He also met his future wife in Greek school, a Greek-American girl named Diana Perparos, whose father John owned several dry cleaning and shoe repair stores in Chicago.
If a boy didn't have ten cents for this repast he went hungry, for he dared not bring a sandwich from home made of the spiced meats our families ate.
One of our untamed games was to seek out the owner of a pushcart or a store, unmistakably an immigrant, and bedevil him with a chorus of insults and jeers.
For that reason I led a raid on the small, shabby grocery of old Barba Nikos, a short, sinewy Greek who walked with a slight limp and sported a flaring, handlebar mustache.
The boys slapped my shoulders in admiration, but it was a hollow victory that rested like a stone in the pit of my stomach.At age 11 Petrakis contracted tuberculosis.
He later wrote, "Those two years were a strange, intense period for me, weeks and months of boredom, excitement, discovery, despair, and terror.
As a grown man he would later refer to books as "a refuge ... a sanctuary against a growing depression bred by inactivity" (from his Song of My Life, p. 18).
[8] Learning of this, his father brought him back to Chicago and enrolled him in a parochial school which specialized in disciplining troublesome youths, but where Petrakis lasted only two weeks.
Starting when he was 16 years old, he and an older betting buddy would study the Daily Racing Form while his parents thought he was attending school.
In his 2014 autobiography Song of My Life, Petrakis recounts how he pawned his brother's suits, sold his sister's books, and stole from cash registers to get money to feed his habit.
[10] One morning, he recalls, he went to his father, who never refused him money, and borrowed $200—the parish priest's whole monthly salary—from him in order to pay the gas and electric bills on the studio apartment where he was living with his wife, who was pregnant.
[12] Lacking a high school diploma, he worked as a Railway Express baggage handler, a steel mill worker, a customer service rep at a manufacturer of auto waxes and furniture polishes, a beer truck driver, a clothes presser in a dry-cleaning plant, a real estate salesman, an advertising copywriter, and a junior-level speechwriter for executives at U.S. Steel.
He also entered the restaurant business, owning and operating a small lunchroom at 13th Street and Indiana Avenue in Chicago called Art's Lunch.
In 1966 Petrakis made his first international success with the appearance of his novel A Dream of Kings, which won him a nomination for the National Book Award for Fiction for the second year in a row.
A Dream of Kings was on the New York Times Best Seller list for 12 weeks, translated into 12 languages, and made into a Hollywood film of the same name.
"[15] The film of A Dream of Kings was released in 1969 by National General Pictures and was directed by Daniel Mann, who had previously worked with actors Burt Lancaster, Anna Magnani and Elizabeth Taylor.
I felt myself part of some luminous confederacy that encompassed all the good poets and artists who had ever lived, an affiliation linked to some divinity in heaven or on earth.
Not yet knowing that the ALS diagnosis would prove to be incorrect, Petrakis decided he would not wait passively for the crippling decay of the disease.
"[17] And when he wrote Ghost of the Sun, the 1990 sequel to A Dream of Kings, he depicted all three of the neurologists visited by the now-old, now-sick Matsoukas as near-barbarians.