High life
Happy days
Taki
Mykonos Mykonos may have the rudest waiters this side of Qum, the greatest number of Gays this side of Fire Island, the worst plumbing since Watergate, but where swimming is concerned no place is better than this island of 365 churches, windmills, and whitewashed houses that lies 90 miles east of Athens. As the wind blows most of the time, not even the greatest polluters on earth, the Greeks, have managed to darken the azure waters. Even the beaches are clean, the foreign nudists being the only eyesores.
For the last four years I have gone to Mykonos with my fellow karate practisers. We get in a good week of training and sun, and when the locals get a bit aggressive, which they tend to do all the time, we have a dress rehearsal of the November karate tournament. (The European championships take place in November every year, and this year they will take place in Manchester.) The Mykonians used to be very poor, so poor in fact, says the local doctor, that before the tourists came he used to hold people up to the light instead of taking X-rays. Then Jackie KO found some cheap dresses there, and Mykonos has never looked back. Every house has become a boutique and everything is for sale or rent.
But the place really took off when the Gays of Capri and San Francisco discovered it. They brought a hell of a lot of Greeks out of the closet — in fact sometimes I think half of the population came out — and Mykonos, needless to say, prospered beyond belief. Sudden wealth, however, does not a nice man make. The Mykonians used to be sailors and fishermen. When they became capitalists they forgot the few manners their parents had taught them. The Gays, who kissed, flirted and swooned like bobby-soxers whenever they saw a macho Mykonian, did not help matters. The locals became progressively richer and more disgusted with the ways of the world. By the middle Seventies only queers and masochists frequented the place.
The trouble was that although I am unlucky enough to suffer from neither vice. I liked the water and decadent atmosphere. But every time I went to Mykonos I ended up in a fight, or worse, raving like a menopausal matron at some waiter while he flirted away with some patchouli-scented German industrialist. When one of the karate boys proposed going to some island for training. I agreed with alacrity. Ever since, I have been getting good service and polite smiles from the locals. The few foreigners that were left last week, however, had never heard of me and my boys. So we had some trouble.
It all began when my best friend, Jeff Jansz, joined us for training. Jeff lives in Sri Lanka and used to be married to a South African girl who one day informed him that she might have caught a bad social disease. Jeff, who is no angel, thought that he must have infected his wife, and therefore he was understanding and took her to her gynocologist. No sooner had the gyno been told the news when Jeff saw him running into his private office and injecting himself with penicillin. You can guess the rest. The marriage broke up, and Jeff came to train with us all the way from Sri Lanka. Upon landing in Mykonos the first person he saw was the gyno with his ex-wife, surrounded by liberal South African Gays. As they say in Hollywood, it was a natural., Word were exchanged, things like 'If you take your wife to a dog show she'll win', and then five of us took on about 20 of them for Jeff's honour. Well, we really were being bullies because the sweet old things were not in good shape. But the waiters at the restaurant were, so we continued the training with them. The best I can claim was a draw, but it gave us a good excuse to drink and celebrate afterwards.
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