Every Hard Rock Cafe In The World

You look up ‘Ugly American,’ and our picture might as well be staring back at you. Grandpa George in his pale blue jeans, stiff gray sweatshirt, and those white New Balances that I’m pretty sure they only sell to grandparents. Me in a Tigers hat, the bright red windbreaker from Gap Kids, and that weird tugging smile that you can really only make when you have braces.

My grandpa George was a salesman for most of his adult life, and was traveling most of the year. He retired shortly after I was born, and devoted his life to watching Jeopardy! and dropping by family members’ homes unannounced, y’know grandparent stuff. After a couple years of that, he grew bored and began to feel that he knew more than Trebek ever would. He set his sights on a new hobby: traveling the world. While he was working, he was on the road a ton, but they were never sexy destinations. He sold class rings in such exotic locales as Tulsa, and Tampa, and Temecula. This was his chance to see the world in earnest, and he took it. Since then he’s been to just about everywhere, and in each spot he visits he does the same thing. Everywhere he went, GG– no matter the climate, primary language, or continent– putzes around in his New Balances, with his big-ass Canon camera in hand, and finds the closest Italian (or Eye-tal-iyan as he pronounces it) restaurant possible.

After a number of solo adventures, he floated the idea of me tagging along on his next trip to my parents. We had always gotten along well, we were both bigtime dorks about history, pop culture and useless factoids, and that’s still what binds our relationship together. Apparently bringing an eight-year-old along who will argue with you over the finer points of the Battle of Gettysburg is somehow better than traveling alone. With that, I accepted his invitation to go to Rome.

Rome

Between the two of us, I could never figure out who was more excited to go on the trips, me or him. Grandpa George would talk about the sights, the history, but most of all, he would talk about the food. Every single destination, the landmarks would be secondary to the food. As an Italian cuisine obsessive, he would talk about the dining in Rome with an energy that I’d only see when we’d square off over Jeopardy! We’re not even Italian, he just loves pasta that much.

He described the meals he happened upon in hole-in-the-wall cafes the way a fisherman tells of the biggest catch he ever landed, “Oh, Jackman, the noodles,” he would breathlessly tell me, “there’s nothing else like ‘em. And the sauce!” The flight over was 90% sauce talk. I didn’t have the heart to let him know just how picky of an eater I was. My only experience with lasagna came from Garfield. I ordered pepperonis on my pizza not because I enjoyed them, but just because I loved saying pepperoni. If that pizza was topped with anything I didn’t recognize, I wouldn’t touch it. I was a dickhead. As grandpa George told his big focaccia tales, I was thinking about the sights and the Sports Illustrated For Kids in my hands. I wondered if they could actually play a football game in the Colosseum, like I had on my PS2 in NCAA Gamebreaker.

Our hotel was on Via Vittorio Veneto, between the U.S. Embassy and Piazza Barberini. The street was gorgeous, a soft slope, lined with leafy trees, embassies, hotels, and restaurants. One in particular caught my eye. Just up the Smart car-packed street from our spot was the true U.S. embassy: the Hard Rock Cafe.

I saw the five or so authentic Italian restaurants on our block, stiff-armed them, and ran to the place where you egregiously overpay for fries while seated under one of Eric Clapton’s guitars.

The next day, we hit the Colosseum, and the Spanish Steps. After our sightseeing, we stopped by an internet cafe on the piazza to email and inform the family of our achievements, both grandpa George from his (g.byam@ask.com) and my own (cyborgGT9@yahooligans.com). I, again, dragged grandpa to the Hard Rock. He was happy to have a travel buddy, but I remember his glass of red wine emptying faster then than it did the night before.

We saw everything there was to see: the Vatican (as a non-Catholic and an idiot, I was more interested in it being its own country than any of the art or holiness), Pompeii (which is every bit as haunting as advertised, even to an eight-year-old), the Catacombs (where I bought a crucifix for my friend who grew up Protestant, because, again, idiot) and my dad’s family friend who had settled in Rome (and had a home-cooked meal with them, where I was grossed out by their spaghetti). Each and every night, we would end up at the Hard Rock. Each and every night, the wine would go faster than the last. Each and every night, grandpa George would have a meal alone in one of the Italian cafes on our street, accidentally alone on a trip for two.

Despite the retrospectively depressing meals, we had a good time overall. I had absolutely caught the travel bug, and on the flight back home, grandpa George brought up the idea of going on another trip. I agreed immediately and asked where he was thinking.

“Japan,” he said, travel pillow notched around his neck, “I’m thinking Japan.”

Tokyo

A year and a half after Rome, we were off to Tokyo. The flight was thirteen hours, and I can’t sleep on planes. So I was wide awake in a window seat from Detroit to Tokyo. I wanted to be knowledgeable about our destination, so I watched Need For Speed: Tokyo Drift three times in a row.

It was a shorter trip than Rome, and the sleep issues on the way over color all of my memories of it. I spent it all half-asleep, which gave the experience this hazy, dreamlike quality which was only amplified by just how weird Japan seems to the uninitiated. I was extremely uninitiated. Grandpa George had watched a Larry the Cable Guy special on the flight, and spent the trip punctuating every other sentence with a “git-r-done,” a practice I eventually started fining him ￥100 (about $1) a pop for. Honestly, other than that, I’m not 100% sure what is real and what was imagined. There’s a memory of ordering at a McDonald’s where the guy behind the counter spoke with a Texas accent. There were coffee vending machines that appeared to be sponsored by actor Tommy Lee Jones. There’s another memory of walking through a department store and hearing Weird Al Yankovic’s “White & Nerdy” on the in-store speakers. We also might have gone to Tokyo Disneyland at one point, but I am genuinely unsure. A positive was that grandpa George and I were both equally lost, equally confused by our surroundings, and that definitely brought us closer. I know we went to the Hard Rock there once. It was as if the familiarity of it, the music videos, the menus, the Clapton guitars (every HRC has at least 3), in these surroundings, made it even more foreign. More surreal. The city was gorgeous, an unspeakably sized mass of humanity bursting with life, and colored by the constant battle between the grayblack of the buildings and the technicolor gleam of the screens affixed to them. In the middle of all of it, were an AARP member and his hopeless grandson, asking which way to the hamburger store.

Athens

 I was in eighth grade, and the moody spectre of adolescence hung over me like that floating emerald from the Sims. The weather matched that. We didn’t see the sun once, it was so overcast. Our hotel was on a small square, which was lush with trees and marble, but with the clouds, didn’t look much better than cement. It was a bustling area of town, but it seemed eerily quiet as our cab pulled up to the hotel. I found out later there had been a demonstration in the square earlier in the day. There were still riot shields on the pavement. Protest is extremely important, but it doesn’t exactly make for the grooviest way to start a vacation.

We made a point of getting to other parts of the city and outside of town as well. We saw the Acropolis and the Parthenon, and even went on a trip out to some of the islands in the Mediterranean. We were both really excited for the island cruise, the demonstrations had made for a rather heavy mood all over the city, and a trip out of town worked as a reset. We were wrong. The islands were supposed to be unspeakably beautiful, but again, were covered in clouds. It looked like New England, and I was pretty sure we saw the Greek version of Gorton’s Fisherman at one point. It was also chartered by a booze cruise company, so everyone else on the boat (including the attendants) were drunkenly harassing one another. Call it bad vibes or horrible timing, but there was a darkness when we there. GG and I argued, and we never do that. We argued in the completely empty Athens Hard Rock. We argued over the same burgers and Clapton guitars that marked all of our prior trips, but it was different. Something broke in Athens.

We never took another solo trip after that. I think part of the reason is timing, we were a little more different when I was younger. As I’ve gotten older I have just turned into a version of him. We’re both just as hard-headed, both know-it-alls, and you can’t be halfway around the world with someone who is just like you. You might as well be going alone. I’m thankful for him taking such a flyer on me, but I worry sometimes that I wasn’t appreciative enough back then. Every time he calls me, I’m hoping, just a little, that he’ll invite me along on his next trip, but instead it’s always something like,

“Oh, by the way, I’m going to be in Botswana tomorrow,”

Of course you are, grandpa George.

Of course you are.