Great Guys I Met is a series about people who blow my mind when I happen to meet them around. I meet a lot of great guys!!!!!
Yiannis. I’d slept for about two hours, but still felt I could cram in the Acropolis and the Temple of Hephaestus before my flight. Bopping around, wearing the seventh-day dregs of what was left in my suitcase and clean (so, not much), I came upon a little bazaar. Yiannis’ stall drew me right away. It looked like the Rare Book Room got barfed onto the sidewalk, with a few additional flourishes: I was rifling through a tower of grimy comic books when he introduced himself.
“I had properties all over the world,” Yiannis boasted before we’d even stopped shaking hands. “London. I still have 17.” Picture him as stuffed into himself: neck into collar, hem into slacks, person into library-as–sleeping bag/psyche. “I have to take a phone call, but then let me show you things. Nothing for sale.” Sure, I could wait.
The contents of Yiannis’ desk drawer, in the order I saw them, according to him:
– [after a long, portentous, penetrating stare] “These are the Golden Dragons. Puma, original bag, 1996. One pair made only ever.” They were crumbling sneakers. They are readily available.
– “Here, look. It is a letter from a saint. In the 17th century. Look through the page—not signed, but you can see her face in the paper, can you not?”
– “This is a true photograph of the first man to ever win the Olympic games.”
– “Kirk Douglas personally autographed this real picture of van Gogh for me, because they have a resemblance.” I decided, at this point, to accept it as fact.
Yiannis closed the drawer, but he had more to show me. “This is me 10 years ago,” he said, pulling out his phone. Three pictures: One, of him in a salmon shirt, giving a thumbs up with his arm held stick-straight toward the camera. Two, in a communicatively unbuttoned gold shirt, propped against a chain-link fence. Three—the best—I don’t remember what he was wearing, but he was sitting on an incontestably flossy sports car the color of an unripe banana. I didn’t know they made luxury vehicles in that particular shade of green. I’m so glad to have learned that it’s doable.
I had to go. “I will come to New York,” he said. “But I only stay at the W!” For our final list of this entry, here’s a sample platter of the parting gifts he forced into my hands, telling me, “You will fly for too long to not read ’em.”
I adored Yiannis for his hospitality, and for the sheer state of credulity I was invited to enter as my very last act in Greece. Long may he believe in unlikely, cool, and wild things.