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  With her shaky hands she again picked up her mug, but the thought of one more swallow of black coffee made her want to vomit. She ran to the bathroom to splash some water on her face and when she looked in the mirror she became sickly aware of the many faint wrinkles on her throat and face. She had noted the wrinkles before but only as minor distractions, a dirty fake disturbance; a miniscule sterility on the surface of life.

  Jesus, she thought, why so soon? Where does fucking time go?

  She cried hard and wanted more time to flush out the tears but there was no more time to be had; she had to pull herself together to go do the day’s grocery shopping. Trembling, she told herself that it was probably the strong black coffee, and too many cigarettes, and that maybe she should cut these out, but her mind revolted at the thought of growing old, of aging, and it made her cry even more.

  “God forgive me, but I’m just not that old to have to give up everything. If I give up cigarettes and coffee, and doing my yard, and all these other little things in life, what’s left?” she sobbed her getting older into her hands.

  She filled her cupped hands with cold water and splashed it again on her red face. She cried a few more tears and stared harder at herself in the mirror, a wishful attempt to retrieve her not so long ago youth, but even that juvenile attempt at revival wasn’t coming out right. Too vain, even in tears, the concern was more with the appearance than in the distressed sobbing, she had to admit.

  When I have spent so many years carefully cultivating my back yard, why the fuck can’t I be buried in it?

  She thought of her well cultivated yard and wished to be buried in it.

  But who would buy it afterward; only her daddy could’ve sold such a melancholic environment.

  Your parents’ gift house is full of sounds and faces of dead people, mostly theirs, always tripping you up with dead memories, she thought inelegantly.

  Burying herself in her back yard stopped the tears dead. The thought of death was a little too early in the day and definitely cheap melancholia, she concluded. She had a long life ahead of her and she wasn’t going to be intimidated by the presence of a few stinking wrinkles. She got dressed and went to the supermarket.

  Chapter Four

  Kitty was the oldest of the four friends by almost a year. Making up for the lead in time which had begun to show itself in grey, she dyed her hair pure yellow blond and didn’t give a hoot that her hair did not match her hazel eyes. Front-runner that she was, she loved the trendy contrast between her true dyed blond hair and her greenish light brown eyes because the clash, as she was fond of reminding herself, made her appear so much smarter. Like her hair, she exuded highlighted confidence. Fashion was her rage and she flaunted it. In spite of her small stature, she was fearless and wouldn’t let anyone push her around. She was everybody’s sweetheart. A loud minimalist in her style, she had an aptitude for winning people’s attention with her innumerable innovations of colourful tight Brooks Brothers shirts that highlighted her magnificent tits and tight fitting miniskirts. Everybody accepted her fanciful efforts, and she in turn loved everybody in kind, and made sure she never lied. It was beyond her vocabulary to say mean or ugly things, but she did love a good joke. She would never insult anyone’s feelings and Christian-like she relished the moment of turning the other cheek. Though blessed with the carnal knowledge of several men in her life, Kitty was the perpetual virgin who would always blush with the telling of a dirty joke. Her favorite song was “…touched for the very first time…” which since high school she flirtatiously loved to sing to Sharon.

  She had no intimate affairs in high school, and never had a steady boyfriend, though she had no problem making out with boys even when she was wearing braces. Everybody lightly loved Kitty and Kitty lightly loved everybody. Though beautiful by any measure, her beauty registered imprecise by the damning expression, ‘she’s so cute’, that hung like a cloud over her. To be known as ‘cute’ was the bane of every girl in high school who wanted to get laid. Nobody took a ‘cute’ girl serious about wanting to get laid. Not wanting to, all through high school, hidden in unconscious fear, she displayed a personality that was almost childish, pacifying all boys and making it difficult for them to think of her as a “good piece of ass.” To Kitty, all the boys were comparably nice to lightly flirt with, in the hallways and classrooms but, when pressed to come clean, the only thing she would admit was that “all the boys were just nice boys, except one” she would giggle to her friends without ever revealing whom she had in mind. It was thought that a boy named Alex, who was on the wrestling team, might have been the one pinning her with a few crotch lifts because Kitty liked sports guys and she would always walk to physics class with him, but nobody knew for sure, and Alex did look like a dork. Among the four friends, it was common knowledge that Hank was corking Sharon, Myrna was always going steady with someone new, but none too serious, and there was faint suspicion that Robin was a dyke. Kitty was beyond reproach; she was just too cute and nobody fucks ‘cute’.

  Although only five four, she had big breasts for her size and all the boys would talk and fantasize about playing with them, but Kitty was, naturally, very particular of the very few whom she had allowed to press against her breasts, female organs always prized by teen age boys. Those allowed to touch them were usually the star athletes of the school, and even Hank Merker had lifted them from behind a few times, in the presence of best friend Sharon, naturally. Neither of the best friends minded Hank cupping them because he was the star quarterback. Anyway, of all the boys, Hank did have huge hands and could easily fully cup them which made Kitty always feel brittle-excited. And when morality muddied her thoughts, she would tell herself, “What am I supposed to do with them? Hide them?”

  “Stop that Hank; I’ve told you many times not to ever do that again,” she would giggle her cute smile when they were in the presence of one of the friends.

  After Hank and Sharon married, somewhat suddenly, thought Kitty, she had a long summer’s sexual encounter with a married man whom even to this day she knew only as Ray, of Mexican or Italian descent, she wasn’t sure. Ray, as she would demurely call him, was six four and all summer long he secretly fucked Kitty, away from her friends’ possible reprimands, pretty much every day. Ray was a produce manager at the Alfa Supermarket and got off early in the afternoon when he would pick her up and take her to a shithole motel owned by a friend. After that summer long fucking experience there wasn’t much that Kitty didn’t know about fucking from all possible angles. She was giggly grateful to Ray whom she never forgot though very indifferently she remembered him as her first substantial lover. One day, Ray, for some sadistic reason, directed perhaps against Kitty or maybe against his wife, but known only to himself, or maybe not, insisted that Kitty meet his wife and his two children and he took her to his very nice homely house. The whole time that Kitty was with Ray and his family, that day, she had an uncontrollable desire to laugh, which she nervously did, impolitely every few minutes, throughout the uptight evening affair. Later that night when Ray was about to take Kitty home, she was approached by the wife who callously said to her, “I know my husband is fucking you, but I don’t care.”

  “No hard feelings, but it’s me who’s fucking him,” smiled Kitty.

  Inevitably, after that amazing evening with the family, Ray and Kitty parted company as dispassionately as they had met. After that grownup satisfying affair, Kitty felt adult happy, a ripe young woman, and no longer a childish, cute girl.

  During those wonderful summer afternoons full of sex, she also enrolled for a summer session of Italian at UCLA. It wasn’t that she was particularly fond of Italian but she had nothing better to do to pass the mornings away and Italian was the only freshman course that fitted her schedule. She found the sounds of the Italian language sensually melodic, like herself, and she decided to continue with the language. Motivated for the first time, she enrolled full time for the fall semester at
San Jose College to major in Italian.

  “You are a natural with languages,” said her young Italian instructor at San Jose who praised her as they rolled in his bed, and he convinced her that she should take a trip to Italy, which she did the very next semester and almost never returned to the US. If it hadn’t been for the memory of her three best friends she might have stayed in Italy.

  “I didn’t raise you to traipse around Italy, of all places,” her father would write her, and threaten her with cutting off money. At one point he even funded a handsome young blue-eyed, blond, American young man to go to Italy and maybe persuade Kitty to return with him to Southern California. Unfortunately, by then, Kitty had gotten into the habit of Continental ease and she would laugh at everything not to her style or taste, and when she saw the young man get off the plane at Leonardo da Vinci at Fiumicino she laughed a little too much and quickly convinced him that he should return to California without bagging her. This, however, did not stop her father from hopelessly continuing the practice of sending handsome young Southern California types to regain his daughter from the madness that had engulfed her to want to live in Italy instead of California.

  “There is a fortune to be made in herbal medicine, and this could only succeed in the US,” he would beg his defiant daughter to come back home.

  But Kitty had fallen in love with Italy, travelling throughout the medieval and classical sites, mostly from a base in Rome. She was a young woman on the make, and there is a direct relationship between the distance from home and the joys of love: she loved to walk the edge and thought herself invincible. It was the romance and familiarity of Rome that made it easy for her to cope after her hilarious divorce from weird, first husband Milton. For two full-fledged happy years she toured Rome and Southern Italy during which time she found solace from the guilt of straying away from home knowing that her best friend Robin had also made the decision to lose her way in the Peace Corps, drifting overseas for two years.

  Kitty often thought of Myrna, and Sharon, and Robin while in Italy but the friendship that she once felt for her best friends had become a bit hazy and she often wondered whether it had ever been as binding as it once felt. Fucking her way to maturity with a variety of sun-burned Italian strangers, she no longer had those needy feelings that once touchingly said that without her friends’ friendship there was no meaning to her life. Being there, full of excitement, every breath she took of that eternal Roman Bernini air, energized every thought in her mind and every morning she longed to live on Italian air alone. She would have wonderful moments walking the glorious memories of sunny Italy, day after day, after day, and lost in her love affair with Rome she began to have doubts as to whether friends, or more accurately, best friends, were necessary for a happy life. Yet being typically a confused American, she couldn’t quite reconcile her love for Italy for her love of Southern California; the schooled feeling of betraying America was always there driving her crazy with regrets. It wasn’t her father that made her unable to get Southern California out of her mind, but the sweet enticement of once again fucking sterile Hank Merker, silly high school quarterback, the love of her life.

  And then quite incidentally, like most single women travelling alone in Italy, she met her real true love. His name was Claudio Albiona.

  *

  At the age of twelve Claudio Albiona began scavenging through garbage bins and city dumps in Palermo, Sicily, for things he could sell, like aluminium cans and other metal scrap, to support his mother’s booze and drug addiction habits. Daily he searched through huge garbage heaps and found treasures, like not so used books, small saintly artefact and discarded clothes that he could sell in the flea market. He was never finicky of the scrappy provisions dumped for him in the daily fresh piles of garbage. He had no regard for those who frowned on the scrap he gathered which often times were enough to buy his mother polluted pills cheap off the street; poisoned stuff that kept her moaning at home instead of roaming the streets looking for tricks in the alleys of Palermo. Two years after he had quit school, nobody cared, his mother died of exhaustion, natural causes they said, but probably from the tainted ingredients in the adulterated pills that he lovingly provided for her.

  Handsome Claudio, dramatically mysterious with his Nordic blond hair and blue eyes in a land of olive skins and dark hair, grew up with the reputation that he must’ve been the bastard son of some German tourist who had paid a few visits to his attractive poor mother, herself a stray away from a humbled home. Disgusted at the profane indignities heaved by unkind people upon his mother, he refused to publically accept his good looks as an immoral encounter between his kind mother and some unknown Nordic.

  One hot summer’s afternoon, at the ripe age of fifteen, he had a mature body for his age, a not so beautiful young Greek woman tourist in her forties, who was hot, out of nowhere, paid him one hundred dollars to fuck her. It wasn’t his first time at love, but it was his first money fuck behind an ancient ruin wall of an ancient Greek site.

  “You’re a Greek God,” she said to him; words that imprinted hugely in his mind.

  Alone in the abandoned ancient Greek ruins with her, out of sight, during that long hot summer afternoon that unfolded all over his adolescent innocence, she clung to him with dripping perspiration and insatiable desires of uncontrollable lust that he had only dreamt about. Violently she kept caressing his face and squeezing his young body, and he loved it. All afternoon she kissed him but all he could remember were her immortal words, “You’re a Greek God”.

  After that happy summer chance encounter, and with ‘you’re a Greek God’ always in mind, he accepted that he was good looking. Silently he thanked his mother’s good looks that were a blessing to him, and God only knew who his father was, but bless him too. He very quickly realized that women paid good money to fuck him. He was young and robust and his sun-burned arms grew muscular under the hot Sicilian summer sun and the durum wheat bread dipped in extra virgin olive oil. He rubbed his hands with sand to purposefully keep them rough the way his women liked them. He wore light blue shirts, and his pants and shoes were always pristine white; he was a proud rooster and all the hens around him were eager to be part of his roost. He was a strutting cock who quickly learned as a young man to easily satisfy two or three lays a day. His reputation as a lover hardened with each new rumour, and infirm husbands made appointments for their frustrated wives. It was also whispered that fathers had brought their not-so-pretty daughters to him. He was especially sympathetic to those semi-pretty girls who always came back for more, and to the silent loving daddies who dutifully paid the cost to see the happy smiles on their ugly daughters’ faces.

  By the time he was nineteen Palermo had become too provincial for Claudio, everybody knew him and the friends he kept, and he decided to move to Rome where anonymity was the norm and where there were a lot more women willing to pay a lot more money for his services. Unfortunately for Claudio, it was the wrong move: Rome was flooded with Romeos full of the cosmopolitan sophistication and neat unbuttoned good looks that he, the provincial, lacked in spite of his superior looks. His competition gigolos had the manners and the speech to go along with the name. More incredible, dark hair was the gigolo mode in Rome where thin-nosed Nordic blonds, both male and female, pursued the dark phantoms of their dreams. It was the complete opposite of what he had known in Palermo. He tried to imitate the champions, drank espressos, and took up smoking, but the experienced gigolos had a way to make their bullshit taste like gelato to their hungry Janes, and poor Claudio couldn’t shed the hick. For five years he worked the side streets of Rome, mostly as a waiter in subdued trattorias, once in a while hitting on unfortunate tourist women travelling on a budget. For a while he even learned to strum a guitar and play a grating version of Yesterday.

  When he began to like his guitar he cried.

  One lazy autumn afternoon, while hanging out in the Piazza Navona, he was approached by a pretty American
young woman who offered him one hundred dollars. Holding hands they took a taxi to her hotel room at the Excelsior and she quickly undressed. She was petite but solid to the touch with perfectly well-defined legs that joined at an amazingly tight American well-fed ass whose dimpled lilywhite buttocks were made to withstand prolonged massaging. Her breasts were fabulous.

  There were no moral dilemmas running interference in Kitty’s mind that afternoon and throughout the whole business affair she said nothing, pretending fragility with her soft ah’s, a super virginal tactic for a young woman fucking in a foreign land.

  It was easy for petite Kitty to feign fragility.

  “Is this your first time?”

  “Yes,” she lied, but who could tell, and Claudio didn’t care.

  When they were finished, they fell asleep next to each other.

  She could not sleep. Exhilarated by his love making, she dreamed wide awake. She got up from their bed to better view him. He was a very handsome man and she thought she fell in love with him as he lay there naked.

  She felt giddy and wanted to see her naked body now enveloped in the intimacy of the late hot Roman afternoon, and looking into the mirror she became aware of her splendid whiteness. There’s nothing more alluring than the lustful body of a young white goddess, she thought and smiled at her image. She went back and lied next to lovely Claudio, her body glistening in a strong desire for more sex.

  He was twenty three, and it was his first encounter with an American woman.

  He’s the dumbest fucking idiot I’ve ever met in my life, thought Kitty.

  It was then that she decided to marry him and to hell with Milton and little Albert.

  *

  Her husband, Claudio Albiona, handsome Claudio to his friends, formerly the glory of Palermo, Sicily, and all of Italy, and currently the splendour of Los Angeles, ran a very profitable fast food and restaurant grease-gathering and recycling service. It was a dirty job that few wanted to do but he accepted it as a blessing. He was good at recycling grease, like he had been good at recycling garbage. Thanks to Robin’s father, banker Robert Sargent, who, at Robin’s pleading, provided the initial loans, and Hank Merker from whom Claudio collected his restaurants’ grease for starters, plus some quick and easy Sicilian, una razza, una faccia, influential connections, street wise Claudio in time came to manage an eighty percent monopoly on Southern California grease-gathering business with a fleet of over two hundred trucks criss-crossing LA and Orange Counties. He made many friends in the restaurant business, including Hank Merker, who in addition to his restaurants, was also lovely Sharon’s husband. Good looking Claudio did covet Sharon’s body but he still hid the Sicilian hick beneath his easy smile, and Sharon was never one to like pretty boys. So Claudio made easy friends with Hank and hopelessly kept a proper distance from the best of friends. He liked Kitty’s other two best friends as well, but he was uneasy around Robin, and he thought Myrna a bit weird; still, there was no denying his wife’s friends’ flawless beauty. It was always a pleasure being around them. The four best friends and their husbands would often get together at expensive restaurants and thanks to Claudio’s connections, the treat was always on the house.