The Rolling Stones
Let It Bleed

THE REVIEW

Summer of 1984.

At that time, to make ends meet, I worked as a dishwasher in a sleazy restaurant in Milan, and my nights seemed endless.

Milan was a fetid sardine in sauce, and Piazza Duomo was an immense pool. At night, not everyone knows, there were quite a few people wandering around in swimsuits or regulation long johns. Water parks hadn't been invented yet, and no one ever cared about a sense of modesty. Every now and then, a love would be born out of the fog.

After finishing my work shift, I dragged myself through the streets until morning in the company of my ghosts. The only ones willing to still believe in my bullshit.
Sometimes I would stop at the usual bar for a whiskey or two.

I must have been on my third glass and it must have been shortly after seven in the morning when Giulia re-entered my life for a few minutes. The impact was violent: a single glance from her took me back at least seven years. She smiled and hugged me tightly. And for a long time.
Feeling dumbstruck, I flashed the usual small-talk questions and kept it vague when answering hers: I wasn't married, didn't have a girlfriend, nor had I become a brilliant mathematician, yes, I lived alone in a miserable studio apartment rented from some obese landlord, I didn't see anyone from the old days, and I had thrown my guitar somewhere because I would never make it big. I was happy to see her. I had never stopped loving her from the first moment I had caught her gaze.
But even this time, I told her nothing. She hugged me again, turned around, and with the same violence with which she had entered, a few minutes earlier, into my life, she left. Perhaps forever.

At the fourth glass, I paid the bill and told off the usual Milan fan. Beccalossi had joined Sampdoria, and I was very pissed off. I found myself in the street, in the morning, in a sunlit and never so desperate city. I was surrounded by decomposing corpses: a fetid can of sardines years old. That was Milan that summer of 1984. Anyway, I was out of time. I had to go home.

I climbed the stairs without haste, trying not to make noise, like a thief. I opened the door, tossed away my shabby, smelly rags, pulled out a glass, dirty, the usual bottle of Johnnie Walker, and a dusty "Let It Bleed". The turntable started to spin as I lit a cigarette. I lay down on the cold floor. I had never stopped bleeding.

At least that damn record still sounded like it used to.