Love or Honor Read Online Free PDF

“My father drives a truck!” Chris knew that his father spoke several languages—Turkish and Armenian, as well as Greek and Spanish—but he also knew that his father didn’t understand how baseball was played. One Sunday, though, when his father walked over to Central Park with him, they ran a race, and George won. Chris was so delighted to see how fast his father could run that he didn’t even mind losing. He talked about it so much at school that the other kids finally told him to shut up about it, they were tired of hearing him say that his father was the fastest runner in the whole world.
    Katrina never learned English, but she spoke Italian as fluently as Greek. When she was orphaned in Greece, as a young child, she’d gone to live with relatives in Italy, before coming to this country. She lived with her Uncle Gus, who had a barbershop at 106th Street and Broadway. In tribute to the family roots, the shop was named The Riviera. George was living in a rooming house on the Upper West Side, getting haircuts at The Riviera. Katrina was earning money as a seamstress. Their marriage was arranged when she was eighteen and George was thirty-two.
    As the only son, Chris felt a special responsibility to succeed, and he hated the feeling. His carefree, happy-go-lucky personality contrasted sharply with his father’s sense of duty and discipline. Chris loved his father, and he didn’t doubt that George loved him, but it was a remote, silent love. His mother told Chris that when he was an infant, George would pick him up from the cradle and hold him close. But the only time Chris remembered being in his father’s arms was one Sunday morning when he was nine or ten. He had a terrible stomachache when he woke up. Katrina thought he was just trying to get out of going to church, so she told him to get up and get dressed, the pain would go away.
    When Chris tried to get out of bed, his legs felt numb, and he vomited. His father picked him up and carried him down the stairs to the street, where he got a taxicab to take them to St. Luke’s. Chris was operated on that afternoon for appendicitis. Except for that one time, Chris could not remember ever being physically close to his father. He could not remember hugging his father, or embracing him as men in the family embraced one another in greeting. Chris and George never seemed to be able to exchange any comfort with one another. They had never kissed.
    When Chris was fourteen, George paid sixteen thousand dollars cash for a house in Queens. After that, Chris saw his father even less. George worked mostly at the coffee shop on West 45th Street in Manhattan, that he’d bought in partnership with Katrina’s sister’s husband. Chris barely tolerated junior high school, living for his music. He took drum lessons at a music studio in Astoria, and practiced for hours at home on a rubber pad glued to a piece of wood set at a slight angle, to strengthen his wrists and fingers and to perfect his timing. By sixteen he’d outgrown the Astoria teacher and was seeking out Gene Krupa clinics all over the city. He had acquired his first set of good drums—the bass, the snare, the floor tom, another pair of tom-toms, and the high-hats.
    He passed the test for The High School of Music and Art, but a couple of his friends were going to Stuyvesant, where Chris had been accepted, too. So he went to Stuyvesant, and flunked out at the end of his first year because he didn’t bother to keep up with the work. He went to a technical high school for a year, and found it tedious; since he didn’t intend to be a greasemonkey all his life, he said, he transferred again, to William Cullen Bryant, where he graduated with a 2.8 average of a possible 4.0. He felt that was okay; George felt it could have been better. Chris didn’t care, because his ambition was to play drums in a big band.
    Two months before graduation, when he turned eighteen,