by Cash Peters
“Back home, are you famous, Cash?”
“Famous? Hm, let me see. I've been broadcasting nationally on public radio in Britain for fifteen years and in America every week for ten years … so no.”
“But once this program is shown …?”
“Oh, probably. Depends how things go. Why?”
Bobbing alongside, she's looking up at me, a little starry-eyed.
“Just asking.” She grins impishly, then clams up.
How very odd.
“Hmmmmm,” I hula-mula-wonder to myself, “what's that about?”
The most difficult aspect for me of continually being on the road is—big surprise—finding food to eat. Specifically food that isn't swimming in oil. And never more so than in Greece—the clue's in the name, really—a country where olives grow in profusion and olive oil is so integral to the national diet that I'm surprised they don't just serve it neat in a pint glass and be done with it.
Waiters become quite offended, I've noticed, if you dare to suggest that your food be cooked without it.
“No oil??” they gasp, forcing me to explain the reason, using my hands to mime boils bursting all over my face. Psh, psh, psh!
The best compromise most times is the soup, once the waiter has assured me very begrudgingly that there's only “the barest minimum of olive oil in it” (by Greek standards that means about half a liter or so), plus some grilled fish fresh caught that morning, a specialty of the islands. Good, that'll do.
Lunch, once you've ordered it, takes forty minutes to arrive. Nobody rushes to do anything in Lesbos. It's either too hot or they're too lazy, not sure which. So while I'm busy keeping my eye on the chef, the crew wanders off to do some clothes shopping in nearby stores, taking Joanna along with them to translate.
As the group walks away, I hear her mumbling to Tasha, “It's a big problem. I don't know which to choose. I love them both. What shall I do? What would you do?”
In the clear absence of lesbians today, we abandon our search of the bars along the seafront and switch our attention instead to filming B-roll of the Bewilderbeest sauntering idly along the beach wearing nothing but a T-shirt, shorts, and his special Mystified Look:4 glance left, glance right, frown, squint, a purse of the lips, then—“Uh-oh, what's that interesting thing over there?”—and walk out of shot at a brisk pace. Never fails!
Skala Eressos has one of the best beaches in Europe, or so they say. It's even won awards. Hard to say why that is, because parts of it are truly horrible. Horrible!
“Ow, ow, ow, OWWWW!”
This used to be miles of golden sand. But then something terrible happened: a ruinous storm, according to Joanna, that hauled in a bunch of shingle from somewhere, doing to parts of the beach what the 2004 Olympics did to the rest of Lesbos, leaving it volcanic gray in color and pebble-strewn, and turning a pleasurable paddle in the water into one of the most unendurably painful experiences of my entire life. Like walking barefoot over crushed beer cans.
“Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, OW! OW!”
Afterwards, I hobble back to the village square to meet with Yorgos, the owner of a local motor-scooter shop.
Having come to this island apparently to see the lesbians, only to find that they're a bit thin on the ground, and with nothing else seemingly going on, we're reduced to improvising, shooting on the fly, filling the show with things we've just thought of, immediately after we've thought of them. It's very laissez-faire, and a lot more enjoyable for being so.
Yorgos, a jolly, middle-aged man with a gray mullet and substantial girth that spills over his belt like sandbags, and who would no doubt benefit from giving up riding mopeds and walking a little more, volunteers to drive me to an old monastery located several miles inland. I dare say that, if I didn't have a camera crew with me, he would never do this, but I'm not about to turn down such a kind offer, so …
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 Blue Sardine with me, though not before Clare had grabbed me by the face and planted a huge tonguey kiss right on my lips.
It was my own fault. I take full responsibility. I'd asked her a question I had always wanted to ask a lesbian about lesbianism.
“Tell me,” I said, “is it a man-hating thing?”
Onc
e Clare had stopped laughing pityingly at my ignorance, that's when she grabbed me and kissed me. It was like drowning in quicksand.
I emerged disheveled and gasping. “Wow!” I cried, wiping bits of her breakfast off my lips, “you kiss like a demon.”
“No,” she corrected quickly with a throaty laugh, “I kiss like a man!”
Manchester girls are the best fun!
At the restaurant, I find that Joanna's brought people too. Mostly family members eager to be on TV, including her diminutive, rather confused-looking mother, a small, bespectacled woman with unfeasibly brown hair. Following quick introductions for the benefit of the camera, Joanna goes about pouring ouzo for everyone.
Ouzo's the big thing around here, and has been since Historical Times, after a previous fad, absinthe, was found to have dangerous side effects, including tremors, hallucinations, dry mouth, cramps, and possibly internal bleeding. By contrast, ouzo's only real side effect is that it gets you crazy-blind-messed-up drunk, which is the one you're looking for anyway, so it was quickly dubbed a worthy substitute. Lesbos’ home-produced version is considered one of the best in the world. A clear, smooth liqueur flavored with anise, it turns from transparent to white the moment you add water, and is generally served with appetizers called mezedes, which tonight are carried to our table by an eccentric Disney caricature of a Greek man with a dark ponytail and a thick, straggly beard. This is the restaurant owner. For some reason, he's turned up wearing nothing but two white tablecloths, one safety-pinned at his hip and the other knotted around his shoulders to make a crude toga. He has no underwear on, something he verifies by cocking a leg and flashing his nuts, to loud oohs and aahs from the crowd. Except for Mary, I notice, who looks away in horror.
“Heeeeeeeey, my frieeeeeeends, weeeeeeellllcome!” he roars, laying down tray after tray of mezedes before us.
Very soon the table is heaving with traditional island food: sweetbreads (cooked using oil), stuffed tomatoes (leaking oil), something lurid swimming in oil that looks like stuffed tomatoes again, only regurgitated; fish (sauteed in oil, I believe); vegetables, brushed with oil; honeyballs that have been deep-fried; and a delicacy called sardeles pastes: basically, fresh sardines doused in salt. And oil!
Distressed, I round on Eric. “I'm sorry, I know this stuff is probably delicious, but I can't eat any of it.”
“Well, try,” he says abruptly. “Do it for the show.” He grew tired of my food issues several episodes ago. Despite the fact that I drew up a comprehensive inventory of all the things I can't eat, he doesn't seem to be taking my complaint seriously any more.
“But there's oil on everything.”
My continued protest inevitably draws a Crew Look. Remember the Crew Look? The one that means, “Uh-oh, the host is being difficult again”?
Tasha rushes in to smooth things over. “Hey, babe,” she whispers in my ear, “do what you can, okay? You don't have to eat the whole lot, just try some.”
For her sake I give in, and cautiously pick and nibble. Some of the sardines are not that oily, I guess. But just in case, I knock back a couple of extra glasses of ouzo to anesthetize my system. So does Joanna. So do the three token lesbians, who are lapping up the free hospitality. “Cheers to queers!” Clare shouts, raising her glass, and soon we're all pretty wasted.
“We'll drink one more bottle of ouzo,” Joanna tells me after a while, slurring her words, “and we'll dance the zeibekiko.” If that's how you spell it. In Greek, it's probably something like
“What's a zebiki…?”
“The zeibekiko …” She rests her head on my shoulder, ramekin eyes ogling me, “… talks about love and sadness, about death, about life … everything.”
“Oh, does it now?” I say, pushing her off me. To show interest at this point, I sense, would be courting disaster.
There's nothing to Greek dancing really. It's very simple, and almost impossible to get wrong. Basically, several people form a line with their arms strapped across each other's shoulders and can-can their way around the room like boozed-up Rockettes. That's it.
Once we're ready to go, the four-piece band of three bouzoukis and a drum strikes up with a new version of the same melody they seem to have been playing all night, the one that sounds like a grand piano being thrown down two flights of stairs, and everyone starts to move around, with me at the end of the line doing my best to keep up.
A zeibekiko is basically a slow tantrum. But we've barely started when an interesting thing happens. I find myself hijacked by Joanna's mother, a buxom dwarf who dances with all the grace of someone who can't. She's wearing a shin-length black skirt and a blue nylon spangly top, inside which two pendulous breasts pursue their own line in choreography independent of the rest of her. A hostage to the bouzouki's terpsichorean rhythms, she advances and retreats several times around my body without ever looking at me, obviously following a blueprint in her head that reduces her partner to a colorful but unimportant accessory. Back she comes, and away she goes, hands held aloft, turning east, then west, swirling and twirling, repeating the same sequence many times over, like one of those robot vacuum cleaners when it gets wedged under a dressing table. But then, once it's over, after the music rises to a rousing, out-of-tune flourish, eliciting loud applause from around the restaurant, something strange happens. Joanna's mother, yanked from her trance and suddenly realizing whom she's been dancing with all this time, shoots me an odd look, one of utter disgust, and charges back to the table, scowling.
What the hell was that about?
Before I have chance to ask, the band starts up again. Same out-of-tune tune, only faster. Fingers skitter over strings. Drums pound. The lead vocalist mumbles a song, taking a drag on a cigarette between verses and letting the smoke dribble from his lips as he sings.
“This is a dance for strong men; for hard men,” Joanna growls earthakittishly, staring up at me, projecting pure sex. “It talks about pain, about love, passion, and despair.”
Oh, does it, now?
Obviously, Eric or Mark put her up to this, because, without being asked, she leads me from the floor to a bench, then onto a table—onto it, not under it, note; she hasn't mastered that move, after all—where, caught in the thrall of the primal rhythm, she abandons all pretension to dignity by crushing herself against me, grinding at my crotch with her ass, and running her fingers up and down my body in a jitterbug of seduction, squeezing my buttocks to the beat, clawing at my shorts, and fumbling with my shirt.
For the record, here's how a woman might end up with two boyfriends she can't get rid of!
“Okay, cut. Thanks, everyone.” Director Mark steps in to save me, signaling the end of both the dance and the entire Lesbos shoot.
Not our best show, it has to be said—it would need to have actual content and subject matter for that—but more entertaining than we expected, certainly.
Still panting, and leaving the crew to mop up shots of the band, I throw myself down at the table, where I begin picking at the food. Apparently, this affords Joanna the opportunity she's been waiting for, because she sidles in like a horny crab beside me, her usually neat blonde-streaked hair more than a little askew. I don't know how many ouzos she's knocked back by now, but the woman's hammered, and, trust me, she makes a maudlin, broody drunk.
“What am I going to do about my two men, Cash?” she sighs after a moment, pouring herself another glass. “It is a big problem. I wish you would advise me. I have no clue what decision I should make.”
“Why not dump them both?” I suggest playfully, giving it the minimum of thought.
“What are you talking about?”
“Why make a choice at all? Dump them and start again with somebody new.”
“But I can't do that.” Tears spring to her eyes. “They both love me.”
Uh, good grief.
Sliding a sardine between my fingers to squeeze out the excess oil, I pop it into my mouth, even though I know I shouldn't, followed by a tomato—ohmygodohmygod, ha
s anything on this planet ever tasted so good?—and put an end to this discussion with a curt “I'm sorry, dear; I don't know what else to tell you.” Then, after giving her a super-sized hug because she's looking so downcast, I quickly return to my plate of sardines. Mmmmmm. Mmm.
Luckily, Joanna has the attention span of a two-day-old puppy. Realizing this is all the sympathy she's going to get from me, she's already put the paramour situation behind her and is on to a new topic. A topic she's obviously been thinking about for a while, and which is troubling her just as much.
“I have something to ask you.” She puts down her glass and fixes me with those large olive-green eyes.
“What's the matter?” I'm busy squeezing sardines, only half-listening.
Casting a quick defensive glance in both directions in case her weirdly petite mother is within earshot, she places a hand on my arm, rubs it gently, and says:
“Cash, please, will you let me have your baby?”
Wha???
Like a torpedo, the sardine I'm holding flies from out between my fingers and shoots across the table onto the floor.
1 Any genitalia, really, including my own. People laugh when I tell them this, but I swear I'm not lying. In particular I am highly vaginaphobic (technically known as eurotophobic). Back in my youth, I remember a friend opening a porno magazine in a shop in North Wales and showing me a close-up of a vagina. This came at the beginning of puberty and changed my life. Hot, dizzy, and nauseous, I stumbled into the street and collapsed to the ground, denting a car on the way down and chipping one of my front teeth. And exactly the same thing would happen today too. The cause has yet to be satisfactorily diagnosed. However, it's no worse, I'm thinking, than people who suffer from aulophobia (an irrational fear of flutes), or lutraphobia (a fear of otters), ostraconophobia (a fear of shellfish), automatonophobia (a fear of ventriloquists' dummies), or, possibly the worst one of the lot, Walloonophobia. Although, quite honestly, when you get down to it, who among us isn't afraid of the Walloons?