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Sunday, March 09, 2003

By Bob Batz Jr., Post-Gazette Staff Writer

Early on the morning of Jan. 2, while opening his Greek restaurant on Sixth Street, Downtown, Christos Melacrinos opened the back door to the alley and pulled a man out of the trash.

Christos Melacrinos beams as he embraces Richard Sesek at the apartment Christos and his son-in-law Dimitrios Mavrogeorgis rented for him in January. Before then, "Ricky," as they knew him, lived in the alley behind Christos' Downtown Greek restaurant and was "the worst homeless I ever saw in my life," Christos says. He and Dimitrios invited him in and helped him get clean. "Now he look beautiful!" (Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette)

He knew the man only as "Ricky," as he'd heard him called -- one of the hard-drinking homeless people who lived behind the Dumpsters on the bend in Mentor Way.

Christos had seen this long-haired bum regularly over the past four years, sometimes several times a day, when taking out the garbage. Seeing him out there, wasted, made Christos angry. But he and his son-in-law, Dimitrios Mavrogeorgis, frequently gave him food and sometimes said a few words to him. Something about Ricky seemed especially unsuited to the street. Christos always told him, in his stubborn Greek accent, "You no belong to the alley!"

This morning -- of the first business day of the new year -- would be a little different.

Ricky was awake, a sweatshirt-hooded figure crouched on a flattened cardboard box under the two heat-blowing exhaust vents. His friends were gone. His sleeping bag had been stolen days earlier, so he'd huddled in his clothes: a denim jacket, 10 shirts, five pants, five pairs of socks. Last night's half gallon of vodka was wearing off. He stood as he heard Christos' door unlocking and braced to be yelled at.

"You no belong to the alley!" Christos barked. But then he did something he'd never done. He demanded: "Come in with me!"

Ricky was dazed. He'd never been inside Christos' Mediterranean Grill and thought the guys there were afraid of him. But they'd never done him harm. He wondered, What's he up to?

It was so cold.

Ricky took a step.

He followed Christos inside.

"We going to help you," Christos said. He started down some stairs and told Ricky, "Come."

Ricky was so filthy, so putrid, that Christos led him straight to the basement bathroom and told him, "Take a shower." Ricky hadn't washed in months. He undressed, shirt by crusty shirt, and stepped under the hot spray. Christos brought more soap, dish soap, even laundry detergent, plus a scrub brush, and went upstairs. The water ran for more than an hour.

Christos left a trash bag for Ricky's clothes. He also left a brand-new outfit that he and Dimitrios had purchased at the Downtown Lazarus department store: A long-sleeved blue polo shirt, black pants, black boots. Ricky put it on and walked up the stairs, wondering, What do they want with me?

Christos and Dimitrios sat Ricky at the back table and gave him a cup of coffee. Ricky trembled. They gave him a new green wool coat, a scarf and gloves. "Now," Christos ordered, "you follow me."

Ricky, sensing he was safe, followed Christos up to Smithfield Street and into the Pittsburgh Beauty Academy. Christos, who'd already scissored off clumps of Ricky's wild beard, told the stylist to shave it all off and cut his tangled hair short.

Back at the restaurant, looking into one of the mirrors that hang beside photos of Christos' family, Ricky couldn't believe he looked so good. Again Christos said, "Follow me," without saying where.

Ricky let Christos lead him over the Allegheny River, across the North Side, to Mercy Providence Hospital. He realized what was about to happen. He realized he wanted it to.

"Tell me your real name," Christos said inside.

Ricky, who on the street also went by "Mike," told him: Richard Sesek.

Christos talked with a nurse. Then he stood as Ricky told the nurse how he wanted to stop drinking, and how if he didn't get help, he'd kill himself. Ricky had considered suicide many times. He also knew that would get him admitted.

Before going back to the restaurant to serve lunch, Christos promised to call Ricky every day.

And he did, on a fourth-floor hospital pay phone, right at 2 p.m. Over the next two weeks, he followed Ricky's progress as he dried out and adjusted to medication for his symptoms of paranoia.

Richard Sesek wishes he had a "before" photo of himself. It was his idea to get this 1991 mug shot from the Allegheny County Police.

On Jan. 16, when Christos called, Ricky told him he was about to be released. He had no idea to where or to what.

Christos said, "Come over to the restaurant. We'll have a party."

Christos, Dimitrios and Ricky sat at the back table, eating garlicky moussaka and creamy hummus and Ricky didn't know what. This was the first time they really talked. Ricky wasn't good at it.

"Why me?" he kept asking.

"You no belong to the alley," Christos kept saying.

He and Dimitrios gave him a piece of cake with a candle in it. They gave him more presents: Blue jeans. A watch. Even a matching silver ring, with a flat black center set off by two sparkling chips. So he'd look like "normal people," they said.

Christos was firm as a father. "We like you, and we try to help you as much as we can. But you have to be strong."

Then he told Ricky to get into Dimitrios' Jeep. "We have another surprise."

They drove about five miles to Brookline and parked in front of a big yellow brick house. Christos opened the leaded-glass door, handed Ricky the key and said, "This is yours." He laughed at the shock on Ricky's face. Ricky couldn't speak.

Christos and Dimitrios had rented the first-floor studio apartment starting Jan. 1, and furnished it for him with an orange floral-print sofa bed, pans and dishes, a little Zenith TV that they turned on to show that it was color. They'd stocked the refrigerator with food and milk. They brewed coffee and broke out Greek cookies.

Holy cow, Ricky thought. What did the good Lord bring me?

How it came to this

Richard J. Sesek used to have his own house, TVs, cars -- a Corvette and a souped-up Vega. As he puts it, "I had it going on."

But the life story the 46-year-old tells is clouded by alcoholism that started when he was a teenager in McKeesport. Some details are clouded, too, but he remembers how his "white picket fence dreams" started to fall apart when he lost his welding job with the 1987 closing of National Tube Works.

He split from the woman he'd been living with in North Versailles, and moved into the other side of his parents' duplex. He'd land other jobs, but kept getting laid off.

The low point was his mother's death in 1989. His father, who had Alzheimer's, had died the year before. His brother was in the Navy, so Richard cared for his mother through her grief and diabetes and colon cancer, and when the cancer took her, he lost his best friend. He had nothing left to care about.

He was as noxious as his Harley. He'd hooked up with another woman, and they had two sons, but she eventually left him. In 1992, his troubles with the law, mostly drug counts, got more serious when he was charged with hitting one son and leaving the other unattended. He pleaded guilty to simple assault and child endangerment and wound up serving a one-to-five-year sentence in state prison in Pittsburgh and elsewhere from March 1995 to September 1998.

He'd had a taste of homelessness before that, after a fire destroyed his house. The first time he slept outside wasn't bad. Like camping.

After prison, he had nowhere to go. So he bounced back and forth, between the streets and rented rooms and other temporary quarters -- hospitals, rehab, jail.

He managed to hang onto a job he'd gotten as a cleaner at Three Rivers Stadium. He'd wash himself and put on his uniform at work, even sleep there at night.

For a while, he settled with a woman in Mount Oliver and stopped drinking, until she left him in 2000. That was the year the stadium was imploded, along with his job. He hit the skids.

His drinking buddies had introduced him to Mentor Way, or "Grease Alley," behind the Cultural District's restaurant row. The skinny, L-shaped alley is a homeless hot spot because of the sheltered passage around the exhaust vents. That 20-foot-wide corner of sticky concrete became Ricky's home.

His days there stretched into months. But he talks about how slowly an hour passes when you're just trying to survive.

A couple of times he almost didn't. Once, passed out, he rolled into the snow and was lucky that Operation Safety Net's Dr. Jim Withers found him with only severe frostbite. Several times he was beaten and robbed for a dollar or two he'd panhandled on the Roberto Clemente Bridge or in front of the CVS drug store on Liberty Avenue. He hated how some passersby treated him as less than human, but he always could hustle enough for booze.

"I had no forward fortitude, I guess you'd call it," he says. "I just got satisfied with what I had, which was nothing. And went with that."

Love and money

The 61-year-old Christos recalls seeing Ricky with his face so bruised and swollen that he feared his eyes would pop out. Another time, attackers dunked a drunken Ricky head-first into a barrel of spent cooking grease.

"Disgusting," Christos mutters.

He felt so sorry for him.

	Christos Melacrinos, left, and Richard Sesek share a laugh inside Christos' Mediterranean Grill on Sixth Street, Downtown. Richard says their friendship "gets stronger every day because I see he's for real about what he's saying. At first I thought it was just a shower, then back to the alley." (Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette)

He'd first noticed him in the alley after he bought the restaurant in 1997, after having waited tables there for 17 years. This guy had stood out because his clothes were clean. He'd disappear for a while, then return, looking steadily worse.

Christos was never homeless, but he knew hard times. Growing up in the 1940s and '50s on the Greek island of Ikaria, he was the second of seven children, and learned to cook struggling to feed everybody with very little.

He left to seek a better life when he was 14. He started working as a cook on oil tankers. He crisscrossed the oceans, later working on Aristotle Onassis' private yacht. He kept sending money home.

In 1965, he jumped ship in Newark. He met Ikarians who helped him meet one from Donora, and two years later he married her. They settled in Brookline. She worked as a teacher, he as a waiter.

After renting for a year, the couple bought a house, and raised a son and daughter in it. The daughter met Dimitrios in Ikaria, and after he came to Pittsburgh to marry her, he worked in Christos' new restaurant. It was thriving.

Dimitrios -- bearded but baby-faced, serene, usually silent -- mostly worked the close kitchen. Christos -- platinum-haired, handsome, sometimes as gruff as he can be glib -- hustled in the narrow, dark-wood-paneled dining room, which is filled with his sepia family photos and other treasured artifacts of his past.

Many times, the two sat at the back table and discussed in Greek the guy in the alley. But although they'd helped plenty of fellow Greeks, they hadn't done anything for the homeless and didn't know what to do for him.

Before Christmas, Christos talked with Dimitrios again, about how well life was going for them heading into 2003, and said, "We have to do something really good this year." They worked out their own plan to help Ricky -- to really help him.

Christos' philosophy on homeless assistance is, "One dish of food is not enough." He also believes money alone only fuels more drinking or drugs.

That's what most people would do, if anything: Drop coins into a cup. Giving Ricky the cleanup and the clothes and especially the apartment is so extraordinary that it's hard to believe.

But Christos says none of that has been as important as their time and attention.

They didn't work with any agency. Didn't check Ricky's rap sheet. Christos says they just went by the look in his blue eyes.

"These people need love."

Friends and family know that Christos is a warm person, someone whose face and voice light up as he hugs a customer he hasn't seen in a while. But he's matter-of-fact when asked why he opened his arms so wide to a stranger.

What he told Ricky, after the hospital, is that he should succeed because America is his country. He and Dimitrios came here with nothing, not even English. They worked hard. Christos sent his children to college and brought over many relatives to live in Brookline.

"Look what we have now," Christos told him. "You have to work hard, that's all."

Ricky was a hard sell.

The first week, he wanted to be at the restaurant and the apartment. But he also wanted to roam the streets. He and Christos argued.

One night, Ricky came into the restaurant drunk. "This is no good," Christos told him. "I knew you wouldn't keep me!" Ricky snarled. Christos confided to Dimitrios, "I don't think we can make it."

But they gave Ricky a second chance.

The next time, he tried to sneak in after just a few drinks, but Christos knew. He'd had enough and told Ricky, "Pick one: In or out!"

Ricky could tell he was serious.

He picked in.

Christos and Dimitrios have spent about $2,000 on him so far, including several trips to Lazarus sales and the $400 monthly rent on the apartment, and are committed to supporting him through June. They'd saved that money to fix up the restaurant. Christos says new chairs can wait.

All Christos wants is for Ricky to get on his feet, get a job he likes, his own place -- to get a life.

Opportunity to succeed

They call him Richard now, and he has a new routine.

Mornings at about 6:30, Dimitrios and Christos pick him up at his apartment and drive to the restaurant, where he spends most of every day with them.

Richard doesn't "work" there. Christos just gives him little tasks -- sweeping, clearing tables -- to keep his mind and hands busy.

Richard Sesek, standing in Mentor Way, the Downtown alley where he used to live, decided in January that he doesn't want to go back. "Life is arisen in my life again," he says now. (Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette)

Until recently, Richard left the restaurant at 9 a.m. each weekday to walk over to the North Side to Mercy Behavioral Health's outpatient "dual diagnosis" program for addiction and mental health issues. He spent until 3 p.m. there, mostly in intensive group therapy sessions.

He'd been in the program before but dropped out. This time, he told Christos, he felt "all that pain pouring out" and didn't miss a day.

Therapist Heather Kennedy said he was like a different person. He told her about Christos on Feb. 7, and was dumbfounded that someone cared about him -- a typical reaction for someone unused to that.

She and other staff members agreed that what the restaurateur is doing is positive, because he's giving Richard the opportunity to help himself. "We all said he should be nominated as a saint."

With her help, Richard got up the courage to tell his tale to the other patients. They cheered him on.

Two weeks ago, he "graduated" to the next phase, and now goes to a follow-up program that focuses on relapse prevention and symptoms management three days a week. Therapist Helen Sysko, whose mantra is that you get out of it only what you put in, says, "He seems to be trying to get the maximum benefit."

After the program lunch, Richard walks back to the restaurant and helps with the pre-theater dinner rush. Christos still gives him his medicine for his mental illness there, to make sure he gets the right dose, but doesn't mind if he goes out for a walk to blow off steam. If Richard feels an urge to drink, they talk about it.

After closing, Richard gets dropped off at his place, where he showers, watches TV or reads before falling asleep. On a mattress. In pajamas.

He's not the only one amazed by the way his life has turned around.

Shawn Leslie, a management trainee at Enterprise Rent-A-Car two doors up Sixth Street, had feared that the guy in the alley had frozen to death over the holidays. Then he saw him walking past -- hair cut, cleanly clothed, confident -- and waved him into his store.

"You look spectacular!" he said.

"Shawn," Richard said, "for the first time, I know it's a disease."

Christos loves it when someone in the neighborhood recognizes Richard as a former street person. And when they don't. On one of their walks, Christos stopped to buy wine at the nearby state liquor store. Richard didn't want to go in, mostly because he'd been thrown out. Christos insisted. They both laughed after nobody said a word.

Richard is as expert as treatment professionals about how hard recovery can be. "Three steps forward, two steps back," as Dr. Withers puts it. Or the other way around.

The Mercy Hospital internist, nationally recognized for taking medical care to Pittsburgh's streets, knows the homeless and cautions against unrealistic expectations of uninterrupted progress. But he knows Richard, too, and is heartened by his successes over the past two months, which he calls miraculous. "We had him on the radar as someone who was probably going to die."

	Melacrinos made a new start himself when he was the first in his family to leave his home island of Ikaria when he was 14. This photo of him as a teenager, which he keeps at the restaurant, is from a document that allowed him to work as a cook on oil tankers.

Hardly anyone would have known or cared. People who reach out to the homeless with both hands are rare, but Withers hears of them, including one manager of a Downtown Subway restaurant who let a man sleep inside her store and then work there so he could get his own apartment. While Withers also has heard negative, even tragic, outcomes, he is moved by the story unfolding at Christos' restaurant. "I do think that love conquers things."

One step at a time

In the quiet times at the restaurant, Christos and Richard sit at the back table, where they talk -- about what happened at therapy, about their lives, their moms. They have more in common than either imagined. They've become easy together, quick to laugh and to hug.

Richard's meaty face still is street-wise and furrows when he feels tight. But it's so much more expressive than it was, and is frequently, you might say, soft. He's always thanking Christos and Dimitrios with a respect that borders on awe. "There's so much love for me from these people, it's ridiculous."

Christos can't believe this is the same guy who could hardly speak, and he teases him: "Now you never shut up!"

Richard teases him back, about how with all the food he eats, "I'm gonna turn Greek, eh, Christos?"

They both know that their venture is a work in progress, and neither can be sure how it will play out.

Christos and Dimitrios haven't told many people, not even their wives. (When Christos' wife, Joanne, asked him where the green wool coat she gave him for Christmas is, he answered, "I gave it to a homeless" -- not untrue.) Christos still isn't worried about their families being mad. But at least one regular customer strongly disapproved from the start, asking him, "Why do you bother with him?"

Richard is used to doubt. Even he -- especially he -- knows the questions that hang over him. He says it: "Would you take someone from the street into your house?"

Christos acts as if he never doubted Richard can succeed. He says that since that first week, Richard has not touched a drop of alcohol (he keeps two of his old half bottles of vodka as sobering reminders).

He and Dimitrios have gotten to know him and they trust him, with money, with everything.

Richard trusts them back.

Talking about their relationship, Richard's eyes get wet, and he reaches over to slap Christos' hand.

On Wednesday, it was Dimitrios who got him choked up by announcing, so quietly that Richard could barely hear, "I have some old car for you." He's giving Richard his mid-1980s Pontiac to drive someday . Richard joked about taking them to dinner. "I'll be able to do that!"

It's not all sweetness and smiles.

Coming off the street means coming back to other problems, such as thousands of dollars of child support Richard never paid.

Alcoholism is a chronic condition that he must fight day by day, hour by hour. He credits his new medication with keeping his thoughts straight and cravings at bay, but alcohol is everywhere, and, "It's rough. I've got 31 years of drinking."

There are people on the street who would be only too happy to drink with him. On his first solo shopping trip to Lazarus the week before last, two guys held out bottles and invited, "You ready?"

When one man came to the window and beckoned for Richard, Christos shot to the door like a guard dog. "No, no, NO! You don't come to my restaurant anymore!"

Richard sat, shaking. He knows he has to avoid the dedicated drinkers but feels guilty for blowing off his friends. He doesn't have many. He doesn't have much.

He hasn't seen his sons or their mother for a long time, and doesn't think his brother, in Virginia, wants to hear from him. He hasn't yet had a chance to pick up the little plastic bag of his possessions a friend is keeping for him, which includes a photograph of his mother, and one of him and his brother in their school drill team uniforms in front of the house in McKeesport.

The "street family" he used to hang with is broken up, too. Rocky got his own apartment. Eddie's in jail. Gypsy, he heard, is dead. Richard can go to where her name is spray-painted on the wall when he takes out the trash, but he doesn't want to be in the alley for anything else. "I want a new life."

Some homeless people have asked Christos to help them, too, but he has had to say no.

"One by one," he says. "I have one now. I can't do any more." Though, he adds, slipping into using the nickname, "If Ricky be OK, maybe we'll try another one." He wishes other restaurants or individuals would "pick up" homeless people to help.

That may sound naive. As when Richard says, "I'm gonna stay clean." But they know those things can happen. A step forward is a step forward. As they say at the Alcoholics Anonymous meetings Richard goes to, one step at a time.

A new day

Another morning comes, and Richard wakes with the dawn, a vestige from all his mornings outside. He's off to the restaurant.

While Christos and Dimitrios fire up the ovens, Richard sits alone at the back table, sipping coffee from the beat-up plastic cup that he favors despite the beer logo (he just turns it away). He stares out across the unlit dining room and watches the traffic passing on Sixth Street as the world come to life. He thinks about his life, and of the scary time when he'll have to do it on his own.

Motherly in his apron, Christos makes and serves Richard a big breakfast: plates of cookies and olives and feta cheese, eggs scrambled with more feta and tomato, toasted and buttered Easter bread. Richard gets up and gets them each a napkin.

They eat and talk, about how in the spring, Christos and Dimitrios want to buy Richard a little gas grill to set up out front, and he can cook and sell chicken and lamb kebabs and keep the profits.

"You start little by little," Christos tells him.

"I can handle that," Richard says.

It's the morning of Feb. 26, and it's time to get moving. Christos has to open his business for another day. Richard has his business, too, to get himself to his program.

While Christos clears the dishes, Richard flips the hood of his sweatshirt over his head and zips up his new coat. He steps up to Christos, spreads his arms and demands, "Give me one for the road!"

They hold onto each other and squeeze.

Then Christos watches the man he pulled in the back door stride out the front door, going somewhere.