by Constantino N. Kouyialis
Summer of ’94. I was thirteen. All knees and razor elbows - a walking contradiction in shorts. My afro - a mop of curls that defied gravity - had taken on a life of its own. Something between a halo and a threat. My head looked like it belonged to someone else.
They called me a nickname back then, courtesy of my skeletal frame - one of those pre-PC gems that wouldn’t last five minutes today. I won’t repeat it now. Not without a detour into shifting social norms and how what we once laughed at has turned into a cautionary tale.
I was not yet a man, but not quite a boy either. A creature in between. Still, no one stood out much. Every kid on the block looked like they were built from pipe cleaners and school lunch.
Back then, you could work at thirteen. It just sort of happened. No one asked if it was legal. No one cared. It wasn’t exploitation. You weren’t being trafficked - you were just earning pocket money.
This was Cyprus. In the mid-90s.
You could bribe a priest with a watermelon. Nobody talked about labour laws. They existed, I guess. But nobody cared. It wasn’t about money. It was about not being useless.
My parents were middle class in the classic sense: nothing fancy, but the bills were paid and the fridge was full. Even so, my mother - a loving tyrant with a moral code written in granite - made it clear: you will not spend three months doing nothing. No discussion.
She wasn’t cruel. Just Greek.
And that was that.
My dad had a cousin with a construction company - one of those sun-leathered guys who smoked three packs a day and built shopping centers with his bare hands. His crew had nicotine-stained fingers, sun-scorched necks, and laughs like machine-gun fire.
One of them, a guy who looked like he’d stepped out of a 1980s WWE poster, handed me a chisel and hammer, pointed at a wall.
"Start cutting," he said.
So I did.
I was carving channels for electrical wiring. By noon, it felt like I’d gone twelve rounds with that wall.
No training. No easing in. Just concrete, pain, and dust in places I didn’t know existed. The blisters arrived fast and burst faster. By the end of the day, my hands were bleeding.
But it felt real. I had earned that grime under my nails—and I was grinning like a fool. I felt useful.
There’s something about the pain in your hands at the end of the day that makes everything else go quiet. You just sit. I didn’t want to talk when I got home. I sat on the couch with my sandwich and stared at the floor.
It was better than TV.
Lunchtime was a savage communion - a kind of theatre. We’d gather around a giant wooden cable spool flipped on its side and dig into whatever we’d brought: fasolada, meat, bread packed with pragmatic density, roast beef and halloumi sandwiches the size of bricks.
I, with my mother’s sandwich wrapped in foil, would sit quiet, peeling it like treasure. Trying to act like I belonged, even though I didn’t. Trying to look unfazed by the banter flying like bricks.
That sense of watching your own life while trying to live it - that started there.
They cursed. A lot. Swore like poets. Laughed like gods. Their hands were cracked from labour, but they held food with grace, arguing about football, God, politics.
I kept quiet. Most of the time. I listened. I learned - I learned more during those breaks than a decade of schoolbooks ever dared teach.
Payday was every Friday, and it arrived with a kind of quiet dignity.
A folded envelope. A payslip. My name on it. My name. That meant something. I think.
I still have that first one. Not exactly out of nostalgia, but because it feels like proof of something - though I couldn’t tell you what. Proof that I was there. That I mattered. That the summer left a mark.
Inside, there was money. My money. Earned with blood, blisters, adolescent rage, and all the misplaced confidence a thirteen-year-old can carry. That envelope was proof that money earned tastes different - or maybe that even at thirteen, you can begin to understand the pleasure of exchange: effort into cash, cash into freedom. Maybe it was proof I hadn’t wasted the summer.
Naturally, I blew it the next morning.
I took my first week’s pay and bought a box set of rock & roll. It felt grown-up. Not sensible - but symbolic.
A friend had given me a mixtape the year before - Bon Jovi on one side, Elvis on the other. And while I liked Bon Jovi, especially the way his early stuff made sadness sound strangely glamorous - it was Elvis that shook something loose.
That voice. That looseness. It felt like something older than music.
That sound was new to me - dirty, thrilling, swaggering. I didn’t know what it was, but I wanted more.
So I traded a week of work for a box of sound. I walked straight into that record store and blew the whole thing on that ten-CD rock and roll box set.
Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Ritchie Valens, Buddy Holly.
And Little Richard.
Jesus Christ, Little Richard.
This wasn’t background music. It was chaos and sex and gospel and rebellion, all squeezed through a busted amp.
Tutti Frutti. Long Tall Sally. Good Golly Miss Molly.
Not songs - detonations.
He didn’t sing. He howled. He summoned something primal that made you want to throw your body at the world and see what stuck.
That sound - so ecstatic, so uncontained - made everything else feel dim. It wasn’t about sense. Sense wasn’t the point.
It was about surrender.
I played that set until the plastic melted. I’d strap on my Walkman, hop on my bike, and tear through the neighbourhood.
His songs were sonic cocaine. Gospel-soaked, piano-smashing lunacy that hit me in the brain stem.
I rode fast. Faster. Like something was chasing me.
Or maybe I was chasing something.
There was a girl that summer. There always is.
Ink on her jeans, gum in her mouth, eyes that didn’t flinch. Daughter of a family friend.
She seemed older - not by age, but by some calm in her skin I didn’t yet understand. Like she’d already kissed boys who weren’t me.
Send Me Some Lovin’ was playing the night she kissed me. Or I kissed her.
I don’t know which came first - the music or the courage. The memory blurs.
We were on the upstairs porch. Late summer. Warm.
We’d been to the movies. I couldn’t tell you what we watched.
We were talking. The air had that kind of breezy silence that makes you feel like something’s about to happen.
Then it happened.
We kissed. Soft. Terrifying.
She was more comfortable. Probably more experienced. I froze. She smiled.
Not cruelly - fondly. Like, “look at this sweet idiot.”
I remember that smile.
I remember the song melting into the breeze.
I remember what it did to me - how it made everything feel electric.
Like we were trespassing in a movie we had no business starring in.
We kissed again. Then again.
Clumsy. Warm. New.
Holy in the way only the unholy can be.
Awkward, thrilling, ridiculous - like all important firsts.
And Send Me Some Lovin’ was still playing, low and steady, like it knew.
I don’t know what made me shake more - the music, the kiss, or both.
The next morning, my mother teased me about the hickey.
My father gave me a look - tight-lipped, like I’d stolen something.
But what I remember - what I carry - isn’t the kiss.
It’s the shift.
Like the world cracked open just wide enough for me to step through.
That summer didn’t make me a man.
It didn’t change my life.
But it stuck.
The blisters. The noise. The smell of diesel and sun-baked stone.
And Little Richard - howling while I rode toward nothing in particular.
Little Richard wasn’t a musician.
He was a screaming, pompadoured mushroom cloud.
Music that made you want to punch the sky and cry and kiss something before it disappeared.
He wasn’t background noise.
He was the beat beneath it all.
The reason I walked with more swing.
The reason I believed music could change you.
And it did.
He hijacked my summer, rewired my brain, and gave me rhythm.
Pure, unapologetic, anarchic rhythm.
And somewhere between the dust and the cassettes,
I became me.
Notes on That Summer
The friend who gave me the cassette was Michael Matsentides.
We used to play basketball together. A lot. He still does.
I saw the CD box set on Telemarketing.
You remember - early 90s private TV, still figuring itself out.
Not many channels, just static and promise.
Telemarketing ran endless ads in those soft-focus morning hours,
filling time with miracle mops and rock & roll nostalgia.
My first ever CDs weren’t even mine, really.
I borrowed the soundtracks to Good Morning, Vietnam and The Blues Brothers from aunt.
Listened to them like they were scriptures.
That summer, 1994, my uncle was contracted to build two houses -
almost opposite each other -
one for Dikran Ouzounian, a local businessman,
the other for Christodoulos Benjamin, former Minister of the Interior.
Greece made it to the World Cup that year.
Lost all their games - Argentina, Nigeria, Bulgaria.
We listened on the radio.
There was something noble in the static.
That was the last time Maradona played for Argentina.
And I remember an old woman —
seventies, easy - stooped under the sun,
filling grout lines with the steadiness of someone
who couldn’t afford not to.
It made me sad in a way I didn’t know how to say then.
Still don’t, really.
But I think a state has failed
when it doesn’t protect its elders.
When someone’s third act is spent on a rooftop
earning a day’s wage under the beating sun.
Period.
Screenless and real days and real people. When moments had colour, flavour and texture! When the button skip wasn't yet invented.