1987

28 years old. The University City days.

After a while I had to leave the schoolhouse, so I got a huge apartment on University Drive in University City with a frenchman named Christian Krezel. He was the best friend of Peter Barsch, who had come to St. Louis to marry Sue Leonard. I dated a few girls. Including Betty Adani.

Betty was from Modena, Italy and seemed really nice. After we had been going out for a while I found out that she had to go back to Italy and I made plans to go back with her and started saving up my money for a long trip to Italy. Then one night at a party, this German girl named Birgit half-jokingly suggested we get married so that I could stay as long as I liked when I got there. Why not? we laughed.

We drove my Toyota Tercel to San Francisco, got married at city hall against my father's wishes (he wisely thought it was a hair-brained idea to marry a girl I'd only known a couple of months) and took a whirlwind trip through the scenic Southwest on our way back to St. Louis, and thence to Italy. My whole family was shocked at this sudden turn of events.

Once in Modena, Italy, we moved into a pretty little apartment on Carlo Sigonio that Betty's mother, Ines, rented out for us and I settled down to learn Italian. It was a bit strange; Betty had told me that she wanted to keep our marriage a secret from her family, but as soon as we got off the plane she told her mother everything. But I didn't care, because I'd given up on love, and marriage to a nice Italian girl seemed like a great idea to me. And her mother was wonderful to us. I'd never felt so nurtured and cared-for in my whole life.

I met Betty's friends Stefano Trota, a jazz guitarist, and Lucio, this crazy pianist who lived in the house of a priest next to this tiny church right down the street, and Enrico, who played bass and reminded me a little of my brother Gus.

Massimo Sozzi was a guy I met that summer stumbling through one of the labyrinthine series of interconnected courtyards in the Centro Storico where we went out drinking on hot summer nights. He was drunk when I met him, with a buzzcut and a military uniform on. Later we would become thick as thieves.

Betty picked grapes that summer and our relationship started to go alittle cold. In the strange rented apartment, coming in from the weak Modenese late summer sunlight, as she came home covered with agricultural debris; sticks, leaves, dirt, grape-crust, and bugs, sometimes live ones with big pinchers.

I was worried about the cooling off of her affections for me but she assured me it was just a momentary thing due to the difficult circumstances of me not working and everything, and that it woud pass. It would never pass.

Learning Italian is hard!