Stay Hungry, Part 3

(Note: This is the 3rd part of a 4-part series.)

Athens is a place where the pursuit of pleasure is tangible. Everything is raw and spinning and pulsing and heaving. If you stand still on the cracked concrete, the whole world twirls around you, and if you move down the streets, it moves with you and against you. The wagons tumbling with green purple orange red vegetables parked on corners. The carts of fresh pretzels speckled with sesame seeds. Smells of roasting meat and baking pastries and sweat smoke coffee sewer whirl in eddies. Flocks of prostitutes with jumbled angles of elbows knees stilettos cigarettes and profusions of feathery curves scatter and gather at street corners like tropical birds in rhythm with the cop patrols. Gangs of motorcycles grumble at each traffic light and take off in a roar. Noises wash you: buses whooshing, people shouting, music humping, children squealing, horns blasting. Passing radios drum out the soft Greek language percussion. Graffiti reads you past the reeking market alleys of hanging meat, past the trains of side shops shuttered in steel and the clumps of stray exhausted dogs, through the endless maze of main streets that spill out into teeming squares that siphon into side streets off of side streets off of side streets strewn with litter and benches and rotting oranges, and then up past the millions of orange trees and the rickety stores stacked on stores stacked on stores and up to the distant glimpses of ancient pillars that rise eternal and up to sky always watching, to sky always the still, diaphanous blue of a watchful eye.

In the midst of all this swirling passion and freedom, I was going to have fun, but first I had to figure out what sorts of things I wanted to do, and, as a recovering fundamentalist, this is no easy task.

I’ve often feared discovering my true desires, and I think this springs from a deep-seated fear of human nature. At the Baptist church I attended growing up, we were reminded weekly of how inherently evil human beings are. This knowledge, strengthened by that nagging consequence of burning in hell forever, motivated me to mistrust any and all of my natural inclinations. In other words, it caused me to actually feel uncomfortable when I was feeling comfortable. To, when joy knocked on the door, squint suspiciously through the peephole, assume it was selling one-way tickets to a fiery afterlife, and leave it out in the cold to freeze. This fear, coupled with a Protestant Work Ethic (the obligation to prove, through constant toil, that you’re really not going to hell), wrapped a double chord around my joy’s neck and pulled hard. I was relieved years later to find that she was not dead, just weak and sickly and understandably pissed.

I’m writing about pleasure today, but I’m going off on a joy tangent because pleasure and joy are closely connected. It takes a lot of time and effort to revive joy, to strip off all of those layers we have smothered it under all these years, and it’s impossible to do this all at once. So instead of trying to climb Mount Everest, I’m hiking little foothills. I am trying to coax my authentic self out through the small things I have denied it for so long, much as you would coax an abused animal out of hiding with enticing scraps of food.

Now, I don’t mean that I’m going to do whatever I want to do. As Paul reminds me when he writes to the Corinthians, “You say, ‘I am allowed to do anything’—but not everything is good for you. You say, ‘I am allowed to do anything’—but not everything is beneficial.” We must seek wisdom in order to discriminate between what a theology professor here calls “doggy freedom”, or that frenzied state a dog exhibits when it’s let out of its cage, and the freedom that builds up. It is in this discrimination that joy can be our North Star, our guiding light. The things we believe will give us the greatest lasting joy are the things to which God is beckoning us. Being drawn along by joy is quite different from being dragged along by fear. And it’s a hell of a lot more fun, too.

In Athens, I was heartened to discover that the things I truly wanted to do were all good, wholesome, interesting things. I didn’t want to hook up with a Greek demigod or take breaks from drunken, scantily-clad booty dancing to do keg stands of Mythos, Greece’s national beer. I didn’t want to chain-smoke cigarettes or get wasted on the pot that Scott was offered several times by a cast of shady characters. (Rory and I attributed this to Scott’s long hair, plaid shirt, remarkable thinness, and repeated use of the words “dude” and “totally”.) I didn’t even want to stay up late double-checking my Facebook account. No, I should have known, after all these years of idealizing Anne of Green Gables and Elizabeth Bennet, not to be afraid.

I wanted to wake early and walk the streets just hearing and feeling and smelling and seeing everything I possibly could. I wanted to pick armfuls of oranges from the trees that grew everywhere and sneak them back to our room. I wanted to make best friends, Lassie-style, with one of the stray dogs that hung out in Syntagma Square.

Happily, the other things I wanted to do were things that Scott and Rory wanted to do as well. We wanted to see the Acropolis, of course, and Haidan’s Library, and the Theatre of Dionysus, and the Temple of Zeus. We wanted to visit at least seven museums, attend the opera, take a tour through the countryside to visit Poseidon’s Temple, and dip our feet in the Mediterranean Sea. And, of course, we wanted to eat everything.

After our big budget blow on day one, we were trying to reign in our expenses. Thankfully, we discovered a restaurant close to our hotel that was appropriately called Joy’s. I only saw one of these places, so I’m hoping that I don’t discover, upon publishing this post, that it’s the equivalent of a Greek McDonald’s. Joy’s had every traditional Greek dish I had ever known, plus it was cheap and delicious. Scott, Rory, and I made it our home away from home and ate there nearly every day. We were hoping to develop a camaraderie with the staff, but they always seemed vaguely annoyed by our presence, so instead of saying goodbye on our final night, we just stuffed our bellies and rolled out the door.

A couple of times, we splurged on more expensive fare: heaping salads with whole blocks of feta cheese, pasta tossed in creamy tomato sauces, smoked salmon with mango and capers, steak and Guinness pie, baklava drizzled in honey. We felt especially honored on these occasions because both times the waiter brought out three shots to finish off the meal, compliments of the house. We didn’t realize this was standard until later, so we probably seemed ludicrously grateful.

We wore ourselves out stay-hungry style seeing nearly everything we wanted to see and doing nearly everything we wanted to do. We missed a couple of museums because of the holiday schedule, the opera because of the prices, and dipping our feet in the Mediterranean Sea because getting down there would have meant falling from a dangerous precipice (read: dying).

On one of our last days in Greece, we were making our way back to our hotel after much delighted exploration when we heard blaring music and joyful shouts coming from an alleyway. Rory, in his hell-bent pursuit to experience everything, wanted to investigate. Scott, the cautious voice of our trio, thought it wasn’t such a good idea. I, being the yin to Scott’s yang, had already decided that nothing Scott worried about could ever possibly come true. So Scott was outvoted 2 to 1, and investigate we did.

Down the alleyway was, literally, a hole in the wall, and this hole in the wall had been transformed into a bar. The bar was stuffed with about 15 sopping drunk Grecians who were still sober enough to realize they had guests and, being Greeks, they had to show those guests a good time. The beer began to flow. I say flow because I mean flow. The woman who was trying to pour us drinks was so generous (and drunk) that she poured about twice as much as would fit in each glass. The beer flooded the counter that had been built into the alley’s wall and made a river down to the drain. As I was lamenting the loss of the beer, a white disk sailed past the corner of my eye and broke into sharp shards on the floor beside me. I looked up just in time to step back and miss being boomeranged by another glass Frisbee, then another. I realized then that the bartender was lobbing plates over the counter. I had no idea, at that time, that breaking plates is something that Greeks reserve the right to do for pretty much any reason, so at the time I assumed the man to be either angry, crazy, or both. But then, despite his evident fury, his patrons began to dance on the broken glass. One woman with a feisty temper, a haggard face, and a wizened pair of teeth, began gyrating wildly on the shards as though possessed by Bacchus. A man with Gumby limbs and hair balding in the pattern of Wolverine from the X-Men came out in the alley to dance too, but his dance was more of a slow robot. This was probably because the broken ceramic pieces had the effect, when you stepped on them, of turning into spontaneous roller skates. The feisty woman danced with Rory, then a reluctant Scott, then Rory again, and she punctuated these dances by squeezing their faces with both hands and planting kisses on their cheeks, throwing a couple of glances in my direction to see if I minded. Meanwhile, ACDC came on the radio, and a middle-aged Bob Dylan in a Sex Pistols t-shirt played air guitar with an all-consuming passion while his friend screamed “ACDC!” over and over into an air microphone. The wizened-tooth woman, who had become a sort of itinerant hostess, decided that now we should switch to half liter glasses of straight whiskey instead of beer, just to get the party started. At that point we decided that, regrettably, it was time to go.

I thought of our hostess throughout that evening, as she had been so far gone before the sun was even close to setting. On my morning walk the next day, I decided to check out the alley again, just to make sure it actually existed and that no one was sleeping on the alleyway floor. When I passed, I did a double-take. The woman, our hostess, at 8:00 in the morning, was (still? already?) belly-up to the bar with a glass of beer, engaged in a heated debate with someone on the other side of the counter.

I didn’t know what to think, besides admiring her passion and stamina. I started to wonder how she and people like her fit in to the Stay Hungry philosophy. Maybe she was always hungry, but not on purpose, always trying to satiate that hunger with things that could never truly satisfy it, things that, in the end, would destroy her. We all have a hole inside of us, a nagging hole, a gaping hole that we try to fill with so many things: alcohol, food, work, TV, self-righteousness, the admiration of others. Earlier in my life, I would constantly entertain myself so that I could not feel it there, and later I would escape into drunken oblivions so that I could not feel it there. I spent my teenage years trying to fill it with dogma, trying to convince myself that I was right and others were wrong, to convince myself that on the day God drew the line, I would be in. And recently, I’ve shoveled the hole full with hours upon hours of work, work, work. But now, in a moment of quiet and contemplative freedom, I discover that, when you sit with that emptiness there in front of you, when you just sit with it, it fills itself up as every opening does when exposed: with fresh air, shadow, and light.