We occupied the in-between place.
The walkway was filled with an army of the living dead.
THE GENTLEMAN THUG BY DIMITRIS PASSAS 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 119
I wasn’t planning on writing about Christos ever.
I was browsing a city bookshop, and as I opened a novel by Bret Easton Ellis, I spotted from the corner of my eye an academic history book by Christos’s brother, a professor at the University of Crete. Seeing the book sparked off a chain of lively memories of Christos.
I nicknamed Christos affectionately The Gentleman Thug. He was my trusted mate, and brother-in-arms for more than four years.
Sadly, he died of a heart attack at the age of 51. At the time of his death Christos was incarcerated for the umpteenth time in his tempestuous life, and we hadn’t seen each other for months, except for some brief FaceTime visits in which he always asked me to send him pre-paid telephone cards, the most common desideratum of Greek prisoners.
The first time I saw Christos, I instantly averted my eyes as I didn’t want him to think that I was provoking him in any way. I was a nameless junkie in the city’s mean streets and walkways, and he was the unequivocal master of the game, meaning the drug dealing game. He was the boss. Period. Nobody dared to cross him, especially when he was in an irritable mood, and his tendency to fight his way out of an argument often left his victims lying on the pavement, blood pouring from their mouths.
Christos was always a lone wolf ruling the comings and goings in the Tositsa street walkway behind the National Technical University of Athens which was the number one place to be during the 2000s if you were a heroin addict. Christos eschewed the senseless chit-chat of the addicts.
The walkway was filled with an army of the living dead, their ages spanning from 16 to 60, that loafed around right beside one of the country’s most esteemed institutions of tertiary education and the National Museum. We occupied the in-between place, and nobody seemed willing to do anything about it. Of course, cops often came to check, but they never attempted to put a definitive end to the dealing that each day began early in the morning and ended during the small hours of the night, to start afresh a couple of hours later.
Everybody strived to earn Christos’s favor and, most importantly, protection, either with flattery and adulation or by treating him to a few free bags of golden brown.
Christos was a man to be feared, that’s for sure. His worn, weathered face left no doubt about the rough life he had endured and constituted his most sinister attribute, even more than his bulky muscles.
He started prison life early, at the tender age of 14. He spent one and a half years in the juvenile detention center for kidnapping a well-known skag dealer. Christos, along with a crew of like-minded buddies, abducted the much older dealer and held him in a car they kept driving around the center. The goal was for the dealer to spill the beans and reveal where he had his stash, and by stash I mean massive quantities of drugs. For the life of me, I can’t remember what happened in the end, the only thing I know for certain is that this incident gave Christos his first ticket to the slammer.
During the course of his life, he would re-visit numerous penitentiaries for a multitude of offenses: assault, grand theft, racketeering, armed robbery, and even attempted murder.
The attempted murder concerned a knife attack on a friend who had stolen a serious amount of cash while a guest in Christos’s house. It was his dear mother’s money, and, in his books, this was the ultimate violation of trust. Thus, he went to the thief’s house brandishing a hunting knife and stabbed him several times in the gluteus maximus. He didn’t want to kill him or critically injure him, It was a matter of honor, and by stabbing him in the buttocks, he showed his complete lack of respect for the victim, the ultimate act of contempt.