37 - Our Family Friends: Kiki – First Flutter of Love

I was in in the last year of elementary school, eleven years old. In our over-crowded classroom, I was sitting at the second desk, with my good school mate Nikos next to me. But when I was first assigned a seat at the beginning of the school year, when an alphabetical order, as well as height and size were the main factors in our placement in the room layout, I ended up being squeezed next to Yiannis and Panayiotis, somewhere in the middle of the right column of about ten desks allocated for the boys. Thankfully, after the first weeks my place in class was changed by our teacher, Mr. Eugenides, possibly after some external intervention. (Children of teachers and other civil servants, like military officers or policemen, enjoyed some privileges in schools, God knows why.)

My joy from that relocation was twofold. On the one hand, I found the two boys, coward bullies in their moments, annoying: in the inevitable ennui during lessons, they would not miss a chance to poke fun and mock me -trying to be attentive; most importantly, my transfer to the second desk, under the teacher’s table in front of the blackboard, was just behind the only desk occupied by girls, in the boys’ column. I would be sitting just behind Kiki for the very last year the Greek educational system allowed mixed-sex classes!

Kiki was one of the prettiest girls in our class, with short black hair, a small ‘French’ hollow nose, between two shin and playful, round black eyes, and thick and shapely rosy lips. Her petite figure and unformed curves of her body were covered under the unattractive blue uniform that girls had to wear at school. The long boring days of that last year obtained significance and meaning. Sitting behind Kiki, I could watch every move of hers, I could easily draw her attention, as well as demonstrate my acumen, when she solicited my help with some maths questions. We had both teacher parents, who nurtured diligence and endeavored our development in exemplary students and, ultimately, good citizens. Therefore, our interest and involvement in classes and our overall performance had to be (and was) above the average of the class. Beside my ability in maths, I believe I demonstrated bravery in Kiki’s eyes on the few occasions when I was pulled out from my desk by our authoritarian teacher, to stand in front of the class and suffer the corporal punishments Mr. Eugenides favored: caning the palms of our hands several times with a wooden rod, slapping a cheeks or, worst, pulling and dragging us on a circle by our side-whiskers -all of which I endured courageously, when some other pupils cowered in fear and cried in pain. My former neighbors Yiannis and Panayiotis were markedly amongst the latter group. My growing boyish ego was further inflated when in a game-fight during one of the class breaks, I pushed Kiki hard towards the wall. She, instead of getting upset, praised my strength!

On our last school trip to the Monastery of Παναγία Σουμελά, cut off from the few friends I had in my class, including Kostakis, and despite the ardent desire to join their football games, I watched Kiki and her friends from afar on their walks in the pine forest, playing the rope, the lame, and their other games. Then I wandered in circles around their picnic spot trying to draw her attention. I felt that irresistible and unambiguous but unrequited attraction, and instinctive but emotionally blurred pull towards her, and the proverbial flame burning in the underbelly throughout that day trip: I felt in love, without having had the vaguest idea of what love meant and what the process of falling in love entailed, beside a smile, a fleeting touch of hands, and perhaps a furtive kiss. The day passed without bearing any fruits of that sort – or any sort, for that matter. My unmanageable shyness and timidity got the better of me and I kept myself at a fair distance, unseen from Kiki for the best part of the day. Similar efforts by the far more assertive, yet always irritating and often repulsive rival Yiannis, were also in vain -rather predictably.

The revelations from Billy regarding sex drastically changed the nexus of human relations as hitherto were pictured in my mind. They set up a colorful, emotional and erotic stage; the imagination galloped unbridled in unexplored planes. Lying on the couch, with my eyes closed, but my body and mind in a state of overstimulation, I fantasized about what Billy had clumsily described as sexual intercourse with Kiki the object: me on top of her, doing something that naturally happens between the bodies of a boy and a girl that fancy each other. Butterflies fluttered in the stomach, the mind was stimulated and agitated, and I felt a natural but nearly painful hardness under my pants, a frustration that waited in vain for release. It would have been a few more months, before I had advanced on to that well-documented next phase in maturity that afflicts every teenager.

Kiki would never be ‘in body’ next to me, but those unfulfilled fantasies with her lingered for a while beyond the end of that last school year in the same class. After elementary school our ways parted: I was placed in a boys' only high school (along with Yiannis), Kiki, the object of our desires, in a girls'. Equally desperate for a full or quasi -sexual relationships with the other sex, Yiannis persistently searched for her in the catchment area of our former school. He found and stopped by her apartment building; he even had the audacity ask for her and speak with her through the intercom. Disappointed and frustrated, knowing that I might also have an interest in Kiki’s whereabouts and well-being, he eventually declared that “she turned into a really ugly girl with a face full of acne spots…, who barely grew in stature since school; she is like a midget", before concluding with a hint of self-satisfaction that “there are much better-looking girls to go for…”

Over time, my phantasies with the fading image of Kiki next to me were substituted by the livelier and more recent pictures of girls I used to come across in my neighborhood streets on my way to school or to the grocery shop or bump into the Thessaloniki’s seafront parks that we frequented with Yiannis in weekends; not long after, during my teenage years from pictures in sex magazines. I eventually discovered, naturally and by pure instinct, ways to release my sexual urges; initially with an improvised rubber vagina and later simply and practically, with the help of my hand. The way out was not just a release from the torment and the futility of purely visual stimuli, it was a tangible, real, almost dreamlike peak in satisfaction, an exquisite joy, a jolt of effortless pleasure in a period of intense hormonal disorders. The sexual instinct and desire, which Billy’s crudely pulled out of a Pandora’s box, came to the fore of my existence and occupied a big chunk of my being ever after. A new period was beginning where I would struggle with taboos and burdened by inexplicable deep-seated guilts, subconsciously imposed by a conservative and oppressive environment, to tame those instincts and channel them through the limited available channels during the barren teenage years. The world of adolescence was becoming frustratingly colorful. It was a world of abrupt mental ups and downs, of endless hours of an unbearable solitude, confronted by sexual repression and a protracted celibacy of several years ahead. The world opening for me was that of an incessant struggle with dreams and phobias and fantasies, a chorus of invisible hormones crying within me, a self that was changing physically and emotionally by the day.

Time slowed down against my will, almost intolerably, as I was impatiently waiting for my consummation into a man, a real man, to bring about a biological, physical and emotional balance. And along with it waiting for the time when I would take my life in my hands, turn it on a course of my choosing, and strive for my liberty and fair share in life.