Naked in Dangerous Places - Cash Peters [45]
Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. Rrrrrrr. Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
… we mount one of his scooters. Fearing I might slide sideways, I wrap both arms around his waist, fingers interlocked on the other side in the deep crease between his gut and nipples, giving me unlimited free access to the rich man-musk of his underarm, then we set off out of the village into open countryside.
Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. Rrrrr. Rrrrr. Rrrrrrrrrr.
If Lesbos were a drop-leaf table, Skala Eressos would be on the bit that folds down after dinner. The rest would be a broad, flat plain littered with mulberry trees, potato farms, and acres of flourishing olive groves. It's quite delightful. Great for riding.
After a few minutes, we cruise over a gentle hill and—
“Oh my God, look out!!!”
—nearly hit an elderly pedestrian who's halfway across the road—
“Wooooooah!”
—missing him by inches.
Yet Yorgos doesn't even flinch. He clearly enjoys running into people he knows.
As we speed away, I shout an apology over my shoulder at the old man. “Have a nice day!” But he doesn't understand. “Yorgos, what's the Greek for have a nice day?”
Twice he pronounces it. Both times it sounds like “pajamas.” And “good afternoon/evening” is, apparently, “kalispara.” That's what I'm hearing.
“Kalispara!” I shout back to the old man we almost killed. “Pajamas.”
he yells back in Greek, waving his clenched fist—the international symbol of forgiveness.
Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
As the sun succumbs gamely to evening, burnishing the hills behind the town a fiery orange, that's when Skala Eressos starts to show signs of life. The same pickled old men I saw in the street earlier, hunched over backgammon boards, drinking ouzo, and smoking, have been home for a few hours to escape the worst of the heat, and now, rested after a short nap, they're back, hunched over backgammon boards, drinking ouzo, and smoking again. Families graze the streets. Children play and perform cartwheels in cobbled lanes. Young lovers in every acceptable sexual permutation speed by on scooters, swerving now and then to avoid hitting the last few bathers stumbling up from the beach—“Ow ow ow ow ow!!”—as they head back to the hotel to put Neosporin on their cuts.
Along the narrow boardwalk that bisects the promenade, dividing the patios of various restaurants from the kitchens that serve them, strings of fairy-lights jiggle and clink overhead in a faint ocean breeze, dousing their patrons, many of them parties of women, in shifting smudges of ochre. The individual establishments are fenced off from each other by lattice windbreaks decorated with octopuses stretched out like roadkill, a traditional Greek way to ward off Satan, unless I'm mistaken.
“Yes, you are,” Joanna corrects. “It's to dry them out before they're cooked.”
Oh.
I tried octopus once. In Sicily. Never again. Next time I crave something rubbery with creepy suction cups all over it, I'll eat the mat in my shower.
The Blue Sardine turns out to be the very last restaurant on the boardwalk. I steer a course toward it using the rhythm of the bouzouki band as my sextant.
Something I forgot to tell you: earlier in the day, before the monastery trip5 with Yorgos, I struck gold, lesbian-wise.6 Quite by chance, I found a small cluster of them in a bar on the seafront eating breakfast. Clare, Liz, and Mary. All from Manchester, England—my hometown, as it happens, so of course we bonded instantly. Clare—who's the ringleader and the most rosieodonnellish of the trio—and Liz are an item, whereas Mary is single and looking for love. “Or whatever I can get,” she says, giggling. Ecstatic at breaking our run of bad luck on the lesbian front, I pressured the three of them into coming to The