Wink
40 WINK In line for Nero’s Golden House, my father (white Reeboks and khakis, Nikon swaying on its nylon strap) turns to catch the pomp and whir of sirens, watches servicemen like moths that mob the limo’s flashbulb nimbus. And when Silvio Berlusconi appears booth-tanned and swaddled in his suit’s evasive discourse, when the magnate-cumprime minister (lecherous louse of a lost empire buttressed by money and the butts of his party girls) winks at my father (In-N-Out t-shirt, knee-high whites) my father winks back. This, when fate offers small convergence, a brush, we say, with the possible, stardom as a kind of friction, a current powering our sad lives in this sweltering afternoon in Rome or anywhere. Because in that afternoon, we are special, if only because this someone supremely absurd but refracted through the vast labyrinth of TV, a face as memorable as cholera, ubiquitous and crooked like the many towers of Italy, this someone deems us worthy of attention, in all our garishness, which is a kind of love, generous though fleeting, that we could never give to him. ...
OR
