Rome, The Eternal Drug

Rome is a drug, a very difficult habit to kick. And, like a beautiful woman, this city can also break your heart. There’s something in the air, in the light, in the colour of the buildings. She demands a reaction; good or bad, it doesn't matter. Indifference doesn’t enter the equation.
But, above all else, Rome feels safe. There is no underlying current of tension, of imminent violence, that one feels on the streets of some cities abroad. Recently, my beloved London was likened to Soweto, South Africa, apparently the most violent place on earth. I read this somewhere. How true it is, I don’t know, but it hurts.
In Rome, you don’t feel that someone might mug you at any moment. This is a priceless treasure. Yes, there are some rougher areas on the outskirts of the city where, if it’s trouble you’re looking for, you’ll find someone only too happy to oblige.
When I first arrived here, I thought what better place than ‘Hollywood on the Tiber’ to fulfil my childhood dream of becoming a film star? No, not actor; film star! If you are going to dream, dream big. My first celluloid immortalization was in a spaghetti western (I loved strapping on my six gun and playing a cowboy) directed by Damiano Damiani called ‘Un Genio, Due Compari, Un Pollo’ (A Genius, Two Friends And An Idiot). The scene starts in a saloon/whorehouse with the star looking off camera at a girl singing a hymn. I am playing poker with other ‘gunslingers’ at a table, my hat tilted back, awaiting my big moment. No, I wasn’t nervous. I was scared witless. On ‘ACTION’, I was supposed to frown – my quizzical reaction to the girl singing a hymn in an unholy dump like this – stand, approach the star and say (I loved it, the line was so ‘cowboy’, or so I believed at the time): “Now don’t you go getting yourself hoodwinked by this hymn, fellah, this ain’t no church, it’s a whorehouse!” Sounds easy enough, doesn’t it?
“Action!” the director shouted.
I swung my head to the right, with what I assumed was a convincing frown… and my eyebrows went wild, shooting up and down like crazed venetian blinds. And I couldn’t stop them.
“Cut!” the director screamed.  I cringed in fear, expecting to be fed to the extras.  But instead of chewing me out, he came down hard on the poor Italian actor playing the sheriff because of his atrocious English.  Survival of the fittest being the name of the game, I heaved a huge, dog eat dog sigh...

It didn't help.  We repeated the take again and again - the poor sheriff the brunt of the director's rage each time -until, magically, my eyebrows finally settled down and we got through the take without further mishap.  I had aged twenty years.
Luckily for me (and the movie audiences of the world), my film acting debut made it clear to me that I wasn’t cut out to be an actor, and so I decided to try my hand at music and became a disc jockey in a night club. That didn’t last long either; and not because I wasn’t any good at it. No. I just couldn’t stand some of the songs people kept asking me to play (over and over again!), songs that still today resurface in my mind and I find myself singing them. And I go momentarily crazy.
So I turned to writing. No, I haven’t won the Nobel Prize for literature or an Academy award for Best Screenplay, but at least writing allows me to pay the rent, and to live in this amazingly beautiful city. The rest will come.  One day.

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