Damien Galeone

I come back to Langhorne each August for a month of family time. Langhorne has my family, food that offers a more robust attack on my colon, and a quiet suburban life. We are a small town tucked into the woods – like every other town in Pennsylvania. We are surrounded by trees, small animals, ticks, and cicadas.

The night I arrived, my sister showed me some pictures from our driveway’s security camera. We are visited nightly by a menagerie of quick moving animals. We get a squirrel and a rabbit. But there are also deer and a fox. A long-tailed little guy running across our porch and towards, no doubt, my dad’s car, which at all times puts off a scent of Tastycakes – a delicacy my dad allows in the car on the way home from any errand.

“There was a bear,” my sister tells me.

“What?”

I have always harbored a secret desire to witness civilization go back to the animals. We took it from them and I can’t imagine it’s something they have let go of quite yet. They probably view us and our cars and lawnmowers and our political choices and wonder what the hell it is we’ve done to the precious environment.

I take three walks a day while I visit home. Considering my raised level of calories, walks help keep me out of a motorized scooter. They are also a way to observe the town and keep me from committing patricide or matricide or any-other-family-icide you’d care to name.

Also, I want to see that bear.

He’s a black bear. I have named him Kevin (for obvious reasons). Once I told my sister and mother that I wish to see this bear, they scoffed and told me he had been relocated.

“They relocated Kevin?”

“Who’s Kevin?”

“Never mind.”

For the first two days, my walks are not fruitful. I see some dogs and birds and neighbors. Everyone says hi and I am confused at first. But aside from small woodland animals and a hairy mailman, there are no other animals. Definitely no bears.

But then, as I passed a tiny patch of woods on the road that would bring me to our street, I noticed movement. Kevin? I thought. No. but it was two deer. One adult, the other young. They were sitting at the edge of the woods and eating some guy’s lawn. I slowed. They looked at me with massive and seemingly trusting eyes, a round, deep black nose popped on the edge of their snouts that would make Rudolf jealous (in the beginning of his song). They chewed grass and did nothing.

I walked away.  

Yesterday, after working out, my sister informed me that I should take a walk to a shower and then use it. I told her I would shower after my walk.

“Cool. Don’t walk near any of our neighbors.”

“Fair enough.”

Maybe, I surmised, if I smell like one of them, Kevin will make himself known. At the same patch of woods, another movement came. The deer again. This time they were much closer, just a few yards away. I stopped. There she was – the adult, Patty (obvious reasons); she was about six or seven feet from me. Flo was not with her now. Patty came even a little closer so that I could take two steps and pet her side if I wanted to try. But something told me not to.

When confronted with an animal I normally don’t see on a daily basis – a deer, a nutria, a beaver, a horse, a cow – I am always amazed by the size and the, well, realness of them. Animals are always larger and more intimidating than you’d think they are. This is probably because when animals (even docile ones) are on TV or movies, they are there as a joke. Or maybe they are anthropomorphized: a talking spider, a pig who herds sheep, an indecipherable duck who wears only the top half of a sailor’s uniform. Media has not prepared us to deal with animals in the quasi-wild.

This is a deer, a symbol of mild euphemism and softness, metaphorically depicting speed, inaction, or a eunuch; a walking pile of steak. And yet, the muscles rippling in its side, its strong legs, its surprising size, all tell me that if I stepped out of line, this animal could knock me into the weekend. I did not touch Patty. She looked at me, sniffed at my shoe and, evidently agreeing with my sister’s assessment of my post-workout aroma, took off across the street.

I spend the night marveled by my experience. Right there – nature! I then remember that on another visit home way back in the 1990s, I walked across the street from my friend Eddie’s house and saw, standing right on our porch, a buck. A huge buck with lots of points on its antlers. Even drunk I knew to avoid this guy. He was less gregarious than Patty and took two giant leaps and was in the woods across the street.

But then it dawned on me: I am king of the deer. This realization was something of a surprise as I had always figured I was Lord of the Hermit Crabs. But you cannot argue with nature.

On my walk this morning I saw Flo and Patty. They were crossing the street to another patch of woods. A driver was coming up the road and I waved with two arms to warn him. He slowed down and let our buddies pass. I smiled in wonder as he drove past me, hoping to engage him in a shared ‘can you believe that?’ moment. But he didn’t smile back. He looked at his watch and made an annoyed face.   

And he’s right. Nothing happened. It wasn’t interesting for him. I’m telling you a (non-)story about a (non-)run-in with a deer. Not Kevin the bear or Terry the bobcat or even Samantha the hawk.

I come home and try to figure out why I’m writing this. Oh, I’m sure there’s something about the circle of life and blah blah blah. But in the end, what I want to say is that if civilization does go back to the animals, then Flo and Patty can have my room. And, if they occasionally had Kevin over for mojitos, that wouldn’t break my heart either.  

It’s been a few days in the land of the Cheesesteak and I’m acclimating nicely. By that I mean that I have yet to stab anyone with a pencil. Being home offers its perks – the family time, the food, the increased blood pressure. Then there is the comfort of being at home, which makes me feel about ten-years-old.

I have slipped into my family’s summer routine. There is camp and work and little trips. I do my part to help out and otherwise stay out of the way. My family and I get along great – until we don’t. Fortunately, I have a room of my own. So, when the fam stresses me out, I can go to this room and, hypothetically, lie facedown into a pillow and scream curse words until I fall asleep. This works well and not only because I am usually awakened by my mother calling me into whatever meal is appropriate to that time of day.  

I have slipped into my own routine here. I get up early, write, walk, work out, drink coffee, eat Grape Nuts, sprint to the toilet. In the unbearably hot Langhorne afternoons, I retreat to my cooled room for work and reading. When I have control of the living room TV, it is playing a show in which a bad British person is murdered by other bad British people and some other less bad British people try to figure out who did what and why.

It seems that everyone around here is doing their part to help me feel at home. They are too loud and they invade your privacy. A man broke the sacrosanct bubble of quietude at a bank’s ATM vestibule by shouting complaints into his phone while standing two feet behind me. It made for a disconcerting transaction on my part. In the Czech Republic, that man may seriously have been arrested. A woman at the next table in a diner yesterday overheard our conversation and commented – at length – in a personal way that didn’t relate to what we’d said at all. Despite enough free tables to run a speed dating night, minutes later a man and woman sat directly next to us on the other side and proceeded to have the loudest conversation in the history of the world.

These things stressed me out, proving with surprise that I have a little more of the Czechs in me than I thought possible. But I crunched my toes and prayed for a car to drive through the window. Instead, we paid our check a few minutes later and I was home on my pillow until Mom woke me up for third lunch.

Whenever I go to Italy, I have pictures in my head of what it’s going to consist of: warm, sun, pasta, and pizza so good that it could take the place of a meaningful relationship.

The problem is, I forget about the little frustrating things that Italy means too. Things move slowly at times, time is a rumor, and public transport schedules run on astrological forecasting. In restaurants, food moves faster than drinks. Waiters are usually pleasant but seem to need a lot of breaks in between tasks. They can be seen at a table breathing deeply in between the aperitivo and the first plate rounds.

Sure, the Italian lifestyle is known for being slowed down and easy. But if you are, hypothetically, a stressed-out type, a guy who loves nothing more than making schedules and then sticking to them, well, the la dolce vita can be a bit of a strain.

I spend the first day in Italy trying to make sense of the waiters’ strategy. So far, it seems to very attentively get us through the door and get a drink in front of us. Then, they bring us a little snack to keep us there (which works really well. Catching flies/honey). Then they disappear for a while as we try to divine liquid from the bottom of the glass and trying to catch the eye of a person wearing a uniform. Any uniform. It’s as though he wants us to want him. I would be annoyed if it weren’t so effective.

I know it’s my issue. Relaxation and I are like fourth cousins. I never see him and only on the rare occasions when I do am I reminded of how much I love him. It takes a while for me to unwind, even in Italy, where the very atmosphere tells you that you might as well chill out because nothing is going to happen very quickly anyway. Nevertheless, I move and think like I have things to do. When, in reality, my To Do list consist of these things: wake up, drink, eat, walk over there, find more food, maybe get tipsy, sleep.

It’s when I give myself over to la dolce vita that I will find some joy. It takes a while. I walk too fast and up hills, too. Burke is annoyed with my inability to chill. I look up bus schedules and metro stops. I am keenly aware of how long it takes me to get from one place to another. We walk up a huge hill to a city square and I do it like the Bataan Death March.

But then, something clicks on the third day. We drink beers at lunch and then head back to our apartment to sleep for a few hours. When I wake up, I walk to the local store for some supplies. No, I mosey. Yes, mosey. And then, I mosey back. We take our time. If we don’t do things, then it’s OK. We have a drink at a local pizzeria and order two pizzas to go. By the time they arrive, I have forgotten that I had ordered pizzas to begin with.

I slip into this wonderful state of mind and bliss for the remainder of our time in Genoa. So, about four more days. Four days of shrugging off bus schedules. Four days of not planning dinner. Four days of drinking in the afternoon and then taking a guilt-free nap. Four days of no email or work.

When I wake up in a mild panic on Sunday, I know the game is up. We have a train to catch and then another train. Tomorrow night we have a flight. Even if I enjoy myself to the fullest in Bergamo (today’s destination), I know that la dolce vita for me is a thing of the past. I clean our kitchen and check for things hiding in the bathroom. We walk out the door, my legs forcing me to move more slowly than usual when running for a bus. What I wouldn’t give for an aperitivo right now.

Milan Central Station is a madhouse. If you have been to a train station in an Italian city, you know this is redundant. The status quo of a train station in Italy is madhouse. We get on the train, miraculously find a couple of seats. We sit. In 1 hour and fifty-three minutes, we’ll be in Genoa. We sit. A Polish family sits across from us – man, woman, child curl up on two seats. We all do the obligatory nod. We sit.

Since I was a kid, I have loved trains. Not in a Sheldon Cooper way – I don’t know train numbers or which train rode the Chicago–New York line in 1976. But I have always loved being on a train. I took a train downtown for high school. It’s the chugging forward, the quiet persistence of a train. It moves quickly at times, other times it just ekes around a corner towards its destination. Nevertheless, it moves, it gets you there. It’s mostly quiet and mostly boring. Perfect.

As much as there’s a distinctly pleasant feeling when a train is moving, there’s a distinctly unsettling feeling when a train isn’t moving. Trains are large pieces of metal. And when one is sitting still when it should (according to the schedule) be moving, you feel that it will never move again.

Such is the situation in Milan (where we still sit). 2:23 becomes 2:33 and then 2:43 and I would have made more progress towards Genoa if I had gotten out and walked to the end of the platform. People mosey on and off the train. This tells me (an avidly obsessive time and schedule keeper, a bad thing to be when it comes to Italian transportation) that we are not moving anytime soon.

At 3:02 our train lurches a little to the right and makes a slow crawl out of the station. I heave out a sigh of relief. This relief lasted until we arrived at the next town, where we sat for another thirty or so minutes. Again, people mosey in and out of the train as if it’s the middle room of a pub. A pub I would make wealthy beyond their wildest dreams at this moment.

We are packing for a weeklong holiday. With a mild obsession for organization and an adoration of lists that borders on kink, packing has traditionally been one of my favorite activities. Then there’s the fact that packing is the act of preparing. Not just preparing, but preparing to go somewhere. I like those things. When I finish packing, I will close my bag. When I open the bag again, barring any unforeseen airport shenanigans, I will do so on a bed in a hotel in a place whose restaurants have a wholly different cuisine, whose language sports different idioms, and whose residents enjoy a completely different cultural-neighborly rivalry.

It was excitement embodied in a menial task.

But at some point, almost without me noticing, I got a bit older. This reality began rearing its head in my packing. Packing used to be straightforward: underwear, socks, pants. Now it’s my good underwear, compression socks, pants with elastic waistband. The number of creams, medicines both preventive and reactive, and things which provide comfort is rising with each year. As if Italy doesn’t have medication that can counteract the effects of a headache or an upset stomach. In effect, I try to bring my home with me abroad.

Today, as I pack, creams and digestants are the least of my problem. What I have noticed is that the pants I am planning on bringing with me are nearly perfect. They are light, cool, perfect for walking. The waistband is elastic and therefore flexible to the whimsical approach I plan on taking towards gelato and anything that includes the word ‘crema’. But the pockets are short and don’t provide the protection one wants when touring a city. And since while traveling my pockets must also house a passport, this doesn’t bode well. These are the pants I am bringing. But this pocket is problematic. I sit down and consider my options.

In 1991 two German hikers in the Ötztal Alps on the border between Austria and Italy came across something extraordinary and disturbing: a dead body. They reported it immediately. Due to storms, authorities couldn’t get back to the body for a few days. But when they did, they realized the body was not a tourist or a mountain climber come to a bad accident. In fact, the body was about 5,000 years old.

It was Burke’s birthday. She is blurm-bling-years-old and so a day of enjoyment was called for to celebrate this inauspicious number and event. The idea was: zoo, cake, burger, cake, air conditioning.

The pluses with a summer birthday are clear. Your range of activity is way open. You can drink outside, go outside, walk outside, play outside. When you’re an October birthday like me, your range of places to drink are limited to: a pub.

As far as I am concerned, the problem with a summer birthday is the heat. But this doesn’t seem to be a problem for the summer-born people. Those people born in summer seem A-okay with the sun activities. They enjoy the feeling of baking shoulders and prefer their beverages to be consumed in the al fresco. The summer people are like human charging ports, a day in the sun energizes them and allows them to glow warmly and happily. They are psychopaths.  

I am an autumn-born person. My idea of fun is avoiding the sun at all costs. I drink my beverages indoors and with a wall or even a few walls between me and the orb of discomfort. Most of my shots are quietly dedicated to the fact that I live in a place which the sun avoids for six months of the year. I get a charge from the shade.   

But it is not my birthday, it is Burke’s. And she has decided on the zoo.

It should be mentioned that I am for this plan in theory. I like walking, animals, and beer and hotdogs. All of these things can be found or done at the zoo. But in practice, and as an autumn-born, what I really want is to hide in my coolish flat for this hot day and watch movies. Maybe we could just let me hang out at home, eat, drink, and watch 30 Rock while animals pass by the flat and watch me. I would be OK with this. Nevertheless, when it’s your partner’s birthday, pitching these fanciful (read: stupid) ideas are not an option. Also not an option is going along with the plan and being miserable. You have to sell it. You have to be into it. I shower. I practice my smile. I remember there will be beer and elephants and my smile becomes genuine.

My barber is a little late today. I sit on the couch amid a few Vietnamese ladies and prop my arm up on the cushion. Upon being made to wait due to someone else’s lateness, my first instinct is usually anger. But I have been concerned recently at my inability to be present. Or at the very least, to lose myself in thoughts as opposed to Reddit. Recently, therefore, I have decided to actively attempt to use my phone less. And unfortunately, once I did that I found there was nothing to keep me from this horror show called ‘thinking’.

Now, I sit quietly and watch the mall people go by. When they prove distressingly real, I let my mind wander. Burke and I have decided to play hooky this afternoon and are going to a restaurant for some beers and pizza. At this moment, the world is my oyster and it will come on bread with mozzarella. But after three months of daily busyness to the point of exhaustion, an afternoon hidden in the garden of some off-the-beaten-track restaurant is exactly what the doctor ordered.

I am irritated with myself for wasting May and June this year. This is one of my favorite times of year – we are no longer teaching but only testing and doing other work. This year, however, I have bitten off more than I can gobble and the time has passed in a blur of stress and short fuses. It was in an attempt to rein that in that we came up with our hooky day.

Paní July – my barber – is still not here. Though I don’t know her well, she must have a medical condition which results in her believing that I am 21 years old. As a result, she cuts my hair as one would someone who is hip to modern trendiography™. She leaves my hair longer on top – as Burke has assured me is the fashion. And while I was disconcerted at first, the number of compliments I got from my 21-year-old students seem to support Burke’s thesis and Paní July’s follicular tactics. The one time I asked Ms. July if she could cut my hair on top a wee bit shorter, she replied, in a somewhat startling but not altogether unpleasant way, ‘No.’

For this reason, I cannot forego haircuts lest I begin resembling Doyle Wolfgang von Frankenstein in 1995. So while I usually let my hair go for two months, Paní July has convinced me that I should come every month. So here I am for the third time in three months like some Prima Donna. So I’ll get twelve haircuts a year instead of six. I’m trying to reckon with the extra time push. It’s a 100% uptick in time. Let’s say each haircut is 30 minutes, I will now spend six hours a year getting a haircut. I marvel a little at that – how the small things add up. And then there’s how the small things add up over the course of your life, not in hours, but in how many more times of an activity or a object your life amounts to. I make the mistake of doing math in my head. Let’s say I have 35 years left on Planet X (bringing me to a lucky, if irritable 85 years old) at twelve haircuts a year, including this one, that brings me up to 425 haircuts left in my whole life.

About 40,000 years ago, I was working as a bartender in an Italian restaurant-bar. OK, this was around 2000. This place was staffed with young, enthusiastic college or recently-post-college kids. They were optimistic and happy, having not yet been bludgeoned down by the real life waiting around the corner for them.

I had worked in dive bars before this and found this experience to be wholly more enjoyable. For one thing, I very rarely had to battle vagrants over a sixpack of malt liquor. I didn’t reach for a billy club at all in this job. And 911 was not on speed dial. This was one of those pubs that just felt nice to be in. It put off a good energy. The staff liked working there and had fun doing so. Many of the employees had formed fast friendships and, like many bar staff, they hung out with each other – oftentimes at the bar itself. Regulars fed off of these good vibes and gravitated towards the place. It was a great bar.

One day, someone – and I won’t say who – conceived of a Drink Off. A good old fashioned drinking contest. See, we had these 3-liter bottles of wine meant for large parties. However, somehow the idea that matriculated down through discussion that we make teams and each team would drink one of these bottles. Five teams of two (2) were created, made up mostly of waitresses and waiters, one bartender (not me), and one manager. We laughed about the potential shenanigans of this contest. We had visions of trash-talking waitresses and lighthearted rivalry slurred by wine.  

As luck would have it, I was the bartender working this drink off. The teams took up their spots around the bar. Ten people. Some had dressed in football jerseys and had applied eye black. The mood was light and the teams jibed each other in a friendly competitive manner. At 5 pm sharp I blew the proverbial whistle and they were off to the races. And then everyone started chugging wine – aka cry juice.

It was soon after this (let’s say 5:08 pm) that the on-duty manager and I realized the flaw in the plan. We had made a drinking contest based on how quickly everyone could drink one of these bottles, not on how much they could drink or not a series of drinking challenges. No. How fast can all young twentysomethings and one fortysomething drink a 3-liter bottle of wine. Huh.

The friendly jibes stopped because people were too busy bringing wine glasses to their mouths and chugging its contents. For the next forty minutes or so, these young, enthusiastic kids devolved into slouching, cross-eyed protohumans whose linguistic skills dissipated along with their ability to monitor volume, and, it should be mentioned, bladder control. About an hour later all hell broke loose. And I was in an island among ten of the drunkest people I had ever laid eyes on while sober. Never have I felt more like a character on The Walking Dead.  

Trouble? Yes.

Unprecedented? No.

Many times throughout history has alcohol made large groups of people go simply bonkers. Sure, sometimes the problem was the booze itself. In the Munich beer riots in 1844, people lost their collective Teutonic heads over a rise in the price of beer. The Irish joined the Germans during the Lager beer riots in Chicago 1855, when new temperance laws and bar closures on Sundays didn’t quite sit right. In the late 18^th century, Americans showed their early irrational aversion to taxes when they started lynching tax collectors during what would become known as the Whiskey Rebellion.  

Sometimes the problem was giving a large group of people a lot of alcohol. Ten Cent Beer Night is a famous example of the equation of mob + booze x 1000 = uh oh. Ten cent beer night was a promotion held for the Texas Rangers-Cleveland Indians (baseball) game at Cleveland Stadium on June 4 1974. The beer was discounted down from 64 cents. Orders were limited to 6 beers per order, but no limit was placed on how many orders. Besides the uncannily dumb idea to give sports fans in a stadium cheap unlimited booze, this situation was set up by a perfect storm of bad luck, bad accidents, and more stupidity.

I walk through the doors of our local pub. Two of my three comrades are at the table already. As I walk in, I am hearing the tune of the Magnificent Seven. It is also possible that I hear that song because I am humming that song. My friends – we’ll call them Bertie and Jay – are in good spirits. Bertie has just received a renewal on his permanent residence. He is visiting after a long absence in Prague. Jay is in a good mood because we are in our testing period at the university and work for the day is well over. Done. Finished. A thing of the morning and the past.

It is time to day drink.  

When I was a younger man, day drinking was put into play on a whim. Any random Tuesday or Thursday could turn into a session with no help from anyone or anything except some guy who might ask ‘so you want something to drink?’ It might be mentioned that this person was often a paid employee of an establishment, and, given the time and context of his question, ‘something to drink’ usually meant iced tea or a coke.

But such were the frenzied outlaw days of my early outlaw life. When ‘liver health’ was a phrase I heard Thursday nights on ER. When a hangover was twenty minutes of discomfort in the morning and cured by a glass of water. Sometimes day drinking was a continuity of the night before, one of those special times when all hit right, everyone’s tolerance was shifted into overdrive, and you could just keep going, and so, in a way that was agreed-upon without a word exchanged, you did just that: kept going until you were done.

But now that my age recently stopped starting with a 4, things have changed. They changed when my age stopped starting with a 3, but I was stubborn. Nowadays, a drink at lunch can mean a headache until dinner. A hangover is a phasal thing, like the moon cycle, or a werewolf cycle. Day one is head pain, day two is joint pain, day three is anxiety, day four is when all the pieces begin to settle back into place, day five, I begin to find hope in the world once again. Just in time for the weekend.

So to decide on a program of day drinking is not done lightly. Affairs have to be put in order, obligations taken care of, organized, pet duties relegated to a mildly irked partner, meals plotted and planned. It’s a scene man. And when all of this is done, there is still one big ole X factor. And that is Knox Wren. And he has just walked through the door. The waiter’s knees buckle.