by Jakos Kerouaki
Awake early I am hanging out on 1866 Sq in Chania.
It’s dark, night-time dark, under the trees, where early bird day labourers, hoping for work, are joining the shifting all night tribes of insomniacs, addicts, male prostitutes, sociopaths, psychopaths and existential desperadoes.
All roosting quietly now on their various benches. Waiting for dawn. Like the birds and the bugs in the black canopies above. Waiting for the action.
I don’t have a camera with me. You don’t photograph these guys. Not out here in the dark with all the nice straight folk asleep in their apartments and no law around.
But I am here and I can tell you what goes down on 1866 Sq.
Here’s what goes down. 1866 Sq is a rectangular green plaza in central Chania. Trees and benches in the middle. Shops, bars and cafes round the sides. All shuttered and unlit now except a couple of all-nighter hole in the wall coffee joints. And there are a couple of fish monger places opening up, busy throwing their icy jewelled beauties onto the white marble mortuary slabs that blaze out into the dark like portals of deathly blue light.
Around, the night hawk residents brood on, nursing their anomalous ambitions and resentments.
The resentments while being various and unique are of course, at the same time, universal and eternal.
‘Why don’t I get the same breaks as other guys?…….That bitch who walked and fucked me up big time. ……..The business that should have worked if not for this or that crock of shit.’
The resentments get buried, pushed down real deep, compressed by each hard passing hour and day of hanging in there, until they are small but adamantine, then even deeper and harder still, like a diamond of resentment able to flare and cut when violence erupts, spewing them as glittering lava from a sullen volcano.
The ambitions are more simply put. They want what you have.
OK. They are realistic, reasonable people and they’ll settle for some of it. Some cash or maybe some of your stuff.
They also badly want their time to win, to show that out here in the dark on 1866 Sq they with their drink and drug raddled, malnourished bodies they can be the Alpha males for one brief adrenaline moment. The daytime wheedling begging routines get dropped for some physical hustling and maybe the flash of a blade. Enough to get the next score of whatever they need. Maybe a lot more.
And the coffee vendors and fishmongers see the rage erupt and the flash of a shank, hear a bottle smashed and used, the smack of a fist against flesh. And they shrug and say ‘ It’s 1866 sq. What can you do? Life goes on. People need fish and coffee.’
So, I get an americano from an all night joint and take a position on a vacant bench. The coffee is pretty good. The air is fresh and scented from lemon trees. It’s a quiet night on 1866.
Soon a young guy angles in on my bench and starts drifting around studiously looking for something.
‘I was here before’ he says ‘ I may have left something. Have you seen anything’
He is slightly built, scrawny even, dark hair and bit of beard, could be Greek but speaks English with some kind of European accent.
I look around in a half arsed, non committal kind of way and shrug ‘ Only old pizza boxes here, man.’
He now seems to lose all interest in whatever he has lost and goes into a super friendly spiel, something like, ‘ Hey are you British? And you came down to Crete! That’s so cool man.’
OK ,I say to myself. It’s game on. I decide to take his faux enthusiasm for Britishness and use it in a mildly ironic deflective move.
‘ Hey man you should check out my buddy Phil. He’s hanging in Kalives twenty k’s along the coast. There’s a whole big British scene there, he can hook you up real good.’
He nods and stares off into the dark, as if to weigh this up, but we both know it’s not what he wants out of this particular interaction with an old guy who wandered into 1866 sq.
There’s a couple of minutes of what, in another situation may be described as ‘a companionable silence’ but, here in the dark, is more like a non violent standoff while each party regroups.
Eventually he is ready to speak more plainly. ‘ Is there anything you need?’ he asks.
I consider the existential and philosophical ramifications of such a question, to a man of my age, in my position.
‘ No man’ I say, ‘I am just having a quiet cup of coffee, but my buddy Phil staying along the coast at Kalives is a guy of prodigious appetites and predilections and you can bet for sure that, at anytime, he will be in need of something’
He seems marginally more impressed by this information about a man of potentially significant needs but does not respond for a while. Eventually he cuts straight to the chase.
‘Can you spare me some euros’ he asks directly, with a flatness that carries no sense of apologetic supplication.
But I also feel I am establishing my ground here, ‘ No,’ I shrug making a stab at looking empathically sorrowful, ‘ but my buddy Phil at Kalives could for sure. Out at Kalives he is known as Phil Anthropy and he could definitely help you out with some euros.’
I can see he’s interested in news of a guy that spews out euros like a centrifugal machine but he’s still thinking ‘bird in the bush’ and all that jive.
At this point red light has broken across the roofs and I judge it time to make a move. I stand to leave. He tenses realising the fish he hoped to land is about to get off the hook and I sense that beneath the hip scrawniness there is something sinewy and whiplike. His hand twitches towards a side pocket. But not as quick as mine as I flourish a pen and pad. ‘Tell you what man! Here’s my buddy Phil’s Hotel and number. Like I say, Check him out.’
And with a fluidity born of decision I hand over the note, turn and leave 1866 sq.
As I walk out the sun is hitting the tree tops, the birds are cooing and rustling and soon the crickets will chirrup. And this morning we split Chania for Paleochora.