Phantom Pain: A Memoire: It’s All In Your Head u15r

Copyright © 2015 Stephen Sumner.

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ISBN: 978-1-4808-1297-0 (sc) ISBN: 978-1-4808-1296-3 (hc) ISBN: 978-1-4808-1298-7 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014922105

All photographs are by the author.

Archway Publishing rev. date: 1/28/2015

Contents

Slack Tide

Marking Time

Fall Move

Catherine Wheel

Happenstance

Hidebound

For Colin, for Matthias And, of course, for Kitty

‘Crawling across this sometime garden now in our chaircars like clever nits in a plush caterpillar should we take time to glance from our dazzle of folders and behold this great green girl grown sick with man sick with the likes of us?’

Earle Birney from : ‘Transcontinental’

‘One must allow contradictory tendencies to proliferate, one must cultivate the opposite ideals, we must follow reason alone. One must not fret over the imperfections of life on earth. One must carry on. The pleasures of living in Italy come from living in a world made by man, for man, to man’s measurements.’

Luigi Barzini from : ‘The Italians’

“Noli turbare circulos meos”

Archimedes

‘Don’t mind my circles.’

dedication

It’s ten years-and-change since my fender-bender in Tuscany. The luxury of being able to ponder that decade – a fruitful and beautiful spell – and, well, poeticize about it is because so many fine people banded together to scrape my ass off the asphalt and kick it back into gear. My debt to those heartsome people, some of whom I’ve yet to meet, is bottomless. I would like to mention just a few:

The formidable Denise and Pietro, near the top of La Montagnola, are in a special suite at the Top of my Heart. There’s Palmino & Cinzia and Fabio (Il Columbiano) too, topping a long list of excruciatingly considerate Italians. You too, Alberto.

All the doctors and nurses and mop-maids and everyone else at Le Scotte Provincial Hospital in Siena have my, erm, undying gratitude. They saved my life, and made me laugh a lot in the process.

Viva Italia!

Then, of course, there is Gaia. Thank you.

My friends from this side of the pond know who they are, probably by now lament re-floating me, and so enough said. I Love You.

And so I lived, and everything was peachy, more or less, except for this Phantom Pain, which was quite literally KILLING me. Long after the end of this book, I found a cure in the form of a household mirror. A look in the mirror. That’s all it took.

The agony of Phantom Limb Pain cannot possibly be overstated, and most amputees, particularly in ‘Developing Countries’, have no choice but to endure it, miserably, for what remains of their lives.

I relieved myself of the most odious, shattering and trenchant thing in my life with a hand-held mirror. After a small handful of weeks the horror evaporated, my vision cleared and I realized that I too was free and clear. It worked.

I also realized that nobody in the Hurting World was going to discover and utilize this simple elegant secret unless someone like me brought it to them. For me it was a no-brainer. That’s what I’m doing now and have been doing for 3 full years. If there are any profits from your purchase of this book, that’s where they’re going. I don’t aim to quit and, tragically, there is no end to the misery out there.

For a world of information on what Mirror Therapy is and what I’m doing, please check me out @

Meandmymirror.org

Anyhow, I trust you will find this an engaging read. If you like, please send me your at:

[email protected]

Warmly, stephen

Dear Kitty,

Just a quick update with some late-breaking news: I got a teaching job with a language school in Siena. I’m their professor in the field, roving from one hilltop village to the next, bringing English to the Italian countryfolk and it suits me to the ground. I got the job on Tuesday, bought a superfine motorbike on Thursday and taught my first class on Friday night. I’m the Village Pastor baby!

I sail along these godsent Tuscan roads on an old grove green motorbike that spins like a top and I bring the Word to the Faithful. What I need I pack in my noggin or hump in my trusty satchel. It’s mostly Rock and Roll lyrics because I’m teaching them our divine language through the music of the devil! All-in-all it’s a great gig: I make just enough money to put gas in the tank, beer in my belly and fresh tires on my bicycle plus I’ve got all the time in the world to ride. Riding is, after all, the point. My beloved Tuscany has never looked so fine and now I’ve found a way to stay for a time. Gotta jump to prepare a class. Today, even though they’re beginners, we’ll study The Rolling Stones. Don’t ever forget that you’re the real gas in my tank. I miss you so much it hurts.

T here it is the window of my discontent my non-event. There, hard to starboard, swallows dropping like stones across it. I can only hope the poor birds get it together before the sidewalk. In a few minutes three infermieri three nurses will come to help lift my shattered carcass – moving me and my pissbag. My left leg’s gone about six inches above the knee what knee and here they come all smiles another dream team. They hoist and lever me into an Industrial Revolution-type wheelchair shunt me roll me over slide that same window up. They’re doing it as a favour for me cause I can’t truck with this corrente thing I’m dying a slow death not dying from my injuries but dying from the goddamn heat.

It’s two-to-a-room and my roomie old Signore Giardiniere old Remo will hold tight for the moment but he’ll pipe up soon enough. All the ward’s doors are thrown open which must piss Remo off from a draught standpoint, they call it corrente – old world Italians are mortified by corrente – but the nurses they need instant access to us, in case one of us starts headin’ south, so everywhere the doors are open. Visitors are parading the hall all spruced up and in their sunny Sunday best I haven’t seen a razor since last Sunday, my bare ass is pooching out the back of the wheelchair but I don’t care I’m off to the window the backwards hospital shift worn frontwards like a toga cause the giant kindergarten plaster of Paris cast on my arm won’t fit through the left armhole, all my starboard ribs are broken I don’t move so well don’t always think so clearly. And I’m burning up, though I don’t feel so hot atall.

Sheets of sweat-rolling down like a liquid avalanche the fracture line running across the actual fracture line of my snapped collarbone finally a healing breeze and on it not the smell of care, chemicals and desperation but lavender umbrella pine and rosemary sweat now evaporating anxiety evaporating like a time-lapse photograph then exhaustion please not already squirming discomfort and thumping pain a pain ixed with panic a pain there’s nothing for you can’t fix Giardiniere ah yes there he is with his slurr his patchy carotids and his stroke addled face roaring: ‘Attenzione corrente!’ The devil himself is borne on draughts.

5 15 20 mins this time gotta sleep sooo tired always tired cant sleep cant ever sleep not sleepings gonna kill me I’ll die without punctuation I’ll buy the farm I’ll slip into something more crazy slip my leash and then slip away

Klingle was hunting me – a formal methodical old-school hit-man in a black tux But Klingle wasn’t a dream Klingle came to me in a coma and the hysterics of the comatose will peal your paint off The comatose are forever disturbing forever disturbed

The square of window with the swallows is now jet black not midnight black cause with any luck it’s long past midnight. I wait flat on my back the right side of head nightsweat plastered to the pillow I’m power-staring at the window willing it to brighten … the nights are so damn long the nights are damnation the nights are wrong.

I need the morning so bad. It’s just as bad, of course, the day, but the procession of events is soothing. Intestino?

It took me a couple days to figure that one out; they weren’t too insistent, at first. What it is is an invitation for some quality time with a bedpan, a ‘padella’. Nothing soothing about that – padella – then more infernal insufferable downtime, in-in-in-in, tick … tick … breakfast the only meal I can eat toast and jam toast and jam toast and jam no coffee but ‘Orzo’ barley coffee substitute, coffee will give me mood swings they say I guess who knows but I want a real coffee exactly as much as I want a good belt of morphine.

There’s a shrill metallic bustle today and I today’s the day of my interventino – tinininninno – just a little one.

Dear Rosanna or rather Dr Avella with the dewy eyes and the smoker’s cough

pricking me all over in an alcove outside the surgery and there’s a garage door of all things and it’s open and I can see that those swallows really don’t come to grief they pull it together and jink away just before the tarmac, just in time – pricking me and pricking me but not blissful sleep. Anestetico locale, caro; it’s safer for you – a quiet suspiration of woe. Is me. A buzzsaw takes the cast away on my poor crumpled left arm and it’s lying on cold steel like a sparrow with bad timing.

They’re building a sterility tent around me and they lied.

This is no interventino no itty bitty procedure said they were going to hang my arm back together on a titanium string like a well-hung wind chime and I’m a cyclist you see so titanium has a nice ring to it but no oh no I see Lacovara the orthopedic surgeon thumbing through a toolkit thumbing through a hardware box I hear him revving up his drill and see the first screw pump in on the monitor. It was a mistake to leave a real-time x-ray monitor on my side by my side. Can’t see him cause he’s on the other side of the green tent but I can hear him sweating cursing calling out for screws one after the other: dieci, otto, otto, dieci, dodici, dodici … two plates twenty-eight screws interfuckingventino but I’m told it’s all titanium so there’s some consolation there. Damnear four hours and no pain in my arm a job well done, but pain fear and desperate discomfort are everywhere else.

Streaming tears and sweet Rosanna no Dottoressa Avella coming around holding my good hand which is not too good either and overandover telling me just a few minuti more. Minutini. Mere moments more. Attimini. You’re so brave caro and she thumbs away my tears how very unsanitary. Wasn’t long ago that the inni-minniness of Italian dimminnniuatives i found charming. Now it’s a conspiracy. But Lacovara I love him cause he’s sweating as much as me sweating like a blacksmith complete with hammer and tongs.

A brighteyed gurneyride a trail of yellowed ceiling tiles flipping by like empty

old newspaperpages arm sticking straight up like a bare mast on a motorsailer back to the sixth floor where I’m presented with my prize. A morphine bombola. Bambola bombola. A clear Perspex cylinder two inches across and a foot long containing an already diminishing clear sack of morphing morphine solution and an IV tube driven into my arm my horizontal lava lamp my limbo license my precious bambola that I clutch to my chest like a wee girl with her favorite doll. Never could sleep but now no chance I fret nonstop about rolling onto the tube and pinching off the pissant flow of morphina not my sister but my baby my cara bambolina she’s tucked under the pillow just now like a sleepy pistola. Come to daddy come to papa papacita. Fill me with love fill me up lover.

Dear Kitty, Prince Rupert British Columbia

My dear sweet lover I miss you daily. It sometimes hits me with a force that knocks the wind out of me. I look for ways to get away from the crew, so I can be alone with my lack of you, my wanting you.

My deckmates caught me trying to dash ashore with my book, pencil and paper stuffed in this superfine satchel you gave me. My ‘man bag’ they call it and the whole rig, packed, they call my ‘prop’ – a dating tool. And I tip my hat, my Sou’Wester, to such spirited ribbing. They love me, more or less, even though as a useful fisherman I’m somewhere between Liberace and Kevin Costner. So now I’m beer in hand on the deck of The Crescent, high above the harbour. It’s not beer in hand on the beach in Vancouver or on a sultry Italian piazza, but we must work with the materials at hand. And, not having you at hand, I must work with other material.

It’s t-shirt warm and well past 8 PM and the sun’s still high above the horizon – a considerable payback for being in the North. It’s a superb sweeping bay; the waters below and the air above full of life. The surface is lively too, boats of every stripe shuttle across it everywhichway like water bugs, like little engines that could. Fishing sucks though. Pretty much always sucks. I guess we’re kickin’ a dead horse here. It’s not that there’re no fish in the sea, but that’s a story unworthy of quality time with you, Sweet Kitty.

When the fishing’s shit, like most always, yet we see something majestic, from pods of killer whales to Krakatoa sunsets, which likewise happens always; my skipper will crane out the wheelhouse window and say, ‘People pay thousands for that shit. I’ll put it on your tab. If you’re lucky, we’ll come out even.’ I

reckon we will.

We’re headed back South soon and it’s never too soon to leave Rupert cause though now’s fine and the bay’s lovely, the town never ceases to send me into a vortex of despair: so much rain, so little hope and so full of angry dissolute cowboys and Indians – like a board game gone bad. No one es ‘GO’, no one collects any money at all, Reading Railroad’s been dismantled and someone forgot to pay Utilities. Kind of like Irkutsk but with better food and less sun.

Nevermind; we’re southbound. We travel at night, the stern wake tumbling out behind us like cinched-down rapids and straight as a ray.

We take two hour turns steering the boat and on a good shift I’ll turn on the wheelhouse stereo, put on Faure’s Requiem and turn it up almost loud enough to wake up the skipper and certainly loud enough to drown out the Coast Guard radio and I’ll be ed by a squadron of Dall’s Porpoise curveting off the bow. If I go outside and stand in the bows and clap and hoot and stamp my feet, I’ll get a somersault or two; they’re such showoffs. My route back to my bunk will be lit by a fat moon. Your lunar motif panties which you tucked in my duffel are tied in a clove-hitch on the little mahogany bookshelf just above my bunk. They pick up what little ambient light filters down into the foc’sle and if I look up as I’m drifting off to sleep they sparkle like phosphorescence and I have the feeling that I’m drowning in your sex. I don’t put up much of a fight. On the boat I’m a fish out of water, but in your arms I’m safe in port, surfing the bow-wave of The Goodship Love, hitching the odd somersault. I miss you Kitty, and missin’ is what I do best. It seems.

Later …

In two days we’ll put the prawn gear down and catch a big pail full. With luck we’ll snag a halibut or two too. We’re not greedy just an itty bitty 30 pounder will do – fisherman call them ‘chickens’. Maybe some mussels too and a bucket of squid. The cioppino I’ll make would curl your toes my delectable Kitty, I wish I could bring it home to you. I wish I could bring it all home to you. If the crab god smiles on us we’ll load up on Dungeness Crab and then things will get really decadent: crab omelettes, grilled cheese and crab sandwiches, crab with ruccola, blue cheese and Anjou pear salad, crab-a-ghetti-o’s fergodsakes. Oh Yum.

And all that’s fun fishing, you understand; fishing for food. We might not make a dime fishing sockeye but we won’t starve; hell no.

Again later:

The fish are on baby. A literal river of pink salmon coursing down the panhandle and homing in on their creeks to blow their loads and meet their fishy maker. And they have a good point; there is something fishy about our maker. We’ve been loading the boat – decks awash and all that stuff. Problem is they’re the wrong fuckin’ species. Ah dear succulent Kitty the fisherman’s life ain’t no life at all.

This is supposed to be a sockeye year but our dear Department of Fisheries (who, collectively, couldn’t find their asses in the dark with both hands and a searchlight) somehow misplaced 12 million fat Fraser River Sockeye. Never a peep from them about pink salmon but they’re so thick out there I could walk across their backs from here to shore and I’ve a good mind to do just that if it’ll get me any closer to you. Pinks everywhere. I can see their neurotic hysterical jumps all across the narrows as I write. But pink salmon are an ignoble race; an altogether lower order. They look like slimy humpbacked piscine Woody Allens. A breakfast fish at best.

The prices, of course, over-reflect that and the 12 to 15 cents-a-pound that we get for their mealy carcasses the; 70,000 pounds we’re packin’ right now wouldn’t buy a fiddler’s fart at a bluegrass festival. That’s it. I quit. But I can’t quit; I’m buried in fish and they won’t buy the price of a Greyhound ride into your arms, nevermind a ticket for two to Italy. Let this Love Dog loose!

Well we’re comin’ home anyhow my sexy inimitable Kitty. We had a big hydraulic breakdown, which fortunately precluded my emotional one, but I’m comin’ in baby. The only thing a fisherman loves more than leaving port is coming back to it.

We’re stormbound today, tied up to the wharf in pounding rain on the Sunshine Coast. Just docking the boat was touch and go. I’m always first to shape up at the rail for the jump down to the wharf to catch the tie-up lines. The rest of the boys humour me and generally let me go – the leap across open water, trying to stick the landing, the leap of faith – they know I like that.

I pulled a hero act this morning out on the water and made the boys a fromscratch corn beef hash with poached eggs and a fresh fruit salad in gale-force winds with a six-foot chop on a big rolling southeast swell. So I’ve given myself shore leave to take a walk around the cove with my watchcap on and my collar turned up. I’m in the hotel pub, yet another ‘The iral’ or ‘The Anchor Chain’, writing a love letter to my sweet, sexy, lovely and much-missed Kitty.

The slashing rain makes the arbutus hills outside look all staticky like grandad’s old Zenith. There’s a boat launch down between the government wharf and the mossy shack on stilts that is ‘Molly’s Starboard Café’. The pewter-coloured geese that filed past me like stuffy ambassadors this morning have all tottered down there to get out of the gale. They’re all standing on one foot, dead-stable on the anti-skid concrete, apparently asleep with eyes wide-open, cause when I quietly went down to pay my respects, they all started muttering and bitching. Err-bra-bra-bra-brabrah.

At 4 AM last night I was on the wheel and it was blowin’ the dog off the chain with a 6-foot chop. As we ed Savary Island to starboard I saw my life’s only after-hour rainbow a midnight moonbow in a biblical sky a tempestuous El Greco sky a moonbow like the vapour trail from six jet-powered porpoise a hotrod coloured moonbow all screaming lilac magnesium and metal-flake chrome … I feel that’s a fair representation of what’s going to happen between you and me in a small handful of hours.

Being apart from you has left me holed somewhere, somehow stove-in, but I think we can patch me up right quick don’t you?

SLACK TIDE

A dream lost walking last seen shambling bearlike inland and frankly mammal between sheet lightning and sulphurous fogs I sat idle and scouted its return in a reliable shelving sea. A beak amid tentacles wary only of colour and light no banks undercut no gnawing blight An octoboy making moves on a man wanting fingers in the shape of a hand Tentacles of impatience groping through a fluid body of love Slip me out to the tidal bore

away from the rocks away from the shore

Antibiotics of every description are pouring into me. They’ve ruined my guts; I’m as gassy as a brewery horse but my stomach is as tight as a tom-tom and farting is by far the greatest pleasure in my day. Poor Giardiniere old Remo my roommate, I say sorry each time and he says forget it, ‘Vai! Vai!’ he sees the ecstasy in my face and says, ‘Vai, Vai! Mi fa piacere, it gives me pleasure. I can’t even savour a good fart these days.’

And so it is. Hospital regime is not agreeing with the poor old fellow. Every day they ask him: ‘Intestino?’ He says, ‘No,no,no porca miseria, I don’t need to make a shit!’

He sends them away with another volley and seconds later rings the camlo and asks them to close the window againandagain. 7am mid-June already 30 degrees and it’ll climb. Oh yes.

We battle over that window, but he’s old and I’m his houseguest sotospeak; so I desist. He’s getting his though. I see them lubing the end of a tube; old Remo’s going to host a power enema. And now a padella is sailing towards me in the hands of an orderly, if things are gonna get shitty let’s get it over with. I’m reminded of certain dogs – dogs that look over their shoulder at you while they’re crapping with a look of unbearable forlornness. I am a dog.

‘FFFFiorrrinna! Where’s the fucking chicken axe!’

Eeek eeeek eeek an IV stand rolling down the hall my window’s black and I’m almost certain I’d been asleep I’ll never get back never get it back.

‘Fiorina, you bitch!’ Eeek eek eek and then they roll by – our man pushing his wobbly stand – past my door and he’s crazier than a shithouse mouse that’s for sure. Hair that makes Einstein look like Paul Anka and a frog belly white ass tufted with grey fur drooping out the back of his gown paper sandals toes that look prehensile and the reddest eyelids I’ve ever seen.

God knows where Fiorina is but we, we’re on the sixth floor of the vascular surgery ward of Le Scotte Hospital in scenic Siena, Italy. And if it seems like a nuthouse more than a hospital that’s cause it’s vascular read strokes read mostly old coots. The poor old bastards are the collateral damage of seventy-plus years of friendly fire under the Tuscan sun. Their eggs are coddled their carotids crispy and their mark of Cain is the sterile gauze pad that flaps along with their unhinged jaws. Everything’s aflap and the poor boys prowl the halls looking for action.

‘Where are you, wife! Dove sei bitch!’ I’ve never seen the window so black.

The Palio is on. The horserace. In the early evenings young girls walk the corridors of the hospital holding hands and softly singing the songs of their contradas and allnight the lovely everchanging nurses pad those same corridors calling to each other and cooing to patients in their own singsong voices.

It’s everhazy opiazy and I can’t tell them apart don’t want to. Until the next squeaking IV stand it’s all a song and dance all a lovely trance and I’m a horse that’s going to finish a horse that’s going to prance.

My new arm hangs above me. Hangs in a sling and from a stand. One of the IV stands that’s not on tour. I have purple Gumby fingers but I can move them; they’re mine. I’m told to move them allthetime to reduce pain and swelling and plus give me something to do: Bullshit, Peace, Victory, Peaceagain, A-OK,

Fickyficky, The Italian Salute, Black Power, Thumbs Up, Thumbs Dow –owfuck OK no thumbs down, Zip It, You Talk Too Much, Bye-Bye. But it’s exhausting and it makes me sweat.

3 AM and there’s a rank lake beneath my Sturmey Archer cot. Another overserved piss-bag.

I drink water

cause I’m desperate to clean my blood it’s all about the blood clean blood clean my blood and get the fuck outa here.

I love them here all my new friends they saved my life and they’re killing me with kindness but if I don’t get out of here I’ll die. Every day panic climbs sweaty hand-in-sweaty-hand with the temperature then there’s my tumbledown body running inside, running a misterfix-itfeverrunningatightschedulerunning in the heat of July.

Drinking water takes up time and gives me something to do opening mineral water bottles with all the dexterity of a raccoon a back-bound one-foot panda they tease me tell me chide me that they’re tolling the piss-bags on my tab. But it’s 3:01 and that’s what I call tolling slowtime time tolling like tilting tombstones I’m drinking to wash down these tiny granitey pebbles of time and nothing’s funny cause everything is and they relent and after two weeks no sleep they give me a pill. One of a million pills but the first pill with nothing to do with blood or agony and funny enough everything goes to hell in a hospital cart.

I was out for a while they say but in short order became a somnolent nutjob and

made up for lost time: unmaking and re-making my bed like a fussy dowager, yelling at everything and blaming everyone allthewhile tube-tied arm aloft and flat on my back. Neither a recipe for social success nor another tablet and whoever I became just went back to some underground place.

At least Klingle didn’t come Klingle never comes he’ll never darken my doorway but he’s always there. I keep thinking I shook him then he shakes me back.

So there’s the window again and when on earth will it brighten.

It always does of course and black may be bad but the cobalt hours are the killers. In July in the South Tuscany, dawn is eternal.

Eternity is a long time when you’re waiting for Gaia. Gaia means happiness in Italian and Gaia is a self-fulfilling fantasy. She’ll come at 7 with a cappuccino a newspaper an impish smile and a hug almost as long as this stretch between cobalt and the rattle of breakfast trolleys.

Gaia and I met over a whoosh of doors and the bustle of paramedics and neither of us were looking our best. Gaia, a trauma nurse on the nightshift and me a hapless bunch of bits comin’ in hot. Nor did I clean up too good or acknowledge her presence or acknowledge much at all. And nor, to be sure, was I in the Land of Nod. I was in real danger and on my way to meet Klingle or Klingle was coming to me.

Klingle smelled like a fresh shave, last night’s vodka, forgotten cologne, old brilliantine and heat. Klingle was the heat. He knew about Paolo and he knew about me. And me, in my better moments I just worried about Paolo; he might be the best nurse, but he’s just a nurse and has no idea what trouble he’s in.

It took me days to realize I’d been pulverized and by that time Gaia had a crush on me.

The Sardinian shepherds’ nephew found me on Pian del Lago, a reclaimed lake bottom not fifteen minutes from the Duomo in Siena and by that time my left foot was necrotizing, eating itself, death-marching away from the whole sorry affair. The nephew’s name is Mattia he’s just a kid and he plays in a band in Siena. Thank god for the Rock and Roll lifestyle cause sheep and herders alike had been asleep for hours – for as I was soon to learn, dawn comes early in the Maremma in June…

- Andbut Mattia and his girl were cocooned in their little car coming home from band practice. His girlfriend saw me smoking in a farmer’s field upsidedownbackwardsanddamnnearinside-out; the rear wheel of the motorino idly tooling around, a tag of exhaust in the soft clear June air and a dim and dimming headlight. They phoned emergency and led me to reanimation, led me to Gaia too.

There’s no recollection no impact no shrieking no can opening steel rending flesh no shivering bones no can do. From him a crash a phonecall a half a confession and burning rubber leaving the scene leaving me and a mystery behind. Nothing. Then morphine. Take me sister tuck me in tuck me in plush sheets of whiteness on a soft white bed take me down softly take me down.

The sum of memory is just this chilled knot of desperation a patch of riven dirt at the base of my skull and it’s summer I know but suddenly I’m so goddamned cold …

Dear Kitty,

Pian del Lago is a sea of crystal fog, a level playing field for the ice capades, my knees are glazed at the fetal angle behind stiff curtains of hoary denim. My fingers are nine frozen toads plus my throttle-thumb (starboard side), which is worse. The veryact of twisting the gas jams the thumb ever-deeper into the icerimed gardening glove which makes it less a freezing than a cryogenic affair.

My Barbour jacket is as stiff as plywood and I swear one of these days I’ll get me some proper riding gear. But succour is close at hand and if I can rigidly and rapidly navigate the next handful of switchbacks – with and without asphalt – then I can jacknife myself over the airtight stove at Pietro and Denise’s.

AAAhhhhhhhhh, relief. D and P have gone to bed but have, as ever, left the fire well stoked and a fat heel of Vecchia Romagna on the sideboard to help me take the edge off. They never miss a beat, they’re great to live with, like an older brother and sister but better, cause we never fight. They are both embodiments of charm in absolutely opposite style: Pietro, the slightest smile, calmly quietly keeping mum – a Cheshire cat – while Denise is full-throttle allthetime, a funny pretty nonstop Tasmanian devil.

Their house is charming too and a big part of that charm is that everything is a little dog-eared and hardly anything works. Pietro is a semi-masterful jury-rigger so that after his attentions the article in question will work OK but not perfectly, never. We have a long-standing joke on this score, which involves a raise-of-theeyebrows and palms-up saying, ‘It goes, but it’s not one hundred percent’ – ‘Va, ma non e cento per cento.’

Vacuums, shower doors, TVs and bicyle pumps. Non `e cento per cento. Thank God the woodstove is, more or less.

From the top of La Montagnola to the castello at Montalcino it’s maybe only an hour fifteen but if this deep-freeze keeps up I may have to hustle Pietro for the old Renault and put the motorbike on ice.

The Renault 4 is a fabulous machine. It’s not a hundred percent but it’s pretty close. Shifting is a vague affair, like playing the trombone and the gearshift is a joystick; it sticks towards you out of the dash – an aircraft control. I drop down the mountain in The Little Car that Could to tend to my flock in farflung towns with names like sex-kittens who cook: Rosia, Casole d’Elsa, Monteriggioni, Sovicille, Monteroni and of course, Siena.

This Tin Can in famous terrain through fall fogs that settle like a sinecure to places in headlamps by tea-time. This car is an elegant bohemian, a ruffle of dinted tin, a lean-to of propped-up windscreens. I feel like Exupery in an old biplane looking down on the lights of Toulouse, Montpellier and Gibraltar. Or, less exaltedly, like I’m piloting a fishing skiff; the bow juddering and dancing in a light chop … or on a snowmobile tearing past signposts through uncertain drifts. The festive and ambulant lights on the hillsides above are the grooming machines settling into a long-night’s work and making perfect the runs that I’ll ski tomorrow on a bicycle in summeryish clothes. A wonder, really.

Each day is giftwrapped and kickstarted by dear David The Dog, my beloved dog, the dog of all dogs, who waits with calm certainty till 7 AM on-the-dot then jumps into my narrow bed ass-first. This warm spooning calms his stick-lust only momentarily; then, foreshortening a fanfare of yelps bedhogging and headbutts, I get up and draw myself a nice long double espresso while he fidgets and gives me stink-eye. He does, however, understand coffee. He’s learned to accept the pause.

Usually David The Dog prevails and we head ‘out,’ or rather ‘fuori,’ for he speaks Italian – though that’s really the only word in his vocabulary – for a good half-hour stick-huck.

Even as I’m looking, stick unthrown, for an unbroken tile on the pumphouse roof where I might rest my coffee, David’s outbound; coursing low and tight to the walls like any good workdog. He’s big, he’s strong, he’s tireless, he’s David. He’s got the low-slung carriage of the classic herding dog, a chest that’s deeper than Hugh Heffner’s medicine cabinet and an impressive top-end. His run is a gallop, sounds like hoofbeats, and he doesn’t just fetch; he pounces on it, breaks its neck and brings it home like a scalp, his head held high with dogpride.

Anytime I touch wood, stack it, split it, whittle it, look at it, David The Dog is consumed with jealousy so the next bit where I lay in fresh wood and stoke the stove for P and D can be an exercise in defusal an exercise in control, for both of us, for all of us.

Then comes breakfast and one doesn’t just give David his meal, one prepares it: dogburger, pasta, an egg, lightly seasoned. My man lives high on the hog and he smells of boar, in a nice way.

Then I ride, baby. And every day’s a venture; one must only add the ‘ad’ the ‘misad’.

I’m a teacher now so a lesson in fours: four strong winds that blow lonely, four long roads that lead to Rome. In the middle of a ride last week I was hit by a cannonade of wind, seemingly from all quarters. Mixed-up, confused but damn strong, somehow always in your face and cold, flinty, full of schist and berg. I unsaddled and went into the Circolo Arci in Radicondoli for a coffee and came out to hear a contadino yelling through his yellow teeth into the white teeth of the wind, ‘Madonna, Franco che cazzo hai fatto per questo Tramontino?’ Or, literally, ‘Madonna Franco, what dick have you done to bring this little Tramontana upon us?’ And the penny dropped; Tramontana is an infamous wind, a breath of crevasse from across the high Alps.

Two days later, still cold from the touch of Tramontana, I sat over a beer in the Piazza del Campo as the temperature climbed up the side of the Torre del Mangia

And I watched a cloud building all full of cinder and spotlights and said to my friend, a waiter at the pizzeria, ‘Antonio, that’s no ordinary cloud.’ Sure enough 15 minutes later my sunglasses were spackled with mud. Sky mud. Mud from the sky. It rained Saharan sand. Next I expect frogs. So a Scirocco is not only an outmoded Volkswagen sports coupe; it’s a wind that kicks up in the Western Sahara, loads up on fine red sand then caterwauls across The Straights of Gibraltar, where it saturates itself in the sultry Mediterranean, then dumps this rime all over Europe and Europeans.

Back home we have our Westerly and our dreaded Southeaster and that’s all she wrote. No Mistral, no Ghibli, no Banshee, no Bise, no Fohn, no Harmattan. But at least we aren’t driven to Absinthe or ear amputation or really bad pop music. O La Paloma Blanca

Later …

I was going to tell you about the roads that lead to Rome, I know I was bad before but I’m a teacher now so I can really hold forth – talk the ears off a jackass – but what I really want, Divine Miss Kitty, is the road that leads to you, to your embrace, your intoxicating caresses. I miss you with literal pain and the sad irony is that I often your absence most acutely when I’m submerged in the most beautiful things; I miss your eyes and wish so much that they could see these things too.

As we speak, I’m traversing terrain that would tug at your heart. I was feeling a little morose, a little penned-in in the foggy hollows of the Colli Senesi and nothing burns off the mist and verdigris of dank sentiment like an October trainride through Tuscany. So here I am.

I’m northbound to Lucca for two days of riding in the Appenine mountains. Just a weekend adventure, a wee adventure, an adventurino, plus an excuse for a trip on a train. I love them; they are shuttling links of possibility. Certain routes I’ve traveled dozens of times, like Munich to Rome or Bern to Siena, with a list of stops that reads like a Hemmingway novel: Berna – Spitz – Brig – Domodossola – Milano – Bologna – Firenze. Plus, a trainride is just the cure for a touch of tristesse.

This one’s a milk run train just three cars long; my beloved bicycle’s hanging on a toe-strap from the hand-rail in front of the WC in the 2nd car’s vestibule. Over the loose clatter of a small town train is the constant shrieking of hyper-excited kids off to visit their grandparents and such. Out the window their paradise rolls by unchecked.

The light, as ever, is everything. Here and now it’s squash seeds, lemon peel in headlights, corn husk and hammered aluminum … and tonight I’ll take a beer outside in the piazza under a nightsky of soft acetylene vaulting over beerglass and belltower alike.

I knew the Appennine well but haven’t ridden them in six years. They’re much bigger than the hills in the south and I can’t wait. I’m as fit as I get and I’ll take no prisoners. I’m bulletproof baby. I’m invincible.

My thoughts are with you constantly and though I’m surrouded by perfection I’d rather be in the rain submerged in you. It won’t be long precious Kitty. XS

A shrill blue cattle-prod of freeze-frame magnesium white full fucking agony my head bounces off the cool brushed aluminum rails of an articulating cot pain gone now gone before the aluminum stopped ringing now gone good god gone as soon as it hit – almost. MotherFUCKER what was that? A course of tears a stream of tears not fey drops of tears but tearing tearing unmanly horrible tears porca miseria what the fuck was that. Professor you told me you told me you promised me you positively crowed. You lied. Professore Palasciano I’m miswired!

Be brave, caro, it’s only an adjustment, an adjustamentino.

Arto fantasma, phantom pain. Pain in the limb that’s gone and there is nothing phantasmic about it whatsofuckingever. It’s as real as the night is long. My nights. My toes clench, on that side, when the rigor mortis the mortal rigours hit. At least Palasciano never said it was just in my head. He may have cut off my leg but he knows better than to fuck with my head. After just one day of quality time with this, this animal – there’s one thing I do know and that’s that if anyone tries to tell me that shit’s just in my head, I’ll rip their fucking eyes out.

I’m not on a cot not a trolley not a gurney not a slab.

It’s a wagon and it’s all wood. Flat on my back on cracked slats of dusty unpainted sunbleached wood and the cart’s being drawn by something I can’t see what. Could be an ox a horse more likely an ass. We’re moving that’s what counts and the sun is directly overhead and it’s sere tumbleweed country not the garden of Tuscany at all.

On my back as usual but the thing is – one of the slats is broken and my left leg

has fallen through and is swinging like a metronome in perfect time with the lurch of my progress. I wipe my mouth with my sleeve and with the jolting and all I can hold my head up just long enough to see my leg down to almost the knee then the hole in the floorboards and I feel my leg swinging freely below, hanging down there between groaning iron-shod wheels and axles. By and by I start to worry for my free-swinging leg worry about what I can’t see worry about rocks and boulders coming up about discreet changes in terrain worry even about a big old cow pat. I try to make eye with whatever’s pulling me to ask it to take care but it’s no good I can’t see past the headboards.

And now on these scorching high plains of rising panic the pitchfork cactus not throwing out shadows at all comes a snowbound scene from a favourite book. In my mind in my head all in my head a wintry World War Two boxcar trundling by headed for the front and full of live cattle for the troops. Many animals have dropped to their bellies through the rotten floorboards and their shattered forelegs clock on every ing tie, their bawling would shiver your timbers.

Phantom dreams within phantom-recollections within dreams of every stripe and all in a heartbeat all in the vascular surgery ward the halls and rooms dotted with frozen wall clocks each one desperate arms akimbo hands reaching out each floor vent a prison cell to a heckling dustbunny rattling the bars and yelling obscenities at the warders: ‘Phantom this, you motherfuckers!’ grabbing at their dustfuzzy crotches and still the warderlies arrogantly swing their keyrings blackjack tap their blue-clad thighs in perfect time. Sister Metronome Sister Mine. Please let it all be good let it all be fine. Take me by the hand, take me down and take your time.

To get from Siena to Monteroni D’arbia you can take the Cassia – one of many roads that lead to Rome – but like most things, the Cassia is not what it was.

Now it’s a lethal imbroglio of stink-pot diesel trucks, lumbering farm vehicles and harried clerks. Time is always on my hands and motorcycles or bicycles are always between them, so I go South over the emerald tops of the Sienese Hills, not along the malodorous river valleys. I launch my slim and willing Honda, its four itty bitty pistons pushing a hornet whine through a megaphone exhaust and giving me a nice tight 90 kph at 6500 rpm; the sweet spot. Push the sweet spot.

Gently now. From Costafabri to Ville di Corsano the provincial road scythes through a rolling seascape of spring wheat, barley and rape. The true Colli Senesi. The terrain around Radi, surely one of the most achingly beautiful places on earth, rears up and gets rambunctious briefly then lies on its side like a beached cello and slopes into the Crete. More a verdant Andalusia than a viney grove, it is a land the Italians call ‘generoso’ which is something, coming as it does from a very generous people.

I slope across the Cassia on foot. My well-loved ‘73 CB 350 ticks down behind me, a tiny spiral of smoke rising off an insignificant oil-leak by the tachometer cable where it threads into the cylinder head. On a rare day Rosanna’s there watching as the bungee cords thwap my fingers, I drop the language school’s tape recorder in the dust and my shoulderbag swings around and hits me in the groin.

But usually she’s late; usually the class is well underway when she slips in with her apologies, her tender tired eyes; her whiff of tobacco smoke young and old. She’s my favourite student and my worst one. When she comes at all she comes late, her books forgotten and a hole where her homework should be. But she gets an ‘A’ in humanity and an ‘A+’ in quiet sad humour, plus her English is already

pretty damn good. She’s a doctor at the hospital in Siena and she would be a far better student if she wasn’t so busy saving lives.

Mark’s toast, he didn’t make it. Another dear friend down; gone down, taken down in his prime. I’m lost in loss. He got run over like a dog outside of Prima Porta by some ass-wipe in a Roman van, not Ben Hur in a chariot you understand. I don’t know what he was riding but I’m pretty sure it was a piece of shit. I lent him 500 marks in Munich towards buying himself a proper motorcycle and he shapes up with this fucking abortion of a British chopper, as if a chopper’s not bad enough on its own now it needs to be a fuckin’ Triumph!

A triumph of asininity! For all I know he got whacked on that.

He’s in a beautiful green plot at the Protestant Cemetery near the Pyramides in Rome. Fuckin’ idiot. Nothing careful about Mark; he is the least careful guy I know and now he’s gone and no one will ever know how exactly or why. He makes me so mad. He needs a good cuff upside the head.

I wait on the curb at the Piazza del Popolo for one of Mark’s girlfriends. I’m always waiting for girls; now I’ll be forever waiting for Mark. I’m at a loss lost again at a corner this now-familiar junction. I see women selling fruit in the Campo di Fiori with cabbage leaves on their heads to allay the Roman heat. I fuck the girlfriends in favour of the fruit-sellers and I see them with Mark’s eyes our eyes our one and only eyes these same eyes that burn that well that will that tear that tear that tary on what’s gone. I’m having a problem with tenses, with tension; I’m having a problem with loss.

Marking Time

We cascaded down these midnight streets these worn and caring streets These blithe skewed forgetful and flyblown streets not so many Times but goodly Times enough. And Time, sadly, only seems to somewhere between when it’s grossly and slightly beyond Timely.

Time is like Mark; loaded for the moment and careening down ancient hummocky streets with shitty brakes and a storm of reasons fluttering like banknotes out of its unzipped pockets. Dog-eared and tres presse Time has your paperwork, Time has your number in one of its pockets. Somewhere.

Frankly though, Time doesn’t give a shit. Time is Capitalized. Time rhymes with rime. Verdigris. Greengrey Time. Buy it. Bide it. Ride it. Time has wheels and Time’s burning out

but it’s still losing Time. Hell for leather and still burning out.

From the window on the sixth floor I look due south over the ruck of local hills then the casual green majesty of the Colli Senesi, the fanning space of the Crete and finally the round twin peaks of Monte Amiata, the giant of Tuscany. I can name each miniscule town in between, picture it’s Circolo Arci, the kind old girl working the counter, the little faceted glasses of so-so beer, the freezer chests full of stale Cornettos and the good old boys, their scrawny asses perched on plastic cafeteria chairs, playing cards or hands up on their canes and braying at the television. I know the name of every little town, every comune and the radius of every curve of the local roads that link them.

I can connect their dots with a million memorable bicycle and motorcycle rides, but now it’s old Remo Giardiniere in back of me muttering about corrente. I pull the window down with my right hand grab the chair wheels with both and peel out to the corridor for another lap of the ward. Or two.

Things are looking up. Palmino took pity on my ass hanging out the back of that beater wheelchair and brought me three new pair of boxers. Straight up Palmino my Lazian pal, an attraction like magnets like opposites attract.

My cycling pal Palmino. Forever I chide him about his slow corner speed, tell him he corners like a lobotomized Spanish cow and forever he says, ‘Pero Stivi sono prudente, I am prudent,’ someone must be. The new boxers I can pull on myself, up and over It without ing out. I do circuits of the Lotto Chirugia Vascolare past nooks and alcoves jumbled with furniture tippy stacks of disused telephones wistful disoriented inmates and laughing infermieri singing out ‘Vai bello. Vai! Avanti Allez!’ I can only use my shattered arm when they and the dottori aren’t looking so I track like a canoe with no keel mostimes. Nevertheless my lap times are coming down I’m casting around for a higher-end wheelchair this thing doesn’t corner worth shit it’s a fucking bucket of bolts something Grandma Whistler would sneer at and I’m also negotiating I’m always negotiating to be allowed to slowly and carefully hoist myself out of said chair and sit on the can and shit like a man not inflict me or anyone else with a fucking padella a bed pan a diaper ordeal times 10.

In plenty of ways life on the sixth floor in the vascular unit is a spa. Gaia never comes as a nurse but comes daily. I tell her don’t come so much, don’t do this for me and she says, ‘Such an idiot you are; I do this for me.’ She shaves my face with a tin bowl and a shitty plastic razor, she’s no good at it; never done it before but like many women always wanted to. Just the furze on her forearms the tiny twin jets of sweet air from her nose, the furrow of concentration and most of all her focusful proximity is often overwhelming. Even her buying me a paper – a seemingly mundane act – is considerable.

The paper I read, the gauche pink ‘Gazzetta Dello Sport’ is a blue-collar rag, a soccer daily, she hates it; it’s an emblem of the Senese hooligans, laughingstocks, childish ragazze. I read it for the cycling results and the motorbike racing and she, I’m sure, keeps her eyes pinned on the countertop lottery tickets when she pays her money at the Tabacchino.

The spa-like pampering comes from many quarters: the sponge baths aren’t istered by Gaia and are considerably more brusque than those she’ll later lavish on me. Still they’re a relief. Shampoos and alcohol rub-downs daily linen changes and menu selections oh yes I’m pissing on ice … no, I’m pissing down a tube that’s jammed in my dick my piss tube a counter-clockwise umbilical fullcircle in reverse.

Palmino smuggles me beer. But only one a day. Two max.

He brings great flats of lightly stolen prosciutto, thick seductive cycling magazines and even my veryown home-made music cassettes bless his swarthy Roman heart. Years ago I made him ten-or-so tapes cause I had a vision of how handicapped he would be if he spent his impressionable early adult years listening to Italian pop. Now they’ve circled back to me. Clockwise and timely. And the blues, for better or worse, are timeless, golden, evergreen.

Palmino never came when I was down below in the inferno in the lower level in trauma in emergency in rianimazione in the shit, and I don’t blame him for one red second. He’s thin-skinned, my dear friend; and he’s sheepish now on the subject. He tried twice, down below, I have it on good authority; but his sporting blood turned to piss at the panorama of misery, the catastrophic results of the want of prudence. He pivoted and split.

It wasn’t just me, you understand.

The first time he actually made it to my bedside was up here not there and he came with his supersweet girlfriend Cinzia, she being the tough one. Palmino was embarrassed, painfully circumspect, unforgettably loving. It was pure torture for him and a thing of beauty. They’d hardly left, Palmino hitting the corridor as in a high wind as on a treill when I heard him blurt to Cinzia, ‘Porca Madonna hai visto il poverino? Did you see the poor little bastard?’ And she shushed him: ‘He can hear you caro, his leg is gone, not his ears.’

Emiliano is up to his elbows in me. Or so it seems. Oh boy there he goes he’s one of Palasciano’s vascular dream team he’s ultra-charming and totally adept but that doesn’t change the fact that from my crook-necked vantage up here he’s up to his elbows in me oh my. He’s irrigating the wound left by my amputation – there, there’s the word – and the middle of my thigh is now the end, which is a nasty cordillera of pooching flesh and blanket stitches. Emiliano could be basting a turkey for all his expression belies and same for his tools for that matter – he’s got a syringe as big as a garden hose he’s going in under the stitches hosing me down with a gravy coloured disinfectant as dear mother would say I feel woozy till he starts to knead my stump like a wad of dough palping it pumping it encouraging drenaggio encouraging it to flush itself clean itself heal itself and woozy is replaced by frantic distress.

Gaia has materialized her sky-sintered eyes in a halo of terra cotta blonde hair and daffodil dust and I promptly release the rails and take up her hand her bedside her manner more than anyone could ask for and it might send me to hell but I’m in it already so I don’t think twice about pressing the side of my forehead to somewhere between her shoulder and her breast Emiliano rests the flat of his hand for two beats on the top of my poor ravaged thigh his thoughtful and tender way of telling me that the violation is over for now and my back which is arched like a swimsuit model’s warily comes down to meet the soaked mattress my eyes close like two blowholes but I don’t letting go of Gaia’s blonde determined swallow-boned hand and I can’t say when I left her or she me.

Fall Move

Even in this wind, dead saturated leaves

slump to the ground in mute resignation Clothes pegs left on the line look like blunt chips from a derelict pier Northwest November in everything’s mind

Yet another moving day, all boxed-up

but a few essentials: resin encrusted coffee pot slab of butter jar of honey half-loaf of bakery bread black book date book booking book fish book check book Thirty final pages of an epic novel

There are pieces of hardened nostalgia we will

not pack rat We challenge each other’s resolve

flaunt borderline objects over a maw of rubbish laugh We’re becoming closer as we move apart

As usual I am booked on a flight

It is my impetus, I will be lonely, the loser off to rake in his winnings and she will it it

Our control here is impressive, it is hard-won

She has dusted my trappings with love, colour, loss

My future is leaving them behind

When I am gone she will feed them bits of me They could press the warmth of her sleeping contours or accumulate under her bed like dustbunnies I can only hope

I have set her forth on projects

She has set me forth on love

I have been smeared with her love so often

it now lines my skin like insulation against cold women, coarse affairs When I sweat I can smell her sex I leave her on my upper lip and go about the days breathing through my nose smiling in the wind and rain

In the beginning there was nothing. And the beginning lasted a handful of days. At first my coma was real, then induced. A rumorous backdrop like a switching yard, shunting squeaking turning rattling soft bootsoles on pot-metal wheelbrakes the crunkle of new dripbags a corona of concerned heads staring down at me from up in the nosebleed seats always aways always away faraway. Then I opened a gooey eye like an overslept sturgeon, saw Colin’s willful face, projectile cried, and ed out again all in 2 secs.

My dear dearest friend he’s supposed to be on the other side of the world he’s still faraway but much closer than I thought. He came to me he’s by my side he’s not lost don’t lose him no more loss. I don’t know how many times he stood there without recognition. He does but he’s not the type to count. Then they clipped my opioid wings – pulled back on the stick of my Little Carapace That Could – and he was there for real and with a burning question:

Your leg’s fucked pal they need your permission to take it away and you’re going to give it to me right? Oh it burns the heat’s coming from inside this time.

Now the soft thrumming of eider wings sister morphine coursing sinking into a tub of downy timelessness downy down going down I’m goin’ down …

Klingle came in the night in the long night the wrong night but no night’s right for Klingle

I’m standing on the rainwet curb in front of a posh private Austrian clinic. I’ve been discharged I feel just fine though the orange glow from the clinic’s electric sign above my head makes me look a little ghoulish. But I’m off to see Klingle and I’m scared shitless and full of shame cause just now on the phone in the clinic I pimped to him the sexual services of my dear friend Denise in exchange for my life, so he won’t assassinate me you understand. Denise doesn’t know yet and who knows how she’ll take it, she’s pretty racy but we’ll find out soon enough cause she’ll be at the club that I’m off to and she’ll be dressed to the nines.

I’m trying to save Paolo here too, but it doesn’t make me feel any better about poor Denise. The explanation – the short version – is that Paolo and I were working on a large oil tanker that ran aground off the coast of Naples, there were lives lost an oil spill a lot of material damage. Paolo and I know what happened and who’s responsible so the shipping company has hired this asshole to waste us to protect their insurance claim. I know it’s a tawdry hit list of clichés a crapulous B-movie plot but knowing it is not going to save my life I have to act. And Klingle, he’s persistent.

Some lackey leads me downstairs Klingle wants to see me alone first to go over the whole sordid deal and the club is Klingle’s style alright all fake red velour brass-like fittings and dark. There he is in his stupid fucking tuxedo and likely onto his second bottle of prosecco. No class. He does though have a gun in his cummerbund. He is sort of handsome I guess in a pouchy shiny-faced dissipated euro-way and poor Denise, well she’s a very handsome woman sexy even but damn near sixty maybe more and maybe a bit too zaftig.

But I’m dying here and Klingle’s enjoying this far too much so I cut to the chase we shake on it and I turn on my heel and start calling out her name. No answer but I can distinctly hear her kibitzing upstairs she’s got a voice like a drill sergeant.

I call overandover, getting moreandmore desperate then I see her and so does Klingle. She’s high in the back of the room where the wall meets the ceiling she’s behind a very large porthole a circular window with three or four other fleshy women in Klondike floozy-wear. They’re floating around laughing their heads off swilling champagne unholstering their breasts and pressing them against the porthole. Klingle is all fired up but all my calling is to no avail. I have to beat it. And while klingle is spiking his glass against the wall in frustration, I do.

Denise is my den mum, my taskmaster, my heroine, my landlady; The Great Earth Mother. I live with her and Pietro on the top of La Montagnola; I stumbled into their kind embrace nearly twenty years ago and it’s been, mostly, a steady diet of laughs, good times, good food, good friends and now this. She’s indomitable she’s so fine she comes up to the Vascular Ward every single day. They told her I don’t eat, need to eat and need to eat meat and protein most of all.

She charges in the door always and as always is in a fulsome lather, late for work and packing a side-splitting bag full of groceries. A fair representation of everything on earth with protein in it. ‘Cazzo Denise. I don’t have an appetite never mind a refrigerator.’ ‘Ti sistemo io,’ she says, which is a super-charming Italian way of saying, ‘I’ll sort you out,’ and up she jumps out to badger someone into coughing up a refrigerator of any description for il poverino Canadese in room 602.

A steady stream of visitors all day every day and it can get a teeny bit tricky cause Denise is a whirling dervish and doesn’t get along with quite everyone.

Today’s all good. Lots of friends but now I’m so very tired. Italians love to be entertained and I’m normally too happy to oblige but it’s not my mother tongue it makes my brain whirl makes me so very very tired. When Denise arrives I’m all alone and she’s packing another meal. In general I’m afraid to eat; the aftermath is so noxious. In short order my stomach gets hard as a chestnut sweat pours off me I get piquantly panicky uncomfortable then mortally tired. But this time it smells sooo good I smell curry how wonderful curry and coconut how can that be?

‘I cooked it just for you carinissimo,’ she says and so she did. Cooked it up on the mountain and packed it all the way down in Pietro’s tin-bucket Renault 4

flying with rattly wings and leaking a curried tale straight across Pian del Lago cause Denise wouldn’t recognize Tupperware if it bit her.

And she watches me eat and eat not with the usual bitty bird pecks but in scoopfuls like a logger. The logger I was before the fisherman I still might be after the fisherman I was. Someone’s going to have to pay for this but now I don’t care cause now I’m so terribly tired I reach up and hold lovely Denise by the earlobe her mad lovely eyes and slip away my tongue pushing bits of coconut fibre around my teeth my filthy sweatered teeth.

My teeth are furry with residue from last night’s palm brandy and curry. I was over-served. Three or four three or four finger servings of palm toddy and three or four delicious curries. My head’s just a tad furry too and boy do I need water. It’s dawnish and the mountains out the window in the heart of Sri Lanka are pinstriped with light. I got lost yesterday and rode into town late, grateful and plenty hungry. I thought I’d keep pedaling but was seduced by the fact that there is a Government Rest House here and the town’s name is ‘Belihul Oya’.

Anytown with a name like that is bound to be friendly and fun. And so it is. I keep getting lost and it keeps turning out beautifully. This map has been recklessly inaccurate but consistently providential. Perhaps it’s a sign.

I’m partly in the clear as far as getting lost goes because maps in Sri Lanka are so crappy. Crappy maps. You pretty much have to buy them on the sly in Colombo’s back alleys, like buying truffles in Provence, and those you find are of 1940’s British survey provenance. Presumably the Indian government wants to give as few clues as possible to the rebels in this horrible war. It’s a war that flares and subsides like a bloody chronic injury and the only good thing about it is no tourists.

So these stately government Rest Houses are fully staffed, empty of guests and aching for business.

In a Rest House you get amenities that mostly work, a predictable if mediocre cuisine and the necessary and comforting evil of petulant and incompetent waiters who move at glacial speeds in perfect whites. A river runs through the one in Belihul Oya – Oh I’d just love to take that name for a roll in the hay – it runs in fact, right under the back corner of my bedroom, so I can dog paddle, play motorboat and flush out my filthy cycling togs while I wait for them to fuck up my order. But it’s dawn, my teeth are in manky sweaters, I need water and

need to do something about this revolution in my guts…

Breakfast is a fez of scrambled eggs, ranks of toast, shameless dollops of marmalade, wheels of supersweet pineapple, a good three pots of hotrod orange Highland tea and two stories by Rudyard Kipling. I’m running late cause I had a swim, I couldn’t give a fuck, and there’s nothing to be late for. There’s only the remorseless heat which is anyhow remorseless. Last night, however, the creek took me to bed and I slept the sleep of the dead.

This is the heart of the Uva Basin; it’s anything but a basin, and it’s some of the best cycling I’ve ever experienced. I crest after Uva , then fire through tumbling houses of juice-stained post cards to stop in a coverall of sweat where a piano key-toothed kid with a cheap machete lops off the top of a pumpkincoloured King Coconut and I drink my quart of sweet pearline gas. Gas in my tank. It’s voluptuous and come-hither; a strapless tarmac that stands up and lap dances. It’s cartoon country: holes in the wall, road runner and coyote corners, Raider of the Lost Ark bridges and not even enough room for wind, never mind guard rails. I spend hours slow dancing on a 23-tooth cog sporting a lamentable expression of half anaerobic grimace and half beaming ecstasy.

Two days back I ed under the spooky pretty peak of Numununkula, the highest mountain in Sri Lanka. It is skeined with perfectly aimless high tea country roads. A sweep of tea plantations. Each individual tea bush is plucked damn near daily so a valley of side-by-side tea estates looks like a giant topiary competition. A ride of enhanced bliss, a swirl through a cuneiform Kiddie-Land labyrinth of deep guiding green …

I took the turn-off labeled ‘World’s End’, ed a knot of boys worrying broken bikes, saw the road ahead ramping up steeply, shifted up into my 23 tooth cog and eased out of the saddle for a long long climb. Nobody ever got to World’s End without a little time and a little horsepower. Switch after switchback the road got ever narrower and less and less able to call itself a road at all.

Wheelspin and gravelshoot I rock my bike through a still band of elegant pines, a blaze of Tuscany that decorates the chest of the upper Uva. A high altitude crown of bosky Tuscan picnic ground on a tropical island full of crocodiles and lonely Tigers with no food and two clips of damp ammo.

Past elfin cottages covered in flowers, in spokes of welder’s light to a ridgeline of treetops moshing in a rocking wind. Things are going sideways, time-lapse, intoxicating. I bark and cuss more in wonderment and exhortation than anything else and it’s always accompanied by the tittering and urgent halloooos of kids and goats. I actually heard an: ‘Up, Up, Cheerio!’ I get off for a breather – an exceptionally rare event – and I’m jackknifed, forearms on my thighs and trying to get it together when a gaggle of tea-plucker girls gently spirit my bike from me to walk it up the remaining 300 meters of goat track to the World’s End Lodge … PO Box 001, World’s End.

‘I’m watching you now for maybe thirty minuites,’ says a happy brown guy holding a pair of binoculars, ‘for sure you are super-hungry!’ He gave me a dry sarong, showed me a wet one full of little brook trout and opened me a quart of 3 Coin Lager. I helped him push a fresh propane tank into place, then I had a hot shower (my first in Sri Lanka) and then I helped him enjoy the trout – all of them.

He called himself Terry and he informed me that my map was crappy, my map was in error, and the road stopped here. An avalanche in the 50’s wiped-out the route to the top. In the morning he introduced me to a boy named Pali, who would guide me over the mountain on foot. Pali’s feet were bare and he was holding a walkie-talkie the size of a toaster oven. He held it before his eyes like a trophy; it didn’t work at all but made a braying squelch that reassured and added a professional touch. I gave him my daypack, shouldered my bicycle and scrambled behind him up the side of the rockface; a redfaced giant in flip-flops porting a dramatically overpriced macramé of steel tubes, thorny underbrush and clingy unmanly clothing.

In 3 hours we made the benchland – the end of the shitty, dangerous part and Pali chuckled, gave over my pack, pocketed a mushy wad of rupies and dropped back down over the edge with his radio like a squawking crow.

I scrambled, slipped and climbed and finally hit a crowned two-track road where I hitched a ride through pin-pricking cloud tatters on a flat-deck trailer behind a tea tractor, a shit-eating smile a mile wide.

Hours later I’m riding across Horton Plains, sailing across a surreal high plateau, sailing on a fine-boned skinny-tired optimally equipped brilliant rosso red Italian racing bike, my jersey pockets stuffed with spare tires and tart green fruit.

Down cinnamon-coloured hardsand roads in guncracks of wind through a beatup Serengeti of rolling savannah and tortured trees. Ground-level clouds ripping around like manic shuttle buses, small herds of deep-chested antelope are looking at me funny as I ride no-hands eating tiny tropical bananas and the light blooms and umbers like a 3 drink coquette.

I’m washing in a hot tin tub legs draped over the edge, the riding jersey I had hung out to dry is disappearing across the high plains like quick-tumble tumbleweed, now palm brandy is advancing toward me across a vinyl covered table and all is good in the world. And the World’s End too. The end of the world is not so bad. Bottoms up.

Back in the valley I reluctantly re-engage with towns. But I need a town; I need one now. My antics in the high-country have loosened-up my drive train; my crankarms are drifting out along my bottom bracket spindle; they’ve lost their grip. It’s an easy fix that requires a special little tool I’ve left on the kitchen counter about 12 thousand miles away. I find a dirt lot and a dirt lot mechanic and while I eat curried buns he takes my crankbolt, sticks it in the end of a scrap

pipe, hammers the shit out of it till it forms a hex, braces his bare foot on my polished aluminum chainwheel and applies a giant monkey wrench.

It’s a total success, I’m on my way and I’m finely fettled. I’ll take a smart hipshot fix over a computer chip any old day. How little we really need; how much is shoved at us.

I need water. It’s early in the game this game of life and death this game of loss. I’m alive I know that much but not much else. There was no penny drop no dawn no bright awakening I’m just laying here and I’m really fucking thirsty. I’m coming to from having my leg whacked off and I guess I haven’t been terribly stable, so they’re keeping a very close eye and they probably don’t feel that good either. But this is rianimazione, not a walk in the park and these precious people have been here before. They’re pros.

Not sure exactly why but I can’t move at all and one angelic infermiere after another arrives and dabs water on my mouth or tries to funnel it past my lips which feel like twin corn husks. Actual size. Cool water purls down my naked chest and is lost in a desert of stiff white hospital sheets. I also know that somewhere down there I’m missing; I’ve figured it out. Testing one-two-three. I scout the cresting white waves of institutional linen for clues. It looks like an impressionist painting of a storm in the North Atlantic. Out there somewhere is a sailor lost at sea.

Light and shadow break camp and now it’s an icefall of knife-edged seracs and somewhere out there a deep crevasse holds a fallen climber. It’s mostly in my head.

A disturbing number of tubes and whatnot coming in and out of me and now I’m feeling hydraulic; like a broken-down pump in the bottom of an empty swimming pool. Just keep the water coming and we’ll get to the bottom of this.

Here’s Colin and here I go bawling again. The gift of his presence is everything, he posits me reinforces me points a laughing finger at what may well have pulled me down. More than anything he looks in my eyes they’re his eyes his kind eyes his good old eyes his sight for sore eyes. His eyes tell me too that this is hard for him and it’s not just me. Not at all. I have eight or ten neighbours down here in

reanimation and most of them are a good deal more fucked-up than me. Spinefucked brain-fucked gut-fucked and each-and-every-one head-fucked you can bet on that. I’ve got a shitpile of broken bones torn connective tissue and a missing bit. But here there’s death allround and all the time; death and destruction and sometimesanimation. Every single day. Colin says, with characteristic lucidity, ‘Imagine the waiting room.’

‘Rianimazione’; I get stuck on that word. It’s a rare example of Italian literalmindedness. They are, exactly, breathing life back into me and my luckier neighbours down here at garden level in Siena’s hospital and if you’re not on the qui vive, stay out of the way. We’re working hard to keep death at bay.

We’re placed just so; a stone’s throw to the helicopter pad and double doors that conveniently swing onto the ambulance turnaround. Seems like dozens and dozens of trauma nurses on the jump and I’ve ed through hundreds of hands every pair of them able, comionate and professional. Then there’s Gaia who’s all that and more.

Time and space are returning to me if only just to visit. Even math. I count things and not just hours and days but bottles pills windows trays one exactly one crucifix and all my favorite infermieri. Not just Gaia – it’ll take me a while to realize that something exquisite is growing there – but all the other ragazzi. They’re mostly boys actually, cause this business of reanimation is often more physical than bailing hay.

It’s been a handful of days since they removed my leg and it will be a handful more till they address my poor arm and it’s time for me to sit up and take stock. Paolo comes to my side all smiles and says it’s time to get back on the pony, cowboy. We laugh in a brotherly handclasp and I know that I don’t really, really need to warn him that his life is in peril; the whole Klingle deal was merely a black twisp of coma, but nor am fully out of the dark fully convinced. Paolo is small but rock-solid; half Special Forces commando and half Jack Russell with a

Mother Theresa chaser. calls me ‘Cento’, or ‘Hundred’; says I’m a hundred times more durable than your average man, he knows how to pump a guy up. He commandeers two other burly he-nurses and they lower the bars, drop the bed and prepare to lift me out of my death pose.

They’ve unclipped most of my systems so I can fly unfettered. There remains, of course, the piss bag and that’ll have to fly with me – like a shuttle attached to the mothership. There might even be some mid-air refueling.

Uno due tre and four hands and my newly gelatinous abdominal muscles assist me upright.

For the briefest moment everything was just fine.

Then a rush of air and the room lurched into a horrible flat spin I keeled over like a Royal Guard. Paolo saw it coming and caught me from down on his knees. Fix your eyes caro fix your eyes on something so I tried the crucifix but it was no help and I gasped and wheezed and whirled and sweat poured down through my hairline then I found a window thank god. They let me go and there I was.

I wouldn’t say the room stopped moving but it was manageable. But I’m cartilaginous, amoebic, spreading yet unbelievably atrophied everywhichway. I’m a partially eaten food item that’s been left in the microwave for three weeks. And I haven’t even tried to move yet. I’m sitting up taking stock and I find I can’t affix any borders to me.

‘Sir Yes Sir!’ Bone white sheeting sweat and awaiting marching orders. ‘Caro, do you not call it an “Easy Chair,”’ and so it was – way down over the bulwarks

of the bed sat a pariah of an American-style rec-room chair: puff-padded bile green shiny Naugahyde with the occasional control lever and mounted on a chromed tripod. ‘Your throne, my Prince,’ laughed Paolo. A puffy green chair in a parallel universe. We’re goin’ down and no morphine this time my friend no sister, sucker.

And so the three of them installed me and there I was again: in the driver’s seat, sotospeak, controls at my fingertips but I’m visibly flattening under grave forces forces of gravity these all-new forces. The right leg reaches the ground and I laboriously pole myself around in my swamp green fishing smack, pole my coracle one full circle hopping around looking for lee in a quartering wind and I try to enjoy the novelty of a panorama without keeling over to the port side. The crucifix came and went.

‘Paolo, I think I’d like to return.’ Cavalier and calm-seeming just infront of a cresting wave of exhausted hysteria slash nausea now I’m back in a jiffy I’m in my hosey white trough looking at life from behind bars and feeling much better for it.

Here in my unit it’s better all around.

After all, they come to me.

Gaia comes often and now the sight of her statuesque and slightly petulant face gives me such pleasure that I become extremely agitated when I lose track of her. I’m OK now cause she’s holding my wrist and me hers my hand slid up just inside the sleeve of her white tunic transported unable and unwilling to release those skybright eyes and Damiano comes sailing around the corner with the fixings for my morning toilette. Gaia understands, of course, and disappears.

Trauma nurses are a special breed and as Damiano is shaving me washing my hair and now sponging me I wonder how he copes with the emergency side of emergency. He’s tall, thin, shy and quiet with an incredibly sweet demeanor; the opposite to Paolo, though sweetness, one way or the other, is the common gene here. I’m ribbing him and he’s softly chuckling while swabbing me down and somehow he manages to solidly backhand my balls.

My arm, the one in a giant cast, snapped up with alacrity and clipped him across the jaw, which did nothing to staunch the flow of, ‘O Dio Mio, mi dispiacce Stivi, O Dio Dio Madonna.’ He couldn’t stop apologizing. Once the shock and throbbing subsided I reassured him that I knew it was a mistake no problem relax just your wrist my nuts and a cot a rock and a hard place but you know what Dami? It might not be now, today or even tomorrow but I will get you back. And mere minutes later God showed and presented me with my first powerful need of the padella. Damiano, poor bastard, was still on the clock and I served it up hot, my revenge.

Though it was darker down in rianimazione, darker in every sense, there were three windows within my 45-degree scope. They were high on the wall, would’ve been unavailable to me anyway and in any case looked onto a parkade, not the post card view from my future lodgings. Still, I could mark time as colour and brightness changed and the days the hot ponderous days dragged by like a chained file of sore plumb tuckered circus elephants. Punctuation came in five forms: one of my neighbours took a turn for the worse, some dire new specimen was wheeled in, my friends the nurses came to make me laugh, Colin visited or Gaia materialized.

We were made for each other, the nurses and I. My condition was grave but I wasn’t, plus I was showing hopeful signs; I was charming and irreverent yet frequently idiotic, sometimes moody and often paranoid enough that they knew their job was far from done. I was large and unlikely, foreign but conversant, and eager – perhaps desperate – for a good laugh. Plus I talk even more than your

average Italian. So they came to my bedside and we yucked it up.

A good day in rianimazione you want to savour want to roll on your tongue want to suck like a rare bonbon.

On such a day I was being observed. Her name was Rosa she was the floor chief and she was a shrink. She hiked herself up on the edge of my bed and, after bare preliminaries, proceeded to poke me overandover in the chest and insist that I was in denial Oh Gawd I hate that word Denial Denial De-fucking-nial, Diniego is a nogo for mio. She was a New Age-nik with the usual purple hair and her smug asinine insistence nevermind the fucking poking incensed me: a sandlot loonytune non-conversation: You don’t realize your leg’s gone. Bloody Hell I do so! No you don’t Yes I do No you Yes I No Yes No Si! Let me prove that I know my leg’s gone, toast, kaput, andato via. And how will you do that, Signore? I will discreetly point out to you, cara signora, that if I did have a leg it would be KILLING me right now because your big fat ass would be sitting right on it.

Rosa looked down; she had to didn’t she? And sure enough her ass was, in fact, as big as a house and was spreading comfortably and exactly across the area where my leg ought to have been. She left in tears, I felt shitty immediately and likewise immediately it became legend on the floor. The story of Rosa’s culo. Dio mio.

The boys on the floor never laughed so hard peeking around tile corners and stainless trolleys smacking their knees and hooting and clapping me on the back of the head (the only part that was safe to clap). I learn that Rosa’s not so popular here. Me I’m not so sure. In a day or two a couple of them are bedside jazzing me and I hear a lovely baritone behind me say, ‘You’re in better spirits today than you were with Rosa, no?’ Salvatore, the capo of anesthesiologists. The capo period. The capo dei capi. A beautiful man two meters tall and full of rakish humour. ‘I’m very sorry Salvatore, but she simply wouldn’t stop and I found her …’ ‘Leave it be, bello. It’s good for you to get red in the face – let’s call it an

Italian tune-up – and, to be frank, Rosa can be a big pain in the ass, the culo. But, jokes aside, we need to combine our efforts to get you out of here.’

‘Ho capito, Salvatore, I understand completely. I can’t wait to get out, get back on my own two feet, I mean, you know, back in the world.’ ‘But you don’t understand, bello, I need to get you out of here because I need the bed you’re in.’ ‘Oh, I see.’

The misfortunates are beating a trail to the twin swinging doors of reanimation. But I don’t understand how they could reuse this bed what with all my history, my efflusions my dreams nightsweats and daysweats my needlepricks and my conscience my hardcore dander my empty quarter my beggar’s velvet my fear and disoria my hazard-soaked happenstance my sweatsoaked haphazard hellbent wholehearted misadventure.

It seems wrong seems cheap seems like a bordello a plain old brothel a brothel of pain. They should bury this stainless birdcage this brushed aluminum belltower this leaky showerstall of Babel in the airborne lake bottom of Pian del Lago where I was pigeonholed by a runaway driver and let the night animals uncover it and scratch their furry heads.

The Senese believe that Pian del Lago was the birthplace of the pneumonic plague in Boccacio’s time so let the pesty and unhappy spirits who wander its foggy bottomland kip for a spell in the surgical precision of my bed, ratchet in its technologic tang next to the smoking carbolic dungwagons that carried them away from this world away from my near-miss my hosey trough of mortal error. Make it storied make it infamous. Roll with it, my rolling pain chamber …

Ghosts and witches flock to the church hand in arm in hand, giggling yelling weaving along gravel and through cypresses with a hitch in their step.

It’s Halloween and we’re throwing a party.

An annual event in our little village on the Montagnola. Franco is a buon vivante who, along with his wife Anna, run a lovely Bed and Breakfast across the lane and he and I have haphazardly been preparing all week. We started by emptying the church of lawn furniture, weed-whackers, boxes of moldering clothes and various furry or eight-legged tenants. The church, you see, was deconsecrated maybe ten years ago then Franco bought it and now it has become a shrine again.

This time it’s a temple of good living more than a vehicle of penitence. Even in its early incarnation it was an arrestingly quaint and lovely little 11th century stone building, the blackbrown door crowned by wisteria, a tiny pea-gravel patio surrounded by cast iron, ancient mortarless walls, creeping vines. There was always a votive candle flickering and no one knew who lit it or who swept out the church.

Now it’s me sweeping or trying to as David The Dog returns through the open door every 25 to 30 seconds with fresh dirt and the same stick. He takes big blind air into the pomegranate orchard over the courtyard wall and you can hear the wind ruffling his lips his smile’s so big. What an animal.

Stereo equipment is jumbled around and I say hey Franco, what we really need to spur this work along is a little Stones at top volume. Stivi, says he, you’ve come to the right place. I look up quick to the swallow nests in the thousand year-old rafters and then start rummaging for speaker wire. Now our man Franco

gets all ceremonial and guides me by the elbow to a couple of milk crates. He snaps off the pillowcases with a flourish and there they are. Most every Stones album cut (vinyl that is) till 1985 plus lots of other music besides. ‘Te ridi’, he says, you laugh, but I’m a very serious Stones fan.

It wasn’t long before four speakers were breathing through a Victorian china cabinet housing a fat amp and a turntable of dubious provenance but minimal wow and flutter. There are two waist-high B&W speakers upfront watched over by a portrait of the Virgin on the crackplastered wall. In back are two HPM 50 speakers, squat and somber like a pair of KGB agents. I tell you, a little stone church is made to rock, and rock, baby, is made for a stone church. Midnite Rambler, Honkytonk Woman, Shattered. Oh good God the sunlight’s beaming in and painting the frescoed wall in broad confident strokes, painting across the virgin’s shoulders. The willow wisp broom will take a pull as a microphone or an air guitar both.

But we forget. Halloween is breathing down our necks. We set up tables and chairs, roll in demijohns of a Chianti from Certaldo and build a courtyard griglia where we will have an auto-da–fe for forty kilos worth of uninquisitive wild boar sausages and the occasional inquisitive pinkie. This little piggy got burned.

I cast a dubious eye at Franco’s idea of a grill, cobbled together with rocks and stray bits of cast iron. He says, yes it’s not one hundred percent but it’ll work. Franco is also a member of the ‘non e cento per cento’ school.

And three days later dusky ghosts are fluttering around the embers. One lit up but was put out quick. Plenty more ghosts where that one came from they’re arriving thick and fast and it’s pretty much one-to-one ghosts and witches. Halloween is alien to Italians so these are the costumes they settled on to a one: ghosts and witches. Partying, however, comes very naturally. There is a strong turn-out from at least four generations here: kids zipping between their parents’ legs, great aunts shouldering kids and dancing to Beast of Burden, the same kids

getting arrested enroute to the sweets table by cheek torquing elders, ghosts playing glow-in-the-dark Frisbee in the lane, kids up to no good down in the lemon grove, now two and three year-olds dancing with their Pappis to Son of The Preacher Man.

Me I’m DJ and having the time of my life playing the Devil’s Music in the house of our lord, taking a turn with Old Scratch while conveniently posted between two fiascos of 2 buck-a-litre Chianti.

I’m deadly vigilant about anyone approaching with Italian pop music in their ghostly mitts – play it at your own party! But how can anyone refuse these covens of eight-ten-twelve year-old she-witches reaching out to me with music in their hands. Shania Twain of all things. An Italian ragazzina uses at least 12 exquisite syllables to pronounce ‘Shania Twain’; utterly delightful.

Outside the salsicce and wild boar sausage has been consumed down to the last link, the grill either collapsed or removed and a pyre-like fire is rocketing sparks up to a Catherine Wheel of stars bridled by an ink spill of local sky.

There’s still muffled giggling coming from down by the lemon trees and now the young parents are swinging into gear. I slip them Stevie Wonder’s Superstition, Sweet Home in Alabama, a little of my own Lyle Lovett (just to mix it up) and later, when most are sated and many headed to their Fiats and their beds, I cueup Mahalia Jackson’s In The Upper Room, dial it up to 9 and damn-near start crying it’s so heavenly it hurts. Not a soul escaped untouched and more than one felt the cool salve of good-hearted dissention, bumptious uncertainty and plain old relish.

Rock and Roll, in short.

Catherine Wheel

I lay spread-eagle on a bed of knee-high grass a fibrous exhalation of pure green actually visible on a night that’s warmer and further advanced than usual

An explosion of fireflies worries the tremulous air

From this low purchase in the rumourosity of utter mountain stillness the base of my head on a sighing earth in cricket riddled fog-torn breath eyes to the roaring casino of the Milky Way

These careless fireflies barely avoid collisions

with shooting stars Parallax juxtapose and just suppose Unattainable undesirable immobility

Balanced by bliss and busy as a bee.

Rosanna is bent over me in her white lab coat her stethoscope dangling over the rail. She holds both my hands including the one in the cast in both of hers and we are both crying. Stop it, Rosanna, that’s very unprofessional, but I can’t believe it’s you, I can’t believe you’re here. That’s what I should be saying to you, caro, but nevermind.

I was here when they brought you in Stivi, it was my one turn per week in rianimazione, but, I’m afraid I didn’t recognize you, till they cleaned you up a bit. Not for three or four days did I realize that it was my caro professore Canadese in the bed. Lascia Stivi lie still don’t worry everything will be fine, you’re strong like a horse but you’re not going anywhere just now. They’re very good here caro, you’ve had the best care, I’ve made sure of it, I’ve had my eye on you. We still have to do a little something with your povero arm, an interventino, but relax, you’re fine and tonight you’ll meet the man who performed your operation. He’s a true cavaliere. OK bello, I must go but I’ll see you upstairs very very soon. Forza Stivi.

Rosannna. Dottore Avella. She dragged me down the corridor a ways as I was a little slow in releasing her hand her tender overwashed hand. Dear Rosanna with her sweet sad eyes her sloe eyes a sight for sore eyes. She’s gone in a flash; there’s a run on hurting just now and my favourite saviour and worst student is on the hop.

I’m lying in a meatwagon on the shoulder of a high-traffic-area my shattered arm cast the first of many casts across my chest like a speedbump. I do a lot of unattended lying in corridors it’s how I learned that the clocks among the damaged here are damaged themselves; not one works. Here in the corridor I’m also on a threshold the threshold of finding succour in a disabled timepiece and one and two and swing your arms and one and two now jumping jacks don’t stop now. But time for the moment still lays heavy on me a sleeping policeman across my chest till Gaia performs one of her acts of magic and makes time disappear by appearing. She could do it with no hands no arms but this time anyhow her hands are at work buried in my mad hair hair mad and tossed like a sweatpillow

salad still she’s in her white tunic and I fear this is goodbye secretly fear a great many things but no her thumbs describe alchemic crescents on my temples transform anxiety into a sensual amalgam into the heat of a moment and she shushes me reassures me it’s OK Stivi it will be better for you in every way upstairs.

I will come to you as Gaia and not as a nurse not as your nurse. Come to me as happiness.

Before I could say anything stupid, two orderlies kicked off my brake and trundled me away from Gaia and toward the elevator and the sixth floor, the vascular surgery ward. It’s a slapstick affair getting me into the elevator. With typical panache the Italians have installed lifts that are, essentially, smaller than the gurney, the standard unit of measurement in the lower levels of hell. Generally both orderlies are required to wedge me in there on a 45 at which point an agonizing process ensues where they try to figure out how to get one of them over me and into the back corner so that both of them might accompany me up or down. It never goes smoothly and there’s a different solution each time. But then, it’s all killing off precious time, which is something.

Time and reason have returned enough for the moment for me to know that I’ve been down there in rianimazione for some 10 or 11 days and some pivotal modifications, but reason stays mum on the subject of what time has in store for me now.

These gurneyrides are a fair to middling distraction, my new motive joy. No more slicing down the mountain with 1/2 inch of high-pressure bicycle tire hooking me onto the terra blurra; no blatting over the horizon on a loose-hipped ol’ motorbike with a notchy 2nd gear, but this; I got this. These are the materials at hand. The hand dealt the bed made the penny saved and earned; a twopence of comeuppance a shot in the dark across the bow and now bow wow a bark nothing compared to the bite. The bite is bad the pain is mad. The bite is right, bite is might. I wish I may I might tonight.

Anyhow this bit is writ and we’re movin’ on up.

During my rebirth I’ve been naked as the day I was born two weeks now and hardly in a position to care but here gliding through my new neighbourhood I see oldsters lining the hall like crows on a wire checking me up and down and I start hitching and tugging to cover up and even putting on my gamest new-guy-intown expression, a nod here a little wave there.

Swerving into room 102 I look up over all five toes to see my beaming new roomie, Signore Remo Giardiniere – pleased as all get out to have a new amico. He can’t wait to get to talking, has even now started over the din of creaking squealing and grunting required to hoist me into my new chaise longue. Once they’ve got me tucked and sorted with all the various inputs and outputs in order, I turn my head and attention to my roommate. He’s a classic Tuscan contadino, a farmer; brown as your boot, compact, ropey, impish cute and cantankerous. He speaks the impenetrable local farmer’s dialect plus he’s had a stroke and is slurring like a drunken Portuguese; I understand about one word in twenty but find I have an unreasonable desire to make him happy and be accepted.

A lot of ‘Si!’ ‘Giusto!’ “Hai ragione!’ and other noises of affirmation generally keep the ball rolling … we’re getting along like a house on fire. And this house is hot enough it may as well be on fire. I start casting my first loving glances at the window. It’s the same waiting, a whole new set of walls and hot as Hades. It’s sunny up here however and old Giardineiro and I, well we’re starting a relationship. Plus there’s a lot of activity up here and most of it’s not the act of dying, as it is downstairs.

I meet a new slew of nurses and they’re as jaunty as can be, uniformly pleasant and uplifting; often literally – it’s no mean feat to get fresh linen under a fellow like me. But it’s a different gig up here, whereas downstairs it’s all gore and offal up here it’s more bores and fecal. Up here in the sunny sixth. They bust a move all day up here in this torpid heat: thirty guests per nurse, while downstairs it’s two-for-one. Italian, being Italian, has beautiful names for even the tawdriest items. The bell used to summon help is electric and on a snaking cord so it can

be overused more conveniently. It’s called a ‘camlo’ and even its sonorous name doesn’t save it from abuse.

For most of these old coots this place is not a stiflingly hot ward in a dated provincial hospital, it’s the Siena Hilton. Old Remo is a perfect example; he’s been busting his ass under the Tuscan sun for sixty or seventy years and now he can’t believe his good luck and this newly conferred power. He hits the camlo to have his ass scratched. Beneath his theatrical groans lolls a man in ecstasy. But nothing lasts forever.

The nurses are onto him but they won’t discipline him; Mother Nature’s onto him too, and she will.

For now though, being out from under the Tuscan sun, having a steady stream of deeply concerned visitors, a bed that someone will adjust to infinite angles and a magical camlo in hand is a dream come true. And dream he must, because sleep – and snore – he does. He can sleep at will like an actress with her tears, and I’m deeply deeply jealous.

Sono geloso. Tonight will be my first night on the sixth, and it’s shaping up to be a long one. Time may or may not , but come morning Gaia will come, and that’s something. But what a mixed blessing cause now I’m not just waiting and aching, I’m aching for her too; waiting for her too … tick … tock.

Well before Gaia I was roused if not woken by lusty Nigerian folksinging. It’s a giant negress mopping my room and the window’s still only a bright pewter a lightly tarnished silver. Well hello sugar.

Remo, well, he’ll be out for hours still. She speaks English, ahhhh. And speaks it with a lovely lively clipped island-style diction; her first language really. She herself is lovely lively jiving beautiful, poking fun at me and her voice her language is purring pouring over me like honey and allthewhile she’s mopping kinda candy striping stropping her voice on my sweatleather head and by and by after lots of chitchat she says so luv what all is wrong with you, you look fine and dandy to me.

I’m a bit banged-up and my left leg’s gone above the knee.

She looks down at the ruffle of sheets, actually leans on her mop and says, ‘Bummer.’

And how could you not love such a woman. It is, in fact and exactly a bummer. Maybe a big bummer, but no more; and a bummer ain’t much, really. A bummer is surmountable. A bummer of a summer e basta cosi. Enough already.

So when Gaia finally comes I’m in a really good mood, Melba toast crumbs all over my mug and blister-pack jam everywhere. I’m holding a bendy-handled plastic cupolino of barley coffee substitute and grinning like the cat who ate the canary. Caro, you’re well I see, but what is that smell. The Orzo perhaps, cara. Coffee, evidently, is too dangerous for me and though this tastes like cat piss, it’s nice and warm and sugary and before I was done she’d disappeared again and returned not quickly but as quickly as the damn Italian elevators allow with a proper cappuccino doppio and a Gazzetta Dello Sport from the concession on the main floor.

Between Gaia herself, the bona fide coffee and my coffee-coloured folksinger I was finally visited by the certainty that all would be well and well indeed, for the most part. Mostly. And that’s something.

The first kiss was such a natural act I would never be able to place it or assign it, but it led to many many more and hours falling end over end my strength my desire rushing into me like fluid into a syringe always wanting more of course but always so very glad so very fortunate so fortified. Gaia’s love put backbone in me. Will and Power.

We release each other only when something gets bumped, a little jolt of pain or alarm, which is often. An ear or an eye on the door too because though Gaia generally is not known here – reanimation nurses remain below – doctors from every ward cruise the halls like white sharks. Then there’s my roommate but my fears are soon allayed when Remo displays unmistakable signs of falling for her too. There’s nothing to fear cause there’s nothing an Italian loves more than a love affair and as word filters through the nurses they become even more attentive even more comionate.

We take breaks when I hurt breaks when I start to sweat from the exertion breaks to sip cappuccino breaks to learn a little about each other breaks when someone or other comes to do something or other to me. Then Gaia often waits in the hall and there’re a couple of old coots out there who start to circle around her and that pisses me off and I’ll set them straight once I get out of this goddamn bed.

It’s OK though, she’s back again it was only a brief interruption. They took my blood my blood pressure my temperature gave me a fistful of pills changed my piss bag and a couple of IV bags, you know the usual. Gaia’s back and I can’t get enough of her flaming hair her scent her slender powdersoft throat her sinuous sensitive touch but it’s exhausting and anyway they’re here again this time to change old Remo’s oil so she’ll leave for now but come back I know and this is yet another of Gaia’s gifts; I’m so tired I may even sleep.

Dear Kitty,

I’m staring red-eyed at the face of sleep deprivation. We wouldn’t be fishermen if we didn’t get up early. It’s part of the image. But these herring are nightcrawlers, so it might be better if we kept disco hours. Still we rise, if not shine, at 04:15, work till 8 or 9, then generally fuck the dog, do deck work, repairs and/or snooze (fishermen call it a ‘kink’ – maybe cause when you do it you’re usually kinked up in your raingear in a door jamb or on a pile of net), then we go fishin’ again between 6 and 9, or rather 18:00 and 21:00 hrs. Old Salty here. In bed by 10 or 11 and off we go again. It’s pretty cushy as fisheries go, but it renders you kinda dozy, kinda like the fish themselves.

Half the time you talk to a fisherman he’s actually asleep, cause we drive all night. I love the control-tower glow of the wheelhouse interior, the whispery saw-edged drone of the Caterpillar diesel two decks down. I always have the side windows cracked open so I can hear the stern wash purling out into the luminous arch of night, the boat bending through myriad lights: lights blinking, shuttling, advising, warning; the slow-motion frenetics of light-minded nighttime shipping life.

We have electronic eyes, of course, even a Hyundai does these days, but lord I try to keep my own peeled and hope the rest of the crew does too. Because hazard is like shit: it happens. And one way or another hazard hurts, every time.

The dragger ‘Hope Bay’ went down in Hecate Straight two weeks back. All hands lost but one; and his story’s none too pretty. Just three days back I met the skipper of the gillnetter ‘Larissa’ in the pub at French Creek. Only weeks ago they were at the top of Grenville channel south of Prince Rupert getting hammered in 70 knots of horrible winter outflow wind, when a rogue gust directly from the cold side of hell plain lifted the boat up bodily and slammed

her back down on her side. The life raft instantly snapped off the tophouse rail like a bathtub toy and was last seen sailing – upside-down and deployed – down the channel at top-speed daintily trailing its GPS locator on a string. It was the dead of night and the channel no more than a quarter mile wide.

It’s a skinny deep pinstraight fjord in that reach, but hazard can wear fortune’s hat too; the shore was close enough that the boys could make the beach through the ice-cold water. After a bracing mid-winter midnight skinny-dip both the skipper and his single crew hauled themselves up on the hoarfrost-covered rocks.

It was 20 below with the wind-chill and the two of them were gamboling around in their underwear when one of them saw both their survival suits, still in their neoprene stuff-sacks, wash up at their feet. Another of hazard’s hats.

Two hours later the Coast Guard zodiac found them alive and trying to share heat in a manhug that would put a pair of moustached San Francisco foreskin activists to shame. And the skipper, he’s OK, though he says that far too often he takes the wife’s minivan down to the river and parks there to watch the sunset with the heater on full and his feather vest buttoned up tight. So, for us this one has been an uneventful trip. We watch hazard and it, I presume, watches us.

When you ache with longing the way I ache for you, the time-honoured solution is to bury yourself in work. I’ll do anything, which is a happy coincidence; usually I have to do anything anyway cause I’m low man on the totem pole and that’s my job. They call me ‘Slav-boy’ because I leap at the jobs that, in this industry, are normally the reserve of fresh-off–the-plane kids on the Yugoslav boats who’re desperate to keep their deck jobs. Throw me down the hold, or up in the rigging – it’s all the same: keeps the wheels turning, the back strong and loss at bay. Secret training.

On tougher fisheries, or when the fishing’s tough I’ll lie in my bunk at night and slather half a pot of hand cream on my poor old mitts; I’ll go to bed with my flippers stuck in the air like a big ol’ sea lion and still wake up clawing at my bedding like a twice-unlucky Captain Hook. I jump at every deck job that sounds like hoist, haul or heave. My skin shrinks, my whole body feels like my back, which doesn’t feel good atall, and every tiny finger-sucking nick gets soaked in a broth of sea water, fish bite and rope burn. Add a soupcon of jellyfish jism and you’ve got a weeping flashpoint for aimless cussing and general hate.

Then a frisky adolescent Minke whale breaches within the com of our net and thumbs a fin at our puerile attempts to catch her or I look up to see 200 bald eagles circling over a school of herring that are boiling on the surface of a gunmetal sea and I quickly forget my hands; I’m all ears, all eyes. People pay thousands to see that shit.

Later … Queen Charlotte Straight

This is a government job baby. So it’s cushy. We search for a big school of herring and set the net around them but then just dip out a few hundred unfortunates and set the rest free. These poor devils, whom we’ll call the samples, we pop open like good old girls shelling peas on the porch. We snap the herring in half over an 8 foot aluminum tray; we separate the males from the females and then grade the roe from one to three under the carbide boom lights, drinking cold coffee in goofy hats and rubber boots and raingear while a cloud of seagulls squawk, ‘Mine! Mine! Mine!’ We give the results to the Fisheries Department and they use them to determine when it’s best to let the boats fish for real.

Yesterday fisheries came alongside in a floatplane to pick-up some samples cause the herring are nearing readiness and the pressure’s on. It was sunny and flat-calm but the plane came in superhot. I was standing there in my house slippers with a goddamn soup pot in my hand when I heard the plane and saw him approaching our hull at a 90-degree angle and at speed. I dropped the pot, ran and scissored over the rail in an irably eager but idiotic attempt to stick my foot out, catch the sharply pointed pontoon bow and cushion the impact. When I landed on the rub-rail on the outside of the hull my goofy slipper slipped and fell off and the pontoon pinned my outside right ankle hard to the hull of the boat.

The pain was so insane I was sure I’d destroyed my foot or at minimum crushed my ankle. Naturally I pretended it was a minor owwie but the guys saw the whole thing. They were a little concerned for me but mostly wondered, justifiably, why on Earth I would do such a doltish thing. Now, if you touch it I’ll go through the roof but it’s just a bruise, a limp and a skidmark on my track record; a leap of faith that went sideways. I could be a touch more prudent.

We’re on the back half of this charter; over halfway through, which is good, but we’re headed north, which is bad. Already it’s smudge-grey out the galley windows, there’s a nine-foot chop and the landscape looks like it got beat down with the bottom of a big sooty fry pan. It’s uninhabitable. Bleak islands roll by bristling with pie-bald dwarf pines permanently healed over at a 45 degree angle in a relentless gale. Not only that, but at this point in our boat-bound existence you begin wanting to vote certain crew off the island, sotospeak. Or worse, you fantasize about them having sea anemones waving out of their crabpicked eye sockets. One of these nights I’m gonna shinny down the teak post below my bunk with my fish knife between my teeth like a Malay pirate and cut the motherfucker who’s snoring down there from ear to ear.

We’re northbound, and if fortune really frowns upon us we’ll end up in Prince Rupert and I’ll sit ass on the curb watching bands of hoodie and mac-jacketed fishermen rove from bar to bar in sweatpants and a testicular squall.

It merely makes me think of what I’ve left behind, dear sweet sexy Kitty. One of these days I’ll stop leaving things behind, and you and I will go off somewhere far from Rupert, somewhere hot, somewhere sunny, somewhere somehow.

Boy do I miss you.

Remo’s got a sweater on, a cardigan in fact. How does he do it? It’s so hot in here the air wobbles and Remo he gets an extra blanket at night. Me, my bedding’s both soaked and askew. I take care however to keep my left leg covered nobody needs to see that shit and nobody’s asked to either. My new boxer shorts are stored away in a drawer it’s too fucking hot for boxers. I’m running a constant 39/40 degrees, which I’m told is warm but OK. The extra few degrees merely the heat of repair rebuilding a work in progress mending mending bones are mending skin connective tissue mending stitches in stitches out but the big bogey man is infection not Klingle Klingle’s gone back to wherever he came from. Maybe see you next coma. Soma sleep summer heat how does Remo do it.

My right clavicle looks like half a grapefruit a ruby red they tell me not to use my right arm but my left arm’s shattered no using the left leg cause looks are not deceiving it’s well and truly gone but my right knee’s been dislocated gotta keep it up on a pillow and when Gaia skooches onto the bed to give me a hug and bumps all my broken right ribs my left arm shoots out in its cast bangs against the bedrails and she hops all around feeling terrible feeling solicitous but come back come back I’ll go through it all again anytime for another one of your hugs.

Emiliano comes in with his trolley full of tricks, winks at Gaia who blushes and steps out to the corridor. Emiliano he’s my new favourite hell they’re all my favourites but especially him so full of charm so deft so certain. Then there’s Palasciano who took my leg he’s all that and more he’s Emiliano’s boss and my hero. They’re all certain and so, so am I. First he clips a few stitches out of my left hand and I’m surprised; it’s a wound I didn’t even know I had. Then to the daily business of cleaning the big one. It’s not nearly as mortifying as it first was but will never be much fun. It’s very good Stivi it’s very healthy and every time he holds me by my good shoulder and looks me in the eye I fall apart a little and get a little stronger just a little.

Letters are arriving now; they started in my last day or two down below, down

there. And now a change of the guards of sorts as Emiliano rolls away with his rolling salvation station, Gaia comes in with her adorable impish smile and in too comes an orderly who’s got a plastic folder full of correspondence from home for me. Gaia slides, carefully, onto the bed and watches me closely while I filter through the envelopes and pause to cherish them, most of all the ones with the childish handwriting.

She smiles her smile of maximum candence cause she’s got a six year-old daughter and knows that there, in those bright envelopes with the loopy handwriting; there in the interchangeable “d’s” and “b’s”; there in the amplitudinous esses, is the most powerful medicine on earth. Still unopened, I clutch them and cry in great wracks and heaves. I do a lot of this of late and far more often than not they are tears of joy.

But it’s a busy day here on the ward and there’s no time for sentiment. Here comes another crew to roll me down to the bowels, to the x-ray wing. They’re going to take snapshots of my thorax; I’ve junk in my lungs – not in my trunk, my trunk has shrunk. Rails up rails down kicking brakes stamping levers cranking cranks. Chipped drywall and dashed aluminum trim on corners all along where boats like mine with their own nasty cargo have briefly foundered before me. The clocks, I see, are up to their usual tricks. The ceiling tiles flutter by again and I think how discriminatory it is that the guidelines painted on the world’s hospital floors are not also painted on the ceilings. We would like to be involved and for that matter we would like to have our say.

I wait at various staging points along the way and then again in a proper waiting room. There’s an alien there and he makes me realize that Colin is the only other English speaking person I’ve encountered in nearly three weeks. Oh, and the Nigerian folksinger. I know medical in Italian and not their English equivalents. I look him up and down but he looks OK to me. Faker. But no it’s his wife; he’s waiting for his wife and she’s in a sorry state indeed. They’re New Yorkers and are here to see the horse race, the Palio, and to tour around the Tuscany.

They took a hot air balloon-ride two days ago and the pilot, if one can use such an elevated handle, came in hot on landing. Way hot. Everyone got a good rattle but walked away, everyone but his wife, whose legs were shattered – both of them. I’m lying on my meat wagon looking at him through the bars and pretty rattled myself: such a grim, unfair and horrible tableau and so utterly utterly random. And the randomness, of course, is what’s acid; hazardous. Waste.

My turn comes and I wave goodbye to my dire new friend and waving’s easy cause my freshly bolted arm is bolt upright to reduce pain and swelling. I rotate slowly from the shoulder and produce a facsimile of the Royal Wave.

In x-ray they flip me flop me like a side of beef and at these moments the abattoir comparisons are irresistible. I leave and plow back through the waiting room casting a sad glance at my tragedy-bound New Yorker; a fellow sadfarer whose shitship is only just setting sail, whereas mine, I hope, is well underway heeled over and driving hard towards a cooler happier port.

Then I’m shunted back toward Vascolare, the Vein Ward.

We successfully navigate the waypoints and the perilous elevators like locks in a canal; I steam into my room and here’s Giardiniero holding forth to Colin, who’s back-to the–wall on a folding chair and reaching into a kit-bag for his second beer. Colin speaks no Italian at all and for all intents and purposes nor does Remo, and if I were Colin I’d be on my sixth beer, but fortunately I’m not so there’s still one or two left for me. One, strictly speaking, but occasionally I’m shown some comion. Jesus, where were you for so long, he says. Ah, I went off for a photo shoot. What took so long? Hair and make-up?

Once the orderlies have hoisted me from gurney to bed and attached me for inflow and outflow, cast an accusatory and disregarded eye at Colin and his Heineken and left – for Colin doesn’t brook fools and you’d have to be an incredibly big one not to cotton onto that – he hands me my prize and as I pop the top and settle into the pillows my back snaps into a ziggurat scintilla of instant electric agony and, again, my head raps of the bedrails.

Jesus. What the fuck was that!?!

Ghost pain, I tell him, it’s my new wingman; you’re old news man, yesterday’s beer.

Get out, he says.

It’s for real. The leg I don’t have has established radio , has been Maydaying, SOS-ing, has been short-circuiting into agony – short-lived shortcircuit short shrift short end of the short shitty fucking stick. Can’t tell you the fuckingagony.

Sometimes I get a rogue hit like that one – just one two second blast – and sometimes they come one after the other for hours and don’t ask how but I always know which is which.

And Colin dear Colin takes a sip leans back and says, simply, what a rip-off. For all you know your left leg’s in a garbage tip or floating down the Po towards Rimini. Crab bait. And it’s hurting you now? What a rip-off. A pure and simple burn.

I gotta go, he says. Whaddyamean gotta go. Gotta go back home, you know: wife, kids, job? Home.

Poor bastard has been here every goddamn day over hurdles galore with the meagerest of compensations from his friend who’s only fuzzily assuming his role as a stumpy disoriented filter feeder and who among us deserves such loyalty? I’ll be back in a couple of weeks and we’ll get you outa this dive and plant you outside in the shade of an umbrella pine OK? I’ll be out of here long before that, I say, you can find me up on the hill with Pietro and Denise. We’ll see cowboy, anyhow it seems to me you’re in good hands here, he says, as Gaia walks into the room.

That I am. In Hands. Good. I am. You would cry too. Good wracking desperate joyful awful purling pearls of the real goods.

So Colin’s gone but returning, Gaia is here, Palmino’s at the Palio just tryin’ to make a buck, Denise and Pietro are still up on the hill and Remo’s just plum crazy. Rosanna’s not my student anymore but she is my doctor, my leg’s gone, the rest of me hurts but my head’s OK and my spine is a relatively straight and functional conduit. The fact that I can compute such a whirligig sum leads me to believe that it’s time for old Stivi to hit the road, though not literally, not again. One can only hope; one can hazard a guess.

I begin to ramp up the negotiations for my walking papers and it’s easy for me to infuse my requests with intensity because I’m hysterically convinced that each tomorrow will be my gateway to insanity. This would be a pleasant stay in a convivial hotel if I could only sleep. My lack of it has made me soft in the head made me focus on it itself made me dream of sleeping with insomniac fervour.

We’re coming up on three weeks here, which would put me in early release record territory and Palasciano and his Dream Team are ive but look doubtful. They like to see such drive because the lack of it is very much cause for concern. It’s down to the blood it’s always down to blood and my blood looks good real fine has all the right components in all the right measure.

The Wound is cleansing itself drying closing and all my other bits are boning up good. Let’s do it Doc I’ll never heal if I don’t sleep. You’re still on a catheter still on IV antibiotics and a saline drip. Well unplug me then let me piss like a man, give me antibiotics orally. OK that we can do.

So now I cruise the hallways looking for action with my papagallo at my side. It’s a plastic jug the exact size and shape of a popular wine decanter. My pee urn. Its crafty gooseneck shape allows me to pee in it from my customary prone position with nary a mishap rarely a mishap the rarest of mishaps. I’m also ramping up the physical training now like a Marine Commando. I can spend a half-hour or even 45 minutes upright and wheeling around averaging between 1 and 1 and-a-half mph.

I rise from prone with no assistance and sit on the edge of my bed with my hospital gown thrown jauntily over my shoulders like a cape and stare at the swallows dropping down across the window with eyes of steel stare over the Sienese Hills Le Colle Senese woven with roads gracefully adorned with umbrella pines rolling like she hips toward Monte Amiata and a Venetian blue sky.

And for every ounce I sweat I drink ten. It’s all about the blood clean blood means walking papers rolling papers and baby it’s time to roll.

I can’t stop rolling. And who would? I have a 50cc scooter that rolls on 12” tires and if David The Dog will get out from underfoot and stop smashing me in the shins with his newly beloved stick I’ll throw my 19 pound titanium road racing bike over my shoulder like a bag of rice, a bag of nice light rice; jump on the wee scooter, twist the gas and portage the whole works down to the bottom of the dirt road where I’ll choose one of four asphalt roads that lead to countless others that unfold like a litany of loveliness every single time. You see, it’s all a game of numbers.

Multiplicity.

From here south to Monte Amiata and north beyond Greve is a serpentine Valhalla of regional roads.

Each day I’ll nod to at least one of the four Sardinian shepherd brothers in ing and at full lean-angle while weaving through their wake of sheep and sheepshit and head out like a well-mounted hunting party in search of warm fuzzy game. And it works every time. Sheep and sheepshit are the kind of navigational hazards we pine for. Depending on the season you have to be headsup for vine clippings, siena-coloured mud slides, flattened monster toads, tractor tread-shaped clods to hop, horse chestnut carcasses and the odd spent condom cause Italians love roadside sex.

It’s like a pastoral video game, except for the condom part. Now and again I get nailed by rain or frozen by rogue alpine winds or plain run out of juice plus I’ve left some skin around to be sure; I could be more prudent, but I view it as the price of ission and it just makes me stronger. Bulletproof. I’ve always said that scars are an advantage cause they’re tougher than garden-variety skin and they don’t sunburn.

These hills are my hills or that’s how it feels on a good day anyway, and bad ones are few and far between. I rip through towns with names that would notch anyone’s travelogue and swing full-circle back to my well-loved Montagnola and settle into the final climb.

Dear Neil Young said overandover that you can’t come back to Sugar Mountain but me I come back every fuckin’ day. I respectfully beg to differ. For twenty years now.

It doesn’t matter how you approach La Montagnola, if you want to get up you’ve got to climb. If you’re lazy or feeling sorry for yourself, come on up via Pian del Lago; it’s a climb too sweet for hummingbirds. Pure Sugar.

But come hell or high water I do make it up. Well, maybe once or twice I’ve had to phone Pietro and plead for him to come fetch me in The Little Car That Could. Most times I get up on my own steam and am met by my loving David The Dog whose need for speed is undiminished by my morning’s adventure. So some quality time with sticks and balls.

I’m so crazy in love with him that I go into Siena to a special Dogician and buy him seventeen thousand lira that’s ten euro balls which he drops for lost whenever he spots a cat. He and I are in agreement on cats, but nevermind, that’s another story.

By now I’m starved and so is Pietro. We have a new ritual now where he waits for me to get back from cycling and I cook him a big hot winey lunch. And there’s another perfect marriage: we love to eat and I love to cook. Often Andrea the German dottoressa from the house next-door s us too. And again, why

not? Any cook worth his sea salt always prepares enough for at least one more. David waits patiently, basking in my love; his haunches cocked outside on the pea-gravel and his head resting on the open door sill, a spittle slimed ball the size of a grapefruit stuck in his smile and he knows absolutely that there’s more to come. What an optimist. What an animal.

Pietro will make almost inaudible noises about doing the washing up but I’ll do it with joy. He is, after all, the Padrone, helps me in a million ways, and has bailed me out of more than one emergency.

Usually I have time for a quick shower and maybe even a moment to prepare my classes. Today I’m on my knees in front of the stereo taping a Rolling Stones cover of ‘The Spider and the Fly’: my 8:30-10:30 advanced intermediates will learn commands, some new vocabulary and a pithy moral lesson.

They follow along with my hand-written photocopied lyrics and giggle and shake their heads and report me to the Diretrice of the language school. But they are usually favourable reports. My students have learned from such diverse teachers as The Clash (Lost in the Supermarket), Cake (Satan is My Motor, Walk on By), Los Lobos and even Cat Muhammad Ali Akbhar Stevens (Peace Train). They got the joke. It’s nice to be able to slide a little social criticism in with your verb tenses, your comparatives and superlatives.

I pack the Spider and the Fly into my much-loved Filson duck canvas and bridle leather shoulder bag along with – lemme see here – two pay-as-you-play telephone cards, a 4 pound cell phone with 1 minute 49 left on the clock, a copy of Primo Levi’s ‘Other People’s Trades’, no gloves cause it’s fair and square out there and no chance of rain or cold no chance of nothing but joy, and my Drizabone jean-style jacket for the late night return and mostly for the cool ghostly fogs across Pian del Lago.

Let’s see here: sundry teaching materials, pens and markers and that’s it. No need for a map cause I know all these roads like the back of my throttle hand. The big chunky language school-issue cassette player I have to lash separately onto the rear rack of my Divine Missy. My Little Honda; The Little Motorbike That Could.

Rosia, Monteroni d’Arbia, Montalcino. Three towns tonight; two hours apiece; lots of riding in between and no time to dick around. By the time I get back, Pietro and Denise will be fast asleep and even David The Dog won’t mark my return; that guy needs his sleep as tomorrow looks like another big day of sticks and balls.

Old Missy starts everytime, she’s faultlessly reliable. She’s got 90,000 kilometers under her slim waistline and she’ll keep goin’ till the sheep come home. She charges like a team of bears; morelike she swoops like a condor, like hippies dancing to The Grateful Dead. She’s lovely and light and narrow and 350 cc’s is the perfect displacement for these long and ultra-curvy treks of mine. She doesn’t take big chances (not like her owner) yet though she’s a little loose in the hips, she’s still capable of impressive lean-angles.

The exhaust note is a sweet high sibilant baritone especially on trailing throttle, which you do a lot, downshifting down the sides of these mountains. Even the horn works, which is good, cause I use it often; for friends, for sheep, as a general warning and of course for asshole drivers. Italians have endless charm and a million virtues but they are egocentric and being egocentric they drive in the center of the road, it being their road. A problem, to be sure, for anyone oncoming, especially another egoist. My theory is validated in all its hideousness down at the wrecking yard in the valley. A lot of wrecks, a lot of head-ons.

Four tiny pistons going up and down frantically, nice fresh tires and an elbowsup sit-up-and-beg riding position. It’s off to Rosia with spiders and flies circling in my head. My sweet green bike that I ride like a big yellow dog.

My students are a crazy mix and the locations for the classes are too. At Rosia I teach in the public school and the dour principal there is my oldest and most diligent student. His name is Leone, or ‘Lion’. My youngest student, Viola, is only thirteen and one of his students. She skips classes yet outstrips the principal by a country mile. And this is the country.

It all seems to work well, though I suspect that my success in such haphazard circumstances is largely due to the fact that the Italians are such courteous people.

Monteroni is one of the few ugly towns in the South Tuscany and is surrounded by some of the most elegant countryside in the world. There I teach one dolt, a couple deadbeats, two engaging young men and women, a farmer’s wife who stares at me relentlessly and is making blatant advances, and dear Rosanna the dottoressa. I teach in the comune, which is to say the Town Hall, unless we’re kicked out by a meeting in which case we move downstairs and down the street, which is the Cassia, a road that leads to Rome and an autostrada that rips straight through the middle of town with scarcely a sidewalk to cushion the blow. We convene at the Circolo Arci. It takes a very small Tuscan town indeed not to have its own Circolo.

They’re bar/café/meeting points that are state sponsored and relics of more socialist days. Over the cacophony of blaring TV’s, oldsters, youths and game machines we’ll add our Spider and the Fly and definitely raise an eyebrow or two.

The town of Montalcino is well known and one of the jewels of the Tuscany. It sits atop a perfect breast of a mountain ringed with some of Italy’s most famous vines and on a good day you can see the Mediterranean from the top of the crenellated castle walls. I teach in the castle and it cracks me up. Each evening I

go to the custodian who gives me an iron skeleton key the size of a squash racket, which opens a 16 foot-high fortified wooden gothic door complete with the requisite crrrrreeeak.

I’ve a great crew of students there as Montalcino is an affluent wine and olive town and my boys are all winemakers except for sco the fast-living artist, all jowly and rubicund with a girlfriend in every city in Europe; and shy and diligent Guido who’s a custodian himself at the monastery of Sant’ Antimo. He’s Chilean by birth and once played the oboe in the Santiago Symphony.

He brought me to Sant’ Antimo one day to show me around and at the end of my visit he uncased one of his vintage oboes and played for me, just he and I in one of Italy’s most lovely churches. It was the most poignant musical experience of my life and something I’ll never forget.

There’s Patrizio who’s fussy and shy and wears his pressed jeans high and is extremely proud of his family’s wines. He filled up two five gallon jugs for me with his Rosso di Montalcino, sealed the top of each jug with 3 teaspoons of his family’s olive oil – his work-horned thumb over the mouth of the olive oil can – and sent me on my way with a smack on the back. I rode the little scooter that day so I could transport my precious cargo home to La Montagnola between my feet on the scooter’s floorboard.

The fringe benefits are priceless and these people are, almost to a one, both thoughtful and generous.

But this time I’m outbound through fields I’ve seen in every season, the skinny rear tire of the motorcycle switching back and forth like a cat’s tail. Here a roadcut through a fleet of Fiat tractors harrowing up a confolded hopscotch of fields between vines, groves and terraces. Able hands, the woods peppered with

women picking porcini in Burberry and Wellington’s, stubby stubbly hunters in camouflage, their spaniels coursing over the clodded black earth and pheasants catapulting out of the hedges and belling like there’s no tomorrow.

Not a stone anywhere left unturned in this most delectably humanized place on earth. I can’t stop almost agonizing over the beauty of this place; can’t help wondering why on earth did we at home exchange development for destruction and give the kiss of death to our glorious green gift this great green girl and then the kiss again to the stately buildings, the footloose streets.

We fucked it up forever and now there’s either a fence around it or we ourselves are fenced in. At least in Canada we’ve got our space, our hinterland, but I’d hate to see it migrate beyond the Arctic Circle; get down to access, math, privilege, cash.

I was born in a strip mall and my first love was deserts. I always fancied that I loved clarity, starkness and wide-open spaces in apposite response to my unfortunate nest. But here is another anodyne, a human one. Not an escape but an enment; every inch has been trod on lightly, well loved, then fettled by man. Made better for it. Not degenerate, crass or hunkered down in its own effluent.

I rummage through these thoughts as I rampage down the Val d’Elsa, the bike singing like Freddie Mercury, as wave after wave of sunflowers have given up following the sun and are now, it seems, mooning me. Deep fall and they’re down-tilted now, taking a breather after a magnificent performance. A curtsey even.

I like their sulphury little bottoms though you can’t see too far ahead with eyes stuck in your stem and your ass in the air.

This is all very invigourating but I must say I am a little tired. Plus the engine’s got a bit of a hiccup between 5000 and 5500 rpm. I’ll look into it tomorrow because tomorrow’s a day off and I plan to be homebound by weather, reading, technical difficulties or pigritude; I’ll decide which when the time comes. And time, of course, always comes.

Happenstance

In the sulphur light of a Milanese night a brace of cars with numbered doors A howl of motors down this street of whores It’s an unofficial rally with championship intent Three hours past midnite from where it went A foot arrested flush to a curb of pensive pockets as these headsweat brigands of threat are followed by their sad caravan of boyish wonder I adore this haphazard dash to shabby checkpoints I come from the safety of a hapless hobbled land I’d like to take my place, like to lend a hand.

Time’s up for Remo, he’s goin’ down. I don’t know what they’re going to do to him but he’s pulling away from the wharf right now and sailing down to one of the lower levels. Closer to hell itself. He just gave me what could only be called a searching glance and I, for my part and to the best of my ability gave him the universal ‘Who knows?’ sign – palms up and eyebrows too, my one palm a little recalcitrant, still calcifying.

I hate to seem heartless but Remo, in leaving, has opened the door to relief. I immediately dig up my camlo (maybe the first time I’ve used it except for urinary exigencies) and ring overandover for one of the nurses to throw the window open to the chocks. And I ask her – it only takes one assistant now – to help me into the same shitty wheelchair so that I might have a holiday by the window, a front row seat to distant Monte Amiata without listening to old Remo’s hypothermic whining. Poor bastard.

I’m naked except for a makeshift loincloth in honour of my ive resistance to this whole ‘No Fresh Air’ issue and I’m uptight to the window damnear out of it and holding on to opposite sides of the window frame when one of the nurses politely taps me on my good shoulder the top of my bad arm to warn me about the corrente about draughts but he’s friendly and not too insistent and I look at his young face and wonder at how this medievalism got to him too. It’s 36 degrees out there and even hotter in here and this window is my only hope.

I turn to see Rosanna leaning in the doorway with her arms crossed shaking her head and laughing her soft and cigarettey laugh. Stivi, must you cause a casino wherever you go?

And where’s your nurse? I hear you have your own private nurse. She’s really smiling now and so am I, just the sight of Rosanna or the thought of Gaia makes me smile but I feel like an idiot in my loincloth so I do my best to cover up and roll over to Rosanna.

‘Palasciano tells me you’ve been, um, strongly inquiring about your release.’ She sees I’m hitching up to hold forth on my now-standard gotta get outa here can’t sleep going crazy monologue and she stays me. ‘Stivi we’re on your side and your blood looks very good but …’ and here a knock on the open door and in comes a pleasant-looking fellow pushing a brand-new light-weight collapsible wheelchair and carrying a pair of fancy aluminum crutches both still in their plastic wrap.

Rosanna raises her eyebrows and I explain that I ordered them; just in case, just to have on hand in the event of, you know … well, Emiliano gave me the number.

The chair I’ve rented for 7 euros a day and the crutches I bought for 75. Pietro and Denise ed the hat around for me among friends and acquaintances in Siena and I have 600 euros to burn on fripperies like brushed aluminum crutches – they’re Italian designed! The delivery is very un-Italian and I’m very pleased.

‘We’ll see Stivi, there’s still fluid in your lungs and your dressings need to be changed every day.’

I tell her about Andrea the German doctor up on the mountain, tell her that Andrea can change my dressings, change my oil, my tires, my IV if need be. I see myself hitchhiking up La Montagnola in a wheelchair with an IV stand over my shoulder like a pair of skis. ‘You know Stivi, you’re still in danger of infection and infection could be deadly and at minimum will set you back months. How clean is it up there?’

I am immediately visited by an image of all ninety pounds of David The Dog with sheepshit in his beard climbing into bed with me while dusttigers growl from underneath it and 13 scabrous feral cats line up along the windowsills to scratch themselves frantically like last-ditch gargoyles whose fleas are bigger than their fangs.

‘Oh it’s good that way’, I say. And how will you get around?

Now I see the little villaggio tilt-perched and cock-eyed on the top of a mountain at the end of a dirt road, the narrow hallways, the polished tile floors the crazy two-step-up-two-step-down layout. ‘Oh it’s good good real good, kind of a bungalow, a bungalino.’

She grabs my ear and twists it real hard and makes me promise, for now and anyhow, to not use the crutches, to treat my arm like a fine wineglass and to be nice to Palasciano.

‘He did, after all, save your life, caro.’

I can still smell Rosanna’s overwashed and still tobaccy hands on my face when the boys charge in. Palmino and two other cycling buddies plus Alberto who’s a friend, my boss at the language school and Palmino’s boss at the restaurant right in Siena’s Piazza del Campo.

Palmino is thoughtful and generous to an embarrassing degree and as usual is packing all kinds of stuff. My favorite cycling magazine times two, my sunglasses which I’d left in his car and which will make my window-framed view across the Colli Senesi even lovelier and now he’s unpacking a buffet of

food. Prosciutto again, two bistecche di maiale, pork chops, two balls of fresh buffalo cheese and some Greek-style yoghurt. All protein-rich. Alberto grabs Palmino’s forearm and looks at him sidelong. The food, of course, is all hot. Stolen, sotospeak, from Alberto’s ristorante. A good laugh that one.

Now Alberto, always a sensitive man, gives me a tiny Sony tape recorder, like you’d use for an interview. He knows I’m a writer, knows I want to write and can imagine the incredible tumult of events the images the ideas and doesn’t want me to lose them either. A very Italian moment ensues where they it around first trying to figure it out and then each unable to resist the temptation of getting their own voice down on tape. I still have it; the recording as precious as the gift itself.

I’m getting tired with all these visits all this banter I’m by no means out of the tunnel out of danger it’s true my mind’s starting to weave just the littlest bit and now another soft knock on the door and a timid little fellow inches in a fellow I’ve never seen in my life but I know beyond doubt who it is and what he means. Mattia, I say, ‘Vieni dentro come on in please.’ ‘Buon Giorno Stivi how are you?’

Come closer I say I won’t bite I need to hug this boy to hold him for all I’m worth to hold him like my life depends on it cause it did this boy this little shy guy he’s only 21 seems younger he found me smoking in a harrowed field in Pian del Lago and phoned the ambulance that led me to Rosanna to Palasciano to rianimazione led me back to life.

I hold him tight all right I’m a gibbering mess I tell him thank you overandover tell him he saved my life tell him I’ll never be able to thank him enough tell him Dio mio I don’t know what to say soak the collar of his shy little jacket.

I finally look up I’m still clutching Mattia I look up through fishbowl tearpane myopia to see all the other boys backed right up to the back wall hands crossed heads down in postures of maximum discretion enjoying this to the fullest and my chest starts bucking and spasming alloveragain. They’re good boys those boys and I’m a very lucky one me.

The poor guy is really embarrassed keeps softly insisting oh it was nothing I was just driving along which of course is true however…

To his relief, I let him go. Oh shit and he’s got a wrapped and bagged gift, which he writhingly presents. I grapple with the wrapping with my fucked-up hands and finally find a small, hand-sized stuffed leopard or jaguar – a gattopardo. Poor Mattia has a line prepared and quickly says it’s not just a toy Stivi it’s made special to hold and squeeze when you have moments of weakness moments of fear which of course provokes another wholesale moment of weakness and I start to bawling all over again wringing the little cat’s neck not a silly little gift not a silly little gift at all.

‘Stivi, it’s like a charm’, he says, and you must name it in order for it to work properly. Fine, Mattia, but I want to get it right can I think about it yes of course he says – no hang on I’ve got it he’s David look I know this is a gattopardo and not a dog but I hate cats and I miss David and this reminds me of him.

‘A good choice Stivi, I know David, he’s formidabile, I’m a friend of David’s too.’

He actually asks me if he might come again and all I can do is hold him by his shoulder and bite my lip there’s coughing and rustling in the background and the boys come up one by one to say bye for now and Mattia leaves with them and for the first time all day it seems I’m left alone.

Just me and David.

I place him on my chest, place him on the pillow beside me but then I can’t see him and worry as I did with the morphine bombola that I’ll crush him maybe pinch off his windpipe and finally I settle on perching him lowdown on my stomach god I’m exhausted please let there be no one else and the door bounces off the rubber stop and in comes hurricane Denise.

And Denise she is a hurricane but she’s no dummy she looks at shell-shattered me and says Oh Stivi are you OK. I tell her yeah sure fine Mattia came and that makes her happy. We both know that she was behind it. Then I show her my new friend my gatto pardo my David and I tell her that’s his name and why. Now it’s Denise’s turn to get a little misty as she tells me that these last weeks have been hard on David. He keeps going into my room at 7 sharp he backs up into my bed snuffles under the pillow and it doesn’t matter how sharp he is I’m not there. He moans he paces he harrumphs he’s not the same.

And this morning, says Denise, I heard a proper casino in your room and came in to see your bed floating around in the middle of the room da solo, unattended, like a Santa Maria UFO and who, Madonna, is under the bed and looking for porca miseria Stivi but nostro povero cane David. Povero Davidav Davidav nostro poverino cane. E una bestia lui. He’s a beast. An animal. Attaboy.

Dear Long-Lost Kitty,

We’re looking for you; we’ve been looking for you everywhere; me and my faithful dog, David The Dog. The whole of the south Tuscany is blanketed in snow, so we would’ve seen your delectable high-arched footprints forsure. Especially Ol’ David, who, or so you tell me, smells in parts per million.

But your parts: ten parts scintillation one-quarter part hand-milled French soap 40 parts loving devotion two parts Venusian mist 100 points care and kindness and 110 percent flame job girl is a solution of such percolating beauty that I suspect David, like any other guy, cannot compute. I feel for him but it doesn’t get me any closer to you. The fact that it was me that drifted off and not you that sent me packing is only the faintest consolation …

But I’m not meant to be looking in the mirror I’m meant to be looking for you, you sweet Kitty you. And David he’s no help he’s run off through the pines on the scent of boar. Left me to my snowy remorse my loss my recollections my letter to you.

I’m feeling remorseful cause I do what I do; cause I lose and regain and keep losing you, but I intended to write in the spirit of jubilation, so in the spirit of stick-to-it-ness, a spirit I’m forever trying to stick to, I’ll relate to you why:

A handful of nights ago I threw some books in my satchel and struck out across the alleyway to another of the stone farmhouses to escape the chaos chez Pietro and Denise, to escape the wailing TV, the cats barking up hairballs and the incessant telephone. I stoked up the airtight, lit some candles, opened a bottle of Franco’s Chianti and settled into a collection of essays by Primo Levi. A couple

hours later I leapt up, flicked on all the lights and started smacking my forehead and hopping up and down simultaneously.

I stumbled onto an idea for a book, an incandescent idea, an idea so obvious, an oversight so inexplicable, that I’m now saddled with the ineluctable need to get it down. Suddenly, I’m a writer. After thirty years of reading and reading and wanting, wanting to write something myself, write something so badly, I found a key that fits a lock, a pot for my lid. So now I’m a writer and you must pardon me for seeming coy if I don’t divulge this book’s identity. It’s a kid’s book, for big kids; it’s a tribute, a resuscitation of one of the greatest writers of all time.

It’s only nascent, dear Kitty, and we writers are a superstitious lot. I’ll tell all; I’ll tell you everything in due time. But now’s not the time for explanation, it’s time for celebration, a melancholic celebration while I’m missing you. But let me tell you how I write, cause it will strike your fancy and you’ll be pleased to learn that the church, once again, has come to my aid.

Since our Halloween party and my rediscovery of the church itself and the visceral joys of rock in a stone church, I’m a frequent flier down there and Franco, in his generosity, has made me Custodian of the Key. It’s another giant iron skeleton key and just holding it in your hand makes you feel good allover.

I went down there again with a broom and a vacuum and a couple of rolls of paper towel, found a big padded wicker armchair and a wooden trestle table. I sorted the lighting, found a huge stash of candles and finally, I struck up a fluid deal with Franco where I give him ten euros for each litre of his Certaldo Chianti that I drink. I make a chicken scratch on the wall beside the Pieta for every bottle I open.

The wine is stored in the church in big fifty litre demi-johns and once every

couple of months Franco and I have a two man bottling party.

It is hard to imagine a more romantic and fertile place to write and I sneak down there at least a few times a week after my English classes or on evenings off, my head bobbing above the 1000 year-old stone walls topped by a verdigris of lichens older than Michealangelo and still visible under the Tuscan moon. I always start with the turntable and a couple of choice tracks before I open the Italian children’s notebook that I write in and clickety-click my two cherished Koh-I-Noor rechargeable pencils, pencils that have followed me along life’s road alltheway from India to this rocktop Tuscan church.

It can get a little nippy to be sure but I have my watchcap and feather vest, worksocks under my Blundstones and a gas bombola attached to a space heater if I really need it. I bet I’m warmer than poor old Dickens ever was.

And Dickens couldn’t step out into a mountain-top gravel cortile and survey a crystalline kaleidoscopic nightsky over tall slender cypresses pointing straight up like make-up applicators to the stars, hear the wild boars rootling in the chestnut groves, see the amber candlelight pouring out of the open church door along with Anne-Sophie Mutter hitting her solo in Beethoven’s violin concerto.

The church is a tonic; it recharges my batteries and I frequently shuffle down there if only to absorb its feelgood properties.

Yesterday I had an unsavoury day, stormbound in Siena. I was feeling both piqued and blasé so when I finally arrived back on the mountain, I had a bite, got warmed up then went back down the road aways; back to church. In just 4 or 5 songs I was healed: Melody, Sister Jive, and You Can’t Always Get What You Want (Stones, of course) then a rousing Hey Joe by Hendrix at 9 1/2 on the volume dial. Sometimes that’s all it takes to remind me that the world really is

my oyster even if I found her on the beach with a cracked shell, a mossy sweater and grit in her belly.

But my oyster has a pearl too and she’s in Vancouver a hundred million miles away and I can dance in the house of the lord till my feet bleed and I won’t be any closer to you my dear sweet sexy much-missed Kitty. Just a couple months now and we can pick up our book where we left off.

This new one I’m writing here and now, one candlelit page at a time, is dedicated to you. Priceless you. I miss you inexpressibly.

I can’t write so I just jabber into my little recorder. I’ve filled up a number of those miniature cassettes with my bed-bound ruminations. Remo’s back, though he doesn’t look good at all and when he first heard me talking or playing it back he couldn’t see the tape player and thought either he or me or both of us were losing it. He can’t move much at all. He’s had more surgery of some sort – something bigger than an interventino – and he’s backslid badly. Palasciano actually came to my bedside before Remo was rolled in to tell me it hadn’t gone well, to prepare me I suppose. And poor old Remo over there he’s not moving much at all. He looks frozen in all this heat. Even my flatulence doesn’t get a rise out of him, and that was our biggest shared joy.

But put a lid on it, cause here comes Gaia sailing in on a wave of sunsprung youth. She’s been at the beach with her young daughter and her skin is now the finest light dusky copper I’ve ever seen. Poor old eighty year-old Remo really is in bad shape; he had a crush on Gaia too and used to steal her from me, talk nonsense to her not twelve feet away, steal time from me, piss me off. But now nothing. Lovely Gaia goes over and perches on the edge of his bed and takes up his hand but he just breathes around his hoses. We try to stay upbeat but poor Remo makes it hard.

This romance is like any other and it’s at a turning point. I don’t know how far it’s gonna go but Gaia wants it to go up the hill and away from here at least and I’m all for it. Her every visit leaves me happy, flushed with strength, more of a man, more in need of more. This needing more an old friend I’d like to spend some quality time with.

So she’ll follow me up the hill in her Fiat carting my stuff, my brushed aluminum crutches, my new wheels. My stuff is accumulating here despite my efforts. All my friends, with the very best intentions, keep stacking things in here with an eye to my creature comfort but the idea of setting up shop here is uncomfortable in the extreme. Still, it’s piling up: face cream and a proper razor, gumdrops, CD player, a four pound biography of Peter The Great which anyway

I can’t hold up; a shoe a singleton a loner I hope comes in handy; even a laptop for watching movies which is far too exhausting to operate. At least I still have a lap, just.

I gotta get out of here first. Every day is an eon and every afternoon I’m crestfallen, reduced to rolling the halls in my beater chair – the other all wrapped-up and ready to go – staring forlornly at my rank papagallo, my lonesome Stan Smith. Each eternal day at dressing time I look expectantly at Emiliano and he snips me closer to freedom one stitch at a time. Beads of sweat form on my forehead in anticipation of when it’s time to knead the fluid out of my castrated thigh. A daily ritual I loathe even more than the bedpan, though they’re in the same league, pain and humiliation being kissing cousins after all.

Not one person speaks English, so the lexical barrage of amputeeism is still before me. Phantom pain I am well versed in because literature is filled with it, often fueled by it, sometimes forgiven by it, a sitting duck of peglegged allegory hop along now and do let’s stop mooning over our feelings. What others will soon call my stump or residual limb I now lovingly call my nub. I’m told I have a nice one. Gaia calls it my ‘gambino’ or little leg and that’s yet another reason to adore her. Eanie meanie meeno Dio Mio. The rest of my leg – the leg that’s gone – is somehow sticking straight through the bed, dangling at exactly ninety degrees just above the occasionally piss-smirched linoleum. A common sensation I’m told. A syndrome.

I guess the syndromes will be rolling in thick and fast. Syndromes will fill up the emptiness. Shiny little rat-faced syndromes. Syndromini.

It’s a morbid thought that’s not worth scrutiny so I flip the sweatsoaked pillows over to the temporarily cool fresh side and lay back with my shattered arm across my chest like a weight on my shoulders and concentrate on dissolving the junk in my trunk.

Fluid in my old bruised lungs; that’s my last hurdle. Hurdle. I shouldn’t even speak anymore using these stilted inappropriate metaphors. Stilted. Stilts. Hobbled. Stumbling. See, here we go again, here comes another syndrome. Ah fuck, where’s Alberto’s tape recorder? But the fluid is it. Get rid of the fluid and I’m gone. Can’t they just suck it out somehow? Shit, Emiliano’s up to his elbows in me every day. Easy now. Bide your time. Ride it. Like a big yellow dog. Like David. A good time to be an animal; to grow a new beak and survive.

I’ve become a fussy little bastard. Just like on the fishboat: a place for everything and everything in its place. I roll around tucking things in. I’m all packed up and eveready for the green light. If I had a car it’d be idling out in the street with a cold six-pack in a brown bag behind a cool starlit windshield and some patio furniture in the backseat – the getaway car.

I have misgivings about my mania but mania or not it’s my mental health we’re talking about. I’m getting manic. I’ve forgotten what sleep looks like; I only know darkness, windows of hope. My biggest fear, aside from full-body gangrene – braingrene corroding my faculties like high-speed verdigris, my brainlobes going to green-grey seed, my sage husks of milkweed pods – is offending my hosts with my constant clamouring for release. I tell them that overoften, and I think I’m beginning to offend them, or worse; to bore them.

But neveryoumind cause tomorrow’s the big day.

The Vascular Dream Team sent an unusual emissary to give me the good news. They sent Dottore Claudio Baldi, vascular surgeon. I lied when I said no one speaks English, cause Claudio does OK and he tries real hard. He’s like a Californian Tuscan and Tuscany is like the California of Italy. He’s fit, tan, has hippy beads in his chest hair and looks like a San Francisco broker who plays a lot of squash. He’s come by many times over the last 10 days or so that I’ve been

a guest at the Hotel Vascolare; on morale-boosting missions for, I suspect, both he and I.

He wants to flex his English and laments a lost girlfriend from, you guessed it, California. From one athlete to another, he kindly searches to assure me that there’s nothing I can’t still do. There are spectacular advancements in the world of prosthetics, MIT is working with the university hospital in Bologna and … this is the first time, really, that I’ve pictured myself perambulating around with a whatchamacallit.

Only hours ago it seems, I viewed myself as a monopod, a new-age hybrid grazing through the internet for a complimentary uniped with a flattish size eleven left foot and no right one. We start up a tentative friendship on the web till I discreetly determine his taste in footwear before an exchange can commence. Maybe, if need be, we set up a Paypal .

But no, now I realize that with a Roboleg I can keep my shoes all paired up and slap a beloved old monkstrap on my Barbie foot. I’ll have a vertical kitbag of tomfoolery, an articulating windchime, an appliance, a loose assembly of widgets and friccastats that I’ll have to turn off on the airplane; a clickety-legged upside-down existential cockroach with a carbon fibre carapace; a one-man-band of little clashing cymbals, symbols, symbolini.

But neveryoumind, the point is that Claudio gave me the thumbs up (literally, I assure you) and as of tomorrow my ass is bound outward and upward. There follows a flurry of cell-phone calls (dear Palmino gave me a cell-phone full of quality time) and everybody’s in. Pietro and Denise are a little reluctant cause they’re phlegmatic Swiss and they know the lay of the land, the hummocky land – still pie-bald in places where I scalped it with a gas-powered weed eater in a former life not three weeks ago – the dirt roads, the crazy two-step floorplan, the scrofulous cats, the muscle-bound dustbunnies; but they sense my urgency and roll over.

The hospital’s going to send me home in an ambulance – on the house – which is considerate and fittingly full-circle. Ashes to ashes, nub to nub. Gaia’s in too. She’s going to follow me up the hill in her little Fiat with my stuff, which, of course, is all packed up and ready to go.

Then the girls come to give me a small handful of pills, extract their pound of blood – they jokingly call themselves Vampires – and give me a big intramuscular pain shot right in the ass. Over time I settle in for the long-haul, settle down to sleep. But it’s no good of course. Never was. Now my insomnia is plugged in, incandescent.

I a litany of sleepless nights from a litany of other lives: game nights, race nights, nights of love.

I nights when I worked for a helicopter logging crew and, still in my teens, choppers whop-whopped lurched and swerved through a maelstrom of crashing timber all night long; all in my head and just above my bed. Then, scared shitless, I’d have to drag my ass out of bed hours before daylight to go out and face it for real. I got that job cause the poor kid before me got hit by the blunt edge of the rotor of a helicopter flipping over on take-off and lost his leg.

Or my first days as a beachman on our fishboat. I can’t how I got promoted to beachman; I think it was because the beachman before me got promoted to a job in a scrap yard.

On the purse seine boats I work on, worked on, beachman was the most dangerous job. A seine boat carries its net wrapped on a huge drum across the stern. If the captain wants to catch the schools of salmon that run along the

beach, he dangles two men – or boys as it were – from the underside of the stern in a flat-bottomed aluminum skiff with a small outboard motor. He steams in generally as close as possible to the beach then punches the beach crew off.

There’s a coil of line in the skiff as large as a sleeping lion; it’s braided nylon and as big around as your wrist. It’s ingeniously connected to the multi-ton net which in turn is ingeniously connected to the multi-hundred horsepower diesel of the fishboat itself, which is now charging away from the beach and out into the current in a race to beat the whimsical little minds of fast-swimming salmon who like to do everything together.

As the net flies off the drum like a scorched banshee, the line sings out of the skiff like a line looped around the banshee’s leg. While the skiffman drives fullthrottle to the shore with the bow juddering through chop and spindrift, the beachman is standing in the bow and paying out the angry line. They ram the beach, which ejects the beachman onto the shore and sends him on his hysterical way in search of something to tie the evil uncooperative line to.

Usually there is an established tie-up spot; a stout tree, or fortuitously shaped rock that he hopes is attached to the terra ferma, but sometimes he has to wing it.

It all takes place at maximum speed because the faster you are and the sooner tie your knot, which anchors the net, the closer it will be to the beach and the more fishy money you’ll catch.

The crew, plus their wives, families, girlfriends, holidays and managers are relying on you my friend, so don’t fuck up and owwies don’t count; can’t slow you down.

Get it tied and tied fast, fast. The crazy terrain you’re highballing over is all part of the deal cause the term ‘beach’ is hopelessly optimistic when we’re talking about the rugged storm hammered coastline of British Columbia. So don’t wipeout either, and if you do, don’t slice yourself to ribbons on the barnacles or slip off a cliff on kelp or algae or starfish.

It’s like a Marine assault landing soldier, so when the crunch comes don’t let your regiment down. Learn your knots and get it right, cause once you’ve tied your knot the boat will be pulling on it like a tank, hauling on that line for all it’s worth; and the weight of the net, the gear and the awesome power of the tide are gonna be bearing on that line too. Sometimes the tree you tie to will uproot and the whole works will explode out over the water, sometimes the rock you tie to will disintegrate or the beachline itself will stretch and stretch till one-and-oneeighth inches thick is now three quarters of an inch of humming polypropylene surrounded by a mirage of anger and spitting fibres.

Sometimes that line will part like a mortar round, so stay clear; stay out of the line of fire.

Now the captain has described an almost full circle and is coming back towards the beach, he’s going to give you the signal and you’re going to have to go up and release your knot. Go on. Shake hands with the devil. You’d best have tied a good knot and hope it has cinched down favourably cause if not I want you to lie underneath that singing uptight motherfucker and cut it with your itty bitty fishknife. If you succeed and sever the line without it taking something precious from you, the sound will be like a crossbow bolt hitting a coconut and the line will be lying way out in the ocean like a dead boa before you know what happened.

And when you get back to the boat the skipper will be pissed, because beachlines cost 700 bucks each and they don’t grow on trees. But it’s better to have fucked up your knot and at least secured it, cause if you’ve missed the tie-

up entirely – lost the beach, as they say – then your net won’t catch a scale and the whole crew will have quiet smoldering issues with you.

This is a worst-case scenario of course but those scenarios do play out in all their permutations, sometimes tragically. Once you are good at it most days are a walk in the park most of the time; but none of them are all of the time. Something is always ready to take something else away. Hazard.

And it’s these scenarios that play through your mind all night long if you are a greenhorn beachman and tomorrow’s your first day and you’re fishing a big sockeye run in Johnson Straights where the tide can run at eleven or twelve knots and everyone’s season will be made, or broken, there.

I didn’t get broken there. It took the hazards of traversing the flat calm bottom of Pian del Lago on a dulcet June night – no storm and no storm warning whatsoever – to founder me on the beach of Monopodia. And now I can’t sleep cause I’m so excited about crossing it again. Crossing the Straights of Agony. Skirting Hope Bay.

And I swear that goddamned window ain’t getting any brighter, the clock hands don’t help; they don’t move at the best of times, and my eyes, my sore sightful eyes, may as well be held open by a mariner’s toothpicks.

Morning comes, of course, though I had my doubts.

So far mornings have always come, although I floated under a couple there somewhere. I’m at the window now, my last day in this beater chair, and the hills between here and Amiata are even lovelier than usual. It’s a jewel of a day that I’m going out to meet.

Clearly word is out that the asymmetrical Canadese is on the hop. Since before daybreak the hospital staff have been dropping by to say goodbye and despite how shitty I feel I don’t think I’ve ever felt better in my life. Just now the ambulance attendants even blustered through in their little uniforms – Italians love uniforms and they love banter – a winning combination.

They laughed and chided me, saying I didn’t recognize them, eh? And it was true, though as with Paolo, there was the faintest psychic ignition.

They say, well, we you; you were a regular barrel of laughs and a proper handful. I ask them what they mean and they demur, say ah nevermind, but you were joking half the time. Of this I absolutely nothing but can’t help but marvel at this proof positive of adrenaline’s demented power.

A train of goodbyes as one infermiere after another comes to shake my hand or kiss my cheek and for a guy coming off a bad patch I’m a very lucky fellow.

Palasciano’s dream team appeared too, but their visit wasn’t entirely warm and fuzzy. In addition to the back-slaps and e-mail exchanges they had to attend to my nub. One side was extra sore and tumescent cause it wasn’t draining so they decided to carve me a new hole. Emiliano blasted me with a steady spray of aerosol Novocain and Claudio lanced me.

They asked me if I still wanted to leave today and I couldn’t hear through the roaring in my ears my eyes nailed shut and the crook of my arm cinched down over my forehead. But yes. The answer is yes.

Gaia propels me with a hitch in her step, a leather string around her slender apricot ankle there’s just a slip of hippy in her. Through the chicanery of this sputtering hull of a hospital and its wheezing elevators to the ambulance turnaround in my chair with my crutches my stuff piled in my lap and a shiteating grin on my face I’m a dolly a dory adoring my flame-haired pilot.

I’m tired by the time we get to the ambulance but that’s OK cause I get to lie down in the ambulance with nylon webbing straps across my chest for the halfhour ride out of town and up the Montagnola. Gaia nips in behind us in her car and we wheel around, me staring at the ribcage of the ceiling like Jonah in his whale but really I should be lashed with harpoon line to the roof.

But I’m not arguing, no chance for that anyway, this is a husband and wife team, driver and attendant, and the banter is nonstop. They’re hilarious. After the first few urban and suburban turns I know these roads know them oh so well can’t see out can’t hardly talk can’t hardly breathe I’m so excited plus exhausted plus bouncing the bouncing ambulance is killing my still-broken ribs breathless however with excitement mostly.

I know these roads I can’t see out just see tree limbs limbs flying cornices poles standards all wired together by powerlines but now more and better greener trees now we’re getting there greener everything and a purer grade of sunshine leafier dapplier picture-perfect light excruciatingly available natural light flickers on the ceiling on the upper ribcage flickering incomparable sunlight runaway film projector light a flickety chiaro scuro project with the emphasis on chiaro not the dull flutter of water-stained torn-cornered acoustic corridor ceiling tiles no squeaking IV stands just a nice belching diesel and real pneumatic tires rolling windows rolled wide open fuck the corrente and I swear I can hear Gaia downshifting her sun-faded Uno cause now we’ve tilted down we’re nose down nosing down the twelve per-cent pitch and two-and-a-half turns down the bank of the ancient lake bottom where the plague used to dwell the treetops here stately lush and continuous there’s a pothole coming up and if he keeps turning around to talk down to me he’s gonna smoke it.

At the ‘Y’ junction at the bottom the driver the husband does a swift rolling stop I hold my breath cause it’s dangerous there let’s not hog the centerline now no more accidents I don’t ever want to see the inside of a hospital again oh I’m such an ass I’ve got to go in tomorrow for my nub kneading and god knows how many times after that but anyway there’s no doubting the perfume of the horse stables as we strike out across Pian del Lago and the light intensifies again as there are few trees across the farmed fields of the old lake bottom and there’s no Black Death here now no way it’s late afternoon in early July and there are people jogging along the narrow shoulders shoulders awave with bloodred poppies and lovers picnicking in the fields I try to hoist head and shoulders up to see but it’s no good they’ve got me strapped-in but anyway it’s OK I know

they’re there I know they’re there for sure lovers and joggers alike. Bloodred poppies boys playing army and cyclists too.

Across the bottomlands and at the first ninety degree left I know that Santa Colomba the town is just above us up there is the 17th century palazzo owned by a wealthy American and nearby live my friends Sandro and Patrizia with their daughter Flavia and lord knows how many animals. Now I smell sheep and over the bank on the left ladies and gentlemen you can look down on the big old house of the four Sardi shepherds that’s where shy young Mattia lives Mattia who gave up the dead-end life of sheep herding to play in a Rock and Roll band and save my life. Rock and Roll came to me in my hour of need.

We’re climbing for real now though this is the easiest climb of the four that bring you to the mountaintop; it’ll be six point one kilometers at an average grade of around 5 to 6 percent.

Past the Villa Cennina where Angelo one of my English students is a manager the Villa bought by a priest who runs an Italian cooking school for wealthy Japanese kids past the domestic boar farm I’d like to say I can smell the little devils but I don’t I do know that a baby wild boar a cinghialino is perhaps the cutest creature on the planet they’ve got leopard spots like my squishy stuffed animal David I hope I haven’t forgot him hope he’s in my bag somewhere.

I feel the grade ease up and then steepen again on that stretch just a kilometer before the castello and the dirt turnoff for our little village. We’re off up the dirt lane the ambulance labouring wheezing spray-painting the foliage with diesel soot and I too am wheezing straining to see outside dead certain of exactly where we are no need to see outside really then a clunk and nothing stopped engine off and ticking down not one kilometer from home.

It’s broken? I ask with a dash of panic, Yes and no, says the driver, mostly just hot. It’s OK bello, we’ll carry you there still. And he opens all the various doors plus the hood, and lights a cigarette while his wife pokes around at the forest verge and enjoys the sun. Gaia comes and holds my hands, rolls her eyes and laughs.

At this point I don’t care either I could make it from here on my own if I had to I could drag myself up this last bit of mountain with my chin like one of Darwin’s fish headed up the big bank definitelyandforever out of the Primordial Soup and definitely on the up and up but still wielding unwieldy I could lay on my side and have Gaia log-roll me up she could put logs under me and poll me up ancient Egyptian-style … maybe ten minutes go by with nothing but breeze ruffled leaves and birds chirping. Contrary to popular conception most Italians know when to be quiet.

The old diesel lights up again no problem and we ease on up the mountain. A more touristic pace this time so as not to overheat and it’s nice this sedate travel in an ambulance with all the goodies but without all the fanfare, there’s plenty to keep me occupied no airbags but there is a respirator and plenty of plasma and morphine both. In the tiny courtyard in front of the village’s six or seven houses he asks me where it’s best to drop me off and I direct him from my back, like a horizontal conductor.

The rear doors whoosh open they hoist me out still on the cot and there I am all four wheels in the dust blinking like a mole in this place I love so much this place that’s been so good to me this place that’s modified me for life.

Eight or ten three to eight year-old kids are ranged along the far rock wall staring wide-eyed I don’t think they were forewarned it’s just that a big bright orange white and blue ambulance pulling in to the piazzetta is a singular occurrence for our ragamuffins. I beckon them over and no one budges.

I tell them it’s me Stivi it’s OK. Nothing. I say hey I look a lot worse than before but I’m quite a bit nicer now. Nothing. Oh well, we’ll deal with that one later.

They unbuckle me and carry me one under either shoulder which is tricky cause my right collarbone’s still on the mend plus all those right ribs and you gotta watch that left arm and the right knee doesn’t bend so good but hup hup allez into Pietro and Denise’s and plunk me down on the oxblood couch. So, um, good luck.

Well thank you I can’t thank you enough really I never thought I’d be here again I don’t know what to say … well then, we’ll see you next time, he says with a big wink a cocked smile and in another wink the ambulance is bucketing downward lost in a spume of July dust now just me and the spooked ragamuffins and Gaia. Ah here comes my beloved David but not much from him it’s what I expected he’s not one for spectacles – except where ball-chasing is concerned.

Out of respect for him I don’t freak out and maul him, just a nice warm supersincere greeting. Over and over. I have to win back his trust. I took off on him.

I’m always taking off.

Gaia’s not herself; she’s fidgety, downcast, circumspect. Another turning point. I look at her in the late slanting light and think what a brave and lovely little warrior. The low golden light is giving her an actual halo, which strikes me as just right. Pietro’s in Switzerland and Denise is at work so it’s strangely calm here, I’d like to show her around but don’t know how I would go about doing that, plus I’m shelled with discomfort and fatigue.

It’s odd that for the first time we can talk or hold each other with impunity but little of either transpires. The atmosphere is positive and loving but prickly, awkward; another turning point for sure, and in short order Gaia must leave anyway, for today that is, to fetch her daughter.

Customarily one would walk a young lady to her car, arm in arm, open her door and kiss her goodbye through the open side window but as the screen door snaps shut I’m still rooted to the oxblood couch and rooting around for something to put beneath me, to keep the gore off the leather, then 3 or 4 pillows for my head, a small one to elevate my nub and a mid-sized one to go under the torn meniscus of my good leg.

I stole a papagallo from the hospital and it would be nice to have it on hand but my bag is way over on the far wall. Ah, but Denise should be home before too long.

Well, here we are.

I’m scratching David’s head and pondering. He’s such a good dog. He’s headstrong and incorrigible and relentless and I love him for it. He’s half French Briard and half Maremmane, the South Tuscan sheepdog. So he’s all workdog and smart as a whip. Just now he’s assumed the classic workdog posture: chin on the terracotta tiles between his two huge feet and staring at me with calm focus. He’s now placed himself exactly mid-way between me and the door that leads outside. It’s folly to credit animals with too much but this much is true: normally he’s rambunctious, a head-butter and climber-upper but not now. He’s going easy on me. As much as I wanted to see him, I was worried that he’d kill me. Maybe he just smells Hurt. Kitty told me they smell in parts per million. Kitty. Hurt. Dog.

Denise is back and so is the bustle. This woman is a monument to care and feeding, plus she’s never turned her back on a stray so I feel my place is secure. The village is, in fact, full of strays; I’m in good company. Here comes one now, his name is ‘Tappo’ or ‘Cork’; he’s a Dachshund foundling, a ‘trovatello’, and a more gamey-legged and misshapen animal it would be hard to find. He’s close on the heels of his owner Andrea the German dottoressa who’s as sweet as Tappo is bent and is dropping in to say hi. In between her sigarette I pitch her on tending my nub and sense more than a little reluctance.

I have to concede that it’s a fair bit to ask even of a doctor and resign myself to a handful of hot and painful trips to the valley to have my dressings changed. My squeamishness has been evapourating apace with my pain and I could probably do it myself without ing out, but I can’t see down there.

It’s time for bed, the focus of my burning fantasies for three weeks now and with a little help from my friends I ease on in. I get the window wide open and

through the screen comes the scent of cypress, lilac and nightswerve, a crescendo of crickets, cicadas, frogs and a little mindless dogbark. That’ll be ‘Floppy’ the most tragic of the foundlings; his voice is the emptiest, the meanest.

BOOM!

My head smashes against the wooden headboard a gnashing involuntary grunt riven by rivets Gattling gun agony shooting into the outside of my phantom foot peppering my outermost footbone my fifth metatarsal. Gone in exactly 2 seconds and well before I could say Holy Fuck. Holy Fuck. And now the blister on my phantom foot the left blister the blister left by my cycling shoe a week prior to my accident a blister from a swollen foot a foot swollen from the smoking barrel of June heat though now it’s July a blister floating down the River Why a blister picked up a minor owwie a blister cause I hate to wear socks in my cycling shoes I find just a tiny bit more power if I can the metatarsals if I can hook my toes into the tiny toe divots on the orthotic footbed in my stinky rough nylon webbing shoe that blister is hotly quietly throbbing I’m quietly hotly sobbing. Not sleeping atall. No chance notnow and feels like notever.

That wasn’t a one-off that fucker’s coming back and now I brace myself for the revisitation while kissing my sweet dreams goodbye. A hand on either side clutching the stitched-up edges of the tick-mattress like they’re rails on a life raft eyes pinned on a knotty whorl on an eight hundred year old oak rafter waiting till lightning strikes my foot again my non foot my gone foot till spit and obscenities burst out of my mouth sweat on my forehead fear in my heart hope long gone and it’s all in my head. All in my head.

Everything’s on the up and up. Gaia comes almost daily – all the way up the hill – and stays, occasionally, the night. We’re going slow cause there’s no other way; slow’s how I go, now. I can always hitch a ride, so to speak, with someone into town to get my nub dressed and though sleeping in my own bed up here on the cool hilltop isn’t quite all I had cracked it up to be, I’m definitely on my way

back from the flip-side of sanity and sleep comes sometimes, which is something.

Performance-wise I sense that my new wheelchair is a big leap ahead of the hospital-issue unit, but there’s nowhere here for me to wind it up. I’m foiled by the crazy and smaller-than-institutional floorplan, the pea-gravel courtyards or the steep dirt roads, plus my arm’s still in a blimpish cast and I promised to treat it like a wine glass. I do get out from time to time if I can find a pusher. Now and again Gaia gets tired of holding my hands, looking into my eyes and giggling and she says let’s go out somewhere, let’s go for a spin, a giro. Generally we get about five steps out the side door to where Pietro has constructed a ramshackle pergola whose trellises, in this season, are abloom with wisteria and it is here that I some of the most pleasant afternoons of my life so far, and not just my new life.

We chat, we caress and I breathe endless sighs of the most profound relief even though it’s still so very, very hot. It’s tolerable if you stay in the shade and I’m as focused as David when it comes to shifting around to avoid direct sun. Gaia clips my nails and washes my hair and now and again she fills up David’s dish with warm water and shaves me. She’s getting better at it.

Today I screwed-up my courage and asked her to wheel me down to the church; after all, the church has always come to my aid. Steps here steps there up and out of the chair then back in and always just a hop ahead of disaster. The door creaked open and the musty churchsmell was like a lost and special perfume from a lost and special girlfriend. I’m all full of drama but of course it’s just as I left it; it’s only been a handful of days. Quite a handful, but just a handful.

The church, being an institution, gives me room to operate; and I’m rolling around at top speed showing her the demijohns, the corking machine, Franco’s crusty old job-specific device for removing the rancid olive oil from the widemouthed tops of wine fiaschi. It’s gotten a bit dirty again, could use a good

mucking out, but down here the dustbunnies are beggar’s velvet, somehow superior, less menacing. Here’s where I wrote, there’s where I danced with both Aretha Franklin and Macie Gray and here, well here’s the stereo – all plugged in.

I cued up the Rolling Stones’ ‘Hey Negrita’ and let it rip. Let it rip and I felt the cure, felt at home in the House of our Lord. And a man’s home is his castello, even if it’s not, or he’s not, one hundred percent, cento per cento. The House of the Lord is a castle made of rock it’s 522 meters above sea-level and 35 minutes from the hospital most of what separates us is a beautiful old lakebottom of questionable intent and my math skills are improving daily … We danced, after a fashion, and the sun beamed in, in actual shafts; columns of light you could chisel crucifixes out of. But it was daytime; and for the church to really give it up, it’s got to be dark – a well-known phenomenon.

A big afternoon.

Sympathy for the Devil a broadside in broad daylight a boogiewoogie on a hope and a prayer hell no a prayer to WHO?

Thinking hard now while a fusillade of bowstrings break as sparks from the museum-perfect throatlozenges of amber laying doggo in thousand year-old cypress limbs twice the size of my femur snap to it like gunfire and invade the lowing day and the Milky Way which, though it’s only faintly checking in along with a non-committal moon I know to be notatall milky atall.

If this is disorientation, I’ll take it.

Why would you want answers to this?

Your saints, of course, do a roaring trade but are generally both harried and exhausted, especially in Italy, Porca Madonna!

By and large they’re invoked to put the brakes on Mother Nature who’s not harried at all but takes her own sweet time and sooner or later turns up fresh as a rose.

And where, you might ask, is Ol’ god during all this? He’s on the job, as it were, 24/7, but his pluck and commitment are being evaluated as we speak. He himself is not available for comment, though his lawyers are. Diis Ignotus!

A big afternoon and sweet Gaia was right there along for the ride; you don’t have to know the words, just the spirit, and you’re right there in god’s fur-lined watch pocket. Makin’ whoopee while he’s doin’ his rounds. Makin’ music while he ain’t around.

My math skills are transcendent, getting better everyday. Gaia comes every odd day; I get my dressings changed on evens. Pietro’s been back for three, Colin and his family come in three, I can stop taking antibiotics in seven, I shave once every five days and am racked by phantom pain ten for ten but not 24/7. It seems unfair to have somehow surmounted all this shit only to be so summarily shat on, but down at the church they tell me You Can’t Always Get What You Want and I’m inclined to believe them.

Denise came into my bedroom with a pair of Gap jeans on a hanger. A pant hanger with clips holding a pair of perfect and perfectly ironed jeans by the legs. Jesus, my jeans. The jeans. The left leg was unblemished unstained unfrayed unchanged. They tactfully hid the motorbike and the helmet from me but Denise,

being Swiss, being thrifty, couldn’t resist the challenge of resuscitating the jeans, bringing them back to life.

There they were, ironed, but otherwise perfect (Denise is the type to iron boxer shorts). It’s hard to digest and I would in a heartbeat sacrifice the jeans to the Great Denim God in exchange for what they contained. My favourite Drizabone jacket was dissected, deanimated, my arm being in more obvious distress. They even cut the shoulder strap of my beloved satchel to get it away from me without disturbing the shattered hissing animal of my arm. The helmet and the bike can stay where they are; I don’t need to look; I feel it would be unhealthy to care. My scuffed boots I intend to wear again – both of them. They’ve been everywhere with me, from Colombo to Cape Town, plus to Hell and back.

Time ticks quicker up here but it still needs to be killed. Always with comion and for a good reason. Just give it the Blue Juice. This time I’m killing time till Colin’s re-arrival and it’s July and the Tour de has commenced; a timely gift. In one way watching is tough though; in watching the tour I experience a new and different kind of phantom pain the riders course through an exquisite parcours in exquisite alpine country I know well at speeds I always aspired to.

I ache for something I don’t have anymore; and it’s aching me back. I ache with advance longing for something I was in the middle of four weeks ago and will certainly never do again. Bad math. I’ll ride, to be sure, but not uh uh no way ever like that and maybe never again exactly up there – where there’s snow in July. This feeling I can’t kill; not like time. It’s a syndrome, I suppose, a syndromino, and a syndrome doesn’t die. It just swaps out genes.

I just hope I can at least get a little saddle on it and push it around. Point it over the hills.

It’s an important stage in the Tour de and I’m settling right in with a battery of pillows, my papagallo or remote piss-jug, and a beer when the door swings open itting a swarthy fruitskin of afternoon light, a big yellow dog, shy little Mattia and his enormous New Age Mamma in an even bigger mummu, or khaftan.

Mamma’s name is Maria – most Sardinian women are Marias – and she’s on a mission to inflict healing on me.

Pietro said she was threatening to come by today, the day of this most important Tour stage and I very New Agedly predicted that her arrival would be synchronous with the television coverage. These healers are gonna kill me. In great billows of raw silk, Patchouli and clucking noises she descends on me, completely obscuring my view of the TV. Mattia is cute as hell but respectfully silent and utterly useless and I’m getting mad at him even though he dragged me out of the abyss just twenty-six days ago, but who’s counting. She is bent on touch-healing my shattered arm, which is now less an arm than a fin.

With a little faith I’ll be doing handsprings by suppertime. Evidently, a cast that’s thicker and deader than asbestos stovepipe insulation poses no obstruction to her toxic ministrations. She keeps making seagull noises and leaves only as the riders file into their motorhomes with towels around their necks and my arm’s now both broken and upset. I’ll take titanium and morphine over seagulls and psychobabbble every time and I’m left to paw over the question of which was more invasive: the surgery, or the healing.

Colin’s here and he’s got his family too. A happy familial bustle will heal what ails you and we all know that kids are our most potent curative. I couldn’t stay together for the kids but I’m happy for their attentions in the aftermath. The best cure for a yuppie looking sidelong at it as you roll or hobble by is a kid running up and blurting out hey mister how’d you bust your leg off.

To an amputee, honesty is never gauche.

And Colin’s kids won’t stop asking questions. His daughter has offered me one of her Barbie legs and his infant son, the formidable Angus, will later offer me a complimentary prosthetic tune-up with every visit, using whatever tool he happens to have in his hand.

Colin’s arrival couldn’t have been better timed. Otherwise I would have had to mooch a ride out of someone down to the hospital for a four-hour fuckaround to get my dressings changed. I figured between Colin and I we could get her done up on the hill. He’s pretty squeamish but he’s even more loyal and so we got to work.

I did my best to ease off the old bandages and apprise Colin of new developments. They’d taken to shoving a thin six or eight inch strip of sterilized gauze up into my nub leaving just the tail-end sticking out to act as a wick, simultaneously drawing fluid out and keeping the drainage hole open. I didn’t have a back-up strip and anyhow shoving a fresh one in might have been a bit much to ask, so I told him he was getting off easy and he merely had to haul the oldie out and then we’d wrap me up with some fresh stuff.

What a trooper. He got down eye to eye with it and eased the wick out and then, after exactly two heartbeats I witnessed an actual geyser of gore arc up over my bedbound horizon and fire out towards mid-room. My poor friend, understandably, shrieked like a girl and did a reverse commando roll over the bed to take cover under the duvet and against the far wall.

I still see the freeze-frame trajectory over his wrist and his Ulysse Nardin watch

and under his chin – a very happy upshot, as he got nothing on him. A miracle. These days it’s a story we both love to recount but if I’d gored him it could have been the end of a long and priceless friendship.

They’ve gone to the beach. Colin loaded his family into a rental people-mover – a Fiat van shaped like a breadbox – and has gone halfway to Rome to dunk the kids in the Mediterranean at Argentario. The only noise in the village is the thrum of cicadas; it’s another still, hot, perfect day and I’m bored. Been left to my own devices for just a few hours and I’m restless and lonely, can’t find the concentration to read and feel that my sea of stories has dried or is drying up was maybe scorched on the pavement on Pian del Lago. A lifetime spent cultivating joy in solitude and now this? I choose to believe it’s a ing phase but am nonetheless chagrined to see in the TV guide that coverage of the tour doesn’t begin for another three hours. Three long hours.

Hup hup allez, it’s down to the church for the time-honoured cure. I gather sundry items and put them in my lap – I’m planning to roll down in my new wheels. An unbelievable performance getting two steps up over steps sills flagstones hummocks grassy crowns with dear David The Dog allthewhile underfoot, as it were. Hands so sweaty I can’t get a grip on the wheels dumping shit on the ground when I lurch up to portage myself neverstop sweating over obstacles eyes blearing cursing David who’s herding me dropping sticks in my bandaged pain-filled lap not understanding my non-engagement alien to this kind of grief now smelling whoknowswhat in parts-per-million now stuck.

Stuck fast in the ol’ pea gravel and many miles before I sleep but only seconds till I weep. Pissed and sleepy all broke down in the itty-bitty pea gravel ground down to a halt bone tired a stifled squawk at a sky serene and empty of avail. ‘Dio non sente gli angeli cantare, figurati gli asini ragliare, God doesn’t hear the angels singing. The asses braying? Go figure.’

I could hop out of it it’s not like the vultures will pick me clean by daybreak but

it all seems so fucking hard so fucking pointless so fucking painful so fuckitty fucked up I need to calm down to rest to think this over find an even keel maybe I just have to keep a tow line coiled in my fucking lap atalltimes I gotta think this over I can’t herd no more I need a drover and David’s looking at me with love in his eyes his dear old eyes his head askance akimbo alert everalert.

Everything is Broken Buddy, May 25

All broke like the Bob Dylan song. So broke down I’m cracking up. Everything’s fallin’ apart like a Walmart hibachi – some assembly required.

As you know, I’ve been here since April and now have, or have had, a good five weeks of first-class riding under my shorts. I’m smokin’ fit, a bomb, let there be no doubt, and if both you and a serviceable bicycle were at hand I’d take great relish in storming by you fast enough to put your hair on backwards. But of all the broken things my bike is numero uno. Late last week I was on a ride with Fabio, a Sicilian friend we call ‘Il Colombiano’, due to both his wee stature and his climbing prowess.

I saw my chance on a steep ½ kilometer ramp this side of Casole d’Elsa and dropped it down 4 cogs and stuck it to him. I got him by several bike-lengths at the top, of course, but after a few pedal-strokes with my hands in the air I noticed something gravely wrong. It felt like I’d potato-chipped my rear wheel or snapped the axle, but looking under the saddle the wheel itself was OK – a terrible sign.

So I got off and it didn’t take long till I spotted the break and was looking at daylight through a snapped frame. Right at the head of the drop-out on the driveside chainstay and right where it broke on me 3 years back. Damnshitfuck. I told them when they fixed it that the design was flawed and that I wanted a new-style drop-out but they told me to piss off. Last time it happened I was three thousand feet up a tiny road in Cinque Terre and it wasn’t much fun either but at least it was the end of the adventure, but this time I’m just midway through a dream-trip and completely SOL.

So I’ve sent it off to Tommasini in Grosseto and they promise it’ll be no more than a week, but I fear it’ll be a Tuscan week, which is roughly the same as a Mexican one.

That was just the culmination of my woes. It all started back in April: The bottom bracket your shop monkeys installed started wandering all over the South Tuscany. I guess my first clue was when I noticed the bearing cup itself protruding from the starboard side of the frame. I leveled each crankarm with its corresponding chainstay and, well, let’s just say that symmetrical didn’t enter into it. So I burned off a day limping in on the bike to my friend’s shop in the laughably named town of Poggibonsi.

After sorting that I had a series of untimely breakdowns involving shift-lever pawls, a cracked handlebar stem, broken cable-stops, an ill-installed headset and … you get the picture. A grease-fingered Spring but neveryoumind – I’m still kickin’ ass out there and though my equanimity has been unhelmed just a little bit, I should survive.

You know I don’t care about the downtime or inconvenience buddy, it’s all part of the parade, plus time, well; time’s something I’ve got lots of, something I got between my hands.

Some of that shit I brought on myself too. You’ll be quick to agree that I’m a little ham-fisted and not-to-be-trusted with a wrench in my hand. Sure shit happens, and it never seems to stop happening to me; in my ample downtime I’ve had cause to reflect that there might be a connection between my stupidity and the stupid shit that continually rains down on me. Yes, my friend, we’re making strides, circles, pedalstrokes. Circoli. Circulos.

For now I’m all revved-up with nowhere to go. What to do with this surfeit of

energy? I’ve started writing again and feel certain I’ll be able to finish the entire book, my treatment of the great Rabelais’s great masterpiece by July; I chop wood – lots and lots of wood. The Sardinian shepherds have given us two long stacks of oak cut into 4 foot lengths.

It’s all piled-up in the back forty so I gently load it into the back of Andrea the dottoressa’s VW wagon, cart it to the house, buck it, split it and stack it for Pietro and Denise. We both know that laying in firewood is the most agreeable menial task in the world and it gives me real joy to be able to set Pietro and Denise up for the winter and beyond.

Then it’s off to Siena. My broken bike is turning me into a Sienese vagrant, like the Albanian hoodlums who hang around the Piazza del Campo. I do it with style though; virtually all of my Italian friends including the matchless Palmino work at a pizzeria right on the Campo and for months now the weather’s been plenty fair enough to sit outside over my pizza and beer. I watch the Torre del Mangia deepen into its trademark bloodstain colour and never cease to marvel at the chromed tailpipe blue of the sky above it. They treat me like a celebrity there; they call me ‘Professore’ and it’s a rare day that I’m able to cram money into anyone’s hand for my food and drink.

They know their pizza, buddy, and if you ate my favourite: topped with rucola, bresaola, porcini, fresh garlic, black truffle oil and fresh bocconcini; you’d jump up wiggle and hug yourself. My friends, they know how to eat too. And when we’re not all (including the owner, Alberto) up to our elbows in the cookie jar at the restaurant, we’re at someone’s flat and in the middle of a food orgy. Last night we were at Anna’s; she’s a cook at the restaurant and likes nothing more than to go home and do it all again for her friends.

She’s from Puglia in the south and the menu was decidedly rustic: penne al arrabiata, a tripe and white wine stew, grilled rabbit, sautéed rabbit livers and some kind of tenderloin roulade all washed down with an armload of bottles of

Corvo, a chewy Sicilian red. Yum.

Makes you want more don’t it? That’s all I want in life pal and that’s why you really must me on my writing crusade. Sure it sounds dreamy but some dreams are made for realization. I’m not built for work-a-day jobs, I’m tired of being a broke and broke-down skid, and a fisherman’s life ain’t no life atall.

I want a new exotic motorcycle, a top-notch bicycle that’ll stop damn breaking and I want to spend much of the remainder of my life in a little rock house on a hilltop in South Tuscany, Marche, Umbria or even Liguria or Lazio. I want a big box of books with plenty more where that came from, a fat heel of Vecchia Romagna on the sideboard and a fluid setup with the locals for wine and olive oil, pecorino and salsicce, wildflower honey, prosciutto, lamb, sacks of spinach and wood-fired bread.

Perhaps Maitre Rabelais has given me a big old skeleton key that’ll unlock the door to all that goodness.

So I write, and it goes well. Rabelais himself was chock full of all those good things and chock-full too of breathless imploring at just how marvelous, mysterious and irreplicable this here life is. He was full-to-bursting with ecclesiastical training, scholarly erudition and yet knew, in the rich marrow of his curious bones, that the glory, the absolute glory of life is right fuckin’ here and now; not in a dead future gamboling in Elysian fields.

So these days every time I stand by my bicycle on the roadside up here on the top of the Montagnola, throw my leg over, clip in, charge into the first corner, drop my knee down, apply just a little finesse to the inside bar and try to nail down that first hairpin of the day; I try to not to forget. Try to get right into here and right ontop of now. The Jewel of the While. I think we can be

reasonably certain that we only get one kick at the cat, one turn in the driver’s seat and we should ride it till the wheels fall off.

Whew. That was quite a mouthful. Made me all thirsty. So I’m going to pour myself a beer, phone the bikeshop and see if my frame’s back yet and then, I guess, go chop some wood.

L8R ☺. Get some on ya. S

July 18

One of the cats died overnight. It’s a loss I think I can withstand; faking heartbreak would push me way outside the credibility envelope, but I can feign concern. Denise is taking it hard. A spider dies and it’s tough on Denise. I’m looking at another day solo up here on the hill; Colin’s taken the family on another excursion and everyone else has gone to work, including Denise.

I promised her I’d bury the tag-eared old warrior Negus, cause she’s not up to it. As usual, burial instructions are painfully explicit; I’m to wrap him in a nice towel, put him down across the lane from the pomegranate trees with all the other dead cats and dig the hole plenty deep. I offer up my services as a favour, sure, but more just to give me something to do and as a personal challenge. I’ve never dug a grave from a wheelchair before.

I know exactly where the pet cemetery is; years ago I inadvertently waltzed in there with the gas weed-eater and precipitated a storm of little decapitations, decapitini – little wooden crucifixes – crosses flying through the air everywhere. I was very worried for a while but Denise never busted me and the supernatural powers let me be, I think. Maybe not.

I’m off. Humping down to the meadow with a spade and a mattock across the Naugahyde armrests of my rig, ontop of that, my stiff cargo wrapped in a tatty towel. The rigid and patch-furred bodily remains of that old itchy-assed scrapper, Negus. Presumably his soul is already lolling in Kitty Heaven, where the streets are lined with scratching posts like elegant cypresses and the food is always wet and rank. The various sandtraps and pea gravel sinks are still hazards to be sure, but one way or another I plow through.

I go real slow; slow’s how I go, and try not to get too hot and flustered. I try to stay mint clean and manage to dig the old tom a good hole. It’s a first-class view-plot looking down over the church, the fruit and chestnut trees; a flock of sheep and the valley below. There’s no traffic whatsoever; there never is. The only traffic is sheep, and the flat staccato toll of their bells is a continual soundloop in these hills.

There is, however, a car coming. Becoming, myself, more pet-like all the time, I’ve developed my dear friend David The Dog’s uncanny ability to identify vehicles and their occupants at impressive distances. This one is Gaia’s tincan Fiat for sure, a 4 cylinder Uno with a tight grouping of shot-sized holes in the tailpipe. My heart gives a bump and I sit back and wait for her and a free ride out of the meadow. Once she’s stopped laughing at where she’s discovered me and what I’ve been up to, she pushes me back to our pergola. She’s powerful, for a little thing, and derives much of her strength from sheer determination.

There’s that furrowed brow again. She is literally blooming through these midsummer days, her eyes now glittering with seaglare and her skin the perfect almond. She folds down her waistband to show me a tan line she got wearing my boxers at the beach with her daughter. The boxers that Palmino gave me. A nice tight little circle, that one; a grouping.

She’s holding my one hand in both of hers and looking at me with utter focus: ing, committing, evaluating. We still laugh a lot and couldn’t be tenderer together, but there are more and more moments like these, a perhaps inevitable encroachment from the sad and empty quarters. I’ll be flying back to Vancouver soon to begin therapy, to begin my nuova vita with all the entrails that that entails. She’s contended with my imminent departure with courage and levity and so, come to think of it, have I. There’s some parity here, cause I don’t think either of us know quite what to think; what has happened, what’s happening. I do think that we both, at base, don’t believe this love will survive; survive my leaving, survive the Atlantic and the even broader gulf of culture. There are so many, many unanswered questions and there’s so very little certainty. And that

lends this departure its particular melancholy.

We’re both applying a brave face along with a touch of possibility and I, for my part, still can’t believe that this flame-haired angel appeared when she did and helped roll me out of the ashes, roll me back to earth, rock me in the church and roll me under the violet umber of wisteria. Now it feels as if I have a plane ticket in one hand and a stopwatch in the other. However, we have both tacitly agreed to keep the more ardent questions at bay and ease apart with as much grace as possible.

Colin and his family are staying across the laneway and it’s time to roll over for an apertivo and then dinner, which we take outside on the stone patio in the perfumed air under skies as soft and humane as skies can be.

Some ardency has crept into Gaia and I and she’s digging her nails into my forearm, kneading me, needing me. It strikes me that the best solution to getting alone together is to hop upstairs to one of the guestrooms and I swivel my chair to take a bead on the stairs – formidable stairs that I know so well.

I inform Colin and his wife of our plan and they’re both all for it, rightly believing that a little loving is ever and always a first-class emollient.

The stairs are tile, steep and narrow with two big kinks at the top. Crutches are out of the question so the only solution is for me to throw my good arm around Colin’s shoulders and hop beside him while he hauls me up. It’s a bit hellish and definitely not a pretty sight, but I figure well worth the danger and effort. Not Gaia though. She started crying and begging us to stop around the halfway mark, as my dear friend and I cursed and alternately grazed knuckles and bare shoulders on the pin-sharp stucco walls on our wavering and rocky way up.

Colin dumped me on the bed, dusted his hands, grinned widely and ed Gaia, carefully, on his way back down.

She won’t touch me. She’s sitting on the far edge of the bed and inconsolable. I’m sheeting with sweat but happy as a clam I’m ready willing and, I think, able, but not Gaia no way she’s mortified; believes her greed her thoughtlessness her self-absorption put me in danger put me in pain.

No amount of soothing will mollify her and I tell her till I’m blue that I would do it all again right now for the chance to be alone with her and I would and in fact I have to do it again in short order and in reverse because though she calmed and relented and came into my arms something was broken broken at least for this night and Gaia poor Gaia needed to leave.

The days are ticking down and hazard’s still around. At five this morning I rallied up some main strength and headed to the shower. Getting over a sill, any sill, is plain tricky and landing on the hot tin floor of a wet shower stall trickier still, but I got in there alright. To an untimely visitor the shower cubical would’ve looked like a big angular upright bug with my various appendages sticking out, the ones I was vainly trying to keep dry. I did discover a handy secret; Denise’s shower-cap fit snugly perfectly right over my nub. My newfound joy in plain old being alive has prompted me to make many resolutions about being a better person so I think I have to tell Denise in the first place and also pick her up a fresh cap next time I’m down the hill.

It’s coming out of the shower where I come to grief. Any monopod will tell you that tile and enamel were concocted by the Devil and sent up to earth to torture us. Hopping down onto the wet tile my one foot shot out from underneath me with shocking alacrity. No question of scrambling – think about it – there’s nothing to scramble with. No chance of recovery whatsofuckingever. Now I’m

buck-naked flat on my back in a welter of tears fear and laughter – yes laughter – mostly at the spectacle I would present to any poor devil just now. Limbs waving in the air futilely like Kafka’s cockroach unable to get up smodging those nasty bathroom dustbunnies on my shoulderbacks and buttocks broke rib walloped head swiveling turtle-like trying to monitor bodily damage trying to form a plan.

I consider screaming out for help but pride gets into it. Nothing for it but to skooch over to the toilet and pull myself into the vertical through the pisssmatters and mank and up the plumbing at the back of the toilet like a shiny pink polecat, a globular silverfish with a bigfat wish. I’m trembling upright and bugeyed on my vivid-hurt non-phantom knee which you’ll was dislocated in the motorbike crash so it’s an imperfect situation from the ground up and I’m wondering where my next step will take me.

But hazard’s still hanging around, as is its wont. One thing hazard won’t do is quit; ain’t no quitter, hazard. Hazard don’t quit. Just hours after my backstroke session in the shower, Pietro took one himself; a shower that is.

I don’t think he used the shower-cap and everything went according to plan. He came around the corner, towel around his waist and cleaning out an ear with a QTip just as the phone started ringing. He jumped for the phone and brought it up to his ear energetically whereupon he shrieked, dropped the phone and collapsed on the couch. When he first grabbed the phone he left the Q-Tip in his ear, quickly forgot and then used the phone receiver to hammer it into his brain like a framing nail; tried to kebab his right lobe. Just a close call and it took an hour to stop laughing but that old hazard was still hanging around, hanging around in the corner like a nasty nebula of beggar’s velvet, a frisky dimwit, a hasty numbnuts, a tireless thoughtless purveyor of pain.

It’s time for another party, this one to mark my last night up here on La Montagnola and to thank as many of my Italian friends as can make it. It’s a good turnout. I wanted to hold it down in the church but it was all last minute,

we’re having food, and it’s going to be an emotionally powerful event for me; which means I might get slightly overserved. It’ll be easier to huck me into bed like a sack of potatoes if we stay up at the house. We also have music up here, which is the main thing.

The entire crew from Alberto’s restaurant show up and they are packing Christ knows how much food – it’s gonna cost Alberto a fortune. They get to cooking right away. Look at them overthere, it’s like a busman’s holiday, kibitzing in the smoke and turning out one platter of grilled meat after another. My beloved Rosanna, the dottoressa, shows up; to me she’s the evening’s star guest, la bella del ballo. Holding onto her shoulders and looking into her sad eyes her sweet eyes her sight for sore eyes I start to lose control till she looks away to see Gaia across the patio and then she smiles and torques my ear real hard.

Oh, it’s all good. A gaggle of friends from the language school, lots of friends from around the hilltop, Sandro and Patrizia from Santa Colomba, but no Mattia from down at the shepherds’. It’s alright; I know he’s far too shy for this nonsense.

At the very end of the evening it’s just Palmino and I eye to eye and I hug him like a goddamn vice I just can’t stop my chest is bucking hard enough to rebreak my ribs when I’m finally able to wetly blurt out that there simply aren’t words. He responds with typical acerbity and matchless elegance saying, ‘Figurati,’ Go figure. Then he says, as he’s said more than once these past weeks: ‘Vai nella boca del lupo,’ or go in the mouth of the wolf. It’s a phrase I don’t quite understand, but love very much.

A good night was had by all and Gaia spent what was left of it with me, in my soupbowl-shaped bed where forces conspire to throw you together. It’s easy to bump me and cause me pain but even easier to hold me and fill me with joy …

Bright and early it’s a big warm goodbye kiss to beloved Pietro and Denise with heartfelt assurances that I’ll be back sometime soon; a not too lingering kiss to Gaia – she’ll be spending a day or two with us between here and Rome. Colin, his wife, family and nanny, his bicycle, his friend’s bicycle, my wheelchair, crutches and all our shit somehow fit into the van we call the breadbox. They pack me in about halfway through the process and then systematically pack around me. Colin was thrilled to note that I took up ¼ less room and an entire suitcase on end fit perfectly in the space below my truncated left thigh.

At first I was worried about it crushing my phantom foot, but after the initial shock there was nothing. A pleasure to be of assistance and I can conveniently rest my nub on the top of the suitcase. We work with the materials at hand.

The plan is to spend a few days enjoying Umbria and points south before we all catch a plane to Vancouver to continue the summer’s adventure. Colin’s rented a villa in the south that’s large, luxurious and very civilized and my next few days are centerfold material for Convalescence Guide magazine: chaise longue poolside, Vivaldi’s oboe concerto at maximum volume through sixteen-foot shuttered windows and posh sunshafts, superfine meals and exquisite wines under moonbeam and grapevines, then replacing the Vivaldi with AC/DC and leaving the volume where it was, maybe even bumping it up.

And dancing, after a fashion. Rolling. The grand solace in not always getting what you want but oftentimes coming pretty damn close.

Most days the family will go on an excursion; half the time I them and the other days Gaia drives down from Siena to visit. Those visits are a loving respite; more sultry than sulky, but when Gaia stays for dinner the cracks begin to show. Conversation is lugubrious, exhausting. She speaks no English so I’m translating tabletop stories and anecdotes for her, which is OK, but she seems utterly uninterested, which is not. She’s jealous; wants me and me alone and doesn’t attempt – at all – to befriend or even communicate with my friends and

this is not a recipe for success.

I’m leaning more towards the company of my friends, leaning toward the airport, the Atlantic and leaning away from Gaia.

Colin’s a beast of burden, my motor, my pusher; he’s pushing me all over Italy. He gets me poolside, gets me to the beach, gets me to a half-dozen unforgettable dining-room tables. He gets me through the warren of streets in these hilltop medieval towns, gets me into a photo op with a three-legged cat; gets me through the day.

In Montepulciano he almost lost me.

Through pilot error we all ended up on foot, sotospeak, at the bottom of a climb that was at least one kilometer at six or seven percent, percento. We ground our way up in unison and right near the top we both looked down at his sandalblistered feet, my raw butyl-blackened hands and we both started laughing so hard he almost lost me and sent me rocketing straight back down to the bottom of the valley.

If I’m treating my arm like glass, it’s more a beer stein than a wine glass. I’m packing some clout again and my cast now smells of spilt beer burnt rubber hope and sweat. Always sweat.

On this evening I’ll say goodbye to lovely loving Gaia. The tiniest pout, the high proud carriage, the unbearable sheen in her porcelain eyes. I don’t know that she senses the shift in my affections but she’s gracious enough and smart enough to make this as painless as possible for both of us. And she’s gone.

Hidebound

How often we say ‘I love you’ with an ear cocked for the echo How often does the staccato of our love-launched anger match, precisely, the waning hoofbeats of something maverick, hillbound and more intimate than the act of love itself

How often.

Next morning the precision packing recommences and we’re off to Fiumincino Airport in Rome and a bona fide nightmare. A cripplingly early AM hotel departure a hot and busy mid-summer morning kids squalling melting down a staggering amount of luggage prams car-seats kiddie wagons toys amputee paraphernalia and one count ‘em one amputee.

Colin dumps us on the curb in order to return the breadbox we’re on the lookout for touts and thieves being pursued by jilted hotel minivan drivers with criminal intent we divide our forces some watching kids and baggage on the curb one watching baggage at the check-in line and me somehow shuttling baggage between these points two carts at a time hopping one armed crutching cursing sweating hurting.

Finally through check-in finally through customs finally to the gate and I’m staring my future right in the face or rather in the back. There’s an old amp at our very gate. At first I see him from behind. I’m on crutches, not treating my arm like glass atall now – I had to return the rental chair in Siena – but he’s in a chair; an old fellow, gray-haired and balding. Hanging from the push handles on the back of his chair is a boomerang-shaped black cordura carry-sack with white graphics across it that say, ‘Limbag’, which sounds, if anything, like a mild endurable disease. I sucked on that for awhile and found it fair-and-square.

I crutch up and have a quick chat with him, my first brother in arms, brother in leg – though his is the other. It’s also my first revelation about the social side of my nuova vita: amps are fine. Trading tricks and secrets for getting along is even better. But I’ll have a life-long aversion to trading war stories. It simply won’t ever happen.

Even the kids are shelled after the battle of getting here and they and parents alike are stitched together with all the carry-on bags in semi-sleep. I’m shelled too, to be sure, but for the moment invigourated by prospects; the dawn of a

truly new day. Vancouver is only hours away and the skin under the skin that I shed, along with the leg; the skin under what went with the leg, is hypersensitized.

These past two months in the Tuscany are seemingly suddenly now and just a dreamy nightmare a sweet wide-angle slo-mo view of inter-slicing tire tracks drooping poppies incandescent broom a blood-spattered tableau vivant the sweetsmell of blood notoriously cloying, stuck in my nostrils forever a rosemary branch in your breadbox wisteria hanging over the eyes like bangs a hellyes in your sacroiliac a yes a hell a hell yes. Fightin’ words; a sexy challenge.

What happened happened in my new world the old world, I’m going home to the new world my old one, the last half of the first decade of my new millennium will make the 60’s look like the 80’s my math skills are on the up and up and me I’m charged up my veins full of new blood old memories naiveté the fresh gasoline flare of distilled adrenaline and its pathotic lackeys humping hubris and phantoms new and old feigned phantoms raining railway spikes on the old me that wasn’t so convincing anyways. I’ll take it up with a chant; ready to go toeto-toe with some gospel truths. I’ll get me a limb bag or not but get me an appliance and then go out there and kick some ass with it. Damn straight.

I’m back into windows and this last window in the old world I can make my way to on my own. I might not be standing upright but I’m getting close – I’m kind of at a 45 – an angle that to ride up would require maximum fitness low low gearing a fierce tug on the bars and more than a little technique.

This last window is a big plate of glass and looks onto an enormous tarmac stitched with expansion cracks and flights to who knows where.

I’m getting more upright all the time even just for now; hoping to not get purple

but feeling a little bruised. I’m standing back (sort of) rocking back on the heel of my Stan Smith looking out and combing my beard with the notch of an arrow; that’s how it feels.

There’s a beautiful little brown girl right at the window she’s between 2 and 3 years old, she’s got her Sunday dress on and a bow in her hair and she’s stretching miming posing at the window dancing really and intoxicated by both her own reflection and the riveting wings outside. I’m with her all the way; we’re on the same flight.

Fuselages full of seats aplenty taxiing route unknown going with wings on our backs going in the mouth of the wolf carried nella boca del lupo by the seat of our pants like an errant kittycat purring squalling pawing at the air.

I’m walking up to the window – after a fashion – head high and left jeanleg rolled way up and out of harm’s way. I can do this I can get up to it any time don’t need anyone’s permission don’t need no push I’m dragging my satchel with me it’s getting wrapped around my crutches like an unruly puppy a playful puppy not a puppy forlorn it’s got my port my valuables in it the shoulder strap keeps undoing I’ve got it tied in a knot my fisherman’s knot a knot that doesn’t work on bridle leather got it tied where they cut it off my hissing body but I’ll get it back home, get it professionally repaired maybe get it replaced.

Pavement everywhere out there pavement everywhere in general the road across Pian del Lago like most roads anyways was paved with good intentions and the road out will be paved with them too; paved with expansion entropy stitches and wings. Oh yes. Oh yea.

The navigational hazards on my road across the Atlantic will primarily consist of high altitude winds air currents corrente winds we can feel but not see, not the

multifarious hazards of the roads through my beloved Tuscany the sheepshit the vine clippings the horse chestnuts the tractor tread-shaped mud pucks the fat squashed toads the road hogs the unforeseen hazards the bottomland fogs across Pian del Lago the infrequent and numberless cars and nameless drivers the one last beer in the starlit piazza the sky a crescendo of roadlike corridors the white tunic warriors the moldering ceiling tiles like dots on a map the swallows dropping like stones the network of tubes in my body the network of wires feeding frozen starfish clocks the network of wires that feed my head with agony feed my head with loss it’s all in my head all in my head all in my fucking beloved head.

An electronic pong and an announcement; it’s time to board.

The flight attendant taking tickets is long-legged, Italian and beautiful, I think she likes me. This newborn confidence is mesmerizing. As she hands me my boarding she gives me a good once over, a good up and down. You’re not exactly one hundred percent are you, she says, non sei cento per cento esattamente. No bella, no I’m not, but I’m getting there. She bumps me softly in the ribs and bumps me into first class. Italians always show grace and humour in tragedy; they’re used to it.

They stow my crutches and tuck me in. All that remains is a jetride.

Dear Kitty, July 27

I can’t sleep, as usual. It’s a long ride; I’ve got time on my hands and a piece of paper between them, so I thought I’d write.

I know I usually write from afar; away in time, away in place, but now I’m writing as I near. You. I’m always leaving, always losing, always getting lost, feeling loss; now I’m coming home. I went back to finish my book, to lay the great Rabelais to rest; I went to lay him down and got laid out myself.

I’m a modified man, as you know. I’m leaving something behind in the Tuscany, but a lot of it will grow back I’m banking on a spirit like the tail of a lizard tentaculous. What filled my empty quarter will always be there will be with me in its absence. A lot of it will wait for me in this forever we’re forever certain doesn’t exist.

Twenty years ago I’d climb out the upper window, crawl up on the roof and lie on my back along the cool terracotta spine of the stone house on the top of the Montagnola, 522 meters above sea level. I’d lie above the canting sheepfolds, the sheep themselves woven in smelly slumber, their bells not tolling for now. I’d lie below the wheeling stars, the measureless crackling tailspin of happenstance, to watch the rushes of my clamorous silent movie. I’d lie and listen to what could only be the sound of the cosmic motor in perfect tune under a sky like a deep-sea mirror ball accident, a sky a sight for sore eyes a sky like an eye an eyeful of tenderness and capable of a meltdown at any moment a flighty eye the chestnut iris of a sloe eye a sexy eye the pistil of an iris blossoming out of the majestic arch of a question mark who’s author is at the height of her powers hands crossed behind her head and maybe staring off wistfully from her own terracotta spine after a long day of not dotting her ‘i’s’ and neverminding her ‘p’s’ and ‘q’s’. I can only guess.

I’m skirting the hem of that same sky just now and I feel certain that behind me it’s being gamely ed, kept aloft by the ramshackle roofs of sheep farmers and the tiny oxidized iron cross on the top of the little rock church on the Montagnola where Sister Morphine’s out cold and Melody is roosting along with the swallows. The Motor’s still humming and I’ll be back. Back here and there and back inbetween. There are those who believe that the Phoenix rose from his flames and not his ashes and I choose to roll with them. The former, not the late.

I’ve still got my beloved satchel, the one you gave me. It’s been by my side through thick and thin and comes home reanimated too. I’m traveling light; nothing in there but two good books, my Rabelais, two favourite pencils, a few roaps covered with dots, hi-liter and asterisks; some hotel stationary, a port and two patch pockets: one full of hope and faith and the other a hopeless confection of pocketfluff ie: a cornered dustbunny, pencaps, paperclips and a well-rounded eraser with a greasy thumbprint that could only be mine.

These last days I can’t write twenty words without using the word ‘beloved’ at least once. I feel at the moment that’s how it should be; though time, I’m sure, will lend me some prudence, curb me. We’re blessed by fate, we’re hazard’s beloved, and hazard without doubt is una donna fatale, a Force of Nature.

I feel a tiny bit out of time, out of step; what the Italians most elegantly call ‘fuoriuscita’ or just outside the exit. But I guess I always have been, have felt so. That part hasn’t changed and I don’t know that we do change. I do know that we can buckle down even if we never buckle up. A gattopardo may never change his spots, but he can learn a little prudenza; a good limb from a bad one. And on a good day, one for the journal, he can go out there in the mouth of the wolf, Il boca del lupo, and bring it on.

I know I’m going out on a limb here, but that’s what they’re for. I want to stand

on my own feet and hold you in my arms. It’s a trick I’ve learned. I’m coming home, my beloved.

Soon. XS

Time flies Let your countless fine memories be the wings on your fuselage of loss.

Dustbunny, Wikipedia, def: Little clumps of fluff that form under furniture and in corners that are not cleaned regularly. They are made of hair, lint, dead skin and dust, and held together by static electricity and entanglement. In British English they are sometimes called ‘beggar’s velvet.’