Big Sex • June 15th, 2019
ΥΔΡΑ, GREECE - Yeah, sexual intercourse is great and all, but have you ever had your DICK TOUCHED by the TSA?
I’d grown complacent. Sluggish. I’d long since paid off the mortgage on the Sex Cave to a psychic named Horse Sled, but my York Field pitching had become distressing. As I raised the Sex flag on the morning of June 1st, I had an itch to get the hell out of here. And Horse Sled, who has examined me for years, confirmed it: I needed a holiday. “Take in the waters,” she encouraged me. For the first time in my life, in the manner of the Astors and the Vanderbilts, it was time to Leave New York City in the Summer. That’s right: Big Sex took a plane trip.
Ignoring reason and any sense of decorum, in an effort to demonstrate to myself again how little of a fuck I give -- about “life”, financial security, “working”, health, a casual understanding of the world’s disdain for Americans, and Rizz’s romantic privacy -- I spread some loans across a handful of my less mercurial bookies, purchased air travel at an Internet cafe, and plotted my ambush of Rizz’s long-awaited Mediterranean honeymoon.
After causing some disorientation in Homeland Security, the Sex Penis was cleared for takeoff at Stewart International Airport. I don’t need to tell you this, but as it happens the cheapest way to Greece is to redeye to Dublin, stay-up drink for twelve hours, then redeye to Athens -- as a close family member put it: “Uh huh, so your plane seats are your hotel. Look, don’t call me here [...]” -- and, to maximize alcohol effectiveness, refuse to sleep for those three days, then sleep for 18 hours on the fourth day; thereby only paying for one room from Friday through Monday. So on the fifth day, I awoke in blazing fucking sunburn Athens, had some silty coffee, yogurt and feta cheesed myself, and moseyed on down a cobbley hill (CHK… where are ye) to a dense neighborhood of flea market stalls -- every four fellers (and I say fellers because much to Sex’s chagrin alas it was just feller after feller after feller) stood in front of a junkyard Room of Requirement-style mountain of tools and hardware, every two fellers sat afront a garage spilling forth with reproduction decorative arts fakes, and every feller was selling hard-copy Greek porn. I spent several minutes smiling about bringing you all back some of this breathtaking, breathtaking porn before realizing that I’d just as soon spend the money on my own continued, continued drinking.
But halfway back to the hotel rooftop to spend another ten Euros on two five-Euro two-shot Harvey Wallbangers, best dropped in pairs, it hit me: what if, somewhere in these piles of garbage, I found an axe handle or something, something close enough to a regulation-size YFS bat? Even if it was the wrong size completely, I still hadn’t gotten Rizz anything for his wedding, and I was pretty free at the moment, and I figured I’d have a look.
And seriously, RIGHT there, like NEXT to where I was standing, in the FIRST STALL I CHECKED, was a wooden dowel rod that appeared at a small distance to be… laughably close to regulation size. Six inches too long, maybe a little thick, but… I picked it up and gave it a good Tony Gwynn swing. My heart raced. A bored man said three Euro. I said my dear man do you have a tape measure. He called over another man who stared with eyebrows. I said my dear man do you have a tape measure. He tossed one over. My lady did some quick converting from centimeters to inches -- and GUESS what you guys -- my jaw HIT THE COBBLED STREET: for it was, exactly, an inch and an eighth in diameter. Exactly.
I said fellers do you suppose I might cut the end off of it. First guy said what kind of question is that. I said do you have a saw. And you guys he pulled a hacksaw, out of his pants. From inside his pants. I said my dear man are we related.
Absolutely beside myself, I trembled, giggling, as I slid the saw into the wood. In my sheer fucking incredulity over all of this I guess I wasn’t sawing it fast enough because Eyebrows grabbed the whole thing and in three strokes lopped off the excess lumber himself. I handed the gruff Magi three Euros for this manna. And so it came to pass, just like that, that I acquired a fucking perfect, regulation, 1 ⅛-inch diameter, 38-inch long bat.
Hastily I arranged for glamour shots of the bat and me in several sightseeing locations around Athens. I faxed them over to Rizzo’s car phone.
Rizz Everywhere, I knew, was stick-shifting his way down the Amalfi coast with his bride in an Italian jalopy at that very moment. Along with the glamour shots, the fax told him to 1.) meet me on “Hydra”, a remote Greek island, in several days’ time, and 2.) he was in charge of tennis balls.
Four score Harvey Wallbangers later I disembarked from The Prince of Athens, a mainland pirate-themed party ship that my woman and I commandeered, and planted the bat into the rocky soil of this real-life desert island -- Hydra, or Yhdra, pronounced “EE-druh”. A telegram waited at my tiny blue hotel, sent from the Rizzmobile: “Fuck you [redacted] no way.”
And long story short, me and Rizz played one-on-one in two locations on the Greek island of Ύδρα, a cannon-lined pile of rocks and ancient monasteries in the sea with no cars, no bikes; only donkeys.
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Field 1, game 1 -- Hydra Coliseum:
Astride a rescue donkey (actually named “Sugar”) on one of my morning constitutionals, I came upon a neighborhood stadium; a punishing, shadeless, wind-less turf footy field hidden in an open pit mine on the side of the mountain, within which Greek children practiced missing penalty kicks. Giddy at my ongoing discoveries, I shoved a sugar cube in Sugar’s dusty old maw and politely asked him to about face. We toddled down to the harbor to receive Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere (just arrived on a heart-shaped Lovebirds hydrofoil ferry). Kneeling, I bowed my head and handed them The Bat, gift-wrapped in shrimp paper. “Heartiest… uh, congratulations... Mrs. Everywhere,” I sputtered, suddenly deeply embarrassed for invading their enchanted honeymoon. But wonderful as can be, she was actually happy for Rizz. And on the heels of their white-knuckle jaunt down the precarious Italian coast, she seemed all-too ready to send Mr. Rizz off on a playdate and get some time to herself.
The air in the mine was heavy, remarked Rizz; and god, hoo boy, so hot, remarked Sex. The only three tennis balls Rizz had been able to procure were overfuzzed, Christmas-crackered, inelastic Teloon® brand tennis balls from Singapore (company website warns, “Can’t talk, WhatsApp only”). They weren’t half Barney-the-Dinosaur purple and half teal, but they weren’t unlike those balls we caught with Velcro hand pads as kids. Something about their fatigue and big seams made them look and feel like the kind made for playing fetch, with a dog. I had what is known as “trouble hitting” out there you guys. But not Rizz -- the dullness of these unspirited tennis balls didn’t stop the Honeymooner from cranking juicy liner after frozen rope into the stadium’s asbestos-laden mat walls, each time leaving a barbarous dusting of spit-up toned powder on the Teloons®. Four or five at-bats in, Rizzhoney Everymoon popped the first Teloon®, then immediately lost the second amongst the folds of the asbestos mats (we found it innings later -- he’d blown it through the wall itself). In last licks he didn’t need, Rizz dispatched what became a walk-off ding dong up the mountainside, where not kidding it came to rest in a laundry line, enveloped by the stretchy pocket of a fitted sheet, hung on a porch belonging to a notably sexy cliff-dwelling lady. By the time she figured out where the air raid had come from we were already scampering with laughter back down to the sea, like two little James Bonds in a motion picture, with our last Teloon® tennis ball.
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Field 2, game 2 -- Poseidon’s Perineum:
We then went to grab darling Mrs. Everywhere and played a game IN the Aegean Sea -- in the churny waters of a pebblesome cove near a place called Avlaki Beach. Tip-toes deep, mostly treading water while in the field, and pitching while we tried to float on our backs.
Mrs. Everywhere was kind enough to videotape our grinning feats (VIDEO VIDEO VIDEO).
Turns out that for all my charming qualities Big Sex do’n’t float; Bix Sex can barely swim. Soon we found a Little Mermaid rock outcropping upon which to bat -- we could clamber onto it and stand for a few seconds, just long enough to swing once before waves knocked our ass back into the drink. Yet here in the waters, I found my cadence. Nothing compares to a home run that strafes a ‘danger no swimming’ buoy -- the Y.F.S. Aegean Sea equivalent of ringing the Twizzler before the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway gods suck the ball into highway glory realm. But again the Rizzminotaur left it all out there: I dog-paddled out to retrieve three of his bombs before he popped the third and final Teloon® on another ding-a-ling past the buoy, setting the Greek YFS record at five in a day. Sex lost again.
In what could be described as game 3, we even tried playing six feet UNDERWATER in an especially clear blue and green swimmin hole of surf: filling the last Teloon® with water, flapping arms and legs like haywire drones; for the double-play can, dropping the water-logged Teloon® on a sea urchin who had penetrated the Sex toe. More or less, submarine gameplay was like a nightmare when you can’t outrun the water snakes fast enough? I’m going to say I won that one.
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Lo how we drank then, from sun-down until sun-up.
I poured my ass onto the hydrofoil back to the mainland, waved my hankie from the deck, and blew a kiss back to my dear Spouses Everywhere on shore. My work here was done. Satiated, we’d concluded it was well to leave the bat in-country, with the members of our nascent local chapter of YFS donkeys, converted in the night: led by Mr. Souvlaki, Sundress, Stavros and the Garlicnauts, Orthodopted, What Government-Debt Crisis?, Tablecloth Stain, and The Ashtray.
On the layover home at the Rizz Everywhere Roma International Aeroporto, in an effort to save the bottle (for Big Sex it is important not to dry out) but unable to consume another ounce of anything, I poured all 1 liters of my San Benedetto oligominerale Elite Naturale water bottle on my head, slid the plastic vessel onto the X-ray belt, shook my hair like the Little Mermaid one more time, and strolled through the body scanners. And the Italian TSA was unconcerned?
I got back to Newark Inte. Airp. fairly loaded on broken-seal duty-free Fernet; still damp in three ways; tentatively glad for my role in Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere’s honeycation; still out of jail.