Blow

I
KNOW IT’S
only self-centered wieners who say stuff like, “You don’t
know
me.” But it’s true. You don’t know me. You may think you do. But you don’t. Most people think I’m some cosmic bogeyman here to rain down God’s holy judgment on the heads of mankind. That is completely untrue and, honestly, a little hurtful. I have feelings, you know. I have a sense of humor. I
hunger and thirst.
Well, actually I don’t really hunger or thirst, but I have it on good faith that I’m moderately funny.

And don’t tell me the problem isn’t all the stereotypical depictions of me on television, because it is. We all know TV is turning our brains into yogurt, but we don’t care ’cause the screen people are so shiny. Harlequin novels aren’t helping, either. They all describe me as a tall, dark hunk with undulating loins. That’s nice, but it sets people up for a letdown.

I’d say I look more like Matt Damon than Skeletor. Okay, maybe not
Matt Damon,
but you know, that look. That healthy corn-fed look.

So let’s just get it all straightened out right now. Nothing on me heaves or undulates — I live alone actually. And I don’t judge anybody — except for people on TV.

All the judging’s from the main office. I just take people individually, when I get a Recovery Notice in my in-box. That’s it. In that way I’m closer to a cabbie than what you’d call a harbinger of darkness. I mean,
harbinger
? When you actually see me, you’ll realize you’re only embarrassing yourselves with stuff like “harbinger.”

I’m even courteous most times and tell people what finally did it. I don’t have to do that, you know. I could just point at them with an icy finger and let them whimper all the way to the waiting room upstairs. But instead, I’m indulging their endless questions about all the damage cheezy poofs did to their livers.

And here’s what I get for the trouble: a reputation as the ultimate bad guy.

I mean, the Ghost of Christmas Future? Come on. A black cloak? A skeletal hand? A sickle? That’s just libelous. I’m a vegetarian, since it’s your business. I take pictures of my bunny sleeping in my house slippers. I collect Precious Moments dinnerware. I mean, really, I’m bleeding here. You cut me.

And if you thought this was gonna be another war scroll or my tell-all of every famous person that begged for mercy, then you’re wrong again. This is a love story, punk. A certifiable, irrevocable, maybe sometimes metaphysical
romance.
It began a long time ago, in Old Timey Europe, as a lot of love stories do, with two people hating each other. . . .

Oh, and also, they all croak by the end of this story. Just letting you know now . . .

B
ABBO
G
IOVANNI WAS
the don of the Chianti family in Cortona. Pierre le Seigneur was head of the Vouvray family in the Loire Valley. Simply put: Giovanni Chianti did not like Seigneur Vouvray. With names like Chianti and Vouvray, you might think the trouble was over wine. It’d be easy to imagine wealthy old men, yelling at each other from the grand porches of their vineyard estates, arguing over reds and whites, and whose country tortured witches better, and whose Riviera had less tourists. But no, Giovanni and Pierre weren’t winemakers, although they did despise each other because of their livelihoods. It wasn’t in the common trades like bookbinding or carpentry that Pierre and Giovanni competed for acclaim. It was mid-market home decorative products. Well, really just one particular product, made of their two arts.

Pierre was a flower quilter. He hand-sewed silk sunflowers, velvet violets, and poplin poppies with such delicate digits that his fellow Frenchmen came up with an idiom: “He’s Vouvrayed it.” Like if a peasant managed to harvest ten acres of flax in one day — that would be some genius-level toiling — and everybody would say, “He Vouvrayed that pitch.” Unfortunately, the Academy of French Language killed the new idiom before it hit the dictionaries. I couldn’t do anything but watch, then gather the remains as if it were Latin or the phrase “cool beans.”

Nonetheless, when Pierre Vouvray hung his trifocals on the hook of his long and knobby nose, the entire village knew that he needed perfect silence. As he hemmed his denim daisies, millers brought their grist wheels to a complete stop. Ducks wouldn’t quack. Children would halt their school-yard games to sit under the shade of trees and calmly play games like “silent reflection” and “sitting on your hands.” Mimes pretty much continued as they were, but everyone else in the entire Loire Valley held their breath so that nothing would disturb Pierre le Seigneur.

Everyone, that is, but Chloe, his daughter, whose humming was the only noise Pierre approved of while he worked. And truth be told, he secretly cherished it more than even the work itself. Pierre’s flowers may have brightened up millions of bank lobbies around the world, and he may have been the “Prized Genius of the Valley,” but it was Chloe that he prized above all else.

Babbo Giovanni, back in Cortona, worked in a completely different style. He was a marble painter, which is just as intricate a job as flower quilting, as any marble painter will tell you. Babbo painted the colorful patterns inside of toy marbles better than anybody. This was before marble making became the exact science that it is today. They didn’t have temperature-controlled kilns, prefabricated glass rods, or any of that fancy stuff the celebrity marble craftsmen are using nowadays. Babbo Giovanni had to develop all his own techniques. At first people thought he was an evil alchemist harvesting the essences of rainbows and women’s cosmetics.

First, he painstakingly cut Murano glass beads in half with a hair from the chest of the monster Bernardo the Hammer, which could cut through anything, even the scales of a thousand-year dragon in the middle of true love. Bernardo the Hammer was such an evil, irritating man that his heart became black and bilious (we didn’t talk much on the way down). It was like a poisoned well inside his chest, and the hairs sprouted without anything but the two Primal Sins, pride and fear, to nourish them. Anything that touched one of Bernardo’s hairs immediately drowned in despair. Every cell they touched would wallow in its own semi-permeable misery. And so each hair could cut through anything, like tiny medieval lightsabers, ripping cell walls with no other Force than sheer cruelty.

How Giovanni came to possess a Bernardo chest hair is a story so mortifying that I can only tell it when the birth rate in the world is high enough and a few extra fatalities by extreme shock and uncontrollable laughter won’t shake things up. Suffice it to say that Giovanni had plucked the rare item and could now snack on coconuts with ease.

Giovanni had carefully wrapped the curly hair around the only two tines of an old (even for back then) olive fork. With such a powerful device, he had to be ever vigilant. If a townsman came to his workshop and thought it was a dental floss holder, the poor guy would probably prevent gingivitis all the way up to his brain. I’ve never seen one of those, but I taxi about six kids a year who have managed to wrap the floss around their necks and somehow gotten the other end tied to the leg of a stampeding zoo animal. So . . . yeah, now you know, and knowing is pretty unsettling if you ask me.

After cutting the marbles, Giovanni sat at his easel with each clamped under a microscope lens. He’d sing an operetta and let his mind wander. Then, to the rhythm of the music, he would brandish his brush, which had exactly three fine bristles, plucked from the tail of the family mule, Santa Maria. And then Babbo would paint. Every once in a while, his son, Giacomo, would bring him a basil-and-tomato sandwich. Babbo would take a break, declare, “Let’s see the French seamstress do that!” and run outside to chase pheasants with his son, whom he loved.

Who’s to say which is more difficult, hand-sewing a flower so perfect that nature itself would be fooled or painting the swirls of a thousand tiny universes inside the center of crystalline globes? No one alive these days, that’s for sure. Frankly, the crafts have been entombed for centuries. I have them inside an oak duvet chest at the foot of my bed, along with pickling pigs’ feet and full-contact hopscotch.

Unlike Pierre, Giovanni painted his colorful constellations by committee. He’d mosey through the stone streets of Cortona with a leather purse filled with tiny planets, and each time he passed someone, he stopped to get their advice. The traveling medicine show gave him the idea to create a miniature starscape by sprinkling paint onto the glass with a toothbrush. A roving puppy made him think of dragging a wet towel over a painted surface to make speckled streaks. Even Nonna Brava — the old lady who sat by the second-story window of her home, yelling at pushcarts to slow down and eavesdropping on the conversations of young lovers — had an idea for Giovanni. “Stupido Gio,” she spat, “you need a real job one of these days.” Admittedly, Gio was just about to think of heating the paint for a tie-dyed effect before Nonna started yelling, but Gio gave her credit, anyway.