Jimmy

Jimmy was a SEAL until he messed up his knee. There's a story in that - he says a medical officer screwed him over - but it's long and involved and due to be told at another time. For now the point is that he has a slight but noticeable limp, and though he'd changed quite a bit since I last saw him - his hair is in a ponytail, his dress is European hippie - I knew it was him coming up the steps as soon as I saw how he was walking.

He's still a shooter, but he does it with cameras; he makes his living these days as a photographer. In Europe, and mostly industrial/commercial type stuff, some catalog things and advertising, which he says doesn't pay as well as you'd think, at least not for him.

He's been trying to break into fashion and art stuff lately; when I asked why he doesn't do combat gigs for news services, he laughed and said: "Which would you rather look at? Beautiful babes or people bleeding?"

After we met near the Tiber, we crossed over and he took me down some back street (a mile? two miles?) from the Vatican. All of a sudden we were in the middle of a street (more like an alley) party. People were dancing via an Ipod hookup to Italian covers of Beatles songs. Not only was the music in a different language but the style mixed some late neo-pop with 50s rock 'n roll with Euro techno-pop - very dislocating if you paid too much attention to it, but intoxicating if you just went with the flow.

The crowd - there had to be close to 150 people there - was heavily female, ranging in age from 18 to 60. Every woman looked like a model.

There was a table with wine and glasses (real glass), though almost no one seemed to be drinking. I fixed that.

"Shang-ra-la," Jimmy told me as I poured us some red. "Just don't talk politics."

I didn't.

Later on, I asked him how he got hooked into the party, which apparently is a regular thing, two or three nights (and early mornings) a week, with a fairly set crowd. (No way I would have been welcomed - and I was welcomed - if I hadn't been with him.)

"I kind of fell into it," he said. "Friend of a friend of a friend. They were so-so about letting me in. Then they got cool."

"Why?"

"Dude - I told them I was a SEAL."