A Greek football team has been warned it will be kicked off the field if its players wear uniforms advertising its two new sponsors. The shirts have been bright pink since the team was founded, and bear the names of local brothels ‘Villa Erotica’ and ‘Soula’s House of History’. The hypocrisy involved is mind-boggling. Football in Greece has been as corrupt an institution as Greek politics, with referees known to have taken bribes still on the field, and owners of major teams who have offered such bribes still in the front office. Now a struggling team of amateurs manages to secure sponsorship and some fat guy in Athens gets on his high horse and threatens to disqualify the amateurs for advertising a brothel. What is the world coming to when a team can’t be sponsored by the world’s oldest profession?
I’ve never visited Villa Erotica but was a regular visitor of Chez Lapin, a wonderful old brothel of a nightclub in old Piraeus, which came to mind reading about Patrick Leigh Fermor and the ‘louche and delinquent dockside tavernas’ two weeks ago in The Spectator. What memories! Piraeus back in the early Fifties was pure Middle East, a Levantine port of roast-peanut smells, souvlaki stands and troubadours strumming their guitars along the docks. The louchest and most dangerous club of all was the Kit Kat, where sailors fought nightly with knives over women of ill repute, the cops not even bothering to break it up.
I discovered the Kit Kat in 1953, when at 15 I was taken there by Mike Williamson, son of the American military attaché, and brother of the beautiful Nancy, a girl that broke more hearts among Athenian swells than Zuleika managed to in Oxford. Mike was tall, tough and very good-looking and drank like a true Texan. I was mad about Nancy but she was older than me and going out with my friend Karolos Fix. At the Kit Kat, after some heavy drinking, Mike cooled some Russian sailor and his buddies stepped in. We fought them as best we could but eventually lost owing to numbers. Mike had been knifed on both his arms and legs, but had been so drunk he hardly noticed. I was spared because of my age and the fact that I looked younger than my years. A black eye and a cut lip were a small price to pay for the honour of having fought all out at the Kit Kat. Sailors are good people, and knifing 15-year-olds is not their speciality. At least back then. And we hadn’t even fought over a hooker. It was politics. Mike had called them filthy commies.
Chez Lapin was an open-air club on the curve above the tiny Tourkolimano bay, where beautiful old sailing boats were anchored. Lalakis was the boss and the second biggest pimp of Athens and Piraeus; a gent by the name of Christos Daichristos was a perennial number one as far as procuring was concerned. My best friend Zographos employed them both, always reminding me that competition keeps people on their toes. Zographos used Christos for ‘upper-class’ girls in Athens and the south of France, whereas Lalakis was mostly for local talent, meaning Kit Kat and Chez Lapin types. Yanni Zographos died 15 years ago, but not a day goes by without my thinking of him. My father didn’t approve of him because of his unconventional lifestyle. He never once in his life did something he didn’t feel like doing.
I remember him during the Fifties wearing a white linen double-breasted suit with co-respondent shoes, a panama hat, and driving a white convertible Bentley. He would pick me up at the tennis club, and we’d go cruising around. More often than not, he’d have Christos and Lalakis along for laughs. A whole district of western Athens was and still is named Zographos, after his forefather. The two pimps hated each other for obvious reasons. This amused Yanni enormously.
Later on, during summer holidays, we’d return from the islands to Tourkolimano and have a late-Sunday dinner dockside. I occasionally find pictures of those days and marvel how young and suntanned we all were. Christos and Lalakis were no longer with us — pimps grow old quickly, it’s the nature of the business — but Yanni and I would drive into Athens and look for trouble. All important Greeks back then had mistresses. Marriage was sacrosanct, as was la garçonnière, the place where assignations took place. I remember my mother once demanding I stop the car on the street where the winter palace was located, next to the royal gardens, where my old man kept an apartment on the side. She had spotted his Mercedes parked outside. I pretended not to hear and she nodded and said almost wistfully, ‘I see you’re complicit in this sordid business.’ She then crossed herself.
It sounds pretty awful now, but those were great times. Life was sweet in Athens, I was carefree and young, we had the commies on the run, and there were girls galore. No longer. Athens is now a brutal place, Greeks are suffering, and in a way I’m glad so many of my old buddies are no longer around. I see Athena Zographos regularly, and young Yanni is doing well as a polo player and banker. But the days of white linen suits and panama hats and co-respondent shoes are gone for ever, replaced by dirty jeans and dirtier trainers, horrible apartment blocks in soulless surroundings, the smells of roasted peanuts and souvlaki supplanted by diesel fumes. Poor old Athens.
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