The Clicking ...

I was fascinated by the clicking sound of his Italian loafers as he sauntered through Fellini’s Rome in the middle of the night, down a hospital corridor, across a marble lobby floor … click click click … so I had them put on the heels of my shoes, not all my shoes, just my black leather shoes … tiny metal wedges not much bigger than a fountain pen point. At night, particularly at night, walking alone on a deserted city street, I stick my hands in my pants pockets, pull the collar of my jacket up over my neck and click down the side walk like he did so many times in the film loop of memory … click, click, click … and imagine myself thirty pounds lighter and that certain age when a man is no longer a young man with no particular style and not yet an old man with his best performance behind him. I inhabit the space between disillusion and nostalgia, where everything still works and there is opportunity to use it … Marcello in 1962