[stop]
The next morning's our last in old Rome. Not much in the way of remorse. We came to the ancient city, saw what there was to see. Covered it all in two days on foot. The old, stone roads, and the hills, and the white stone palaces, and the churches, and the Vatican, and the ruins dotting and scarring the city like old, healed wounds, like a badge of honor, a testament to age. The warrior Italy. Conquered in two days, with a riotous pub crawl for icing. Weathered travelers. Experienced, and Mike's catching on quick. Our bags are never far from ready. And now, we're ready to go. It's going to be an all day affair.
A bold task, but we want to get into France tonight, so at the terminal we jump on the first train headed north. To Pisa. We grab four seats facing each other with a table in between. "All right," says Grant, "I'm breaking out the deck." And he pulls a deck of fifty-two from the front pocket of his backpack before stowing it overhead.
"Yeah!" I'm stoked. "What do y'all wanna play?"
"Well, there's four of us," observes Mike. "We could play some Hearts..."
"Dude. Yeah, I'm into some Hearts." Grant's stoked, and he starts shuffling and bridging and shuffling and bridging.
"Man, I haven't gotten down on a game of Hearts for a hot second now." I'm thinking aloud again.
But Max was a lost puppy. "What the hell is this old-man 'Hearts' game? Please don't tell me it's some stupid game like Old Maid or Bridge. That shit's troublesome."
"What's wrong with Old Maid?"
"Nothing."
"You're being facetious, Max." I retort to his retort.
"You are the one that is being facetious!"
Grant steps in before the vocabulary gets out of control, "Has a little hot someone never played Hearts before?" He's using his Papa Grant voice.
Max looks down and twiddles his thumbs, "No... Never got around to that one."
"Don't worry, it's chill. You'll pick it up along the way no problem. And well, we've got some time 'til Pisa." So Grant deals out the deck, and we lay down the ground rules in a quick game summary. We tell Max about the first pass and the Two of Clubs and the Queen of Spades and shooting the moon, and he hits the ground running. Grant's keeping score in his journal. Max is the first to one hundred on the first game. But not the second, and that mother-fucker shot the moon on his third game in. Like that, we've become old men squinting at cards with furrowed brows. Spreading them out like an accordion, sorting them, closing them up again, and spreading them out. Leaning towards the window or the aisle, not each other. Eyeing with suspicion and daring. Feeling the pain of defeat, and sipping the sweet nectar of victory for all to see. It's funny how vested one can get into cards, into the emotion of them, especially when it's the only thing going, game after game after game. The fear of the Queen, and the agony of taking her. It doesn't change. We just get faster, and the hours to Pisa fly. We get there, the final stop, check the time-board, and the next train going north isn't for a measly forty-five minutes.
[stop]
So we rush headlong, packs and all, towards the other side of the old Italian city, towards the Tower at a brisk walk that comes easy with experience. The buildings are old, the streets are old. The river runs slow through the middle, past a modest pearl chapel on the south shore, and the whole place seems to be sleeping in the hot summer sun. It's a quiet little whisper of a town, and we're to the other side in twenty minutes, with only a slight sweat on our brows. The Piazza del Duomo, a high-walled castle courtyard at the northern edge of town, is lovely and strangely lively compared to the rest of Pisa, outside the plaza walls. There's vendor after vendor slanging touristy trinkets. There's people sprawled on the grass and taking pictures in stupid poses, trying to hold the Tower up. It's warranted, I guess. The Tower's got a mad lean on. We see it. We photograph it. We mock the crowds. Max smokes a cigarette. Then we hightail it out of there, back to the station, and hop on a train to Genoa.
It's a bitch of a ride. Hours upon hours on end, through little Italian towns and Tuscan summer landscapes. Definitely not one of the faster trains we've been on, and the rolling brown hills, the olive groves, the scattered stone ruins, the trees that stand not like the evergreens of California, but quaint and puffy-bulbous like tiny green clouds stuck on toothpicks' ends, they all seem to be crawling by in this dreary heat. This particular train's rather shittier than the one to Pisa. No tables, just little fold-out side desks that remind me of college lecture halls. Awesome. No hearts on this train. So I read through a handful of chapters in All the Sad Young Literary Men with some LCD accompaniment. It's dry. The author writes like he's writing a paper, but it's good, I guess. It written well, and it's real. It's real life and real drama and real growth, and his analysis of it all is meticulous and, at times, thought provoking. In the intellectual sense. In the world issues sense. In the sense that it's someone's life. Three persons' lives, in fact. But it's so mundane. That's not my type of living. Their problems aren't my problems. Or maybe they are, and it's just the setting that's different, and the way things build up over time. I don't have that kind of time. I'm on a goddamn train to Genoa. And I'm tired of this man's words so I think I'll write my own.
[stop]
There is an inherent musk of shit encased in this, probably not the shining flagship of Tren Italia. Couple that with the beating Italian sun and it's ensuing heatwave, it is a scent most unappealing to say the least. But one can only hunker down in the questionably designed hard, rubber-lined seats and blissfully hope that this train to Genoa is not much more impossibly long than it already seems.
A rather curious seat choice lends to some unlikely entertainment. Out of the fifty or so empty seats in the car, my new friend wisely decides on the seat directly across from me. Same side of the aisle, and my feet off to the side now so we're not playing footsies. His beady little brown eyes only more pronounced by his exaggeratedly furrowed brow. It's something that comes with the years passing, and by the gauge of leather exterior and the wizened, blatant way he keeps looking us over suspiciously, I would say he's passed quite a few. He's grandfather-looking, his eyes deep wells, glazed and opaque with ancient knowledge. I wonder what they've seen.
[stop]
We get to Genoa and the shadows are long, and the sun's soon setting. Genoa's on the coast at the top of the boot Italy. It's west, towards France, we need to go now. There's a lurch in my gut that tells me we're probably not getting to Montpellier tonight. We all feel it, so Grant e-mails our host, Elsabeth, telling her we'll be there the next day. There's no trains actually going into France, but there's one to the coastal border-town of Ventimiglia in an hour. Just enough time to stuff pasta in our faces at a cozy little sit-down looking out onto the station and the main square. I'm famished. Still, i eat steadily. Slowly, there's no rush. A little TV in the corner is playing some Italian reality show not unlike Punked. Except without the celebrities or production value. It's pretty much just some Italian guy fucking with other Italian guys, but we don't understand a word of it and maybe that's why it's so hilarious. When it's over, the sun's gone down outside. Our plates are cleaned, bone dry. All the bread's devoured. All the water cups empty. Grant puts the meal on his card, we tally our debt, stroll back to the station and hop our west-bound train towards the border. We get to Ventimiglia just before midnight, and there's no more trains across the border until the morning. Well, looks like we're sleeping here then. "Fuck sleeping in the station though," I say, "Let's go sleep on the beach. It can't be too far."
"Yeah!" And it's not far at all really. Except there's just one minute detail I didn't account for. The whole beach, as far as we can see in the dark, is rock. Small rocks, not particularly comfortable. Whatever. We jump in the Mediterranean, for me the first time (the water's pool temperature and saltier than a sea dog), and then we all pass out on our bags on the beach in Ventimiglia.
