranded on an island too with nothing but her imagination. When she was a teenager all the boys made fun of her because deep down they were afraid she might actually say yes. She told me as much herself. Anybody that was nice to her, she said.
I get the same feeling with this one, standing in her mother's pizzeria in her wallpapered world of rock and roll. As she takes my order she points to posters and playbills from concerts she swears she's attended all over the world, mostly from monster rock bands whose heyday was before her time. She even has concert ticket stubs that put her at two ends of the earth on subsequent weeks and tour shirts to prove it.
She goes on about them while I eat. I can't take a bite without her. She arrived with the pizza like a condiment and sprinkled herself at my elbow, talking with a slowness that made me want to chew through the table. And now it was a tug of war between the cheese and her monologue and I didn't want to know about it. I was already sick of her suffering.
I put my head down and ate the rotten pizza. This poor girl was marooned on the island of Sardegna with a virtual link to the outside world and I wanted to strangle her with her apron. I wanted to put her on a lifeboat once and for all. I swear I would've bought her a ticket to Rome right then and helped her find a real live concert if I thought that's what she wanted. But that would've made her sad. She would've felt dumb and cheated by her life.
She was better off dee-jaying from the kitchen where she was safe. She'd never catch on fire at a club that was over capacity and she'd never wake up alone in a busted-up hotel room. Maybe I should have listened to her broken record. She probably could have helped me. She probably could have sat me down outside and made me listen to that howling wind and those crazy birds hiding in the trees and she might have said something about devotion, about Cassi living out her own sentence of seven years with her vices intact, waiting for me to say yes to a family, waiting for me to come home from a summer romp in Europe, grown-up and acting like a man.
But that's rear-view tenderness after what I've done. Besides, I've already called YaYa, and if she didn't exactly jump at my idea to come to Rome, she didn't say no either. It would be worth the rough trip across the sea just to surprise her and see her face although I didn't expect a homecoming. She was about to lose her apartment because of me and her job, and her old man was forever moving out, a tenuous balancing act than required more than the dirty umbrella I was offering.
I finished my meal and tipped the pizza girl. She stood in front of me, staring at my beat-up army pack, and dusting the flour from her delicate arms, while she mouthed the words to some U2 anthem. Her mother, who had been keeping an eye on me from behind the counter, now came out to say good-bye and shake her daughter free. She dried her hands on her apron and smiled. I was still their only customer. I got the feeling that if I grabbed the girl and walked her out of there no one would protest. I could take her to Rome just for the company and then pimp her off for being so pathetic. At least that's what her mother's eyes were telling me.
I stood up and lingered. I wanted to say something - that I was content, that the pizza was good, that they had a nice place but I couldn't lie in their tongue. Instead I bought a melted ice cream and hiked to the tram that would take me to the harbor.
At the port cafe, after a couple of beers to steady my stomach, I went to the gift shop to buy some wine for the trip because that is how you make friends in the cheap seats, especially on the overnight leg.
I know because I'm always seated next to the lunatics. For instance once I shared a train cabin with a Romanian prostitute who was border crossing illegally to work. She was going home on the red-eye with two very heavy duffel bags that I helped her situate.
Along the way, because we had nothing but my wine, she opened one of her body bags to show me that it was filled to the zipper with tiny cellophane packages that squeaked like mice when she dug in with her hands.
She sifted through them like a prospector and fed me, having me compare the different cakes and fillings, telling me they were like gold to her, and that to have them at home, locked in her bedroom, where she could play with them, stack them, cupboard them and select them was forty pounds of individually wrapped heaven.
Speaking of the cheap seats - there are those that will come later, like the fat German man on the long haul, the mountain that will roll over me and fart like a landslide in the night all the way from Naples to Rome. The one who will run fluids in the morning from every orifice as though the daylight has pierced holes in him. The one who will press his body into mine and make me visit Cassi with my free hand. If only I have the courage to open some wine ahead of time perhaps, but we will have to wait and see.
And then there is YaYa, the cause of all this, as she proposes to me, sitting on the floor between train cars, speaking of the next time she sees me and how I will go away again, almost in the same breath.
I could go on. But why? And why me, I wonder? What unlikely companions do I merit or confer?
In my defense I am not always such a willing partner but an empty bottle between strangers is a good book. And here, tonight, on this boat, another loose bunch, connected by the criminal underclass, and I hand them cigarettes and pour wine into styrofoam cups which I don't like to use because they crackle like foil on your teeth.
I lift my glass and settle in for a rough night, glancing over two rows at a family sleeping under a single blanket. I could be next to them I guess - but it is the luck of the draw really. Both rows of seats were empty when I boarded and sat down. Somehow it is just my lot.
Later when I tell YaYa these stories, of all the attention and hospitality I've encountered, she will say it is because of me. The idea of it will please her though I can't tell you why. Deep down I know it's a lie. She will say that I am not a typical American, and there is that word again - simpatico - that I keep hearing, and that others can tell right off. I don't take that as a compliment. I am very much an American, perhaps even among the worst of them. How does she not see that?
But I have lost myself again. The plot! Always the plot!
Back in Sardegna I stood on a sidewalk in Sassari in the rain with a forty-pound pack on my back, rotten pizza tearing my insides, as I consulted the cracked heavens and contemplated my next move.
Like I said, I knew well ahead of the coin toss where I was going, but the ritual has become important to me. The few Sardi's that were caught outside in the storm seemed to appreciate my sidewalk performance. I knew those old shepherds still prayed to the rocks and the wind and I figured it wouldn't hurt to have a few witnesses around in case I washed up later on the town.
I held up the oversized coin, an untarnished Kennedy from my childhood that I carry in a special flap of my wallet. It was like greeting an old friend and lately we had become very close. I spat on him and shined him a little and then I warmed him up in my palms like a pair of dice. Naturally, for full dramatic effect I had already positioned myself directly across the street from the Tyrennhia cruise line offices and I looked at it like this - that there ahead of me were the ticket counters and salespeople, and behind them a few streets, the harbor, and beyond that the sea, and thereafter a short train ride to Rome, and there of course waited YaYa - an unbroken chain starting with my reflection in the cloud dark windows.

I will cross the stormy sea for her. I will come in the night and will not sleep. In fact, I will stand on the moonlit prow for much of it, facing the gale-spit, and I will see her round face brooding on the sea, a pale green light wrapped under her chin, her big eyes love broke, the question formed partway on her generous lips and I might as well admit it, because it's true: I kissed those lethean waters that first night of her along the Tiber and fell in for good. Leaning in over the edge I caught the green breath of the dizzy current like a nipple on my upper lip and I have not been able to let go.
And now, stopping the boat in its tracks, she wants to know why? I answer her, knowing that everything passes, by kissing each eye whole again.
Is this sea crossing idiotic beyond the normal turn of events I wonder? I've yet to see this woman's bed - though I have failed miserably with her elsewhere. Of course, when she learns of it, Cassi, for all her love and patience back home, will never speak to me again even though I pretend it is out of my hands, the result of a haphazard coin toss.
Is this romance or ridicule? I let in the voices of my other life, of those who would critique me from their desks or standing over diaper, of those who have forgotten what it feels like to want to die in love because that is how much you want to believe.
Why? They still want to know. Because the Tiber runs out to the sea, I answer, and it refuses no one. Because everything else becomes a lie if you wait long enough. Cassi back home planning a nursery and a wedding all to herself. Titti ramming her little buttercup into the corner of her office desk longing for me to return like the wind. The rotten pizza girl and her bad teeth. Springsteen. The Rolling Stones. Kiss. The Cure. Motorhead. U2. The World Wide Web. All the auctions and collections in her head and that other one, that bag of confectionary sugar behind the iron curtain. Bad teeth and a fucked out pussy. One big cavity of hunger and isolation everywhere you look. That's why. Because I want to believe in something again. And I'll keep flipping the coin until I get the answer I want.