La sera...

Am in Bari now, and it's almost midnight. This pension i'm staying at closes its doors at midnight which, of course, gives me the perfect excuse to have already turned in... It's only an excuse though, because we all know that unless i went to the movies, i wouldn't really have much to do out at night, particularly having arrived in this place already after dark. Yes, am a bit chickenshit, and if i haven't seen a place by daylight, i don't feel comfortable strolling around it at night!

I suppose i could go to some gay bar or other, but don't like the places much. In my experience, people mostly go there to fish for lays, and that's old. In my crazy days in Philly and MN i behaved like a real... whaler (was gonna write hook, but that's too close to hooker, and one thing i never did was to get paid for it. No sirree!).

Did go out to a café a few blocks from here though, and got a couple of sandwiches and a coke: my dinner (incidentally, the men and woman behind the counte -- gay, all three).

My room here is nice, though it smells a bit musty, or old. I don't know. It's a familiar smell, though i can't place it. The building certainly is old: ceilings two and a half times my height, floors with red and white tiles that form psychedelic rows of rhomboids, narrow double doors and a window to match, with decrepit locking mechanisms. The bathroom is at the end of the corridor and i dread having to bathe in it tomorrow, as it is dirtier than my own ever gets back home, and that's saying a mouthful, as anyone who's spent any time in my house knows well.

The place is looked after by two men, father and son, i assume. The younger guy can only be a little younger than me. He's cute in a dorky kind of way, with longish greasy hair that'd have looked better in the 70s. Unwittingly, i start making up stories about the place and the men: perhaps the house is so run down because the mother died not so long ago, or maybe the guy seems so awkward because she left years back and he had to grow alone with his dad, or maybe she didn't die or leave at all and i just haven't met her yet.

Oh, one last thing: i got screwed by the taxi driver who brought me from the airport. Not literally, fortunately (guy was bold, old, ugly, smelled bad and had a bad temper, apart from being dishonest). What happened was that i ended up taking a taxi with 3 other men who were waiting for the bus at the airport. Because we had 30 more minutes to wait, we decided to pay a taxi together instead, but the bastard ransacked us. 10€ each!

Two of the guys were a couple, i think. They kept whispering all the way, and it seemed to me i could tell they were together. Did i imagine it or were they holding hands under their coats?