Issue #13/68, July 1 - 15, 1999  

by Mark Ames

I arrived here in Crete only two days ago and I'm just coming to life. Moscow, with its relentless muggy heat, has turned me into a bleary-eyed swamp thing. I haven't sweated this much for this long since I fled San Jose. My clothes stink of Moroccan pheromones, which have been waging a savage, scorched-flesh campaign against my weaker European pheromones ever since this heat wave took hold over a month ago. When the Moroccan blood takes over, folks know. People don't just turn their heads--they dry heave as I pass. Like in the Pepe Le Pew cartoons. Imagine smelling a mangy 15-year-old Irish Setter after it's spent an afternoon wading in a sewage treatment plant, and you'll get the idea...

It's much worse this summer than two summers ago, when I wrote about how Taibbi and me had transformed into a pair of sweaty land otters; this time, I've turned into human fondue. I've lost track of what's happened to everyone else. I leave puddles wherever I go. My bed has one huge sweat stain on the mattress in the shape of my back (with fish-bone-sized lines where my back-hairs are). The only thing that's kept me barely cooled is the Chinese fan and the occasional gorking-binge, which has a weird way of cooling the body down while speeding everything else up. The problem with that though is that all the grease from sweating can give you boils. Last summer, a summer I barely remember, my back and shoulders were covered with boils.

This summer, I'm going to do my best to remember at least a few weeks. I have to. Coming down in this heat is too much to bear, even for a decorated speed vet like myself.

So instead of railing out, I decided to bail to a wind-blown, sea-hugging island. Crete. It was the only way to cool off without totally frying the remains of my brain.

From the minute I landed, I've spent nearly every minute holed up in my Heraklion hotel, air-conditioner turned up to eleven, curtains and windows drawn shut, lights off. It's been pure bliss, to borrow a phrase that Andrew McCheesey used to describe his night in bed with some bitch from Siberia. Who needs sex when you have air-conditioning? Not me.

Besides, I'm in Crete. Which means Greek people on every street. Who the hell wants to go outside when you've got Greek people everywhere? Not I, said the swamp thing. Just looking at them can raise my body temperature by ten degrees. I read a stat recently that says that Greeks consume the most calories per capita of any people on earth. Jeepers, I never would have known. I mean just because every girl here over the age of twelve has arms that jiggle like a jellyfish, and asses that consume their torsos and crawl up their backs, that doesn't mean they're fat, does it? Uh, well, yeah, it does. So let's just come out and be bold and say it: Greek women are fat. There, I said it.

I've tried my best to keep myself from hating the Greeks. I don't need to add another race or ethnic group to my list of hatreds. My stomach is already one bubbling cauldron of sores, bacterium and bile. An acute heartburn burst in the past two weeks was the body's way of telling me that the whole bile thing is just getting out of hand. Anger isn't energy--anger is stomach sores, as far as I can tell. I'm going to have ulcers breaking out of my ulcers if I keep adding to that list of hate... And the Greeks, by being the way they are here, aren't helping my stomach at all.

It's not just the girls. The way I see things, there are two types of Greek men here: either the standard issue Bitter Man, or else the salsa-dancing, ponytailed asshole.

I can handle the former Greek male fairly well. They tend to be wearied, slouched, more bark than bite ...

The only Greek-American I've known closely was the original Bitter Man himself, Chris Frajidakis. We studied together in college. Chris and I hated each other almost from the beginning, but we had mutual friends and a mutual crowd that made us nearly inseparable. He was a college radio DJ at Berkeley's KALX and one of those white-guy basketball players who dedicates his life to being accepted by authentic ghetto African-Americans. In this case, that meant Chris, who had scored a perfect 1600 on his SATs and was one of the more brilliant persons I'd ever meant, moved to Oakland after graduating, and became a crack and heroin addict, a habit he supported by moving furniture for shit-ass discount fly-by-night firms. He often bragged to us about going to crack houses in West Oakland with some low-rent gang banger named Rudy.

It was hard for me to feel sorry for him. He was a quintessential twerp: a lanky six-foot-six Naziphile who befriended primarily Jews and blacks and later resented them for it... One night, at a Cramps concert, he stole my acid then had the nerve to proclaim, in the middle of the show, "Irony is the trope of our generation." It's hard to forget something that disgusting. Another night, my friend Ramirez, who stood almost 6 inches smaller than Frajidakis, beat the shit out of him. It was painful to watch the Naziphile twerp get his ass kicked by a prep school beaner, but afterwards it was good for a laugh and storytelling.

Neurochemistry got the last laugh in on Chris. He got hooked on anti-depressants, then went back on the crack and smack, and eventually he disappeared from the map of my life. No one I know has heard from him since around '94. He'd somehow escaped a project he was living in in the Filmore District of San Francisco, and wound up totally fucked on the road somewhere between Tennessee and Illinois. The last line I heard Chris tell a friend of mine was, "I live in a world of hurt." And then he vanished. Either dead or in jail, we assume.

Somehow, that miserable tale has kept me all warm 'n fuzzy inside, while cool on the outside, as I sandbag myself in my air-conditioned room here in Heraklion. The best these people could throw against me has been smitten. No matter how many gold-chained, cheesy Greeks there are running around this fucking city, I'll always be able to remind myself of the story of Chris Frajidakis, and I'll feel the tingle of victory.

Venturing outside, however, can reverse all the gains. Today, I foolishly took an excursion to some Minoan ruin at Knossos. Our tour guide was some lady-killer with a salt-and-pepper ponytail. You know the type. Has the entire Gypsy Kings ouvre back at his bachelor's pad. An eight track player with Barry White already jacked up. The kind who mooches off rich old ladies and deflowers young Swedish student-tourists. And afterwards, they all love him and speak fondly of him as he skips to the next scam. He went on and on about how the ancient Minoans were the best civilization that earth has ever known because they respected women's rights, loved their hippie dolphins, had hippie-long hair, didn't build walls... all in all, these flaky Minoans were everything our own Stuart Pratt would dream of. A happily-functioning, progressive society respecting and honoring Mother Earth, or Gaia as she was called.

The nice thing is that the Minoan civilization suddenly and without warning was wiped off the face of the earth. He claimed that it was due to some massive tidal wave, although most people believe the Greeks, war-like savages that they were, razed the place and killed all of its inhabitants. I like the Tidal Wave theory myself, just because it shows Mother Earth in all of her peace loving, nurturing self, wiping out the kindest, most advanced species as she always does, and keeping only the mean, the rotten, the unforgiven.

Just writing it down somehow soothes the stomach. I like these happy endings. The happiest thing of all is that I bail tomorrow for Cyprus, an island crawling with Russian sluts. Thin, drunken, irresponsible Russian sluts. Now folks, if that ain't a happy ending to this little Greek tragedy, then strike me dead.