…he (speaking of the original trance inductor) either wanted this outcome – the same as I might – or I’ve done it despite hypnotic suggestion/coercion.
Note: this post as a work in progress.
…..
I remember its being the day after Frank Zappa died (4 Dec. 1993), ironically, the night before that having sent a prank phone call to my second hypnotist, mockingly playing a recording of Frank Zappa’s “Central Scrutinizer”, an episode that I discussed in part One of Trance adventures. That is, I remember this being the first time that I was thrown off the U. Mass. campus, a prohibition of two years by the campus police.
As I played “The Central Scrutinizer” I was called by a NYC police captain who told me that they had a trap on my phone, that Naomi did not want to press charges, she just wanted me to stop prank calling her.
The next day I was called by U. Mass campus police to come in and discuss the matter of my campus activities with the police captain. I must say that he seemed to be somewhat sympathetic, tried to be a bit helpful even. He explained that I was being banned from campus by combination of the frizzy haired mediocrity that I accidentally harassed more than I really felt interested to do (because I didn’t realize in two instances that this was not a different interracial couple); and for my prolific postings of “White Women For Sale!” throughout the campus and town. The police captain tried to persuade me that there were different ways to protest other than confronting and harassing people (i.e., interracial couples). I responded that this was a relatively safe way to make a point where my voice was otherwise completely blocked, and the conventional academic route through an advanced degree was not practically available to my concerns. With my documented banishment in hand, I was calmly resigned to the two year ban as a prompt to look elsewhere for a base of operations.
Nevertheless, fate had me malinger and cause mischief in Amherst for another year and a half (discussed in part one), until time came for the big trance at the Al-Anon meeting in July of 1995. Fate called me to Europe, to try to reconnect with my homelands and people.
I’ve briefly mentioned another trance that I fell into spontaneously, years before, five years before the grand trance at the Alanon meeting in Amherst, Mass. With Don, the German American Harvard trained psychologist whose services I sought out to help me work through Naomi’s intervention, I fell into trance. Besides seeing that I’d encounter Ann Richards, who would pleasantly respond, Yheaas! to my identifying her as “silver foot in the mouth” on a walking bridge in Venice; and, being prompted to its humor by his good sense thereof, as I would compare the prices in my future adventure through Italy, a Salerno supermarket in particular, where “Succo di Banana” (banana juice) would be only 1,500 lire. And there, in Salerno, I would meet Magda Fuhrman, who would query me with stern skepticism, “you said something about a house?” Don would laugh as I imitated her impatient voice in response to my trying to impress her with my resources – speaking of a couple houses that my father owned on Newark’s North 11th Street.
One of the houses was that of my late grandmother at 457, and the other was one that my father picked up the mortgage on a block away, just about next to Bloomfield Ave. That would be where I would land in 1996 after finally having to give up any hopes of using my Amherst ties as a vehicle to further academic pursuit.
Newark’s North Ward was one of a few once apparently vibrant Italian American communities along with Iron Bound and The First Ward – which was a classic example of what E. Michael Jones talked about, as the powers that be visited “urban renewal” upon the Catholic communities in order to break them up by bringing in blacks from the south, providing high rise housing projects for them (incubators) and scattering the Catholic allegiances, diffusing them into the suburbs where they could not effectively organize as ethnogroups against the establishment.
It’s hard to exaggerate how bad most of Newark became as a result of this policy. As my father would drive me around the city as a kid, vast swathes of it looked like America had just lost WWII. My father would tell me what a beautiful city that Newark was and he seemed oblivious to what it was now: A blighted post industrial nightmare of burned down buildings, lots filled with garbage, dirty concrete pavement everywhere. The North Ward, which bordered on Bloomfield, was not quite as bad – still mostly Italian, but there was nothing inspiring, maybe a grudging ethnic Italian market or overly well lit cafe to hint pathetically at the culture once there. Sad place.
It wasn’t always sad, as I was reminded by a teller at the bank on the corner of Bloomfield Ave and North 11th. “It used to be the place to be. Not just a bedroom community and easy commute to New York City, but having many things going in its own right.” That bank was the place where I waited on line, observing and remarking from a passive distance to clearly indicate that I was no threat, “is that an Italian girl with a nigger baby? What a shame.” But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. A little background is in order first.
I was born in the North Ward in September 1961, but my parents moved me and my three older siblings to Montclair in time for Christmas. Montclair is a green suburb of New York, with a broad demographic from lower middle class white neighborhoods, some poor black areas as well, but also some of the most wealthy estates in America as you made you way up the Watchung Mountains overlooking New York City. While I grew up in a lower middle class White area and went through primary school experiencing only a sprinkling of blacks, it was enough to know that you didn’t want anything to do with them as a sane White person. The Montclair Board of Education’s decision to bus White kids to the black part of town for “school integration” in 1971 put an end to any doubt about that. It was like being sent to school in some kind of planet of the apes, some kind of wild monkey cage. And alas, Newark was still there; with our visits to our grandmother every Sunday on North 11th street serving a reminder enough of what loomed.
One block away from North 11the Street was a Newark City Stadium. That was where the National Guard parked its armored vehicles when L.B.J. called in the troops to quash the black riots in the summer of 1967. Police had gotten rough with a black taxi cab driver.
Black riots would erupt in Newark again in April 1968, when news came over that Martin Luther King had been shot. I found the disruption of my cartoons for the announcement to be annoying, especially with the announcer saying “I repeat, Dr. Martin Luther King is dead” four or five times, as if I was supposed to care. I may not have found him as directly offensive as Malcom X saying that “the black man would rule”, but it was already clear to me in my childhood that King’s “dream” of coming together with blacks would be a nightmare for me and the people I cared for.
Had I been a teenager at that time, going through a rebellious stage where Jimi Hendrix music seemed to channel my masculine rage and creative vision, I may have been at Newark Symphony Hall, where Hendrix played an abbreviated show amidst the riots the day after King was shot. Legend has it that Hendrix sullen performance “for a friend” moved the audience and even police to tears. But I would eventually be brought back to the hard line through interactive experience that something like music, no matter how good, was not worth my women, people, way of life.
Anyway, after I was (understandably) asked to leave by Jim and there was no hope left in squeezing anything more from Amherst, I threw caution to the wind and went to Italy for six months in my first effort to escape from America. Having exhausted my means, I had to come back to the U.S. by February 1996. I took up my father’s offer for me to stay in the three family house that he’d bought on North 11th, down the block from my grandmother’s old house. So there I was, back in Newark.
My father wanted to see if I would be an industrious asset, if I would just start cleaning, painting and spiffing the place up. But that wasn’t going to happen. My mind could never be devoted to practical matters of making anything work in America, keeping the S.S. Mulatto Supremacist functioning and on course for the singular and massive anti-racist atrocity it was perpetrating.
I had this overwhelming priority of mindset particularly after my experiences of America, its academic trajectory and by contrast just having just spent six months in Italy; knowing from that it was sill possible to live in a nation predominated by its native European concerns; that mattered infinitely to me.
The sequence of events is a little bit murky after all these years, but I’ve already discussed it in the first trance thread; after the episode when my father detonated my primordial rage with his stupid incitement – he was going to teach me about “accountability” ..and with that the chthonic element that he kicked to reaction decided to tell him what it thought about my brother’s kids – Despite having made myself radioactive, I had to go from Amherst to his house on the Jersey shore in order to fetch my Passport.
When I arrived, my sister-in-law was there with her son and she scurried out to the car with him and locked the doors while my father was repeating “call the police” like a mantra, as he held my Passport in his hand. I snatched it from him and told him to shut up; as if I was going to risk my well being in order to enact some sort of revenge against my brother’s little shits.
Anyway, I was now as set as I was going to be; and within days I would be headed for Italy on time for the feast of August 5th in my grandfather’s village, Calabritto. “Mother of the mist” is the name of the mountain adjacent to Calabritto, as it peaks through the clouds with a small church atop; where every August 5th a procession carries the virgin mother up to /or down from the mountaintop church depending where it had been left the prior year.
I was going there, of course, with the idea of finding an Italian wife to live, gain citizenship and have kids with; to do my part in rekindling Italy’s birth rate, which at that time was among the lowest in the world; an alarming fact, if you care about the people, as I did and when compared to the exponential birthrates of sub-Saharan Africa.
Calabritto, Caposele, Materdomini, August, 1995
It is difficult to recall the first trance experience that I’d have gone into at this point – difficult to recall more for the psychological embarrassment than chronology, although that’s not entirely clear either; but the chronology is not really important and I think that I’ve more or less got it, so..
What brought on embarrassing trance expressions, when they were embarrassing, was not knowing my weaknesses and limitations; as if I was supposed to be a superman of liberal virtue.
Indeed, not knowing that I could not perhaps withstand as much stress and alcohol consumption as others was part of what would push me over the threshold of normalcy into quasi trance states which moved into psychological states beyond my full awareness and control. I made a practice of making myself comfortable in a town that I arrived in, having some beers in Salerno and then in Calabritto when I arrived there a day or two later; even though drinking beer is not exactly the Italian custom, it provided a comfortable familiarity to a different situation for me.
So, when I wasn’t a bit drunk, I’d be hung over and stressed, pressed by the messianic service of post hypnotic suggestion to follow my fate.
As I walked on the one main street of Materdomini a few boys whisked by me on a scooter, shouting at me “for shame!” … I didn’t know what they were talking about. …
I had drunk plenty of Peroni (beer) for the feast of August 5th in Calabritto; stayed as long as I could in my cousin Emilia’s quasi extra apartment on the old market square – an apartment, by the way, which should belong to my family as my father had paid off the leans and debts amassed by his grandfather, my great-grandfather, Arcangelo Corbo; while Emelia (who had lived rent free with my grandmother for years at 457 North 11th in Newark) finagled the paperwork to her ownership – but anyway, that was all the more reason for her to promote a discouraging angle against me getting situated in Calabritto.
So I took recourse with cousins from my grandmother’s side of the family in Caposele, figuring that I might network for a wife through them. But instead that is where I would go into a rather stigmatizing trance in my stressed, alcohol hazed machismo over the matter. After that mess, I’d get a room at hotel “Sete Bello”, owned by another cousin up the road in Materdomini. And that is where I’d be prompted that there was something I should be “for shame” about …as the trance episode had been suppressed from what minimal awareness I had when I was under.
I must say that I was going about my hunt for a wife all the wrong way – if the goal was acquiring a good wife, that is. As a man, you should be going about your business making your life better and preparing the financial grounds for family formation; then keep your eyes open and be ready for the good opportunities that present, as they will on occasion.
But not being satisfied with my own orientation and understanding of the anti-White political circumstances, nor with others understanding of it, the search for a wife became blurred with politicking, and this translated to a rather dyslexic reaction to women, where I would shy away from the good choices, not trusting in the circumstances surrounding them, seeing them as insufficient, like good berths on a sinking ship, while I desperately tried to gain agreement with women more broadly and arbitrarily. But it is also true that I had a physical concept of a woman that I wanted, not altogether common, though it does exist among Italians.
I wanted to test women a bit; I wanted the women least disposed (you can say genetically as well, then), least disposed to go with blacks…and so protect my legacy from that as well.
So, between following what I perceived to be my fate, and holding out for the possibility that I would be able to be very selective in the kind of woman I took, even physically, I was narrowing my chances and passing up some really good wife material.
And I brought those motives and that mindset into a talk with Guidannine and Geraldine at their home in Caposele. Hence, there are a few prefigurative ideas of mine parleyed in post hypnotic suggestion which manifest trance with them. Firstly, there was the idea that I’d brought from my very first trance – the one with Wally Weikert way back in 1985. That is, being a quintessential continental European, I/we were part of an ecological buffering of Europe from Africans and other non-Europeans (“you don’t like niggers”).
Adding more of a personal touch to this positioning, I brought with me a yearning for a very under represented and under appreciated kind of female attractiveness in America. Too much of the cute victim look, small nose, straight up and down features, blonde hair and big boobs. While the cutesy, victim look could be offset some by another look, the “official” look in these North West European peoples – i.e., the long nose and serious adult woman look – I had a yearning for something more radical in female attractiveness, and I’d seen it in some Italian woman. It struck me as meaningful in the sense that Africans could have this radicalness as well, and the dynamism of it (e.g., long extended chins, big noses that weren’t always the ugly, flaring nostril type) could explain some of the attraction of miscegenators, as nature abhors a vacuum in the ecological scheme of things. Thus, I had this idea that there needed to be more of this radical Italian look to offset what might otherwise be an unbuffered, unmediated difference in Africans, making them more intriguingly exotic than they need to be.
I suppose that I was looking for something like the female counterpart to my grandfather.
I was also equipped with the idea that Italy had the lowest birthrate in the world and needed help; particularly as the population of Nigeria was tripling. Further, that Italians had nothing to do with slavery and therefore were in better position to throw off guilt trips about it and speak more candidly about niggers.
We were in an awkward position as Italians in America. White enough to take blame from the PC battalions for White privilege and misdeeds, but not exactly White enough to have an easy inside track to what White privilege there might actually be. Thus, I sought to protect my Italian relatives and to so my part in the population dearth and ecological buffering.
It was a few days after the August 5th feast, and quite frankly, as with most of my trances, a combination of being hung-over and emotionally stressed precipitated the trance that I was about to fall under. But to begin, I was trying to explain over the language gap my concerns, what I was looking for and why. I told Guidannine and Geraldine that I was looking for a woman with a tough look, who looked like a buffalo with a big nose. I’d actually seen a woman like this fleetingly, on a Vespa down a furtive alley; but I never saw her again. She was a rare type and nobody knew who she might be. The closest thing otherwise was one of my Mattia cousins, but she was spoken for and not the least bit friendly besides. Then I began voicing my concern for Geraldine’s young daughters, Guidanna and Annalisa. The stress of that is probably where I started to go under trance.
Not that I would care to specify otherwise, but the Barbara Streisand type nose can raise eyebrows in our circles; thus, I will specify that the woman on thee left is not family. Annalisa is the dark-haired girl on the right in this video.
As my memory of it came back to me after this trance episode, I recall…
Though I might not rather recall, a thing that I went into under trance as I had in my grad class, and I think that I’d go into one or two more times in trance episodes yet to come…
The only saving grace is that I was indeed, in trance and not in control. Not that by legitimate traditional standards that makes it acceptable or even forgivable. An adult man is supposed to have control over his faculties, and I can understand that standard; may not be forgiving myself of someone else… but as it was myself and I truly was not in control, I have no choice but to forgive myself; and note that after one or two more episodes like this, it would never happen again. I healed myself and was no longer susceptible in decades that followed.
It was the Casale’s that my brother and I had stayed with way back in the summer of 1972, when my parents tried to give us some of our European culture following my bussing to a largely black school on the other side of town for Montclair’s policy of “integration” back in 1971.
Now it was the summer of 1995, and I was back, desperate to reconnect with my Italian roots after a brief taste in a(n encouraged) vacation with my father in 1992. I came to Vincenzo (my grandmother’s nephew), his wife Guidanine, Gerardo and his wife, Geraldine in August 1995, intent on riding the credibility of my recent, even if failed post graduate experience in the Caposele/ Materdomini and Calabritto area. Along with getting myself situated and hopefully a wife, I wanted to protect them from what I experienced as the genetic horror going on in America. To give them the real dope on what was going on there and some means to keep their kids on good course. Since 1972, Geraldine had married Gerardo and had three kids, a a nice boy, Vincenzo and two delightful girls, Guidana and Analisa. In this episode, I found myself talking to their grandmother, Guidanine and Gerardo’s wife, Geraldine, who informed me that she was related to me by way of Maria Giuseppa Cecere as well.
I bought Geraldine’s son primer books on Aristotle and Kant, to give him philosophical grounding to pursue a solid direction. And I would try to segue awkwardly into a stigmatic non sequitur to try to explain to Geraldine and Gudianine the horrors of having blacks imposed on us as European peoples, that its not like what they might see on TV. But before imploring them not to allow Guidana and Analisa to slide into this black hole, I went into my description of what kind of woman I sought and why; and my presented warrant, a corny chest thumping bit about how I was the re-manifestation of my great grandfather, Archangelo, a patriarchal authority figure. In the beginnings of a trance state, the stress of this fraudulent muster of supernatural authority sent me into an altered state for real, but not one with much of the redeeming, verifiable psychic phenomenon of other trances. Pretty much only the stigma. One fortunate thing for me was that Geraldine was a good person, ready to suspend disbelief in my having a bonfide message.
Sensing that perhaps, I was banging on my chest like an idiot going on about how I was manifesting the spirit of my great grandfather, Arcangelo, a patriarch, demanding the wife of my choosing and obedience from the local Italian girls, insisting that her girls Analisa and Guidana must not adopt the nigger loving ways of American girls. …and with the stress of overstressing my capacity for dominance and self assertion, I blacked out more deeply for a moment, same as when I went into trance in the grad school class, wavering in and out of consciousness…
I come out of blacked-out consciousness to the prompt of Guidanine moaning in pity, I’ve got my legs spread and I’m rubbing my member through my pants (at least I didn’t have them down!) and squealing teasingly with a giddy smile on my face. Again, fortunately, Geraldine was cool about it (didn’t run screaming for the police the way that Trudy did in grad class). I regained consciousness enough to stop myself from this of course shameful involuntary act which represented nothing of my deliberate self. However, the awareness put me into a modality where I felt that to explain myself more and call for empathy. So in the anxiety and ambiguity of this passive aggressive state I wavered from hard assertion to whimpering and crying confessions.
Having fessed to them some fairly perverted sexual thoughts in my life (never homo, by the way) and experiments with drugs, including psychedelics (never opiates or much speed, never really over-indulging in anything except alcohol at times), I will spare myself further confession to you, my reader, as fessing up to this stuff to my old world Italian cousins and aunts is bad enough. When I entered back into more consciousness, I believe that my hope was to explain to them that there were reasons for my difficulties and experimentations but that I was harmless, not going to commend drugs or wayward sexuality to the children of Caposele/Calabritto. Of course, you ask, why the confession at all. Well, these trance states are like being a cornered animal in an utterly ambiguous mental state; one feels sussed-out to the umpteenth degree and is just desperate to purge oneself of any potential guilt accusation and to find the way to innocence. It’s a form of tortured confession, if you will. While I managed to achieve pity from Guidanine, as opposed to her calling the police, and Geraldine was kind enough to appreciate some of the paranormal aspects coming through me, neither was I making a good case for the kind of guy you’d like to have in your village.
This was an awkward place to stop, but as you see, it is heavy going; and there is much more to come in these trance adventures, which require my placing incidents in their correct time, not always easy to sort out and then reflection upon them in observation of significant implications.
However, after a break to attend to other matters and the holidays, I shall be resuming this post.
So, for the first week of August 1995, I was treated by cousins in Caposele like family and given a place to stay, I guess for about two weeks in this sort of guest carriage house over their garage; my brother and I had stayed with the Casales in the summer of 1972 (these villages were in a different world then, let me tell you). Though my father and grandmother had accommodated them in the US when their family was there, I still did not want to overstay my welcome, especially as I was an adult now with a free will to party, i.e., drink a little hard than was the local norm. Speaking of that, Peroni beer has a property about it that went straight to the center of my brain, quite powerfully, and produced quite a hangover as well. Like I said, this stress apparently precipitated some of the trance states.
Imbibe I did, like an American, not like an Italian, relaxing as I might in the feast of The Mother of the Mist over in the adjacent village of Calabritto, my grandfather’s village. Cousin Justine, a bar owner, was ok with it; and nobody was bothered much, only annoyed, and put off understandably, if I could not remember their names. A tactless drunken fool, I could not remember the name of a girl that I was trying to chat-up, even though she’d already told me twice. Worse, I could not remember the names of adult cousins (in fairness the two brothers looked similar) as I chatted on separate occasions with them and some towns bureaucrats who seemed ready to put some weight behind my claim to family property. By the end of the second episode, the cousin embarrassed me, asking if I remembered his name now, making the whole idea of my familiarity and family ties to the area seem tenuous and crass.
Once I had left my cousin’s carriage house in Caposele, My cousin Emilia did let me stay in her, well, kind of a garage with a bed in it, right on the old market of Calabritto. Again I was treated with reciprocity like family to begin with; and rightfully so, as Emilia had not only lived rent free with my grandmother in the US for years, but had managed to usurp a property claim to an apartment that should have gone to my father, who had paid of the debts of his grandfather, Arcangelo, once the largest property owner in Calabritto, who lost it all for a drinking and gambling habit. So, when Emilia got wind that I was interested in the righteousness of my family claim to an apartment in Calabritto, I was subtly told that she and her sister Angelina would be needing this garage in a few days. I’d have to look into a cousin’s hotel in Materdomini.
A frazzled outlook, too late to re-connect with community support that I sought beyond intense nuclear family provocation and incitement…
And so I took recourse to the third village of the area, Materdomini, where just about everyone was a cousin of some sort, same as with Caposele and Calabritto. My grandmother’s nephew Chich Malanga owned a hotel there, Sete Bello, were I could stay at an affordable rate. This imperfect answer to getting a toe hold proved less secure than I thought when I emerged from the hotel on one of the first mornings there to hear some kids wizzing by on a Vespa, saying to me, “for shame!” …so, gossip had gotten around quickly. I tried to talk to one of the none too abundant pretty girls that I saw on the street and was greeted in Italian with “not a chance.” The proprietor of the Sete Bello restaurant that evening insisted that a young Spanish cook be introduced to me to establish their anti-racist bonafides.
You see, my father’s fantastic, volcanic temper tantrums and histrionics, flamboyant assertion and commands void explanation, even ability to communicate a coherent idea, even if he wanted to, was a largely a form of display and entertainment to break up the boredom and monotony of the village life back in the day… but back in the day, I would have been ensconced among people closely related and sympathetic, helping to pick up the pieces of a shattered mind; so it would not have been the handicap that it was in America – where there is nobody to help, but rather a few hundred million competitors out for their own selves.
My frazzled outlook was too late to re-connect with community support that I sought beyond intense nuclear family provocation and incitement…
I was getting the conscious impression now that if I were to pursue my own interests, fertility or otherwise, that I would have to pursue it, along with my racial politicking in the broader Italia. I already knew that I wanted to get back to Salerno and parts further south, Sicilia in particular.
Salerno was always like a home base for me in Italy; even more than Calabritto, because it was ensconced in my native area, yet a big enough city, providing anonymity from the nasty gossip of family villages; While the hostel where I would stay comported the challenges of international travelers that I was unfortunately used to having to take-on (people more familiar with the issues, whether they were liberal or not) along with the occasional normalizing, corrective effects of their varied perspectives. On this particular trip, August 1995, I had not stayed long in Salerno to begin, but fled there after the alienating experiences in Calabritto chased me on my fated way.
As a step in our trip to Calabritto back in 1972, my brother and I had stayed a night with a cousin in Salerno, not at a hostel, but as independent adult, hosteling became normal accommodation.
And so I was back to the Salerno hostel, my most homey base of operations of sorts; from there I would follow the whims of my romantic fancy, encouraged as it were by an undeniable sense of fate beyond trance suggestion, in foretold destiny. I will do my best to recall the sequence, but there was a bit of back and forth and exact chronology can be hard to sort, especially when it is not important; but I took a broad line of travel from August 1995 in Salerno to Sicily, viz., the Lipari Islands, Taormina, Catania, Agrigento, Canicatti, Selinunte, Sciacca, Mazara del Vallo, Trapani, Egadi islands, Palermo (esp. Mondello area), Corleone (and adjacent villages), Bagheria and then back to Catania with junkets to Aci Creale and Aci Costello (I’d already been to Siracusa back in 1993 as I’d previously described in my reverse “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy experience; where I would find profundity at the end of my vast excursion, rather than trivial familiarity). Finally, I came back to Salerno from where I’d get a train to Paris in late January 1996, as I had to get a plane back to the U.S. from there.
Although the relevant incidents, stories and implications of these events are not hard to recall, the chronology, for all the to-and-fro, can be hard to recall, and so I will block-out the locations and fill in the events as I can place them. Again, starting from my urgent return to my family’s Italian villages given the stigmatic reaction to my father’s incitement (discussed in the first part of trance adventures) that finally drove me to the almost unthinkable abandonment of America and its dream for great personal success. But though I fled to my ancient familial homes of Calabritto, Caposele, Materdomini, I was not not to be so quickly unburdened of a life time of PC stress; my strategy of trying to get comfortable upon arrival in a town or village with a beer Peroni only exacerbated my stress and proneness to the stigmatic trance states that I’d brought with me … it contributed to stigmatizing lapses in memory for names that I should recall, cousins, girls that I was trying meet … the good will of the town bureaucrat who endorsed my right to an apartment as he sat with me and a cousin (whose name I could not remember), among others; one young woman sitting at a table with me at the Calabritto village feast recognizing the significance of my great grandmother, Maria Giuseppe Cecere age 107, saying to me, “you must stay.” But all for naught, as people shied-away from me, alerting me that gossip was stigmatizing me; on a subsequent day “for shame!” decried two strange village boys of Materdomini who road by me in a scooter, apparently having gotten gossiping wind of my trance state. So I was headed back to Salerno –
Salerno, August 1995
Salerno became for me a comfortable home base in Italy, because it is big enough a city, away from family ties and deadly gossip. The hostel there was a life stream of normalcy, as tourists, mostly young, educated people, would be passing through, with interesting discussion to share.
While I have come to find that life with the benefit of internet outweighs its drawbacks more then 90%, there was one this one thing in particular that was wonderful about not having the internet when you were trying to travel and immerse yourself in a new place in order to escape from where you’d been, as I sought to escape from America; you’d have to go out of your way to know what is going on in America. You were in a different world with no internet to bring you back into immediate contact with America or anywhere you’d just as soon leave behind.
And if anywhere in the world I was akin to a native host to visitors from other parts of the world, taking a stand against liberal globalization, it was here in Salerno. But despite this comfort, Salerno was not free from the black plague and western liberal influence imposed itself, thus any attempt of intervention on my part was futile.
I brought my aesthetic arguments with me from the earliest part of life in response to an insane world, as aesthetics and the beauty of women, our women, were sensible braille if not empirical rational by which to make sense and provoke shared perception, if not grounds for an especially good argument. By the same token, it was not all lighthearted, as I liked to shock the Nordic liberal Hegelian self transcendence with some Italian Hegelian self assertion.
Thus, I would tease interlocutors that the only aesthetic advantage that blacks have over Whites as a rule, is a chin that extends out gracefully. I played down the fact that their big noses (not always the piggish, fairing nostril kind) and dynamic features can sometimes out-do Italians, played it down because Italians do capture these aesthetic delights in a way not appreciated enough by the aesthetics promoted of White America — blond hair, straight up and down facial structure, small nose, big boobs, fairly tall. Nature abhorring a void, and the genetic buffering of Italian aesthetics under represented in The US, blacks may come to seem more exotic and alluring for their difference from its preponderant Nordic White population. And so in my home base now, I’d judiciously spice these observations into conversation. Then if I felt an interlocutor was susceptible and able to handle a small shock, I would add that I do not care for the brillo hair; that I do not like the color of their skin, it is the same color as shit. Shocked, well, while there is nothing in fact so shocking as a naked White woman – I mean that’s naked – dignity brought down to natural sublimation; one cannot say the same thing about the bubble butted all too symmetrical monkey that is a naked black women. I did not know that a monkey was supposed to wear clothes. What is special? But in fact, if you get to know blacks in pattern, they do not just look like monkeys, they act like monkeys. etc.
But as with the irony of a curse, this issue would follow and confront me. On the main street of Salerno during a quite afternoon, when almost all people were in their homes for the afternoon meal and nap, a lone black sat on a bench in the center way. And it wasn’t my imagination this extended chin of the African; two teenage Italian girls stood, ogling his profile; not quite ready to approach him, I tried to intervene, to say something mean about blacks to discourage them; they barely paid any attention to me while they had been riveted to the African’s profile.
I don’t recall if it was this same time in Salerno, because Salerno has always been a hub for me in the several times that I’ve been to Italy, but it may as well have been the same visit where not even a block away from the previously mentioned episode, next to where you get the bus to Calabritto, I see a gorgeous blond woman arm and arm with a coal black. I mean, beautiful woman, not tawdry either, by all outward appearance healthy and normal, fine manner of dress, no tattoos, the kind that any White guy would be more than proud to call his wife. Obviously she was not Italian but from somewhere in Northern Europe.
At any rate, at least I can say that in this case, I was not alone in taking demonstrable issue with the coal burner as an Italian guy insisted on sitting provocatively near by her and staring at her, trying to get her to make eye contact and gain attention to his derision; while his Italian girlfriend was upset and tried to pull him away; not a bad looking girl, not as hot as the blond, but that’s not the issue; her boyfriend was right and I joined in his protest with a few choice words, which, as in the last incident, were simply ignored by the coal burners. They were unperturbed. The Italian girl was eventually able to pull her boyfriend away from his protest once I joined in; at least I’d given him a sense of support, that he was not alone. Small consolation for the destruction of 40,000 years of evolution; and for what in exchange? A monkey wife and a planet of the apes sci-fi night mare existence? More destruction of 40,000 years of evolution. No, these coal burners are not innocent and needless to say we are not being “enriched.”
Lipari Islands August/September 1995
The Lipari islands are a set of a few volcanic islands to the north of Sicily’s northeast coast. I was interested to visit given my cousin’s advice that these were beautiful places, that he’d spent his honeymoon there and in Catania. Thus equipped with the bravado of my status as American in its newly minted unipolar empire and my trance mandate to assert the justice of racial discrimination, particularly against blacks, I set upon the hostel of Lipari to assert the message.
I came into Sicily through the ghastly sight of Messina by night, dark, sooted by diesel, everything closed and shuttered with metal security shutters, no people on the streets, a deadness speaking only as an epitaph of the place where the black plague introduced its dead crew and vector to Europe in October 1347. From this ancient portal of the black plague, I ferried to the Lipari islands, where I would continue my effort to forewarn native Europeans of the next black plague.
The hostel itself was a large medieval structure; despite being well attended by international hostellers, I was practically the only one occupying a bed in a large dorm room of what must have been a hundred bunk beds. There was a court yard where hostellers would gather in the evenings to talk, share stories of their adventures, a bit of guitar playing, that sort of thing.
The first few nights were an accompaniment of the usual sorts of hostellers, some Italians, of course, an ordinary but amiable French girl (I think, can’t quite recall) who spoke perfect English, a reasonable young German guy, a young Irish guy, very friendly but unabashed, leaning decidedly my way politically, two Irish girls, not beauties but good nature showing through despite a feistiness, a bawdiness, a radiantly healthy, beautiful young woman from Denmark, a decent woman from I don’t recall which country, long blondish hair, had a slight accent but aimed to please, a frumpy but respectable young au pair from England and a young Italian guy, good natured while he enjoyed trying to be a challenge; and he had a strange “Italian” friend, who, though light skinned and not speaking any English, nor having the nigger lips or the worst kind of nigger nose, looked like a nigger indeed; even his friend remarked, “is a Nijer with White skin.” Never mind, not much to say besides a bit of uncomfortable ambience to that. Besides the proprietors, a gnarly and unattractive middle aged Italian man and wife, these were the main cast of characters for the time that I spent there.
During the first night the amiable French girl brought forth an enthusiastic profusion of travel advice about the islands: Lipari island, with its medieval structure4s and cobblestone main square on the port, understandably most popular; Stromboli, a literal volcano, which you can climb in an afternoon to gaze into the wonders of its lava display, “the greatest experience that I ever had;” Panarea, a smaller island where all the jet-setters go; and finally, Filicudi, the smallest, most removed and wildest island, for nature lovers.
The second night, all in the courtyard could hear her whimpering and crying, sobbing from her room for minutes on end, something terrible must have happened. The German guy learned that when she was queried, it turns out that someone had spilled shampoo in her open luggage. He commented, what to say to her? “well, wash it and”… and what could you do but laugh, comedy being someone else’s “tragedy” and all.
Her advice was hyperbole as well. On the third evening, another German guy returned utterly exhausted, having made the hike up and down Stromboli volcano through the cold rain; not witnessing anything at all worth it to him. So, he saved me that trouble, anyway, but not the disappointment of Panarea, the “jet setters” island, which I would treat myself to for my 34th birthday – hopefully meet a hot Italian chick looking for an upwardly mobile Italian American.
The boater’s club on this not particularly beautiful island was ok, but not boasting great luxury, nor bedecked with jet-setters; rather a straggle of families having dinner and after they left, two or three waitresses, two Italian girls, not ugly but nothing special and a large black girl, of course brimming with confidence as they always inexplicably are. I could tell that she viewed me as an Italian boy tied to his mommas apron strings, as I didn’t fancy making the move on her bubble butted swarth. They quietly, disappointedly brought my bottles of red wine through the night, as the planned celebration of my upward mobility mutated into a tranquil but solemn reconciliation with reality until the ferry would arrive in the morning to take me and my hangover back to Lipari.
I can’t really say Lipari proper was disappointing though, with its intriguing medieval charm; and the hostellers were fun, too. With my mandate by post hypnotic suggestion, I took every opportunity to tell them that they should not accept blacks into their European countries. The Irish guy understood, generously referring to me as “Alfonso”, as I wanted to be called by grandfather’s name, in mafia-chic. The beautiful woman from Denmark sat comfortably at my table when she heard me talking that way. The spirited young Italian guy pointed at me and shouted loudly, “you are a racist!” While it was sporting of him and he accepted that I was unperturbed by this moniker. The feisty Irish girls took in stride my banter as rough sport. The girl from I don’t recall where sat by understandingly, while the au pair was apparently the one dissenter, sitting apart by herself with a worried look on her face as I spoke of my disgust that we’d now gotten to a stage in America where human women were dating blacks.
Typically as drunkenness would, I was wavering into semi-trance state. I recalled something from the Amherst trance. That a girl that I met on the train near Messina had been shown me as part of the wonder wall against Africa that I had to that I was destined to meet and had to meet again. I could tell that she liked me, obviously enough to give me the name for the hotel that she was staying at in Palermo. And she was beautiful except for one not so small detail. She had nigger lips; not slightly, but the whole protruding mouth area thing with big thick lips that only stopped short of the full baboon’s ass look. It is a testimony to my beholdenness to a sense of trance destiny, that I ignored my revulsion and set about an arduous junket to Palermo into order to rendezvous with this nigger lipped destiny of my wonder wall. I had my custom made suit, looked sharp but for one thing – traveled wearing cheap backpack; hardly the complementary attaché.
Arriving in Palermo by night was ghoulish; dark, dead and spooky like some horror movie from the 1930’s, Frankenstein or The Mummy, actually, as there was an ancient Egyptianness about it. Of course that was only intriguing to me, and a welcome contrast to the plastic lobby of the hotel, where I waited for nigger lips.
As I was wont to do in these trance circumstances, I instructed the hotel clerk what my mission was about and to send me on my way after I met the girl. After some hours, she returned to the hotel from wherever she was, with a bouquet of flowers. Some guy didn’t mind her nigger lips; but anyway, I stupidly tried for about forty minutes or so to arrange a date with her; my appeal finally ending with her declining my overture, saying “Io stressato” (I am stressed by this). The annoyed hotel clerk wryly watched me leave. With nowhere to stay and no train til morning, I slept on bench in the Palermo train station; that might have been more frightening were it not right next to a police booth. And come the morning, I took the train all the way back for Lipari on the other side of Sicily. An extravagant and exhausting junket this was, outside of any organic motive, as only beholdenness to trance suggestion could prompt in me. I mean, all this to pursue a nigger lipped girl, who I did not honestly like?
I got back to Lipari with a story to embellish anyway.
I was ready to overcompensate with some brazen confidence, as I was in top form in these days, having worked my way back to my high school weight just before leaving Amherst. It was a confirming moment, at the beach with the fellow racialist Irish guy, who had no problem calling me Alfonso (I liked the so goofy that its cool mafioso name of my grandfather); and a couple of nice, normal (English? don’t remember) girls who called me Alfonso timid deference when I took my shirt off; and eagerly engaged me with their experience of worried revulsion over their experience of a visit to Lost Angeles – “it’s just too much!”
The social and moral disorder of late modernity was not my private issue and it was flattering to be looked upon as someone to appeal to for remedy of some kind. But what could I do, really; these were the days before the internet and I had just experienced full force the futility of taking on America’s bad influence through the university systems and hence, the futility of transforming its political system. What to do? Get drunk and bellow my trance mandate back at the hostel.
The Irish girls were randy and as eager to support my Italian nationalism as I was to support their Irish nationalism. They were amused by my pursuit of the girl I’d met on the train and my determination to get Italian women pregnant in order to help Italy with its problem of having the lowest birthrate among the world’s nations. The chided me. “So why are you not with this girl in Palermo?” I fired back. I began caressing her on the very train. She loved it. And when we arrived in Palermo, I fucked her and I got her pregnant! With twins, I am sure. The more amiable won laughed kindly, no, you would not know so soon if she were pregnant. The other was more feisty, though in good sport. I told her this girl loved being fucked by me. She said incredulously, “you? You didn’t get her pregnant, you didn’t fuck her, you’re an arsehole!”
What could I do but laugh and fire back again: Oh yes I did, and when I fucked her, her eyes were half closed in ecstasy! The amiable one laughed, the feisty one repeated, “you didn’t fuck her, you didn’t caress her, you’re an arsehole! We laughed again and I began slipping into semi trance state. I am frankly glad that I cannot remember much of what I said beyond the gist of the kind of thing I would have said. First of all, in addition to being obnoxiously chauvinistic for Italians (the wonder wall of Europe) I would have been abusive to women I did not think were pretty, calling them ugly and so on. All that, of course, while brazenly expressing my disdain for niggers. Typically enough, the English nanny girl sat aside, worried. The Irish guy told her that she could come to Ireland and cook for him.
Well then, with dinner finished, I made my way to my room to fetch what I needed to go out on the Lipari plaza. And I was confronted with a sick irony, as I always seemed to be. A slender and fresh faced young Italian girl was with a nigger, both equipped with camping gear, they were obviously hosteling together. I knew better than to confront them directly, that would be futile. I made my way out to the plaza to to take in the night ambience. sure enough, I see these two sitting near some monument across the way. This really – really enraged me. She was pretty, like ideal pretty; any red blooded White guy would love to have a wife or girlfriend that looked like her.
Where did she get the idea and the temerity to do this? I remember a time not that long before – as recently as the 70’s and early half of the 80’s – when you wouldn’t see this pairing. I was determined to make it known to this girl, somehow, that she was destroying the most valuable things in the world.
At first I scowled at them to get their attention, but they didn’t seem perturbed. Then I tried scratching my sides in monkey gestures. The nigger pointed at me like I was the fool, and maybe it was not the best angle. So I bore down more seriously, looking at her, I made a cradling gesture with my arms, as if I had her future mixed baby in my arms, and then I slammed the imaginary baby to the ground and stepped on hits head. And then I mouthed words as if she could hear, as it was not hard to imagine that what I was saying was neither approving nor prone to forgiveness – indeed she gave me a look of obedient respect, but it did not mean much, as I could not hope to change much. I went back to the hostel with my wrecked mood,, drunk, moving in and out of semi-trance. When I asked the proprietor woman for my room key, I gave her the trance suggestion that I’d gotten from Amherst; which was to remind me of business Ihad to take care of in France.
The next morning when I went to leave the key at the desk and sign up for another night, her husband said to me angrily, “Mr., I need your bed tonight.” Odd, there were a hundred empty beds in my dorm room. He said, “there is a class of school kids coming in, I need your bed, tonight.” I caught the drift that he’d gotten wind of some of my trance induced unpleasantries, and was kicking me out. There was a consolation, however. His wife looked at me with a calm smile, apparently understanding that I was in trance and that I was concerned to defend Italians and all Europe. She reminded me indeed, with a calm, approving, friendly smile, “you have some matters to attend to in France?”
People apparently understood from my trances that some sort of plan of trance suggestion was being enacted through me, but it was protracted, an overall plan indeed, as I would not be going to France for another four months and there would be several strange adventures before that.
Toarmina, September 1995
I made my way to the beautiful tourist city of Toarmina, with its ancient Greek amphitheater ensconced in a florid atmosphere beneath the volcano Mount Etna on one side and peaked view of the Mediterranean on the other side. I was eager to don my custom made three piece suit to project authority on its streets, not just any Italian, but an Italian American, wielding its experience and power.
Though affordable, I had a private room which was considerable step up from a hostel bunk. My room had a balcony that opened out to a view of the main walking street below and Mount Etna in the distance above, shrouded in florid vegetation. The shops below were luxuriantly equipped with my favorite intoxicant, the Belgian beer Chimay blue – brewed by Trappist monks, their pent up sublimation seemingly fulminated through its leavening properties, the closest thing to a cocaine high that isn’t cocaine.
I got a bottle of my drug at a small shop with a curtain over its door; the clerk was a tallish blond, not exactly ugly, not beautiful either, with whom I found mutual irritation. Me, because I resented the impositions of blond and tall as a standard of any kind in Italy, and her because she took me for a conceited American man with money, reading a cliché of power unbridled by wisdom.
As I walked up and down the main promenade of course my fate would have me encounter a pretty woman with some very apish looking black. For god sake, this is Italy – Sicily! The men are supposed to be ultra tough and mean, not put up with anything remotely like this. The mafia! people are supposed to be afraid of disloyalty. I tried my hand at asserting myself, with an angle that I’d tried unsuccessfully a few years before against an interracial couple in Maratea Italy, when I was visiting with my father (English woman and her black husband on vacation there).
Flashback fall 1993, Maratea, Italy, visiting a resort with my father – a resort we were at because my alcoholic mom had been snookered into a time-share scheme. Anyway, I had my custom made suit, still had hopes at the time of a PhD., and was trying to swagger the crazy Italian thing of my trance deal (“in exchange for an education”); so when I saw this English tourist lady walking by the pool with her black husband and daughter, along with another English couple and their daughter; I remarked (In Italian), “cock big enough.” The two girls were saddened but days later when the couples and their children were leaving the said some mocking thing toward me (couldn’t hear it, probably “cock small enough?” or the like) and were laughing. The point being that they weren’t hurt by what I said; and I should not have repeated that tact.
With the head of the theater production I tried another angle of discussing this new phenomenon of interracial dating, which barely happened before 1985. I was with my father and I told her that if they allowed blacks to take Italian woman I would come and bomb this place! My father’s cybernetic response for this grandiosity on my part was to put his fingers together in a tedious way and say to the girl that he doesn’t like it when the White girls get together with the black guys. Needless to say, this was futile. Oh, the days before internet were such a lonely wilderness. As I think I said before, but will repeat in case I have not, my father was asked by my professor to take me on this trip to clam me down, if he could about the interracial stuff and to ease my mind about financial worries – he bellowed, “I’ll give you $800 a month for the rest of your life! It wsa stupid of me, but it infuriated me that he considered his money the only thing that mattered with all that I felt up against, with all the White hating people were doing.
And with that, the way that he would pontificate his American story ignorance as authoritative rebuke of my racialism. “When Italy invaded the Somali and there was a lot of fraternizing!” … a famous Jewish lawyer once brought me before the Supreme Court of The United States to testify befre labor union discrimination to say, “I just want the same rights as everyone!” He’s “teaching” me this after I’ve been leaning the egregious nuances of Lockeatine rights. He’s making me furious nad I could not keep my tact well enough to not berate him and ruin my chances for $800K a month commencing then and there. Ever since his looks given to me as a small child, amblazened with hatred from the cthonic depths, I could d neve trust him and never avoid automatic retaliation, fighitng back of sorts, whenever he would assert himself (which, when it came to anything but money was usually a bit stupid, to be honest).
Anyway, so I didn’t quite learn from that experience and when I saw the interracial couple in Toarmina, I growled at them in the first passing. A street artist smiled and winked at me. That was about all there was in notice and bother about this abomination – not enough of a statement. And so the next time I passed them, I said (in Italian), “cock big enough?” She only laughed and grabbed him for a hug. The blond girl from the shop happened to be out there at the moment and leered at my crotch saying, “piccolo cazzo.” Now I’m really pissed. Minutes later I would pull open the curtain of her shop where she was huddled a bit worried, her partner apparently more conscientious then her.
But what more could I do than present as threatening, potentially dangerous. That’s not much and really, while the girl had her carefree laugh, this is is a serious matter, the demographic, genetic and behavioral clashes are catastrophic, and particularly wrangling when Jews, whose part I was not fully prepared to take on, even if aware, preferring the less stigmatic angle rather to take on their weaponized liberals.
So that didn’t work; and while I’d find more effective remarks to intervene with interracial couples on the street (which I’ll discuss later), I was left with no avenue to autonomy from liberalism than to buy a couple more Chimays, enough to make me sick; prostrate on my bed, oblivious to the fact that I’d left my door open for anyone in the hotel to see me in that condition. Embarrassing, but nobody said anything. No matter, I’d be off to Catania, a big city where I couldn’t be trapped in a fish bowl with poisonous gossip.
Catania, September/October 1995
And so I went back to Catania, which would become for me a home base of sorts, within Sicily. I’d been there briefly, with exuberance of a deep cultural connection back in 1993 when I travelled to Italy with my father. The city resonates with me somehow.
I flashed back to the moment that I first came into Catania (staying for four days in 1993) at night, driving through this, yet another ghastly Gothic nightmare of a city by night, and loving it..I was in Europe…a Europe that I could embrace, I did not have to hear the American bullocks about Sicilians being this or that…while I drove drunk out of my mind, a car marked “Vigilanti” drove up beside me and I shouted unafraid, big smile on my face, “Catania Bella!” …I was so happy that I was utterly unafraid despite driving drunk; still driving beside me, they caught my drift, shouted – asked me cheerfully where I was going and escorting me safe to Piazza Duomo where my penzione would be.
I took a “penzione” (cheap hotel) on Piazza Domo. With my first steps onto the plaza would try my hand at flirting with the girls attending the ice cream and espresso bar. One was a raven haired beauty, elegantly dressed but not speaking any English. I gave myself no chance – even if I was dressed the part in my three piece suit, I knew I was nowhere near being ready to back it up. The other was a beauty as well, but had this high cheekbone look, that to me, rightly or wrongly, felt like underlying African symmetry, even though her skin was white, her hair a limp reddish brown. With my phobia she wasn’t quite what I was looking for even if friendly, ready to play along with my flirting and speaking some English – some: “managia!” her frustration as I didn’t understand the Italian word for “closed” when I asked if Club Banacher was open this evening.
Although I would eventually find my natural anti-circadian rhythm, i.e, my mediterranean genetic proclivity to sleep in the afternoon during pranza time, that would be years off. Therefore, I had to bide my time in the afternoons in the park, trying to catch up on my reading (William James at that time, Pragmatism and The Meaning of Truth).
It was quite near this spot that a trance premonition from Amherst came to pass. An Italian boy was getting fresh with one of the Italian school girls entering the park, “seniorina, avera pantaloni nienta!” (miss, you do not have panties on). I had uttered these words to the Jewish incest victim during the Amherst trance. I was eager to be out and about in Catania in the evening, remembering the time in 1993, when like a school of tropical fish, the most subtle beauties fulminated at a festival gathering off the main drag that led from Duomo to the park. That experience of a collection of subtle beauties was never repeated, though I would move through the cafe’s and bars hoping to spot the ideal Italian wife. Instead, of course, I would up getting drunk, solo, on Chimay, capping my evening with a bit more of it in the park, near a monument which I’d also foretold in the Amherst trance. It was fraught with right wing graffiti. One remark said, “Auschwitz Lives.” That surprised me as an American, and still having hope that an alliance could be formed with Jews against blacks, I remembered the tears of my Amherst trance, intermittently singing Wonderwall, as I told how I’d scribble out the words and leave instead my jacket at the base of the monument, “nigger out!”
I also attempted to recapture the magic of my first visit to mafia discotech Banacher in nearby Aci Costello, also no-avail fishing after a school of fish that weren’t quite there anymore. I did happen to see Maria (was her name), the pretty but not my type girl from the ice cream/espresso bar on Piazza Duomo; and she was delighted to see me though amidsts friends of her own, “rigarda!” The other big disco in the area, “Maclntosh” was nearly empty, and worse, was playing videos of black American d.j.’s spinning records at George Washington University! I’d be back to Catania and Banacher to fish after the initial magic, but for now, it seemed best to pursue adventure elsewhere in Sicilia.
Agrigento, October/November 1995
Agrigento, an ancient city with Greek ruins in testimony to its challenge and fall, for a time, to Islamic incursion, was a must-see in my wonderwall destiny tour. At noon everyday, the overwhelmingly loud sounds of church bells left no doubt that Islam no longer reigned here – the wonderwall holds (by this Christian religion, for now).
I was given my own small, cedar wooded room with but one tiny window on the top floor of a convenient hotel,. The room was the size of a jail cell but I felt secure in my privacy and holed up there for a month. Though addled by wine (and hangovers) much of the time and tormented by my experience in America, I was determined to do my part to promote Italy’s fending-off Africanization.
Having finally gotten used to napping during the afternoons, along with everyone else, I would make my way on to the streets, viz. the main street of Agrigento during the evening. I would ogle the women I passed-by and poke around the local shops, coming to one, a wine shop titled with my family name. I went in and talked to the proprietor in pursuit of genealogical information. The middle aged man, bald, humble but in no way offensive looking warmed-up to my earnest concern for our name and its history. I was surprised to find this name in Sicily, as my family is from Campania. He told me that all Corbo’s come from Canicatti (a city to the northeast of Agrigento), that there were two brothers there, and one went up north to Regio nel’Emilia (I wonder now, as there is reason to guess that a great, great, great grandfather of mine may have made his way from Regio nel’Emilia to Calabritto during the late 1600s – an issue for anther time, complicated for the fact that line might account for my tiny trace (2.58%) Jewish ancestry.
Mr. Corbo handed me a free bottle of red win and kissed me on both cheeks Italian style as I parted with his acquaintance. In subsequent evenings I popped-in and began testing how he’d receive my racial politics, floating skepticism of immigration from the “big people” of the north and of more dire concern, the potential deluge by an exploding African population. I talked about my experience of the nature of blacks and asked why a firm stance could not be established against African immigration. Mr. Corbo gave a surprisingly good answer – “it’s the regligion.”
In my wine addled days to come, I seethed in anger that anyone or anything could our people, our sublime women to risk – just one for me. I would stupidly leer if I saw a half way decent one passing by on the evening walks from the main street to a side walk way where couples walked together and I stupidly intruded by myself, humming the sounds of the Cranberry’s “Zombie”, its sounds having a profound resonance to me – while some took note of this weird solo guy and his yearning ditty. But to my addled mind, I was not upsetting the apple cart, instead stewing over an Italian priest I’d seen on television, discussing immigration, and saying, “what’s wrong with darkening our skins.” To me, I was with them, hoping to find a woman for me, true, but just one.
As with all of Italy, the blacks that you saw were straight out of Africa and not integrated into Italian life, as well they should not be. That does not mean they did not have their drives. Corresponding to one of my hypotheses that qualitative distinction in women is susceptible to the black hole of miscegenation, I noticed that some Africans were alerting each other to the most qualitatively beautiful Sicilian woman that I saw in my whole time in Agrigento. The horror that these apes should think they have any such hope in prerogative.
I found my way to the church the next day, to try to talk with the priest, to update him on philosophy. I mean what would Giambattista Vico say? Well, I suppose that “anti-racism is Cartesian, it is not innocent, it is prejudice, it is hurting and it is killing people.” The priest thought with a smile that I was denouncing racism in my poor Italian. I corrected him. No! Anti-racism is not innocent, niggers are destruction! He begged off in a mild panic, “mi dispiace’ , and scurried away. Between that and my other addled antics, word was apparently getting around that I was a bit awkward here. The next evening a teenage boy apprehended me and with some of his friends pushed me against a wall. I did not understand. He pointed to his eyes and then pointed to a young girl who I’d made uncomfortable by staring at her. I would see Mr. Corbo a short while after and he cringed at the sight of me.
But still there was some appreciation of where I was coming from. Some young right wing guys set up a card table to take political ballot signatures and I handed them a note saying that I love Italy and do not recommend Africans. My hand was shaken vigorously. Later at night I went into a western style bar, western style in that it was showing MTV videos on a big screen. Some girl fawned retardedly as the Michal Jackson / Lisa Marie Pressley video came on. A young Italian boy handled it perfectly, staring at her with a smile on his face, not needing to say, “what an idiot!” The place was owned by one of the few Arabs around, and I slipped into trance with him at the bar, saying, “this is not Akragas (Arab name for Agrigento) anymore, you are going to give me as sign as to whose side you’re on, Italy or Africa.” He was moved near to tears by the recognition of a profound state. And when some wayward mixed black walked in the next day, the Arab held his lighter to light the cigarette for the nig an extra long time, to let me know where his support was.
Addled, at times hung over and frustrated by all of this, I tried my hand at asserting myself, pulling rank at an African standing near the entrance of my hotel. I made a disparaging remark as I walked past the nigger; he remarked back defiantly as I passed by. I walked back ot him and pointed my finger in his face. He grabbed my arm and pulled it down. I pointed in his face again, and he pulled my arm down again. Best to leave it with a nasty remark; but the truth is, the nigger has won the gesture of assertion. Their evolution makes them good at self assertion – hyper assertive, even – so, Whitey better be prepared when attempting to assert himself with niggers.
I made my way to shake the hands of the proprietors of my hotel, who had been patient and cool with me, understood that I was benevolent toward Italy and trying to work through a political message. One was a tough middle aged buy whose baldness only made him seem more tough. He was a bit cool, but had given me some slack in case I was more important than he realized, like the son of an important guy who needed a mental rest. The other guy was older, an understanding type. But whatever the case, the cooler one had apparently heard enough gossip and had given me enough slack already, eight dollars a night in a really nice room. I was getting the hint that it was time to move on from Agrigento.
Oh, one more thing perhaps made the locals want to ease me away. One older guy that I talked to was perhaps a bit too empathetic with me and spilled some beans that could’ve been dangerous for him to divulge. After saying how blacks were not good for “the quiet life” (being “quiet” was seen as a virtue by the kid in Lipari, too), he told me that he’d been a taxi cab driver in New York City and “came back a man after shooting a nigger who gave him a hard time in his cab.”
Canicatti
I was not going to sojourn westward without first investigating Mr. Corbo’s assertion that Canicatti was the aboriginal point of my Corbo family, two brothers from there, one going north to Regio nel’ Emilia. I wasn’t able to find much beyond the obvious. There were a number of Corbo’s in the phone book. Like any of these places, and any place in the world, I suppose, cooperation was not going to be forthcoming for a young man looking for connection, especially female connection. When I asked one guy for directions to the discotech called “Academia”, he gave me directions in the opposite direction. When I got there, the place was empty except for a few guys. I was able to speak to them in English. They asked me what I was doing there, because Corbo is a common name here? Yes. But nothing much more than to possibly check with the priest who looked after the archives.
I did that, next day. A little boy showed me the way; I’ll be darned if this priest didn’t seem like a rabbi with his long beard and room overflowing with dusty antiques and volumes of books covering the walls, stacked up to the ceiling and piled up on the floor. With a circulating gesture of his hand the ancient sage was ready to believe that I could be related to the people of Canicatti but with the language barrier, there wasn’t much to be gleaned from this visit.
About the neatest thing about it was the feeling that I had ascending the steep hilled street leading up to his house. I noticed something about my evolution: how adapted that I was for this hilly terrain, how easy it was for me to walk up and down these hills keeping my balance. I have big feet, short legs with thick thighs, and a skinny torso, perfect for maintaining balance on these steep inclines.
But Canicatti was practically dead. Nothing happening and not much hope of finding anything revealing about my family history. No place where I wanted to linger. It’s no wonder that they’re offering to sell houses and apartments there for one Euro just to try to repopulate the place.
Sciacca, November 1995
Well, the whole reason for traipsing around Sicily, other than the allure of skinny, raven-haired beauties with arduous facial structures… was the intrigue of mystery and hint of danger in the background of its oblique confrontation of reality. With that, how could I resist trying to rub elbows with the native culture of a place named SCIACCA.
Playing hooky from the mainstream, as I was, there was little chance of unfolding this mystery. I did see one beautiful, impeccably well dressed, and impeccably out-of my reach woman tending to her baby in a stroller; a precious thing, given our low birth-rate. But I had to find my way down to the unmanicured, on the port, in order to have human connection.
Sciacca is a fishing village, of course; and there was a make shift bar – with an ice cream counter, lol – set-up in what must have been a storage area on the beach: anything but beautiful, but that was part of its charm. It was about function, like the gruff fisherman who gathered there in the morning – to drink beer! Now that was something that I could relate to, connection with the priority of functionality, the non-snobbery which would admit to adventures through beer in the morning, as any mental tasks for the day were already well understood, not requiring any subtle mental agility. Indulge in the radicalness that this ordinary position ironically affords, to come into the day with primordial drunkenness. I could relate. I was a pirate of life.
Rather than cool, hidden and mysterious, however, the atmosphere was a bit casual, revealing and funny. The owner of the bar and ice cream dive was a youngish guy who’d moved back to the old world from Brooklyn, New York. His equally young but lumbering cousin had followed him there from Brooklyn and was dispensing the ice cream.
I told the owner of my passionate concern that Italy defend itself against African incursions. He straightened up and looked off into the distance with the assurance of one who understood. It was clear that he understood perfectly; and he created an atmosphere for me of colleague and friendly fellow traveler among the middle aged and old fishermen getting drunk on beer in the three or four mornings that I was there. Even though I was accepted, I tried to speak Italian.
Especially as hard as the beer was hitting me, however, I couldn’t quite manage to say, as I should: “Vorrei un gelato al cioccolato.”
The cousin helped me, in a way that still tickles my funny, as he said in a thick Brooklyn accent, “you want CHOAWKLIT”?
Funny, as I attempted to go native with a guy who was also a boat blown back to native shore from the harrows of Africanization. Indeed, that is where the Brooklyn accent is a comedic veneer upon the tragic fact. The owner indicated to me that a part of the reason that this man, in the prime working years of his life, was scooping ice cream on the shores of Sciacca, was to get away from niggers; as anyone with any sense would, as anyone who has experienced certain parts of Brooklyn would have experienced.
[I need to relate an analogy to the funny Brooklyn accent thing from the old 1960’s sit-com, “F Troop.” The situation of the comedy was dealings between U.S. soldiers of the 1880s and Hekawi Indians. Anyway, the chief described how the Hekawi got their name – chasing a herd of buffalo through the dust they’d kicked-up until finally the whole tribe accidentally fell over a cliff in pursuit of the buffalo herd that had also fallen over. Arising through the death and trauma of the fall, the great chief rose and asked, “we-artheheck ah we?” – get it, yuk, yuk? ‘we’re (not where, for the accent) the heck ah we?” in a Brooklyn accent. An Indian is not supposed to have a Brooklyn accent; its funny, don’t care if it is a joke that doesn’t travel well].
Where the heck was I? By the third or fourth day finding myself awkwardly about the only one there drinking after a point and with no really connections and reason to stay, seeing that it was time to move to the next point of intrigue.
Selinunte, November 1995
While the Greek ruins of Selinunte are among the best preserved, I have to admit that desert-like topography and the equally deserted lack of human hub-bub in surrounds did not render the proposed inspiration for me. Even so, a force of historical greatness speaks, even if muted and lacking in color and human animation.
It was November, and I stayed there for about a week in a camping ground, thinking that just my sleeping bag and my hammock would keep my comfortable and warm at night. After all, this is about as south as Europe gets, the very southern coast of Sicily. Wrong. on the third night it was raining and cold; the campground owner had the sense and decency to let me stay inside a camper that he had on the grounds.
I ran into a pretty Anglo-Australian girl waiting for the bus at the ruins; she was complaining about the Italians at the hostel she was staying at, saying that they were trying to cheat her. I tried to encourage her that the Italians were basically good people and had to be a bit scrappy, de-fanged as they were for their role as defenders of Europe. The beauty of our women, for example, an under appreciated buffer against African exoticness. By the way, you’re very cute too (she was, I was flirting with her); and she apparently liked my flirting, and let me believe that she was available. This provided an embarrassing moment as her boyfriend arrived subsequently. He was a diminutive, nerdy but decent Anglo-Australian, nobody I’d want to hurt; but he shared the kind of absurd Australian chauvinism that I would come to find among travelers. At least we could agree on the significance of one thing, not many blacks there, “that’s another thing they we got right”, he said.
There was one and only one bar in a picturesque setting in a beach enclave where I’d go at night. The proprietor was half Sicilian and half English and she looked very much like Jane Seymore; i.e., she was gorgeous. Even though she was out of my league, I spent as much time as I could pretty much the only customer there at her bar, talking with her. She told me that she spent most of her younger days in Australia but didn’t like it because it was to anti-social – you go to your house, I go to mine – whereas she fell in love with the communitarianism of this Sicilian enclave.
Despite her beauty and having found her place, she was depressed. For the fact that she identified with Tina Turner and would play her, along with music from the 1950s that included a lot of Motown music, it was clear that my hints at racial politics were not going to endear me to her. Even though I did perhaps not have enough Italian verve to be more than a commercial interlocutor, she was too old to be serious about anyway. Her (not so great looking) daughter would come in from time to time with her boyfriend, to lighten the atmosphere by playing some A.C.D.C., snapping along in her sunglasses to “Hells-Bells.” But it did not help me break through the gloom of mother’s depression. She was down on relationships. The only clue I got: she was married to a Swiss man and lived in Switzerland. “We go into a marriage with expectations; and then there are surprises.”
A young snappy German motorcycle tourist popped by one evening and chided me – you come here every night just for that (to talk to the Jane Seymore look-alike)? I took it in grace, I suppose he was right. He took occasion to speak of his politics, which did seam fairly reasonable in fact.
He said that most people are normal, they want to stay where they come from, implying that the causes of immigration are not necessarily in the immigrants in any inherently opportunistic way.
He said he liked Italy because it maintained a sense of history (I could agree) while France, he not even go there, “they are nationalists!” … I couldn’t quite agree with nationalism being France’s problem. Africanization, yes, that’s a problem.
I mentioned to him that I liked Italian woman and that I was here in part to find an Italian wife. I took some exception when he warned me about how some German guys come down here, falling for a lovely young 18 year old girl and they come back two years later and its not the same woman – big and fat, everywhere, fat ass, fat tits. Stereotype though that may be, and though most Italians are thin (certainly thinner than Americans) and often stay that way, I would have to admit that there was a grain of truth to what he’d said as I would see this in some female cousins in Calabritto, who I’d see two years later.
Still, I proffered my theory that Italians were a neglected demographic buffer in America. He understood that America, its Whites, anyway, were predominantly German. He reserved agreement as to whether they did not interface with blacks as well as could be, as well as Italian evolution, for example, which has been an ecological hypothesis of mine.
I told him that I was here to escape America. He remarked with moderate disgust, “it’s so big!”
I said Blacks are taking over. And then a foreboding came over him as if a cold wave dashing years of careful liberal cultivated thought … psychically, I could see his right arm going up in a stiff arm salute and his dread for the involuntariness of his arm betraying him, going up in a stiff arm salute. He didn’t actually put up his arm, of course, but it was there in his dread. lol.
We talked more, his liberalism persevering. “These damn German tourists go to Poland and take prostitutes, doing to these Polish girls things they’d never think of doing to a German woman. I didn’t say anything about that but remarked that I found Germans and Germany quite pleasant – Neuschwanstein Castle – amazing! and bratwurst and beer, I love it! He said, “yes, beer. Germany might not have much in the way of culture but our beer is magnificent.” The only foreign beer we drink is Pilsner Urquell, because that is the original Pilsner. I agreed that is good beer, but added that I like the Belgian beer, Chimay. “Ugh!” he said, “I can’t even drink it.” … and now, in recent years, neither can I, because drinking it has literally nearly killed me that last few times I drank it. I guess they’ve got some Monsanto Franken-Wheat in the brew now, which causes an allergic reaction in me, near completely cutting off my capacity to breathe. But I digress.
He was one of the many who come to mind when I speak of my experience of German people in my travels, as good people, not represented by the American Nazis of so-called White Nationalism.
Mazara del Vallo, November 1995
Next I moved on to Mazara del Vallo. So, I’m getting to the extremities of south-western Sicily. There was nowhere reasonable to stay for a hotel, so I found an unused horse stable to crash by night. If that sounds a bit risky to you, you’re right. I did this for consecutive nights, maybe less than a week; and I noticed a revolver on the ground in the stable; by the last night, it was missing. Not sure if I was discovered, but I did have occasion to talk to the son of the owner and I tried my racial politics on him. Young guy, he asked me if I was an “Aryan” and of course I said “no”, but I caught the drift that was not OK with him, that he associated racialism of this anti-African kind with northern Europeans. He introduced me to a light-skinned, mild manner black worker of his premises the next time that I we met in the morning: ugh, I have to shake hands and be nice, and wonder how much these Mr. Nice guys will interfere with Italy being able to assert its difference.
But I emerged from my nightly sleeps on the ground in a horse stable and put on my three piece custom made suite to appear as if I’d just emerged from a five star hotel. Then, with not much to do, of course, I’d get sloshed on red wine. This can be rather a trip as the winos of the world might tell you, and a rather enjoyable trip to take by day, especially as I found the most amazing church, its alter shrouded by the stone carved image of leopard skin parchment and scrolls – huge, exquisitely tasteful ornamentation. I was playing hooky from the world, alone to enjoy this wonderous church, drunk on wine by day.
By night there were people strolling by the shore walk, with vendors, some from other countries. A bit seedy. I remember a polish couple selling a deck of cards decorated by a white woman ogling a black guy with a dick hanging down below his knees.
But there was another aspect of surprisingly superior culture – to me, anyway. The town had a small piazza and in the evenings people would gather there and talk. I thought this was great. I would just observe them in my wine state, but it was all so civilized; seemed to me the way some evening hours should be spent among the community. The only other place I’d seen this kind of communal discussion going on was in synagogue when I chauffeured Itzhak Perlman from New York to a New Jersey synagogue. I must say, I did notice that some of these Italians looked a bit Jewish; my prejudice against Jews though extant at the time, was tempered with respect for practices of theirs which we should emulate, such that even if there were blood mixture, that perhaps it was contributing to what I saw as good, intellectual practice.
Still, this is Sicily, and I must have cut a suspicious figure, walking around in my three piece custom made suit. So when I emerged from one of the primitive squat and go latrines about four policemen were there asking for my documents. The first one that I presented was actually my grandfather’s passport which I showed him exactly hoping for the effect that it would get from the police officer, the bellowing laugh at the most primitive Italian face, but nothing but Italian face that you could ever see, mi nonno (grandfather). So, it worked. The interrogation lasted spanned less than a minute and a few questions.
Still, truth be known, I was never going to go native in a place like this, too American, too half Polish, not rich enough to broach the difference nor having enough of the language. Nothing to do but remain a tourist and move on to the next place, testing my anti-American racial politics where I might.
Marsala, November 1995
From its name, Marsala, imposed over its once Roman name, “Li Libya” – toward Libya, as a Roman Stronghold against the Carthaginians, Marsala was a disappointment for an empty promise of history, its vestiges not just destroyed by the Muslim invasions which imposed the name, “Marsala”, tantalizing us only by the name of a famous dish (veal Marsala), Marsala was a disappointment for what looked to be the extremity of exoticness: rather a dreary modern city, built upon the ruins of its having been destroyed in World War II. The only significant bits of history remaining in a museum, which houses one of two remaining boats from the Punic wars.
The lady museum guide, having been born in Chicago, was taken to Marsala by her parents as a teenager for the same reason that I was escaping America, apparently; but she was dissatisfied, with accounts of a difficult economy, an example of some boys having snatched her purse a few days before; and an expressed wish to return to Chicago – instructing me that I might put on blinders to what I don’t want to see in America. No sense arguing with her that I can see niggers in abundance straight before my eyes. Not much more to add about Marsala; what I hoped to be an extremity on the map of this exotic adventure was a dreary disappointment.
Trapani
I would spend quite a while, probably more than month in Trapani on the western coast of Sicily. It combined a placid topography, flowers and palm trees with a harrowing background of mafia peril. But what does one go to Sicily for, after all? I’d never before seen armed guards inside plexiglass booths, with sand bags at their base, in front of all police stations, court houses and banks. The lovely park featured bust after bust of judges who had been murdered by the Cosa Nostra. Nevertheless, I sat there several afternoons, drinking wine and reading William James, “Pragmatism and The Meaning of Truth.”
Coming form the park to a street that was main but not having much in the way of cars or pedestrians; the main sign of life being the armed guards I’d mentioned, I had my first occasion for an emergent anti-nigger mini-alliance. I walked passed a boutique selling clothing items. Being chased out of the store was an African, bedecked with belts and other items to sell. I’m not sure if the pretty young Sicilian woman or her man was more angry, or what they were most angry about: whether the nigger was under-selling their goods or, quite possibly, if he’d sent out some offensive sexual vibes to the woman. Whatever the case, as the couple followed the nigger, yelling at him, I joined in their pursuit, yelling at him in English, be gone nigger! The nigger started swinging his belts back in forth, as to say he’d hit us if we came any closer. But he was on his way and that was enough. Not that much appreciation was shown from the store owners, still ii felt ok, I guess, to show that my point of view had practical utility.
I stayed in two or three different hostels while I was there; and my views would not meet up with much cross-cultural coordination.
The first hostel that I stayed at in the Trapani area was a massive, spacious, modern structure, clean and well over equipped for the trickle of hostellers that I’d encounter upon my few days there. As always, I tried to complement a German tourist in whatever way I could, describing how nice the German hostels are; he remarked, “not nicer than this.” The way was clear to try to engage this decent, if mildly dorky middle aged solo traveler. I eased into my talk about how America was going to hell by way of non-European demographics; and I hoped for a way for Europe to avoid this fate, particularly from the skyrocketing African birthrate. My German interlocutor wasn’t very receptive, made some remark about how there are some nice African immigrants, some of the usual Pablum about immigrants being necessary. While I woke up the next morning hung over and straggled to the shower area where he efficiently made his way through the three s’s and sort of made a waving-off motion with his arms, not directly at me, but a forget about it motion nevertheless, as if to say he wanted nothing to do with conservative politics: The World War II experience of his parents was enough.
The only other guy in my bunk room was a young French guy, and I tried talking to him, but he was very clear that he was only interested in talking about what he wanted to talk about – “only the abstracts”, particularly of the American Pragmatists – C.S. Pierce most of all.” Perhaps this should have been ironically appropriate, as I was reading Pierce’s protégé, William James, at the time. But in addition to being liberal by indifferent default, I found this French guy weird, in that brisk, French way that some of them do. The bunkroom was empty except for us two and he decided to sleep in the bunk right next to me. I asked him if he could choose another bed. He said that “this was strange.” So I got up and moved to another bed. And I wasn’t going to suffer the discomfort of this weird Frenchman to discuss American pragmatism with him.
And finally I remember two other Germans – a young couple who grew up in East Germany and had somehow retained Communist ideology despite that. I started off easy by commenting that Italian pizza could be surprisingly disappointing, quite short on cheese. They laughed that this was a frequent remark by German tourists, how terrible Italian pizza was compared to the pizza in Germany.
One thing about their being Marxists though (and think about it, these were East Germans and the wall had only been down a few years at that point), at least their Marxism made them gauged toward “intellectualism” (what else was there to do in that accounts requesting hell hole besides talk of one’s fidelity to Marx) and thus I could attempt to engage them. My resources of erudition were not well cultivated to say the least at that point, especially not when beer addled as I was. I think I began taking offense after I remarked that Antonio Gramsci did have some interesting things to say and the girl said, “he was the only Italian intellectual.” Though they were not Jewish (I don’t think) I was familiar with the “intellectual = Marxist” thing coming from Jews, but I was in no mood for the slight against Italians, as my thing at the time was to defend Italy’s place as “the Wonder Wall.” Drunk, I got sloppy and tactlessly assertive.
I baited them, listing what meager Polish intellectualism that I knew of; and added with very embarrassing ‘American authority”, that “we don’t want to make the same mistake as Adolph Hitler, do we?” (I said that! ugh, how embarrassing a drunk). The girl tried to placate me, pointing out the verse in Nietzsche’s final days of dementia when he said that he comes from Polish nobility. As I was undoubtedly tactless enough to talk about my preference for dark haired women, she encouraged my enthusiasm for the dark haired beauty who was passing through: a Mexican girl, easily as pretty as any of the Sicilian beauties.
Next morning the Hostel proprietor angrily asks me to leave. Hate to say it, but can’t blame him.
I found a smaller hostel and a Serbian couple were roomed with me. This was awkward as well, with Serbia having been bombed by the US for their war against the Muslims. An awkwardness exacerbated by my cock sure ignorance. This was quite an embarrassment, in retrospect as well.
They were a couple, both medical students from Serbia. At this time Bill Clinton and (((Madeline – ” its worth it to kill hundreds of thousands of children”, in the case of middle eastern Muslims – Albright))) had just finished clobbering Serbia. So, they were on a combination vacation and reprieve from the heated situation. I hadn’t bothered to consider the situation beyond what the mainstream media had said. They offered a critical angle on the Muslims there, and I responded, confident ignoramous that I was, offering no other way, no gray area, but that the Muslims were to be respected in their right to be there. I could read the disappointment in this (very pretty) woman’s face. I don’t know, at the time I looked upon fighting Islam as a conflict of religious fancies, intolerably tedious, especially if it was between genetic Europeans.
But this Serbian couple were proud nationalists, and obviously intelligent – medical students – as such, they did not quite share my enthusiasm for Italian patriotism, and the woman was disappointed when I quoted my cousin complaining that “thousands of Serbian refugees were now in Italy”… but by the same token, they were able to relate to my distaste for America, even if they did hope to reason with me, as an American. As a matter of fact, the guy had spent some of his teen years as an exchange student at a high school in New York State. He said, “I wouldn’t do it again.” .. he was referring to the homely quality of the females. In this regard, he had a radical connection to my concerns. His girlfriend bent over to get something from my luggage. They noticed that I was looking at her ass. I cringe to think of it, in retrospect as well.
I think back on my general intransigent ignorance on the matter and the uncomfortably cheerful reception given me by a taxi cab driver, Serbian man, as he drove me from the train station to the ferries in Copenhagen. Why would he treat me, as an American, with such friendly enthusiasm?
Egadi Islands
The Egadi islands are a few small islands off the west coast of Sicily. It was cold and wet this time of year, which, on the positive side increased the intriguing atmosphere of its few ancient town areas, cobble stone streets and so on, but on the negative side, increased the my sense of loneliness and alienation – what the hell am I doing in a backwater like this, at this time of year?
I was not completely alone in my tourism there. I spotted some big guy with a Pittsburgh Steeler’s hat on, and I presume that he must have been one of them. though I was not particularly interested, there were other things from the west somehow coming to this remote place.
There was no place affordable to stay. Some older Italian lady let me stay in the camper by her house. After two days, her son and his wife explained to me that they “had a problem”, their mother expected me to pay good money to stay there; that she was trying to teach them how to be enterprising by taking me in.” Ok, they’re reasonable. I sympathize. You, know, mothers.
So, I’m talking to them and the guy is pretty cool, but is going on about how much he likes, how important he considers the music of black American blues artists… the creep of how you can’t escape this shit only has viral attachment in his tastes; at least his wife was Italian and she did try to join with me in damping his impression of the value of black artistry. I wound up sleeping in a wrecked boat near their house the rest of the time that I was on the island.
There was a sunny day. And I saw a lovely young Italian girl, in a colorful dress – totally normal looking, pretty girl – walking around with a black. It’s like you can’t escape this shit. Even here. I tried to get their attention with some nasty remarks, and again, I did get a wink from one of the portrait artists on the street, but that was about it. And as if that example wasn’t bad enough. I ventured onto more remote parts of the island. Walking on some ancient path, I see another young, beautiful Italian girl bike riding with a black. Here. Even here.
That’s all I have to say about this place. Gradually settling further in is the idea of having to find like minded people and a place to take a stand. But this is 1995. No internet. As if I am the only one who notices these things and cares.
Palermo, Dec/Jan 1995
Despite the fact that I spent over a month in Palermo, there isn’t much that I need to say about it, for better and worse. I spent most of my time there in a port area, which was quite mild, pleasant, rather middle-classish in its temperament. On the good side was the fact that despite Africans being allowed to set out items for sale on the piazza area, by around 11:30 P.M., if they had not otherwise made themselves scarce, they were rounded up by the police, unceremoniously forced into a paddy wagon and removed.
To note for the assholes out there who are always trying to maintain the urban legend that Sicilians are part black, among the crowds meandering around the piazza at night, there was only one man who apparently had some black admixture; and he did all he could to overcompensate with all the Italian mannerisms, kissing everybody on both cheeks and so on; while I distinguished myself as not approving of him.
I also distinguished myself by making a gun gesture with my hand, pretending to shoot a black in a few instances; and I guess you can say that it was cool that some of the teenage girls smiled, thinking that this was cool on my part (understanding the menace and danger of Africans), in retrospect, I am not too sure that this was cool of me, despite their understanding.
This particular area of Palermo being named “Mondello” added a quirk of starchy reminder to my disposition, as the name of the Italian kid, Keith Mondello, who killed black Yusef Hawkins because he came into his Italian Brooklyn neighborhood to pursue a White girl. I remember the time when that happened, I was just starting to take umbrage to the affront of blacks. Mondello got twenty five years, and my father asked me, “was that worth it?” I answered. “It wasn’t worth it, but I don’t care that he did it.”
So, I wasn’t about to go as far as Mondello in Mondello when… I ducked into the bar off the piazza … these Italian bars leave something to be desired, bright,, more like clean, uncomfortable ice cream parlors, but its the only place where you can sit with a drink. Of course, eventually in walks a tall nigger with two girls, one blonde, and the other a skinny, dark haired Italian beauty. And they did not have an uncomfortable shred about them. I tried to change that, scowling and saying some nasty things in English. It made no difference, after the bought what they wanted, they walked out unperturbed. The proprietor, a handsome young Italian man, gave me the wink of approval. Hardly a consolation when clearly nothing was going to be done about this, not even in Sicily, for all its purport of dangerous ethnocentrism.
I stayed at a camping ground, where I met an Iranian couple. The woman was beautiful. The Muslim man asked me if I was Muslim, I told him no, although I believed in monogamy. He told me that he liked The US more than Russia.
At the bus stop, I saw one of those type girls that I like a – a small forehead, jet black hair, slender. She was so young, however, that I did not think I had a realistic chance. I hopped on the bus and there was an older woman trying to discipline some unruly boys in English, hoping that I’d join it. I disappointed her by taking their side, wanting to encourage their feral rambunctiousness. I called a black kid on the bus, “a monkey” and he just laughed at me. Futile.
The next time I waited for that bus, I was at the stop with the same girl that I liked. As I was about to get on board the bus, I asked her what time it was, “che ore sono?” … she answered with happy enthusiasm, “dodici mezza” … she was just so happy that I had said anything to her. But I got onto the bus and saw that she was looking away in despair. The opportunity for this Americano to rescue her from Sicilian poverty had been missed. I still regret not getting off the bus to connect with her.
University of Palermo, Psychology Department (trance).
At the time, I still had this stupid idea that I might be able to rekindle my graduate career, there in Italy. So, I’d visit the University of Palermo Psychology Department to inquire as such. The few times that I went there, I saw another cute Sicilian girl, with the same, what are for Americans, rare and exotic features of skinny, raven hair, pretty face and white skin. At least I made a pathetic effort to try to talk to her, saying that I’d come to study psychology; and although she was very smiley and friendly, I was probably not wise to try to push through the language barrier when my excuse to be there was thin indeed – no way was I going to study there.
But I did go in to speak with a few lady psychology professors…
I met with the two ladies from the department twice, and I suppose that they were interested to compare notes as I was just recently coming from my top level academic contacts through U. Mass. I thought they might not have heard of Harre, but would be impressed if I name dropped colleagues of his, such as Jerome Bruner – they were impressed. And then I got to the point.
The topic that you were not allowed to talk about. The imposition of miscegenation. The giving away of our women to blacks as it had begun to commence apace in America. I wanted to warn them and appealed to help against this heart breaking affliction. I even broke down a bit in my pain at telling them about this. And I fell into a trance at the stress of it.
I made a jerking off motion to tell them I’d be jerking off in my tent that night – which of course I would do. And then I leaned forward in one of those patent trance moments, wherein the interlocutor understands that they are going to get insider information. Similar as in the Amherst trance, when, in the position of “the Godfather”, I said, “this is what is going to happen” and everyone listened in silence, with the two Sicilian professors, I leaned in quietly and informed them that within a week or two, I’d be going back to the Catania area, and I would meet with a support group headed by a beautiful Italian woman who had Mafia connections at Club Banacher and in fact, thought of herself as The Godfather, il Padrino.
I said, “this bitch thinks that she’s the godfather.”
The two lady professors laughed uproariously.
I proceeded to say that I was on a mission to put her in her place and get a man in position. The lady psychology professors understood that I was under trance suggestion and did not worry.
I went back to visit them once more, the dark haired more mature one was outside the entrance way of the university looking upset as she talked to another professor, I would guess about my despair about miscegenation White girls spreading their ways from America. I went into talk to the younger one. She humored me and assured me that she liked Italian men.
But before that appointment with destiny, I had a few more stops on the mafia tour. Bagheria, a city to the east of Corleone, was notorious for being the most mafia of mafia cities. And then, I had to see Corleone and a few of the villages around there.
Bagheria, December 1995
While Bagheria may have had a spicy reputation as a mafia stronghold, and may well have been, my day there did not prompt me to stay longer, as I found a city that was pleasant enough, but not exciting, just a place where families live. Maybe that’s why I took assholish occasion to add some spark by giving an intimidating angry glare to the one black guy that I saw walking around with his family. He reacted by bringing his children closer to him. And so the day there passed to evening without further event. I found a phone made a collect call to my father, to try to reconnect to him through our heritage, thinking that he’d be interested in where I was. He merely informed me how expensive the collect call was, and added, “you call me for this?”
And so I went back to Palermo that evening. In the morning still not interested in its museums or much else for what might be found beyond the dead afternoon hours, I attempted to talk to a woman I found in the phone book, who shared my family name, Corbo. Went to her house and opened the door to the stairway leading to her door. She screamed, in Italian, “close the door!”
Ok, lets try something else. Since I’m a free man, let me see the paesa made famous in The Godfather as the cradle of the Mafia: Corleone.
Corleone December 1995
I did it There actually is this place made mythical by the book and movie, The Godfather, and I actually took a bus and got there; disembarked to a moment when there were no people about the quite unadorned central square, some grass, paths, a few unimpressive trees and a bit of disrepair. Not horrible but far from the fastidious pride you might expect in such a land mark.
There was a distinguishing aspect to the names on the storefronts surrounding the market square, however – on after the other: Gambino, Bonanno, Gambino, Bonanno, Gambino, Bonanno.
Infamous mafia family names of the Cosa Nostra, not only here, but in America as well, of course. In fact, if anyone’s personal story of emigration from here as a boy to go on to become Capo di Tutti Capi, it would be Carlo Gambino.
On the other hand, life should be so clear as to create characters who might not require a composite from actual people. Carlo being a rather shy mousy type of personality, the Godfather archetype would have to draw upon
Bonanno did not approve of Gambino as a personality, “shy and wincing”, and in fact, probably would have been better cast than Marlon Brando, who would sit stroking a kitten and require patrons to kiss his hand in deference.
Truth be known, I don’t like the mafia, for all their talk of loyalty, what they are really about, in a disgustingly vulgar way, is money. And while I like the artistry of the movie, I did not like the story of The Godfather either. But I digress.
Coming back to our adventure to Corleone, I set about exploring… now where did they get this and that shot from The Godfather?…
But before I was about to move out of the “central square” – and I use those square quotes deliberately, as it was a poor excuse for anything showing social concern with its crumbling paths, absence of flowers or a fountain, just sort of a square grassy area with some stunted trees and those crumbled paths – a school bus let out. And this was not the kind of thing I would tend to speak loudly about either, especially not in the company of WN, whom I typically have to defend the Whiteness of Sicilians against, typically with unambiguous conviction. But in the case of the Corleonese kids, all of them, without exception, seemed to have a dangling version of African kink to their hair, despite otherwise White features and skin. Their hair was a bit discomfiting, but shhhh, it was the only place in Sicily where I noticed this.
And I moved to explore the City, or rather paesa, as it were….
“…now where did they shoot that scene from The Godfather?”
I meandered into the city’s labyrinth, not that much of a labyrinth but some bit thereof. Down a few old streets I came to a place where the streets widened, one of these mini piazzas that the old Italian villages have, this one equipped with a fountain, or rather, not equipped, as the fountain was dry and its element was rusted and pathetically fallen over in the center. I didn’t quite understand this pathos and negligence on display but then, there was nobody around but me to notice, or care, it seemed.
Finally though, some woman from a third floor window did take notice of me traipsing around; and apparently did not approve. Seconds later some youngish man comes and apprehends me, forcing me against a car and pat me down. Then he opens his wallet, suggesting that I’m supposed to put money in there. Needless to say, I was a bit alarmed, and armed only with my genuine good will toward the people. I pleaded with him, “please senior, I am just a student (I was already in my thirties, but a grad student of sorts), I don’t have much money …I am just a tourist”, then, even more stupidly, I said, “I am not against the Mafia”.. he throws me against the car and pats me down again. Then he say, “go to Palermo, don’t come here!”
Believe me, I eagerly got the next bus out of town.
I got back to my room in an adjacent village; actually, it was not a room, but a bed, awkwardly in the living room of an old woman and her daughter. Ever a bit under the consequence of red wine in these days, I made a stupidly bold and persistent attempt to ask the daughter on a date, probably promising her the world, which I felt entitled to do, wearing my custom suit and all. She was quite awkward as well, apparently flattered and humbled by my overture, as I promised her economic security, but she countervailed with her sights set on returning to Germany, “where there was no problem finding work.”
Giuliana December 1995
I had intended to visit Prizzi the day after, its name having been made famous to Americans by the Jack Nicholson movie, “Prizzi’s Honor.’ Giuliana was closer, so first to see, a nestled village the name of which got my attention I suppose, under the impression of NYC Mayor Rudolph Giuliani who had just done the seemingly impossible of transforming Times Square from a dirty sex industry hell hole into a clean and family friendly entrance into New York – even if on the antiseptic side of Disney. But I digress. Entering Giuliani promised the usual rustic Italian village scene, good for art photos kind of thing. But I barely got to the closed door of its church when I was confronted by a group of angry young men. The leader of this pack had eyes going in different directions, sort of like the guy from the Australian group, “Men at Work.” He asked me what I was doing here, and he too opened his wallet, suggesting that I put money in.
I tried to reason with him, saying that I was Italian, loved Italy and Sicily, that I wanted to see these lovely villages and that I’d be soon moving on to see Prizzi. “Prizzi!” he exclaimed, as if I had uttered something unconscionable. I was afraid they would not let me go, but I was somehow able to scurry away and I began walking back down the country road out of the village.
I walked briskly down the road from Giuliana, a road that was on a shrub covered hillside, completely vertical to my left and a steep ravine, with shrubs and trees to my right. I was not far out of the town and uh-oh, I hear the voices of the boys and the sneer of Vespa engines revving-up their rpm’s. This isn’t very good if they’d want to hunt me even out of town. As I heard them getting closer, I leaned into the vertical embankment to my left. There was enough shrub cover so that you could not see me with a straight on view down the road. I also knew that they knew that I was not far out of town and could not have disappeared. And in the moment I stood there, hoping that they would not be bothered, one of the boys on Vespa slowed down and looked directly in my eyes. Maybe I lucked out that this was not the inbred looking one that was looking to extort me, but just a hanger on; whatever, he did not try to apprehend me but rather turned around to rather the rest of the pack on Vespas.
I saw my chance to play it safe. I bolted to the other side and went down into the ravine, traversing its rather precarious steepness and ducking under some brush and trees. I intuited that they would not eagerly follow me down there and I made up my mind to holed up there as long as necessary until I was satisfied that they gave up looking for me.
Indeed, about five times over the span of forty minutes or so, I heard the sneer of their Vespa’s passing back and forth where the one guy had spotted me, just above. It’s a subtle thing, but I was and am proud of myself for more than three hours, until it was dark, to be safe that they had given up trying to apprehend me. I made my way back to my bed, told the story to the nice young lady I’d solicited the night before while here mother farted as she left the room and we pretended not to notice. I told this story to a high school friend, Andy, some years later and he said it sounded horrible. It wasn’t really. It was an adventure. kind of classic for the setting.
Catania, December 1995/January 1996
I got back to Catania in time to spend Christmas and New Years there. Somehow, I managed to get what must have been an old fashioned honeymoon sweet at a penzione, but for a price that was affordable to me, only a little more expensive than a dorm room.
The proprietor spoke English. Naturally, given my fate, this “Italian woman”, I put that in parentheses, because she had dirty blonde hair and was now pregnant with her, eh, husband – a very black nigger. Not that this was very common, but: my fate. Her old mother disgusted me, like a dirty old woman, with a big giddy smile on her face delighting over her genes going Mulatto via her scuzbag daughter. I had to pretend this was all ok with me, of course, the room was too good and it would be impossible to find anything better for the holiday season.
I wasted no time making the least of the opportunity of my royal quarters, what, with a canopy over its king sized bed and all. What I mean by that is that I’d be getting drunk on my Chimay and red wine, not exactly refining my “game” to fulfill my mission of finding a hot Italian wife.
Nevertheless, I’d be out and about in and around Catania, and that would bring interesting ventures through my trance fate. Before setting out on the town, I had occasion to talk to a tiny retired professor from America, he taught at Berkeley, if I recall. “I never fit in there.” Different values, I proposed. “Yeah, it’s all about money.”
I went out on the city, bedecked as it was with its Christmas festival ornamentation and I made my way to a small plaza off of the main, Piazza Duomo, where a stage was set up for a band and a small crowd watched a band called, unoriginally enough, “The Silver Beatles.”
I would not even mention this story except for the fact that this was one of the more clear episodes that I had seen back in the Amherst trance. The band fashioned their cool look with conservative dress and short hair only accented by sunglasses; their music in a late 50s, early 60s style featured a lead singer on a stand up bass, bellowing, “adesso, adesso, adesso!” …which I could never forget, going back to the Amerherst trance, as I spoke “adesso, addesso, adesso!” mockingly to the lawyer guy who had prompted the trance’s onset. But it was deep into the trance when I likened his style to a style that I didn’t care for, the pre-hippie era, kind of greasy, a bit conservative, kind of be cool by caring a whole lot about cars culture. This mockery and trying to liken the lawyer guy to this type as if it was something to mock, was a bit stupid of me, but I was in trance and have that excuse. Anyway, I was experiencing now, in Catania, what I’d been shown in trance back in Amherst, the “Silver Beatles”, their lead singer in a leisure suit, with sunglasses, playing a standup bass, bellowing “adesso, adesso, adesso!” (now, now, now).
While the sublimated Belgian monk’s frustrated sexual energy fulminated to the 9% proof Chimay beer and a near cocaine high that addled me through the bars and piazzas by Catania’s night, there weren’t all that many happening bars to choose from, but there were a few.
Club Banacher, up near Aci Costello, was less interesting every time I went there and the other big alternative disco tech in the area, “Club Macintosh” was completely dead – worse, amidst the dead club videos were played of black D.J.s from America’s George Washington University spinning records. However, Catania remained intriguing and I found a few clubs and a plaza with several bars and cafes that I would frequent by night while during the day I could read in the park and duck into a few of the espresso bars and a small library off the main street through Catania.
At Club Banacher I did run into the classically featured Maria – when I say classically featured, I mean a version thereof having some of the high cheek bone dynamics that you’d expect of an African, but without the dark skin, broad nose and thick lips – she was a girl who I’d met in the ice cream cafe below my penzione; she recognized me “subido” (immediately) from two years before and greeted me with a big smile, “rigard”; and with that prompting, I took occasion whenever I could to flirt with her as best I could at the cafe, even if she was not really my type, despite being, “beautiful” – classic beauty, i.e., a high price tag, while I was shopping for my off market type – you know, big nose, diminutive, small breasted, dark hair, maybe some acnes scars.
Nevertheless, the scene was set for me to flirt with her, me in my sharp custom made three piece suit – “The Godfather.” I told her, Io, il Padrino, faccio tu bello adesso percha to hai regard. Due anni fa, tuo brutto.” Translate, “I, the godfather, make you beautiful now because you have regard. Two years ago you were ugly!” Fairly confident in her appearance, she played along: “two years ago I was ugly?” I answered, “si” (yes). Her co-worker, I nice and pretty enough Italian girl two laughed. My social skills were working a bit for a change. I was making friends with the girls. Of course, through the addling of the Chimay and stress bringing on semi-trance states, I would take one very stigmatic turn with them.
I had been trying to tactfully explain to these girls that blacks were bad news and I tried my line on them, that “the only thing they have is an extended chin.” I guess Maria lit my fuse by saying that she liked the looks of African men, their faces. That, combined with the slight look of a nigger with White skin that she had disagreed with me. So when I cam back from the bars, stopping into her cafe before my penzione, I fell into a brief tirade: “You thought you could fool a Corleone? You are a White nigger and you will not bring niggers to Italy! I will kill them and you if you do!” Needless to say, this was insane of me, very dangerous; her co-worker at that moment, there for the first time that night became frantic and tried to wave to the police to come to the cafe. I quickly scurried out. I think what saved me was the several funny and friendly exchanges that we’d already had, my clear genuine concern for the well being of our people; my excuse, that I was very drunk coming along with a sincere apology, equipped with flowers and a small gift. Amazingly, she accepted my apology, called me “crazy” in the generic sense, as in ah, he’s just a crazy guy; she shared a coffee with me and we went on with our friendly exchanges every morning before I set out and in the evening before I went into my penzione.
One anterior piazza had a few different bars, but none especially popular nor promising for my Italian woman hunting. Particularly not this one, despite being hip in its decorum, music and clientele. A small problem was that the bartenders were all these very pretty Swedish girls; you may think I’m crazy, but that’s just not what I was looking for – I was on a mission to shore up the Italian birth rate and the Wonderwall against Africa of tough, raven haired women. Not tantalizing blonde victims held up supposedly to be the ultimate prize even to Italian men. In a word, it was a bit insulting to me. I mean, I was glad they felt safe here, but… not what I was looking for.
Not that there were so many, but I was very angered when one of the times there outside of this bar, I saw three blacks, comfortably dressed and seated a curb. I gave them a note: we don’t need your women, black women are ugly, go back to Africa. I went into the bar and after a few minutes one of them came in with the note and gave it to a male bar tender. He became visibly scared but said nothing. I was seated next to a fair looking Italian girl and the black put out some vibe to her and she fixed up her hair. I guess you can say that the nig successfully one-upped me; but worse was the sexy raven haired girl who took occasion to call me “una racista!” as exited.
Bringing forth a consciousness that black genetics were a threat was going to be an uphill battle, even here. Again, while there was not a lot of it, I saw yet another pretty young women walking with a tall, nothing special at all black, down the main street of Catania. I berated them in Italian that black women were ugly, that we didn’t need the. While a pained expression came across the nig’s face, the woman said, in English “I don’t understand.” She seemed a bit bemused, not to worried. It was futile- and as such, infuriating – at this point to challenge this kind of travesty.
A bar right off piazza duomo had two stories in classic exterior architecture and interior architecture, but had the advantaged of being populated by young, middle class kids and so it became like my home base among bars. This would be where one of the more freakish trance experiences in Catania would occur, but not until I cam back in the summer. The only noteworthy incident from the winter there was the time when three Americans sat at a table on the second floor. They were young enlisted people as there is a U.S. Naval base off of Catania. I found this offensive as well, and as I passed by them on the way to the bathroom, I told them that they might be happier back in America with the niggers and ugly White women. As I came back out of the bathroom one stuck his foot out and tripped me so that I almost fell. I think that I called him a piece of shit and told him to go back to America; nothing more came of the incident.
But in the summer, I would be back to that place for a weirdee.
I did spot one girl who was kind of the type that I was looking for; and maybe people would say that I am crazy, that she was kind of plain, but to me not – she was diminutive, had the dark hair; and seemed a conservative type, working in a shop where I would always try to buy my Chimay, hoping to screw up the courage to ask her to dinner. She obviously spoke no English and, well, she was a conservative girl, so, probably not looking for a foreign man – confirmed after raising her suspicion and irritation by going there a dozen times. In the end I left her a white rose as a gesture of peace and did not go back to her shop. It was cowardly of me, perhaps, but what was I supposed to do, play “game” with her, in order to try to get her into bed?
Back at my hotel, where I had this sweet good for a king’s wedding night, I got through the holidays alone, drunk. The proprietor lady, the one with the nigger husband and her mother who struck me as a perverted old woman for her giddy smile at the prospect of her very pregnant daughter about to bring forth a niglet, they tried to be nice to me. Anna, I think her name was, said that I “have time”, as I worried about my age, mid thirties, and prospects for finding a wife.
Anna actually gave birth to the niglet during this time that I was there. And her mother (something out of Rosemarie’s Baby) was delighted to let me know. Anna needed something from my room (bundle of fabric) and said that I could hand it to “her husband” … I guess that she was testing to see if I could get along with his kind. I stuck extended the bundle down the stairwell to him while refusing to even look at him or greet him in anyway. I could hear Anna let out a huge wail as I snubbed normal relations with her “husband.”
It was time to get the hell out here and the next morning I got the train back to Salerno.
Paris (by train from Salerno), late January, early February 1996
I arrived back in my home base hostel in Salerno with the idea that I’d be taking of from Rome with my standby voucher within the next few days. Problem was, there were no seats available from Rome for the next few weeks and the closest airport with standby seats available in the next week was Paris. It wasn’t quite within my budget but what a shame, I’d have to go to Paris for the first time, and the next day I made my way to the Salerno train station to get a train to Paris … “me scusi”, I said, accidentally bumping into a cute American girl in line, as I pretended to be Italian, and she volunteered a generous smile for ‘my’ culture.
Going to Paris and taking the train there was risky, beyond my budget and totally Not in my plans, but I was committed to following my fate – it was calling me there indeed ….as the hostel proprietor lady from Lipari had suggested, with a smile (in ironic contrast to the anger of her husband who threw me out because I upset the girls with my wild racism), to my own claim made to her while I was under trance the evening before, that she would prompt me the next day that I have a mission in France to fulfill. People generally know when you are under trance suggestion and they are happy to oblige when they think a benign force is behind it.
Boston, Mass, February 1996
New Hampshire, March 1996
Unlike Richard Spencer, I have been skiing exactly twice in my life. The first time was in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Having taken my ski lessons and mastered what was called “the intermediate slope” quite handily, I developed a bit of hubris in my ability – at least for the intermediate slope. I tried the advanced slope once and could not even stand before falling and being jettisoned downward. Nevertheless, even little kids were whisking down past me and I could not believe how they did it – I only realized that I could not handle the advanced slope.
Satisfied nevertheless, I returned to my hostel that evening (but I did of course see an interracial couple on the way, in case anyone believes New Hampshire is immune). One of the townies was there talking about how he advocated Pat Buchanan, who was running for Presidency (was that the year he had a Negro running mate? Perhaps); it struck me as strange for a kid that young to be promoting Pat (whom I never thought to be very good – “rather than ‘the sewer of multiculturalism’ all Americans should integrate as English speaking Christians” – good thinking, Pat. No wonder the mainstream media kept you around as a convenient foil all those years), but I appreciated the defiant conservatism of the kid promoting Pat. New Hampshire was one of the few places where Buchanan could win. Fate was kicking in, the trance recollections before and during my recent trip to Europe from which I’d just returned were prompting me..
There were some English skiers there at the hostel. A couple of young lads and an older English gent there solo. I could not forget his name, as it was Hamilton. We talked candidly about race. He expressed his admiration at how Germany had built their country right back up after World War II. When discussing the problems of our respective European nationalities, he gritted his teeth and said, “Jews!” I was not ready to go there. I still needed to hold breath that this may be in some part, if not primarily, a distraction from deeper issues. It was probably not in that moment but somewhere in that evening that I felt myself being aware that I was outside of my normal consciousness, castigating (laced with the vilest profanity) the girls running the hostel, one from France in particular, for being a nation of feminist bitches. They apparently understood that this was a trance as they calmly instructed me the next morning that I had to visit North Hampton – as I had told them that they were going to tell me to go to North Hampton in the next few days to meet my fate among the greatest concentration of lesbians in The U.S., North Hampton being the proximity of two of America’s most prestigious women’s colleges – Smith and Mount Holyoke.
The parting with Mr. Hamilton did not go as I might have liked. It was clear that we were both dearly committed to defending Europe against liberalism and non-Europeans. I had told him in the trance state the evening before that you can trust a man if you can look him dead in the eye and he does not look away. The next morning Mr. Hamilton had a big smile on his face as he saw me (my trances always seemed to have a healing effect on people); we shook hands in parting, he looked me dead in the eye; but I turned my eyes away and a puzzled frown came across his face. Though I regret making myself didactically untrustworthy in that instant, I know now that I did that because I did not yet know enough to express full enough agreement with him. That day, Hamilton, a Thomas Hamilton rather, massacred school children in Dunblane, Scotland. So it must have been the 13th of March 1996.
Amherst, Mass, March 1996
Newark, N.J. (short trip back to Amherst), April to July 18, 1996
By late 1995 my efforts to pursue graduate studies in Amherst, Mass. were clearly over…
In the Spring of that year was the big trance.. I went under and became an impromptu master of trance ceremonies for about 30 people who attended a 12 step meeting (for the children of alcoholics). All the people there went into the trance with me, for about 3 hours…
Though the events of the trance would slip from my consciousness during the normal course of my days, that trance, in particular, instilled in me a sense of fate – because, among other phenomenon of trance, I was seeing some things that would happen in the future – mostly trivial, such as speaking some Polish (whereas I knew no Polish) and seeing that I would pick mushrooms with my cousin Ryzard in Poland. But these phenomenon, which I would not believe had I not experienced them, were compelling enough to cause me to follow my fate, even where it did not make full, rational sense. I told you about that in part one of my trance adventures.
The goal of an advanced degree being kaput, I left Massachusetts and went to Newark, New Jersey, where I was born – an Italian enclave in a horrible, mostly Black city. But my father had an empty house there that he’d bought as an investment. It would be a place to gather myself and find my next step. Though I did not grow up there, my grandmother lived in the area until her death in 1984, and so I had some roots of sorts, there.
There would be a few interesting episodes there, in this lower middle class, White section of Newark’s North Ward.
Adriano, the young, handsome Italian guy, that I had foretold the German 5 about in the grand trance of Amherst was here, fresh from Rome, as my father hired him to paint the house, getting it ready for sale. Of course, I was being tested, to see if I would join him and help to get the house ready for sale; perhaps I should have but my head was elsewhere. I did not remember at the time that I had told the German 5 about this guy, telling her that he was handsome, looking like a young Pete Best and that he was clear to say that he liked German women; but Not Jewish women, “I don’t need their women; you can’t trust them.” …in that important respect, he was ahead of me, although steeped in my American experience, I countered with confidence, saying “no, niggers are the big problem”, going into the matter of their long pre-evolution, aggression and so on, while Whites should group-up in our defense, like Jews do. Being much younger than me, he took a step back and offered that maybe I was way ahead of him in terms of experience and knowledge.
He was hooking up with Denise, the realtor who was trying to sell the house. Denise was not especially interested in him, but saw me as a potential viable partner. Adriano, stereotypically jealous and temperamental Italian, did not understand that I was not interested in Denise sexually when I went to visit her socially. He came rambling over, and I was able to defuse his temper with a bit of old world, Italian ethnocentrism. I said to him, “you thought you could fool a Corleone?” After he left, Denise explained how jealous that Adrian was, that he said he was going crazy as he saw the ten toes in bed through her window. Denise was with her Arab boyfriend, in from Sweden at the time. I didn’t especially like that, but liked even less the way she talked about Swedish men; she’d visited him in Sweden and said the men were “wimps and the women see that (Arabs) and … I made some remark about at leas their not being black and that they were wise to the shenanigans of Jews. She said “you don’t know” (how much they hate them), but where I could agree with her more readily, knowing enough about the JQ to express disgust with “the Jewish media.”
Anyway, during those days I was immersed in reading, The Godfather, among those books, and probably to my discredit to spend my time that way, whereas I might have been helping Adriano and his partner to spiff-up the house for sale
While out and about in those days, Adriano wound up stabbing someone whom he found insulting – “acting like a jerkoff, made some remark about my mother” – lucky for Adriano, the guy did not die. And nevertheless, my spiritual replacement had been delivered to America for the German 5, who had enthusiastically agreed that she would like him, perhaps envisioning him as well, when I explained how he looked in the Amherst trance
On April 6th, I saw in the newspaper that one of Jimi Hendrix’ X girlfriends, Monika Dannemann, had committed suicide after losing a libel case against another of Jimi Hendrix’s White girlfriends, Kathy Etchingham. This was a reminder of my days when I was a Hendrix freak, his music combing the manifold creativity of L.S.D. and the ultra aggression of hard rock that captured my disposition. But just who I was placing my admiration before? True, there was the semi-excuse of there being no internet to interact with, engage ones thoughts and emotions, and all we had as an outlet was the proxy of music. This left me, anyway, inarticulate, pressured with these misguiding musical overtures of woman as panacea, for which no price was too high.
Because you did not see White women with blacks until the late 80s, the pressure of competition from him or his kind did not enter my mind; the pictures of Hendrix with pretty White women off in Europe did not strike home.
While there’d been many years of ominous build up of hyperbolic feminism since the 70s in which White women seemed to ridicule White men to no end for everything while being aggravatingly defensive of blacks, you still didn’t see human women walking around with black men. That damn burst around the time of the Madonna “Like a Prayer” video.
In part one, I talked about how I’d been prepared through post hypnotic suggestion to do my part in protest, “acting like a crazy Italian” on campus. Having to retreat from that, what was becoming a war, I was back on the streets of the non academic world, in an old family neighborhood, experiencing the impact of academia, as it does influence the mentality of those in non-academic circumstance/ neighborhoods and their behavior.
I went to my bank, which was on the corner of North 11th Street and Bloomfield Ave. and I noticing a young, pretty Italian girl with a mulatto kid. I remarked, “is that an Italian girl with a nigger baby? What a shame”… I said that calmly seated on a chair, waiting my turn for the teller at a clear distance from her, obviously intending to take no action.. days later, I bought a slice of pizza two blocks a way, on the corner of 11th and 2nd Ave., not knowing that the nigger that they had working there was the father of this nigger boy… it tried my patience as I heard him happily listing the girls that had been at a party with him while he served my pizza. I think that I grumbled the N word under my breath as I walkd out.
He came out of the pizzeria shouting at me, “are you a racist!?!… are you a racist?!” I stood there unafraid but not wanting to get into a physical fight, believing that I had the right to my thoughts, thank you very much. But he pushed me and I slipped because my shoes were slippery… I hit the sidewalk on my face, around my eye… I stood up smiling, because I could not believe how stupid the nigger was.. I grabbed a chair and raised it slowly, showing him that I would be glad to bring it down on his head.. the owner of the pizzeria said, “don’t, I’ll call the police!”… I calmly said “go ahead, I’ll have him locked up for assault. Just give me my three dollars back;” I walked away and the Italian girl was there with her nigger son, saying, “remember the bank?” while the nigger was screaming at me, that “you will never look at my son again!”.. well, later I would send a note to the pizzeria.. addressed to the nigger, saying that “you, nigger, will never hit a White man again.”.. my strategy being to put him into a double bind – he is either beholden to my orders as White man.. or goes ahead defiantly and stupidly maintains that it is his prerogative to dictate how people must feel about niggers and to assault them if they are “racists”, taking him one step closer to the jail – even better…
But on that day, I had my giant facial bruise, just as foretold I would, as in the Godfather movie. And with that bruise I would drink and go in and out of trance for a day in the top floor apartment of the house my father was selling (more on that in a moment); and during the week I would wear the bruise as I called The U.Mass. Amherst college newspaper (from a phone on the same corner as the incident) to ask about the controversial status of my “White Women For Sale!” editorial that I wanted run. ..and one ridiculously futile call to my father, in which he would bark at an automated telephone service, asking him if he’d accept a collect call, “is this ATT”!?
… I would see the nigger from a distance up the street a week or two later; something interesting to say about that; but let me not get ahead of myself.
Such were my days there.. me with a big black, swollen eye, just like the episode in the “Godfather”, and just like the godfather I was.. and there, on this particular day, I drank into night and went into a trance.. while outside, yet another girl, a blond, waited with the the nigger across the street, cuddling with him, securing him to show support for him and defiance of me…
Many songs that I had sang in the big, Amherst trance, were being played on the radio, resonating the sense of fate, particularly “Ironic“, by Alanis Morissette… equipped with its lines:
Mr. Play It Safe was afraid to fly
He packed his suitcase and kissed his kids goodbye
He waited his whole damn life to take that flight
And as the plane crashed down, he thought
“Well, isn’t this nice?”
And isn’t it ironic, don’t you think?
The song concludes:
And, yeah, life has a funny way of sneaking up on you
Life has a funny, funny way of helping you out
Helping you out
It was being made clear to me that I had to get the hell out of here and get back to Europe come hell or high water; not to give up the fight, but to have a more conducive base of operations, where I’d be with my people, first of all a part of those still considering themselves a people, discrete from non-Europeans and worth defending in our particularity.
Political Correctness had become the religion of the West, drifting down from (((the universities))), liberalizing White boundaries on punishment of all manner, and giving females, including the puerile, a large, unmerited, short term advantage, pandered to from all kinds with the prohibition of classifcatory discrimination (“racism and civil rights”); susceptible as such to this brainwashing. While the amygdala generates fear responses in Whites when shown a Black face, Jewish mediums of power (movies, The New York Times, “higher education” etc.) have been steady at work to brain wash White people that their instinct for survival is evil, and they manipulate newer parts of the brain to suppress that survival instinct (K.M.) – convincing Whites that Blacks are harmless or victims; they are not. They are dangerous and violent to Whites. Dangerous even, in the less immediate sense of imposed cohabitation within the same polity, as the PC taboo prohibiting discrimination and reversing prohibition of miscegenation, elevating it to social heroism, is equivalent, when carried-out, to eliminating so many White offspring, depending on the Distance of Ethnic Genetic Interests, blacks being the most distant.
In fact, the year (2011) would be the first year when more non-White children were born in America (not by popular democratic choice, but because it was orchestrated to be that way by Jewish interests).
Ok, but at this point, 1996, I was only somewhat aware of the Jewish thing (especially money and media);; still giving them some sympathy for possibly overreacting from the holocaust, hoping that they could be reasoned with. I was still thinking in terms of liberals and conservatives.. and trying to find out who cares.. I had just spent about six months, mostly in Italy after my university plans had fallen through.
I stewed in and out of trance and drunkenness on the day of incident with the nigger, him sitting defiantly of me across the street with a pretty young blonde all afternoon; add to that a subsequent trance with my family (that I will detail in a moment) and it became clear to me that I had to go back to Europe sooner than later. I wanted to go, but had been figuring that I may have to make better preparation rather than using my credit card. It didn’t matter. I really could not stand America – hated it there. The people were so alien to me. I needed to be able to say, “this country is my country. These are my people.” I could not do that in America.
But I was still there, physically, in that day of 1996, learning through the phone on that same corner by the pizzeria, that the U. Mass. college paper staff had voted against running my “White Women For Sale!” editorial.
And in returning to my house I’d see an older lady across the street greeting her neighbor, of the one nigger family on the block; they were assuring one another that they were ok with each other, as I passed with my big black eye; they knew about the incident; as did her ugly nigger daughter who, on another day, sat in a rocking chair staring at me with contempt and smug superiority.
And the final episode stemming from that incident, as I mentioned, seeing (from a distance) yet another White (possibly Hispanic) girl saunter up to this (ugly) nigger on the corner with a smile on her face; while a Hispanic boy walked away in disgust, obviously disgusted as this nigger was going through choice young girls at his whim, as they made themselves quite available to him.
It was not long after the incident with the nigger, the trance of that day and a subsequent trance (with my family, that I will detail next) that it became clear to me that I had to go back to Europe sooner than later. I wanted to go, but had been figuring that I may have to make better preparation rather than using my credit card. Nevertheless, the social environment had gotten desperate enough so that “practical and rational deliberation” was not the pre-eminent concern; especially not given a sense of trance destiny calling me. I really could not stand America – hated it there. The people were so alien to me, including my family, in their concerns. I needed to be able to say, “this country is my country. These are my people.” I could not do that in America.
I don’t remember the exact reason why I went to my father’s house in Brielle, New Jersey (maybe to get my Passport), but when I did go there, my siblings (two brothers and respective spouses) happened to be visiting; and that set the stage for another trance of major significance for me.
Trance with family in Brielle, N.J., Spring or Summer 1996
Trance with family
So, with bridges of rational negotiation with my family burned, in utter disgust and desperation to escape America’s panmixia identity and a sense of destiny and fate to launch me on my way irrespective of lack of normal rationale, I used my credit card (i.e. money that I did not have – though my expenditures in that manner would be based on the budget that my father bragged would be entrusted to me during our trip to Italy in 1993) and bought a stand-by voucher – these are special air tickets that allow you to board a plane if there are empty seats on the flight.
FLIGHT 800
It was now July 17, 1996. I talked to my travel agent and he told me that there might be seats on the flight to Rome. Well, after making the 2 hour trip to JFK airport, I discovered that the flight to Rome was full. I could not get on. But, I called my travel agent, and he told me that there was one remaining available seat on a flight to Paris, leaving in 45 minutes, if I made a fast decision.
Now, Paris was not my objective; I had been there the previous February for the first time and I liked it, but my purpose was serious, to get to one of my homelands. Still, going to Paris would get me into Europe and it was not impossible to get to Italy from there…so, I got on the airport shuttle bus and road it to the terminal of Air France. I did not get off the first time, but rode the bus around once more. . I really could not make up my mind… passed the Air France Terminal a second time…maybe it would be nice to go to Paris for a few days? I could always get to Italy from there..but I really just wanted to go to Italy.. but Paris could be ok…it had been good last time that I was there.. I could not make up my mind.. I vacillated in decision back and forth, finally coming to a hard decision that I would go to Paris as I arrived at the Air France Terminal the third time and then, for some reason, I just said, ‘Naaah!‘.. and I road the shuttle to the bus that would take me back to Newark.
The next morning I woke up and got the newspaper. The headlines read: “Flight 800 to Paris Explodes in Mid-Air.” All passengers dead.
Ok, Ok, the flight to Paris that I almost took for the one available seat was another flight also to Paris which had left 45 minutes prior to Flight 800, but the dangling proximity was weird enough.
Salerno, Italy, July 1996
Calabritto and Materdomini, Italy, August 1996
Catania and Aci Costello, August 1996
Wonderwall
Adventures of a racialist following trance and fate – to Sicily and Poland.
Perhaps next I ought to begin with what was the big trance for me, when I inappropriately talked about race in an Al-Anon (ACOA) 12 Step meeting at a Church in Amherst, Massachusetts – must have been in early 1995. There were about 30 people there from all walks, a Muslim woman, tunic and all, a French girl I had a crush on but who was never at that particular meeting, Jews, German Americans, a large gamut. In my stressful but impassioned despair over miscegenation a fart came out. Not loud but audible and I apologized. Being the nice people that they were they told me not to worry about it. But one of them was a lawyer who angrily said that I probably had not broken any law, not for the fart, but for the racial talk. At that moment, I farted loudly and said slowly, “niggers and Jews”…everybody laughed and we all went into a collective trance for the next few hours… DanielS
Peter: can’t tell if you’re being facetious here.
Did this really happen? How did you end up talking about miscegenation and farting out loud in an AA meeting? What do you mean by collective trance?
DanielS Posted by Yes, it happened. on Tue, 16 Dec 2014 04:28 | #
Yes, it really happened but it was not AA, it was ACOA (adult children of alcoholics). It happened at a meeting as such, which means there were witnesses (for better and worse). The fart was involuntary. Miscegenation was such a serious matter and so prohibited to discuss that it sort of forced its way out as a topic as well.
Continuing to expound upon said adventures here and here.
It marked a difference of this group, an Amherst Alanon meeting of thirty or so, as I bluffed in the same way that I would, by standing up and pretending to shoot with my finger – Bang! Bang! Bang! But from this group ensconced at a church literally across the street from Emily Dickinson’s house – nothing. No reaction. They looked calmly upon me as only a harmless fool – A bullfrog on a lily pad. ..I’m nobody, who are you?
I foretold them that the Sicilians would act differently.
More than a year later, it was August of 1996, when at a similarly conciliatory meeting of similarly normal people seated in the same circular formation, I stood up, raised my finger like a gun barrel and shouted Bang! Bang! Bang! aiming at the Sicilians in rapid turn around the room in Aci Creale to their immediate fright and panic. To them, it was quite possible that this would be a real gun.
I woke up late on a morning as it turned September to see an unusual funeral procession moving through Piazza Duomo. Two coffins were being moved.
I saw the names of those who I would learn were Salvatore Botta 14 and Santa Puglisi 22, the nephew and niece of a rival mafioso. They were shot on August 27th while attending the funeral for Santa’s husband – who had also been shot…
Back to the conciliatory meeting of Sicilian friends for purposes of mutual healing, I castigated the beautiful and stylishly dressed woman who seemed to organize it:
“With your friends at Banacher, you pose as godfather but you are not the godfather!” I was walking on thin ice and knew it. I attempted to prove myself genuine as I knew without evidence that one of the girls had been incested. I charged the group to answer, “how did I know?” I was scared, emboldened by trance or not. I made it worse, blurting out that Maria was ugly (painful to talk that way about anybody, but especially Maria, a kindly lawyer who I met in a book store, who had brought me to the meeting) and that she didn’t care about her. Maria howled in pain. Seeing Maria’s (non-present) sister in my head, I imitated her voice and gestures, again, indicating my veracity. I ordered the “godmother” to hug and console Maria. She did and everybody clapped.
When I told the godmother that weeks before I had attempted to take a small, carved stone from the street ruins of Tiberius’ Villa on Capri, she reacted in horror, as if I was pulling a rib. Then I knew she was genuine enough for me. I told this group of Sicilians the truth, that I loved them, as tears poured down my face.
Attempting to collect a souvenir by picking one of the small stones from the path meticulously and anciently leading to Tiberius Villa had created a look of dread on the face of ‘the godmother’, like tugging at one of her ribs in order to pry it from her.
Visiting The University of Palermo to look into matriculation a week before brought me into the Sicilian city at night – they can have a ghastly feel at night, like some Gothic Frankenstein movie, no people on the streets, no stores open, just dark and eerie silence among ancient buildings – a tinge of Egypt and mummification.
The next day I went into trance while talking to two lady psychology teachers, looking from side to side then spontaneously telling them, “this bitch thinks she is the godfather”… they laughed and I was on my way to that meeting in Aci Creale.
I stayed in a penzione off of Piazza Duomo in Catania. In evenings I would go to bars, eventually finding my way to one appropriately named Sonnambula. In these days and nights I tranced, remembering who a girl whom I’d met in Salerno weeks before was, Magda, as foretold and seen in my mind’s eye in Amherst, “not even the rain had hands so small.”
September 14, 2021, is twenty five years to the day from when I followed the irrationality of recognizing events and persons as foreseen in trance as giving me a sense that I must follow my fate, with destiny then calling me to Poland for the first time. I took a train to Poland from Salerno, having met Magda there, recognizing her in my memory from trance only after she’d returned to Poland from her vacation, as I tranced all day, the entire day, on 9-6 96.
Salerno, September 1996
I went back to Salerno where, on 9 6 9 6 I tranced the whole day. The Amherst trance came back to me, and fate gave me the excuse of spiritual mandate, even though in reality I could not afford to go and visit Magda in Poland.
On September 13th, to one of my biggest regrets, I forfeited an opportunity to connect with a half Italian half English girl at the hostel – she was bemoaning troubles, breaking up with her boyfriend in Australia and bought me a glass of wine to commiserate with me…but I had my ticket for Poland and appointment with destiny already. I told her I regretted not being able to stay. She was lovely. I kissed her on the hair and left. To make matters worse, that evening the hostel was having a hospitality night for African refugees. As I opened the door I saw a lovely Italian girl cheerfully coming to meet one of the Africans. I was disgusted. I couldn’t escape this even in Italy. I protested but knew that in the overall, for now, there was no fighting. I had to leave.
Krakow, Poland (after a brief, accidental visit to Warsaw) and Auschwitz, from September 14, 1996 to...
September 14, 1996, I arrived in Krakow for the first time, made my obligatory visit to Auschwitz from there and so on. As foretold (in trance with my kindly German American Harvard trained psychologist), one of the tips of my new boots would be coiled as I turned a Krakow corner and my toe collided with the toe of a large Polish oaf turning the sidewalk corner from the other direction at precisely the same time.
Gdansk, Gydynia, Sopot and Helska penninsula, September 1996
After a few days in Krakow, I went to Gdansk (where the Nazi attack had begun), and, as foretold, I met-up with Magda where she lived in Gdansk, Zaspa, and where Lech Wałęsa also lived during his Solidarność days. As I explained “fate and god” had brought me to this rendezvous she naturally thought I was crazy; though maybe funny, equipped as I was with stories of my having to intervene on behalf of a broken Sicilian goddess who’d been snapped up by a strange Mulatto in Catania (I could see the energy waves emanating from him, and I told two girls in trance episode before, in the Catania restaurant, to acknowledge the phenomenon and its catastrophe – they obediently sat on each side of the pair; acknowledging and pointing out the catastrophe. Surreal sounding stories aside, Magda went out with me a few times and I was able to treat her fairly extravagantly at the still humorously inexpensive Polish restaurants.
Pila, Poland, October 1996
After some days the Gdansk area, I went to Piła, because that was the only place in Poland where I knew that I had cousins. This was where my grandmother’s brother, Bronislaw, was moved as the Poles were moved westward – his hometown became a village in Belarus and Schneidemühl became Piła (again) – following the Nazi defeat in their territorial gambit for lebensraum at the expense of the eastern nations and for which they received justifiable territorial penalty in return.
My Grand Uncle Bronislaw was gone by then but his wife was still alive (still living in the same house in Pila and having letters from my grandmother). I met all three of sons and their families. One of the sons, Ryzard, took me picking mushrooms in the woods. Spotting a good one he identified it and spoke, “Podgrzybek” – as I foretold in the Amherst meeting, my first Polish word spoken there, when I had never heard or spoken Polish in my life, but slowly did there, in the Amherst trance, saying, “Pod-grzy-bek ”…I could see my cousin Ryzard and explained to the group that I’d meet him..that Poland would appeal to me among other reasons because the women were beautiful and there were no niggers there (in fact, the Amherst group laughed as I asked, surprised and innocently, “are there niggers there?” Particularly funny as I was oblivious to the fact that two Oreos were sitting right next to me).
Upon return to America, I arrived in Boston and stayed at an international hostel for two weeks; a lovely, otherwise normal seeming middle class Australian girl was “seduced” by Chuck (she asked me where “Chuck” was), seduced, as in, I had watched this nigger like an animal seizing prey, grab her cunt and for the heavy taboo and prohibition against “racism,” I could say nothing, as he remarked, “love happens.” She apparently responded favorably to this and was now looking for him. In the common cafeteria, a beautiful French girl was chatted up by a local nigger who gave her a line about how White people gobbled up American land for pittance and drunken gambling games while they had blacks doing slave labor; the French girl stretcher her arms upward in relief and beamed a smile at the end of this rap while I wiped the smile from her face, catching her eyes at this exact moment, to let her know that no, she did not know niggers, and they were not alright (to mate with and so on). I banged into her in the hallway, chiding, “nigger, nigger, nigger.” After two weeks there, I had to leave as that was the maximum stay.
I moved to the Irish hostel near the Boston Garden. I saw what was (to me) a beautiful Italian woman with a black husband and mulatto child going to “Disney on Ice.” … I tried talking racial politics, with an Irish girl, explaining that I’d just come back from Sicily and it was a common misunderstanding that Sicilians had African admixture; nevertheless she told me that Sicily deserved to be swamped with Africans because of Mussolini. Nice as the hostel was, and well meaning though these liberal girls were, this was making me angry already and making the hospitality shown to a non-Irish person difficult to reciprocate with levity.
I went to one local Irish bar during the day where a young black sat innocently drinking a beer at the bar; as I can pass for Irish, I decided to make him uncomfortable for being there; and I enlisted the ire of a cherry faced old Irishman to do the same. He did and the black asked me in annoyance, “is this an Irish bar?” I said yes. I guess he didn’t stay for another beer, and it was a futile gesture, but I was trying things out.
As I did at another bar, hip one, where a lot of college kids flocked on weekends; in fact, I recognized U. Mass Amherst students there; one Jewish girl in particular would be familiar with my testing (mostly dirty looks) from my days at U. Mass, and got me kicked out of the bar. That really pissed me off. I had done nothing in this case to warrant that; and I wasn’t doing anti-Semitism in those days. I was one of those, the queen says, “I’m uncomfortable” things.
Back at the hostel, the thickly accented Irish girl who ran the hostel said that I should take advantage of discount tickets to the Boston Celtics basket ball game (niggers). Of course I was not going . But she also added that I should have a Guinness at the bar downstairs, “because they know how to pour it.” Having gone there to fetch one , a barmaid put “Wonderwall” on the jukebox. It was the first time that I heard the song – besides as foretold in the Amherst trance – and it all came back to me, resonating with my fate to be here.
In the last years prior to Internet taking hold, it was seemingly only me who had notice enough to care about the vastly unjust imposition of interracial politics and to to care enough to want to take on the daunting forces of anti-racism in its array to want to fight or flee. In the bar below the hostel the barmaid put a song on the jukebox, “Wonderwall”, which I “heard for the first time.” I say, “heard for the first time”, because it was not the first time – actually, I belatedly recalled why it was so familiar: I sang it repeatedly in the Amherst trance which happened in early ‘95, months before the song came out. It was apparently the summary song about me and that collective trance in which I was the unwitting master of trance ceremonies.
Amherst, Mass., October 1996
Fort Monmouth, N.J., (homeless shelter), November 1996
1997 was my last full year in The United States, living at a few different places on the Jersey shore.
1998, starting in the summer, I traveled several European countries
1999, after wintering on the Jersey shore, attending the feast in Calabritto in the summer, I attempted to get situated in Pila, Poland
Winter 1999 - 2000, I took care of my sick father in Brielle, New Jersey until he died in early February. Then I drove his car out west to my brother in Arizona.
Helplessly Hovering
Shortly after my father’s death in the first days of February 2000, I had the task of driving his Toyota Camry from his house in Brielle, New Jersey, to my brother in Pine Top, Arizona. I made some detours along the way to take in some sights, including some time in Aspen, Colorado, to try the ski-slopes, secure for having done fairly well in my first ever attempt at downhill skiing in what were designated the “intermediate slopes” of New Hampshire’s White Mountains in 1996.
Richard Spencer’s experience of being fated to a ride a ski-lift to its conclusion in highly uncomfortable company prompts a story of my own fate on the chair.
In Richard’s case, fate had him stuck next to one Randy Scheunemann. Despite the discomfort, it was instructive (for me, anyway) to learn who this man was – an insider neo-con, influential during the W. Bush Administration and in fact, a member of Project For A New American Century, a.k.a., Operation Clean Break (to secure the ‘realm’ around Israel). Scheunmann was one of its loud voices advocating all of its wars and military operations going on behalf of Israel, using The U.S. and any other nation it could press into its service. But once out of a job with the “neo-cons” out of office, there he was, helplessly hovering, captive with an enemy.
My own experience in the fate of helplessly hovering did not have me placed in the company of an enemy, but with a man who was on amicable terms, could have been a good friend. Instead I ruined his day and caused a cringingly uncomfortable, seemingly endless ski-lift ride to the top of Aspen Mountain. As this particular episode did not highlight the large fall of a once prominent man, but the pathetic bungling of normal relations, I am prone to examine rather what I believe to be its non-trivial aspect – and that is the connection of fate. It is not my purpose to state that I have anything like a sufficient explanation yet for the meaning of fate. Rather, that I am compelled to believe in its more or less possibility – whereas I had not, and would not take the notion of fate seriously prior to these experiences which I recount.
Hovering with (people who should be) friends – a different kind of fate, the fate of a non-snob. Hovering with what should be friends above, friends below, friends on the level and not realizing who were and who were not friends – with bad effect.
To recapitulate a paragraph:
Unlike Richard Spencer, I have been skiing exactly twice in my life. The first time was in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Having taken my ski lessons and mastered what was called “the intermediate slope” quite handily, I developed a bit of hubris in my ability – at least for the intermediate slope. I tried the advanced slope once and could not even stand before falling and being jettisoned downward. Nevertheless, even little kids were whisking down past me and I could not believe how they did it – I only realized that I could not handle the advanced slope.
Hubris meets Nemesis
My hubris in prevailing over the intermediate slope of the White Mountains is humbled by the Nemesis of Aspen’s “intermediate” slope.
So the next and last time I went skiing was in March again, four years later, in 2000; it was a few weeks after my father passed away. I had to drive his car from New Jersey to my brother in Arizona. On the way I decided to try skiing again – this time in Aspen, Colorado, on Aspen Mountain precisely. I must have made an awkward sight in my Carhartt pants amidst all other people equipped in proper skiing attire. But such was my hubris, I had mastered the intermediate slopes in The White Mountains. I could do this, just as I am. I rented my skis, took a day pass and hopped on the ski-lift next to a guy maybe around my age, late 30’s, obviously a nice guy – as one who clearly had experience, he nevertheless told me not to worry about my pants; and gave me some tips; to watch what other people were doing and encouraged me to have fun. We talked more and he mentioned that among outdoor activities, that he enjoyed hot air balloon racing.
I quickly chimed in with the story of the two balloonists who had accidentally drifted over Belarus the prior September, only to be shot as helpless sitting ducks. As I recounted the story to him, I did what many of you would do – I laughed, because it was so ridiculous and pathetic: the thought of these two sitting ducks, helplessly hovering there, American passports in hand, pathetically shot down as they dangled above the doltish force of nature that is a neo-Soviet mentality. My raucous, cynical humor was not well placed. A sudden pained expression came over his face. “These were my friends” he said..
Oh, Christ. We were near the beginning of the ride. Dangling captive, far above ground. I had to go all the way up the mountain with him after having laughed about his friends being killed. And he was nothing if not a nice guy. I don’t remember what I said to try to help us past my faux pas, but as the day went on, it became clear that it did not help. I saw him from time to time, either at the top of the mountain or from the lift. He was not mad at me, despite witnessing my pathetic struggles, as someone who clearly did not belong, out of his element, trying to eke down the mountain perpendicularly, at a ridiculously slow pace (and still falling constantly!); he did not pay particular attention to me, but was, in fact, clearly despondent, withdrawn into himself, not the cheerful man I’d set upon the ski lift with.
I took to the intermediate slope only to find that the “intermediate slope” here was like the advanced slope in the White Mountains (and there were no beginner’s slopes on Aspen). It was all I could do to stand up – with that degree of incline beneath me it took every muscle in my body just to do that – using muscles that I had barely used in my life, just to keep from falling. I was bewildered as people whisked by me, dashing down the mountain with joyous skill, virility and strength, while I eked down in the most horizontal pattern that I could manage so as not to be hurtled down the mountain uncontrollably. It was during my first trip down that I realized my most important task was not to enjoy this, but to not get hurt.
Still, I wanted to do it. I made it down and back up twice this way. Some experienced skiers commended me, saying they were watching me, approved of my careful enjoyment of the slope. In truth, it wasn’t particularly enjoyable. I was way out of shape for this. After the second trip and at the top of the mountain, I saw myself in a mirror, face as red as a cherry, having to concentrate on breathing. I was exhausted. Other people, Nick Buoniconti among them, went about calm, relaxed, passing me by and enjoying their skiing. After resting, I managed to make it down and back up a third time. Now I was completely exhausted and I wondered how I could even make it down the mountain a last time, but as the slope’s closing time approached I had to try.
This time I was at a true snail’s pace in my perpendicular pattern down the slope. I was in pain. Falling down every two or three minutes after a while. It started to get dark. Skiers passing me by became fewer and fewer, more intermittent. Eventually it became clear that the last skier had passed me as I lay on the side of Aspen mountain unable to move. Finally, this lady in a red suit, white cross on her chest, whisked up to me and asked, “are you hurt?” I answered, “no, I just can’t move. And I don’t want to get hurt.” She said “it happens all the time”, got on her walky-talky and called for help: “we have a tired skier.”
Then this guy also clad in red suit and white cross whisked-up with a stretcher. Oh my god how humiliating. I have to lie down on that stretcher? Yep. With me humbly on the stretcher, he skied me down to the bottom of Aspen Mountain. About the only thing I can give myself credit for after having ruined the balloonist day and otherwise making a fool of myself was that I steered clear of pushing myself so hard as to hurt myself, perhaps winding-up embracing a tree in the manner of Sonny Bono or Michael Kennedy – who collided to their death against a tree, fated or otherwise, the later of whom on that very mountain.
In the ski lodge that evening, I sat at the bar having a glass of wine. Some famous looking guys saddled up to the bar. They looked like musicians I’d seen on television. One got on the bar phone and asked if he could speak with “Jane Seymour.” He looked at me and I pretended to be unimpressed, though I was thinking – that Jane Seymour? As in, Bond-girl, James Bond girl? Doctor Quinn, Medicine Woman. Hmmm. I’ve got to see her.
Soon she did indeed emerge from the stairwell in a shimmering white chiffon dress and made her way to a table right nearby. Appearance-wise, she has always been among my favorite types. It was surprising that she did not disappoint, but was as beautiful, if not more, in person. The conversation I overheard was not particularly interesting and she did not touch her glass of wine before leaving. It is too bad that she is half Jewish.
Maybe it was not a coincidence but fated to encounter her, as I had always cited her as an exemplary beauty. Gene hijacking is a terrible thing; and tanstaafl’s focus on Jewish crypsis is well emphasized.
I will detail more of my experience of what appears to be a phenomenon of fate, and perhaps speculate on its meaning and truth, in some posts to come.
I have discussed in part 1 of these trance adventures what was the big trance for me, when I inappropriately talked about race in an Al-Anon (ACOA) 12 Step meeting at The First Congregational Church in Amherst, Massachusetts – must have been in about July 1995. There were about 30 people there from all walks, a Muslim woman, hijab and all, a French girl who I had a crush on but who was never at that particular meeting, Jews, German Americans, a large gamut. In my stressful but impassioned despair over miscegenation, a fart came out. Not loud but audible and I apologized. Being the nice people that they were they told me not to worry about it. But one of them was a lawyer who angrily said that I probably had not broken any law, not for the fart, but for the racial talk. It was a deadly serious moment with tense silence, but then I farted loudly. Everyone laughed. I said slowly…..“niggers and Jews”…. everybody laughed again and we all went into a collective trance for the next few hours…
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Here is an account (by Tom Hamilton, naturally) of the balloonists shot over Belarus
Tragedy in Belarus
by Tom Hamilton
The grand event in ballooning, Coupe Gordon Bennett, lifted off from Wil/SG, Switzerland on Saturday September 9. The 15 teams from seven countries had excellent conditions and it appeared that new records might be set for this prestigious event.
Founded by publisher James Gordon Bennett in 1906, this international gas balloon race is decided by which balloon flies the greatest distance. Pilots have been known to stretch the limits in order to achieve the best result.
As the race progressed, Jacques Soukup, president of the International Ballooning Committee, was giving lively updates on Internet. A number of teams had stayed in the air two nights. And then three nights. As reports of the team’s progress filtered in one could sense the excitement. This year’s event was going to be a true test of which team could fly the longest.
By Wednesday morning, September 13, four teams were reported to be still in the air. Then the magic of this event was shattered by an AP wire story from Minsk, Belarus. Two Americans flying a balloon had been shot down and killed by a Belarussian military helicopter near the Polish border.
The shooting occurred on Tuesday, September 12. The Belarus government waited 24 hours to inform the U.S. Embassy that the two pilots, who were carrying American passports, had been killed.
Alan Fraenckel, 55, and John Stuart-Jervis, 68, representing the Virgin Islands, had been shot down after crossing into Belarus airspace from Poland and, according to an official statement from Belarus, failed to respond to radio calls and warning shots. Their balloon was reported to be near the Osovtsy military base and an adjoining missile base.
Both pilots were reported to have died from injuries suffered when their deflated balloon fell to the forest floor near Beryoza, about 60 miles from the Polish border.
Alan Fraenckel, a professional airline pilot for TWA, resided in St. Croix, Virgin Islands, and Ballston Lake, NY. John Stuart-Jervis, a retired Royal Navy pilot and business man, also resided in St. Croix, Virgin Islands…
http://www.balloonlife.com/publications/balloon_life/9510/tragedy.htm
Another take, from one of the widows:
http://www.rferl.org/content/Widow_Of_Slain_Balloonist_Still_Seeking_Answers_From_Belarus/1760608.html
….
An analogous, but even more senseless and numerous killing of helplessly danglers (This time by a US fighter pilot flying into cables of a ski-lift as a result of reckless daredevil flying):
http://www.nytimes.com/1998/02/04/world/20-die-in-italy-as-us-jet-cuts-a-ski-lift-cable.html
Summer 2000 began two years of hell in Pila, Poland (detail in separate post;) punctuated by a trip to parts south, incl. Calabritto.
Summer 2002, I began living in Poznan, Poland, back to the U.S. only twice for two months since then; some inter-European trips.
That’s me, top left, on Helska peninsula, Poland – where I had no rational reason to go, but was prompted there by the recognition that I had seen Magda (“not even the rain has hands so small”) in trance; and recognized her belatedly in another trance on 9-6-96 after having met her in Salerno. So I chased her as a muse to Poland. There I was, Magda Fuhrman, center, her friend Helen, top right and Magda’s cousin, bottom left, in late September 1996
Peter on Tue, 16 Dec 2014 03:25 | #