Walking Backwards. Mark Frutkin

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СКАЧАТЬ for a beer. Moments later, we stand at the bar, sipping our Italian Peronis, listening to the Beatles singing “Strawberry Fields Forever” on the jukebox. In wanders Professor Fink and orders a glass of white wine. We stand in a line, the three of us, at the tiny bar. Professor Fink teaches me art history. He is one of those professors, a German, who thinks he knows everything and wants everyone else to know it. A snob of the first order. Sometimes I think he’s actually stuffed. A Germanic mannequin. We drink and listen to the jukebox. The Beatles perfectly reflect the attitudes of a thousand million young people around the world: “Nothing is real and nothing to get hung about/Strawberry Fields forever.” Professor Fink turns around with a sneer on his face and says to no one in particular and to anyone who will listen: “Das ist not musik! Das ist noice!”

      Irish Michael and I head for a table. Two of the tables in the corner of the student union are taken up, as always, by eight bridge players, almost all skinny bespectacled Jewish and WASP boys from New York City and a couple of pale girls who wear ill-fitting outdated dresses. The bridge players all look like they’re already well past middle age. They are intent on their card game. Their concentration is heroic, obsessive, complete. They will be found at these tables for the next nine months, every day from 8:00 a.m. until 11:00 in the evening. No one will ever see them outside, wandering the grounds, or in the nearby restaurants of Monte Mario. None of them will travel anywhere outside the campus. Even when they are sighted going to classes, they look like they are thinking about bridge. They are all eccentrics, visiting only with each other. They never drink. They never speak to anyone else. They never put a lira in the jukebox. They never learn a word of Italian. Bridge zombies.

      Munich

      At a time when it is difficult, if not impossible, for young American males to quit university and travel because of the ever-present threat of the U.S. draft, which could possibly force us to travel to the one place none of us want to go — Vietnam — the Loyola third-year abroad program is tailor-made for would-be wanderers. The school in Rome has scheduled significant vacation breaks that will allow us considerable travelling time while still in school. Ten days for American Thanksgiving, a full month for Christmas (when we will make the Istanbul trip related in Chapter 1), three weeks for Easter and, somehow, three five-day weekends in April and May.

      The first major trip we take is one the school has arranged for a weekend in October. Five train cars have been reserved for the Loyola students who want to visit the Oktoberfest in Munich. Lebanese Michael and I decide to go with another friend, Wally, who is from a small town in central Ohio. Wally is interested in everything from Japanese gardens to Beat poetry, which is not at all typical of a Midwesterner from a small Ohio town. With his shock of black hair and his enormous round head on a stocky frame, he looks a bit like a cartoon character, a cross between Alfred Jarry and Charlie Brown. But he is good company and keeps Michael and me fascinated with the depth of his unlikely knowledge gleaned from library books in Dover, Ohio.

      The trip up to Munich on the train is a replay of the KLM flight over to Rome. A drunken revel all the way — one that continues unabated on arrival in Munich where we will have to find our own lodgings. We never even consider spending the money for a place to stay and decide that we will either remain awake the entire weekend or sleep in the train station.

      The Munich Oktoberfest, which started in 1810, is the world’s largest fair, drawing 6 million visitors a year. It is held in a spacious city park of forty-two hectares, called the Theresienwiese (Field of Therese), where Bavarian breweries set up massive tents. In 2006, the six major breweries sold 6.1 million mugs of beer at Oktoberfest. In addition to beer, typical German food is also served in the tents, including chicken, sausage, roasted oxtails, cheese noodles, and sauerkraut.

      The first night, we find our way to the park where the Oktoberfest tents have been set up. Each brewery tent seats thousands of patrons at long tables, where that company’s beer is served. The three of us begin in the Hofbrau tent, which seats ten thousand people. We are astonished at the level of noise and the size of the waitresses. Each buxom matron carries three huge one-litre crockery beer steins in each hand as she serves, and God help the poor slob who gets in the way when one of these fleshy steamrollers is coming down the aisle. Everyone is shouting and singing and drinking and arguing like there are a whole lot of bad memories to be drowned out as soon as possible. We have no hope of keeping up with the drinkers around us, being North American neophytes with teaspoon-sized bellies. Nevertheless, we manage to down enough beer to float ourselves out of the park hours later when the tents start closing down.

      As we head out of the park, tens of thousands of drinkers (the tents can seat a total of about a hundred thousand) are exiting at the same time. At the edge of the park, a small building serves as a public urinal. A stream of urine two feet wide and an inch deep is flowing out the door of the crowded, overused building, running down the hill and into the street. Everyone is drunk, some more than others. Young men and old are falling down in their own piss and not getting up (these are referred to as “beer corpses”), or being dragged away by their stumbling friends. Others are vomiting where they stand or kneeling on the churned-up ground. It resembles a scene from Dante’s Inferno, grotesque, overwhelming in its visceral, animal-like frenzy.

      Our plan to sleep in the train station is quickly quashed by the police who come through and roughly toss out any drunks or malingerers. “Raus! Raus!” they shout, kicking stragglers with their high, shiny leather boots. Luckily, we have met a couple of friendly German fellows from Frankfurt, Jochen and Karl. They tell us we can sleep in their VW bug while they are in their rented room. They explain that they would happily sneak us in, but the landlady keeps close watch. The next morning, Michael, Wally, and I unbend ourselves from the Beetle and, not so much hungover as still drunk, go for breakfast with our new German friends. Another day of drinking lies ahead.

      The train ride back to Rome proves to be significantly quieter than the journey up.

      Perugia/Assisi

      Taking a journey alone is a necessary part of every young man’s education. In early November, I decide to go on my own over a long weekend to two small cities in the hilly Umbria region due north of Rome. Perugia and Assisi are about halfway to Florence and I am able to hitchhike there easily in a day.

      This is my introduction to Italian drivers, from the inside of the vehicle, that is, and my final ride is from a young, handsome Lothario who appears at one with his sports car as he delights in taking the twisting turns at top speed. Luckily, he has the skills required, downshifting into curves and accelerating out of them, the car hugging the road with the balance of a cat chasing down its prey along a balcony railing. I am pleasantly surprised by his obvious skill, for the Roman drivers were a scourge on every pedestrian daring to take the city by foot. We North American students quickly learned the rule of the road in Rome: “If you are killed while crossing in the crosswalk, the driver must pay for your funeral. If you are killed outside the crosswalk, the driver faces no such liability.”

      In any case, I arrive in Perugia in one piece. The driver drops me at the train station and since it is dinnertime and I don’t know any better, I enter the station to take a meal. With the innocence of youth, I sit at the counter and order the fish of the day off the menu. The chunk of dogfish served to me by the harried waiter is bony and smells fishy as a men’s public toilet. I remember that I once had the misfortune to catch a dogfish while visiting Long Island with my parents when I was a young teenager. The damnable thing flopped about the dock barking. Barking, for god’s sakes. Its head, mostly mouth, was three times the size of its body. A freak of a fish. I recall gingerly nudging it back into the sea with my foot.

      Holding my nose, I dig into my plateful of reeking fish. If the Italians can eat it, I tell myself, so can I.

      Later, after walking into the centro area of the city, taking in the lovely views over the wide valleys below as I climb up the ancient streets, I find a place to stay. The room is in the second-floor apartment of an СКАЧАТЬ