Hello, Beautiful

Bright colors cloud my vision, subdued only by the excess quantity of black leather and soothing pattern of animal print. Italian poser-rock stars are everywhere and of every kind and hair color. Drinks float above their heads constantly, preparing for a crash-landing. Strobe lights confuse my vision inside, but I know its night time, that’s when the show begins. Girls in mini dresses run inside, shivering, too cheap to check their coats inside. Bodies revealed, hormones spilling out of the too-tight fabric, they make me look down and question. My hips still squared, thighs un-shaped, and feet still uneasy and uncomfortable in high heel shoes. Their stilettos don’t even click against the cement floors. Too covered in litter, the magic is gone. But look up, and you’ll find it. Swirling around passively in the twenty-foot high speakers, biding its time before it’s unleashed into the room.
My cousin and all of her friends, just clones of everyone else around, dance aimlessly. Drinks held high and egos even higher; they are on top of the world.
The music lessens to a high-pitched gargle underneath the yelling, clinking of glasses and grunge from the musicians setting up on stage. Every once in a while a sound bite from someone else’s conversation would float my way. But the air bogged me down too much to pay attention. It was as if every molecule were two parts whiskey, one part sweat, and one part smoke. Sure, the smell was both sickeningly sweet and appealing, but while it clogged your throat, it also left you thirsty. My glass rested cold against the pads of my fingertips. Much too cool for comfort, but too numbing to put down. I’d never drank before, I’d never even sipped from my mom’s wine glass. But tonight was different, I was in Italy and the rules of the game were beginning to change. The foreign feeling of tight leather groped every inch of my legs, both provoking and teasing a sense I’d never known.
I supposed my cousin and her posse knew this whole sensation quite well, maybe they even chased it by fleeing to crummy holes in the wall at midnight when it’s below freezing. They all varied from mimicking one poster I’d seen in my dad’s music closet to another. Leather gloves cut off at the fingertips, band shirts ripped into tank tops, and chains pulling it all together. It was an endless un-penetrable bubble of teen angst and caffeine…until he broke into my semi-permeable shell of preserved air. With the simple extension of a drink and a hand on my hip, I felt myself swing forward, too quickly, but so enticing. With what I found to be a silly and childish, not sexy, accent he sputtered the words, “Hello, Beautiful.”
Zip Faster, ringleader of the Empoli underground rock scene, was about to become the most influential stranger in my thirteen-year old life. I had no idea what was coming, but that’s the thing about innocence: it doesn’t mean being shielded from experience, it means never being aware that you need to put a guard up at all.
His huge, Italian eyes melted down on my face while his glass strategically slipped into my small hand. His arms ripped through a homemade Motley-Crüe tank top, they seemed manly then, strong and full, but from the pictures I know they were just extra beer flabbing out of the too-tight arm-holes. Frosted pink fingernails gripped around the condensated exterior, my own drink weighing down on my left hand as I brought his to my lips.
“You will like. Swedish beer, very good.” The words seemed to clunk out of his mouth awkwardly like lego vomit all over a lace cloth. Of course I took a sip, but the metallic liquid struggled against the walls of my throat the whole way down. Maybe that’s why he sounded like such an idiot, too much beer still wringing the life out of his mouth. But that smile kept me distracted, and his hand on my bare skin showing between the top of my cousin’s leather pants and her best friend’s jean zip-up vest I wore felt more like a pinch, screaming for attention, sucking blood to the contact zone, distracting the nerves everywhere else.
The band began to slip into their pre-made alter egos and the background music toned down. My first concert ever, I felt like the sound waves were feeding directly into my adrenaline receptors. The instant I felt I could no longer tolerate the spinning feeling in my head, eyes peeled wide, his arm pulled me in, pulled me down, back to the filthy cement floors.
We spent the rest of the night dancing to the Poison cover band on stage, the opening act. Zip’s band, Hogan’s Alley was next on the bill. But, before he left my side, his now-familiar leather cut off gloves grasped my arm, tugging me in to his side. With his head tilted low, he lured me in for a kiss. One simple kiss on the lips and the anchor sunk, my head spun, and I was forever stuck.
That was my rock star up on the stage, my man. I was swelling with so much pride, I probably looked more like a two year old on Christmas morning than the guitar player’s girlfriend, but I didn’t care. For the first time that evening I felt like I fit in, like I finally belonged in this mixed up world of Italians, musicians, and fashion queens. He gave me my place, he made me a part of something bigger, and he made me myself.
At the end of the night he stealthily turned towards the bar, slid over a napkin and scrawled out a note, sealing it with a kiss. Slipping it into my left hand, he held me by my right as we stumbled out of the Sunset Pub back into the streets of Empoli. I can still see his wink flashing by the window of my cousin’s car as we slipped back into the Italian night, away, to another place I wouldn’t know.
I spent the whole next day by the phone, waiting for a call back, confident Zip was asleep next to his, ready to wake up to a missed call from his little American. It never came. My trip was winding down, only one more day before I was to jump onto that jet and fly back to sunny California. I wasn’t even stirred, something inside of me grabbed hold of that one night in my memory and never let it go. I was his, he was mine. Why else would he have held my hand in front of his friends, kissed me on the lips, and called me beautiful? The same question that runs through every thirteen-year-old girls mind, a question that is less of a mystery and more of a statement that everything is okay.
He called. 4 o’clock on the afternoon before I would take off at exactly 5 o’clock the next morning. My heart swooned and of course I left my grandmothers house blind as to what it means when a boy calls just early enough to drive you away but too late to actually get to know you.
We hopped into his car and drove off into the Tuscan hillsides. With the wheat all freshly cut, the never-ending landscape shone golden under the setting sun. His rudimentary English attempted to make the word drive sound like a magical adventure of fairy tales and happy endings. And I definitely bought it.
I still have flashbacks any time a boy graces the back of my neck, or the bare patch of skin between my jeans and my top. I can still hear his words slipping out the wrong direction, like breathing bile directly into my mouth. But in that moment the whole world was different. I slipped on my rose colored glasses as my innocence, youth, and virginity slipped away. The car became a swan boat, and the sound of cars passing by on the highway to the right became music to my ears. Nothing had ever felt so right, he loved me. He must.
When he dropped me off he handed me a box, a small blue box with a ribbon on top. Inside laid a pendant on a chain. 24 Karat white gold. It was your typical heart with a crack down the middle, one half with an M and the other with a Z. he slipped his rough fingers into the silk packaging and pulled out the charm, holding half between his index finger and thumb he held it out towards me, I grabbed the half etched with a Z, attached to the chain. This was it. This was when I knew that he loved me, and not the kindergarten “lets-get-married!” love. This was real.
He signed his initial as a Z, evidence to me now that it was his stage persona in love with an American girl. Not a boy in love with a girl. His name remained a mystery to me, along with who he really was, or if that person really even existed underneath the black bandana around his brow and chains around his waist.
I never saw him again, he never called, and I’m still not clear on what exactly happened. There are memories still trapped in my thirteen-year-old mind that my now eighteen years of experience either still cannot explain, or purely chooses to block out. As far as my consciousness extends, my trip ended with the words “Hello, Beautiful.”