"Umm, their Pad Thai is (like a plate of) Fancy Feast."

~Gwyneth, warning me to not consume a local restaurant's victuals

***

Balthazar, the Savage, Developmentally-Delayed Asthmatic Cat: The Miniseries, Part I

Rome, Urbs Aeternis, April 1997

Shortly after our drunken pilot flung our 747 onto the skidmarked runway in tofu-thick fog at Leonardo da Vinci Airport (colloquially known as Fiumicino), it quickly became apparent to our gathered group of high-school Latin-taking Mainers that we were a) not going to be alone on the tour bus and b) that the three other school groups joining us were, and I will be frank, complete douchebags. Within moments of meeting them, we were able to ascertain that:

1) The inner-city History students from Chicago were not (even if it were possible while on tour) even remotely interested in blending. Or trying foreign food. Or seeing anything. Also: where can you buy a Phillies Blunt, dawg?

2) The all-woman Art History troupe from Vermont were interested in a) their own sundry eating disorders, b) a diet consisting entirely of Evian water, and lots of it and c) weaseling out of as many museum and site tours as possible so that they could shop. When asked why they had skipped going to the ruins of Pompeii, they indicated that they felt - and rightly so! - that "Pompeii would be depressing" and that, instead, each one of them had purchased a stunning Italian cameo brooch. But they bought some postcards - like being there, no?

3) The Religious Studies group from Albany were degenerate hoodlums who spent as much time as possible bemoaning their fate ("God, here I am, stuck in Athens, two blocks from the Acropolis, and there's a game on tonight we're gonna miss! Shit, my man, shit!") and purchasing the most potentially inappropriate souvenirs they could find. A delicious example would be a cigarette lighter purchased in the shade of the Parthenon; it was a naked woman bent over as if eagerly awaiting, uh, canid-type intercourse, and when one pushes her legs towards her head, a steady flame erupts forth from her fastidiously-detailed lady-parts. When one of the kids from the Albany group was nearly hospitalized at a discotheque in Delphi with alcohol poisoning, I was, as you might well imagine, fairly underwhelmed by the shock of it all.

The tour leader, a young, vapid British thing named "Helen" who would later answer my knock on her private ferry-room door girded merely with a soaking towel and a smile, gathered us together and, mooing, we were led to the awaiting transportation object. Our first night in Italy was to be spent much like a troupe of chimpanzees who have been locked in a room filled with toys designed for MENSA children. Cries of "How do you flush the toilet? Is it this rope thing OH MY GOD I JUST FLUSHED MY TRAVELER'S CHECKS" and "When I try to use my dryer it just hisses and throws sparks out and makes this black smoke and PUT ME OUT FOR THE LOVE OF GOD PUT ME OUT" and "How do you say 'giant Satanic spider in my shower stall' in Italian?" echoed down our hall all night. Needless to say, when we were taken en masse to the bus-thing the next morning I had begun to formulate subtle, yet sinister plans for ensuring that each and every one of them would be needing to make use of their repatriation insurance.

Mistress Roma felt as though she'd like nothing better than to be a sodden, insolent whore for the duration of our stay in the Eternal City; while I found it to be moody and atmospheric, the weather merely gave wind to the bitch-fest from the Albany corner. Vermont couldn't have cared less; as long as the boutiques were open, they didn't actually give a fig if they saw the Colosseum. And Chicago just bought a gelato and sat down by a fountain for a spell. During a walking tour near Piazza Navona, we were given a half hour or so to wander about and I, eager to procure a shiv for a later "appointment", headed back to where I'd earlier seen some shady characters whispering over a huddled smoke near the eastern entrance to the piazza. Filled with disappointment like a pastry being piped with cold diarrhea to find them gone, I turned and grudgingly began to return to the group when one of the shadows detached from the gathered darkness of a small, dank alley. An elderly woman clad in what I can only describe as unspeakably oily tablecloths scuttled over to where I stood and I, expecting fully that she was going to cut me, rankly wet myself for a moment until I ascertained that she wasn't about to gut me like a freshly-dispatched squid.

She took my hand roughly in hers, which looked simultaneously like they'd seen ten thousand years of hard, cruel work in inhospitable conditions and yet were as frail as a pallid songbird. She looked into my eyes - hers a gray I've always thought of since when my mind wanders to, say, a winter sea in Varna - and she crudely spit what appeared to have once been a small almond on the ground. Mumbling for a moment and pressing the creases on my hand, she then squeezes it so hard that I fear for an insane moment that the tips of my fingers will burst and five jets of gore will erupt forth to sully the ground. No such thing happens, and she begins to speak English to me (having never spoken to me before), itself accented with a whisper of both the lush fecundity and the bleak, endless nights in inner Carpathia. Her breath had an odor I couldn't place; imagine, if you will, taking your grandmother's linens and then pouring cooking sherry on them. Yes, like that. She hissed, barely audibly:

"Von day you vill have cat."

The impulse to say "Umm, duh, already have two" was causing me physical pain.

"Thees cat vill be from the Satan. He vill shred your arms like the cheese and vill lie in vait to sink his fangs into your legs. He vill not listen. He vill not obey you."

Fancy, I thought.

"And he vill make the cough, like thees." She bent over and began to wetly hack.

I began to become impatient in my impetuous youth; I began to tap my foot in a "get the hell to your point" stacatto. This is because I was clearly insane.

"What", I began, "would you like me to do, bipolar unwashed woman of Romany descent?"

She took my face suddenly in a surprisingly liquid movement that would have been admirable had I not been the recipient of it.

"Eef you keel this cat, the door to Hell itselv vill open."

She let go and, in a swirl of oily tablecloths, disappeared down the alley without even supplication for a few lira. As I made my way back to the Piazza (taking the longer way as I had, uh, quite noticeably moistened my undergarments), I mulled over her prophecy. It just didn't really make much sense, and I wrote off the experience to a proliferation of street-huffing in Italian cities.

I put it behind me and moved on with the trip.

Put it behind me.

Until three Fridays ago.

***

Hehe!

Dom