Helplessly Hoping

I learnt a lot about Alice in the days following that. I learnt that her parents were French, but she couldn’t speak a word of it: that she liked hot weather and wearing as less clothes as she could. And that she originally wanted to be a pastry chef, “my hands weren’t cold enough”, was her reasoning.

She told me it was her crush on Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire was the reason she started acting – so that she might be in a film with him. She wanted seventy children and to buy a house in the French countryside, where her seventy children would learn the most beautiful language spoken in the modern world and said, “I’m going to take night classes and learn French when you’re in Vietnam.” I told her that I wanted to go to Italy and then she promised me that she’d come with me.

Freddie Elias never did get his coffee granules. We drank the whole jar after a week of doing nothing but listening to records, fucking, dropping acid and smoking a hell load of weed – just like the rest of the twenty-somethings of the sixties. She spent ages trying to put this fucking ridiculous idea of love at first sight into my head when I was high and the next morning, we’d eloped. I was such a push over. But honestly, I don’t think it was such a bad idea. In fact, I was happier than I’d ever been in my life.

You’d never have seen so many couples that looked like us in that registry office. The queue to get in was around the block, just pretty young girls and scared looking guys, both straight out of school, trying to gain as much time as possible with each other. But they were lucky; they’d gotten to spend their entire school career with their love. What had I’d gotten? Seven days on a drug binge filled with sex and Beatles records? Sure, it was great, but I’d first seen my wife screwing some Harvey Keitel look-alike.

Those kids with their high school sweethearts were going to die. I wasn’t. You know why? Three years more life experience and a dangerous family, to boot; when your grandfather’s constantly getting shot at, you learn how to dodge bullets. It’s one of my earliest memories, actually and disturbingly. How many four year olds can say that they had gotten nicked in the shoulder by a bullet from a Beretta M 1934? I suppose only one – me, the kid that knew which gun had shot him because he’d seen his uncle’s “friends” use the same one. But that doesn’t matter. Because what mattered was that those kids weren’t going to see their wives again because they’d never even seen a bullet before, let alone 50 coming towards them at one time. I was going to see my wife again because I knew how the world worked at age four. I was just living my childhood at twenty one.

Once again, that doesn’t matter. I had phoned my mother the day after, to tell her I’d got married. I’d never heard her more mad; she was screaming at me in Russian. My mother never spoke Russian around me because she feared my grandfather would make her divorce my father due to him banning any language except for that of Italian or English being spoken in his presence. She went absolutely crazy. Basically shouting about how she should disown me – until my father took the phone and invited us to dinner and drinks at some fancy restaurant.

We went. We were sat around this big table, with my grandmother sitting between my father and Uncle Enzo (who was constantly looking at the doors and windows), my mother next to her insanely religious sister, Olga, who was sitting next to her weedy husband, Martin. And then there was this really scary looking guy who was always hanging around Enzo, Peppe, I think his name was, sitting next to my sister, Irina. It was a really big table. In a really dark restaurant that just smelled like cigar smoke and strong whiskey.

I think my dad had asked Enzo to book the restaurant, due to such short notice, which was never going to be a good idea, really. It was never a good idea to let him do anything really. Somebody always ended up dying under suspicious circumstances… But, luckily, no one died at this dinner. Irina just got absolutely fucking slaughtered and ended up throwing her drink on Peppe for being an “absolute douche”.

Alice absolutely charmed the panties off my mother, which was fantastic considering her foul mood, caused by Enzo’s general dickishness. But no matter how charming Alice was, it couldn’t change those dirty as fuck looks mom was giving me. She looked like she was going to slice off my eyelids because I’d gone off and married some girl after only a week and a half of knowing her.

But, you know what irked her off the most? That I hadn’t been married in a traditional Russian style, Olga agreeing whole-heartedly. Mother had really pissed me off that day. She hadn’t even been married in a Russian Orthodox Church and couldn’t she live her dreams through Irina? And she knew that we’d never even set foot in one of those churches because we’d been brought up as Roman Catholics, which she was all for until one of her children got married. She was taking all her fucking anger out on Alice, she was resenting this girl because she hadn’t gotten her way and that was a massive problem.

Enzo had stopped yelling about “what a fucking guy that Jimmy Burke” was and started listening to my mother and Olga lecturing me and Alice about how “Jesus would not approve of that sham you both call a marriage”. I stood up, grabbed Alice’s hand and when we’d got in the car, started crying.

What a big man. A man who’s off to fight in a war. A war he doesn’t even believe in. Fabulous.