Memories of the Ghost
by Srinivas "Cheeni" Rao
College of the University of Chicago

Winning story in the 1998 ACM Nick Adams Short Story Contest

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When the kid said, "I'm just grateful to God and this program to be alive and sober today," I got up, took the stairs out of the church basement, and didn't stop till I was at Ortega's.  You can be gone from meetings for ten years, come back, and you'll notice they haven't changed.  There'll be a kid there, more time sober than he ever spent drinking, trying to teach you about gratitude.  Thing is, he might actually have something to teach.  For some reason, he's the chosen one, and it's not bullshit.  And me?  Every day another part of me drifts into the memories, another frame in the movie that keeps playing in my head.  It's a two thumbs down movie I can never leave.  I've got to stay and play it through.
The other day I drove by the old Cicero house.  It looks different without Dad.  Even the old weeping willow that was stuck out there is gone.  Time just came and washed over it.  Maybe I shouldn't have sold it, maybe then I'd at least have something real.  But you can't hold onto houses, just like you can't hold onto people.  In the end they all just drift away.
The only way I can figure it is that I'm a ghost.  Trying to do something.  Screwed over someplace in-between.  Not a ghost like in a haunted house or anything, not something horrible.  It's just that I don't matter anymore.  All I've got left are words, and words don't work too good with me.
The only history I've got left is Ortega's.  Ortega's is down the street from the Abbot plant, on the corner of 26th and Ogden.  At Ortega's the front wood is lacquered in soot and dust from the kick-up of trucks, and the windows have iron bars on them. Inside, people stand with arms crossed over their chests and call you "Boss".  "That O.K. Boss?" or "Boss, get the fuck out of my space."  The girls huff smoke from Virginia Slims and ash on the pool table with the dug-up felt and the "No Cigarettes on the Table" sign.  The guys bum Camels or Reds and bitch about the third-shift.  Every night the same girls and guys come and pound beers and pause to yell at the Sox on t.v.
Ten years ago, I was single and drunk, waiting on a pool game.  I was thinking that there wasn't anything special at Ortega's anymore.  That maybe it was time to move-go someplace like Houston, do something with oil, and come back first class on a plane.  But that night there was a lady sitting at the bar.  She wore a long black skirt.  She smelled like wheat after rain, not nicotine and yesterday's beer.  She was drinking tequila with no lime, so I decided to sit beside her, and I told her my name.  Her name was Debbie.
I'd always been waiting for the magic that Dad had talked about, how when he touched Mom it was like touching a live wire without the pain.  Every girl I'd met wanted to talk about herself.  They wanted to know how I was feeling.  They wanted to move in and rearrange furniture.
I can remember, though, maybe two weeks into seeing Debbie, this time when we went to the top of Tapmen's hill.  I told Debbie that I wasn't good with words, that all the right words were reserved for other people.  We sat on the grass, bottles beside us, and we didn't look at the moon or the stars.  She surrounded me with her words, her lips, her hands, and I thought that, maybe, with Debbie, I didn't need to explain.
With most women, explanations always began with my mom. All I knew was that her maiden name was Betsy Mikanos and that my dad met her just after she graduated high school.  He was twenty-five years older, and her family put up a fuss, but in the end they got married, and a few months later I was born.
I can remember being five, my head in Mom's lap, a green and red quilt draped over my legs.  I can remember when I was six, that one night she folded paper airplanes for me to throw in the fireplace.  And I can also remember when I was ten, the times when Dad was passed out in his chair, his thick legs crossed.  I spent all my time looking out the window at the street, at the number 305 bus passing on Laramie, at the people coming and going in the rain without umbrellas.
I started learning about all the things Dad hated when I was twelve.  That was the year I finally got the knack for cooking.  I had made the transition from frozen dinners and measuring cups, to the world of homemade garlic bread, the garlic shaved thin, and rice pilaf with a hint of lemon and cilantro.
Dad would wait for dinner with a bottle of gin, paying me every night with a twelve-ounce cup.  We could sit like men, our elbows on the table, tearing bread with our bare hands, talking between mouthfuls.
He'd ask, "How's school?" or "How the women?"
And I'd always say fine.
We'd talk baseball, usually about the Sox, how much we hated Bill Veeck.  It was always the same.  He'd mention politics and how much he hated it.
"I hate that Harold Washington," he'd say.
He hated lots of things.  He hated people because they were always leaving.  He hated talking with people because nobody ever said what they meant.
I guess it was Czechoslovakia's fault.  He'd told me that in Czechoslovakia you either kept quiet, or you talked about what you hated.  There was no point talking about what was good, because the simple fact was that the communists didn't leave enough good to talk about.  You learned not to say what you felt, soon after, how not to feel, and if you hung around long enough, how to keep working hard enough to keep the numbness out.
One day he'd said, "I fly planes for the communists."
I had asked him what communists were.  I'd been at school and a kid had told me that our enemies were communists.  I'd said our enemies were the Russians.  The kid said I was stupid, I said he was a retard, and I ended up bloodying the kids nose, so the principle had to send me home.
"So you're a communist?" I asked.
"I'm Czech," Dad said.
"So what's a communist?"
"They're bastards."
"So the Russians are our enemies, right?"
"You hate the communists.  That's American," he said.
I eventually figured things out in school.  A teacher pulled me aside and told me what was what and arranged for me and dad to sit down with him one night.  I don't understand much of what went on, but I do remember that my dad kept his hand on my shoulder and patted me on the head every once in a while between yelling at the teacher.  On the ride home dad said, "These son-of-a-bitches don't know about family.  I tell you, Americans are all idiots."  The teacher told me the next day that my dad tended to get words confused, and that, in his opinion, my dad needed help.
*****


In the beginning, dating Debby was like shoplifting from White Hen.  The rush of an escape with prizes.   She never asked me for money, she never yelled at me.  When she danced, she would lean in close, her brown hair smelling like strawberries, her body heat seeping into my skin.  When she kissed me, I would close my eyes.
I remember one night; we were sitting underneath an elm tree with peeling bark, somewhere out by LaGrange Park near the forest preserves.  We'd brought a wicker picnic basket the color of coffee and cream.  When we packed that basket, we were a team.  I made the sandwiches.  She wrapped them and put them in the basket so the pop cans wouldn't crush them.  I didn't even think of getting beer or wine.  We sat under that elm tree and watched the gnats moving in clouds around us.  We were quiet.  When we talked, it was easier than thinking.
"Why'd you ever come to Chicago," I asked.
"Because I'd heard about you and I wanted to meet you."
"I'm serious."
She looked up from her sandwich and winked at me.
"I came to Chicago to get out of Peoria.  And to meet you.  Someone like you."
"That's all?  I thought you liked Peoria."
"I do.  Nothing like the corn.  Nothing like a picnic out in the corn fields with the wind blowin' on a good summer day.  And the people are good.  They work hard, and they care about your business in a good way. They look out for you."
I grabbed some grass from the ground and threw it at the gnats.
"I had to get away from my folks," Debbie said.
"They hit you?"
"Nothing like that.  I guess it's just that my folks are kinda like handcuffs."
And we kept eating, throwing grass at the gnats, feeling the bits of breeze that snuck past the trees. We were okay with not talking about it.
*****
We had been seeing each other for a year when Debbie went into detox.  She'd showed up at her receptionist job a little drunk for the third straight day, and they gave her the choice.  The job paid well, so she went into treatment.
"It'll only be thirty days or so," she said, "It'll get them off my back, and then we can go back to normal."
I'd been a little worried because I knew how those treatment programs were.  They pumped out hundreds of bible thumping recovered alcoholics who took it as their duty to hassle me and my dad and other regular guys at work.  And at the grocery store.  And on the street corner.  Once they learned your name, they never let go.
Halfway through the thirty days, I got a call.  Debbie wanted me to come over to the place for a little talk.
When I got there, they led me to a little room.  Debbie was sitting on a sky blue leather couch.  Her hair was in a ponytail, she had no make-up on, and she was wearing her gray sweats.  This waspish lady with her hair in a bun, blue eyeshadow, and a tight black suit was sitting behind an oak desk as big as my car.  On the wall behind the wasp were little plaques: "K.I.S.S. - Keep it Simple, Stupid", "One Day at a Time", "There's Nothing So Bad that a Drink Won't Make Worse".  The walls were noticeably pink.
"My name is Margaret," the wasp said, "Please sit down."
I took a spot next to Debbie on the couch.
"What's this about?"
Debbie held my hands.  She looked at the ground.
"I can't stay clean and sober living with you," she said.
"What she's trying to say is that you need to clean yourself up," the wasp said.
"I know what she said."
"I want to stay with you," Debbie said.
"They're brainwashing you."
"Only because she needed it.  You could use a good brainwashing too, from what she's told me."
I tried like hell to keep my eyes on Debbie.
"Is this really what you want?"
"You can't drink at all," the wasp said.
"Am I talking to you?" I yelled at the wasp.  She gave Debbie a knowing look.
And Debbie was looking at her, not me.
I held Debbie's hands.
"I'll do whatever you want me to do.  If it's really what you want."
"Promise me," Debbie said.
*****
When I was nine my mother had promised that she'd take me with her to San Diego.  I'd caught her moving underwear from drawers to suitcases.  I'd made her promise on her soul.  And when I woke up the next morning, all I had was Dad, sprawled on the bathroom floor.
I went to an A.A. meeting by myself that they held at the church on Armitage.  They held it in the basement.  Everyone grabbed a foldout chair and a styrofoam cup of coffee.  They were talking loud and patting each other on the back.   When they told me that being in the program meant not drinking ever again, one day at a time.  I walked out.
I thought of Debbie, and I came back, and I did it.  It hurt.  But I had given my word.
Once the shakes went away, and Debbie started to hold me again, I took her to an Italian restaurant and did the right thing.  A real diamond on the ring.
Everyone always tells these jokes about getting married, like "Life's a bitch, and then you marry one."  Dad never said any different.  But when you get to be twenty-six, and the crew you ran with has three kids apiece and no time for a night out, you start to wonder.  It becomes something you have to do.
Just before I married Debby, I got Dad to come to one meeting, a speaker meeting at the Twelve-Step House on Damen, just south of Wilson.  The speaker was talking about the fifth step: admitting to ourselves, our higher power, and another human being the exact nature of our wrongs. They passed the basket around for the seventh tradition, everyone throwing in a dollar, and Dad says to me, "This is not church.  No money."
By now I'm a pro at this, so I tell my name, say that I'm an alcoholic and a drug-addict, and I say how grateful I am, that God's been working in my life, and that it's good to have my dad sitting next to me.  Dad says he isn't an alcoholic, and tells everyone that this whole bit is bullshit.  They tell him to keep coming back-- that's what you always say to newcomers: "Keep coming back." Dad never did.
My sponsor in the program told me I had to keep away from my dad.  He also told me not to get involved with Debbie.
"No relationships in the first year," he said, "Behind every skirt is a slip."
But the way I saw it, who was this guy to tell me?  He was just another drunk, so I stuck with what I knew.  I'd gotten into this thing for Debbie, so there was no way I was leaving her.  Besides, we had to get married.  And I was all Dad had.
I learned what you had to say at meetings, and I stopped the drinking, even the coke.  Debbie wanted it that way.
*****

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