The House of Atreus

by Geno Petro

Chicago Broker Owner Realtor | RE 2.0 Blogger

Author website

I watch him, through the French terrace doors in the living room, as he ambles across the sidewalk and up the limestone steps of my still unsold 1.5 million dollar McMansion. He double parked his Escalade next to my X3 without bothering to put on his flashers, its mere shadow swallowing my embarrassingly sensible Bimmer. He’s wearing an Urlacher jersey, number 54, size XXL would be my guess. It’s tight. Squirrels scatter and birds empty the barren trees into the charcoal, cloudless drape that’s been hanging for a year over this soon to be expired listing. For some reason I immediately re-calculate my own net worth like I always do when this guy shows up. It only takes a few seconds.

“Still got this Moose?” he asks, smiling. Our inside joke. The ‘Talking Moose,’ my unsold 6 bedroom Behemoth jammed shoulder to shoulder into a block of Chicago brick bungalows.

“Last day,” I tell him. “If Jesus Christ doesn’t walk through the door in the next half hour the Builder is moving his family and all his in-laws in.”

He looks at me as if to ask ‘hey, what am I, chopped…?’ I’ve written about this guy before, a derivatives trader at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. He calls me Dino. He thinks I’m Greek. He knows a lot of Greeks down at the Merc, he tells me again although I’m quite certain he’s probably never read one.

“So,” I begin. “A lot has gone apeshit since the last time we spoke.” And it has. In the past month the whole world economy has been thrown off its axis. This we all know.

“Body bags, dude,” he says. “Go long on body bags.” I know he’s kidding but I still ponder the notion as I imagine turning my Wachovia water into wildcat wine in one frenzied trading session. I think back over the last 500 days on this Open House assignment and wonder if he hasn’t been leaving me obtuse investment tips all along.

“I’m just a sniper,” he continues. “I’m a sniper in a grassy knoll…”

“Nice ride,” I say, motioning to his Escalade, changing the subject; lowering the conversational bar to a subject of under six-figure commodities, like cars and lottery tickets. Things I can more easily relate to. “Kind of a Moose in its own right,” I add.

“It’s a hybrid,” he says quickly. He’s a last word guy, this derivatives trader. “New toy.”

I think back to a Christmas morning when I was four or five. At the time, I was an only child and both of my parents worked full-time jobs. I spent most of my waking hours being shuffled back and forth between the families of my less financially fortunate aunts and uncles who took turns getting paid to babysit me during the weekdays. Each had a dozen or so kids of their own, my cousins; Vatican I casting its own indelible shadow in the form of more hungry mouths to feed.

On this particular morning my own small, birth controlled family unit stopped by one of the houses for some Christmas cheer. Under their tree were just two toys– one doll for the girls, and one toy airplane for the boys. The airplane was already broken. “First one up gets the prize,” I remember my uncle saying. He was a security guard at a steel mill.

They had a cramped house already full of broken toys. Cars with no wheels. Dolls with no arms. Guns with no handles. Broken toys and kids everywhere.

I figure my trader friend comes from such a family. I don’t know why, I just do. He’s standing in front of me now…

“Hybrid,” I say nodding my head in approval. “Good choice. Nice toy.”

“I just came in to use the head. Do you mind?” He brushes past me and into the powder room. “Locked myself out of the house again and my teeth are floating,” he calls back without closing the door. I brace myself for the sounds that are about to follow…

One time in the early 1960s, my favorite cousin stayed over at our house for the weekend. He was bigger and tougher than anyone I had ever met during my first years on this earth and I always felt safe when he was around; although thinking back, he himself was only six or seven. We’d walk through my working class neighborhood and he would just glare at the same Irish kids who would normally crack me in the head when I was alone. And being an only child in a tribe of Catholics, I was always alone. (Two sisters would come a few years later, their own destinies not yet downloaded into the parochial rhythm queue.)

At the end of that long ago weekend, when it was time for my cousin to go home, my uncle stopped him cold with a backhand as they were exiting our front door. I froze in the hallway looking up at my father’s oldest brother, the biggest Petro of us all.

“Okay Slick,” he said. “Empty your pockets.”

And my cousin did. Handfuls of my smallest toys hit the floor. Army men. Plastic farm animals. Marbles. I don’t know why I was the one who started crying but I did. And not because of the toys or the roguish act. Because of the unfairness and gravity of life, period. I tried to explain that I gave the meaningless trinkets to him but my soggy words went unheard, overshadowed. Foreshadowed.

My cousin didn’t cry although everybody in that tiny Levittown vestibule knew what was in store for him when they got back to the car. That particular Petro never cried. Even today, after so many funerals and family heartaches later, he’s still the toughest guy I know, now a security guard, too…of sorts……

I empty my own pockets of the McMansion keys for the last time, leaving them on the granite island countertop in the kitchen. I set the alarm, kill the lights, and pull the locked door shut behind me once and for all. As I pull away from the curb it suddenly occurs to me that I didn’t check the toilet seat in the powder room. I don’t recall if I even heard a flush. I can’t imagine that a sniper would ever take the time to put a toilet seat down in a grassy knoll. Not when there’s so much trump to knock down and so few trading hours in which to do it. Not when his teeth are floating.