The Honest Truth

I’m on a bus with 50 Italians when I hear the announcement:

“Abbiamo un bell’sorpresa quest’anno da nostra ospita internazionale (We have a nice surprise this year from our international guest,” says Lucca Albertini, the man at the front of the bus holding a microphone.

I’m with my cousins on a trip they take every year to Germany for Oktoberfest—the annual beer guzzing, music listening, weiner schnitzel eating fall tradition in Munich.

They’ve been going for 15 years, back when the trip was a couple carloads of people. Word spread, and now people reserve a year in advance for a spot on the bus filled with Italian parents, kids, significant others, recent divorcees and sulky teenagers.

Lucca is the man in charge. Growing up, he made frequent trips to Germany with his dad who bought animals in a town called Rosenheim for a farm in Italy. Lucca became enamoured with German language and culture, and anytime he had a free minute, crossed the border to get his fix.

Now he runs the unofficial “Albertour” (derived from his last name) and every year he takes care of all the organization that goes into getting 50 Italians to a table in Munich and 2 litre pints of beer in their hands.

It’s a lot of work, but also his time to shine. Lucca’s a natural tour guide: A lanky, almost bald man, with bright blue eyes and a wide smile. He has the energy of a ten year old, and the ability to snap into problem solving mode when someone gets the vegetarian plate rather than the roast pork they ordered.

The 3 day excursion is a chance for Lucca to wear his beige german overalls, get up on stage at Oktoberfest and conduct the symphony (he’s been going so long they know him there), and be treated like a hero of every Italian on the trip. There’s inside jokes from years of beer-stained history, and though the people on the tour change slightly by the year, everybody know and loves Lucca.

He’s standing near the busdriver explaining the night’s festivities as we return to our hotel that falls just outside of German, and into Austria.

It’s the last night, and the group always puts on a show of some sort. In previous years it’s been a beauty contest or a talent show. This year, among other things, I hear these words tumble slowly out of his mouth:

“Angelina, la Canadese, va cantare un cansone Inglese (Angelina, the Canadian, will sing an english song.”

I sink deep into my seat. I’ll do anything, just don’t make me sing in front of people.

I took songwriting lessons for a couple of years when I was 13. I even performed some of my songs at a local bar open mic. I loved singing, but after being sushed to many times while singing along to the radio, many failed auditions for the city choir and a specific episode in high school where my best friend and mom both agreed I didn’t have a good voice, I decided they were probably right. I just didn’t have it. Ever since I’ve probably exaggerated how bad my voice actual is, and despise singing in front of people.

I laugh nervously at Lucca. Chances are, if I don’t make a big deal, this will go away. Lucca’s a guy who likes to joke around, right? Just look at those overalls…

I’ve gotten enough attention already from being the only international person here. From the tall, creepy man with glasses asking me “Posso domandare una cosa: Cosa fai qui? (Can I ask you something, what are you doing here?)” to the bus erupting in applause when I met them in Austria (I came from Berlin) before arriving at the hotel.

Singing infront of the entire group? Too cruel to be true.

That night, we sit in the hotel dining room finishing off our dinner. We take up half of the chunky wooden tables in the room with windows that look out onto a beautiful hilly landscape of small town Austria. Our waitresses are dressed in traditional green and white dresses with their busts spilling out.

We are divided into groups by region of Italy. There’s the table from Venice, by far the most obnoxious and loud, two Bologna tables (Northern italy), the Reggio Nell’Emilia table, a city North of Bologna, and the kids’ table.

Lucca, who sits at our table, is always bouncing around doing damage control.

Maria-Grazia, his wife, is a tall, lanky bird with a witchy nose and thick, untamed black hair. She’s always lurking around, screeching at people with her high-pitched voice.

“Adesso, facciamo le preparazione per la spetaccolo (Now let’s start the preparations for the show,” says Lucca, standing on the stage above the dining room. “Tutti le pays di Italia devono cantare un canzone tipico della regione (Every part of Italy ha sto sing a song typical of their city.”

Okay. Group singing I can do.

“Sarebbe un po di balla country (There’ll be some country dancing).”

I wasn’t part of that.

“E la talenta internazionale (And the international talent).”

Shit.

Lucca comes over and puts a songbook in front of me. “Scegli qualcosa (Choose something),” he says, without asking whether I’m truly okay with it or not.

I get a few sympathetic looks from some of the women at the table, but no one stands up to say maybe I don’t want to do this.

I put on a brave face, hold my beer tight and flip through the song book.

It’s weird how memory works. I flip through these songs I’ve heard a million times. Elton John’s “Crocodile Rock”, Paul McCartney’s “Imagine”, but when I see the lyrics I forget the melody.

I take a swig of my Leffe and thank god I’m not paying for the beer.

There’s “California Dreamin’”, but only in Italian and I can’t remember all the English words.

I try to pick based on what could get the crowd going. There’s nothing upbeat except an Ace of Base song I’m not sure would translate so well on acoustic guitar.

There’s “Let it Be”, and “Hey Jude”, but with my flat voice, they might be kind of sleepers…

I must’ve had a panicked look on my face because one of the guy’s at the table looks at me and says casually, “Dai, Fai Yellow Submarine (C’mon, do yellow submarine).” Thanks for the advice.

All around me the Italians are going over their sheet music. At my table, everyone’s playing shy and convincing the guy with a good voice to sing most of it solo.

Lucca comes over and asks if I’ve picked something. “Um, ohhh..,” I manage some sort of answer which leaves him satisfied enough to send me to the stage where the guitar players are waiting.

There are three: one, I learn later, a classically trained professional guitarist, another, a middle-aged blonde-haired man with a passion for music, and the third, a acned teenage boy who’d rather be playing in a garage band.

They ask me what I chose. I fumble the same answer again, and the blonde guy takes the book from me. “Facciamo Let it Be? (Let’s do “Let it be?” he says. “Una bella cansone (A beautiful song).”

I let them take the lead and we go through the song once.

“Voi cantereste con me? Will you sing with me?” I ask at the end.

“Non lo so come pronunciare le parole (I don’t know how to pronunce the words),” says the blonde guy.

“Non e bello quando noi cantiamo in Inglese (It doesn’t sound good when we sing in English,” says the professional guitarist.

The next half hour is a blur of trying to get more drunk and reminding myself that nobody really cares how this goes, and at least, in the end, I live in another country.

The people who really don’t want to sing get to be judges. The three guys, my cousin included, take their place on the side of the stage. Lucca announces we’re about to begin, and I go grab another beer.

The Venetians kick things off with a melancholy song about riding in a gondola. The judges jokingly walk off stage within the first couple seconds it sounds so bad. To me, they sound pretty good.

I have no idea when I’m going to be called up, but until then, my heartrate won’t go down to the level of a normal audience member.

The country dancers do a couple sleepy numbers and then, from where I’m sitting at a table to the side of the stage, I hear the word “internazionale.”

I’m up.

“Questo e cattivo (This is mean),” I hear myself say, as I get up on stage. I make the guitar boys stand around me near the front of the stage, and after a series of awkward attempts to hold the book so everyone can see it, Lucca squats down in front and holds it open.

The blonde guy must’ve caught on to how nervous I am. While strumming the opening chord, he hums the starting note, which brings back memories of a particularly mortifying audition for grease in high school when I sang all of happy birthday off key.

Off I go.

I hear my voice in my head but I don’t know if anyone can hear me.

As usual, when I’m nervous, I overcompensate.

I move my hands like I’m conducting the audience, especially at the chorus. I have no idea how people are looking at me: with pity, admiration or embarrassment. I’m picturing them all naked.

When it ends, I take a bow (I think), and thank the guitar guys profusely (maybe they played so loud they drowned out my voice).

I sit back down at my table with that adrenaline rush the rest of my table can feel. A couple people tell me good job. I smile politely and give an overwhelmed look.

After five minutes my performance is long forgotten after a guy from tReggio Nell’Emilia with an incredible voice leads the group’s song.

Then the classical guitar player busts out an amazing tarantella, and people look from him to each other with expressions of “isn’t he amazing???”

In the end, I win the prize for most emotion filled performance. I don’t know what the means, but can only imagine I looked like a clown waving my hands around and smiling like a maniac.

Once the show is finished, Lucca’s sister teaches a group country dance lesson, and some of the room files out for a good night’s sleep.

The blonde guitar player calls me up to the stage. He asks enthousiastically if I’ll sing “Hey Jude.” I’ve just country-danced country with a 50-year-old for the past twenty minutes. My ice is broken.

I get up there and surely do shame to a beautiful song. This time, I don’t really care. I forget sections, fall flat on notes and make the guys sing in their broken english.

“Ba ba, ba ba ba…baaaaaaa,” I sing like a fool, trying to hit that top note and failing.

I realize my voice isn’t the point. They have classically trained professional guitar man for that job.

The point is I’m foreign, and I can pronounce the words to beautiful songs they can’t. Finally, my talent is…natural.

That night, I went to bed singing.

“Hey Anggggggg…don’t make it hardddddddddddddddd.”

My eyes burn.

I’m surrounded by rows  of ceramics: plates, vases, ashtrays. There’s something about these grey warehouse walls and the vast space filled with shelving that makes everything look the same.

I hate buying souvenirs.

I’m with my Cousin, who lives in Northern Italy, his wife, and ten-year-old son in a small South Western Sicilian town called Caltagirone (http://www.pbase.com/bauer/caltagirone, check out the pictures, my souvenir to you). It’s late August, and we’re visiting his parents (My great aunt&uncle) and sister (my cousin) in Sicily.

The sun is shining and we’ve just finished a delicious “granita a frutti di bosco”, a high-class slushy made with blueberries and rasberries, typical of the region. Everything is going well, until I feel the need to commemorate how well it’s going by buying things.

It starts at the top of 142 stairs. Caltagirone is known for its staircase leading up to Santa Maria church, each step framed by cermaic tiles.

Once I get to the top,  my adrenaline’s pumping, I’m feeling in love with Italy, and convienently, there’s a souvenir shop a few steps down.

This isn’t your eiffel tower rubber keychain souvenir store either. We’re authentic cermaics from a small town not even some of the most Italians of Italians have been to. Even a cheap-ass like me knows it’s time to spend…

What do I decide to buy? Obviously a gift for my Italian cousins I’m with who come here everytime they’re in Sicily. Obviously.

I hate buying souvenirs because I’m bad at it. I want everything to be meaningful. I can’t buy a souvenir, it has to buy me. It has to sell me on the fact that its colours, its form, its very being is exactly right for you, you and you.

This goes inherently against the nature of souvenirs: designed to be cheap reminders that you thought of your loved ones in a place they might never go to…for 5 minutes and euros.

In this case, I make a worse mistake. I try to make a souvenir into the most meaningful thing of all: a gift.

I spot an espresso set painted with lemons and blue swirls. I remember my cousin’s wife saying she has an entire set of lemon dishware from the town. It’s perfect. I’ll add the missing piece.

I give 25£ to a dodgy-looking guy claiming to have made all the ceramics and walk out the store rich is smugness.

After joining my cousin and his wife at the bottom of the stairs, this feeling ends a block later when we arrive at their favourite, authentic, ceramic store.

I watch in horror as my cousin’s wife buys some lemon-decorated plates that are smaller, and match her set at home. As she laments over the fact she can’t buy as many as she likes, I let my golden opportunity to “buy some for my mom” pass, feeling too weighted down by the bag in my hand.

The regret doesn’t end end here. For the grand finale, they take me to a warehouse, announcing it’s the best, cheapest place to buy ceramics in Caltagirone. When in Rome…follow a Roman.

Here I realize not only did I buy the wrong pattern of lemon, but I got ripped off. As is the case with most things sold from a warehouse, I see the same set for less than half the price I paid.

Like a guy with a small penis, I look to compensate.

I notice my cousin and his wife bringing armloads of things to the cash, and I start thinking of people back home I could by things for. People who will think what I buy them is cool by virtue that it comes from far away.

I stare for awhile at a modern looking ceramic ashtray splashed with bright colours. I like it. I have friends who would gladly impress guests by saying their ashtray is Sicilian. Maybe I should get two? What the hell…maybe five?

My cousin, who demands attention by virtue of his size, walks by and says dismissingly the ashtray is a poor attempt to modernize an old design. The authentic stuff are the ceramics with traditional blues, yellows and greens.

Reluctantly I take a walk down the aisles, one cermaic blurring into the next. I try to appreciate the classical style of decorating, with fruits and nature, but I don’t have an aunt Gertrude with a country home that needs more flair…

I slyly wander back to the ashtrays, and look both ways to make sure my cousin isn’t lingering. I alternate for a while between picking it up, picking it down, justifying why I shouldn’t buy it, justifying why I should buy more than one.

I settle, as I normally do, with a rational in between. I quickly take an ashtray to the cash and pay for it like I’m making a drug deal.

That night, I can’t get to sleep. I’m thinking about my other cousin, the one who lives in Sicily, and how I haven’t bought them anything to thank them for their hospitality.

There’s that tooney I have at the bottom of my backpack..? I toss and turn, trying to avoid what seems to be my only option.

I can’t…that’s stupid…they live a stonesthrow from the town…but it looks modern…my cousin is a modern woman, she even reads a magazine called donna moderna…zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

I wake up early the next morning and go straight to van. I open the door, reach into my bag and pull out the ashtray. Inside, I place it on the kitchen table, and write a thank you note.

Dear reader: if you were hoping for an Italian souvenir, I’m sorry. I’ll pick you up some maple syrup from the Ottawa airport.

Ray looks like he just woke up in a place he didn’t fall asleep in. He surveys the room, bug-eyed. The walls are covered top to bottom in pink fur and plastic beads. Bright pink, like the inside of a neon uterus and light up by gaudy chandeliers. Techno music pulses and the room is sweaty with men standing around, anticipating sex. Ray is fresh meat on a conveyor belt.

Walking into Roses Bar is being transported into another world. From the street this place is unnoticeable; a door with a small rose lit up like a seven eleven sign. Inside gays, lesbians, oddballs and eccentrics bump elbows under the pink glow. There’s no windows, just a small front and back room, packed wall to wall.

We’re in Berlin. It’s a crisp September night, and I’ve dragged two Australian boys, Ray and Adam, and a Montreal-Canadian girl I’ve just met at the hostel for drinks on my birthday.

None of us know the city, but my friend who spent a year here compiled a list of must-do’s. Going to Roses was number one.

I didn’t consider that Zack’s favourite bar would obviously be gay, over-the-top and a shocker for these jockey Australians. I was more focused on navigating us through the metro, and streets with numbers that jump randomly from 4 to 187.

We b-line it to the bar and squirm our way through the crowd to find a place to sit. We squeeze half a buttcheek each a small couch in the corner beside a table. Ray sits on a stool, facing the entire room. He’s higher up than the rest of us, and there’s a picture of a lit-up baby jesus behind him.

He sits with his arms crossed sheepishly across his tight white t-shirt that says “Viva Vida.” He’s a big guy, with bulging muscles from working on his parents’ farm and a full head of brown hair. His face, with chiseled cheekbones, a strong nose, and gooey blue eyes, always has an innocent expression. He looks tasty as a wiener schitznel and doesn’t even know it.

“I can’t look up,” he says through tight lips in his soft Australian accent.

“Why?” I say, sitting beside him on the couch.

“People keep staring at me.” People meaning men. “I’ve never been to a place like this,” he says, genuinely frightened.

“You’ve never been to a gay bar?” his friend Adam says loudly, with a harsher accent. He’s rounder than Ray and has spiky hair and crooked teeth. “You never been to (insert Australian gay bar name) back home?” he asks, surprised.

Ray shakes his head.

“I love gay bars,” says Adam too enthousiastically to be true, and casually leans back on the couch.

I’m feeling, and pardon the pun, cocky. I’m high on the fact that I brought these kids to this strange place because I have a cool friend who lived in Berlin. I feel in-the-know, and like this is exactly where we should be in this pulsing city.

I remember Zack saying the bartender at Roses loves giving free drinks to cute girls. After spilling my gin and tonic after a few sips, I confidently strut up to the overweight bartender with a buzz cut and slicked back hair. “I spilled my drink,” I say, coyly. “Can I get another?”

“No problem,” she grunts, in a thick German accent. “But you have to pay for it.”

“Of course,” I say nonchalantly, trying not to hide my disappointment. 8 euros in the hole and no birthday buzz.

I walk back to the couch beside Ray, who is sitting on his stool with the expression that someone might throw a pie at him any minute, and start chatting up the German guy beside me.

“There’s an old man staring at me,” says Ray, tugging at my arm.

“Pretend I’m your girlfriend,” I say, laughing, and brushing him off.

Across the room I notice an older Indian women and two young German men looking over at me and whispering.

One of the guys is gorgeous. I smile flirtatiously, and raise my glass.

I’m  feeling more than happy to indulge some attention, and the trio and I shoot glances back and fourth.

The woman flashes me a flirty smile, and gestures me to come over. I realize the cute guy is gone, and her other friend is playing wingman.

Even still, I’m a few gin and tonics down the shoot and decide to play along. I make some Italian gestures with my hands that mean “what do you want?” but can easily be interpreted as “you’re driving me crazy.”

Ray, who’s been watching the whole interaction, leans down from his stool. “Now you’re in trouble,” he says.

I laugh confidently, as to say, don’t worry about it Ray, I can handle myself at a gay bar.

The woman keeps waving me over and I’ve indulged the attention too long to ignore her. I  sheepishly gesture that I can’t, pointing to Ray and implying we’re together. I try to keep talking with the German beside me, but I’m drawn in by her hungry stare.

It’s my birthday, I’m feeling good, and in Zac’s honour, I decide to walk over.

“I’m going,” I say suddenly to Ray.

“I don’t think you should,” he says. “Anyway, if you’re going to do it, at least find someone better looking.”

Ray just doesn’t understand. The Indian women is beautiful. Sure, she’s older and a little short n’ squat with that over 40 haircut, but, she has really nice eyes..? I take a hard swig of my drink g&t, which may be to blame for this whole situation, and strut confidently towards her.

When I worm my way to where she’s sitting I smile and give her a kiss on both cheeks. She pulls me in close and asks me where I’m from.

“Italy,” I hear myself say, in a weird accent I think sounds like an Italian speaking English but which someone later informs me sounds Russian. Apparently after having spent the last month and a half only speaking Italian I’m reluctant to switch back.

I don’t catch where she’s from, but she has a strong accent of some kind. I give a kiss to her friend, and he smiles knowingly at me. Her eyes burn holes in my back and after some small talk she pulls me in close.

“You’re so cute,” she says, and her eyes twinkling at me. “I have a hotel room…”

I shake my head shyly. “No, I can’t.”

“C’mon,” she says, pulling me in tighter. “Do you like women?”

“Uh, yeah,” I hear myself say to be “open.”“ I like men too though,” I add, quickly.

“Have you ever tried it with women?” she asks, flirtatiously.

“Yeah,” I say, lying. “But I have a boyfriend here.” I point vaguely to where Ray and the German guy are sitting.

“Which one?” she asks, intensely.

“The left,” I say, pointing at Ray.

“Him?” she says, disapprovingly. “Too bad.”

Now she has her hand on my thigh and is whispering “C’mon,” in my ear.

I look desperately at her friend and say “She’s crazy.” He nods, and gives me a look like, “you asked for it.”

After a series of false promises: “I’ll come back and find you tomorrow nights” and “I just can’t get away while he’s heres,” I pry myself from her grip and say bye.

“You know it’s a gay bar,” says her friend, as I pass by and shoot him an overwhelmed expression.

Back at the couch I sit down and lean into Ray who’s been watching the whole thing.

“I told you it was a bad idea,” he says, laughing.

“Shut up,” I say, tight-lipped. “Act like my boyfriend.”