Travels with Penny: True Tales of a Gay Guy and His Mother (8 page)

Despite the attack of restaurant indecisiveness and potential foray into cannibalism, I had the sense to marvel at how lucky we were to be here. Although I didn’t know it at the time, Mom and I had come to Europe at the perfect time. The whole world seemed to be riding high on the prosperity and sense of frivolity that accompanied Clinton’s administration. It was during those fun years when American tourists still traveled abroad with a sense of adventure and were usually met with polite warmth. The U.S. had yet to experience the horrifying events of 9-11, The Department of Homeland Security and George W. Bush.

Just as Mom and I were debating the priorities of our next culinary exploration of the day (she demanded cleanliness; I demanded the ability to serve something edible that didn’t have its head and feet still attached), we happened to pass a magnificent brick building flashing a host of neon lights advertising an array of international beers and alcohols. Several people in long coats and wide brimmed hats sat beneath a thick fog of cigarette smoke at small metal café tables that lined the sidewalk, looking like anemic aliens under the phosphorescent lights. In unison, we turned and strode through the front door without a word being spoken—four empty stomachs turning into crazed tourists on the hunt for French fries.

In the states, we’d call this place a sports pub. In the center of the cavernous, dimly lit room, a long, wide wooden bar dwarfed everything and everybody. Surrounding it in ever-widening circles were heavy wooden tables. In the far corner, easily visible from the bar, was a large-screen TV. A dozen college students sat at the tables poring over notebooks, clutching a highlighter or a pint of beer. Open textbooks lay stacked around them like paper fortresses, while pens, rulers and cigarette lighters rolled freely amongst the chaos. We took a seat at a round wooden table all the way at the back, behind the bar and next to the kitchen, where the aroma of grilling burgers teased me.

Within minutes, a beautiful young blonde woman walked up to the table, laid down four menus and whipped out an order pad. She asked us something, but since I didn’t speak the language, I had no idea what she said. Assuming the European wait staff operated the same as American wait staff, I jumped to the conclusion we were supposed to tell her what we wanted to drink.

I mimed drinking and said, “Water.”

“Do you speak English?” Mom asked. I shot her a venomous glance. “What?”

“You can’t assume everyone speaks English.”

“You never know unless you ask,” Mom snapped.

The woman’s eyes lit up, and a huge smile spread across her face. “English? Yes. I am to learn English in the college.” Her voice was breathy and the final words of her sentences went up at the end, so everything she said lilted like an exam question.

“See? I told you,” Mom chastised me. Then to the waitress said, “What are the specials?”

The woman stared at Mom for a second, her eyebrows wrinkling as she processed this. Then, with a sharp intake of breath she responded with exuberance. “The special food?”

She rattled off a couple of dishes starring German sausage and featuring enough cholesterol to stop a heart at twenty paces. I loved her airy, breathy voice that tinkled with excitement. Her English came out in spurts, as if her brain processed each phrase as a separate unit. The verb tenses were haphazard, the accents on the wrong syllables and she said too many “the’s,” but otherwise she had a wonderful grasp of English. When she left to place the food order, Mom nudged me.

“Most of the Europeans can speak English now.”

“Yeah, but we should
try
to speak their language. It’s only polite.”

Mom thought about this and nodded. “Yes, we should. But either we learn the language in five minutes so we can order, or they speak English. I thought you were hungry.”

“You are so typically American.” I scolded.

“Yes, I am,” Mom nodded. “And there’s nothing wrong with being American.”

I wanted to argue with her—to accuse her of having the same arrogant American attitude that so many from the States bring with them when they travel in Europe. But in the end, hunger won out. Political correctness dies in the face of a German sausage.

“Besides, they probably want to practice speaking English.”

“They do not want to practice,” I grumbled, hoping the breathy blonde remembered to bring us some bread.

The woman returned with our drinks and a couple of baskets of bread. As she paused, her face contorted in deep thought, I dug into the loaf like a starving character from a bad post-apocalyptic movie. My mouth was crammed full of sourdough when she burst out with, “I would like to practice English. May I speak it with you?” She was so cute. I wanted to wrap her up and take her home, but I was too busy chewing.

“Told you,” Mom muttered under her breath.

Damn, I hate it when she’s right.

“How long have you been learning English?” Mom asked. Being a terminal student, I’ve frequently been asked to chat with people so they can practice their English, but they never suggest a subject. Usually, my English practice sessions deteriorate into a stilted interview with all the interest of watching the city council chambers on closed-circuit television.

“Oh, long time. I started learning the English in the small school … school for the young.”

“Elementary school? Primary school? Grade school?” Mom tapped my shoulder and motioned for me to add more ideas. What was this?
The Million Dollar Pyramid
? Suddenly, the woman nodded furiously.

“I not practice much. And when I do, I do not know if I speak the English properly.”

“You’re doing fine,” Mom encouraged. “So you’re in college now?”

Before I knew it, our waitress had told us all about her school experiences, her desire to speak fluently “like an American” and, finally, her big dream. She was determined to visit the one place she had longed to see: Florida. She wanted to see alligators in the everglades, Mickey Mouse in the Magic Kingdom, and the sandy beaches of the gulf coast. Her face lit up when she spoke of Florida with all the glowing warmth of a woman gazing upon her first born child.

“Florida’s a horrible place,” I said. “It’s hot. Humid. Too many tourists.”

“How about Chicago?” Mom suggested. “That’s where we’re from.” She announced proudly.

She cringed. “I want to see the beautiful beaches of Miami. I want to visit the sunny, sandy beaches.”

“Sandy beaches hiding the used heroin needles,” I muttered to Mom.

“Chicago’s much better,” I said to the woman.

“Too many guns,” she said, shaking her head.

“Well, if that’s what you want to do,” Mom said, “good luck. Eat an orange.”

As she left to check on our order, Mom turned to me. “Guns? Is she kidding me?”

“She’s going to be so disappointed when she sees Florida.”

“Maybe she’s never seen a beach,” Mom suggested. “She doesn’t know the fish should be
in
the water, not floating around on top of it.”

I noticed our waitress chatting with a group of college students near the kitchen, but thought nothing of it until a few minutes later when she showed up at the table with a tray and a couple of the young people in tow.

“They are learning the English, too,” she motioned to the new faces. “I want you to have this. Thank you for helping me speak the English,” placing a plate of appetizers on the table.

“You want to practice your English, too?” I asked the pack of students, trying to sound upbeat. They looked sweet, but we had been out all day sight-seeing, and I was tired.

“The more the merrier!” Mom said, her voice booming with excitement. Before the students could settle themselves into the chairs they dragged from surrounding tables, Mom was firing questions at them: Where they were from? What they were studying in school? Was English hard to learn? I’m not sure if she wanted to help them with their English as much as she wanted to chat with someone else besides the three of us. Sure, I’m her son, but there’s only so much family one can take before empty nest syndrome becomes a fantasy.

Throughout the next few hours, we collected a cluster of young people, all eager to talk to us using the English. After about an hour, I felt myself becoming short tempered. I enjoyed the opportunity to chat with the locals, but I really wanted to head back to the room. Mom seemed to be having the time of her life, though. She nodded furiously whenever their broken English made sense, or they correctly used an idiom. When the communication broke down, she gesticulated wildly—a mutant compilation of mime and yelling—as if the arm movements would improve their English skills. Her conversation flowed freely and her patience endless. I thought about what I would say to Dad when she told him about her foray into becoming a language model—which she would, as she told him everything that happened with meticulous detail Anderson Cooper would envy. Is this the kind of harmless interchange he would find charming? Or would he add “chatting with strange Belgian students” to the list of “Dangerous Encounters” beneath “New York sex shop”?

As the conversation began to wind down, I mimed to the waitress to bring the check. She helped me count out the local currency and took the money with great flourish. I didn’t know how much to tip, though.

“Tip?” She looked at me through squinted eyes.

“Yes, extra money for you, to say ‘thank you’ for good service.”

She shrugged. “It is up to you, but none is required.” She must have noticed the odd look on my face, for she laughed politely and continued. “You do this tip in America. In my country, all jobs pay enough. We do work we love, not for money. If you do a job you love, life is better.”

I wrote those words down in my journal. I think they’re onto something, those crazy Europeans. They commit themselves to employment because it is something they enjoy, not because it pays enough to buy an SUV. In Brussels at least, “work” isn’t a four letter word.

Sometime after the check was paid, but before the students ordered their last beer, Mom had picked up the conversation again, and I watched her nodding in response to the students’ statements. I sat wondering if she was ever going to be ready to go when the waitress touched me on the arm.

“Your mother, she is?” I nodded. “She is wonderful. Delightful.”

I nodded. “Yeah. She has her moments.”

Maybe this kind of interaction was her way to make up for lost time—the last time she was here, she didn’t hang out in restaurants chatting up the locals. So I decided to screw Dad’s “keep your mother safe” directive. I made that my daily mantra, hoping that by the time I returned home, I would work up the fortitude to shrug off any attempted guilt trip. It could happen.

“IT’S GOING
TO BE FOURTEEN DAYS
. That’s the longest I’ve ever gone without sex,” Mom said to me.

We were walking down a cobblestone street outside of Heidelberg, Germany, a picturesque town that had exchanged its prestige for tourists. We’d planned to tour the town’s pride and joy, a centuries-old castle that stands guard over the small village. It’s beautiful, ancient and $20 for the guided tour. Since the tiny bus doesn’t depart up the winding drive for an hour or so, we decide to make good use of the time by wandering the streets of the quaint village. History is everywhere—some of it real, some a fictional facsimile of what the Germans think the town looked like in the years before capitalism and that pesky inconvenience called World War Two.

“That’s nice, Ma,” I tell her, mainly because there’s no other way to respond to your mother chatting you up about her sex life.

“Because, really, this is the first long trip I ever took without your father,” she says. She stops every couple of steps to gaze into the shop windows that line the cobblestone avenues, so it’s taken us about ten minutes to go half a block. “And sex in a hotel is more fun than sex at home.”

“Mmmm.” I wasn’t touching this conversation with ten-foot pole.

“Oh! That’s pretty!” she meandered over to the window of yet another shop and stood scrutinizing the cuckoo clocks.

“Maybe I shouldn’t have bought that other clock,” she sighed. “Look at this one! Isn’t it pretty? I like it better than the one I bought.”

“Ma, it’s just buyer’s remorse. You bought yourself a class-A cuckoo clock.” I looked at my watch again and felt slightly dismayed that only ten minutes had passed since the last time I checked. Funny how time warps itself in exactly the opposite direction than what you hope for. Like when you are on a bad date and you find yourself sitting across from some loser wishing to God the hands on the clock above the bar would speed up like they do in a cartoon so when you say, “Wow. I didn’t know it was so late! I’ve gotta run,” you won’t be lying.

The cuckoo clock she’s talking about is the one we’d just spent over an hour purchasing. The great cuckoo clock adventure began when we left the hotel with a mission: Buy a clock. Not just any clock. A hand-carved cuckoo clock made in the Black Forest. Her insistence bordered on obsession. Moments after stepping outside of the hotel, we passed our first clock shop.

“Here’s a good one, Ma,” I said, trying to be helpful.

“No.”

“What? Why? Look, Ma, tons of clocks.”

“No it’s not that, but look at the salesman.”

“Yeah?”

“He’s Asian. Asians don’t make German clocks. We need to find a German.”

“A German cuckoo clock maker who lives in the Black Forest?”

She nodded. How hard could it be? We were in Germany. The Black Forest was around there somewhere. I hadn’t been there yet, but behind the hotel is a cluster of trees and a forest is, by definition, a cluster of trees. It’s not like there would be any yellow plastic tape strung across two street lamps announcing DO NOT CROSS—BLACK FOREST.

“Why the Black Forest?” I asked out of curiosity as we inched our way along the sidewalk. Mom can’t walk as quickly as I can, so I have to wait for her to complete a full step before I take half of one.

“Because when your Uncle Jerry was stationed in Germany, he bought your grandmother a cuckoo clock made in the Black Forest, and I’ve always wanted that clock. It was beautiful.”

“I’m sure there are other clocks just as nice. Look here.” We’d gone about ten yards, and already we stood in front of another clock store.

She stared in the window for a few minutes, pondering the possibilities. “Those are nice,” she nodded. “Let’s go in.”

I held the door for her to enter. She took one step and nodded politely to the man behind the counter. She leaned into me and whispered, “He looks German.”

Blonde hair, stout build and bad teeth. “Yep, sure does,” I whispered back.

She strode to the counter. “I’d like to look at your cuckoo clocks.”

The man smiled broadly, nodded and said something in an accent so thick you could cut it with a spork.

“He sounds German, too,” she whispered.

The blonde man with the German accent gently laid a clock on the counter. Mom examined it for a moment and pronounced her judgment. “Beautiful.”

He started extolling the pros of the clock: how it’s made from genuine porcelain this and honest-to-God German that. I tried to tune him out. To me, a clock’s a clock. If you need one that badly, go to Goodwill and scour the Housewares department. There’s a lot of junk people get rid by giving it to Goodwill. Besides, I’m from Seattle, where only Los Angeles transplants buy
new
stuff. Seattleites are more concerned with saving the environment by reusing non-recyclables. I roll this idea over in my mind and wonder if a cuckoo clock made by a genuine German living in the Black Forest is something that a person would bequeath to Goodwill. Apparently, a Black Forest-made clock touched by real German hands is a commodity. Maybe I should have been a clock maker. I mean, when I was young I looked German. Who would know?

Mom look pleased as she fingered the clock’s intricate carvings like they were made from crystal. She nodded. She smiled. Mom smiling is a good thing. The woman shops so much that very little impresses her anymore. When it comes to sniffing out a bargain, she was born with the nose of a bloodhound and the soul of Ebenezer Scrooge.

The man explained the details of the clock while Mom nodded: The chains were silver-plated alloy, as were the heavy counter-weights in the shape of pine cones. The design of the house part of the clock was modeled after traditional German cottages. The roof was an overlay of balsa wood, while the wood of the cottage is maple.

“So it’s not made locally?” Mom asks. I can tell by the way her eyes caress it and she uses her pinky to touch the tiny bird that pops out of the small door that she likes it.

“It’s assembled in Berlin,” he said to her.

“It’s a beautiful clock,” she said to him, “but I think I’d like to finish shopping first. Thank you for your time.” That’s the cool thing about Mom—she puts a salesman through the hoops, but she’s always polite about rejection.

“Anyone can buy a clock built in a factory,” she explains to me as we leave the store. “I want something locally made. I didn’t come to Europe so I can buy stuff that I could have ordered over the internet.”

We shuffle onward down the uneven sidewalk. I can’t argue with her logic. I remember feeling betrayed our first day of the trip—last week—when we arrived in London. We had descended on the rented apartment several hours earlier than expected, sparking chaos. The four Japanese tourists who thought they had secured the apartment through that evening stared at us four Americans standing on the porch, bags in hand. There was much chattering in Japanese and so much bowing I felt light headed. I pointed to the four of us, mimed sleeping and gestured to the apartment. Somehow they were able to decode my theatrics and understood what we wanted. They nodded and bowed some more before disappearing inside, taking our bags with them.

“Well,” I said turning to the group. “I’m guessing they’re either pilfering through our belongings or telling us that we’ve got the place.”

“Let’s go bumming around London! We can find a mall and do some shopping.” Mom’s voice always lifted an octave when the word “shopping” was uttered.

“Ma,” I sighed, “this is the land of Shakespeare, the Queen and Big Ben. I’m not going to a mall.”

“Oh, give me a break, you snob. It’s just a couple of hours.”

Within the hour we found ourselves wandering an enclosed, generic structure that looked exactly like Every Mall, U.S.A. While the other three were off doing God-knows-what, I spied a tea shop. Perfect! My friend Crystal was a tea drinker, and I was in desperate need of a British souvenir for her.

“I’m visiting,” I said to the saleswoman who looked too young to work legally, “from the U.S.”

“I can tell from your accent. Chicago?”

I marveled at her. Most Americans can’t find England on a map, yet she could identify me just by a few words. “Yeah. I’m wanting to ship some tea to my friend. Do you have a gift box with a huge variety of British tea, but small enough that it’s not going to cost a fortune to mail?”

“Well,” she said, popping some gum—seems New York doesn’t have the patent on sales people popping gum, “why don’t you just order it over the internet?”

“Yeah, I could. But I was hoping to send her something from London. You know, as opposed to some trinket cranked out in China.”

“It’ll be cheaper.”

I thought about her suggestion to save some money and for a moment, the miserly facet of my personality was tempted to throw authenticity to the wind and charge down the Road Cheaply Traveled. But then I felt myself succumb to that human urge that requires us to take a piece from where we’ve been. That voice that says, “Ah-ha! Welcome to the moon! Now—stick a flag in it!” or “You must strap a video camera to your head for the next 47 hours of your vacation and tape every church, waterfall, birdbath, bathtub and street sign you pass!” Seriously—it’s not enough to leap around the lunar surface with an NBC camera trained on you? Apparently not. And how many people return home, pop a bowl full of popcorn, sink into the couch and say, “Rewind to the little kid picking his nose outside the Globe Theatre. Ah! There’s a memory.”

“Ah, that’s okay,” I said to the sales girl, vowing to have a piece of Great Britain sent to America. “I really want a souvenir from the U.K.” How much could it cost to ship? It’s only tea.

“Okay.” She rolled her eyes and guided me to a display. She babbled on about the tea, sounding very knowledgeable, but I didn’t really understand her. I’m a coffee drinker. All I know about tea is that it’s a leaf that you dunk in water and load down with sugar, honey and milk to make it taste like something you want in your mouth. Besides, I love the lilt and rhythm of British English. The Brits need to record their best and brightest stage actors talking about something boring—like tea—and sell it to Americans with insomnia. Those CDs will outsell Ambien.

“How long will this take to get there?” I asked, giving her my charge card. By the time she rang up the purchase, added tax and shipping, I paid more for these chopped up leaves than I’d expected and was smarting a bit. How heavy can a bunch of leaves be, anyway? Apparently a hell of a lot more than ground-up beans.

“Well, you should know, you’re American. It’ll be shipped out of our supply warehouse in Ohio. How long will it take to go from Ohio to Kentucky?”

I stood dumbfounded. I just paid half a day’s salary for something to be mailed from Cleveland? “British tea from the United States?”

“Our teas come in through the central distribution system in Quebec.”

“British tea from the United States, via Canada. Wow. I was hoping for something … you know … authentically British.”

She laughed. “Told you it would be cheaper over the internet.”

So I could hardly blame Mom for wanting to buy an authentic, German-made cuckoo clock. Who wants a Black Forest cuckoo clock shipped from Cleveland?

“Let’s try here,” Mom said. I looked up to see her pointing to yet another cuckoo clock store. While my mind has a tendency to boomerang into the past, Mom’s mind stays rooted in the present. Maybe this is why I talk about memories, while Mom talks about the world using present tense.

As soon as we entered the shop, I knew this place was different from the other cuckoo clock pushers. It didn’t reek of Lysol and sterility like some of the tourist traps that cater to Americans. Nor did it try to mask its air with a tacky air freshener that tries to convince you that you’re in a pine forest. This one had a thick, woodsy smell that landed somewhere between “lumberjack” and “wet lumber.” Pieces of half-carved wood lay about the work counter amongst carving tools with tiny mounds of sawdust beneath them. We had stepped into a
Twilight Zone
episode—walked through the door of a tiny Heidelberg boutique and entered a tiny cuckoo clock slaughter house. Indirect sunlight bounced off the surrounding buildings, giving it a tranquil, peaceful ambiance.

“Can I help you?” The dark-haired man behind the counter asked. His English sounded clipped and precise, like the careful pronunciation of a non-English speaker. He might be authentically German. It was a good sign. I crossed my fingers.

Mom explained what she was looking for and he led her through the maze of display shelves to a section of the shop where a tiny wall stood hidden behind clock parts. The rows of the little black houses ticked erratically, the little arms swinging in syncopation while their brass chains tinkled. As the salesman explained the specifics of the clocks, Mom examined them carefully.

I envied her dedication to shopping. To her, choosing where to put your money is a religious experience; an act that must be contemplated with a focus of mind that borders on the holy. Mom is a shopkeeper’s nightmare. Her mastery at examining every aspect of a potential purchase is worthy of its own reality TV program. My idea of shopping is running into a store, grabbing the first thing that catches my eye and dashing out. I have often timed myself; any transaction lasting over ten minutes was a failure, a sure sign of my incompetence to resist the capitalistic attempts to part me and my money. While watching her approach buying souvenirs on this trip, it became clear to me that one must know what one wants from one’s shopping experience to make choices one doesn’t regret. Knowing that you want to spend your money and time on a cuckoo clock made in the Black Forest by an authentic German gives Mom a goal, a vision, a mission by which she can gauge her success and, therefore, feel satisfied. Knowing what you want makes all the difference in the world.

It dawned on me that shopping is a metaphor for my life. I’ve always snatched up the first thing I saw laying around without the slightest thought as to what I was grabbing. “If it looks good, go for it”—that was my motto. Sure, one can stumble onto a great bargain along the way, but what was I not seeing as I grabbed the nearest shiny object? Maybe I’ve been spending my life missing great opportunities not due to some divine plan, but because I’m always taking the road easiest traveled. I’ve become a post-modern couch potato, flipping through the channels of Life TV, watching what everyone else is doing because I don’t have the ability to stop. Look. Think. Choose.