My Partner in Crime

There are friends you choose. And there are friends who just happen to you — in summer, by accident, because someone’s parents have a tiny house in a village that not even Google Maps can find on the first try. That’s how I found my Partner In Crime.

Andrea happened to me like that. We were sixteen, maybe seventeen — the age when you don’t need a reason to become someone’s friend. A motorcycle, a summer and nowhere in particular to go. That’s all it takes.

Cavona is a hamlet in Valcuvia — a handful of old stone houses on a hill, no bar, no shop, nothing that justifies your presence. But his parents had a little place there and came up every summer from Corbetta. I used to hang around Valcuvia with the usual loose circles of teenage friends — the kind where you meet people through people and eventually forget who introduced you to whom.

I don’t remember much about our first summer. It was more of an acquaintance than a friendship, one of those light things that happen in late July. But there was one detail that changed everything: he had a motorcycle, like me. Actually, he had a better one. I rode a Gilera SP01 — the same bike my father would replace a few years later with a gesture I still can’t fully explain. Andrea had a Cagiva Mito with seven gears. Seven gears on a 125cc. Rich kid stuff, I thought. The kind of guy who doesn’t mess around.

We became inseparable. Not in the poetic sense — in the sense that I was physically always at his house. I spent weekends in Cavona, slept there, ate there. Parties together, girls together, trouble together. We never denied ourselves anything, and when I say anything, I mean anything.

There’s one night in particular we’ve never been able to fully reconstruct. Twenty-five years later, still not. We know it was one of those nights that belong in a movie — the kind you don’t plan, the kind that just happens. We know we made it back to Cavona so drunk that I forgot where I’d parked the car. The next morning we woke up in a panic, convinced it had been stolen, and spent a solid hour searching the village. A village of twenty houses. Picture “The Hangover”, but in Valcuvia — no tiger, no Las Vegas. Just two idiots and a missing car. We laughed until we couldn’t breathe.

Summers passed, and with them the 125s. Real motorcycles arrived — the kind with horsepower you can no longer count on one hand. And real recklessness arrived too — the kind that makes you feel immortal, and that today, looking back, makes you break into a cold sweat.

Because yes, surprise: the guy who now calls himself Slow and writes a blog about slowing down was once a full-blown speed addict. I was young, cocky and convinced that bad things only happened to other people. Not to me. Never to me. The world was a racetrack, the road was mine, and the throttle was the only answer to any question.

And as it turned out, nothing ever did happen to me. No crashes, no falls. Andrea, on the other hand, had his share of disasters. The best one — and I say best because enough years have passed — was the day of his final school exam.

Andrea had taken his exams after me — he’d been held back a year. By then he was riding a Honda CBR 600 F — a bike with a sharp, full-throated scream, the kind you can hear coming three corners away. And that day, after his last oral exam, after saying goodbye to school forever, he walked out with the kind of euphoria that could only end one way: fistfuls of throttle on that CBR. He pulled a wheelie at a traffic light like a bucking horse, lost control and destroyed the bike. Luckily without a scratch on himself — which is the only reason this story is funny and not tragic.

But the best part came after. Andrea began telling everyone his version of events: he said he’d opened the throttle at a green light, the rear tyre had slipped on a white road marking, and then when the rubber found the asphalt again, the sudden grip had flipped the front wheel up until the whole bike went over. A flawless technical reconstruction. Almost scientific. So precise it was obviously made up.

Nice story for people who don’t know you, Andrea. But you couldn’t fool your partner in crime. We laughed about it for days. We still laugh about it now.

Then came more good years. Plenty of them. But at some point we drifted apart. We didn’t argue, nothing dramatic happened. It was something more insidious — lives that run parallel and then, slowly, stop being parallel at all. It happens like this: first you skip a birthday, then New Year’s, then you don’t notice that six months have gone by since you last saw each other. And when you do notice, you no longer know how to start again.

All I know is that it happened. And that while he was going through some of the hardest moments of his life, I wasn’t there. His mother passed away. And I wasn’t there the way I should have been. Not the way his partner in crime should have been.

There was a period when we came close again — or so it seemed. I was going through a dark patch, I’d left the job of a lifetime and ended up working with him at the bar he was running successfully. It felt like the most natural way to reconnect: same rhythms, same laughs, like Cavona all over again. But working together isn’t the same as being friends together. Things got complicated, roles got confused, and what was supposed to be a homecoming became another departure. I left disappointed, deeply disappointed, and once again we lost each other.

Then my father died.

And Andrea was there. At the funeral, without needing an invitation, without needing an explanation. He held me tight — the way only someone who’s known you for thirty years knows how. In that moment everything was erased — the years of silence, the disappointment, the distance. We were suddenly brothers again. Older, with more on our minds and a few grey hairs, but still us.

From that day on, we never lost each other again.

And when his father passed away some time later, I was there. This time I was there, because I knew what it felt like. Because he deserved my presence just as I had deserved his.