Meatballs went flying everywhere. It was like Vesuvius had erupted.
“Cazzo!” Giovanni’s friend yelled angrily.
“Eccolo,” Jahan bellowed.
I sent red lava and hot magma exploding all over with my brilliantly klutzy act. Thankfully, none of it touched the art—it just splattered over my shirt and his—but still. I was mortified.
A crowd formed around me as I sputtered my apologies. Giovanni refused to let me apologize and instead led me to his bedroom—massive, by the way, just totally insane—where I took a quick shower and changed into one of his shirts. It was a blue button-down, made from the smoothest Italian thread. He watched closely as I changed into the shirt. I asked if he had something less expensive, that felt less like clouds and more like cotton, and he just clucked his tongue. “Keep it,” he said. “The clouds are yours.”
Obviously, we didn’t have meatballs for dinner, but we had everything else. I piled pesto pistachio pasta on my plate, juicy slabs of tomato and mozzarella, and a butter chicken that was decidedly not Italian but tasted better than any other chicken that I’d ever had . . . probably because I was having it in Italy. Some people took their plates to the fancy couches in Giovanni’s living room. I pulled up a chair at the desk in the office room, where Jahan and Neil were sitting. It seemed safer for me to eat next to an iMac than on an antique sofa.
Water didn’t seem to be an option at this party, so I poured myself a glass of red wine. It was dry, not sweet like I was expecting, but it went down smoothly enough.
After dinner, we reentered the living room, where Giovanni was holding court with the other boys. His face perked up when he saw me. “Gentlemen,” he said, and it was like a podium had sprung underneath him. “Have you met our new friend Amir?” The others all exchanged silent smirks.
“We’ve all met,” I told Giovanni.
“Ah, but they must meet you again. Amir is a writer. He is rewriting his life. That accident with the meatballs was merely a plot twist.”
Giovanni took me under his wing. I had the distinct feeling that he just felt bad for me and had already told the other boys about how I’d ended up in Rome. I was under the impression that Giovanni was trying hard to make up for my difficult past by showing me just how good I had it, being at that party.
They were fascinating people, though, I have to admit. I met doctors and painters; a singer with a shaved head who had just won a minor talent competition in Italy; a Greek man with a very loud laugh; and Giovanni’s boyfriend, Rocco, a macaroni artist. I’m not kidding. He makes actual art out of actual macaroni pieces.
All of a sudden, I was happy to be there. I felt lucky. The common denominator in the room wasn’t that everyone was gay, or that they were Italian, or that they were friends with Giovanni. It was that they were a fun, interesting group of people.
15: Gets along with other gay men.
Most of all, the common denominator was Jahan. If these boys were a rainbow, then Jahan was their sun, the source of their light and the center of their universe. I watched the way he swept through the crowd with such wonder. He commanded the room; he always held the power, whether it was in animated conversation or in the slightest movement, the way he took a step or reached for a plate. He never second-guessed himself.
Jahan used his power to start playing music videos on YouTube, on the iMac in front of the Caravaggio and next to a bust of Julius Caesar. The party transitioned from dinner and conversation to high-energy dance party.
It was a warm evening, made even warmer by the fact that we were inside an old apartment with no air-conditioning, jumping up and down.
Jahan and the other boys took turns pulling up grainy eighties music video after music video. Some Italian, some English, but all completely unrecognizable to me.
“Who’s that one?” I asked when a woman with a seriously bad spray tan in a shiny silver leotard came on-screen.
“That’s Mina!” Neil shouted at me, sufficiently drunk by now. He got close to my face, and even with his breath smelling like alcohol, I was more than a little turned on. “She’s one of the most important divas in Italian pop culture. She was like Ariana Grande in the sixties and seventies.”
“That’s an insult to Mina,” Jahan said.
“That is an insult to Ariana Grande,” one of the other boys snapped back.
It went like that for a few hours—a different diva or queer icon would come on, I’d ask who she was, and a different boy would yell at me for not recognizing her before educating me. “Child!” “Child!” “Not again!” “SOMEONE NEEDS TO REVOKE HIS GAY CARD!” I didn’t think it was fair; these people grew up in Italy, or in Neil’s case, the Castro in San Francisco, where they were surrounded by plenty of divas. I was sorely undereducated in the diva department.
These boys made it their mission to educate me.
Neil, Jahan, and I stepped outside when “Let’s Have a Kiki” by the Scissor Sisters started blaring through the speakers.
“Amir, do you even know this song?” Jahan asked.
“‘Let’s Have a Kiki,’ by the Scissor Sisters,” I said.
Jahan raised his chin. “Very impressive.”
“It was on the computer screen . . .” I admitted. Neil and Jahan looked at each other, rolled their eyes, and laughed.
It was raining lightly, and the three of us huddled underneath the entrance of Giovanni’s apartment building. Neil propped an elbow against the arched wooden door. He ran his hand through his perfectly sweaty, greasy hair. The overhead light illuminated him like in a museum exhibit. He was pretty much the statue of David in that moment.
Jahan took out a lighter and flicked it no fewer than a dozen times before it caught fire. He lit his cigarette and looked at me appraisingly. “You’re going to need more lessons if you’re actually staying here,” Jahan said.
That should have scared me more than it did—the idea of permanence, of a new life in Rome—but I was drunk. I just giggled. “I think maybe I should learn Italian first,” I said, “before I become an expert on divas.”
Jahan scoffed. “Nonsense,” he said. Then he peered at Neil. “But if you’re serious about learning Italian, Neil could help you. He’s a tutor, you know.”
Neil and I started to object. “I’m sure Amir would prefer an actual Italian to tutor him in Italian . . .”
“Yeah, no. I mean, it’s not that, I just—”
“I’ll ask Francesco if he has any friends who can tutor him,” Neil said. “Maybe we can even find him a hunky Italian tutor.”
“Francesco?”
“His amore,” Jahan said.