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My First Bar Fight
What does a couple do with the approach a milestone anniversary? My husband and I thought it would be a good idea to celebrate our 20th with a nice, romantic vacation. I especially wanted to go to Venice to get Steve far away from his band and work distractions. The opportunities for enchantment seemed endless. Gondolas! Ancient courtyards! Bridges! Italian food! Italian bars.
When you come off a trans-Atlantic flight, shifting several time zones and so on, all the books recommend staying up until normal bed-time to adjust. Which is why we’d been up about 25 hours when we found ourselves at Caffé Blu, not to be confused with Caffé Noir, Caffé Orange, or Caffé Rouge (all within about 5 minutes of each other). Caffé Blu pitches itself as an American/British sort of pub, meaning that it serves much more beer than the average Italian watering hole and actually has a selection of scotches. Not that the friendly barmaid knew what scotch was. But we were able to point to the bottle of Teacher’s on the top shelf and comprehension followed quickly.
By the way, there’s something you should know about my husband. He’s a transgendered glam rock and roll star known to just about everybody except myself, his mother, and his sister as Venus. Don’t think Hedwig—think Ziggy Stardust, with Cleopatra eyes. It’s true, he fronts a band, all corseted-up, singing, playing guitar, staining the microphone night after night with blue-black rubbed-off lipstick. The show usually ends with him on his knees, then he lies down backwards. He arches his back, thrusts his pelvis and legs into the air, and plays guitar upside down, all the while moving his thigh-high patent leather stiletto boots in slow bicycle gyrations. This is also how he appears offstage, even on those rare occasions he accompanies me to church (well, okay, he doesn’t wear the thigh-highs to church).
I guess I’m trying to say that Steve/Venus stands out in a crowd. I believe he likes to stand out in a crowd. Which is probably why he suggested standing at the bar at Caffé Blu rather than sitting at a table in back. People would want to talk to us. We were working on our second round of Teacher’s when a beautiful, blond transperson introduced herself to us.
Alessandra completely passed for female, except for the husky timbre of her voice and her drag queen sized ego. She told us, among other things, that she was a Venetian princess, a world traveler, etc. Perhaps I was too blasé and accepting of it (“Hey, that’s cool”) instead of falling prone before her. She did get worked up, going on incessantly about how important she was:
“I…” she began, her hand fluttering rapidly against her chest “…am Venezia!”
She said that a lot.
She also talked about her house being only 50 meters away, so much so that I began to doubt the truth of this one. (However, when we ran into her two days later at another intersection of alleyways, and she seemed happy to see us—perhaps the lucky victim of alcohol-induced amnesia, thereby forgetting the events of our previous encounter—she pointed to an incredible raised, walled garden just down the lane, a torrent of roses spilling through its wrought-iron fence, and indicated it was her garden and her house. Her companion, “Sebastiano,” she said, lingering on every glide and fricative as she pronounced his name, did not appear to disagree with her.)
Back to my first night in Venice. We were all getting drunk. Alessandra was getting very drunk. She was clearly interested in my husband and he was, in his own noncommittal way, doing nothing to discourage her. Only after the critical event happened did I realize that it was a nearly instant replay of a squalid scene perhaps 10 years earlier when I’d had to pour my entire drink over the head of another eager fan to discourage further moves in that certain direction.
For some reason, Alessandra was talking about me and in a broken English sort of way trying to say that I was a nice person. She was smiling; however, her fangs were flashing. As she smiled at me, she began inserting the word “merde” every few breaths. I put up with this a few minutes, then decided it was not a good idea to play nice and dumb. While I may not be conversant in as many languages as the world traveler Alessandra, I do know the French word for “shit.” I said, “Alessandra, I know what you’re saying, and I don’t like being called a piece of shit.”
I probably said a couple of other things. When enraged, I can be volcanic, positively Shakespearean in my wrath. I then grabbed her by the shoulders, gave her good shake, and to ice the cake faked a little knee-to-the-groin movement. I want the record to show that I did not actually knee her; to the best of my memory I’ve never kicked anyone in the balls. But it was a surprisingly automatic, instinctive move. Then I walked out. Steve/Venus wisely decided to follow me.
The moral? Never, ever try to pick up a woman’s transgendered male-to-female glam rock and roll slim-hipped bustier-sporting eyeliner-wearing husband when she’s trying to celebrate their 20th wedding anniversary.
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