Florence, Italy: Of Girls And Beasts (cont.)

We arranged to meet up with Sindy after she had slept a bit and “gotten organized.”  It was a national holiday, and there would be a concert in the piazza where we had met her the previous night.  After a day of tourist dodging, we were obediently waiting in front of her restaurant at 8 pm on the dot.  She arrived with a friend, Sandra, an excitable Brazilian transsexual who had been living in Italy since she was a teenager and Jurij of course, who happily greeted us.

We met up with group of her friends, mostly familiar faces from the morning, who had staked out a curb in the corner of the piazza, sitting on the curb between opposing car fenders.  The crew, with several unleashed hounds in tow, was friendly and eager to share their plastic cups of wine.  The free concert had attracted many a punk and beast, and the dog situation quickly grew out of control.  If the punk dogs weren’t frantically marking their territory in the middle of heavily trafficked sidewalks, they were picking fights with each other and even sometimes with their tethered and more civilized counterparts. 

At one point, a large mutt with territorial inclinations belonging to our group picked a fight with a tiny, helpless lapdog on a leash, and in a panicked attempt to save her precious oversized rat, the owner yanked it into midair by its neck.  It was difficult to watch and ignited a heated argument between our wine sipping hosts and the impeccably dressed husband of the tiny dog owner. 

We observed all this from a safe distance with Sandra who, despite having lived in Florence for years now, shared our disbelief about the entire situation.  It was massive canine chaos, and nothing could really be done.  Sandra suggested to the group that we round up the dogs, take them home, and move on to a reggae concert; the crew eventually obliged, and we made our way to the bus stop. 

As we exited the piazza, I noticed how our friends turned heads. Sindy’s tomboy getup couldn’t disguise her obvious beauty, and Sandra’s leggy figure elicited all kinds of comments between double-taking men as she sauntered by.  Watching from my vantage point at the back of the caravan, I noted how they and their entourage were continually stared at by either admiring, confused or disapproving passersby.  The unleashed dogs seemed to know their role and stayed close, forming a buffer of protection on the narrow sidewalks.  Sindy and Sandra appeared oblivious to the attention; chatting and giggling all the way to the show. 

The concert, which cost fifteen Euros to enter, was deemed too expensive by the crew, and alternative entrance schemes were quickly hatched.  Sindy’s friends had clearly done this before, and within a matter of seconds three of them had disappeared having jumped a fence, scurried under a tent, and found an open back door to infiltrate.  We stayed outside with Sindy and Sandra who didn’t want to participate in any covert operations.  At a loss for a plan, we stood in front of the ticket window while a loose swarm of dogs played roughly nearby. Sandra reminisced about Brazil.  As time passed, the cover charge began to fall; until we finally relented and entered at five Euros apiece. 

Inside, the music had driven the crowd into frenzy.  A song finished, and the building shook as the crowd showered the band with appreciation. We rejoined the rest of the crew, and a plastic bottle of wine was thrust my way.  As I drank more, I begin to lose myself in the intensity of music and the exuberance of the crowd; and I finally sensed it: I had exited the gravitational pull of the Florence of postcards, and was floating in a punkabestia vacuum.

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