Phone Home - Rome Call Log

Several days in Rome already. Still surprised by how dark and busy Viale di Trastevere is. Around seven in the evening. This road is nothing like Lomas Santa Fe, Solana Beach, at the phone booth there. This is flat, narrowed by hairy-canopied trees. They take out the light. In pools of yellow, people. Some lanterns hung at restaurants, others on walls. In one, two scruffy men and their dogs tread water. Very friendly. Also surprising. The two men call to me at the booth of shattered glass. L'altro! L'altro! Apparently this phone does not work. Hang up the red plastic boomerang, and swing around the broken windows to the booth at its back. Grazie, to them. A smile too. No coins though. The machine takes no coins. Only numbers from a receipt. I dial many. Eventually my mother answers.
What a strange surprise
I am in Trastevere
and Mommy is too

. . . . .

I go back to her. Walk down San Francesco da Ripa. It's been only a few days. Amazing, after this continental trip, here we talk together again. Street's brighter; it's day. The grey is light and cigarette buts and black stains no longer hide from the night. Very clear on the sidewalk. Turn the brick corner, the group of scruffy men are there too. Dogs, no doubt. Right across from the shattered phone booth. We are all friendly still. They do not ask but, I should give money. Should I? Too concentrated. Head toward the booth. Still noisy, though morning. Pick up the red plastic hairband, wiggle my ear into one end and, after a few numeric combinations, there she is again. My pack is with me; sits close on my feet. Hear her voice. Also the ambulance, an ape motor, business man's shiny fourwheelmobile. That's wonderful, Mom. Wow. What a day. Hey, could you talk louder? Troop of motorcycles, racing towards the Ponte Garibaldi. Dad, louder? Yeah, good to hear you too.
This call is hard so -
garbage truck eats the pavement
loudly - later then
The guys pretend not to watch. Like I do with them. Still think they're nice though. Dogs tired.

. . . . .

Tried Viale di Trastevere again but, wandering through alleyways, there was a quiet Piazza. We walk on a broad street to get there. Bakeries passed. Via del Cerdo, Via della Scala. Down many stairs - looks like Atlantis. I, a merman. Swim past more curving walls. No sense of direction, only sense of street. A trash pile on the right. A school suddenly opens out of the wall on the right, children spill through the gates. More twisting, cars on either side, parked. Cars, motorbikes approaching, not parked. I park in between two parked cars; they roll bumpily on. Morning glory-laden arch to the left, of yellow stucco. Turn past and, the Piazza appears. Church on the left. Pink. Banner over the doorway announces an exhibit on the Middle East inside. It is a small but open piazza of the usual steel-colored cobblestone and, in the center, I approach the phone. Stickers leech all over the transparent phonebox. Drunken man sleeps on the church steps, body curled around the sharp edges. There was a restaurant there last night with plastic weave chairs, behind where I stand. It is quiet beneath the leafy overhang now. The morning sky shines grey-blue and, as I dial my familiar set of numbers
bearded sleeper stirs
church steps littered with black clothes
soft awakening
Hi Andre.

. . . . .

On the end of Ponte Garibaldi, caught a bus. Waiting for it there was a sign I didn't understand. I asked what it meant and, Dei Capassi - place name. Final destination, not ours. We kept talking, boarded the bus to Termini and rode past the shop-ridden streets. All familiar, with the curve and crowded height of the buildings. Busy streets; like the alleyways were expanded. The bus was very busy but, we kept talking. At Termini, I headed out to Stella Polare to find ceramics where the mediterranean waves lap on the sand. He to Firenze. But the restoration architect gave me his telephone number. I was in Florence in a later week. It was very tidy there, and there were no water fountains. Wouldn't expect to find a phone either. Everything was brightly lit. Even the natural light shone metallic on the billboards, the sunglasses, the leather jackets, the stylishly restored renaissance antiquities. The street was broad, all square right up to the tops of the walls. On the edge of the wide, shallow sidewalk, there was a phone. It was red, like the shattered booth in the dark Viale in Trastevere. But it had been cleaned. Maintenance costs money.
It ate the coins as
shuffling through clanging pockets
hands scramble for gold.
Credit gone. Call made. Hurry off to the meeting place, across the Ponte Vecchio on the other side of the Arno River. Pio Palace. The Big one. No phones there.