His name...I remember it,his name was Petros,he got into drugs last year,he was saying that it was the only way for him to escape real life,the world in which he was feeling like a stranger.
I remember we were hanging around squares,he was always telling me stories that his mind brought to him,he was a good boy,even though inside his family they didn't showed him love nor respect. I remember him since we were on the elementary school,he wasn't a good student he had 8 after 8,in the morning his was late and never had in his bag pencil n' rubber. The kids from the other desks were mocking him,you see Petros was dyslexic, no one gave him attention and he was always alone in a corner.
The elementary,the gymnasium and high school are now all things of the the past,it's been long since I've seen him last. But I learned that the last two years Petros is hanging out with kids from other backrounds, I tell 'em
"What happened? Is Petros okay?"
they tell me "He is no longer the same as he was in the classroom."
"What happened guys?Tell me what's the problem and what has changed?"
Every time I tried to learn something about him I heard the worst about him and his friends, I heard that they nagged a poor kid,him,Alexi,Vanya n' Yuri, I heard that he broke up with his girl and went with a whore her name was Yuli,Yuli,who sold crack in the 12th Street,and cops raped her so they wont bust her.
I looked through his connections and learned that he does not longer live in Corktown. I went cross the Hamilton Ave where he and his strange friends lived. I found no one from their crew over there but I found his old girl,her name was Katerina.
"Hey Katerina,do you know where Petros is?"
And she said "Let's not talk about it Sotiris."
I tell her "No,I want to learn,tell me what is happenin'."
Katerina told me "Sotiris,Petros is having troubles,so it's better if you'd never saw him again,you loved him so much then,now he is so sorrowful. He puts his feet up with Yuri n' the other dogs,they are twocking kids n' sellin' hashish n' sellin' mushrooms. I know that it's a pity but if you insist so much, he is outside the pool hall."
I went outside the pool hall and indeed in this place a lot of pickpocketing and drug dealing happened.Outside, it was full of stolen motorcycles n' bikes. There I saw Petros doing again the same shit,he noticed,understood who I was and walked towards me awkwardly, he was 5'1 but barely 110 pounds weight, his clothes were dirty,old and in tatters. He was junked, his eyes were swollen, his breath smelled bad and his teeth were rotten, his face old,his skin with holes, sitting on a stolen motor. We went away from the others and talked about the old days and after about 10 minutes I tell him
"You are not the Petros who I supported and who supported me."
And with this he opened his heart and talked to me.
"Everything started 12 years ago,when I left school, when someone raped by younger sister and now she is left inside the house on meds for the rest of her life. The happiness of my face died and I started hating life more n' more day by day. My mother worked like a slave from sunrise until sunset and my father was cheating here n' there. My mother wanted to protected my young sister from the father who abused her for what happened. I couldn't settle on a stable on and this was when I started stealing from young kids,I gave everything that I could manage to get for about 20$,just enough to get high with hashish,just enough to buy pills so my eyes could forget was I saw."
He got up and went back to his dogs,he promised that he will change and that when I see him again he will be okay. I too stood up and left to go to my apartment and relax.
After a while I learned that Petros was found dead outside the pool hall,when I heard the news I was shocked but the truth is that I was very happy about that, because like Katerina said he was indeed sorrowful, because where he is it's surely better, because his father won't hook up with every random whore that he meets, because his mother won't work like a slave and his sister would not be left from a rapist insane.
Να είσαι καλά Πέτρο, γαμιέται η κοινωνία... Καληνύχτα Πέτρο, Αναπαύσου Εν Ειρήνη...