To Gian With Love

Alex Gaertner

Giancarlo and I sat above the pool, sunlight beating down on the water, Sezze jutting out of the hillside like a chin. We were discussing an essay I’d written for our workshop, a short, amusing piece about a one-night stand. He said it reminded him of his past. I glowed. Impulsively, I told him about my past, specifically my greatest wound. “Oh, shit,” he said, puffing his cigarette. “Write about that.” When I told him I wasn’t sure if I wanted to, that I didn’t want to upset the people in my life with my story, he said, “Don’t think about that. Just write. You can figure the rest out later.” His voice had changed, a slight but noticeable shift, and I realized I’d excited him. My story did. How it could manifest in the world as a real, honest thing. In that moment, sitting above the pool, I saw myself through Giancarlo’s eyes: a story waiting to be discovered. His interest undid something in me, a latch I haven’t closed since.

During the week I spent at Mors Tua Vita Mea in October 2017, Gian told us our most important stories—the ones we needed to write—lay in our wounds. If we feared something, we should write about it. No exceptions. No excuses. This advice followed me home, a hand on the back of my neck. How could I be a writer if I didn’t write about my wounds? How could I take myself seriously if I didn’t listen to Giancarlo DiTrapano, the legend, the myth, the rebel of publishing? I knew I needed to listen to him, so I did. The moment I noticed his interest, I knew I’d do whatever he told me. Even if it terrified me.

I wanted to impress him. Who didn’t? He was everything an artist/writer/person should be—worldly, bold, brave, generous, kind, a romantic. He was effortlessly himself. Cool in a way that made you feel tragically uncool. I had a crush on him, I’m now realizing, this blonde-haired, husky-voiced Italian American who loved cigarettes and art and literature; who listened to classics like Mazzy Star’s “Fade Into You” but also kitschy pop songs like Camera Obscura’s “French Navy;” a man who knew how to have fun, who scared the living shit out of us in a castelletto while wearing a white-faced mask and laughed afterward—oh, how he laughed—in a full-bodied, infectious way. He seemed to exist outside of time: the past and present perfectly intertwined into a single celestial being. He was the kind of person I’d always been searching for: a homosexual whose confidence in and knowledge of himself had helped him create a beautiful life.

He was also a brilliant teacher. He encouraged us, his students, to write about our wounds because he understood doing so would knock something loose in us. Art, yes. Freedom, maybe. It seems obvious, this lesson, but rarely does one listen to logic unless it’s disclosed by some sort of sage. Gian was a sage to me. Show him someone beaten down by life and he’d nurture them into an artist. He’d encourage them to tell their story. He wasn’t interested in faultless people. He loved faults. They made people real. “Stay gold, ponyboy,” he said several times during our week in Italy, and those words meant something coming from him.

And, like a sage, Giancarlo told me what I needed to hear. He saw my doubt and he told me what to do. He encouraged me in his blunt yet gentle way to say fuck it—to myself, to doubt, to everyone. He recognized a story within me, waiting to be discovered, and he knew if I wrote it, I’d change. Don’t think. Just write. Fuck it. And because I trusted him, admired him, and wanted to impress him, I listened to him. “Oh shit,” he said, eternally smoking his cigarette. “Write about that.” I did. I will.