Travels with Penny: True Tales of a Gay Guy and His Mother (9 page)

Who knew a cuckoo clock could spawn such deep introspection?

Mom wound up buying two cuckoos that day; one for herself and one for my sister. She still has the clock. So does my sister.

* * *

“Can you imagine living here?” Mom asked me as we passed the castle. “Getting up to pee at night must have been a bitch.”

“If you don’t know about indoor plumbing, how can you miss it?” I reminded her.

“Still,” she said, her head moving back and forth like a bobble-head, “they had to have hated getting up at night. Freeze your tutu off.”

The castle that overlooks Heidelberg dates back to the thirteenth century. Since that time, it has withstood fires, wars, partial reconstruction and American tourists. The citadel has seen thousands of visitors and been the star of films, photos and documentaries, and my mother notices the bathrooms. I poked fun at her, but the embarrassing truth is, I was thinking the same thing. The toilet I saw was a small room the size of a guest closet; in the chamber was a raised stone platform. On the stone platform was a smooth piece of wood with three holes cut out. Apparently, after doing their business, the user would then pour water down the hole, adding a twist to that song, “Wash that man right out of my hair”—only this wasn’t run-of-the-mill-Rapunzel hair. I didn’t think twice about the contraption, to tell you the truth. I’m not that interested in bathroom history.

“That castle is true German. This is why we come to Europe. See truly German stuff.”

Who knew that authenticity was so important to my mother? There was no way in hell she would meander throughout Europe buying products that could just as easily have been found in Chicago. The same held true for its restaurants. The more unpronounceable the cuisine, the higher the ranking on the “We Must Eat Here” list. According to Mom, the food we ate had to be unique to the locale in which we ate, so naturally, my penchant for eating “traditionally American” salads, grilled fish and veggies was a great annoyance to her.

“For God’s sake, you can get a salad back home!”

“I like salads,” I would respond. This was our dialogue: critique, defense, comment. When one’s away from home, it’s comforting to know some family dysfunctions can still be obeyed.

“Besides, Ma, I don’t want to go home after a trip to Europe and go on a diet.”

“Diet, schmiet,” she would say, “you’re only in Europe once! Eat the damned food!”

I nodded mutely, as—let’s face it—when’s the last time anyone really won an argument with his mother? I ate the salads anyway, admiring everyone else’s ability to chow down on creamy sauces, fat sausages and thick gravy while not giving a crap about how much weight they gained. I have always been one of those people who eats a gluten-free, made-with-Nutrasweet cookie and watches as it super-glues itself to my gut. The polite term is “spare tire,” but those of us with the metabolisms of a snail must face the music sooner or later; we don’t have a spare tire as much as we carry the whole freaking bus. Some people dream of doing great things. I dream of fitting into the same pair of jeans for more than one summer.

The battle-to-put-the-kibosh-on-Jenny-Craig would come to an abrupt end one week later when I surrendered any delusion that I would someday sport six-pack abs. A huge steel kegger? Definitely. Three or four days after Mom had caught the Lufthansa flight back to the States, I was snoozing away on the bench of a speeding train as the surprisingly comfortable sleeper car rocked through the southern part of Switzerland. I awoke starving (as usual) so I waddled off in search of something to eat. The dining car was nearly empty. The sole employee caught my attention first—a heavy-set Italian man with thick, black hair and a five o’clock shadow accentuating his jawline. His white shirt may have been pristine that morning, but by this time of the afternoon, it had one foot in haberdashery heaven; the tails were pulled out of his trousers and stains spotted the front from neck to waist. His olive skin was the perfect backdrop for his teeth because it made them seem less yellow than they were.

Standing in front of him at the counter was a handsome couple; the woman thin with a long blonde mane and a man who had combed his hair over the bald spot at the crown of his head. They clung to each other with a pornographic urgency and kissed between sentences. They reeked of alcohol. I would like to imagine them as a newlywed couple lost in romantic passion of their honeymoon. The truth is probably that they were bored American suburbanites playing hooky from their Lexus SUV by drinking their way through Europe with all the maturity of snookered college co-eds.

“Don’t you have a green salad?” I could barely hear the woman’s breathy voice over the knocking of the train against the track.

Mr. Italy nodded furiously. “Of course! The most freshest of the vegetables we have!” I was impressed by his enthusiastic attempt at American.

“A salad, I think,” she asked, rubbing her hand along the man’s ass. “Not too much dressing. Can I get it on the side?”

“A side?” Mr. Italy’s smile faltered.

“Yes, please.” Ms. Blonde didn’t catch Mr. Italy’s furrowed brow. That’s the curious thing about Americans. They bitch about tourists from other countries not attempting to speak English, but don’t bother bringing a foreign language dictionary with them on their jaunts. The double standard could be seen as naïve if it wasn’t for the fact that in the twenty-first century, any foreign language dictionary is an iPhone application away.

“Not on the salad,” I explained, trying to be helpful while Ms. Blonde and Mr. Ass exchanged some spit. “She wants it separate.”

“Separate from the salad?” He looked horrified. I nodded. “Oil and the vinegar made here by the chef. It go onto the lettuce of the salad.”

“No!” Ms. Blonde, shrieked as if someone suggested she exchange her Nordstrom purse for a shopping bag. “The calories!”

“Just on the side,” Mr. Ass snapped like he was training a dog.

Mr. Italy looked to me and I shrugged.

“I want a hot dog, hold the bun,” Mr. Ass quipped before diving into Ms. Blonde’s mouth again.

“We have bread,” Mr. Italy said, pulling at a bag.

“No,” Mr. Ass explained in the same condescending tone. “Hold the bun.”

“He means no bread. Just the sausage,” I quipped. I was hungry and didn’t give a shit whether they thought me rude or not. They may be too busy to rise above trailer park behavior, but I had just woken up from a comfortable nap and had had neither coffee nor food. I was dangerous.

Mr. Italy placed the anemic hot dog and a bowl of lettuce on the counter, took their money and the lip-swapping duo staggered off to suck more face. Mr. Italy turned to me, sighed and shook his head.

“The food needs the spice,” he said to me. “Food is for life. You must have spice in life. Americans have no spice. How can they have a life?”

I instantly thought of my mother and her admonishments of my food choices. I, too, have been traveling throughout Europe, visiting countries I had only read about, just like Mr. Ass and Ms. Blonde. I, too, had been paying more attention to the scale than my sense of adventure. My body may be in Italy, but my mind was firmly planted on Jenny Craig’s promise of looking like Valerie Bertinelli, post Eddie Van Halen.

“I’ll take a salad, too, please,” I said with a shrug. “But I want the dressing all over the lettuce.”

Turns out the dressing was a tasty concoction that smacked like a marriage of Italian, Balsamic Vinaigrette and spicy tomato. I have no idea what it was called, but I remember how delicious it tasted on the crisp vegetables. Jenny may have disapproved, but screw her and Valerie—it was worth it.

I hate when Mom is right.

* * *

“I still can’t get over those bathrooms,” Mom said as we boarded the shuttle back to the town. “It reminds me of camping.”

“What’s with you and bathrooms?” I sat watching the tour guide pointing to various attractions along the road as the bus bounced along the uneven road. In one tour alone, I heard that woman speak in German, French and broken English, moving between them with more ease than most of my students use their native tongue. I marvel at how lucky the Europeans are; they live in an area where the countries are so closely knit together that they can pick up another’s dialect as easily as we change the channels on the remote. My last attempt at a spoken language was in high school with a teacher I affectionately referred to as Frau Cow. An obese woman, she carried herself with all the grace of the love child of a Sumo Wrestler and Nurse Ratched.

“Well, haven’t you noticed how it costs to get into the bathrooms over here?” she asked. How could I not? I live in Seattle. We drink more coffee than water. We drink so much coffee, we fund the entire South American coffee export industry. I would sooner go broke on this trip paying to use the toilet than buying souvenirs.

“I don’t mind paying for toilets here. The restrooms are
really
clean.” She nodded her head to emphasize how clean they were. “You could eat off the floors.”

“That’s a bad visual picture, Ma.” Some mental pictures should stay undeveloped on the darkroom floor.

“I mean, after anyone goes and does their business, some person goes in there and tidies it up. Don’t they do that in the men’s room?”

I don’t remember these kind of things. With all due respect to Senator Larry Craig, I don’t usually hang out in public bathrooms. Taking a photojournalistic tour of the men’s room never figures into my travel plans.

“Well, in the women’s they do,” she said. “I don’t mind paying to go if someone’s going to keep it clean. It keeps someone in a job. You have to admit taking money for the restroom is better than being out of work or living on welfare. I have to hand it to them—I don’t want to clean my own bathroom. Why should I want to clean someone else’s?”

She had a point. I have a friend who gets her house cleaned monthly, mainly because she doesn’t want to clean her shower. I’ve asked her why she just didn’t do it herself and save the money. A shower is a shower. It’s not like a truck wash or a maternity ward where you have to deal with oil, grease or afterbirth.

“It’s just gross,” she told me.

“So’s wiping your ass, but you have to do that, too.”

She threw something at me—keys I think. “You’re just sick.”

“When I was growing up, we had pay toilets,” Mom said. “I always thought it was a rip-off. But here, you get something for your money.”

“Isn’t the privilege to pee enough of a reward?”

“Funny,” she chastised. “Next time, look at the bathroom. It’s so clean.”

* * *

Having learned my lesson about food somewhere in Switzerland aboard the Germany–Italy train, when I arrived in Cinque Terre, a rugged region of northern Italy, I did what Mom had suggested and paid attention to the bathrooms. The toilet in the hostel was nothing to write home about—the usual small room with a sink and a commode: white, sterile and boring. The water worked and the toilet flushed.

On my second night, after a two-mile hike across a goat path from one of the small villages to the next, a plate of spaghetti and meatballs accompanied by a couple of bottles of wine was just the ticket I needed to feel human again. About half-hour later, my bladder was so full I barely made it to the “bathroom,” a 4x4 wooden shed on a slight rise a few yards from the restaurant. The room had no door, just a narrow entryway that faced away from the restaurant and towards the sparkling blue waters of the Mediterranean. The floor of the shed was made of concrete and sloped like a funnel from the four corners, convening at a hole in the floor. Suddenly the boring toilet in the hostel looked much more inviting. As I urinated, I felt very lucky I was a man. I thought about Mom’s fascination with bathroom facilities and understood why a clean bathroom must mean so much to a woman over fifty.

Too bad the iPhone hadn’t yet been invented. I would have taken a picture for her.

* * *

Throughout the first week of our trip, I had gotten into the habit of paying with everything by credit card. I don’t normally like to live on plastic because, frankly, the easiest way to destroy the high from a wonderful vacation is to arrive home and look at the Visa bill that arrives in the mail the next month. To me, it’s the financial equivalent to waking up with Coyote Ugly: every romantic memory has just been replaced by cursing and banging your head against the wall, condemning yourself for not being more fiscally responsible. That being said, I have to admit that the easiest way to see Europe is on the back of a Visa card. Instead of feeling stupid when you don’t know what the hell a quid looks like, you simply reach into the wallet, dig out the plastic and SHAZAM! Like magic, all your problems are solved.

Until I tried to Visa my way through Heidelberg, Germany.

We had returned from our quest to find the perfect cuckoo clock filled with the thrill of accomplishment. Mom got her dream cuckoo, secure in the knowledge that she had haggled a damned good deal from an authentic German cuckoo clock maker. All was right in the world. So while the rest of the group waited for the city bus that would take us to dinner, I excused myself so I could dash across the street to the German equivalent of a Walgreen’s and get a snack. I ran into the sterile white market, grabbed my purchase and headed to the cash register. I glanced out the window to make sure the bus hadn’t arrived—unlike any other country in the world, German busses are punctual. I was in luck, as the three of them were still standing at the bus stop; although Mom didn’t stand so much as paced.

The sales clerk said something to me in German.

“Excuse me?” I asked, cursing myself for leaving my cheat sheet of German phrases with Mom.

The young clerk scowled at me and repeated herself while waving my charge card in my face. Her jaw was set and her eyes squinted—never a good sign. She shook her head slowly, like she had just sucked on a lemon. I shrugged.

“What?”

She rolled her eyes and started spewing German to me again. Damn! Why didn’t I listen to Frau Cow more intently?

“I am sorry,” I spoke slowly and clearly, “I don’t understand. Sprechen sie English?” I knew I was pronouncing this one correctly. “Do you speak English?” is the only phrase I took away from Frau Cow. Everything else sounded like I was hacking up a lung. That’s the problem with German—it may make sense linguistically, but unless you have a hair ball stuck in the back of your throat, it’s almost impossible to get the dialect right.