of Cards; Alex Cord in Harold Robbins’ Stiletto. Downtown, at the Trans-Lux, The Great Bank Robbery, with Clint Walker and Kim Novak, has just opened.
At three in the afternoon, after the lunch rush is over at papou’s store, a man drops a stack of Daily News on top of the cigarette machine. I take one to a booth and read the reviews of the films whose titles I have seen splashed across the marquees earlier in the day.
I look behind the counter at my grandfather. He is slicing a tomato that he holds in his hand. The juice of the tomato stains the yellowish apron he wears around his ample middle. There is a Band-Aid on his thumb from his accident on the meat slicer earlier in the day. He sees the tabloid open in front of me and knows my daily ritual.
“Anything good today at the movies, Niko?” he shouts across the store.
“Nothing much, Papou.”
“Okay, boy,” he says, and continues to slice the tomato. There is a smile on his wide, pink face.
I THREW MY HEAD back and killed another beer. More horns sounded. I pulled back within the lines of my lane and turned left on Florida Avenue, heading east.
I ran the red at North Capitol and bore left onto Lincoln Road. I passed houses with rotting back porches, alleys littered with garbage, and packs of young men grouped like predators on street corners.
Then I was veering left, passing under the black, arched iron gate of the Glenwood Cemetery. I pulled the top on another beer and stayed to the right, driving slowly around long curves and lazy inclines, by rows of headstones and monuments crammed together, their symmetry broken only by the occasional dogwood or pine.
As the names on the headstones changed from Protestant to ethnic, I slowed down. When I reached a section that only contained the graves of Greeks, I stopped the car.
I remained seated and drank my last beer. When I finished it, I crushed the can, tossed it into the backseat, and slipped the pint bottle inside my jacket. I got out of the car and staggered onto the grass.
Spartan immigrants had chosen to lie here. They were buried on a long hill overlooking the road and a junior-high playground. A few of the headstones mentioned their native villages and the year in which they came to America.
I recognized many of the family names. Some had been friends with, or had known my grandfather: Kerasiotas, Kalavratinos, Stathopoulos, Psarakis. On the headstone of a guy named Vlatos, the inscription read, “I Wish I Was in Vegas.”
I had a seat under an oak tree across from my grandfather’s headstone. I reached into my jacket and pulled out the pint, tilted it back to my mouth, and watched bubbles rise to its upturned base. I swallowed, toasted my grandfather with the bottle, and replaced the cap.
Though it was probably very cool, I felt comfortable. I listened to the faint laughter and yells of the boys playing ball on the playground at the foot of the hill. The wind blew small yellow leaves around my feet. And I stared at the headstone that bore my name: Nicholas J. Stefanos.
I stayed in that position for the remainder of the afternoon. I was unable to focus my thoughts on any one thing; all of my emotions seemed to flow through me at once. In the end there were only a few pathetic certainties: I was thirty years old, unemployed, and sitting dead drunk in a graveyard, an empty pint of rotgut bourbon in my hand.
Sometime after the skies had darkened and the sounds of the playground had died away, a man in a caretaker’s uniform walked towards me. He kicked the soles of my shoes lightly. The name stitched across his chest, on a white patch, was Raymond.
“You better get on up,” he said. “They’ll be lockin’ the gates, and just before that the police cruise through.”
“Thanks,” I said, using his arm to help me up.
“You all right, man?”
“Yeah, Raymond. Thanks a million.”
I DON’T REMEMBER THE ride home, except that there was shouting and more hornblowing. There was also a nasty bit of business at the National Shrine, where I attracted a small crowd when I pulled over to vomit.
I woke up early the next morning, halfway on my bed and fully clothed. There was some puke splashed across my denim shirt, and a dried clump of it on my chin.
I had a cold shower. After that, I put