There was that bloke I knew a long, long time ago. He was an excellent guitarist and had a Metal band. He was also very bright overall and could have certainly made a name for himself in music… if it wasn’t for heroin.
Heroin ruined him. Like for pretty much everyone who’s ever tasted her sly sweetness, she opened for him a perpendicular path to his downfall and demise. It would be a rare stroke of luck if he’s still alive by now. The last time I saw him, more than a decade ago, he didn’t seem all that willing to resist death.
That last time was the first time I was seeing him after yet a number of years. He’d vanished entirely in the meantime. Everyone thought he was dead. I bumped into him at random, downtown Athens. He was still in as bad a condition as he used to, but he was alive.
At the time, he lived in a hill park in central Athens. He invited me over for a coffee, and I didn’t turn him down.
At the mouth of a depthless cave, a reasonable distance from the closest walkway, well-hidden in between thick growth, there lay two tattered tents. The second one belonged to an old junkie with whom the protagonist of our story shared the spot. Our arrival rose him. His topped with long, unkempt, grey hair head first appeared out of the tent; his emaciated body followed. He was nervous and impatient; he was out of his medicine. No sooner than he greeted, he was off to sell some tissues on the buses and score. My acquaintance and I were left alone.
It was an early summer afternoon. The shade and the freshness of the forest offered relief from the surrounding heat. He plucked out from the tent two excessively reused plastic cups, a small can of instant coffee, and a water bottle. He shuffled the mixture hastily with a twig and passed me the one cup.
The tent only contained that coffee paraphernalia, a small sack with clothes, a charred teaspoon, some scattered syringes, and a worn acoustic guitar. He brought the guitar out and began strumming a sort of angry, Black or Death Metal progression. He suddenly muted the instrument in discordance and peered at it with a gaze of abysmal distress for a few moments…
“I have taken my decision,” he exclaimed as abruptly as he raised his gaze to look at me. “I will push it today!”
He was in a deplorable condition. I knew the guy. He lived for music – even more so than he lived for heroin. The guitar was his sole unrelinquishable personalty: the only item he’d not do without under even the harshest of circumstances… the guitar and his teenagerhood leather jacket. It’d been keeping him warm on homeless winter nights for many winters… until he sold it two days ago.
I tried to persuade him not to do that: “Ok, you sell the guitar, you score for today, and perhaps tomorrow… and then what? What’s to do then? Sell the tent and your underwear?”
I could see that the sudden reminder of tomorrow disturbed him but only for a glimpse. His thoughts were nailed to the right now like a compass is to the north. It took me many reiterations of the word tomorrow to make him ponder it for real…
“I don’t know. I don’t care. I might beg or steal… otherwise, I kill myself. I don’t have much to do.”
“Why don’t you try to quit?”
He released a slight, scoffing grin. His face then consolidated into a fixed relief of terror. He spoke with the minimal muscular effort that’s required to do so intelligibly…
“I cannot quit. I’ve been a junkie for more than ten years, well beyond the point of salvation. I have tried everything there is and failed. I cannot take up this martyrdom another time. I’m utterly helpless. Not even God can save me.”
He continued after a brief, thoughtful pause…
“I was clean, you know, for sixteen months – the most I ever did. And I was clean from everything. It’s been only a few months since I relapsed. For sixteen whole months, I didn’t shoot smack; I didn’t smoke weed nor drank wine; I didn’t have a single aspirin. I hardly spoke to or saw anybody; I only ate as much as needed to remain alive… I quit everything.”
“And what did you do then?”
“… I… worked, prayed, slept, and repeated.”
“Where have you been?”
“Far, far away. I was in a monastery, in Mount Athos.”
Phew, that was getting interesting. I was dying of curiosity to hear of how he had fared lately, and the revelation of it was intriguing beyond expectation. I’d never got to talk with a drop-out monk before, and especially with one from Mount Athos!
Also known as the Holy Mountain, Mount Athos is an autonomous monastic community in northern Greece. The fairly large peninsula is home to twenty Eastern Orthodox monasteries and nothing more. The monks, who are the only inhabitants of the region, enjoy full self-governance and fall only under the partial jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople. This has been so ever since an 885 AD Golden Bull by Byzantine Emperor Vasileios I, which proclaimed the mountain a monks-only zone. All other secular people, including farmers and shepherds, were evicted and restricted access. Visitors, mostly pilgrims, may acquire a special permit to enter for a limited period, given that they are men. Even after a 2003 resolution of the European Parliament to lift the ban, access to women remains altogether prohibited. Curiously – and imagination-disturbingly – female domestic animals, such as goats and sheep, have also been banned.
The place is the perfect asylum. All sorts of runaways have sought refuge there throughout the centuries; men escaping the law, qualms, sins, psychopathy, or any other persecutory force that society and their minds imposed on them. I was aware that it isn’t uncommon for addicts as well to retreat there. And here was one who did…
“And how was it? How come you left?”
“It was just… just perfect, at first. From day one, as soon as I set foot on that blessed ground, I got infused with divine elation. It was like I was reborn; like all my past life was expunged from my memory in a single instant; so simple, no effort involved.
“Since day one of my arrival, I was put to hard work. I was given no time to think about anything. Late in the evening, I was led to my cell and given the Bible. I was overwhelmed by a sweet kind of exhaustion. I lay in bed and opened it on a random page. I began reading a sentence but was fast asleep before I could complete it. That was it. God had forgiven me and opened his arms to embrace me.
“Heroin… I hardly ever thought about it again until the day before I relapsed; not even during the first days. I didn’t even suffer a cold turkey. I had my routine: I would wake up at dawn, work hard till sundown, eat, withdraw to my cell, pray, and sleep like a baby.
“It may sound dull to you – it also sounds so to me now – but at the time, it was all I needed. Everything there was so quiet, so peaceful, so divine. I was totally content. God was inside me. I could have just continued like that for as long as it’d take for him to lift me to heaven… But then I let him down… those bloody demons… I couldn’t resist. I failed the test.”
He fell silent.
“Test?” I urged him to keep on.
“The test, yes. I failed. I wasn’t worthy of God… I stayed in the monastery as an apprentice for one year. But then I had to pass the test to be appointed as a full monk…
“They led me to the edge of a vertical cliff over the sea. They put me in a basket and carried me down – me, the worn robe I wore, and the Bible; nothing more. They carried me down into a small cave, only slightly larger than enough to prostrate. There was nothing to see other than the cave’s walls and the endless blue of the sea and the sky. I had to stay in there on my own for six months. That was the test.
“They only came once a day before sundown and passed me down a loaf of bread and a flask of water. They never said a single word to me. I read the whole Bible over a number of times and prayed intensively while staring at that endless blue monotony. I was growing mad and weak day by day. Then the demons began to visit me.”
“What did the demons look like? What did they want from you?”
“They looked like women: women I knew, women I didn’t know, women from the Bible. They wanted to divert me from the path of God, of course. I resisted for days, but they wouldn’t give up. I prayed ceaselessly, but their attacks only became fiercer and more frequent. They haunted my mind day and night. I stopped sleeping. I could stay up all night, biting my hands, sitting on top of them, punching the cave walls… all to prevent them from reaching down here.”
He pointed down there.
“It was one morning about a month after I entered the cave when I finally succumbed. I was reading a part about Maria Magdalena, I think. Very naturally, I let my hand slip down and gave it a good wank. That was the end. I had sinned, and God abandoned me altogether.
“I stayed in the cave for three more months, begging for forgiveness between brief intervals from unremitting, vile masturbation. I must have been jacking off twenty or thirty times a day during those three months. I couldn’t take it any longer. If God wouldn’t help me, I knew what would.
“When the monks came to bring me food and water in the evening, I shouted to them to lift me up. I quit and didn’t even pass by the monastery. I had no belongings there, anyway. I walked the trail through the night and had made it to to the town by dawn. I was in Athens by late evening. That night I passed out on a pavement after a heroin injection.”
He fell silent again.
“Do you still believe in God?” I asked him.
“Of course, I believe in God. That is, I believe that he exists at least. I know; I’ve met him. But he’s just not there for all of us. Some of us are better off with smack than God.”
He paused suddenly as if he just remembered something.
“I have to go now,” he said, grabbing his guitar under his arm.
“Good luck,” I told him and watched him disappearing through the bush.
The story you've just read is a part of my "Real Stories of Real People" collection, wherein I narrate my encounters with various remarkable characters I've run into while traveling around the world. The entire collection is published on my blog and may be read here. But if you'd like to get them with you to the beach in your ebook reader or as a physical book, and very appreciatedly support my creative activity, go ahead and grab your copy from Amazon for the cost of a cup of coffee.
