The Tina Trip 01 Athens

Hi everyone.

I have started to publish this story once before. I´m a beginner at this, and I found that the segments I published the story in then were too short. They felt chopped up, the rhythm wasn´t right. So now I´ll publish the story in three segments instead of fourteen. I hope you´ll like it. A lot of it is quite true, but certainly not everything.

I´m grateful for feedback and I don´t mind nitpicking. I´m writing in a foreign language and I appreciate all help to get it right. Finding the right prepositions can be tricky, for instance.

Ok, here we go:

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CHAPTER 1 -- THE JOURNEY BEGINS

1984, but Big Brother doesn´t see me at all.

1984 was here at last. It was supposed to be an ominous year, but I was looking forward to it. This was going to be a good year, a travel-the-world year, a big-brother-doesn´t-see-me-at-all -year. I was going to Africa. I was excited about that but if I had known that I would meet Tina on the trip I would have been even more excited. Meeting Tina is the story I want to tell. And I want to tell it in English. It would be easier in Swedish, of course, but it all happened in English, with an occasional sprinkling of German.

My journey began the very first day of the year. Hitchhiking in Sweden in January was pretty bad. Cold, obviously. Snow. Dark early in the afternoon. In other ways hitchhiking in the winter was pretty good. No competition and people feel sorry for you. Several of the drivers told me they never picked up hitch-hikers but what with the cold and my gigantic backpack and me looking harmless they´d made an exception.

I suppose I do look harmless, in spite of being pretty big. Tall at least, almost two meters. Ridiculously thin, not that that was apparent with my being bundled up for winterhitching. Ridiculously thick glasses. Longish hair, scraggly beard. Big nose. I´m told I look like a nice guy.

The drivers all asked where I was going, like they always do. It was a thrill to be able to say Kenya. They were duly impressed, or pretended to be. The feasibility of the project was questioned of course. And rightly so, the Middle East was a mess. My plan was to hitchhike to Athens and take a plane from there to Cairo. Most people who pick up hitchers are really nice, at least if you´re a bloke. If you´re a girl all kinds of creeps want to give you a ride. Of course you get the occasional asshole, like that bible-thumping nutpriest who pontificated on the wonderfulness of AIDS, that being God´s punishment on all those terrible homosexuals. Yep, we got our bigots in Sweden, too. I was pretty damn offended, I tell you. Not sufficiently offended to leave the car, though.

Only one driver had managed that, a Turkish truckdriver who demanded sex. What with my sad lack of sexual experience some may have thought I should be happy for whatever I could get in that area, but no. I left, although the Yugoslavian countryside in the middle of the night and in pouring rain was quite unappealing too. Felt like I got a bit of hands-on (and not even my hands) experience of what life is like for women.

I guess I ought to have left the car when that guy in Holland stopped by the roadside to do heroin, though. Slightly hairy situation. He said he´d show me that he had the fastest car in the world. And he did, to my great undelight. He was perfectly nice to me, though. He wanted to bring me to Hague and show me a good time in his whorehouse. This time, too, I failed to rectify my embarrassing virginity. Fictional friends in Amsterdam awaited me with breathless anticipation and must not be left hanging.

All those assholes and dangerous drivers had been on previous trips. Every one who stopped this time around was perfectly nice. A short hitch with a hearse in Denmark was the only ride that stood out. It was a beautiful car, somewhat limoish. Vanilla, not black. If the driver had had sex with his passenger it would have been vanilla sex and totally perverted at the same time. I felt privileged to experience this fine vehicle while still alive. Somehow I doubted that I would enjoy it as much when deceased. I was happy with the ride but I managed to look suitably somber.

I don´t know if there was a body in the back. I asked, but I didn´t understand the answer. Danes understand us, but we sure as hell don´t understand them. I read somewhere that Danish kids are among the slowest in the world to learn to speak because of the gutturality of Danish. The poor kids don´t understand either. This is the kind of research that gets quoted with glee in Sweden and probably repudiated in Denmark. But they can repudiate all they want since the rest of the world doesn´t understand what they say anyway.

They, in turn, have this notion that Swedes are unable to drink in a civilized manner. I suppose there´s some truth to it, too. A lot of my beloved compatriots do tend to get totally smashed when they drink, and it´s cheaper by far to achieve that smashedness in Denmark. Sometimes I have pretended to be Dutch while in Denmark. I don´t have to answer for all those drunk Swedes and the Danes will agree to speak English with me, which they usually won´t if I´m an official Swede. But at least we don´t hate each other anymore, far as I know. We used to be at war all the time in centuries gone by. A few hundred years ago the city of Ronneby was ethnically purged by us Swedes. About ten thousand Danes were massacred, including women and children. Gives you a bit of long-range hope that today´s mortal enemies one day might be able to live in peace.

Germany and Austria was a breeze. Best hitchingcountries in the world. I slept outdoors, having a good sleeping bag and a thin water/windproof extra bag. It was cold but not unbearably so, and waking up under the sky always is a special feeling. Makes you feel like you´re part of nature, even if nature consists of a few bushes behind a Gasthof. Those are German petrol stations/restaurants/stores that abound along the highways -- Autobahns. Good places to hitchhike between, getting into the cities is just a lot of bother.

Then came the dreaded part. Yugoslavia. It is a shitty hitchhiking country. I´ve been through there a few times but never with ease. I hoped they would take pity on me because of the cold, but no. Eventually I got to Zagreb. Fed up with hitching I decided to take the train, which left in the morning. I found a nook (which is a word I´ve never seen without cranny, but I have to tell it like it was, no cranny there) to sleep in. When I woke up some fuckhead had pissed on me. I was very grateful for my waterproof outer sleeping bag, though it was a less than pleasant task to rinse it reasonably clean in a Yugoslavian train-toilet.

Riding a train was a luxury. I reveled in every second. To appreciate the simple things in life, hitchhike in Yugoslavia. To appreciate all aspects of life, find yourself a Tina. I was soon to find mine.

CHAPTER 2 -- MEETING TINA

Friends without benefits again?

Athens. Spring in the air. A spring in my steps. A feeling of promise. I didn´t yet know that Tina was there, of course, but maybe some part of my subconscious astral niceguy rhinoceros aura felt that there was something fantastic coming up. Or maybe I was just happy not to freeze my butt off.

I suppose that you´ve gathered by now that I wasn´t much of a ladies man. Lots of friends who were girls but no girlfriends. It was this nice guy thing I had going. I was convinced that if I let my hidden sexuality out of its closet all those friends without benefits would be grossed out. I would then get ostracized and forced to dwell in a male chauvinist swamp, drinking beer and bitching about women. Friendzone was better than nothing and far better than the swamp. But I was sad about it, sadly convinced that I would die alone, unloved and unfucked.

I found myself a ratty hotel, where I paid for a bed in a ten-bunk room. The hotel smelt of boiled cabbage, which was odd since I´ve never seen a Greek eating cabbage. I looked forward to sleeping in a bed again, but that was not to be. When I wanted to sleep all ten beds were taken, which seemed to be an everyday occurrence to the staff. Someone had sneaked in and taken my bed without paying and the hotel guy didn´t want to wake everybody up to try to find the culprit. There were no beds available, he told me, but he could offer me a nice piece of hard, cold stone floor on the landing of a stairway going nowhere. For a moment I considered making a fuss. A short moment, about three seconds. Oh well, at least no one was going to pee on me that night. That sounded like a song to me so I hummed it while I lay down to sleep -- quietly as to not wake up the girl who was already sleeping on the landing:

Last night I had a real bad pissy fright

Now I was screwed out of my bed, that´s not allright

But the girl here next to me is out of sight

And I don´t think I´ll get peed upon tonight

This is something I do all the time. I make up songs, with rhyme if little reason, to accompany whatever I´m doing. I will spare you from the vast majority of these songs. They may be a little funny at the moment of conception, but not on paper. But I include this silly little ditty since it, in all its silly dittyness, would have a decisive impact on my life.

When I woke up someone was holding my hand. I opened my eyes and that someone was looking into them. She was smiling.

"Hi," she said. "You are drooling a bit." Quick check with free hand. Yep, beard was wet (and scraggly).

"Don´t worry," she said, "It´s cute. Soo...you think I´m out of sight?" Apparently she hadn´t slept last night after all. I had complimented a pretty girl on aforementioned prettiness and she seemed cool about it. Maybe even warm about it.

"You look like a nice guy." She said. Shit. Friend-zone here I come "I promised myself that this time I´d fall for a nice guy", she went on. "I´ve had it with assholes."

Thus far, there had been a lot of "she said" and no "I said" in our conversation. I tried to think of something wittier to say than "Uh?" Failing that I said, well, that. She seemed happy enough with that less than stellar repartee, and told me, now sitting with legs crossed but still holding on to my hand, that she had pretended to sleep because most people are assholes especially men but my song was funny and she had peeked and I looked like a nice guy and then she fell asleep and when she woke up she was holding my hand and she was sure it was a sign and my drooling was sweet too. She was sure I was the one and ok, she´d felt like this before, ok, a lot of times, but this was different because I was obviously a nice guy.

I found my glasses and her smile got even wider. "Oh, it´s so cute the way your eyes look so small in those glasses". Apparently I could do nothing un-cute this morning. I didn´t mind cute, and if I had I hadn´t been able to argue the point, being re-rendered speechless by her beauty. I didn´t want to be rude and dumbstare at her but I was utterly unable to look away. An objective objectifying observer may not have found her features all that outstanding; brownish hair, greyish eyes, mouth perhaps slightly larger than what was considered conventionally beautiful , teeth somewhat uneven. Nose supercute though, with a few freckles. Dimples. Oh God, the dimples! Breasts smallish, probably firm as far as I could tell from what limited information I had. I certainly wasn´t going to dumbstare at them. Nice guys don´t stare at tits, they sneak peeks on the sly. Short. She was short, I mean, though of course the peeks were short too.

What made her spectacular was the vivacity. All that life and joy. The power of that joy would have been irresistible in any circumstance and having it directed straight at me made me feel like a bug on a windshield; squashed but exhilarated, going somewhere fast. In spite of my squashed condition I managed to speak: "This is the best wake-up of my life!"

"Of course it is! This is the first time you wake up with me and we will be together until we die. I´m Tina and I know that you are Johan because the hotel-receipt peeked out of your pants so I peeked back. It´s my favorite name in the world now. Come on let´s have breakfast." Johan is my first first name, but no one ever calls me that, until now. I decided to go with the flow. If this Johan was someone that pretty girls smiled at I wanted to be him.

Our first breakfast together consisted of bread and cheese and a bottle of water, sitting on a park bench. I, and apparently Tina too, was so used to travelling cheap that none of us even considered the possibility of something more festive or romantic. But we had a great time, telling each other those things that you tell someone who you don´t know at all but is destined to spend the rest of your life with. She was from Kreuzberg, the coolest part of Berlin. She was a librarian, the modern and hip kind. Love of books was another thing we had in common. Anyone surprised I liked science fiction? No. Thought so.

Although simple, it still was my best breakfast ever. Following my best wake-up ever. It struck me that from now on almost everything I did would be the best ever, including my taking a dump, which was going to be soon. I´m a regular guy, I go in the morning. Tina laughed at that. In fact she laughed a lot. The walk back to the hotel, hand in hand with Tina, was the best walk in my life. And in spite of an unspeakably disgusting toilet the shitting was good. Perhaps not the best in my life though, I had a vivid memory from that time in Turkey when I had the runs and almost came in my pants the wrong way. The relief of being able to let go that time was hard to beat.

When I came back Tina was arguing with two German girls. My German is far from perfect, but understanding is easier than speaking. There are grammatical rules out your ears, but a lot of words are similar to Swedish. Had they argued in Danish I wouldn´t have been able to understand a thing, but now I was able to make out that they thought that Tina was totally irresponsible, that she would lose her job, that she had a heart big as a hippopotamus (Flusspferd) but the brains of a gnat and that her parents would shit on her from dizzy heights. I concluded that Tina (who was completely unfazed) had told them about me.

Tina spotted me and smiled with happy pride. "Here he is," she beamed. "Be nice." I said hello and introduced myself as Johan for the first time in my life.

They were nice. Somewhat suspicious, but nice. They introduced themselves as Regina (tall, blond, wagneresque) and Regina again. The second Regina was short with brownish hair. Looked sort of like Tina, except totally different. She (being the short one?) had her name shortened to Gina.

"Soo, Tina told us you´re both going to Africa?" Gina said. This re-re-rendered me into unable-to-speak mode. That was me now -- not stupid but regularly dumb. That seemed to be what life with Tina was like. Hopefully I would get used to it.

"After knowing each other for half an hour." Regina said. Or, actually: "When you einander kennen for half Stunde." Her English wasn´t all that good, which fit right in with that valkyrian thing she had going. I was somewhat at a loss as to how this situation ought to be dealt with in proper nice-guy fashion. It would feel like I was illoyal to Tina if I let on that we hadn´t talked about travelling together at all. I had mentioned where I intended to go, though, and she´d mentioned that we would grow old together so why be surprised but I was.

"I didn´t need more than five seconds to understand that Tina was a very special person" I said, pleased with this diplomatic way out.

"You can say that again" Gina said. "Very special indeed. And I love her a lot. She is also fucking crazy!"

"Gina, you turd! I am not. Well, maybe a little. But that is part of my charm."

"This is the third time you fall in love this holiday alone." Ouch, that hurt.

"It is not. Peter was an asshole. Dieter was a jerk. Johan is a nice guy, I´m sure he is the one."

They kept on arguing. I felt a little sad. Obviously Tina was impulsive, to put it mildly. And it seemed likely that this grow-old-together dream would last a week or something. But all right, if a week was all I would get I´d be happy with that. Possibly heartbroken and miserable, but happy anyway. But sad.

Meanwhile, TinaGinaRegina had arrived at a compromise acceptable to all. We would not hurry to Cairo right away. We would stay in Athens for a while and get to know each other before making big decisions with too much instant karma. My agreement was taken for granted and happily given. It seemed very sensible. Tina insisted that if we were to stay here we had to find a proper hotel were we could get a room of our own. With a big bed. I did, of course, agree to that too, with a mixture of absolute joy and absolute dread.

"We need condoms." Tina said as we searched for the right hotel. "Lots of condoms." We found a drugstore with a decent selection of rubbers, though the lights seemed unnecessarily bright and the clerk unnecessarily young and female. I tried to look invisible and nonchalant at the same time and I actually think I managed to pull it off reasonably well at first.

"We need heaps and heaps of condoms!" Tina announced loudly, thus shattering my attempts at invisible and severely damaging my attempts at nonchalant. "Big ones! Just look at him. Big nose, big feet. He will be magnificent." I paid the giggling clerk, rather more red-faced than I had hoped for. But a little embarrassment was a small prize to pay. We were going somewhere I´d never been and I couldn´t wait to get there, terrified or not.

CHAPTER 3 -- SEX, ACTUALLY

Dionysian revels?

We found a hotel, aptly named the Dionysos. Everything was white and it smelt of some probably-forbidden-in-Sweden detergent. I don´t know if Dionysos would have been altogether enthusiastic about that antiseptic approach, but we found it a vast improvement on the grimy cabbage of yesterday. The joy/dread thing had now filled me completely and I could feel it oozing out of me through every pore. The fear smelt much like that detergent, so I had hopes it would go unnoticed. The joy, smelling sort of like fresh bread, I hoped she´d notice.

The Hotel room looked...well, like a hotel room but whiter. Since anything better than squalor was luxurious to me I thought it looked very nice. Tina didn´t waste time looking at the room; "Orgy time!" she yelled and tackled me. Suddenly she was everywhere. She was kissing me, undressing herself, undressing me, squeezing my dick and tickling me at the same time. I was mostly on my back, patting her, kissing whatever part of her was accessible. I was nervous, of course, but it seemed that Tina was more than willing to take the lead which was a relief. But I worried about the dreaded twin monsters facing the neophyte lover -- the Scylla of not getting it up and the Charybdis of premature ejaculation.

Scylla didn´t have a chance when Tina got going. She felt amazing. Was amazing. She looked proud of her handiwork, looking at my now completely un-scyllied dick. She expertly rolled on the condom. Ok, time for some anti-charybdic measures. I had read that the thing to do was to think of unsexy things. I vainly tried to think of stamp collections, dirty socks, Gary Glitter, hitchhiking in Yugoslavia, but it didn´t work very well. Tina was there and all I could think of was her and she was the most un-unsexy thing in the world. She had some adorable freckles on her left tit. I loved them forever.

Just when Tina was about to take my virginity she stopped. She stopped, lay down beside me, hugged me python style and started to cry. Shit! So close!

"I can´t do it!" She sobbed." Not with you!" Shit again. Confirmed once more that I am totally not fuckable. But my niceguy autopilot turned itself on. "What´s wrong, sugarpig?" I said, hugging her back. Not python style, though. More like very secretly pissed teddybear.