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In the morning we learned that deck passage to Piraeus was a few bucks and just that, pas-
sage on the top deck. The ship would leave at sunset and cruise all night. Since it was early,
prime deck spots near the smoke stack—for the warmth—were still open. Kevin and Bruce
found a garage to store the car, and we were on board by five. The youth brigade of Amer-
icans, English, Italians and Greeks made up the manifest in equal measure, happily awaiting
departure, snacking on sandwiches, souflake, giros, olives, pita and hummus.
I ate underway, picking freely from the smorgasbord of untouched delectables left on the
dining salon tables. Then it was time for sleep in the mildly pitching sea and salt mist, so we
curled up in the smoke stack's three-foot radius of warmth all night. Could it get any better?
It seemed so in Piraeus, moving from the dock to the bus with a warm farewell to Bruce
and David—they aped discretely when Carolyn, the formidably beautiful and articulate wo-
man who would vanish directly, rushed in to ask if I would mind terribly if she sat beside me.
“Not terribly,” I said. “Can I ask why?”
“Yes. You can. A man is following me. He may not get on. But I think he will. Just in case.”
“Not to worry. We'll pretend to be on our honeymoon.”
So the road happily unraveled into Athens, the bus bouncing nicely along the Greek coun-
tryside on a beautiful sunny day, as my future wife and I got to know each other—till we
checked in, and she checked out.
The first of two salient events of that phase occurred while strolling an Athens sidewalk
that afternoon, wondering where to find a pension or hostel. I'd checked out of the hotel once
what's-her-name split, because it was twenty bucks—four days budget! Ain't love strange? I
stopped to scan a park that looked inviting, but I saw no campers. Being first could set you
up for arrest, and we knew even then about what happened in jail and what they invented
in Greece. I squinted at what might be some backpacks and people near some bushes and
stepped nearer for a closer look when a familiar voice called out, “Hey! Beezer boy!”
There under a parasol at a sidewalk café table sipping a Nescafe was David Rayall. Yes,
we'd had some friction, but a reunion never felt better. He arrived three days ago from Rome,
where he'd been since Madrid. He loved Greece.
“You visited Bruno and his mother?”
“Yeah. It was . . . It was . . . how can I say it? It was . . . real Italian.”
“What the fuck did you expect? Lower Slobovian?”
“No, I mean the language, the cooking, the wine . . . Taken together it was a . . . a unified
context . . . you know . . . you could really . . .” David became Professor Rayall, his first symp-
toms of lecturing condescension occurring there on the streets of Athens.
“So. Was he sad to see you go?”
“Not at all.”
“You guys fall out?”
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