John Butleron the man with the dangerous aura
When you're no longer young, empirically speaking, what other people think of you becomes far less important. Really and truly not giving a monkey's - whatsoever - is a great compensation for the advance of time. When you're young, you try to convince everyone that you don't care what they think, but of course you do, of course you do. So much time is wasted seeking attention on one hand, while the other hand complains that no one is leaving you alone.
The summer I left school, three friends and I worked on a Greek island. One friend earned his drachmas peeling ears of corn in the town square, and mine came from waiting tables in a restaurant on the top of a hill.
It wasn't the most popular island, yet there was a tiny cabal of Irish people living there. Some, like the desiccated old hippy with the curly ginger hair who was waiting for the aliens to land, were refugees from the harsh imperatives of conventional life. Others did those things we find ourselves doing after leaving home - running bars, taking long holidays, hiding from possible knee-cappings.
The most opaque ex-pat was the one rumoured to have been involved with the provos, said to have been forced into hiding on this very island in order to escape some grim retribution. It was hard to find out exactly what had gone down, but understandably, there was this aura of danger around him. I suppose he was happy with his aura, but if I were hiding - really hiding - I would have extinguished it and blended in as a tourist. Then again, I was young, and far more concerned with what people thought of me than he was.
Thinking about it now, I can't remember his name or even his face. He was one of those guys of indeterminate age, maybe 40, and time has rendered him with photofit features. He had a moustache. My friends and I struck up the oddest kind of friendship with him, due entirely to the fact that he decided to hang out with us. Absolutely everything was totally cool to us then, including hanging out with sketchy ex-cons. We were too young to want to risk offending anyone. It was only years later that I figured out how we became friendly with him. He was drunk, all the time, on his own, and at a loose end.
When we ran into him of a morning, he was drunk. We were sleeping on a roof at the time, which was no hardship in the balmy Greek summer. The sun would wake us early, and we would climb down for a swim, brush our teeth in briney surf, then eat bread and drink syrupy coffee on the beach. He'd flop down beside us, his bare arms pink. He'd throw a few jibes at us for being wasters. He'd pick up one of our guitars and play the riff to Smoke on the Water, then dump it back down on the sand a little too hard and demand a cigarette. Whoever had the most cigarettes had to give him one, and he'd smoke it fiercely, looking at us through eyes narrowed to slits.
"Whereabouts in Dublin did you say you were from again?"
I didn't like him, almost as much as I was scared of him, and he didn't seem to like us either (particularly me). This was clear as day to us, and yet there he was, showing up in my restaurant at closing time, drunk on retsina wine. My boss was a squat bald Aegean with Popeye arms, and a deserved reputation for generosity. He thought that this guy was my compadre and he gave him a few shots of ouzo the first time he showed up. He then took to showing up nightly, and I would have to leave by the back entrance to avoid him.
In late September, a huge storm gathered itself out at sea, and up there on the roof we could feel the night breeze getting damper. The parasol we stole from the bar had blown off the roof and into an olive grove. It was clear we'd have to evacuate.
This guy offered to put us up in his apartment. My boss had offered to take me in, but as my friends had no such offer from their bosses, they accepted his offer.
On the night of the storm, they thought it only fair to take their host out for a few drinks. I joined them on the patio of a bar covered with fronds from an exotic tree. The wind was whipping around us and you could sense the giddiness of being outdoors, but sheltered, wrapped in the electricity of a night that was going to deliver something.
We drank, and within an hour, our host was hammered. I went to the bathroom and on my way back I passed him. He brushed past me without a word of acknowledgement. Then he turned and called my name, grabbing my arm. I turned around and he stepped forward, jabbing a finger to my chest. His breath was pure petrol.
"I don't trust you. You're either stupid and you're pretending to be clever, or you're clever and you're pretending to be stupid. I don't know which it is yet."
That night in the restaurant, the words raged around in my head as I tried to attach some meaning to them. Rain drummed the window panes.
When I met my friends the next morning, the storm had not abated. They had spent a long night with him drunk and ranting at them, back in the tiny stucco flat with one bed and a marble floor. That night, they stayed in the restaurant, and it's only now, when I don't care what he thinks, that I appreciate exactly what that guy meant. I'm happy that at 17, I was able to generate an aura at all.
John Butler blogs at http://wordpress.lozenge.com