This Game of Ours, Chapter Four
published on 08/19/08 at 8:16 am
I took my high school diploma and tried to make sense of what to do next. Mostly, I played a lot of poker. That kept the money coming in. My parents were understandably less than impressed with what had happened, so I basically tried to make sure we led separate lives.
My father kept extremely well-regulated hours, so that wasn’t difficult. He took one of two trains to work every morning and one of two trains home again every night. So I made sure I returned from a night at the tables minutes after he left and went out every evening just before he got back. For the whole of that summer, we hardly spoke. We had nothing to say to each other.
I spoke to various colleges and assessed my academic options. The place at MIT had gone, but I was able to enroll at a New York State University to major in math. State universities in the US are cheaper than the private variety and they have to take you if they have room available. So I began what would become a sludgy soup of an academic degree, taking the first steps towards a qualification I would eventually draw from half a dozen institutions.
But after my four years of college math as a high school student, studies were less than hard. I spent the vast majority of my time playing poker, seeing the old crew and doing exactly what I wanted. I continued to earn thousands of dollars at the tables and life drifted along in exactly the same way it always had.
Thoughts of the future weren’t unduly concerning me at this point, to be honest. My parents remained highly pissed, to say the least. But I still had money in my pocket and was hardly swamped by ambition, so I wasn’t all that bothered.
The fallout of the basement-game bust was bitter sweet for Joey, Mikey and the others. On one level they were proud of the way I had stood up for them, the way I had respected our laws, covenants and friendships. I hadn’t violated the trust of the neighborhood I grew up in.
But at the same time, they were aware I was the one of us who had a chance to get out of that world. I had a chance to make something more of myself, to a certain extent living that dream for all of them. So they were also disappointed that doing the right thing took away my chance to leave. They were happy with my actions, but they regretted the outcome and the end results of those actions.
Personally, it wasn’t even something I considered. The alternative course of action, selling them out to keep my own passage to MIT clear, never even crossed my mind as a possibility. I think it’s hard for people nowadays to understand the true nature of the bond I shared with guys like Mikey and
Joey.
Joey and I were still as close as any two people can possibly be. Growing up in the inner city was tough enough. Growing up without friends like Joey by your side was impossible. Joey and Mike were not just friends in the classical sense of the word. They were guys that had your back and were willing to take a bullet for you. Of course, as in every relationship, reciprocation was key. And there was no doubt in their minds that I would gladly do the same for them.
Our friendship, our covenant to one another, was something few people in today’s society need or can possibly begin to comprehend. This relationship did have a dark side to it though. The positive aspect was that my friends were my safety blanket, my body armor. As long as I stood true to them, and they to me, no one could really hurt me.
If Joey introduced me to people in a club or bar by saying I was a friend of his, that didn’t mean we played ball together. It meant he would be responsible for anything I did in there. It meant he vouched for me. At that point, I had no name; I had no identity beyond being Joey’s friend. The problem with that equation is that if you ever do anything wrong in that society, it’s your best friend who gets sent to take you out. If I ever managed to offend the wrong person, it would have been Joey who was responsible for dealing with me. Joey would have been the only one that could ever get close enough, and he would have been just the man for the job. That’s a very dark side to a friendship.
So our relationship truly was the proverbial double-edged sword. Regardless of how close we were that realization was always in the back of everyone’s mind. Every time Joey pulled up unexpected, the thought that this may be my last car ride was always there. Fortunately, I never gave cause for any action to be taken against me. But even though this very real threat never materialized, it was nonetheless always present. In the meantime, I just got on with life, playing poker and studying, then playing more poker.
My father was abroad on business one fall, when he was taken ill. He was hospitalized with significant pains and they suggested he underwent a series of tests on his return to the States. He had a history of heart conditions, but this was an unrelated problem.
My sisters and I weren’t told what was wrong with him at first. There was nothing obviously up and I continued to lead my separate life. My older sister was already well on her way to completing her undergraduate studies in a prestigious local private University, and my younger sister was doing well at school. Everything seemed normal.
But in late September, my mother sat me down and told me that my father had been diagnosed with lung cancer. As time went on, it spread to his liver. She told me about it because he didn’t want to hear about it, didn’t want to discuss it, didn’t want to be told anything it. Whether that was denial on his part or just a state of acceptance, I don’t know.
My father had never been a demonstrative man and he showed no emotion about the situation at all. Zero. He was stone cold about it. And that made the whole thing pretty much unreal. In those days, you didn’t hear of people having cancer as much as you do now. And he looked fine, was still working and doing everything as normal, still shouting and yelling at me the same way he always had. So I couldn’t relate to the idea that something was killing him.
I was used to death, of course. I came from a neighborhood where people died all the time for a variety of reasons, stupidity probably chief amongst them. But this invisible killer didn’t seem real. I guess I was reacting the same way he did – we have bad genes for skepticism and denial in my family! I didn’t accept how ill he was until I saw the physical deterioration.
That wasn’t long in coming. He still carried on as normal until the end of the year, but early the following January he was admitted to hospital for a biopsy and never came out. It became clear this wasn’t just something he had, but it was something that was killing him. From that January onwards,
whether we accepted it or not, it was just a question of time until he died.
Even then, I don’t think the reality of the situation actually hit home that hard. Through January, February and March I found the whole thing irritating more than anything else. This thing was annoying him and it was annoying us. It was still something I expected to stop. I thought things would go back to how they were. The denial continued.
My mother wasn’t equipped to cope with life on her own. Her days changed completely. She would still get up early every morning to prepare dinner and make sure all the housework was done before anyone else was awake. Then she’d make sure the three kids got off to where we needed to be, before going down to the hospital and staying with her husband all day. The worse his condition got, the longer she stayed. By the end, she pretty much spent a month straight in there. We used to take her changes of clothes from home.
As the year wore on, it became clear even to me that this situation was irreversible. May gave way to June and his situation became critical. His pain and anguish was terrible to watch. The disease spread, well, like cancer. There’s a reason why that’s a saying – his decline was rapid and awful. As the cancer took hold of his lungs and liver, it spread further. He was in excruciating pain. Towards the end of June, he lost about 40-50% of his own bodyweight and his organs began to fail. We watched my father, a big, strong, imposing man who had dominated our household both literally and metaphorically, waste away before our eyes.
And we were helpless to do anything about it. The pain grew worse and worse as his internal organs packed up. He was basically drowning in his own fluids. Watching him lie there in agony day after day was just horrific. There is no other word to describe it. And the worst thing about it was how helpless we were. Not just us, but the nurses as well.
We became good friends with the nurses on his ward, especially those that covered the night shift. His ward was not a good place to be. Everyone on there was pretty much terminal. Towards the end, he would only be conscious for about 15 minutes in an eight hour period and he was largely incoherent. His room was at the end, opposite the nurses’ station, so we were usually hanging out there. We could still see him if he woke up or stirred, but at least we were able to have a cup of coffee and a conversation, to try to think about something else instead of his impending death.
I used to chat to one nurse in particular. Neither she nor I were taking the situation particularly well as we approached it on our different paths. I was a kid standing by helpless, waiting for his father to die, wanting him to die even because of the pain he was in. And she was a highly-trained and committed medical professional who was watching a man die before her eyes. No doubt she became a nurse to help people, but there was nothing she could do. After seeing this man for eight hours a day over six or seven months, of course she had built up a relationship with him. Hell, if you play poker with someone for four hours a night you become friends with him, let alone if you care for them for twice as long.
This nurse had grown to known my father well, and she had become close to the whole family. My mother was there all the time and she had gotten to know the kids, know what we were all doing. She was pretty much part of the family at this point. But at the same time she had a job to do and it was
horribly clear that no amount of professional help could do much for my father.
July started and my father was in a terrible state. Lessons in church may have talked about souls being ripped apart in hell, but we were watching hell on earth. Dad was lying there being torn in two from the inside out. He was being ripped apart in front of our eyes. Our prayers for the dearest man in our life were “please take him now, please make this stop.”
On the 4th July, we were all by his bedside. He was dosed up to his eyeballs on pain medication and still in agony. Unable to watch any longer, I walked over to the nurses’ station and found the nurse we had grown so close to bent over in silent tears. We stood there and had a conversation. We didn’t say much to be honest. It’s very hard to describe what we did actually say. But there was an understanding, almost tacitly, that something had to be done. And there was only one thing that could be done. I walked away from the conversation knowing that something had been agreed on, even though no specific words had been used.
As her shift came to a close, the nurse gave Dad a shot of morphine that she didn’t enter on his charts. By this stage, he was on the maximum levels of painkillers possible, so his levels were being carefully monitored. The next nurse started her shift, checked his charts and saw he hadn’t been topped up, so administered another dose. That pretty much did it. I don’t know to what extent his death was due to the second injection and to what extent he just died from natural causes. His body had pretty much packed up and stopped by that point, so there was almost nothing left. I like to think it was just his time and he went.
Appropriately enough, the Independence Day fireworks flew into the sky all around the hospital as my father was given his freedom. Whilst the sense of loss was enormous for us, the overwhelming emotion was one of relief. Relief that his pain and suffering was over. Just as suddenly, the last vestiges of denial were washed away from me. No one said anything that night, but it was clear life had changed for ever.
We wasted no time in burying him, and that meant a trip back to Greece. If my father had ended up in American soil, he would have spun in his grave. Burial plots are picked out before birth back in Greece – families are laid to rest together. If someone marries outside their village, then people worry about where the “foreigner” will be buried. So there was no question he could be buried anywhere else than back home.
We had a quick wake for relatives and friends based stateside the following morning and that afternoon we flew back to Athens, his body in a casket in the cargo hole. It was a strange kind of homecoming. For me, it was my first trip back to my native country since the move to America. And I realized for the first time the truth of the saying “there’s no man so miserable as he that has known two countries.” I didn’t fit in there any more, yet I was still emphatically a foreigner over here.
I will die a foreigner in the United States, no matter what else I do in my life, even if I lived to be a hundred. No matter what devotion, dedication or sacrifice I make to this country (and so far I’ve offered everything but my death), I will always be a foreigner. I will remain a foreigner because the mindset of the people sees to that.
The only acceptance you find is in inner-city communities. In the inner-cities you have such a great ethnic diversification that the very differences are what unites everybody. That difference is the commonality. But the inner-cities are not America. Once you step outside that melting pot you are a foreigner. 90% of America is not a melting pot.
I may have been accepted by metropolitan New York, but that doesn’t make me an American. In the heartland of America and the Deep South I would never have any hope of acceptance or acknowledgment of the commitment and sacrifice I would make for this country. It would be far easier
for someone of Cuban decent to gain acceptance in Florida, or someone of Mexican decent to be at home in Texas, Arizona or New Mexico, but a Greek outside of New York, Boston, bits of Jersey, Chicago and nowadays probably parts of LA and San Francisco? Not a chance. That’s it as far as
acceptance goes in the US for European immigrants. It’s all actually pretty strange really, because actually if you don’t have feathers in your hair, you’re truly a foreigner in this land.
But being back in Athens showed me I knew nothing of life over there, I didn’t understand the people and I didn’t belong. If anything things were even more foreign to me there than here. Standing by my father’s grave I felt rootless. The first thing I asked my mother was, “Why are we going back to
America?”
Her response summed it up. “What do we have to come back to here?” And she was right. Our life was in America now. My older sister was at college, doing well. My younger sister had known almost nothing else. She had been only two when we had emigrated and all her memories were of the States. Even my mother had a roof over her head and a community of friends and relatives there.
I was the only one of the family with little to keep me in the States. Little, that is, apart from my family. I considered canceling my ticket and staying in Greece, as much because of the realization of what awaited me back home as anything else. But that was a three-minute idle fantasy. It simply wasn’t an option; it would have been shirking my responsibilities in the most craven way imaginable. It would have been the most selfish act in the world to have bailed out on the three women my father had left behind.
As soon as we buried him, I knew it was all down to me. I knew I had to provide for the family, to keep together what he had started. I knew what was coming as soon as our plane touched down back in the States. No one told me. No one explained it all to me. But they didn’t have to.
Our stay in Greece lasted just a matter of days. We laid my father to rest in his native soil and returned home.
John “The Greek” Leontakianakos is a professional poker player with 27 years of experience. He runs his own website called JohnTheGreekPoker.
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