The Soccer Game

The first week, I was trying to recover from jet lag (this takes me awhile). I always ended up taking a nap in the afternoon. One day, one of my classmates, Becky, bursts into my room, rousing me from a sound slumber.

Becky hailed from Minnesota and she was big and blonde and loud. A nice enough girl, but take her our of her Midwest element, and she was larger than life. When anyone would ask us where we were from, she'd say "Min-ne-SO-ta" in a slow and inadvertent Italian accent. And she actually expected them to know where that was. Being in a foreign country was the most exotic, erotic experience for her, and I am pretty sure her intellectual, academic, and international goals could have been fulfilled in the solitary event of getting laid by an Italian.

Bewildered and disoriented, I was dragged down the freezing stone steps. Becky was chattering excitedly and putting my jacket and hat on me while we ran through the convent. Waiting just outside the wrought iron gates were two men on mopeds. It embarrasses me just to write that. One was a local fellow named Alex who we had nicknamed Jesus because of his long hair and beard (much to his disgust). The other was someone I'd never met. The stranger was on a slightly larger moped. He had maneuvered his crotch as far to the front as he could and was grinning expectantly.

"You get on with Alex, and I'll get on with Mario," said Becky authoritatively.

"No fucking way," I whispered vehemently. "Where the hell are we going? I'm not getting on that thing. It's barely big enough for Jesus!"

"That's why you're the one who has to ride with him."

Becky outweighed me by 20 lbs. and she was as strong as a bear. She practically lifted me onto the tiny little moped where I became quite well acquainted with Alex's bony ass. We flew up the Janiculum Hill in the twilight at a breakneck pace. My eyes were screwed shut at first, but flew open in terror as we weaved in and out of traffic. We headed for the outskirts of Rome, and I prayed that they weren't serial killers.

We ended up at an old crumbling stone building. It actually looked more like a great mound of crumbling rock that may have once been a building. We scrambled off the mopeds. Becky was exhilarated, and I was shaking a little, and we followed the two men inside. It turned out to be an indoor soccer field. Becky had used all her feminine wiles to get us into an amateur soccer practice.

We sat around on the bleachers and most of the guys gave us the old eye. That's just how it is. Then, en masse, all the men started removing their clothes. Like it was nothing. Hairy penises, hairy, hairy asses, no one seemed to care that there were two American girls, living at a convent, sitting right there.

"Whatever you do," I said to a gaping Becky, "Don't point."

I tried looking at the ceiling, but hairy, hairy men adjusting their jock straps have an odd gravitational pull and I couldn't look away.

To be quite honest, I don't remember either the game, or the ride home.