III
Finishing our drinks, the maître d’ seated us for dinner. We heard the specials from our waiter and, since it was a Friday night, ordered a few seafood dishes and a bottle of Fiano di Avellino, a noteworthy white wine from Campania.
As the wine settled and the conversation deepened, we found ourselves reminiscing about our mutual attraction to countercultural subcultures and the avant-garde revolt that was in vogue at the time. Rejecting the prevalent Guido and drug cultures, we prided ourselves on our artistic and intellectual pursuits.
Branching out from a childhood fascination with Classical European art, history, and high adventure, my early exposure to philosophy, poetry, and (to a lesser degree) the occult in secondary school proved portentous. Deep dives into D’Annunzio, Nietzsche, and Spengler, to name but a few, didn’t uproot me from my heritage—they intensified latent dispositions, such as aristocratic radicalism, ignited by their contempt for mass society.
Shaped by the Southern Italian ethos of my parents—family loyalty, sacrifice, and reverence for ancestry—these encounters didn’t estrange me from my roots; they deepened them, giving form to instincts already stirred by the old-world fatalism, dignity, and quiet mistrust of modernity I had absorbed at home.
In fact, back in the late ‘80s, Annalisa and I co-published a few issues of Bal des Ardents, a metapolitical journal named after the infamous “Ball of the Burning Men,” held by Charles the Mad at the Hôtel Saint-Pol in Paris in 1393. It was replete with art, poetry, history, religion, socio-political satire, and scathing commentaries on the modern world.
A couple of young idealists, we railed against the system and its many injustices. She did most of the writing; I handled the mechanicals and paste-up.
Out of step with the times, we not only embraced our rebelliousness—we reveled in it.
Disillusioned with the world around us, we saw ourselves as a militant vanguard, waging war against the effete stupor of modernity through our art and a metaphysical revolt against materialism and spiritual decay. We sought a higher power in the only ways we knew—through meaningful action, inner resistance, and lived experience.
Rejecting the confusion and desacralization of the post-conciliar Church, we pursued alternative paths to spiritual transcendence—non-Christian and, in hindsight, tragically misguided.
All the rage at the time, we used to go on missions to find other countercultural fanzines. Creators would trade them at gigs, galleries, and record shops. While many were stodgy, half-baked rags not worth the effort we put into finding them, a few offered worthwhile commentary.
Prior to the advent of the Internet, these samizdat-style publications were one of the few effective ways to spread alternative ideas. Before computers and smartphones, the photocopier and P.O. Box were the main tools of rebellion.
As the stranglehold of information gatekeepers and self-appointed “fact-checkers” tightens across news, social media, publishing, and academia, nonconformists will be forced to revive old-school methods of communication, including underground presses and secret gatherings.
We often attended underground meetings on campuses, in dorms, libraries, and parks. I don’t know how the girls found them, but they always convinced Giancarlo and me to go to pretentious art exhibits or turgid poetry readings in converted lofts in Williamsburg or ateliers in Park Slope—back before either neighborhood had been fully gentrified.
Once, we even had to endure a wacky vegetarian luncheon with a bunch of Hare Krishnas we met in Tompkins Square. The only saving grace from that fiasco was that they gave us free copies of the Bhagavad Gita and, strangely enough, Gaddafi’s Green Book.
“You’re one to talk,” she chided. “Weren’t you the one dragging us to all those weird lectures? I remember sitting through Lyndon LaRouche and Sun Myung Moon because of you.”
Her voice rose. “Didn’t you take us to a couple of hardcore shows at that biker gang’s clubhouse?”
In Annalisa’s defense, it’s difficult to remember every gathering we attended. The ’80s and early ’90s were strange and interesting times, with no shortage of fringe groups and furtive cults meeting in the backrooms of beer halls and cafés. That said, for the record, I know I never brought them to see the LaRouchites or the Moonies.
We did, however, frequently attend clandestine anti-communist meetings in Queens, composed of multi-national cells of émigrés from the USSR and its satellite states. Our “nest” consisted primarily of Romanian dissidents, though it also included Hungarians, Croats, Poles, and others.
It was at these gatherings that we first learned about the Katyn Forest massacre, the Holodomor genocide, and other communist atrocities often omitted in Western schools.
Naturally, after the fall of Ceaușescu in 1989, we lost all contact with them when the Romanian contingent returned home. As far as I know, the group became defunct after the fall of the Iron Curtain.
“As for the bikers,” I joked, “you’re lucky I don’t smoke, because the Sergeant at Arms wanted to trade me a carton of cigarettes for you.”
“So it’s your fault I’m not riding across the country on the back of some hog today,” she grinned, clearly enjoying herself.
The thought of such a dainty and thoughtful creature on the back of a Harley was preposterous and made me laugh. Continue reading
