Road Remedies

CRUMBWHISKER
VENICE – Furnaces belch. Glass blowers huff down tubes.

Workshopped art. No worship here. Sorry.

One lady simply dusts the finished pieces. From her puckered expression, I'd wager she's as bitter as monkey-suit waiters who strop crumbs with straight razors.

How do you explain that to your anklebiter? "Well, junior, Malcom's mother is an astronaut – I don't know if she wears a diaper. Concentrate, please – and Guinevere's pop runs a yoga studio and writes pompous books. But I ... I ... I whisk linen clean for rich people.

"Someday this all will be yours. Including the doggy bags."

Anger is natural. And, thinly veiled, probably results in more tips... Not enough for the psychotherapy the kid's gonna need, though. Cruel cycle...

Anyway, the Palazzo Gritti is a gorgeous, gilded cage; the Lido a revelation. But I need out.

This city's ghosty for me, I realize. Not quite Thomas Mann haunted, but close.

"Why am I creeped out by my ex-husband?" I ask a fellow traveler. "Places we lived together don't suck this hard."

"Did you have a good time here?"

"No. Miserable. We shivered and shook, ill-prepared for the northern cold. Venice suffered the highest water – altissima aqua – in memory: all the platforms floated away from Piazza San Marco even. We stayed with a professor we didn't know well in palazzo that smelled of rotten sarcophogus. His wife, dissolving in the damp, screamed for us to leave. Often."

"And how did you guys react?"

"We drew close ... tried to keep each other safe."

"Hello? Cause and effect?"

Si, si certo.

Nonetheless: time to gogogogooooogetgone.