Adventures of a racialist following trance and fate - to Sicily and Poland.

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.
               
                                  Tiberius’ Villa Jovis as it was on Capri

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.” 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.

September 14, 1996, I arrived in Krakow for the first time, made my obligatory visit to Auschwitz from there and so on. As foretold, 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. After a few days in Krakow, I went to Gdansk and met Magda. She lived in Gdansk, Zaspa, where the Nazis shot the postal workers/resisters, where Lech Wałęsa lived during his Solidarność days. As I explained “fate and god” had brought me to this rendezvous she naturally thought I was crazy. Even so, she went out with me a few times and I was able to treat her fairly extravagantly at the still humorously inexpensive Polish restaurants. After some days there, 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 eastern nations and for which they received justifiable territorial penalty.

                             
Balcony in Schneidemühl, where Hitler once gave a inspirational torchlight speech for the likes of Duke, Anglin, Hunt and other assholes.

My Grand Uncle was gone by then but his wife was still alive (still having letters from my grandmother). I met his three 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 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.”

In the last years prior to Internet taking hold, it was seemingly only me who’d notice that, care and want to fight or flee. In the bar below the hostel the barmaiden 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.

Money running out in Boston, and not seeing other options, I went to New Jersey but my father wouldn’t let me stay in his carriage house. So, I went to Fort Monmouth, New Jersey (where Italian WWII prisoner’s of war had been kept) and entered the homeless shelter (predicted too, to the accompanying tune of Phil Collins “Another Day in Paradise” sung badly by yours truly at the Amherst trance).

Black girl says, “dat White girl be fartin’ and gettin’ high on it.” They don’t like White girls. But the black women who ran the homeless shelter did like me, were delighted with me for antagonizing a young black who was messing with White women. I heard blacks talking about White women at the shelter. A White kid told stories about, and scoffed at, White women who went black, either making excuses for them or because “they were stupid and he hated stupid women.” He befriended the nig who I gave shit to. He figured Jews had their place on TV because they were talented. He supposedly had a 165 I.Q. Challenging me, I beat him 5 games to 3 in chess – one loss coming when I was drunk, another when upset, after returning from an argument with my father. 

Another black at the shelter, characteristically pugnacious, claimed that Sicilians were not White, and that “they would kick the ass of anyone who’d say they were.” So insisted Henry Goldblum too, an acquaintance who I managed to see weeks before – insisting emphatically that Sicilians were “almost black”, though I had just been all around there and knew utterly different.
                                   

I had told the Sicilians that I would meet a guy of Sicilian extraction named Blaise at the shelter (I did, and he was not black, maybe a bit like Martin Scorsese). Another Italian guy wound up getting into a fist fight with the pugnacious black.

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.
                 

A night later, I went to Club Banacher at Aci Castello..

       
They noticed me in my custom made, three piece suit. I looked sharp. I was told that I could come in, “but no whiskey.” A kid actually followed me and told the bartender “no”, when I tried to order something irrespective.

           
                                  Club Banacher

I began frequenting a bar on Piazza Duomo and I tranced at a dinner party in the side room. I told the people to show me the broken Sicilian goddess, whose sacrament of tens of thousands of years had been surrendered to a Mulatto. This disgusting beast was gaining the treasure of her energy. I could see it radiating from him, the stolen legacy of the aeons. There she was the next day – she was so subtle, so beautiful, and a travesty sitting there with the radiating mulatto who, in no way, shape or form, should have been able to even dream of her. Two girls from the dinner party sat pensively on either side, bookmarking the tragedy to point it out. I was unable to do anything but display my anger, and the slime even thanked me for some reason. It made me sick. As I would be sickened by the few occasions when I saw a Sicilian woman with a black. I had to tell the Sicilians that it was not we who should be fighting and killing each other.

In Catania, a city of 500,000, there were 86 murders the prior year, almost all mafia on mafia. Still, compare it to the black city of Baltimore, same size, 364 murders in a year.

Though not Sicilian, I felt the profound relief of being in this place.

On a side street of Catania I sat with a Chimay Blue on the steps of an ancient columned building. The street was empty but the architecture, unlike modern architecture - impersonal and dwarfing any significance as it might - was rather like Roman architecture - ennobling. But it was more. I had a feeling here amidst a building with columns, of…who can make me go? Who can make me not feel at home? Let them try.