We grew up overseas. My dad was a foreign service officer and worked for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). He would always hoard his leave while on assignments in order to give us, his family, a nice long summer break. We would always travel back to the US but we would choose different routes home each time. Sometimes, we would travel the Pacific route, sometimes the Atlantic.
In the summer of 1984, we traveled back to the US via the Atlantic route. We planned to stop in Rome, Amsterdam, London, then across the pond to our point of entry into the US. The best part was that USAID paid for the airfare to and from my dad’s stationing. That was cool.
Now, my parents never liked to eat at familiar places while overseas. We never got to eat, say, McDonald’s while we were in Italy. We would only eat at small Mom and Pop places, no matter what. That summer, we spent a few days in Rome, then traveled south, mostly along the Tyrrhenian Sea. We ended up in a small coastal town halfway between Rome and Naples, I think the name of the town was Gaeta, and we stayed at a local hotel. That was the other thing my parents tried to avoid - big hotel chains overseas. They preferred to do what the locals did, no matter the country.
When we checked in, the hotel proprietor told us proudly that he had a deal with the restaurant across the street and all we had to do was sign our check with the room number and we could add meals to our hotel check. My dad and brother quickly found the TV after a long day of traveling and turned on a local soccer match. They were engrossed. My mom went down for a nap and I was starving. I pestered my dad to feed me and he told me to go across the street and get some food.
“Sign it to our room,” he reminded me as I walked out of the hotel room.
I walked across the street and sat down in a small booth a few feet from the entrance. The wait staff was nonplussed about me being an unaccompanied 11 year old. I guess they saw that kind of thing all the time. I ordered a plain cheese pizza and loved the part after it arrived at the table when the chef/cook walked out and dressed it with fresh olive oil and his bare hands. I loved watching it and the pizza tasted so delicious as a result. I gorged myself on pizza, a coke, and an extra large piece of tiramisu, compliments of the nice old woman at the cash register.
My check came and I pointed to the hotel, as I didn’t speak Italian, and the server didn’t speak English. He pointed on the check where to put my room number. I printed my name, signed the check, and added my room number at the spot he pointed to. He smiled, took my check, and briefly went over it. He stopped cold and his face instantly changed from affable to hardened and worried. My demeanor changed and I worried that I had done something wrong. I felt alone and scared with no one to ask for help. He looked at me and made a hand gesture to wait. He walked briskly into the back and I became even more scared. I could hardly breathe and wanted to cry.
The aforementioned chef walked out with the check in his hand. He asked me in heavily accented and broken English.
“You. Name?” he said eyeing me.
I swallowed hard and stuttered out my name. His face changed to surprise and a little shock. He held up the check in front of me and tore it to shreds. Holding the shredded note, he said.
“Money. No good. No good.” I started bawling my eyes out and was scared out of my mind. I had no idea what to do. The chef barked something at the old woman who came running over with water and some napkins. She started soothing me and I heard the chef bark again, this time at the server. He dashed out of the hotel and a few minutes later, my dad and the hotel owner walked into the restaurant. I ran to my dad and clung to his leg as the chef conversed rapidly in Italian with the hotel owner.
The hotel owner laughed and thanked the chef followed by a courteous gesture to leave the restaurant. My dad asked what happened and the hotel owner said.
“The owner does not want your money. He’s a friend of your family. He said, this man’s money is no good here.”
My dad took it in stride, nodded, and took me up to the room. He spent a half an hour convincing me that I had done nothing wrong and that everything was ok.
I didn’t find out until I was 18 and out of high school that my paternal grandfather left southern Italy with his new bride because he did not want to get tied up with the mafia. I also found out that southern Italy, at least in the 1960s and 1970s, had a huge Anania presence. A ‘family’ presence. I put two and two together and understood what happened in that restaurant seven years earlier. I year after I graduated high school, Goodfellas hit the theaters and I thought it was so cool that I had some kind of familial tie to the mafia, even though they wouldn’t know me from Adam.
Dang cousin. If that had happened to me there would have been free tiramisu for days…