19 June 2011

My Cherry Has Been Popped

I have finally become part of the crime victim statistics, under the heading "Pickpockets & Bag Thieves" heading. Not only have I escaped unscathed in Rome for 13 years, but I have never ever been robbed in my adult life. (I'm not going to count when they robbed my childhood home and took my piggy bank.)

I was sitting outside having aperitivi in Trastevere with Will, a visiting girl friend of mine, her new boyfriend and another Rome based friend of hers. I had a large purse with me as the plans was to go over to Ma Liason's place after he finished working. So I had my little bag of make-up, my glasses & contact lens case, a jacket to go on  his motorcycle after, sunglasses and the usual purse paraphernalia of wallet, money & sundry documents, keys and iPod. I hung it off the back of my chair, fairly firmly wedged in between the chair back and the wall behind me.

My weekend pack of cigarettes was on the chair next to my leg as was my cell since one of my flatmates was joining us and I had been waiting for her call to signal her arrival in Piazza Trilussa. She called and I sent Will to go grab her. And here is where I am 95% sure that a Gypsy woman made off with my purse, as Will had been sitting facing me.

When I realised what had happened, you could say it put a bit of a damper on the night's burgeoning festivities. The other males went a searching up the nearby streets for a bit to see if they had dumped my purse in a bin after taking the money and good bits. Will actually shadowed the gypsy woman who had been hanging around.
"But then she made me, and I didn't want to get beaten up by some Gypsy pimp or whatever, so I came back."
I just sort of sat in a bit of a dazed shock for a bit, while my friend appointed herself as my Official Glass Refiller for the night. I did get a bit damp eyed for a few moments, but all things considered I was surprisingly sanguine, resigned to the inevitable morass of paperwork ahead to replace my docs.



And we all then proceed to enjoy the rest of the night, which seeing as my friend's new boyfriend ordered a new bottle the minute an old one was empty the entire night, we all got fairly fuckin' blitzed. And I smoked the entire pack of  Weekend Cigarettes.

This new boyfriend of hers seemed like a very nice, personable guy from the start and obviously is crazy about my girl friend, which: YAY! because she's had more than her fair share of Relationships That Didn't Work Out, To Make a Mild Understatement.

At one point in the evening my girl friend drags me into the bathroom and hands me a massive wad of cash.
He doesn't want to offend you, but he wants you to take this and use it to replace what you just had stolen and I'm going to tell you that he'll be really offended if you refuse."
Holy. Shit. I apparently forgot to add "loaded and generous" to the descriptors list of her new boyfriend. I told her I'd think about it, and to hold onto it for now, 'cause hey, even if I did accept I didn't want to be walking around with a huge chunk of cash in my jeans pocket.

I'm pretty sure it was then that she and her boyfriend proceeded to apply themselves even more diligently to the task of keeping my glass full with Liquid Persuasion (and theirs as well), which after a certain point just seems funny because the thought process becomes something along the lines of "HEY! I thought my glass was empty a second ago. But now it's full and it didn't even leave my hand. How did that happen? OOOO! I LIKE MAH MAJAK GLASS OF WINE!"

I eventually started drinking water because, dude, the Level of Sloshiness was just capital E Epic, As in Too. I occasionally have a semi-intelligent idea when drunk. Heh.

Met up with Ma Liason who was appropriately sympathetic. He and I went back to his place, where we first played a couple of hours of Breakout Revenge on his PS2, which was rather cathartic as the primary aim of the game is smashing your car into other cars to try to make then crash and cause as much damage as possible. And then we shagged until the birds started chirping, which was the reason why I woke up yesterday with a black and blue lower lip again. Whoops.

And the start of yesterday was spent first getting a spare set of keys from my flatmates and then going over to Will's to drop off his credit card he had left with me the previous night "just in case". On the 3 block walk from his place to mine, I was walking fairly fast and crankily (if one can walk crankily that is) because I was hot, tired, sweaty, not at all looking forward to the post-purse theft errands and, sans purse, sunglasses and iPod, feeling a bit naked and jittery. Having just crossed a major intersection, I note movement in my peripheral vision along with a "Scusa".

I ignore it.

"Scusa."

Fucking hell, what does this guy want. I turn my head.
"Scusa ma mi chiedevo pechè una bella raggazza sta camminando da sol..."
"Guarda stronzo che non è proprio il giorno."
 I'm sort of surprised that the poor guy didn't just curl up in a writhing ball on the sidewalk from the venom behind that little quip. I took a shower, changed a bunch of passwords, went back to Trastevere to file the police report, and then met back up with Will. We had a spot of lunch and then both got our eyes checked, new glasses and contacts at my optical store di fiducia. The new glasses (chosen by Will) are Tina Fey-esque (or rather will be once they fill my insanely strong eyeglass prescription in a few days. Bats can see better than I can without my glasses/contacts).

I also treated myself to a €60 pair of Tom Ford knockoff sunglasses, which is about €50 more than I usually spend on sunnies but far more economical than the actual €350 originals that I had tried on a couple of weeks ago. The sunnies were a godsend, as in relating the "verbally eviscerating some idiot chi voleva rimmorchiare" Will commented

"Don't worry sweetie. We'll get you a new pair of sunglasses and a new iPod so you don't have to interact with the rest of the world soon enough..."
We then took the pedestrian route to Via del Corso to go by new make-up at Sephora. This entailed Will telling me "Ask the gay man over there for help." Said gay man hawked me a bunch of Lancome products, excepting the eyeshadow as Will threw a label whore fit
"Honey I will tolerate other stuff for the rest, but for eyeshadow I am putting my foot down: only Chanel or Dior."
I got Dior. We finished up with lip gloss, which upon prompting from our salesman, I used my finger to take some from the applicator and rub it on my lips. This was apparently our salesman's turn to have a huff, and he turned me towards him and proceed to meticulously make up my lips. Satisfied, he gave us a little "with purchase" gift and waved us to the cash registers where I promptly turned a bit green at the total. But as Will rightly pointed out, one does not normally purchase the full arsenal of make up all at the same time.

I also swore Will to secrecy as if my Mother finds out I bought a crapload of Lancome (& Dior) she will kill me, because she, being an aesthetician, is every bit of a snob about what goes on her face as Will is about his shoes. (This is also why I was semi-clueless at Sephora, because the majority of the makeup I had in my stolen purse was stuff my mom had given me.)

After that it was time for some well deserved aperitivi so we headed over to Trastevere once again. After aperitivo, we hit  up the freshly opened Lungo Il Tevere, where open air stands and restaurants & bars line the banks of the Tiber. We smoked a shisha while sipping on some limon-coco; Olive was supposed to join us but had been shanghaied into waiting for the arrival of 2 chicks her flatmate had coming so they could get in and get some keys; this ended up being the interminable wait for poor Olive and she didn't make it out.

Flagging, Will & I pulled up two places at a Mexican restaurant. Maybe I should say Mexican't because the only decent things were the margaritas (which we waited foooooorever for) and the black beans. The rest was crappy cheese and overuse of jalapeños from a can. As we trudge up the stairs to street level post dinner, I to go meet other friends and wait for Ma Liason to get off work, he to grab a taxi home, I tell him
"Will honey, we're from Texas. It's called 'Taqueria El Paso' and there's not one damn taco on the menu. What the fuck were we expecting?"
And that was my weekend. How was yours?

And yes, I accepted the gift from my girl friend's boyfriend. And told her to give him a big ol' sloppy Thank You blow job, because dude, I'm still sort of gob smacked about that level of generosity from some one I had just met not 30 minutes prior.

2 comments:

  1. aqsakal19:07

    Shit, Kimmy, that's terrible (apart from the silver lining with the girlfriend's new boyfriend). But hey, should it ever happen again, to you or to anyone you're with (I'm making lots of corna, which is making typing extremely difficult) remember the gippo has YOUR KEYS AND YOUR ID, and therefore YOUR ADDRESS. A cute little burglary kit. So your very first move is to drop EVERYTHING (even a half-finshed drink) and rush straight back home and put one of you on guard at the door while the other finds a 24-hour locksmith to change the locks. Believe me, I'm speaking from experience.

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  2. If one of my ID's had my address on it, that's exactly what I would have done. But they don't put your address on the permesso di soggiorno and I don't have a Carta di identità, so the only address they could have attempted to bust into would be a Dallas, Texas address from my US driver's licence.

    And I mentally went over every item I had in my wallet about 60 times and double checked it with my 3 inch thick stack of 20 Photocopies of Every Fucking Document I Have Because Every Time I Have to Do Red Tape Type Stuff I Haul The Whole Kit-n-Kaboodle With.

    So yeah, another silver lining.

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