Mykonos

The one place we didn't want to go is where we ended up. It was my method of improvisational travel that got us here. We planned to take the SYROS EXPRESS all the way to Syros but I came up with an alternate plan. We would get off at the first port, Paros, where there would certainly be boats to Syros all day. Of course I hadn't counted on the SYROS EXPRESS being a decrepit old rust bucket of a ship. Where do they get the nerve to call these slow boats to hell "Expresses"? A more appropriate name would be SYROS ETERNITY. I sat next to two Oriental law students and we discussed the seaworthyness of the small inter-island ferries. I point out the rust and the derelict condition of the ship. They laugh. "This is nothing. You should see the piece of junk they call the MYKONOS EXPRESS". We got to Paros a half an hour late and fifteen minutes after the boat to Syros had left. We were going to wait around for a six-thirty flying dolphin but then I came up with another alternate plan. Let's go to Mykonos. There will be lot's of boats to Syros. We bought tickets for the three oclock boat. To our horror it's the MYKONOS EXPRESS, half an hour late of course. It was the very boat the two oriental law students had warned me about. They were right. The crew didn't even bother trying to make it look ship-shape. It was covered with rust though in some spots they had covered over it with white paint. The lounge looked like Chernobyl with young tourists passed out in a smoky haze. I didn't dare use the bathroom. It smelled bad enough from where I was sitting fifty feet away. Still it was an OK boat ride. The sea was rough so the movement of the listing ship was kind of entertaining and Amarandi enjoyed it till she fell asleep in my arms. We got to Mykonos a half an hour late and fifteen minutes after the boat to Syros had left. It was the SYROS EXPRESS again. We decided to stay the night. We had a light lunch at Nikos Taverna and Amarandi met the two famous pelicans. After walking the short harbor road of Kamares for ten days, Mykonos is a treat. The harbor road goes for a mile and the back streets of the village are an endless labyrinth of creperies, boutiques, bars, discos, restaurants, jewelry stores and tourist shops. We dump our bags at our friend Tom Mazarakis carpet store and find a cheap room on a quiet residential street. Our Landlord, Dionysios is a guide to the sacred island of Delos. It's one room with a shared bath, across a three foot wide street from a guy who argues in a loud voice with a group of silent people all night long. Amarandi is impossible but after awhile she gets into the swing of things. We wander around for hours. We have dinner at a fast-food spaggetaria, at Amarandi's request. The streets are packed with tourists. The outer harbor has two giant ocean-liner size cruise ships and you can pick out the passengers by their accents and loud New York voices as they wander the streets looking for bargains. Mykonos also happens to be Mecca for the male homosexuals of the world. Walking past one of the bars whose customers have spilled out into the courtyard of a small Byzantine church, I see more gays at one time then I have in my whole life. Gay men of every shape and style. It looks like the most happening place on the island. The other bars are full of drunk stupid tourists, talking loudly and saying nothing. The crowd at the Byzantine church next to the gay bar seems far more interesting and culturally aware. We sit next door and have a beer and an ice-cream, watching them scope one another out.. I don't sleep very well tonight. The islands only mosquito is in our room and avoids my blind swatting like he had escaped the swatting of thousands of others before me. We were told by our host Dionysious that there are no mosquitoes on Mykonos but apparently through its own cleverness this one has escaped detection. We might do our part in preserving the species by capturing it alive and turning it over to the Greek ASPCA but I would be satisfied just to kill the thing. I find him in the morning resting in the shower, so heavy with our blood that his little wings can no longer carry him. I concider hitting him now, leaving his remains on the linoleum as a small shrine to his longevity and perseverance but I decide to let him live and let the next visitor decide his fate. There's not much I can say about Mykonos. I feel a sense of redemption after being critical of a place I haven't been to in twenty years. Now I know that I was right. I made a joke to Andrea that the old men are each paid a hundred thousand dollars a year to wear those blue Mykonos fisherman caps, but as the night went on I realized that those hats were all new as if they had been passed out at the beginning of each tourist season along with last season's paycheck. The island is artificially Greek. Even the whitewash on the street is latex paint. It reminds me of Tarpon Springs Florida where the former sponge fishermen of Kalymnos have created a replica of a Greek island on the swampy banks of a small southern river. So this morning when we awaken, all I want to do is leave. The three of us wander around and fight until we find an actual traditional Greek bread shop with the only reasonable prices on the island,(besides our room) and we eat whole wheat bread and a delicious spanokopita. There is hardly anyone on the streets and it's nearly ten. Most people are probably just getting to sleep after a night of wildness. We plan to go to continue our journey to Syros but at the last minute I decide we should go to Andros, an island neither of us has ever been. The only reason Andros wins out over Syros is because the ship is leaving a half hour sooner and looks much newer. So we get on the ultra-modern SUPERFERRY II, an air-conditioned lounge of a ship, complete with movie theaters, video games, bars, and who knows what else. It's paradise and we talk of spending the rest of the summer riding back and forth between Rafina and the islands, never getting off the boat. We could be reading, writing, and enjoying life in air-conditioned splendor. Then disaster. The ship is pretty much empty until the moment we arrive in Tinos, the Lourdes of Greece with it's famous church to the Virgin Mary and miracle working icon. Within moments of docking the boat fills up with thousands of old women fresh from their magical cures. With few exceptions they are all over fifty years old and suffering from some malady, visible or invisible, real or imagined. The woman next to me has elephantiasis. Her right leg is as big as a tree trunk. There is a teenage boy wearing a Michael Jordan cap leading his ailing grandmother down the aisle. They all have some kind of affliction of the vocal chords and keep up a high pitched whining that never stops. Andrea thinks it must be a tour because they keep coming in waves. Just as last night the crowd at Ikarus was the biggest group of gays I'd ever seen, I don't think I have ever been in the midst of so many old ladies. So what began as the most pleasant of ferry rides has turned into a geriatric nightmare of cackling crones all in various states of hysteria. I wonder how Andrea can concentrate on her book. The loudest most obnoxious voice of all belongs to the woman right behind her. In an ear-grating screech she tries to orchestrate the seating arrangements of all the other women in this section. Amarandi sleeps through it all. In fact she was last awake when we were still in Mykonos walking towards the ship. I wonder what she'll think when she wakes up in a different place. Does she just accept it as something unexplainable? She hasn't been a good traveler, especially when she wakes up. She cries and cries and sometimes I feel like either I or Andrea are going to lose our temper. Today I wanted out of this family deal. My reasoning was that if God had meant for me to be a family man, he would have given me a happy family, not the crying, complaining one I have now. Andrea asks "How could I have such an unhappy child?" It's not a very difficult question to answer. I'm the only happy person in the family and I'm not feeling that great myself. We were disturbed by the un-Greekness of Mykonos. We decided to escape the phoniness and find the true Greek experience on a more traditional island. Instead we have found it on the ferry from Tinos for there could be no truer Greek experience then this. What could be more Greek then the two old ladies about to have it out, hurling insults at each other, fighting over a seat, after spending their holiday in prayer. So while I watch this, on probably my final visit to Mykonos, (unless someone makes me an incredible offer), I think back on all the memories I have of the once quiet, pristine island, now an international symbol of narcissism and decadence. Of all the experiences I have had from nights of sexual discovery to my first acid trips, my strongest memory is of Goon. GOON LIVES Goon was a kid from my high school named Greg. He got the nickname not because he was big and lanky and looked like a goon, but because Mr. Davenport, the PE teacher, shortened it from Gouganis, which was his last name. It stuck. Probably because he was big and lanky and he looked like a goon. He was only at ACS for a year and when he left we forgot he had ever existed. Then, one summer after my senior year a bunch of us went to Mykonos, at the time our favorite island. We would take the bus to Platyialos, which was as far as you could go in those days, and walk around to the beach we called Paradise and the beach before it (that we never thought about asking its name), but we liked because of the little cave we stayed in out on the peninsula. It was during this trip that Goon returned from the states and for a few short days was a part of our lives. We were not well liked by the hippies of Paradise beach. This was in 1971 and many of them were on the way to or from India where they had bestowed upon themselves an inner grace and serenity that they displayed for all. But we got on their nerves. We yelled and laughed and did funny dives off rocks and while they grooved on the sunset we destroyed the ambiance by having rock skipping contests and rank-out sessions. We called them 'India People' and they called us 'Day Trippers'. We took it as a complement. "That's right pal. We live here. Eat your heart out," We would say. They would take acid in ceremonial fashion like a religious rite with a profound respect for the lessons they would learn on their journey. We would drop acid and dance on the tables of George's, the only Taverna on Paradise in those days, and continue our rock-skipping and rank-out sessions, while debating on who was better, Ritchie Blackmore or Jimmy Page. But for all his Gooniness, Goon was accepted among the India people to a degree we could not understand. With us, he was big, goofy, Goon, often the butt of our jokes and goodnatured enough to be able to withstand continuous needling. To the saffron robed India People, he was like a God. They listened to him intently so as not to miss any of his words of wisdom. This surprised us but not as much as when he disappeared with the two most beautiful India chicks for two days and when they returned it was obvious that they had become unified in some spiritual-sexual ceremony. It was more than Christopher, the poet of our group, could take. I found him alone in a dark corner of the far Taverna on another beach drunk on retsina. "It's Goon. He's driven me to this." He told me through clenched teeth. It was to be my last island trip with Christopher who sunk deeper and deeper into drugs and self doubt, eventually going to work for an insurance company. But Goon re-appeared a few years later when Leigh Sioris and I returned to Paradise. Goon had become one of the foremost experts and collectors of model trains. At a young age he had risen to the top of his field and I wondered if perhaps it didn't have something to do with his experience with the India girls on Mykonos. So as I put Mykonos behind me I wonder, does Goon still go there? Maybe I should not have been so quick to leave the favorite island of my youth. Maybe I should have taken the bus to Platyialos and walked past the miles of cafes, hotels, swimming pools, fancy restaurants and beach chairs and the hordes of tourist nude-sunbathing, oblivious to a future of cosmetic surgery and dermatologists. Maybe I would fine Goon, now portly and middle aged, holding court with beautiful jewelry-bedazzled blondes at his side while his yacht lay at anchor with the dozens of other yachts in the tiny bay, talking about his youth and the gang of teenagers who thought they were hot shit but couldn't even carry on an intelligent conversation or get laid by an India chick and were probably selling insurance, waiting tables or hanging posters in small southern towns. I shoulda stayed. I bet he would have bought me a lobster dinner. My friendship with Rick Miller, AKA Parthenon Huxley was cemented on a trip to Mykonos. Someone sold us some orange sunshine and we dropped it immediately. All of us except Rick, who was afraid, having never tried it. Who could blame him? Peter seemed to. Not that he didn't have some antagonism towards Rick anyway, but this seemed to put Rick further out on the fringes of our gang and proved to Pete that Rick was not truly 'one of us'. Chuck followed Pete's lead and Rick became the butt of their jokes all evening. I chose this particular evening to have my first bad trip and went through a silent hell, assuming that everyone knew what was going on inside my poor fragmented mind and never letting on about my suffering. Hours later when I had come down a little my friends were shocked to find out that I had been having a bad trip "I thought you were just being silently profound" said Peter. We split up for awhile the next morning, still under the effect of the LSD. Peter and Chuck smelled something that reminded them of Aunt Jimima pancakes and were walking to town to find some. I was wandering around when I ran into Rick, eating breakfast at a cafe. He wasn't in a very good mood and not particularly illuminating or even nice to me. It was obvious he wanted to be left alone with his breakfast so I went back to the cave where Pete and Chuck had given up their quest and were sitting on our stolen beach chairs. Ricks sacred container of orange juice was at their feet and they both had the same guilty expression. "What did you do?" I asked them. "Nothing" they replied in quick unison. They sounded guilty of something. I looked at the orange juice sitting in the morning sun. I picked it up, opened and smelled it. It smelled terrible and I accused them of pissing in it. They vehemently denied it and told me I was crazy, but I spilled it out on the rocks anyway, just in case. When Rick came back and looked for his juice they told him I had poured it out. I didn't have the heart to suggest that I suspected his two friends had urinated in his beloved orange juice so I took the blame for being a jerk. Rick stayed angry at me for the rest of the trip and it wasn't until twenty years had passed that I told him why I had spilled out his juice. I figured he could handle it by then.