A Boy, a Girl, and a Fountain

The spring I turned twenty-two, I was desperately trying to

recover from a ravaging love affair that had changed me from a

girl who was somewhat confident for her age and mostly happy,

to one who was completely demoralized. It was not only the

relationship itself, but the reactions to the demise of the

relationship by friends and family who I thought I knew that

made me lose all trust in my perceptions of people.

And so, I stopped caring about anything at all. I was walking,

eating, breathing, but I wasn’t really living. On I went like that

for a while, truly believing that was how I was going to exist

for the rest of my days. Until that one day, when I opened my

dresser drawer and noticed the engagement ring I’d taken off

blinking out at me. I looked at it for a moment, then picked it up,

put in it my handbag, left the house, took the subway to

Manhattan’s Seventh Avenue Diamond Exchange, and sold that

ring to a jeweler for two thousand dollars. Then I promptly

spent the entire two grand to buy a tour of continental Europe,

the “If-it’s-Tuesday-this-must-be Belgium” kind.

My first holiday abroad, and I was going alone.

It was in Rome, the third city on the tour, that it happened, just

as we’ve all seen it happen in the vintage black and white films

starring Audrey Hepburn. I was already recovering myself,

brave enough to book the trip, brave enough to travel by myself,

braver still to venture out of my hotel room sans tour guide and

group to see the sights. I’d only walked a block when a young

man drove by in a convertible and looked over at me. He had

everything ─ the good looks, the fancy car, and the sense of

romantic adventure that sanctioned his cutting off a taxi and

driving up onto the sidewalk next to me with the finesse and

casualness I now know is an inherent trait passed down only to

Italian motorists. But as this was my first visit to Italy, I watched

dumbfounded as he got out of his car, leaving the door wide

open, and strode over. Then he just stood in front of me and

stared.

After a few moments of that, he said, “Signorina, my name is

‘Paolo.’ You are so beautiful. Will you please, please, please

go out with me tonight?”

I should have said no. That would have been wisest, but he was

looking at me with such enchantment and hope that I heard

myself agree to spend an evening in an unfamiliar city with a

stranger who, depending on how you viewed it, was either a

very bad or a very good driver.

When he picked me up at my hotel later as promised, he’d

brought his car, and sitting in it was another young man who

introduced himself as “Giorgio, Paolo’s friend”. Apparently,

Paolo, who didn’t speak English, had noticed my poor Italian

and recognized that there would be a language impediment. So

he’d brought along a translator. Giorgio did speak English very

well, and seemed quite happy to serve as liaison for his friend

and his friend’s foreign date.

It never occurred to me for one moment that I was at risk.

Despite my recent disillusionments, I was still ridiculously

naïve, and they seemed like perfectly nice young men with

nothing more on their minds than spending an evening with a girl

who, for some reason I couldn’t fathom, they both found

intriguing.

Here’s the point: I was exactly correct. After we left the hotel,

the first thing we did was zig zag through narrow, stone-paved

streets to get to an out-of the way trattoria where we shared a

pizza that tasted as though it has been made for the gods. After

which, they took me to the Tivoli Gardens, where Paolo

bubbled explanations for what we were seeing, and Giorgio

translated whatever I couldn’t catch. Our last stop for the

evening was the Fontana di Trevi, the famous fountain in which

one throws a coin in wish and promise to return to Rome.

Typically tourist, I held up my camera and asked if I could take

a photo of them in front of it, but Giorgio insisted that the photo

be of Paolo and me. Just as the flash went off, Paolo leaned

over and kissed me, just one simple, boyish kiss on my cheek,

caught in that photo, for me to remember forever.

“So, nothing happened?” is what I was asked dubiously by my

seat mates the next morning, as our coach sped off to Venice,

the next city on our route.

‘Yes, something happened,’ is what I wanted to say, ‘my faith in

human nature and in men has been restored.’ All in one evening,

and at the glorious fountain I will always believe is as magic as

it’s purported to be.

I recount this factual but somewhat sappy ‘woman’s magazine

story’ if you will, for one reason only, and that reason is: Joran

van der Sloot

Joran van der Sloot, with the gleeful assistance of every major

newspaper and television station has horrified young women

and their mothers into believing that every stranger ─ indeed,

every foreigner ─ who has a penis can and will use it as a

weapon against females. As the mother of five sons, and as the

(formerly) young girl whose disillusioned spirit was cared for

so tenderly that time in Rome so long ago, I resent that

depiction so much I want to spit.

Just once, I’d like to see Larry King or Nancy Grace interview a

‘Paolo’ and ask him about his dealings with women, like this,

“Tell us, Paolo ─ you had a vulnerable girl who stupidly put

herself at your mercy ─ why didn’t you take advantage of that by

drugging her, raping her, beating her to death, and then throwing

her in the Tiber? No one would have known – you could have

gotten away with it – so why didn’t you do it? Why don’t you

share the foreign man’s purported image of American women as

‘sluts’? What were the ideals and morals you were raised with

by your parents that have made you like and respect females so

much? Tell us. And most significantly, tell us about your

relationship with your mother. She must be quite an

extraordinary woman.”

The mother. Yes. The mother in this sordid tale who’s being

most blogged about, most talked about, is Beth Holloway ─ in

vague, but insinuating enough terms that she was feckless in

allowing her daughter Natalee to go on a high school graduation

trip to Aruba.

Parents of teens, please help me out here ─ can you not just

picture how that conversation went?

Beth: Jug, honey, do you think we should let Natalee go on that

trip?

Twitty: Yes. No. I don’t know. Whatever you think, hon.

Beth: She’s such a good girl, graduated with honors, member of

the National Honor Society, and now going to attend the

University of Alabama on a full scholarship. I hate to be the

only parent to say ‘no.’ She’d never forgive me.

And she’d be right about that, wouldn’t she, parents who have

teens and young adult children? Our sons are all in their early to

late 20’s by now, yet they still gripe about stuff we didn’t allow

them to do in high school that other kids got to do. And you

know what? – They’ll keep right on griping…until they have

kids of their own.

So Beth Holloway bet on the very good odds that Natalee would

run into a Paolo and Giorgio instead of a Joran, Deepak, and

Satish. She lost that bet. And being blonde, white, rich,

attractive, intelligent, and ramrod persistent, television,

magazines, radio stations and newspapers will make her pay

for losing by subtly painting her as unsympathetically as

possible ─ her divorce from Natalee’s father, her plastic

surgeries, her rumored affair with John Ramsey ─ because,

let’s face it, television, magazines, radio stations and

newspapers only like to ‘buddy up’ to blondes when said

blondes are Anna Nicole Smith, or on the other end of that

spectrum, Ann Coulter.

Yet from my perspective, the mom who seems to have gotten a

‘free pass’ from the media regarding even a consideration of

maternal incompetence is Anita van der Sloot, who insisted in

an email to her son’s ex-girlfriend that he “was being set up.”

Then again, also from my perspective, the only way she could

not be deemed incompetent at this point is if she took a gun and

shot the creature that sprang from her womb. And while she’s at

it, I’d love to see her blow away every single sensationalist

news outlet that has paid and keeps paying her monster of a son

for interviews; interviews in which he lies over and over again,

interviews that have been so lucrative for him that he has lived

off of them for the past five years since Natalee Holloway’s

murder, enough to go gambling in Peru where he was able to

murder yet again.

I am sickened by all of this, but most of all I am sickened by a

media that we have allowed to morph into our ‘dysfunctional

parent’ ─ a xenophobic, ethnocentric, small-minded parent with

a self-serving agenda, to whom we have given our full consent

to emotionally blackmail us into believing that all foreigners

are terrorists, all American women are despised by said

foreigners and therefore in danger whenever they travel abroad,

(so best to stay home, provincial and pregnant); psychopaths

‘deserve’ to be heard, and a bright, promising 18-year-old girl,

with the assistance of a mother who loves her, somehow

colluded in her own brutalization by accepting a date with a

handsome stranger.

Please note: The glitches on this page are worse than ever. I’m really sorry I have so much trouble posting here. If you would like to say hello, or respond to this post, it also appears in Harlots Sauce Radio June Issue and at my WordPress blog

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