Praise for Michael Kazepis
&
LONG LOST DOG OF IT
“If there's an antecedent [to Long Lost Dog Of It] in noir literature, it's David Goodis and his dreamy portrayals of losers and the low life, where the hardboiled stuff is punctuation, not purpose.” —Nick Mamatas, THE BIG CLICK
“Kazepis' debut grabs Amerikani noir by the throat and drops it headfirst in Greece's streets, bars, small rooms, and strip clubs. Reeking of booze and cigarette smoke and jittery from too much caffeine, Long Lost Dog Of It is an elegant, violent, smutty, heart-wrenching novel stuffed with a bizarre sense of nostalgia and an international flair currently lacking in most contemporary crime fiction. With its language and sharp dialogue, LLDOI does for Athens what Woodrell did for the Ozarks. Yeah, this is a hell of an intimidating debut.” —Gabino Iglesias, author of Gutmouth
“Michael Kazepis' Long Lost Dog of It is David Lynch meets Pulp Fiction meets government conspiracy fiction (think Three Days of the Condor), spiked with a certain dose of what-the-fuck-ness.” —COMPLEX
“If you leave these pages with dust on your tongue and blood in your hair, don't say I didn't warn you. Long Lost Dog Of It sticks to you, like thighs on black vinyl.” —Violet LeVoit, author of I Am Genghis Cum
“Honestly, the last book I recently read that triggered so many resonant echoes, and haunted me this hard, was Don DeLillo's White Noise. A very different book. But sensorially the closest.” —John Skipp, FANGORIA
A Broken River Books original
Broken River Books
103 Beal Street
Norman, OK 73069
Copyright © 2014 by Michael Kazepis
Cover art and design copyright © 2014 by Matthew Revert
www.matthewrevert.com
Interior design by J David Osborne
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written consent of the publisher, except where permitted by law.
This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Where the names of actual celebrities or corporate entities appear, they are used for fictional purposes and do not constitute assertions of fact. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
ISBN: 978-1-940885-08-7
Printed in the USA.
BROKEN RIVER BOOKS
PORTLAND, OR
for yiayia (rip) and papou, heroes
There was a solemn, almost devotional cynicism to these eyes, reflecting, as though by a genetic process, all of the horrors witnessed by generation upon generation of forebears.
—Robert Kaplan
* * *
we drank ‘til morning made us
then ate the shit we stole
—SMZ
The vagrant woke in plateia Monastiraki and wasn’t sure when or how he’d arrived. His name was Ciprian Varia. He was dressed in salvaged clothes and boots that barely fit. Every part of him hurt.
No clouds had formed in the sky. The flea market was at full hustle, crowded densely with tourists, as strong afternoon sun pounded its boutique-lined streets. An old woman fainted from the heat at the entrance of the market and a space opened around her. Opposite that, the opening to Hadrian’s library stood mostly deserted. Almost no one paid attention to Varia, now rising from the sidewalk. He lurched past the gate and tried to shake the pictures out of his head, tried to make sense of dreams or memories that had overlapped and become neither. He suspected his body had ceased to register sleep—he was always exhausted now—and he wanted out, but god had seen otherwise.
Some youths had converged on the platforms which linked the square to odos Ermou, one of the city’s main avenues. They smoked and ate pitas. Nearest to the church at the heart of the square, a foreign street performer found himself surrounded—he juggled spheres and took tips and told stories to an audience that didn’t much understand him. Passersby spit over a rail and into the ruins of an aqueduct, where a scavenger below searched for coins in the ancient stream.
Varia smiled dumbly at the day, his front teeth gone. Past his feet, a newspaper fluttered across the ground, headlining coming elections and the Troika. Two men on the metro steps played reggae with acoustic guitars and hocked their homemade records, the area around them littered with trampled cigarette butts and crushed soda cans. Varia exhaled slow and tried to steady himself. The air reeked of mob perspiration and deep-fried car exhaust, an air that felt thick enough to wade through, amplified by the humidity. Vendors hollered prices faster than he could figure and pointed at the mounds of produce stacked high on their carts. Taxicabs singled up at the curb and their fares got in and out, the line moving as if on a conveyor belt. Varia yawned and stretched his arms. He had no idea what time it was, didn’t much follow the concept of “time” anymore. He held out a fist to the sky and measured the daylight.
He thought Ah plenty and yawned again and walked down odos Athinas.
Already most shops had started to wind down for mesimeri and he watched storekeepers pull down shutters and flip CLOSED signs. There were visibly more bicycles on the streets than there had been. He understood their newfound popularity as the crisis metastasizing, petrol become something of a luxury among many other things here which once seemed granted. He started to cross the street, and one of the cyclists dinged their bell and cursed at him and swerved past. Varia grunted and tried to imagine owning a car (because no one pulled that shit when you had a car), knowing he never again would. He shook his head and threw the cyclist a mountza fuck you, a mannerism he’d absorbed in his time there and found effective. The cyclist yelled something back, but rode on. Fatigue blossomed in his skull. He kept a nazar in his pocket for protection.
Varia passed through Omonia, where the cops talked shit to each other and sucked on frappés and checked out passing girls. Dealers at the corners quietly made their rounds, peddling matchboxes of Albanian weed. East European immigrants were huddled on stoops and drank Amstel from cans. Varia was by now almost twenty years sober and the impression of a taste still lingered. He licked his lips and loathed it, needing coffee.
The kiosks buzzed with business types, with lost tourists looking for the bus to the KTEL terminal or the museum. He overheard the confusion and laughed to himself. Every city a bitch of a labyrinth to its uninitiated. The coffee was some of the cheapest there, but he didn’t stop. Soon, he passed an amputee in a tattered hijab muttering graces in her language. He understood that if he wanted to take the money from her cup, she’d have been powerless to stop him—there existed no authority this far down. He stopped and watched her, but she didn’t recognize his presence. Instead she prayed or begged kindness to the air or the sun, both of which understood. Some men approached and tried to sell Varia blue jeans. He shook his head and they left. He coughed, thick with phlegm, dropped her the smallest of his coins, and he left too.
He wandered toward Exarcheia, along many closed supply shops, barred windows, some plywood- covered. Stripped bicycles chained to rusted posts, parked cars with flat tires. Some people sleeping on the street. Pigeons crowded sills and statues, shitting everywhere, flocking wherever it seemed there were crumbs. Armored buses parked at odd intersections, carrying riot police, maybe reserves. Some stray dogs chased at traffic. Every transport station along the walk had been demolished by rocks or Molotovs, the sidewalks lined with their melted plastic, broken glass, burnt advertisement posters. The marble façades on odos Akadimias were chipped from crowbars and axes, mined for projectiles in more recent clashes. Some grouped cops in tactical ge
ar patrolled the blocks. The scene looked to him like the makings of a civil war, sans the heavy artillery, or maybe it was just an occupation.
Yet the cafés kept busy. Varia bought an espresso in the square and sipped it slow. He found himself able to think more clearly once the caffeine began settling in.
Narrow, unevenly paved alleyways and cobblestone footpaths led him beyond tipped dumpsters and still smoldering garbage piles, marking a trajectory of the previous night’s demonstration. Varia lit a cigarette and walked toward the incline.
He found a shaded spot on Lofos Strefi where he sat and watched two cats fuck, the shadows stretched to expressionistic proportions. Varia counted change until his stomach growled. He felt hungrier than he had ever thought possible. The tomcat clawed into the molly’s back and she shrieked against each thrust. Varia inspected his wrists. He couldn’t recall ever having been so thin. He pressed a cigarette out on the heel of his boot and flicked it into the dirt. He contemplated the cats and tongued the gap in his teeth. He felt goddamn lobotomized by survival.
Mara Junesong’s tattooist was a bearded, ponytailed man called Tolis Galanos. He cut deep shadows with an eleven round needle. Galvatronik Ink, a tattoo studio on a side street just off odos Athinas, was wall-to-wall with shit like lithographs of Bela Lugosi and Kavafi, color doodles of Rat Fink, Asterix, Lucky Luke, posters of some old bands and films. Junesong held the pain well, squeezing the capped water bottle in her hand each time he went over the softer flesh. Beside the door, the shop’s neon OPEN sign strobed pink. Tattoo binders sat unorganized on the coffee table in the entry, beneath a photo collage of past shop work and visitors tacked to a corkboard. The floor a brown and beige composite marble, old residential, old as the building itself. Galanos told her he appreciated her resolve. A small stereo at the back jammed out At the Drive-In tracks. The buzzing stopped and she scrunched the bottle and breathed slow while he wiped.
Across from Junesong and the tattooist, her girlfriend, Elena Pallas, drank black filter coffee, skimming some of the zines she’d found on the counter, seeming bored. Pallas wasn’t allowed to smoke inside, but she had wanted to stay close for support, and because she knew she was on thin ice, she didn’t dare move. She ran fingers through her short pink mohawk.
“I think we can do better than this.” Meaning the booklet Pallas was thumbing through.
“I can’t hear you.”
Pallas didn’t repeat herself. Instead, she felt at her ears and contemplated increasing her gauges another size. Her stomach growled. She spotted a pen on the counter, the kind with an image of a woman in a bikini on it you could turn upside down and the bikini disappeared. She picked it up and examined it, flipped it. Scribbled “ZERO FUTURE” on the nose of her left shoe and found herself wishing she’d brought a flask along. Bourbon sounded real nice that instant. She tilted the pen again and thought tattoos seemed to take forfuckingever when she wasn’t the person getting one. Junesong had let her hair go, the bangs at that weird length where they got in the way of her vision but were still too short to do much with. Pallas liked her with longer hair. Had made her promise she’d keep growing it. In coming weeks, Pallas was planning to finish the sleeve on her right leg, almost framing her ass between a winged Thanatos leg piece and the heretical iconography across her back. She wrote “I DREAMED OF A WOMAN WITH NO MOUTH” on the convex rim of the same shoe, a line from a poem she’d recently read. The couple had met at the rock bar in Gazi two years before and had instantly hit it off, tearing apart two relationships in the process. And that had been the easy part. Pallas turned the pen, thinking about that first encounter.
Her then girlfriend, Nicole Thomson, a Canadian without papers, had brought Pallas to the hostel where Thomson worked and up to its rooftop bar, over- looking the city. Late daylight burned orange, sketched with heat lightning. Backpackers from places as far as Perth and Buenos Aires were relentlessly hitting on both of them, unaware they were together, nor would they have cared had they been, she supposed. Thomson suggested they just stay for the free drinks, at least until it got late enough that the bars crowded. Pallas thought these travelers all seemed similar somehow, like they were just out of focus, as people. Phrases like “gap year” and “apocalypse (sic) at sunset” and “like Kerouac” common. Pallas leaned on gray railing covered in elephant grass at the far end, under military netting, and watched the moon, early to its station opposite the dusking sun. Thomson put arms around her, holding a plastic cup of beer lazily so part of it spilled down on the sidewalk below.
“Love you.”
Pallas didn’t reply, wanting.
The circle of people (all from different places judged by the division of accents) beside them sat on beanbag chairs discussing sex, who they’d messed around with in whatever city they’d seen. Jack Johnson, “Upside Down” played over speakers set like posts across the rooftop’s corners. An artificial paradise vibe. Thomson sighed in her ear. “I don’t like this place.”
“Me either.”
“Let’s get out of here.” They left, carrying their drinks down polished marble steps, barely buzzed on kegged Mythos and something the bartender called a “Sex Bomb”—shots of tequila, Bacardi, vodka, orange juice, pineapple juice, drops of grenadine. Thomson had joked, tasting it, that they should call it “Date Rape” instead, which Pallas, who’d ordered it, hadn’t found funny. Two dogs Thomson referred to as Steve and Martha laid on the front steps, blocking the entry. They stepped over them, headed toward the nearest main street, Syngrou, hailing for a taxi. They threw their cups on the pavement and got in.
“Where should we go—Gazi, maybe somewhere else?”
Pallas scrunched her face. (Thomson always wanted to be in trendy bars.) “Gazi is fine.”
The driver didn’t set the meter until Pallas pointed it out, harshly. He grunted and flipped the switch. He dropped them near the metro entrance of plateia Kerameikos, which was cordoned off by metal construction barriers. They passed the sandwich stand, smelling grilled meat. Thomson gagged; vegan. They worked their way through rows of motorbikes and scooters, and Thomson turned to Pallas and kissed her. They turned the corner and went into Intrepid Fox, where it was gloomily lit and the music was loud. Songs while they waited for drinks: The Ramones, “Poison Heart,” The Distillers, “The Young Crazed Peeling,” The Velvet Underground, “All Tomorrow’s Parties.” Thomson didn’t speak a lick of Greek, but Pallas was at least improving her English. Thomson spoke fast sometimes, faster than Pallas could keep up, so she’d let her do it, zoning out into her bottle of Corona. Thomson yelled “shots” over the music and Pallas nodded. They knocked back Cuervo with salt and lemon. Thomson started to tell her about something called “clamato juice” and Pallas’ gaze drifted from the bottle to the pool table to the girl behind it standing at the edge of the bar surrounded by bodies and posters, none of the light finding her, a hole punched right through everything. Thomson looked over, sipping her Amstel.
“She looks interesting.”
Thomson waved, sealing fate. The girl looked down at the floor and then back at them, and started walking through the crowd. She introduced herself as Tamara.
Junesong’s own girlfriend, Evadne “Evi” Theodori, joined them a moment later, having just returned from the restroom. Evi eyed them all suspiciously, then eased into conversation with Pallas. Junesong talked to Thomson, asking her where she was from and where she’d been and how long she planned to stay in the country. Before long, Pallas and Junesong had started talking to each other, in Greeklish. The other two, unable to communicate, mutual outsiders, sat and watched.
When they went out for a cigarette, Pallas got the idea to ask Junesong if she wanted to go somewhere else with her. Junesong hesitated and said she didn’t know, looking back at the entrance. Both their partners still in the bar, invisible behind the doors. Junesong was only somewhat intellectually troubled at the thought. She stepped back for a wider view and raised her hands, framing the moment. The streetlight highlighti
ng a nimbus of smoke around Pallas’ head.
“They’ll be fine, Mara, don’t worry about them.”
The buzzing paused again and Junesong inspected her elbow, now swelled pink and running. Galanos told her to hold still again and he wiped and continued. Soon enough her arm was too numb to bother her much. Junesong dreaded the opening shift she was scheduled to work the next day. She hated the morning customers that came in because they typically didn’t tip for shit. She imagined herself swimming in a Scrooge McDuck pool filled with money. Then she thought of how many communicable diseases that might leave her with. Junesong watched Pallas preoccupied with her shoes and the marker and she smiled the way people in relationships do when some small detail stands out for a moment, remarkably. Galanos wiped again. It was the first time she’d gotten work done by him. Her regular tattooist had left for Berlin—there was a massive precipitation happening, it seemed—the North had become something of a cistern for talent.
Pallas doodled on her right shoe, round shapes over intersecting lines. Galanos asked a shop assistant to bring him a freddo cappuccino. Once the piece was finished, Pallas stood excitedly and complimented it. Galanos rubbed ointment on it, and covered the fresh wound in plastic wrap. Junesong paid and tipped him in cash. The bell above the door dinged and they emerged back into the June heat. For a moment there was no crisis, no boredom, only a return to the city’s grand ambience. But then a child stomped past chasing a pigeon across the sidewalk, and two older men followed and bitched about austerity, praising Alexis Tsipras for his rhetoric. A young man asked for change to get a metro ticket home, but they ignored him and he shuffled over to the people behind them. Junesong squinted, eyes adjusting to the new brightness. Pallas dropped large sunglasses back onto her nose and got out a much needed cigarette and lit it. Athens synchronizing with them again.
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