8 - Classmates

Confronting the troupe of our teachers, the protagonists and the extras amongst them, there was the audience of students looking up at the dais and scrutinising them, but rarely being attentive and receptive to their teachings. Our sitting arrangement in the classrooms were distinct and layered. There was the aristocracy of the front rows, the crème de la crème of the class favoured and in some cases pampered by teachers, a generally diligent and disciplined crop, with fundamental intelligence and a working ethos; then, there was a usually indifferent mass of the middle rows comprise the  mediocre,  but also the ‘fairly good’, ‘good’ and some ‘very good’ amongst them, as well as a thin layer of simply dump and spiritless scattered amongst them; and, finally, the gallery of lumpen elements, of delinquents and troublemakers at the very back of the classroom.

Solid friendships, especially between the members of the second category, the middle stratum, were established: at parties, in discos and café , in sports groups, in furtive dates outside the girls only schools, or, for the most daring, in joint wanders in seedier parts of the city. The first category, of the ‘excellent’ ones, with the potential to occupy higher echelons of society, were usually the offspring and were guided by ‘enlightened’ middle class parents. That group, as the university entry exams were approaching, became rigid and insular and detached itself from the rest and most vibrant members of the class. I belonged to this dull category of ‘excellent’ students: from the first to the last day of high school.

My closest childhood friend, Kostakis, ended up to a different school, a modern but remote establishment in the eastern side of the city and disappeared from our street and pretty much from my life. Upon entering the Gymnasium, our neighbourhood games that absorbed many carefree days were finally and irrevocably over. There remained some sporadic visits to the Aris football ground to watch the odd game and, later, when Aris’ basketball team, featuring legends like Papageorgiou and Nick Galis, after his arrival from the States, dominated the national league, we would meet at the ‘Palais de Sport’, the then only enclosed arena of the city. But even those rendezvous with Kostakis became rarer, as those crucial for our future exams were approaching, until that most intimate friendship of my childhood faded away and died. With a few other children from my former primary school, like the ones whom I shared a desk with, Zois and Dimitropoulos, and who occasionally invited me to their homes and, presumably, enjoyed my company, we found ourselves in the same high school; with Zois in the same class, by virtue of being separated in classes in alphabetical order. Even those casual friendships gradually faded as time passed. Admittedly, the ever-growing distancing might have been because of being branded, along with a couple of others, ‘nerd’ par excellence. That, in turn, was the result of the excessive, almost compulsive, dedication -under intense peer competition for grades and parental pressure: to study hard, to focus on the academic ideals my family nurtured and the promise of a prosperous future. Therefore, I distanced myself from people, who were either less focused on the future beyond school and university, or they had it secured through some family business and inheritance, or, most likely, they merely managed to balance study with extracurricular activities and a semblance of social life with friends.

Eliopoulos, with who in the later years I shared the same front-row desk, never became a real friend and he could never have been. In a perverse way he respected me as studious and intelligent student and I helped him with tests, even covered up in his truancies. Sometimes we played basketball at the end of school day or in weekend in the newly founded Poseidoneion open swimming pool and sports centre that featured several basketball courts. Less often, he would invite me to participate in football matches the non-league team he was playing for: in the seafront park initially and football grounds around the city later, which featured proper goalpost, like that in the Papafeion orphanage complex, or the ground of the low-league team ‘Alexander the Great’ in the eastern gates of the city. He might have appreciated some talent in me or, more likely, because his teams had to make up the numbers ahead of a game. But Eliopoulos belonged to a different caste of students. He had a broader circle of interests: he joined in team sports activities with the fittest and most skilled of the school, himself with an athletic, muscular body and physique and skills; he was regular in parties and weekend outings to discos in the company of girls... of many girls. On the other hand, he associated himself with the two or three bullies of the class, whose relatively early and rather predictable successes (with girls!) allowed them at every opportunity to make fun of the ‘nerd’. As they had never seen me in the company of girls, I was incessantly teased in morning assemblies and breaks for my pimples and light acne: as a sign of hormonal changes, it was suggestive of sexual frustration, and as a result, of habitual masturbation. There was an element of truth in those claims, but they nonetheless infuriated me when expressed publicly.  

An anachronistic segregated secondary education system placed the objects of early desires and the female protagonist in my first fantasies during the last year of primary school, Kiki, in a girls’ only school. My lame efforts to find her address and keep in touch proved fruitless. The beautiful girl of the same age from my neighbourhood, in an apartment building across in Gambetta Street, whom I often bumped into on my way back from my school, but never summoned the courage to chat, became the temporary passion of my imagination, my new teenage longing after Kiki. She had a lovely name: Vicky. Without the courage and the grace to charm with words, I resorted to foolish acts, which were unlikely to result into getting to know each other, let along hang out together. I found her family on the intercom of her apartment building and her phone number from the white pages. And I was calling her. Cowardly, anonymously, silently, holding my breath, I was playing pieces of music from my cassette player: songs by the Beatles, but also by the Rolling Stones and Deep Purple (which I thought, ignorant as I was about contemporary music matters, were the Rolling Stones, until Eliopoulos with arrogance and mocking style of the relevant connoisseur corrected me). Vicky used to listen to them for a few seconds, before, after a few ‘hello!’ and ‘who is it?’, hanging up. Only once did she bother to speak to me, saying: ‘You choose nice songs to play for me... Why don't you talk to me? Why don’t you tell me your name?’ Yet, even at this opportunity for a firs chat, I found impossible to overcome my shyness! I could not mutter a single word, let alone reply coherently, and even if I did, I thought that would betray an utter lack of self-confidence, a virtue in I knew girls found attractive in men. I comforted myself with the thought there would be another time, another opportunity. Or, perhaps, she might recognize the quiet boy who played songs over the phone, in my stare, when we came across each other on Gambetta Street. Sadly, there had been no more opportunities and Vicky remained one of several unfulfilled teenage desire, which ended into a mortifying frustration.

Weekends became thus lonely; for hours I was locked in my room with myself as a company. Adult chats and parties were dull, the presence of adults undesirable and unwanted. At the family meals my uncle and aunt organized next door on Sunday afternoons I sat silent and sultry. Other classmates gathered in hangouts, cafés, even in their family apartments when their parents were absent, many went to trendy discos, such as The Figaro or The Palladium, both big night-life names of the city in the ‘70s, as could overhear in envy from conversations of weekend adventures during breaks or sports games. And as the years passed, as the want for friends, female and male, and outlets grew and I gained a few inches in height, so did the burdens from school and the forthcoming major exams grow in proportion, so was time constrained outside school and constrained by tutoring classes. It was only in the last couple of years of school, when the coarse features of adolescence softened, whilst indifference to my appearance gave way to my growing interest in my looks and grooming, my ‘coquette’ as grandma used to say. It was when the boy with the ugly and immaterial fluff of a moustache over the lip was shaved, with the pimples subsiding, the hoarse voice stabilising into a deep proper man’s voice, when he was turning into a rather good-looking young man, that I eventually invited to the first and only party over the six years of high-school. It was the birthday party of the Karavassilis twins. The chubby of the two, Vassilis, always smiling, kind towards me and well-intentioned, used to call me ‘the handsome dude’. My old friend from primary school, Zois, might have intervened to solicit an invitation for me or it could be on the recommendation from another chubby schoolmate, Karoulis, who, on several occasions, invited me to his poor family's apartment to help with homework and exam preparations; his mother was a primary school and an acquaintance of Mother’s.

On that unforgettable party occasion, a maiden milestone in my adolescence, I danced for the first time in life, as a seventeen-year-old ‘handsome dude’ to the sounds of some slow-temp, romantic music with a girl. The little available white wine which Zois had taken care of to bring, mixed with Coca-Cola, had calmed my nerves and I overcame my natural inhibitions. At the end of the dance and the party, I felt an uncommon relief, a peak in happiness from what was an insignificant and, sadly, a short-lasting conquest; yet, for me, it was a small triumph, a satisfaction from one step into adulthood and of achieving a milestone. There was another world in a teenager's life, beyond tedious exam studies and ‘building’ an abstract future, that I was only aware of from hearsay and could only conjure up -until that night.  At that party I also discovered in alcohol a remedy for my shyness and extreme introversion.

The party was a glimpse of a world of fun and joy without precedent or follow up during the years in school. To moderate the air of melancholy around me in lonely Saturday evenings, for a respite from studying and in-search for some pretty girl to chat and flirt with, to touch and kiss, in my rare outings to the parks and cafes of the city, I had to rely on the company of a colourless and wearisome classmate, who became a quasi-friend. I knew him from primary school. It was the guy I shared a desk with and was bullied by in the 4th grade, the rival for Kiki's heart, the one I once punched as a response to his bullying at the end of a school day and, indeed for that reason, I was applauded by eyewitness classmates.

Yiannis D was a generally disliked kid in primary school and he had no more than a single identifiable close friend in high school. Perhaps, he was attracted to me in those latter years for being the better looking and smarter of the two, his own back up and clutch in years devoid of heartbeats and rare opportunities in vain search for female company. We had nothing in common with Yiannis D, apart from the not-so-hidden burning desires of adolescence. He was taller and bulkier than me, but with an untrained body, with a narrow torso and shoulders. A spare tyre around his waist was becoming visible. He had messy hair and small, agile brown eyes testifying more to cunning and clumsiness than intelligence. To both sides of a large and hooked nose there were two furrows, more like those formed by expressions of disapproval and disgust, or as the facial reaction to something tasting sour. He was not interested in sports involving physical activity. His passion was cars and motorbikes, sports car racing, their engines specification and performance. Motorsports hardly interested me, but Yiannis D, along with his single best mate Panayiotis, could talk about cars in our joint outings for hours on end. Of course, that was partly because there were no girls in close association to divulge. Upon reaching the legal age, both Yiannis D and Panayiotis rushed to get their driver's license, and then indulge in taking their family cars for a spin: in the empty streets of the city in early morning hours whilst imagining driving a Ferrari, a Porsche and the like.

His idol was a strict and austere father, a fabrics importer and merchant. Yiannis was saying about his dad that he had graduated from the so-called ‘university of life’. He set up shop, with shelves for rolls of fabric and large tables for measuring and cutting, in a loft in a high-rise building on Valaoritou Street, in the heart of the commercial centre of Thessaloniki. He ran his business with the part-time (while in school) help of his two sons and managed it shrewdly, weathering frequent storms from the periodic market fluctuations and local competition. The family enjoyed a relatively modest lifestyle with their income from the trade of fabrics, augmented by the teacher salary of the wife. Mr D senior wanted Yiannis, his eldest son, to obtain some sort of university education, despite that he was intended as the main heir and successor in his business. He always asserted during my visits to his shop that it would be great if Yiannis got a degree, any degree, because, as the saying goes- and Yiannis frequently recited it: ‘Learn a trade and set it aside, and if you go hungry, take it up again’, or ‘you can never have too many strings to your bow.’ In out penultimate year at school, Yiannis, of the customary sour face and a countenance generally betraying limited intellectual capacity, followed me to the same tutoring centre, which Father had selected (by virtue of knowing the director). I could listen to him huffing and puffing during the lectures, stemming from his inability to keep up with much of the teaching material, but he pointed out the fingers solely to the quality of the tutoring school and its teachers. In his view, only a couple of the tutors were competent enough to implant the necessary knowledge and understanding in his brain that would guarantee limited success in the exams. Unable to comprehend much of what was being taught, he naturally ascribed his failure in the first year of the exams to the tutoring centre, where he followed me hoping for miracles. In the second year he attended a different centre, however without any tangible results or marked improvement in his exams performance. Having thus failed the university entry exams, he was conscripted into the army, as it was legally mandated, before he finally pursued the predetermined merchant’s career in his father’s family business.

If I was more handsome and brainy, relatively speaking, he was equipped with bravado and audacity and fluency in making witty remarks, because of an above-average sense of humour, a useful attribute during our expeditions in search of female company. In a strange way, one might have argued, that we complemented each other on this ad-hoc basis. As far as I was concerned, in the absence of better alternatives, I joined him on many Saturday evening outings: at the seafront, for aimless walks along the old and new promenades, in the youth cafés of Queen Olga’s Avenue, even in the dark streets and hidden alleys of Vardaris, the city’s red-light district. The unfulfilled longing for girls and love, this subconscious pull to the opposite sex driven by biological forces, exerted from childhood to old age, brought us together in those years of irresistible urges; an invisible hand that guided us to places, and led us to actions, many which the recollections I still find hair-raising.

In the early years, in the winter afternoons after school, on the way home we would stop by outside a kiosk on Queen Olga’s Avenue, in front of the Radio City arcade, to ogle at the covers, and, as discretely as possible to daringly flip through the sex magazines hanging with pegs on railings outside the kiosk, all the while trying hard to evade the attention of the shopkeeper and passers-by. We went unnoticed most of the time or so we thought; the owner was out of our sight, inside his kiosk and behind its windows, with only small gaps through stacks of merchandise to have a wide view of what was going outside or he was busy with customers. It did not take us long to summon the courage and dare to pull magazines from its pegs and steal them, with one of us keeping an eye for movements within the kiosk and the traffic of passers-by, the other with the skills one recognizes in pickpockets. Twice our endeavours were successful and we managed indeed to get hold of a porn magazine and enjoy raunchy photos of attractive nude female modes in its glossy pages in the privacy of our rooms -sort of views of we were deprived of in real life. The third time, however, while I managed to release the magazine from its peg, and both begun to walk away inconspicuously with the magazine folded under my arm, we saw not the familiar old kiosk owner, but a young and fit man running out of the kiosk towards us menacingly. I instinctively threw the magazine away and ran as fast as I could in a panic mode, along the pavement I towards the dark arcade and the quieter streets at its other end. Thanks to the dusk of the mid-winter afternoon and fast legs were spared the wrath of the owner and possible police involvement. That botched attempt to steal a sex magazine would be the last. But the terrifying shock I experienced, like some others of that period was enduring and chastising. Such episodes teach useful lessons in life.

In another excursion, on our way to the Salamis Fun Park for a fun evening out with Yiannis D, Nikos Z, and two or three classmates, I overcame inhibitions and moral barriers from the same uncontrollable sexual urge. Perhaps, I wanted also to demonstrate to the male gang, behind the secure anonymity numbers provide, as with being part of any mob, that I do not ‘chicken out’ and ‘lose my bottle’ when I encounter girls; that I had grown up to a real man. Of a girl who was approaching us alone from the opposite direction, I groped one of her boobs. It was a vulgar and obscene act, amounting to a sexual assault proper by today’s standards. Beyond initial exclamations of surprise and some giggles from members of party, it must have astounded and maybe disgusted them. Surely, I did not get the approval, let alone praise I was counting on, for the act. I had exceeded the limits and scruples of behaviour, even norms of contact that are knowingly relaxed amongst teenagers. Who would expect such a thing from a model student, the ‘nerd’ of the class? Was I and did I appear to the gang as sexually starved and desperate? The girl shrieked and blasted at me, hit me with her purse, and walked away. I laughed her and the shameful incident away. Inside, the sense that ‘I achieved something’ or ‘I showed something’ to my mates and that even I reached a milestone on course to sexual maturity, in par and even beyond the first, beside the crudeness and vulgarity, was short-lived ad was quickly succeeded by the unbearable weight of shame: that of a sexually deprived boy who showed himself up as a cowardly brute. Not to mention that the incident provided further ammunition to the couple of bullies that tormented me at school. I still carry in me fragments of that shameful event in memory, while the others present, as I hope the girl herself, whom I arguably harassed, have forgotten it, and any trauma it caused healed.  

There were more pleasant instances during the term of that quasi-friendship we established with Yiannis D, in the absence of better options to entertainment. Like one late evening in one of aimless walks along the ‘New Promenade’, his eagle-eye spotted two girls, seemingly unattached and available, sitting on a bench under some eucalyptus trees. With his admirable daringness and pluck he approached them and spontaneously started to chat them up. His boldness almost bore fruit. Whilst I was sitting at the edge of the bench, facing the sea and listening silently and nonchalantly to Yiannis’ full of hot-air overtures, one of the girls, the prettiest of the two, turned towards me with a light-hearted compliment: ‘You, the quiet man! You have such beautiful eyes. It’s a shame that they are a bit small...’ Before the two girls departed, Yiannis managed to agree on a date: tomorrow evening, at the same spot. Next day, we walked back and forth, past the spot, but rather predictably the girls did not show up. Bewitched by the flattering comment, the first ever passed to me by a pretty girl, I passed a few more times alone by the same spot in the days and weeks that followed in the hope of finding the girls. It was in vain.

In the summer at the end of our last year at school, I spent a few days -the only summer vacation days in the company of Yiannis D. He was guest to his close friend Panayiotis’ family holiday home, in the seaside village of Leptokarya -under the Pieria mountains, an hour’s drive south of Thessaloniki. I was tagged along reluctantly, after the few miserable days the two of us spent sharing a tent in the camping of Skotina. In Leptokarya, Yiannis’ incessant courting and flirting with girls, which often veered to uncouthness, in the presence of me and an equally reserved Panayiotis, was proving again ineffective and fruitless, albeit entertaining. We were sitting at the edge of the train station of the village, where he introduced me to a group of girls as an ‘English’ tourist, who was requesting help to find somewhere to stay for the night and some directions to this end from a local. His introduction allowed me to open a rare conversation (in my average but adequate for the occasion English speaking skills from sever years of tutoring a small local school equipped me with, along with a 'Lower’ level certificate in English) with a gullible but pretty the girls in a group of friends. It was, as a poorly designed as much as audacious joke, predestined from the beginning to lead to a dead end. We had a laugh afterwards, truth to be told, whilst I was satisfied with myself that I overcame, in a dignified and courageous way this time, the hurdles my shyness and reserve always place in social interaction.

After several teenage years of sexual deprivation, Yiannis was eventually drawn by the red lights of the seedy and ill-reputed districts of Vardaris and Ladadika, possibly prompted by his father. He, unlike mine, was allegedly forthcoming and discussing openly sex matters with him. Yiannis on a couple of occasions dragged me along to those areas, outside shabby houses with a red-light lantern at the door indicating the sale of sex, frequented by drunken soldiers and uncouth farmers. Just passing in front of their open doors and peeping indoors made the heart beating fast because of some undefined expectations. Yiannis was perfectly capable of brushing aside without hesitation any qualms and entering these houses, and it was my sober presence or lack of money that prevented him. Over time, after several visits to city brothels, he obtained the necessary expertise, whereas I, for my part, always hesitated at the doorstep, where the enticing thoughts of pleasure and sensations on offer was counterweighed by the moral conundrums, such the considered brutal exploitation of the women in those places, and the odious nature of the people that frequented them. I never summoned the courage to cross those doorsteps and my adolescence remained ingloriously celibate, with devoid of joys from the sought-after fundamentals of existence: love and sex, eros.