49 - Epilogue to an Awkward Friendship

In the years that followed, Mother & Father continued with the life professions they had chosen and served until their retirement, and an unchanged daily routine: they walked a "well-trodden path", as they say, like many common people -of their class and nation. Nikos became member of Papandreou’s Socialist Party, as soon as the military junta collapsed after the Cyprus crisis and the transition to a parliamentary democracy began taking shape, and quickly ascended its ranks, partially due to his roots in the populous Pontian community of Thessaloniki. The populist party he adroitly joined opened wide open its doors and allowed him to pursue his ambitions and a career in politics he had been dreaming of and meticulously planning and putting into play, with determination and perseverance, since the early days of the dictatorship. His rise in the arena of Greek politics was meteoric: from municipal councillor to member of parliament, from member of parliament to a minister, then to almost Thessaloniki’s mayor. His efforts were vindicated, his talents awarded.

Billy and I, after school and university, followed our own different paths, unshackled from parental guidance (or, one might say, coercion into career paths of not one’s liking or choice). We met again after nearly twenty years, one December evening at the party for Nikos’ name day, that is on St Nicholas day of the orthodox calendar, in which he organized every year, in the latter years in spacious family mansion at the eastern outskirts of city. Apparently, politics increased substantially the family wealth. Both Billy and I had long since spread our wings and emigrated to different shores. We did not exchange many words that evening. Nikos was fervently filling my glass with wine of his own making, whilst joking and recalling the old days when we were children. Later, during dinner, sitting right across the long table from Nikos at its one head, I was challenged to answer some rather staged question from him about life in England, a country that I had long since adopted and its culture began to embrace. My answers, with valid comparisons with life in modern Greece, attempted with hints of wit to dispel several myths and impressed and caused laughter amongst his guests. His questions, after his visits as a member of the Greek parliament in London, were stemmed from entrenched perceptions and prejudices about Greek and European societies from an old-school patrician and politician, and expressed the sort of stereotypes that the minds of many average middle-aged, middle-class Greeks, either “worldly” and cosmopolitan or not, form even to date. For the first (and last) in the presence of that family and their social set, I somehow felt liberated from the various inferiority complexes that plagued me during childhood. Yet, it might as well have been because of the influence of Nikos’ wine.

Years have passed since. We went our separate ways on almost parallel and in some respects symmetrical paths: with our immigration, our marriages and divorces and children, our parents’ illnesses and deaths, and so on. Perhaps, all those apparently ill-intentioned remarks I made about Billy at that time and the feelings of envy and low self-esteem in his company were both symptoms and part causes of a more generic inferiority complex in progress and with deeper roots than our sleep-overs or early adolescence holidays. Those associations merely acted as centripetal forces of withdrawal and further distance myself from the social environment. Most of thoughts and feelings merely swirled within myself, locked in self’s well-guarded confines. I walked through life under the veil of inwardedness, cryptic and laconic or concealing truths and even lying, sometimes serially and compulsively, whilst often displaying a cold and expressionless exterior. I was ‘cold’ indeed, as Tina, Billy’s beautiful friend, rightfully branded me, with long periods of repressed and deeply buried emotions, interspersed by explosive eruptions of temperament, with only a few flashes of extroversion and sociability to speak about; and those often carefully pre-planned or artificially prefabricated or supported by doses of alcohol.

Digging into the far reaches of memory, into the outback of the human mind, is essential; especially during the last half of one’s life. What is all about this amazing self-awareness which emerges, god knows how, from the inner chambers of the human brain? It could be said that is the consciousness of self and of existence in relation to the other human beings that surround ourselves with movements and words and actions and exert their influence. It is built gradually with the passage of time, before its expiry with death, as the impressions left by the world and whatever is sensually experienced, the application of reason that attempts to explain phenomena and their causes and effects, their crystallization into opinions, ideas and feelings, accumulate and deepen, as the being and the self-perception of this being, one’s self-awareness and conscience, are maturing. Human nature is shaped through cyclical repetitions of common everyday phenomena and through the vortex of our relationship and interaction with others, the emotions they cause, the imprints on the soul they leave, through an incessant processing and correlation by the mind of the impressions left by sensations and observations of what is taking place around us. It is a continuous and ceaseless process that concludes with death, but somewhere in mid-life, after the end of our youth and as we enter old age, it seems to peak. In that vein, the friendship with Billy and the days in his family apartment and the Skotina campsite, despite the vast temporal distance from the present that makes them look insignificant events, were big steps towards the integration and culmination of my being into what it is; at least as seen and judged subjectively and from within.

Inner order and peace contribute to a harmonious existence and even happiness, but this balance and peace can be brought about after one had encountered and negotiated emotional storms and acquired sufficient experience and knowledge to manage the emotional turmoil and the bottomless depths that the abyss of human sour is well known that it can reach on occasions. Knowledge is a necessary condition for freedom and harmony, always within the constraints of our environment; it is a prerequisite for extending the limits and broadening the horizons of our freedom. I learned a lot during those years through our friendship with Billy and his family: from what constitutes the biological basis on which the attraction between boys and girls is grounded, contemporary ways of how to approach and get that love, what music people listen in foreign cultures, the beauty the countryside can hide, and others. It was a friendship, of family and childhood, which ended constructively and with a positive sign, despite disappointments and embarrassments and awkward moments.

Recently, in the cemetery of the ‘Resurrection of Christ our Lord’, a few steps away from the grave of the Mother in a forest of gravestones, Brother alerted me to a neglected grave with Kiki’s name on it. On a weather-worn stone amongst the weed, a short epigram was engraved with some verses by the poet Sikelianos, the literary passion of her life. Mother always spoke enthusiastically about Kiki’s soirées that included reciting poems by Sikelianos, at a time when neither the poet, nor his poems made much sense to me. Mother was always invited to those literary evenings until old age and dementia got hold of both of their lives. Kiki, our friend was dead and despite the thirty odd years that passed since the last time we met them in their house, I felt a sadness with no apparent rational basis. At the end of the day, the loss of every person we met in our lifetime and our paths crossed sometime and somewhere, weighs down our souls with nostalgia. Their death cuts a piece off from our own lives.

48 - The Last of Family Holidays

Our penultimate holidays in the camping of Skotina was the one of the turbulent for the Greek nation summer of 1974. The tranquillity of the seaside resort was interrupted abruptly on a late July morning, with our beach holidays in full swing, by the news of the invasion of Cyprus by Turkey. Our dumb friend Takis deluded into the victory of an ill-prepared Greek-Cypriot army and its incompetent leadership, after every radio announcement emanating from Cyprus of the military losses that the ramshackle Greek-Cypriot forces inflicted to the invading hordes, went into a rapture shouting: "Yeah, Another Turkish plane was brought down. Come on, Androutsopoulos [the recently appointed by the latter junta prime-minister]! Teach them Turks a lesson! Kick them out of Cyprus!" But the breakout of the war triggered a more measured approached, defused by genuine concerns, in the now less clandestine conversations amongst the grown-ups in the evening gatherings around the Akrivides’ tent. The dictatorial regime was clearly in its final death throes.

My family worries were exacerbated when Father was called up as a reservist lieutenant and dispatched to an artillery unit in Porto Lagos, not far from the Greece-Turkish land border. Not surprisingly, the shock from Father’s call-up brought a few tears to Mother. Nikos, the ever reliable and genuine friend, after embracing her on the news of the call-up he reassured her, in his usual political style, that he would stand by her under any adverse situations that might arise. He will be there for her a phone call away in any eventuality. But there was nothing to worry about or be afraid of and life will sort itself out. Father’s call-up and the spectre of an escalated conflict closer to home also marked my own soul. After his departure, Nikos helped us to disassembled our tent, before my uncle came to drive us and our holiday gear back to Thessaloniki. Our holiday prematurely over before the end of July, a couple of weeks after it started. From that summer, the photo of the Mother with her short, blond dyed hair posing next to Father, in his military fatigue decorated by the two silver stars of a lieutenant fatigue, at the seafront of the town of Kavala, was left as family memorabilia from those months of Greco-Turkey skirmishes, which after the invasion of Cyprus achieved its objectives, it was reduced to endless negotiations and an ineffectual to date political theater.  

The last chapter of our joint holidays with our family friends and Billy was written in the next summer, that of 1975, at the same campsite. It was the last of family holidays in that place. Our vacations were preceded by unnecessarily stressful for young boys and exhausting exams for entry to the so called ‘Experimental High School of Thessaloniki’, which allegedly had higher standards and provided a better educational environment, than the public schools intended to the hoi polloi. That made the holiday break at the end of my primary school years even more desirable. Billy and I, with performance grades and intelligence presumable above average were urged by our confident and proud parents to take the exam for two of a limited number of available first year places in that high-rated model school. I felt that success in the rather demanding exams for admission, given our young ages, was taken for granted in the case of Billy at least. His family was prominent in the educational, as well as political circles of the city. They had good connections to the exam board and the teaching staff of the new high school. Strangely perhaps, it was assumed that I would breeze through the exams as well. But then, I stumbled upon the maths paper, solving a problem using numerical data taken from another question. Simply put, I committed a blunder. The initial shock from the discovery of my error quickly faded into mere disappointment, which, however, did not last long. At lunch with the two families in a tavern to celebrate the end of the exams and the beginning of our holidays, Nikos consoled us: he would ‘have a word’ with X in the exam committee, a teacher and close family friend of theirs, so that the examiner of the Maths paper would overlook my schoolboy error, take into account the method I used and the exposition and neatness of the solution, which anyway should have been reflected by my written answer to the questions, rather than the end numerical result of a single question, and they would accordingly show some due leniency in grading the paper. ‘There was no reason [for me and my parents] to worry…’, Nikos said with a well-meant smile.  

The final grade in Maths of 13/20, however, as unexpected it was after Nikos’ reassurances, ruled my admission out of that school. Thereafter, Father's ‘Pay attention to the input data!’ became a recurring advice before each of the numerous exams I had to sit in for the rest of my student life and beyond. Billy was effortlessly admitted to the model high school of the city for gifted children. After counterfeiting the electricity bill of a Father’s colleague as a proof of address, I was admitted in the ‘1^st High School of Thessaloniki for Boys’, instead of the less respectable 9^th in the catchment area of which our street belonged, and where children like Kostakis and others from the lower strata of the eastern districts of city and our neighborhood ended up attending.

My life paths after the failure in those exams would de facto deviate from Billy’s. After the illicit intervention of Father to falsify our home address, my teenage years path diverged from that of my neighborhood friend Kostakis, too!  Our last vacation at the campsite, where the Akrivides’ family now stayed in their luxurious caravan they had recently purchased instead of the tent, passed indifferently, largely outside Billy’s circle of friends and his ever-present shadow. With the ominous teenage years right in front of us, he had been already steps ahead in every respect.

47 - Another Injury to a Boy's Ego

At the end of those exhausting sports afternoons, which became the bread and butter of my holidays, as soon as the sun’s halo touched start the ridges of Mount Olympus and start its swift descent behind them, and after a tentative washing off the dust and the sweat in the public restrooms, I usually stopped by the Akrivides’ tent. A group of adults had been already gathered in a crescent on folding chairs enjoying the fresh breeze of the dusk, drinking and joking, while Billy might have been playing, in an amateurish way, but with confidence and professional zeal, his guitar. I found the thing ostentatious. In the first days of our joint family holidays, before he expanded his circle of friends, we would go down together to the main square for food, drinks and entertainment: foosball and billiards, later at the disco. The paved square, with its secluded youth corner, was a field for socializing, striking frivolous friendships, but most importantly flirting. It was there where I introduced Billy to my basketball mate from Larissa, as well as ‘dumb’ Takis, the scion of one of Mother's distant cousins. Billy showed a particular interest in getting to know better that lad from Larissa. They became best friends in a flash, primarily on Billy’s initiative, and there was a simple reason for that: the lad was closely related with two girls, neighbours and family friends from his hometown, good-looking enough to flare up Billy’s already awaken sexual instincts. A few nights into our holiday season, Billy would be dancing the so called ‘blues’, to the sounds of ‘The Hotel of California’, in the repetitive finale of the DJ's program, with the most attractive of the two girls, a cute creature, with a slender petite figure and boyish dark hair.

Next morning after that intimate dance, which I witnessed and filled me with jealousy, the two new friends were discussing and organising a day walk along the coastline to the Castle of Platamon. The plan was the lad from Larissa to invite both girls -their parents permitting. They asked me tentatively if I would be interested to join. I answered in the affirmative, even though the actual objective of that walk was evident from what had been developing in front of my eyes in the disco night before, and from as long as I knew Billy, and the secret smiles and the whispers between the two friends I overheard. I had already begun to feel intrusive and marginalised, before anything definitive vis-à-vis the day walk was decided: the exactly when and if the two girls would finally accompany them... My opinion on these rather ambitious and exciting plans was never solicited, nor would it count, but the lure of a long walk along the coastline to the ominous castle on the cliff that could be seen from distance, seemed appealing enough to shy away from it -more as an adventure than an opportunity, for me too, to flirt with the girls, any girl. What the worst that could have happened?

Next morning, the day of the walk, I stopped by Billy’s tent on my way to the beach. There I learned from Mrs. Kiki that they had already left for their walk. They were four of them, two couples. It became obvious that I had been hard-heartedly left out, as the odd man out, or simply thoughtlessly ignored amidst the excitement of the expectant courtships. ‘What! Didn't they ask you to join them on their trip to the castle? Shame on him! I will tell him off when he’s back. Rest assured of that…’, Mrs. Kiki said with a genuine expression of embarrassment and disappointment. ‘It doesn't matter...’ I replied, I got on my bike and continued with the remnants of another routine day of my vacation: a lonely and unexciting water splashing by the beach with Mother, a Napolitan or Bolognese pasta and Coca-Cola for lunch, several hours of basketball in the afternoon.

Inadvertently and against my wishes, my omission from the walk was escalated into an inter-family affair, which increased the sense of humiliation and laid bare my inferiority as a human being with respect to Billy and his friends, even the adults, and exposed my loneliness and timidity. Billy was scolded by his mother, in my presence in fact, and was forced to apologize in front of me and others. But all this had not healed some already deep wounds in my ego incurred in the time I spent with Billy and his family; if anything, it threw salt into it. I came to realise that Billy and I had no place close to each other as equals, together or in a group. It was becoming asymmetric and fragmented that so called friendship of ours. Anyways, it was inherited by our parents and, therefore, not organically developed; and it was tested over the course of several holidays season and home parties, and now irreparably damaged.

46 - Long Afternoons of Sports

Even those holidays passed relatively carefree, without many unhappy episodes for an adolescent along his turbulent route to adulthood. Early in the afternoons, as usual, I would take the main road by bike and my Slazenger basketball under my arm to the courts, before anyone dared emerge from their tents or caravans or bungalows into the suffocating heat of the afternoon and face the brutality of the midsummer sun. Oh, the sun! who inevitably dispatched two or three afternoons into my holidays to the first-aid centre of the resort with severe burns on my neck and shoulders and back -as sometimes I foolishly played bare-skinned and most of the time without sunscreen protection.

Yet, in the middle of the scorching by the heat concrete surface of the courts, one could see a white-red skinned, bony, sweaty body, with himself as both teammate and opponent, practicing his basketball -throws, bounces and dribbles. After a while, one by one, my basketball mates from the world of camping youth appeared. Takis was a distant cousin, taller than Billy, but with relatively ‘low intelligence’, as Mother used to say mentioning his drooping lips – evidence, according to her, of dumbness. Then there was this lad from Athens with an admirably muscular physique for his age, who, he once told me, was attributed to a daily diet of many eggs. His sharp vision and, because of this, his excellent shooting accuracy, on the other hand was due to the many carrots he ate. A plump guy from Larissa, with pleasant manners and soft-spoken, despite his provincial accent from his Thessalian plain heritage (an accents normally associated with vulgar manners), was another regular of the basketball and tennis courts until later in our vacation he befriended Billy and his focus shifted from sports to courting girls. In the chaos of the courts exclusively by males, as the sun was setting, Father would sometimes surprisingly turn up -after the obligatory afternoon kip, for one or two shots of the ball. But the place was eventually dominated by the Yugoslav youth, whose technique and athleticism were built on traditions of socialist countries in popular sports. That was pretty much the family of basketball aficionados in which I belonged to, made up of boys who took their sport seriously.

Billy did not participate in those team games. He had flat feet, I recall, and did not show a good perception of a ball’s (any ball’s) movement, as Father had once pointed out, and, as a result, his handling or kicking of the ball was clumsy, dare say throwing or kicking a ball like a girl. Tennis, however, was the one elitist -in my view- game that he fervently wanted to play, with me or the guy from Larissa, with the expensive racket he brought. Being an individual rather than team sport, tennis did not particularly inspire me, but I faced him as an opponent, once under the gaze of his beautiful friend Tina. Despite my lack of experience with the sport and a cheaper, heavier and inferior racket, I easily prevailed in those games, without however capturing Tina’s heart. Father summarized it quite well, after all: not all men have the brain and body to cut it in ball games.

45 - A Hungarian Family of Campers

 We were standing under the porch awning of the grand Akrivides’ tent, a little further down the lane from our more modest one, when a family of Hungarians arrived and parked their Dacia outside the perimeter of their designated bush-fenced lot, in a communal area between lots covered by lawn and small trees. It was the same lot where the Akrivides’ set-up their tent and occupied for the last couple of holiday seasons. The regulations of the camping site had long since been relaxed under the pressure of the increasing flow of tourists, and several campers brought and raised their tents often wherever they saw fit, and with disregard to those regulations and the privacy of others· preferably, close to the amenities offered by the campsite, but not too close to the communal toilets, ideally in a patch of the shade that one or more of the scattered trees provided, an essential shield from the sun and the heat in the most privileged of the lots. The precious shade of the tree was an indisputable and non-negotiable right of regular holidaymakers, especially of those with connections to the campsite management and they ‘reserved’ the premium lots well in advance of the season. Life in a tent was exposed to the brutal sun of the Greek summer afternoons, and could become insufferable without the protection a tree shade offered.

It was clear Nikos by no means wanted the Hungarian (or any family of foreign tourists for that matter) raising their tents in the vicinity of his lot and share some of the shade of the large plane tree he appropriated. His imposing tent was his ‘castle’ for a month or two and he created a village of friendly tents and caravans around this ‘castle’ of his. We might as well point out the individualism (of not only Greeks) that renders slogans of ‘the traditional Greek hospitality’ type void. All in all it was unthinkable for Nikos to allow someone to knock him off his perch in his patch of the resort, having established himself as a prominent and formidable figure amongst holidaymakers during his few weeks of vacation, let alone  being intimidated by a random bunch of second-rate tourists from a country behind the ‘iron curtain’.

An argument soon boiled between him and his unwanted neighbours. I stopped by the Akrivides’ tent that morning on my way to the beach to see if Billy wanted to join me, and he asked my help to act as an interpreter, with my English that he presumed I had a good grasp of after several years in a neighborhood tutoring school. He wanted me to articulate his discontent and objections, and justify amply to the unwanted foreigners his unshakeable objection to them raising their small tent on the patch of lawn by his lot. I did not have time to concentrate on a task on that was unexpectedly assigned to me by Nikos and I was unnerved, primarily due to the chronic lack of self-confidence. It often happened when I was faced with unprecedented situations or unexplored domains where my opinion and contribution was solicited, and it often caused anxiety and even triggered panic. Seeing me somehow stalling, Billy promptly joined his dad’s argument with the Hungarians (came to my rescue one might have said) with his typical boldness and characteristic ease and readiness that distinguished him in such cases. I stood silently, a sad figure, on the sidelines listening to the arguments. The conversation, subjected to the arrogant smile and pomp of Nikos began with adverbs common in the oratorial toolbox of a future politician: "Of course... Surely… Anyway, ladies and gentlemen…", thus addressing the poor Hungarians like a diplomat on a mission and looking down on them with a hostile irony, and with measured professional pauses between his phrases to allow time for Billy to interpret into English. His aim was to expel them from the vicinity of his tent there was no need, I thought, of intricately advocating his case and impostures. In the general disorder that the camping site was falling into, arguments about order and adherence to regulations did not have sound rational basis.

The Hungarian finally, in the face of Nikos’ pompous intransigence, collected the skeleton of their tent and move somewhere else in the site. Before leaving, in a determined but dignified manner, they said: "We came to Greece several times, we visited many parts of it, and its people were mostly hospitable and friendly. It is the very first time we have been treated like this."  Nikos wish prevailed and ‘surely’ or ‘certainly’, as he would begin his sentences, he was satisfied with the outcome of the quarrel. Billy was once again at the forefront of demanding proceedings with ease. His confidence shone. I was humbled for being pushed to the margins and rather ashamed, probably for no good reason, for way the Hungarian family were treated by Nikos and Billy as his accomplice. At the end of the day, as on other occasions, I felt the familiar sense of inferiority next to Billy and on the sidelines.

I also realised that standing there next to him and his dad, dressed in an expensive attire of famous brands was worsened these feelings. Some races believe themselves superior or ‘chosen’. The same is true for select few people within the same racial denomination. What clothes one wears may temporarily raise one’s self-esteem, but this is a purely subjective notion and offers little help change the way an individual is perceived by others. Form without substance becomes an empty shell. As with the emperor of the popular tale, it is like covering the nakedness with invisible clothes.

44 - Struggling for Attention

Summers rolled by, children were growing into teenagers, the camping-cum-resort was ageing too along with its loyal holidaymakers, and lost its pristine and youthful charm of my first summer there. Its first manager, the retired military officer who demanded discipline from employees and holidaymakers alike, order and cleanliness in the site and the observance of the regulations to the letter, was replaced by a public servant, who was appointed thanks to his connections with the new slightly more “democratic” government, and with little experience and even less skills in managing a tourist enterprise of that scale. He implemented the familiar tactics of the traditional Greek governance. The limited number of bungalows, which in the opening seasons were rented to holidaymaker on a first-come, first-serve basis, were now allocated well in advanced, even before the end of the preceding holiday season, to family and friends, and friends of friends, who had some access to the echelons of the administration. It is called favouritism and it was applicable to holiday accommodation in state-owned and managed resorts as well.

Father, unable to hire a bungalow, he followed the footsteps of our family friends, and bought a tent -predictably, smaller and of lower standards than his friend's. We had to bring to the campsite well in advance of the commencement of the holiday season, to secure and set it up on one of the few privileged lots that had not yet been occupied or ‘booked’ by campers or caravan owners, with illicit or other means, and before the large crowds converged to the resort in peak season. My skinny adolescent body undertook the setting-up of the tent in the late morning sunshine, on soil hard from the spring drought. Father was averse to anything requiring physical effort, let alone the exertion of setting-up a tent, as his main interests, outside his day job in the telecom industry, lied exclusively in the domains of intellect. Therefore, he limited himself into issuing instructions and commands. I set the tent up on my own, with considerable effort it must be said, under the condescending comment and unhelpful guidance of Father. After I completed my task, whilst standing in a queue in the self-service restaurant for a plate of pasta and a Coca-Cola, I passed out. Upon regaining conscience, I found myself lying in a bed in a side-room. An unknown lady, possibly a nurse, was smiling at me and saying to the worrisome Mother who was standing by: ‘Nothing is wrong with the lad... He's tired and dehydrated.’ I felt a sudden rejuvenation and an unusual vigour from the oxygenated blood flow returning and swirling like mountain streams in my brain and enjoyed my pasta meal with great appetite, a scant reward for the hard work done.

Those first holidays in the tent would begin with preparations dictated by the immature way of thinking and conducting myself: new ball of professional standards, new Adidas clothing, Converse All Star footwear for basketball, all bought by a rogue sportswear dealer from the pocket money I managed to save from different sources and the occasional pinching of 50 and 100 drachma notes from Father’s pockets or Mother’s purse without them noticing. Ah, and the Fred Perry polo-shirt for evenings outings, and a pair of Speedo trunks for the beach... All were brands with recognized logos on display, for every social occasion that give adolescents an illusion of an elevated status and esteem amongst wealthier peers. With such artificially enhanced outward appearance they believe that they generate impressions and become, at least temporarily, centres of attention and, potentially, stir emotions of admiration from friends and envy from foes. So, under peer pressure one might say, I went with the flow and tried to follow the trends of my age, to gain attention and confirmation and recognition, especially amongst the female populace.

For a taciturn, timid and introvert child, these were coarse and subconscious expressions of an imaginary modus vivendi as far as he could understand it, but the means and the methods were superficial and ineffective, when seen from the perspective of adulthood. But then again, I had neither the life experience nor the knowledge, nor the depth of thought for deep introspections. The trends of my milieu were dominating our way of thinking and conducting ourselves, and the immature child in me adopted those trends thoughtlessly, but eagerly. Self-criticism had yet to become a tool in personal development. As it turned out, those brand names I was wearing at a large monetary cost did not help me a jot. They failed to attract even fleeting glances of admiration from girls I was desperately seeking, let alone help me build any sort of solid friendship. Several boys of my age used similar tactics, in perhaps more glamorous and effective ways, especially when their fashionable appearances were augmented with their auras of courage, bravado, conviviality, personal charm and other personal gifts I did not possess. But I had to tread water and survive amongst stronger egos and follow blindly those, after all, oppressive trends. I naively presumed that a personality is somehow enhanced by showing-off a trendy attire of recognized brands. Those presumptions were tested in the holiday site and, in hindsight, they crushed in the brutal world of adolescence. I learned the hard way, as was pointed out by Leo Cohen and others, that reality is a possibility that we cannot ignore or underestimate.

43 - Eddie

At least, during the first of our holidays in the Skotina resort there was footie. Plenty of footie, for that matter: from early afternoon till dusk and it was played on the large green patches the camping had to offered, as I dreamed of it when we first visited with Father, in contrast to the injurious hard and dusty surfaces I was used to in school, the parks and the streets. To these footie games, which attracted girl spectators too, Billy did not participate. Football in the Skotina camping became keys to gain some self-assurance and a domain of minor distinction. It was where for a few hours I was becoming integral part of an often-winning team, and for the moments the ball was at my feet, I felt at the centre of attention of teammates and opponents, and maybe the target of a few glances from girls and boys and adults nearby.

In one of those football games, on a green plot by the camping amenities square, during that first summer holiday in the Skotina camping I met Eddie. A Yugoslav boy of my age from Belgrade, it turned out, from the number plate of the darks Mercedes his dad was driving, he was the son of a Serb diplomat and lived in Thessaloniki, possibly -I thought -close to the Yugoslav consulate in Vasilisis Olgas Avenue, not far from my neighbourhood.  He had lively blonde hair falling to his shoulders and smiling brown eyes. He was like a mirror-image or the twin brother of the beautiful Yugoslav girl, whom we were staring at with Billy in the youth corner of the square. Eddie was staying in a nearby bungalow, but his Serbian family followed a different daily routine of sleeping, earing, sea-bathing, etc. than ours. Our brief holiday friendship was built on our joint passion for playing football. It meant to be, as one would have expected, one of those fleeting friendships that are born in the short period of vacations and die an instantaneous death at their last day, without sadness and tears.

Every single afternoon, a few hours before sunset, I searched for him, for his blonde hair and slim figure, in the area around the paved square of our holiday village. As soon as I spotted him and he noticed me approaching, with a happy smile and a meaningful node he joined me in trying to set up teams for a game of football. The number of participants was irrelevant. It was football, and only football, that connected us during the few weeks of our friendship, usually as opponents in our ‘international’ football clashes. He was a skilful player himself, but he frequently praised my game -after a brave tackle, a glorious pass, or scoring a goal. His praises and taps on my shoulders caused my cheeks to flush from a tinge of pride, whilst familiar and invigorating feeling of elation was running through my soul. We did not and could not exchange many words and the few were in English and more about football, less about our families, our holidays and homes and schools in Thessaloniki. But he aroused in me an inexplicable and extraordinary attraction for a boy of my age. His smiling looks, his golden blond hair, the beautiful face, the slim but fit body, the Slavic exoticism. It was the sort of attraction, in the process of the chaotic development of sexuality in adolescence, which, should it be analysed in retrospect, it would hint at some latent homosexual instincts.

One day Eddie left the resort with his family unexpectedly, without saying anything during our footie the evening, and without a farewell. The sight of the empty terrace of their bungalow filled me with sadness. But the fire of the captivating charm he exerted upon me, because of his compliments for my football skills as well his looks, and his memory I found hard to extinguish for weeks after our last game. As soon as we returned to our home town, and before the start of the school year, I used to walk down to Vasilisis Olgas Avenue, in the area where the consulate of Yugoslavia was located, in search of Eddie’s residence. I scanned lists of names in the intercom list outside the apartment buildings around the Consulate for surnames with the typical Serbian suffix to no avail. After a few fruitless attempts to find him, the bright star of my summer football afternoon at the camping eventually started to fade. Whether there was a primitive and subconscious homosexual element in my attraction to Eddie, as I suspected in retrospect, in the tumultuous process of defining and settling on one’s sexuality, I still question, dozens of years later. Possibly, there was such element, as Eddie had been the only boy that exerted a kind of physical attraction, most likely however unrequited. But the boat of life and live quickly took and settled onto its normal course.

42 - A Wounded Pride

Relations with girls, despite the deep yearnings of adolescence and the burning desires that days with young female bodies in swimsuits on the beach or minidresses over smooth and sun-toned skins in the evenings in the square stimulating the imagination, despite opportunities for encounters, which Billy’s broad circle of female friends enabled, despite all of the above, a casual holiday friendship, let alone a more intimate relationship with a girl remained wishful thinking. The boat of longing for a maiden touch and a kiss was crushed on the rocks of shyness and timidity, on the one hand, and, on the other, the self-confidence and arrogant charm Billy was exuding, a friend who harboured similar yearnings but had the agility and zeal in seeking and fighting for his share in all this. There was strong competition in that arena – where the battles amongst adolescent boys for girls’ attention were fought and where, no doubt, Billy with the opportunistic friendships he formed with him positioned at the centre, had a major advantage.

One morning, whilst splashing water in the shallow foreshore and chatting with Billy and a couple of mutual acquaintances, he said to me behind his lop-sided ironic smile: "Tina was talking to us about you yesterday evening..." Tina was the beautiful daughter of a Greek-American couple, with straight long hair, shiny black, parted in half. My heart naturally leaped. "She likes you, it seems..." One of his friends nodded in confirmation, also with a suspect smile. “Oh yeah, really?" I queried sincerely, having fallen into the trap of their pun. After a pause, a meaningful glance and a wink to his friend, Billy added: "We're just kidding! She told us that she dislikes you. You come across as too cold a person." My heart sank in bleak disappointment. It was not just the crushing of yet another faint hope that I could exert some attraction—if not charm, to a good-looking girl. I felt even uglier than the skinny and short boy I was to others, with a conspicuous and repulsive hair growth under the nostrils, like a fake moustache, an unattractively breaking voice which sounded like a bray when I shouted, the pimples -oh those pimples! that kept spreading on my face. It was not just the mocking declaration by a friend in front of others of a brutal dismissal by a girl in my absence that was humiliating enough. It was yet another heavy blow to my self-esteem and self-confidence. It was also an anger overflowing within from that unsavoury teasing, an unnecessary insult by Billy and his accomplice mate. I felt more alienated and placed another buffer zone between myself and Billy and his circle of friends.

With him and the others in his company days passed before we talked again. It eventually happened in one corner of the paved square with the amenities of the resort: the self-service restaurant, the café tables under wicker parasols, the small grocery store and the first-aid station, cubic structures painted in red that occupied most of the space. At the far distant corner an enclosed area, hidden by a reeds fence, was allocated for the entertainment of the camping youth· with ping-pong and foosball tables and a makeshift disco. In one of the leisurely evenings, after a few hours of basketball games at the courts, and having not much else to do, I was strolling aimlessly towards that youth club area, when a stunning Yugoslav teenage girl in a tight and short white dress, with short straight golden blonde hair around a supple and delicate neck, caught my attention. Shortly after, Billy approached out of nowhere and stood next to me, with the aim -I believe- of talking to me and making amends, if not apologising. My anger from the beach incident had not been yet abated and I ignored his presence and, so, we were standing speechless a few paces from this Slavic beauty, staring at her. With his lopsided smile I always found annoying, and nodding his chin in the direction of the blonde Yugoslav girl he said to me: “Sound face, don't you think?” I couldn't help but agree and retorted: "Yes, indeed… But 'sound face' for such a delicate creature? It’s blunt and does not do her beauty justice. It’s barbaric." My comments seemed to have made some kind of impression; he saw it as a witticism, made him laugh. He even conveyed our brief conversation that same night to others, although what I said was done on the spur of the moment, without pondering and intent to sound funny or witty. Besides, my sense of humour, which in any case always required courage and familiarity with the human environment around me, was generally much better in the chats I had with Kostakis, the children of our neighborhood, and some of my schoolmates.

Of course, neither myself, nor Billy -that giant of confidence and assertiveness, dared to approach and talk to the beautiful Yugoslavian: she was above our station, notwithstanding the fact that she was surrounded by athletic and handsome Slavic boys. Clearly self-assured of the beauty she radiated and enveloped by an air of haughtiness she was placed in a league of her own, out of the reach of Billy or any of his entourage. Later, during the disco hours, we resigned ourselves to ogling her dancing with no much less good-looking friends.

My relations with Billy thawed after that evening. A part of my ego was restored and reappeared in his company, albeit tangentially to the circle of his friends, a circle which was expanding as our vacation approached the peak of the holiday season, placing me further away from its centre -Billy, that is. He went to organize gatherings to show off playing his guitar and charm his audiences outside his tent on the grass under the poplars or in the courtyards of the bungalow complex, where Tina was also staying, or in a remote corner of the beach. Since I lacked the interpersonal communication and social interaction skills, I either opted not to participate to these parties, or, as always timid and taciturn or “cold” one, I was watching from the margins. My facial muscles often tired from trying to wear a cheerful expression, whilst the conversations about girls, music, excursions and the next party came and bypassed me indifferently without leaving any lasting impression, or arousing an interest or emotions, barring perhaps that of envy and frustration. At least participating in the other activities that the camping offered made me feel better: in basketball, in chess, even in the tennis games that I occasionally played with clumsy Billy whom I easily thumped. My above-average sports skills, despite my skinny physique and low-to-moderate stature, despite the acne pimples that started appearing here and there, despite the homeliness and unloveliness of many teenagers like me, generated some tailwinds that were at least temporarily boosting my ego and confidence, far from Billy and some of his retinue.