I’ll Always Have Paris — Chapter 7

I arrived in Athens in the Summer of 1971 sick as a dog. That particular hitchhiking stint had begun right outside the Army base in Katterbach where I’d spent the night with America’s buffer against the Soviet hordes and gone very well until I hit Salzburg, Austria, and there it ground to a halt. Nasty piece of work, Austria. Several hours on the main road out of town heading South, and all I got was one Kurt Waldheim lookalike and spouse after another giving me the hairy eyeball. I trudged back to the bus station and took a bus to a picturesque little village situated on a two-lane headed South through the woods toward Yugoslavia. Mercifully, its name escapes me.

Salzburg is actually a very beautiful town, with much to visit, I’m sure, but I was on the move. It was late June, the second time back through continental Europe after visits to England and Scotland and back to Germany to see Horst and the new show at Nolde haus — incredible watercolors that Nolde had taken up when he was forbidden to paint by the Nazis and already been discovered once by the smell of his oil paints despite attempts to seal off his studio — and I was headed to Greece for the Summer, and maybe Israel beyond. No time for fortresses, palaces, Mozart, etc.

I got off the bus and started walking and set up and put my thumb out in a perfect spot at the edge of the village, in front of a country store, the last commercial building in town, with a broad apron for parking and pulling off the road. And there I sat on my perfect spot for three hours, thumb out, ignored, laughed at, and derided, by passing Tyrolean Trolls and those who’d stopped to patronize the store. Not a loveable bunch, the Austrians. I’d had trouble getting a ride once before in Southern France outside Montelimar, and wound up buying a train ticket for Nice. But there’s been no editorializing, no going out of your way to rejoice in my predicament. Just couldn’t get a ride. After all, it’s a favor; I get it. The French get a bad rap.

The Austrians, on the other hand, went out of their way to be nasty. It was the first time in my life, anti-Semitic cracks included, that I’d felt despised in their eyes for who I was, a hippy supplicant. Even with the local St. Louis rednecks, it just felt kneejerk, but with the Austrians, it felt calculated. A nurtured and venal sense of superiority. Fuck them and their museums, and I say that as a stone Gustav Klimt, Josef Hoffman, and Egon Schiele fan.

I bought some food inside the store, trudged back to the bus stop, and caught the last bus back to Salzburg center as the light was fading. Arriving at dusk, I figured what the hell, walked down a couple of hundred yards toward where I’d started that morning, and stuck out my thumb. Within three minutes a dated VW van pulled to the side. A young German guy with a wild mop of blond hair, barefoot, in cutoffs and a t-shirt, accompanied by his American girlfriend. They were heading down to Krk, a Yugoslavian island in the Adriatic I’d never heard of, and invited me along.

All things comes to he who waits…. and perseveres….

Sometimes.

They were a somewhere between cute and nauseating couple. He was clearly extremely proud to have an American girlfriend, and she was just as tickled to have a German boyfriend. They were all goo-goo and said silly stuff to each other — all in English, she spoke no German — and the more time I spent with them the more I became convinced that not only were they made for each other, but that no one else could possibly put up with either one of them for more than an hour or two. Today, they’re probably an old, happy couple with grandchildren, and the laugh’s on me, still the single guy. But would I trade places?

On Krk, a dot of rock off the Croatian coast, we met up with the German guy’s younger brother, who was exactly the opposite. Cool, quiet, self-possessed, hanging with a couple of quite attractive women he knew from Germany who were renting a small apartment on the island. When we stopped in, the German girls were sitting around topless, because… why not? This was a new thing for me, a very good new thing, as they were, and while sex had been fairly routine in the sixties (and I’d already gotten laid a couple times working my way through Germany the first time), walking around half naked among strangers had not yet set in back in St. Louis, Chicago, New York, or anywhere else I’d been hanging out stateside.

There was a New Zealand couple on the island who were continuing on to Athens, and they offered to take me along. In those days, Yugoslavia was still one country, and you had to drive around Albania, which was a closed, Communist country, where you wondered what kind of illicit shit was going on. As we were working our way through the countryside we came around a high curve and there a guy straight out of a fairy tale, with a bushy mustache, wearing a red fez, blowzy shirt sleeves, and dark, ballooned pants tucked into high leather boots laced up to just below his knees, driving his herd of sheep across the road astride a sleek chestnut horse with ribbons woven into its hair. We waited patiently while the Sixteenth Century held sway over the Twentieth.

Camping that night at a riverside just across the Greek border, we were not alone. A group of people had parked vehicles and put up tents, and one guy was catching frogs at the water’s edge. That night I had my first ever frogs legs. I hate to say it, but it did taste a lot like chicken. Next morning we had yet another Close Encounter of the Livestock Kind. Unbeknownst to all of us camped out, that dirt river bank was also a well-warn morning route for a herd of goats. We were all wakened by the bells and bleating as they moved right through us on their way to morning pasture. Most were protected by their tents and vans. Not me. All I could do to avoid the moving cloud of dust was turtle down into my sleeping bag and wait it out while 400 cloven feet marched past.

As we rolled into Greece, down a bright, new freeway, all systems go, suddenly the motor stopped running on their little square-back vehicle the New Zealanders had bought for the trip. Just like that. Fortunately, we were approaching an off-ramp, and we just rolled off the highway, down to the end of the ramp and, a block later, rolled to a stop in front of someone’s house. We managed to explain to the family living there what the problem was, and the husband immediately called someone, who came over and towed us, the husband, and the car to their place. At that house we were served watermelon and sodas by the mother and exchanged a bit of English learning for Greek with the kids, while the husband and his buddies actually fixed the car in their driveway. It didn’t require buying any parts, but still, they would not take a cent, and sent us on our way with good wishes and the joy of performing a good deed for a stranger.

Many years later, I found a parallel in a Jewish studies class. According to Rabbinic teaching, Abraham had a tent that opened in all four directions so that he could scan all the horizon for travelers and not miss anyone, so important was it for him to show hospitality.. He would run to bring people in so that they could come rest, wash their feet, have something to eat and drink. He, too, was a traveler, had been a stranger in many strange lands, and it’s taught that his essential character trait was chesed, or loving kindness (just as Isaac’s was din, or justice, and Jacob’s, rachamim, compassion.) By the time the car broke down, I’d noticed over the months that it was common that the less people had, the more they shared, and that the sharing seemed to come naturally from their character. I didn’t remember noticing it in America, but perhaps I hadn’t given enough people a chance or wasn’t paying attention. European countries are small, people hitchhike everywhere, and maybe the “social” in socialism is a bit stronger there. It made an impression on me. I remember thinking when I finally come home, I hope everyone I met in Europe would come visit so I could return all the favors. The only person who came was Horst’s sister, when I was not in Chicago, and my parents put her up, so I guess I come by it honestly.

As we approached Athens I’d come down with something, and it was clear the New Zealand couple was more than ready to be rid of me. In fairness, they’d taken me quite a ways under no obligation to do so. They’d been nice enough; it was close quarters for three people; they slept in the car, and I slept outside in my sleeping bag. We’d gotten along all right, all the way through Yugoslavia and Greece, but I don’t think the guy ever got over me spotting his wife naked when I opened the back of their little mini-carryall, looking for my backpack, and finding her there butt facing out, reposing on her stomach. I quickly close the trunk, but the damage was done. It was not spoken of again, but the fact that I was raging a fever that day in Athens did not generate an ounce of sympathy. They dropped me off in front of the first cheap little hotel we found in the city, and got the hell away as quickly as they could, never to be seen again.

I spent a day and a night sweating it out, before making my way to Syntagma Square, where all worlds in Athens collided, and where American Express functioned at that time as sort of a Travelers’ USO, providing everything but hot coffee and dancing, but in particular, a community mailbox. I had given people the long destination, so I wouldn’t outrun a letter, and AMEX was holding more than a dozen for me to the great envy of those in line behind. I took my trove to an outside table, ordered a beer, and caught up with everyone. I needed sandals, and this guy knew where I could get them made to order. A place to stay, and that guy knew a hotel down the street with room on the roof where you could sleep for a buck a night and they kept on eye on your backpack for free during the day. Food you found on the street as you went –yoghurt and honey for breakfast, souvlaki any time of day or night, fresh fruit (peaches the size of grapefruit) and twenty-two different kinds of olives in the massive fruit and vegetable market. On sketchy directions, I walked halfway across town and found a laundromat. The only male in the place, I was quite the conversation piece and the object of much curiosity, but the ladies helped me with the soap machine, and all was once again clean and well with the world.

*****

When I started telling people at school I was going to work my way to Europe on a freighter, I not only had no idea how to do it, or if it was even possible, I had no idea why I was saying it, other than its obvious romantic appeal — the “Paradise” in Sal Paradise, as “on the road” had morphed over the decade from America to Europe as destination. I wasn’t taking a “gap year”; I was going, with no thought of returning. It seemed only some, but not many, of my immediate friends were going on to graduate school and professional careers, and frankly, I’d been close to dropping out completely my Junior year, not really seeing the point any longer. But ’68 was what it was, and the Viet Nam War was a powerful stimulus to embrace one’s 2-S Deferment and hold it close. It was later that I realized how many did go on to graduate degrees in science, public policy, law, education, and Medical School. I, instead, chose the Federal Welfare office and the Ugland Management Company of Grimstad Norway. And glad I did.

By that summer I’d been gone for better part of a year and none the worse for wear. I’d been in Norway for a cup of coffee, and Sweden about the same, then Denmark, Germany, France, Italy, England, and Scotland, before backtracking through Germany, Austria, and Yugoslavia, and now Greece. I was thriving. The thousand dollars I started with showed no signs of petering out. Was I on the run? I don’t know. It felt more like being on a run. The early setback of stolen coat and traveler’s checks had not slowed me down and instead became winter’s stay in Nice on the cuff and friendships I still have to this day. I had stopped thinking about going home months before and looked forward to each new, adventurous day. The day before I was leaving somewhere to continue the journey was hard. But arriving by public transit at the city’s edge and putting out my thumb, was an exhilarating feeling of freedom I had never anticipated. There are moments even now when I think that hitting the road again might be some sort of answer to life’s both vague and specific problems. The allure remains.

Not only had I not been interested in graduate school, I had not been all that interested in pursuing a professional track. I wish I’d thought of talk radio at the time. A call-in sports show would have been ideal. After graduation I had gone down to the St. Louis Post Dispatch to inquire about entry level positions in journalism, but there were none. I hadn’t gone to journalism school and had only my BA in English Literature. It was suggested I “go to a small town in Iowa” and learn the craft. This, with the arrogance of youth and no Dan Rather fire to be a journalist, I found insulting, so I said “fuck you” to the Post Dispatch and went where I knew they hired and had to take you, the U.S. Government’s Welfare Program. At $388 dollars a month to start (paid monthly), I could actually save money, with my one-bedroom with hardwood floors costing $75 a month, gasoline at thirty-five cents a gallon, and me on a motorcycle. Food seemed almost an afterthought.

I had planned to work and save for a year, but got fired after nine months. Turned out they had to take you; they just didn’t have to keep you. I got along fine with everyone who worked there, who were all Black, and not so well with the two White supervisors. My deskmate, Ray — we all worked with two desks pushed together, facing each other, was a great guy, a 20-year man, who showed me the ropes and had a great sense of humor. Took me home once to his Mom’s house for dinner — best ham hocks and beans and cornbread I ever ate. My direct supervisor, an overweight and dessicated woman who was being kept on beyond mandatory retirement for reasons I never understood but suspected blackmail, fired me by manipulating a 6-month numerical rating so that I landed one point shy of what was needed to continue on. I know it bugged her that I got on with the secretarial pool, that I tried to go the extra mile for my clients, including gathering a sample of some colored alcohol some doctor had directly given one of them that I suspected had no medicinal value, but could be harmful. And apparently the large, plastic Army tank I liberated from the Christmas Toy trove and placed on my desk did not endear me to anyone other than Ray, and it disappeared within days after my ensconcing it between us.

I could have sued, but why bother. It was illegal to fire someone on the basis of their rating alone. It had happened to another friend of mine, Dan, the year before, a similarly iconoclastic personality who also did not do well in large bureaucracies, and went on to a successful life painting houses and being his own boss. I did call my Congressman who sounded surprised to learn he had constituents to whom he was so easily accessible and hastened to explain to me how monumentally difficult it would be for me to pursue a case, that it could go on for years if it got off the ground at all. I let him go before he had a stroke just contemplating the effort he might have to put out.

Luckily, through another friend, I picked up a weird job grading drug questionnaires covering rural Missouri and Illinois to pick up the slack. This was the first time I realized that contemporary human behavior was being at all systematically scrutinized, and frightening it was. You would not believe what some of these people were putting in their bodies; battery acid I think set the curve. It was a bleak window into the rural Midwest, decades before opioids were a glimmer in the Glazer family’s eyes. Suffice it to say, they were mostly getting by on what was available more or less for free, and not really contributing much to the greater illicit drug economy.

The questionnaire jube filled in for most of what I would have earned at Welfare, and regardless of how much money I had and how far it would take me, I was leaving in the fall — St. Louis, my college girlfriend, my cat. When my Draft Board cleared me to go for the six months I requested (an amount of time I thought reasonable under my new 1-Y deferment that wouldn’t look like I was taking off forever), I knew it was open-ended. And being open-ended, it meant I wasn’t thinking at all about taking any steps to establish myself for a professional future. Years earlier I had had the thought that if I could write and publish a book while still an undergrad, I would never have to work a real job at all. A great idea, but it required actually writing the book. Never happened, of course. Busy with school and getting stoned and getting laid, and watching TV, and not even remotely disciplined enough to approach a novel. Wrote some good poems, a few of which I found stashed in the garage at my parents’ house when we were preparing it for an estate sale after their death. Not sure I would own up to authorship today, I might self publish some time just for the hell of it just to say I was here and did this. Worse things than being posthumously discovered as a poet. Ultimately I left with a solid thousand dollars in Travelers Checks. Not bad for those days.

*****

I got out of Athens in July and August to visit two islands: Santorini and Hydra. Santorini had been a twelve hour ferry ride. The first thing I remember when getting on the boat, was a woman frantically running up and down an aisle of seats saving a dozen for her extended family, dropping something, anything — food, clothing, a magazine — that would convey proprietary rights. Ferry Rules. I spent most of my time out on deck, soaking up sun, and marveling at the blue Mediterranean. We arrived at the island, also known as Thira, after dark. The first docking was at the town of Thira (Fira today) with its famous (and grueling) 588 steps up to the town from the dock. Everyone was getting off. I tend to not like to go where everyone is going, so it wasn’t for me, not to mention the steps which just made it a no-brainer.

I did not go to Santorini alone. The night before in Athens had been pretty wild, and ended with a Swiss girl and I having sex on the roof on in my bed while around us dozens slept or so we hoped, though I’m not sure we cared much one way or the other given a somewhat inebriated state. Everyone could have been easily lying, quiet, one eye open, and why not. She had retired to her bed, but in the morning, I awoke to find her sitting on the end of my bed, dressed, packed, and determined to go with me on the ferry. This was not my plan, but so it was that the two of us avoided the 1,300 foot trek up the hill with the madding crowd, and instead, went on to the second stop, Athinios, literally a hole in a volcanic wall embellished with a long pier and little else. It was not charming or exotic. More an outpost — a node on a tendril of civilization at the outer edge of what rooted thousands of years before.

Santorini is a dormant but active volcano. What’s there is what remains from several eruptions, the last of which, in about 1600 BC, destroyed Minoan civilization on Crete with its subsequent earthquakes and tsunamis. You sail into the caldera, surrounded by the portion of high, crescent cliffs that haven’t blown away and fallen into the sea. A small, barren island of cooled magma guards the entrance and smokes from time to time just to let you know. On the far side, the more touristy and populated side, the flat volcanic beach is black, and there were archaeology digs in progress.

I look at pictures today of Athinios, and it’s unrecognizable other than the background cliffs now nearly obscured. Giant ferries the size of small cities dock at the expanded concrete jetty taking on and disgorging cars and trucks as well as people. Dozens of vans line up to take people to hotels up in Fira or across the island to the black beach. There are cafes, restaurants, money changers, taxis, travel agencies, and parking lots. When I landed, there were two cafes: one carved out of the cliff, the other a repurposed ancient dwelling, and a few, modest, abandoned dwellings like the Israelites might have left in the Sinai. They served coffee and wine and soft drinks, a little food, whatever they might have thrown together that day. From there a few decrepit taxies cabs waited for those who had passed on conjuring their inner Edmund Hillary to ferry them up the hill.

The dim cavern of a one-room café had a flat roof extended away from the cliff wall. The proprietor was a consumptively thin older man, with a fine mustache and a white, Ben Hogan, snap-brim cap. His skin was sun-burnt a deep umber, but below his neck I could see skin white as a cue ball. I indicated we did not want to go up the hill but would rather stay there and sleep on his roof, which seemed like a fine idea to him, and obliged with some straw mats to put beneath our sleeping bags. His name was Yiorgos, and he called me Mitsos and my companion Helena — the face that launched a thousand ships. I admired the, once again, almost casually forthcoming hospitality. There was no thought of charging us, but rather helping us settle in.

Helena and I made love on the roof once again, with only the stars for prying eyes, and slept like babies, that is until the sun made its way over the cliff heights, driving he temperature instantly to 95 degrees. We’d make our way groggily down inside the café, where we stretched out on the car seats that had been set against the wall as couches. Later Yiorgos made us coffee. I tried to pay, but he wasn’t having it. We were guests.

I spent two weeks on that island, but not with Helena. The sex was fun. We would fuck at night, out on the end of the pier that disappeared into the café, hidden by the darkness beyond the cave mouth. We went up the hill into Thira one day on the bus. But almost immediately, she started ordering Yiorgos around like he was our servant, and I couldn’t stand it and told her so. She packed up and took the bus for the city, and I stayed on the roof. It had not been my idea in the first place, and frankly, not only were there were women arriving daily, literally by the boatload, I also craved a little isolation. (I later found out, when I met someone leaving by our ferry with both her arms in casts, the result of falling off a rock while dancing naked, that there were sections of the black beach across the island that were basically nonstop bacchanalia. Sometimes you miss things.)

Yiorgos taught me to make Greek coffee — basically, diluted mud (I was never a coffee drinker to start with) — mixing one heaping teaspoon of finely ground coffee into an espresso coffee cup’s worth of water in a briki — the long-handled, metal coffee maker — and bringing the solution rapidly to a boil. I began helping him around the café when the ferries would land; I could talk to people in English and French. He taught me to make the only food he served, which were island keftethes, a word that normally denotes meatballs, except there was no meat to be had. So he crushed tomatoes, mixed them into a batter with flour, salt, pepper, and fresh basil, and fried up what were essentially tomato fritters in local olive oil. They were addictively delicious, and I got very good at making them. I also felt like I was contributing to my free room and board.

No good deed goes unpunished. As I said, there were two little cafes at the end of the pier. Yiorgos’s was definitely the more downscale of the two. The other was run by a guy who worked for whomever owned it and went home every night in a taxi, arriving each day around noon. He had a wider range of food, cold drinks, and nicer tables. That wasn’t enough. One day a cop car descends the cliffside road and a burley uniform gets out and approaches the two of us. He really did not speak English, but made it clear he wanted to see my passport. He then made it clear that I did not have a work permit and could not be helping out in the café. I explained I wasn’t being paid, but that didn’t matter. I could see our neighbor grinning from his piece of rock next door. From then on I kept inside where I couldn’t be seen when boats arrived. Some guys need every last drachma.

Late at night when all was cleaned up, Yiorgos would open large, 3–4 foot high, glass decanters wrapped in woven wicker and full of local wine, krasi, which actually just means “wine” in Greek, but I thought meant this, specific, local white. We would drink from pewter cups, which he would fill to the brim. It was always just one more (ena), which he’d cunningly denote by holding thumb and forefinger just millimeters apart, and then he’d fill it right to the top. For a small guy he could hold his krasi. Probably weaned on it .

One day on a Sunday, a woman, dressed all in traditional black like something out of “Zorba,” came down in a cab. It was hard to guess her age, and she had a beautiful little girl with her, barely a year old, with the biggest blue eyes. I marveled at the circumstances; this was his wife and his daughter, and they had a home somewhere else on the island. He was a man in his 50’s at least, who had fought the Nazis with the Partisans during the war. His wife was not young. They set up housekeeping for the weekend in one of the little abandoned stone structures down the beach.

Perhaps the most unique thing about Athinios were those abandoned dwellings, and I fear they are all gone. Small, no door, one-room, whitewashed stone houses that people would come down and take over for the day or overnight to get away, go swimming off the pier, eat food they brought. A staycation. One of the buildings served as a little church and had a couple of icons inside. I’m sorry I have no photos, because they were unique and precious — sad that they no longer housed anyone, yet happy to house transient dwellers from time to time. Had they been built for that purpose? Had Athinios once been a micro-village of some sort? A young American couple came off the boat and spent the night one night. She was gorgeous, and he was kind of a dick. I actually stood outside and wondered if I might be able to get her out of there without waking him but thought better of it and went back to my roof.

Our cafe had the only phone (possibly another source of our neighbor’s jealousy). I think the number was a single digit, and the best fun I had was answering it. I learned to pick it up and say, Ya. Someone at the other end would say, Athinios? I would say, neh. (Yes), and the person on the other end would rattle off a stream of rapid-fire Greek, and then I’d say, “I’m sorry, but I don’t speak Greek.” There would be this flummoxed silence at the other end, and then I’d put Yiorgos on the phone. He got as big a kick out of it as I did. I also had my twenty-fourth birthday in Athinios. A ship captain who had docked a fishing boat took me out in a dingy fishing, and we ate what we caught that night and drank ourselves silly.

One of the last nights before I left, there was a full lunar eclipse. We first had several cups of our local krasi, and then hiked up the road, halfway up the face of the cliff, and lied down in the road to watch as the Earth passed between the sun and the moon, turning the nearly-full moon blood red. These are not particularly rare, but it was my first and wonderfully impressive. The full solar eclipse I traipsed down to Mexico to see, those are rare, and magical, and I went to great lengths to get on the line of totality. But this was special, sharing it in the road with a man I’d come to be quite fond of and whom I knew was fond of me. We watched it come and go, both fell asleep for a while, then picked ourselves up and hiked back down to the café.

When I left, I told Yiorgos I’d be back to see him. I really meant it, and especially in his case. I wanted to see everyone I had met again, everyone who’d been so kind to me, so generous, but particularly certain people who’d put me up and with whom I’d spent time. I wanted people to come visit me so I could put them up and repay the hospitality, but I knew that would never be him. I have no picture of him (or many others, having broken and hocked my camera early on.) I’ve kept up with certain people: Horst in Germany; Barbara and Pierre in Paris; but many, most others, have fallen away. Even on return trips to France… KENZO is a whole new world now; no one I knew there was still there even seven years later when I went back. I’ve never even been back to Greece, despite returning often to Europe — France mostly. I never saw Yiorgos again, and by now, he’s long since been drinking krasi on Mt. Olympus with the other heroes.

*****

After a week or two back in Athens I left for another island hop to Hydra, only an hour and a half away, and this time alone. The port city was quaintly built up and picturesque, and I was able to find a room in a local auberge for a dollar a night without any trouble. The next thing I found was Joel, a tall, very tan, very mustachioed and flamboyant gay guy from Philly, who was perpetually holding court wherever he was. He hailed me from a dockside table where a group of Americans were drinking, and once I’d introduced myself, he introduced me around as if we’d grown up together. We hit it off because he hit it off with everyone. That was his superpower. He was also very funny — as quick a wit as I’ve ever seen — he would have made a wonderful sitcom writer. Everyone liked him, despite the fact that he never seemed to pay for anything, and, importantly, he was a magnet yet no competition for girls.

He’d been on Hydra for a while, so knew the terrain, not that there was much to know and appeared to have no plan whatsoever, except having a good time, not that I or any of us can be said to have had “a plan.” He, too, was travelling alone and happy to go wherever the group was going and with whoever was paying. There was a lot of drinking and hustling going on, much of it local guys hoping to latch onto an American or European girl who would get them out of there, but settling for sex when possible. They did well, but things could get tense. If they’d gotten lucky, they tended to overestimate the depth of the liaison. I was once talking to an American girl I’d met on the island — just standing and talking outside a shop — and here comes this Greek teenager she’d evidently fucked, pushing me away and protecting his property. As it threatened to escalate, while I stiff-armed this kid and tried to persuade her to call him off, she just stood there, thrilled apparently at this joust over her. I felt like slugging her.

I met Jenny while wandering around one night on Hydra. I’d stopped for a beer in a little outdoor café, where soon I was watching a strange piece of theatre relentlessly unfold. It was a small stone open-air courtyard set up with card tables and folding chairs, with a walkway sort of right through it to the side. I sat at one table, a group of young Greek sailors at another a few yards away, some of them barefoot, with enormous forearms and hands, and by herself, off to the side against a wall opposite me, a woman in her 30’s, reddish-blond hair, wide-eyed, fully made up and coiffed, sitting primly and quietly alone in just a chair, her long skirt brushing the cobblestones and looking not unlike someone you might ask to dance in a more formal situation, finished the triangle. The proprietor, a small and harried man in his fifties, a slight mustache, did the cooking and serving himself, and it was clear the woman against the wall was his girlfriend. Also clear was how overmatched he felt by the uber-masculine sexuality exuding from the sailors’ table, the men delighting in driving him a little nuts with comments to and about the woman and ginning each other up in the process.

And then out of nowhere, it erupted, as it often does when men, women, and liquor are thrown together and shaken, not stirred. A loud bark and a retort, a backhand swipe at a chair that came flying like a toy across the courtyard, bounced once beside my table and skidded past. Voices escalated, and two young brutes rose like rutting grizzlies onto their hind legs, fistfuls of each other, and the woman demurely rose as well, took her chair, no doubt not for the first time, and moved languidly to the kitchen, avoiding the testosterone-fueled aggression she’d apparently and innocently provoked before the two sailors found their composure, and returned to their drinking. After all, they’d have to work together the next day. At that moment, Jenny walked right through the scene, my left to right, like a silent chorus, diverting my attention completely. She was petite, with short Lady Brett-red hair brushed back from her adorable face. I was up and out of my seat before she got twenty yards down the cobblestones, leaving my beer half full and the passion play to its denouement.

I caught up with her at another outdoor café where some people were playing music. I’ve really never been great at picking up women, but I just jumped in with my best yasou, and mercifully, she spoke English and French and seemed to be glad I had chased her down. We talked and talked, and gradually walked back down to the harbor in our own world, as shops and bars were closing, continued around the harbor, and just kept going, neither one of us seemingly wanting it to end. Following the road away from town to the East, which went nowhere for miles, it was well past midnight, and then when we’d left behind any remnant of sound or light other than the stars, we finally sat down on some rocks and looked out at the night. We sat there together for hours, silent, just being with each other.

I have never sat that quiet for that long with another person, ever. (many friends would agree) Something was going on, but I’ll be damned if I knew what. Dennis and I had sat quietly together on a Doric column in The Roman Forum after midnight, but we’d been loaded on Moroccan hash, and were communing with Marcus Aurelius. Something else was going on here. It wasn’t that sex was out of the question, although rocky and barren landscape would have been extremely uncomfortable, it’s always doable; it was just wrong for that moment. It was about being there together. Perhaps I was falling in love and tongue-tied, but she never got bored, got up, said “Time to go,” and yet by the time we did go, things were different. Some sort of bonding had taken place. The next day she left Hydra and gave me her numbers in Athens and Paris. She was just in Greece for the requisite August vacation, when Paris empties out like a tub full of used bath water. I knew I’d see her soon. So did she.

Another day, and I was headed back to Athens, and Joel tagged along. Back on the roof, he found a nightly dollar for the bed. We went to outdoor movies — “Kelly’s Heroes” I remember in particular — projected against blank facades at the back of an empty lot at night. An outdoor, urban auditorium. Everyone who lived with a window on the lot got a free film that night, like it or not. I went to Jenny’s house the day before she left for Paris and met her mother. Joel and I hiked up the Plaka, went out to the Acropolis. We picked up a couple of sisters one time who brought us out to their house in the suburbs for dinner one night and another outdoor movie, where we stayed over, me with one of the sisters, he sleeping on the living room floor, but when it came time for me to leave, when I decided to head to Paris to follow Jenny, he begged to come with me even though I was going to have to buy his ticket — $30 as I remember — which I did.

When we finally parted company in Paris, Joel told me the same thing he’d told me one night on Hydra, when it was clear that the old American queen who had invited us up to his cliffside house for drinks had designs on a threesome. As I was making my way for the door, and he wasn’t, he said, “Don’t worry about me,” he said. “I’ll be fine.” I wasn’t so sure. It had occurred to me there might be several young gay guys buried under the patio or lying broken on the rocks below, that was the vibe our host gave off. But the next morning, there was Joel at the port drinking Mimosas when I got there. I didn’t ask what happened, and he did not tell When next I heard from him, it was a letter at American Express. He was back in the States, having somehow scrounged up the fare.

It was the end of the summer. Both my abortive rendezvous with Jenny, and my heady days chez Kenzo lay ahead.