Part I: Bar Trovelessi
It's sunset and we're all at Bar Trovelessi in Piazza del Comune. Pigeons explode upward from the cobblestones in waves, circle, resettle, like some demented fractal pattern that never quite resolves. We have bright orange spritzes in nice crystal, the usual clown is unironically playing Stairway to Heaven on electric guitar behind us, and tourists are everywhere, photographing the Temple of Minerva next door—Roman columns from the first century BC, now with a Baroque church shoved inside like a hermit crab in someone else's shell. Goethe sketched it. Stendhal wrote about it. Byron probably fucked someone on its wide steps, worn smooth and round as river stones by two thousand years of pilgrims and pigeons and bare asses.
Eli and I are with the expats this evening. It's an eclectic group.
The British guy is as generic as they come. Pale. Thin. Wire-rimmed glasses. The kind of invisible middle-aged Englishman who dresses up as Richard von Krafft-Ebing at Halloween and nobody notices. His book is about the early Franciscans, the ones who set about retrofitting the actual man to fit the marketing plan. He says he spends his time looking at old church documents, trying to understand the mindset.
This causes the Italian American—guitar on his back, plays Volare at open mics—to say he'd like to go back in time and be Galileo, maybe. Maybe Leonardo. Hard to know because he pronounces all Italian words wrong, including his own name.
I'm fixating on this monk someone brought. They're everywhere in Assisi, by the way. I could have brought five monks that evening if I'd wanted to. Walk into any church, tap a shoulder, say "free spritz at Trovelessi," and you'd have a friar. But someone actually brought one. He's young, brown robes, rope belt, the full costume.
He's wearing leather sandals revealing perfectly manicured, very long toenails. Like talons. They curve slightly and each one precisely filed. These aren't the destroyed feet of a pilgrim. These are the feet of someone who's made a very specific, possibly compulsive, aesthetic choice.
My mind escapes to other toes. Roxy's toes. We were in her giant bath, knees to knees. Her toes painted black, rising out of the steam. Roxy doing things. Things as if in slow motion in and out of the steam, languid and lost in it. The giant open window behind us overlooking the widow's garden, bright orange persimmons like illuminations in a medieval manuscript. We're listening to Jazz on the Autobahn and I was thinking about mushroom clouds and bird baths and glockenspiels and there's a moment when I really see her—this tiny woman from a small Sardinian town who speaks Sardu, runs like the wind, dances like she's never heard music, and sings even worse. Giving herself entirely to me. Her black hair wet and curling around her flush cheeks. She catches me getting glassy-eyed. Closes her eyes, takes a breath, opens them with a smile, and lifts her leg out of the bubbles to tap her toe to the tip of my nose. It's about more than I can take.
But I can't tell Eli this. Because Eli doesn't want to hear about Roxy, so he pretends he doesn't know about her. He's like a large language model. I can explain every detail of my relationship with Roxy and all our feelings shoved into the shopping cart and he can check out each item one at a time, but by the time we reach the car and store it in the trunk, it's like he's never heard of her.
"You love Rossana. You love Yuki. You love Rachel." Got it. He'll say. And I can see in his mind he's thinking this means I love nobody. Maybe he's right.
I look down at the pigeons swarming around us. Some are missing toes, or whole feet. They must get them stuck in drain pipes, or bitten off in the mad scramble for crostini. It bothers me that I don't know if they grow back like lizard tails. I know nothing about animals, yet I'm always obsessing over one animal or another. Lately it's been bats. I see them when I run in the evening outside the walls near the cemetery. Someday I'm going to walk into a dusty old bookshop in London and find the best book ever written about bats, and it's going to be 10,000 pages, and I'm going to read it every day in my pajamas on a little terrace that pops out of my bedroom window and has a little round table where I'll sit overlooking some cliff with Matisse blue water in the distance and all kinds of Dragon Palms and Umbrella pines and the whole thing smells like gardenias. This is what I want said at my funeral, and only this: he spent the last 5 years of his life reading about bats.
The British guy is saying something about mendicant orders. I've lost the thread completely.
So I'm sitting here trying to ignore the monk's feet while thinking about Roxy's perfect black-painted toenails, and the British serial killer is talking about medieval asceticism, and the American doofus is saying something about wanting to be Galileo or Gallagher or Gilligan and then someone turns to me.
"What about you? Who would you want to be?"
And I say, without thinking: "Tommy Lee."
The Silence
Immediately after I said it, I regretted it. Not because it isn't true—it's 100% true. But because Eli doesn't know who Tommy Lee is, and therein is our difference.
None of these people know who Tommy Lee is except guitar boy, and he has a puzzled smile on his face. Our eyes meet. I shake my head.
Eli is asking me who with his eyes.
"The guitarist for the band Mötley Crüe."
The monk's face doesn't change. The British guy blinks. Guitar boy is still smiling. Eli looks confused.
"The rock band," I add, uselessly.
The Honest Body
The silence after I say "Tommy Lee" stretches out. I can feel their judgment settling over the table like fog.
Why does this make me so angry? Maybe because I'm stuck here with people who aren't even engaging with any kind of intellectual reality, so they are, as Nietzsche would say, not even shallow.
Nietzsche's critique of mysticism applies here: mystical explanations are so vague they have no substance. They aren't even a "shallow" explanation because they lack the minimum qualities of a proper explanation. It's an illusion of depth. People treat mystical ideas as profound because they seem poetic or tap into spiritual longings, but this is an illusion. Like a murky pool that appears deep only because you cannot see the bottom.
These people choosing Galileo and Mozart are engaging in the same mystical bullshit. They're picking saints. Picking safe, culturally-approved heroes who let them feel profound without actually thinking. They can reference the approved touchstones but have no practical wisdom, no honest reckoning with desire, with the body, with the crude material facts of existence.
Tommy Lee is about the body. About being alive in a body that wants things. He didn't transcend his desires—he fulfilled them so completely there was nothing left to transcend. Money, fame, sex, drugs, rock and roll. The absolute peak of hedonistic excess. Married Heather Locklear. Married Pamela Anderson. Drove his Ferrari into a swimming pool. Went to jail. Got out. Did it again. He lived the pure Freudian id and survived.
Ironically, the Buddha would probably approve. The Buddha tried extreme asceticism, nearly killed himself, then realized: this doesn't work. So he ate. He sat under a tree. He figured it out without torturing his body or performing his enlightenment for an audience. Tommy Lee tried extreme hedonism, nearly killed himself, then scaled back. Found his middle way. He's 62 and still touring.
St. Francis never found a middle way. He just inverted his attachments—wealth to poverty, comfort to suffering, his father's approval to God's approval. He died at 44, destroyed by his performance of holiness.
The monk is watching the pigeons. His horrendous toes crossed at the ankle. He's drinking water. Of course he's drinking water. I wonder if he's thinking about the body too. About what it means to wrap yourself in rough wool and walk barefoot through Umbrian winters. About what desires he's repressing or inverting or performing away.
Eli has been scrolling on his phone. By his bemused and slightly horrified expression, he seems to have taken the full measure of Tommy Lee.
"He's not a guitarist," he says to me, dryly. Looking directly at me over the glasses on the end of his nose.
"He's a drummer."
"Whatever."
What They Heard
When I said "Tommy Lee," what these people heard was: "I'm not serious. I don't appreciate history. I'm being ironic or provocative."
What I meant was: "Let's stop performing these silly games and try to be honest. You're picking people who make you sound good at dinner parties. I've picked a man that walked through life as Dionysius."
The British guy goes back to talking about church documents. Guitar boy threatens to play his instrument, but he can't because the busker in the background is now hammering out the Ballad of John and Yoko for everyone's enjoyment. The monk excuses himself and offers everyone a handshake, including me, and his grip is limp and damp. Eli looks disappointed in me.
I finish my spritz and think about Roxy's black nail polish, bats, and other black things. Oh, to be Tommy Lee, on that spinning platform suspended over a laser-lit arena full of screaming fans, underwear flying up at him as if propelled by an industrial popcorn machine plugged into a nuclear reactor, thousands of women throwing their intimates into the aether with extreme vigor.
Yeah. That's the answer. Easy.
Part II: The Walk
An hour later, Eli asks, "Take a walk outside town?"
We walk toward the cemetery. Long row of cypresses. The light is dying. Assisi sits on the hill behind us, lit up like a stage set, but we're shaded by the cypresses in the near dark. Ahead: fields, olive groves, the valley dropping away toward Perugia, and Assisi's spectacular cemetery.
Eli is agitated. I can see it in the way he's walking—too fast, like he's trying to outpace something. His shoulders are tight. He keeps starting to say something and then stopping.
I don't see it coming, though I guess I should have.
"I have a crush on you," he says.
And suddenly I remember. It was weeks ago, maybe a month. We'd been walking through Perugia and Eli had said something about the breathtaking beauty of Italian men. And I'd responded—without thinking, the way you do when you're comfortable with someone—"Tell me about it, they're making my life harder than it should be."
What I meant was: these are my competition for Italian women. What I meant was: every woman I'm interested in has a dozen of these perfectly dressed, dark-eyed, motorcycle-riding bastards circling her like sharks. What I meant was: I'm fighting an uphill battle here.
But in the moment, even as the words left my mouth, I'd realized there might be some ambiguity about this in Eli's mind. That he might think I meant something else entirely. That I was locked in some mortal war against latent homosexual desire.
I didn't feel like drawing a line around our difference right then. It seemed cruel, somehow. Pedantic. So I let it sit there, ambiguous, and we kept walking. Soldiers from Assisi fighting a war against Italian men in Perugia, just like Francis had, as they filed past us like stronzi (in my mind) and dolci (in his). One of us could very well end up in jail here, just like Francis.
And now here we are. On this path behind Assisi. And Eli has made it real. Made it embodied. Made it impossible to keep avoiding.
In that moment it's easy to feel cornered. The relationship you'd agreed to isn't being agreed to anymore. But had I given him reasons? He knows about Roxy. He even knows about Yuki. I've never hidden what I am.
"I'm flattered," I say. And I am. Eli is beautiful. Brilliant. Kind in a way that makes most people look like monsters. "I care for you. You know I do."
And I'm trying hard to avoid the word, "but", but I can't.
"But I just don't have it within me to be that kind of partner to you. I'm obsessed with women. Roxy. Yuki. The girl at the bookshop. The barista at Trovelessi. I'm obsessed. It's not a choice. It's not something I can turn off."
"But you're so angry," he said. Confidently, as if to him that had been the sign.
"It's not that."
We're walking now in silence, forced to traverse the entire backside of the city toward La Rocca Minore. The fortress looms above us.
And there they are. The bats. Scattershot in all directions. I've been obsessing over them for months and I've never looked them up. The bats aren't the point. Roxy isn't the point. Yuki, the girl at the bookshop, the animals cycling through my obsessions like stations on a broken radio — they're just the current form of the thing. The thing is the hunger. Solve it and you kill it. Kill enough of them and you've killed the man. So I won't look them up. I'll take the bats unsolved, dark and scattershot, wrong-angled, ridiculous.
We walk in silence. The olive groves silver in their own shadow and the cypresses lining the road are black and their shadows stripe the road into the valley.
"Do you even believe in God, Leo?"
"Of course, what kind of question is that?"
"You sit through church smiling about God knows what. You told the priest you couldn't pray."
"Yours. I really love your God."
"Exactly. You don't believe anything."
"I'm for all the Gods that will take any fraction of any child's pain away. If we love one another, God lives in us. That's what I mean when I say I love your God. I just mean that I love you."
Eli stops and looks at me and I can see that he's going to cry. I pull him to me.
"So what you're saying is that me and Jesus are a package deal?"
"Absolutely."
"And you accept me into your heart?"
"I do."
"Let's just forget this," he says into my shoulder.
"Forgotten."