Good-bye, Stella: Greektown will never be the same

My mom, a full-blooded Greek, sent me a newspaper clipping the other day.
It was a story that appeared in the Free Press on Jan. 21 about Stella Perris, the “queen of Greektown,” who died at the age of 97.
Dozens came out for the homeless, schizophrenic woman’s funeral, held at the same Greek Orthodox church in downtown Detroit where, 32 years ago, I was baptized. The fact that anyone showed up for the funeral was a surprise considering Stella was best known for wearing a tattered green army jacket and screaming Greek obscenities at passersby on Monroe Street. It was surmised she also had Tourette’s syndrome.
But Stella was a fixture, evidenced by all those who showed up to mourn her. Almost all Detroit media outlets carried something about her death.
She was known to everyone, but when I was a kid, I was definitely known to her.
My mom attached a note to the clipping she sent that read, “John, it’s safe to go back to Greektown.”
You see, as a kid, I was a marked little man.
No matter what we were doing or where we were at, Stella would find me. Usually, she’d be huddled in a dark alley or doorway, quietly going through her plastic bags. Until she saw me. If we were walking in a large family group, she’d ignore the rest of them and focus her attention entirely on me.
And scream at me.
My goodness, could she scream.
She’d point at me and holler in Greek, which I couldn’t understand.
I was terrified of Stella even though I was probably bigger than her by the time I was ten.
Two Stella run-ins stick out the most in my memory.
The first one is when Stella found me after a debacle on Easter had already shaken my budding nerves. I was probably around 7 years old.
Easter, if you didn’t know, is very big for the Greeks. There is a large midnight church ceremony after which we traditionally have a dinner or go out to eat. If my family decided to go to the downtown church, we’d inevitably end up at the Laikon Cafe, our favorite Greektown establishment for lamb and rice pilaf.
I liked Easter because I was allowed to stay up until 2 a.m. Maybe the clairvoyant Stella knew I would stay out much later when I got older, and was giving me a preliminary dose of grief for my own good. Who knows?
My parents, brother and an aunt and uncle sat in a booth next to window facing the street. In the booth directly next to us, two non-Greek (”whites” we Greeks -- even half-Greeks like myself -- call them) men and two women were whooping it up, having a good ole time. They ordered everything on the menu, including a half-dozen bottles of wine. They were loud and obnoxious. They definitely hadn’t come from church.
One couple left before the bill came.
When the curly-haired waiter, who spoke with a thick accent, came to give the check to the remaining couple, they pretended to fight with each other. They fought with the waiter. They didn’t want to pay.
“You paay!” yelled the waiter.
The man at the booth grabbed the littered table and angrily heaved it in our direction a few feet away, where it slammed against our table, a gesture of how much he really did not want to pay. My brother and I had lifted our fingers up just in time so they weren’t smashed.
The man proceeded to scream and yell. He and the waiter got into a scuffle, a little farther away from our table, resulting in a broken window in the door. The curly-haired Greek waiter yelled obscenities in his thick accent the entire time. The Detroit police finally showed up.
So, after witnessing this random display of violence, my 7-year-old self was ready to call it a night. But as we were walking to the parking garage, Stella found me. Even though there were six of us, she hunched down, looked at me and started pointing and screaming. My mom held my hand, tugged me down the sidewalk, and calmed me down when we got to the car.
The second Stella instance I remember was when the same aunt and uncle I was with that night were married at the downtown church around the same time. Stella showed up with all her plastic bags filled, twenty-five plastic barrettes in her hair, all different colors, and the green Army jacket with medals and pins stuck all over it. I waited for Stella to do something horrible to interrupt the ceremony, but she didn’t. She stayed in the entryway, fiddled with her bag, until a gentle church worker came and escorted her out.
I’d still see Stella in my young adult forays into Greektown, but I don’t think she remembered me. She no longer even batted an eye.
I figured she died long ago; she seemed very old when I was a kid. Seeing all the people who showed up for the funeral made my heart swell. While she terrified me as a child, Stella taught me that she and her conditions were things to be respected and understood. That we should make an attempt at understanding all people and respect them.
My thoughts go out to Stella’s family, which I didn’t know she had until reading the Free Press story. Mental illness is a terrible thing to deal with.
So, good-bye, Stella. Greektown will never be the same.