My grandfather’s name was Efthimios Vasilios Patouhas, but I called him Papa. As a toddler I could only manage to spurt out [img_assist|nid=6105|title=The Open Doors by Brian Griffiths © 2010|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=167|height=250]the first syllable of the Greek word for grandfather, pappou. The repeated pa, pa, pa eventually became Papa. I’m nearly four years older than my next sibling and decades older than some of my cousins, so the name stuck long before any of them came along.
Every summer, Papa went back to Greece to run his bar. He spent the winters living with Angie, his youngest daughter, in a trailer park off of Route 70 in Pennsauken. As a kid I would sleep over there, falling asleep watching old movies with my aunt. In the morning, I’d wake up to Papa and Angie whispering, so as not to wake me, and the smell of scrambled eggs and English muffins.
“You’re too skeeny,” Papa would say through his thick Greek accent.
I ignored him, in order to act offended, but then got myself to the table for my breakfast. When I was chowing down, Papa’s complaint would change.
“They don’t cook for you at home? Eat, eat. Bravo, bravo.”
When he died in November 2006, I couldn’t attend the funeral, because it was in Greece and I was 7000 miles away, in New Jersey, in the middle of the school year, teaching “The Odyssey” to ninth graders. Logistics, like time, money, and distance kept me from a farewell. It was all for the best though, because I wanted to remember Papa in my own way.
A few weeks after his death, when I talked to my Aunt Angie on the phone from Greece, she said, “When you get here you can look through his jewelry box.”
“I only want the tie,” I told her. I didn’t have to explain which one I meant.
“Okay, it’s still hanging in his room.”
For two more years, until I could get to it, the tie hung on a hook in his room with all the others At last, in 2008, I boarded the plane for six weeks in the Mediterranean sun with only a long narrow piece of fabric on my mind. The thirteen hour trip exhausted me. I wanted nothing more than to collapse on the lumpy bed in the house that Papa had built but my mother and her siblings now owned. But not before going into Papa’s room to retrieve the tie.
From the cool of the dark long windowless hallway I knocked tentatively on his closed bedroom door as if he were still in there. I opened it and looked in. I wasn’t ready to study the pain of the room just yet. I only wanted my souvenir of his journey. I opened the door further and saw the hooks full of ties by the master suite bathroom door. There on top was the tie, my tie, the one I was after. It hung so neatly and was still knotted as if Papa had loosened it from around his neck, pulled it over his head, and hung it there the night before.
I grabbed it and pulled it over my own head and retired into the adjacent room. I slept carefully, so as not to undo his handiwork.
Efthimios was born the fifth child of eight in a rustic mountain village in December 1938. He was an identical twin, but he was unlike any of his siblings. He had a wandering and wondering spirit that lead him at the age of fifteen, to traverse 20 miles of dirt road that wound down through evergreens and Cyprus trees to escape the andartes, the Communist rebels who were stealing children from their homes to fight civil warfare among the rocks of the motherland. By foot, by bus, by boat, by the grace of God he made it to Wilmington, Delaware and became an American, Tom Patouhas.
During the day, he loved everything about being an American, especially the work and the money. He worked his way up and down the country from Delaware to Tennessee to Florida to Ohio. It was while working at Libbey Owens Ford Glass Manufacturing in Toledo, Ohio that he met Simela Spirides. In the 1960’s and ‘70’s, he was a short version of Errol Flynn with a mustache, and he always wore a three-piece suit when he went out. That’s probably why Simela, on first seeing him, told her girlfriend that she was going to marry him. She did and they soon had three kids. The first was my mom.
During the night he liked everything about being Greek. Smashing plates, dancing on tables, and drinking until he felt like smashing plates and dancing on tables. He loved his “Johnny Walker with a splash of Coke”, smoking a half pack of cigarettes in half an hour, and laughing his wheezing squeezed-lung laugh at dirty jokes. This may be why he and my grandmother divorced after five years. She later joined a convent.
In 1996, when I turned twenty-one, I hung out at the same bar Papa did. It was the only bar in South Jersey that played Greek music, so all the Greeks gathered there to smoke and drink and break things. I worked full time, studied at college full time, and partied full time. Weekends began on Thursday at 10 p.m., Greek Night, at the 70 West Bar and Lounge, and ended Sunday, at 4 a.m., in the adjacent diner, with pancakes and eggs for breakfast.
Papa bought me my first legal drink.
“What you have?” he leaned in and asked over the blaring belly dance music cut with a techno beat.
“Ummm.” I looked at the waiting barmaid, completely lost.
“Johnny Walker with a splash of Coke, hun,” he said to her. “You drink whisky, no bad shit,” he said to me.
My drink was delivered right to my hand. He lifted his and we toasted Yiamas!, to health. I lifted the short stout glass to my lips and swigged a few gulps. The liquid ran through me, marking a path like a brushfire from my tongue to my stomach. For a second, I felt faint. I swayed enough to put the glass on the counter. in case I dropped to the floor, but I recovered almost instantly.
“Yeah?” Papa caught my attention out of the blaze in my brain.
I turned up a weak smile, “It’s good.” I said, and promptly left the drink on the bar to go dance and sweat out the flames.
The Christmas I bought him the tie, I was working as a cashier in an expensive women’s undergarment chain that used to be classy before it became campy. I worked, cascading small, medium, and large undies into panty table waterfalls and layered the sleeves of fuchsia ostrich feather robes as they hung from padded hangers. I kept myself motivated through the late winter work nights by saving every penny to buy my summer vacation in the Greek sun.
Two weeks before Christmas, the company that owned my store gave us a 40% off discount throughout all its stores. Since the conglomerate owned three-fourths of the mall, I was set to get some decent gifts at reasonable prices.
By then, in his sixties, Papa still wore a three-piece suit when he went out to the bar. Usually, it was a tan ensemble – jacket, pants, and vest. I figured a smart tie would be the perfect gift to go with his pressed shirts, but I struggled picking it out. The sales guy hovered over me as I touched the silk of each tie on display and scrutinized the individual designs. Finally, I chose a tan one with a design of inch-high rectangles that had binoculars, lanterns, or four tiny license plates with horizontal or vertical striped backgrounds. I chuckled about the binoculars. Papa used a pair to watch pretty girls on the beach, from the balcony of that home he’d built in Greece, with all those American dollars he’d made. I picked out a tan pair of socks and was done for that season.
Christmas at my parents’ house was always a big deal. We had to all get dressed and wait for my grandfather and aunts and uncles to show up before the gift exchange could begin. That year I was sure everyone would love what I’d gotten them. It was my first real job and the real money I’d ever had to spend on gifts. I’d gone all out, or as far out as my budget allowed. Papa strolled in with my Aunt Angie and us five kids and my parents settled around the living room close to the tree to hand out packages.
Papa had a system to his unwrapping. He made two piles, one to keep and one to return. There was no polite pretending he would use the electric toothbrush or the back massager. He held them aside so he could give them back to you to exchange at the store yourself. I worried the tie would end up in his reject pile.
He unwrapped the socks first.
“Oh, these are good. These are nice,” he said showing them to everyone in the room.
“Look, they’re the kind that won’t cut off my circulation.”
I beamed. “I got them at the mall,” I said. “Now open this one, too.”
“Oh, more for me?” He tore the paper from the box and lifted its lid. He nodded more approval. “It matches the socks,” he said holding them up next to each other. Both were placed in the “keep” pile.
I was proud that my hard work and hard earned money had garnered such a fine gift.
Weeks later, deep into the new year, I came home from a class to find Papa drinking coffee with my mother in her kitchen.
“You know that tie you got me for Christmas?” he asked as I walked in and unloaded my book bag.
“Yeah,” I half-listened as I rifled through the cabinets for a snack.
“It’s my whore tie,” he said.
“What is it?” I asked peeking out of the cabinet.
“My whore tie.”
“Why?”
“Because, when I wore it to the bar, all the whores came around me.” He wheezed out that hysterical asthmatic laugh and exposed the gold that replaced his upper right canine tooth.
That’s the Papa I remember when I see the tie, his whore tie, now hanging on an antique hook by my own bed, knotted still, exactly as it was when he last put it around his collar and headed out to the bar.
Elaine Paliatsas-Haughey is a writer of small important things and a teacher of small important people. She is grateful for a story-rich family, Michael, and the Rowan Writing Program. “Whore Tie” is dedicated in memory of Efthemia.