Last Cloud

Lauren Lauterhahn

We talked.

Small talk when we met at the airport.

Chain smoking across from each other at the long wooden table on the veranda.

In a meadow beneath some mountains while drinking sodas and eating sandwiches we’d ordered from a nearby food truck.

In cafes, standing to consume espresso, because in Italy you don’t sit down to nurse a drink.

We talked over the music on his radio, he drove while all of us were squished in the backseat, like little kids.

In direct messages. When his father died. When I got engaged. For birthdays. When his ex-boyfriend died. When he had a wedding anniversary. When I got married.

He sent links to rare Stevie Nicks demos, outtakes from She’s So Unusual, quotes from St. Elmo’s Fire. We had conversations on twitter threads that turned into private messages when they became too personal for an audience.

We sent voice messages. The velvet gravel of his voice made me shiver.

For three and a half years we stayed in touch.

We left each other on ‘read,’ a pause in the barrage of our chatter, a conversation that eventually stopped until it restarted, on a loop that didn’t end.

I met Giancarlo during the fall of 2017 at Mors Tua Vita Mea’s inaugural workshop. I didn’t know much about him before I arrived in Italy. Had never heard of him before I applied. When I met him outside the airport in Rome, he had on faded jeans with a denim shirt, a white v-neck peeking out. Five o’clock shadow, sandy blond curls and that thick, deep voice. Smoking a cigarette and bouncing on the tippy toes of his perfectly broken in leather Oxfords.

Straight up, he was hot. He was so nice to look at, to listen to. The kind of people who try too hard could never imitate the effortlessly cool presence Giancarlo possessed.

It was unspoken, but obvious to me, at the start of the workshop that there were ‘Tyrant’ people there (Paul Dalla Rosa) and ‘Chelsea’ people there (everyone else) but after a day or so, me and the other writers all fell in love with Gian.

I learned about him in snippets. There was no exposition when he spoke, you either knew what he was talking about, or you didn’t. He held back without coming across as guarded but was unbridled with detailed stories about his life and the writers of the books he published, secrets that belonged to him but was simply gossip to us, his students, his enchanted audience. At one point Chelsea said You guys know what happens in workshop stays in workshop, right? protecting him and us and Gian said Yeah they know, they won’t say anything. Only then did I vow in the future not to say anything. He was uncensored and uninhibited and yet I told my husband the night I found out he died that I felt like I barely knew him at all.

One night at his villa in Sezze I poured myself some mineral water in a green sea glass-colored cup. I wanted my drinking vessel to stand out so it wouldn’t get lost among the alcoholic beverages flowing that evening – I’d been sober at this point for nearly five years. We were all milling around, Chelsea, Giuseppe, the other writers, listening to music, talking, going back and forth to the veranda to smoke, when I picked up my cup and drank a mouthful of gin. I walked to the powder room, spit it out in the sink, walked back through the living room, up the steps to my second floor bedroom, and processed what happened. After I collected myself I went back downstairs and outside to smoke. I was only alone for a minute before Giancarlo came outside too and closed the door behind him.

I told him I was freaking out because I’d just accidentally drank something. He said he saw it happen and wanted to check and make sure I was okay. Giancarlo had secondhand knowledge on sobriety and recovery, we’d talked before about his ex who was sober. It was Gian’s drink I had accidentally sipped from. I said I had picked that green glass so I wouldn’t get it confused with other people’s drinks.

Yeah, he said. But I saw you pick that glass and I copied you so we could be twins.

I felt better, I felt fine actually, but as other people came outside to join us he said to me If you need someone to talk to later come find me. I knew two things at once – I probably wouldn’t go to Gian if I needed someone to talk to, but I could. Because he said so. And I don’t think Giancarlo said things he didn’t mean.

Initially he intimidated me as an editor. As an emerging writer, I went to Mors Tua Vita Mea knowing very little about publishing. I knew even less about editing and revision. The night we arrived I asked Chelsea and Gian how many drafts of my manuscript I needed to write before I could send it out to be read. The manuscript I was referring to was 20 pages of an unfinished first draft that I’d brought to workshop. Giancarlo said 100 drafts. When he saw my expression he doubled down. You? 200 drafts. Later that week during my manuscript consultation, after only knowing him for a few days, I trusted every word he uttered. His taste level, his appreciation of style, the sentiments he expressed over beauty and pain, I wanted all of what he had. The scrawled notes he wrote on my story were candid, sometimes brutal, but full of promise. He whittled my story down to a couple paragraphs, the parts he told me sang. He told me to cut the rest and start over. He was already my friend, already my teacher, he listened and laughed as I spoke and asked me why the experiences coming out of my mouth weren’t plastered all over my pages. Stop trying to be a good writer. You are a good writer. Stop writing what you think you should be writing and start writing all the things you’re telling me. He told me to send him something to read when I was finished.

I never finished that story. I wrote other essays, other pieces of my writing popped up online, but I didn’t have anything to send Giancarlo until last Christmas. I wrote a short story that felt good enough, ready for his critique. He emailed me before he was finished reading it, complimenting sentences, telling me how much he loved it. He fired off several more emails, asking me if he could send it to other people to read, saying he’d send it to Jordan for the Tyrant site. You should send this elsewhere, too. You can do better than Tyrant. Is there better than Tyrant?

A few weeks later I texted him when another magazine agreed to publish it. Boo. I wanted it. I get first dibs on the novel please. I didn’t believe he was serious, but Gian didn’t say things he didn’t mean. I never got to be one of Tyrant’s writers, but I was one of Giancarlo DiTrapano’s writers. And I always would have been.

One day during the workshop we drove to Naples. We stopped and had pastries and espresso on the side of the road. I sat in the middle row behind Chelsea, and Paul’s headphones blared The Psychedelic Furs from the back row, right behind me. I stared out the window, counted water buffalo, watched the country speed by the windows. In Naples we ate pizza and wandered the city, Giancarlo talked about how he wanted to live there one day. We spent the afternoon in the ruins of Ercolano, a city decimated by Vesuvius. On the ride back to Sezze we stopped in Naples again, battling rush hour traffic, so Giancarlo could take us to a gelato spot he swore was the best. We stood around Piazza del Plebiscito eating ice cream cones and watching a sunset. Giancarlo snuck off and returned carrying a bakery box of cookies for us to enjoy later. He called them cloud cookies. That night we sat around the table, eating a dinner Giuseppe cooked, the day couldn’t have been more perfect.

I went to the kitchen, poured coffee, ate the last cookie, and tweeted about it.

The next morning before workshop started, we were all gathered around the table, smoking, scrolling through our phones, talking, eating. Giancarlo read my tweet aloud to nobody in particular. ‘I ate the last cloud.’ Oh, that’s beautiful. Approval from him felt like stepping into sunshine. I caught his eye and held his gaze for a second before he stood up from his seat and started his morning lecture.