o’nakis

March 17, 2013 at 12:33 pm · Filed under books, my father, wastes and tagged: birthdays, o'nakis, shysters, wastes

Page Five

it’s sunday… the 17th of march, 2013. st patrick’s. had he lived, bill nakis would have been eighty-seven today.

once, maybe I was thirty, I had a T-shirt made for him for his birthday. white with green trim, and a couple of shamrocks on the front. on the back, in heavy black letters:  o’nakis. all of his life, since long before I was born, there had been jokes about a greek being born on st. patrick’s day. my father was only half greek, but because it was the male half, it came out in the very obviously greek last name. anyway, he loved the shirt, and wore it often for a number of years, showing it off to anyone he ran into.

years later, when he was in one of his periods of not speaking to me, my daughter and I came back to turners trolls after a visit out to my parents, and I found that T-shirt on the floor of my car. grampa gave it to me, my daughter says. I don’t really want it, but I didn’t want to say no. so I myself got the T-shirt back. it meant something to me, that shirt, even if it no longer meant much to him. I saved it, as I save many things. it’s gone for good now, though. because of my brother.

today, on this birthday, I know things that I didn’t know when I started this book and decided to call it lucked out (and in light of this new knowledge, I’m seriously considering a different title). it was an expression he used a lot, this lucked out, and it was as well a desperate hope he always had: to luck out. but, he was not irish, only born on the big day. and he did not luck out. not in the end. not in the most important things. I sit here now, knowing the things that I learned three weeks ago, and see him as a very unlucky man. unlucky in his wife, unlucky in his sons, in his grandchildren, and, if he were here to say it, he would say that he was extremely unlucky in me, his only daughter. financial failure that I am. stubborn witch that I am, insisting on saying true things in the family that no one in the family wants said. and all that expensive illness when I was a child? if he were sitting here, bill nakis might well say that I am the biggest piece of bad luck he ever had.

I disagree with him there. I did when he lived, and still do so now, fourteen years after  his death. two years after his blessed baby son, now also dead, lost bill nakis’ house to gambling, drinking, and shyster mortgage companies. I disagree with you, o’nakis, that you were unlucky in me. I would not have lost the house, poor as I am. I have no gambling or drinking problems, however disabled I might be. I have a love for that little house — for every ounce of work you put into it — that no one besides you had. I remember the day we moved into that house: memorial day weekend, 1958. I remember your labor there, well into your sixties. decades of labor. decades of pride that you had a house for the kids, a house to pass to the grandkids, when your own parents had given you nothing. I remember today that it’s your eighty-seventh birthday. does anyone else? I very much doubt it.

I now have to see that all his labor taking care of a house he saw staying in our family for at least a generation or two more as for nothing. I look back on the way his sons always treated him, the way his grandchildren treated him, the way his wife treated him, and say that his efforts were for nothing. it’s so strange to me always that he could never see that I was, in a way, his only chance. I am more like him, the best things in him, than anyone else. I wanted some of the same things he wanted as badly as he did. I was his best chance for a real friend among his relatives. I was his best candidate for caregiver when he got older and more ill. I was his best chance to save the house. and yet I was the one to whom he dished out his worst nastiness, the one he rejected over and over. the one he belittled the most. I don’t mean to say that there were no better times between me and o’nakis; there were. but they never lasted long enough, and there weren’t enough of them.

I was his best chance. he either didn’t see that, or I suppose, out of some sort of self-loathing, treated me the way he did because I am the most like him, the most like his better side. whatever the reasons, reasons I’ll never know for certain, he threw his best chance away. and now his house, his little half-acre of cherished land, belong to shysters. the baby son to whom o’nakis entrusted these things is in the cemetery plot beside him, and ashes are all that’s left of his decades of work for the family and for its future after he was gone.

william constantine o’nakis, born on st. patrick’s day in 1926 to a mafia man and a flaming sociopath of a woman, was a very unlucky man. which fact, naturally, breaks my heart into tiny irish smithereens, yet again. how many times can a heart be torn to shreds, I wonder, before there’s no heart left at all.

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