Atlantic Canada

Crackerjack in the Kitchen

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By Ed Staskus

   “I see you’ve made it back,” Michelle said. She was sporting retro eyeglasses and handcrafted rings on nearly every finger of every hand. Waiting tables, delivering three, four, and five plates at a time, is all hands on deck kind of work.

   “I want to try the pad Thai this time, after seeing the folks next to us digging into it the last time we were here,” Vera said.

   “That’s one of Emily’s best, definitely,” Michelle said. “Would you like to start with a drink?” She was one of three servers on the floor the mid-September evening Frank and Vera Glass were there for dinner. It was busy but nobody had to wait long for liquids and solids. The place was The Mill in New Glasgow on Prince Edward Island.

   “What is a good mixed drink?” Vera asked, running her eyes up and down the menu.

   “Everything is good, but Kim can mix up anything if we don’t have it on the list.”

   “What is Straight Shine?”

   “Shine.”

   “Like moonshine?”

   “Just like that. It’s our island-made moonshine.”

   “Like Ole Smoky in a mason jar?” Frank asked.

   “Not the same, it’s more like a margarita,” Michelle said.

   “That’s a step in the right direction.”

   “My God, I should moonshine,” Vera said. “My grandfather used to make his own vodka at home. All his friends from Lithuania, who escaped during the war, would come over on Sunday afternoons after church, drinking the rest of the day, yakking it up and singing their old country songs all night. I’ll try it, for sure”

   “Not for me,” Frank said, “I’ll have a pint, something IPA.”

   The Mill is in a two-story Dutch Colonial-like blue building built in 1896. It served as a community center and later as a courthouse, among its many incarnations. It was converted to a restaurant in the 1990s by the Larkin’s, nearby poultry farmers who are the largest turkey growers in the province.

   “We used to have a guy in shipping where I worked, in the warehouse, from West Virginia, who brought back moonshine every time he went home for a visit,” Frank said. Vera sipped her Straight Shine. “He always said you could tell it was good if you put a match to it and the flame burned blue. That meant it was good to go and wouldn’t make you go blind.”

   Michelle walked up and lit the tea candle on their table.

   “How is it?”

   “It looks good to me,” Vera said. “What I mean is, it tastes good.”

   When the Larkin’s transitioned out of the dining room business, The Mill stayed where it was when chef Emily Wells took over, putting her fusion-style stamp on the dining room. Diners soon put their stamp of approval on the fare.

   Vera ordered the stir-fried garlic ginger cilantro rice noodle fettucine pad Thai with lobster and Frank ordered the special, which was curry sweet potato soup, baby back ribs with mac and cheese, and dessert. It was East meets West meets Italy. Fusion cooking is the art of mixing ingredients and preparation styles from different cultures into a distinctive plate of tastiness.

   The window Frank and Vera were sitting at had gone dark by the time they finished their dinners, although Vera was still coming around the bend. She was a slow eater and her plate had been stacked. A quarter-moon in a cloudless sky reflected a milky light on the Clyde River below them in the hollow. Frank leaned back in his chair as Vera lifted a final forkful to her mouth.

   “Since we both ordered something new to us, why don’t we try something new for dessert, too?” Frank said.

   They had eaten at The Mill several times and usually ordered coffee and carrot cake after dinner, since the carrot cake was just about the best they had eaten anywhere.

   “It’s better than my mom’s, and she’s a pro,” Vera said.

   Vera’s mother was a freelance pastry chef in Cleveland, Ohio, providing sundry restaurants with sweet treats. During the holidays she made website-ordered Russian Napoleon cakes, shipping them frozen solid all around the country by Fed-Ex next-day air.

   “How about the chocolate cake that couple from Boston told us about?” Vera asked.

   “When we’re here we drive around the island,” the husband from Boston said. “We’ve eaten at a lot of restaurants but overall this is our absolute favorite. What’s so great about it? The unique combination of flavors and menu options, for one, and there’s not a deep fryer in the kitchen, for another thing. They’re dedicated to local sourcing, which means super fresh food and vegetables. Make sure to try the chocolate cake even if you’re full. It melts in your mouth.”

   He added that the portion was large, too, enough to share. Unlike some restaurants with a glowing reputation on Prince Edward Island, in the meantime serving prison camp portions at penthouse prices, The Mill gets it done with a square deal, even though it has as much, if not more, in the culinary arts to crow about.

   “Do you bake the chocolate cake here?” Vera asked.

   “Our baker does,” Michelle said.

   They ordered  a slice of the chocolate cake and two coffees. Michelle stopped at their table. She asked them how they liked the cake.

   “It’s totally delicious, the dark chocolate, if you want to let the baker know,” Frank said. A few minutes later a strapping youngster with disheveled hair walked up to their table. She said she was the baker and her name was Anna. She looked like she was maybe a sweet sixteen teenager.

   “You made this?” Frank asked, pointing to the half-eaten slice of cake he was sharing with his wife.

   “Yeah,” Anna said, wiping her hands on her apron.

   “Do you make the carrot cake, too?”

   “Yeah.”

   “This cake is what chocolate cake should taste like, up-to-the-minute,” “era said. “They can be boring, the same thing over and over again. This is definitely a bomb cake, in more ways than one.”

   “You seem awfully young to be making something this good,”  Frank said.

   “Yeah,” Anna said, shrugging and smiling.

   “How old are you?”

   ““I was 15 years old when I first started cooking here two years ago.. I came in to work one day, I was bussing tables, and my boss said, you’re scaring everybody out there. You have to go into the kitchen. From that point on I’ve worked in the kitchen.”

   “Scaring everybody?” 

   “Yeah, they said my personality was too big.”

   “Too big?” 

   “I was just barely fifteen. How scary could I be? I guess I can be scary sometimes. Nothing’s really changed.”

   “I told her when she worked out front that she was scaring the customers with her huge personality,” Kim, the mixologist, said “Now that she’s in the kitchen she can still be scary, I’ll teel you. She’s come up with nicknames for all of us. We won’t talk about that, though. It can get gross.”

   “What did you guys eat?” Anna asked..

   “She had the Thai and I had the special,” Frank said. “We often have the big seafood chowder bowl, the unofficial one.” 

   “Ahhh,” Anna said.

   “I’ve heard you have a name for it in the kitchen.”

   “We have a nickname for it.”

   “That would be Big Ass Bowl?”

   “Yeah.”

   “I always taste orange in the soup,” Vera said.

   “Yeah, there are orange peels, marinated, and bay leaves, that we take out right before service. We make our own fish broth.”

   The restaurant, brainchild of Emily Wells, who was named one of Canada’s top chefs by the Matador Network in 2016, serves local food made with global flair. She works in an adaptive vein, adapting her recipes to what’s in place and on time. “We’re buying local lettuce, local tomatoes,” Emily said. “A huge chunk of it is seafood since it’s seafood season.” A graduate of the first class at the Culinary Institute of Canada, she cut her teeth in kitchens in Ontario and later made a name for herself at The Dunes in Brackley Beach.

   “I’ve been at it for thirty-five years,” she said.

   “Oh, I’ve got mussels on the stove, back in a minute,” Anna said, striding out of the dining room.

   “I thought Emily was making the desserts, or they were buying them from some high-end bakery,” Vera said.

   “If that teenager is the pastry chef, all I can say is, she’s totally up to speed,”  Frank said.

   “Do you make all the desserts?” Vera asked when Anna came back to their table.

   “Yeah, I’m a line cook and the baker.”

   “My mother is a pastry chef. You’re darned good.”

   “How did you learn to bake so well?” Frank asked.

   “Emily taught me. I‘m a quick study. I learned a lot from my grandmother, too I used to spend all my time with her when I was a kid. She taught me how to pickle and bake.”

   Not everybody is good with pastry, not by any means. Not even celebrity chefs. “I make no bones about it,” says Michael Symon, chef, author, and restaurateur. “I have no understanding of pastry whatsoever.”

   “Honestly, I hate to say this,” Anna said, “but my aunt makes an even better carrot cake than I do.”

   “You’re early on to be nearly as good as your aunt,” Frank said.

   “Most of our staff is young,” Anna said. “Everybody in the kitchen is under 20, except Andrea and Emily. We have a 19-year-old, another 17-year-old, and a 13-year-old, who I   is my sister. Luke, our other prep, has three younger brothers who work here.”

   “It’s like the family line on the line,” Frank said..

   If you are under sixteen in the province of Prince Edward Island and want to work, you must have permission from your parents, must work only between 7 AM and 11 PM, and not work in an environment that is harmful to your health, safety, or moral development, among other things. If you are over sixteen, those limits don’t apply.

   Sometimes known as the Million-Acre Farm, farming is king on the island. Farming for a living is hard work. You probably don’t need a gym membership. There are some advantages. You are your own boss, you can go to work in boots and a t-shirt, and you eat like a king.

   “I started as a dishwasher,” Anna said.

   Working the dish pit means long hours on your feet, getting wet a lot, and ending the day smelling like food and soap. It’s not markedly different than farming, except farming is at the head of the line and washing dishes is at the end of the line.

   “The kids are great,” Kim said. “Ours is a teaching kitchen, so they get an education, and get paid. They all have a great work ethic. The little hostess, she’s fifteen, a crackerjack like Anna. It’s good to see that they want to work. I’ve worked in other places, and it’s like pulling teeth, all standing around. Here, they’re eager to learn and do.”

   “A lot of people, their idea of baking is buying a ready-made mix and throwing in an egg,” Vera said. “I make carrot cake at home, but it’s just carrots and stuff. One of our cats likes a piece now and then. Yours is both simple and complex. It’s subtle, really fine,”

   “The main spices we use are ginger, cloves, and cinnamon, and a bit of all-spice, and that’s about it.”

   “The cake isn’t heavy, which is what I like.”

   “There’s pineapple in it, too.”

   “The frosting is terrific.”

   “I was supposed to whip up more frosting yesterday, but I couldn’t come to work,” Anna said. “I decided my cat must have died.”

   “Oh, my gosh, that’s too bad!”  Vera said. “What happened to make you decide that?”

   “She was an outdoor cat. I had her since I was six, I came home one day and asked, where’s my cat, but nobody had seen her for days. It’s been a month now. I sat outside yesterday in my lawn chair until it got dark, hoping she would come back but she never did. I’m pretty sure she got eaten by a coyote.”

   After paying the bill, Frank and Vera lingered outside at the rail on the front deck. The band that had been playing in the upstairs loft was in the parking lot, still hooting it up. The night air was damp but brisk. The moon hovered in the inky sky. Across the street lights glowed over the bay doors of the New Glasgow Volunteer Fire Department.

   “That girl might be one of the best 17-year-old pastry chefs no one has ever heard of,” ” Frank said.

   “Between the known and the unknown, what else is there?” Vera said.

   “That moonshine seems to have gone to your head,” Frank said.

   “Ha, ha, ha. Anyway, she’s got a big smile, big energy, and some big cake talent. Somebody will hear about her, sooner or later.”

    There’s always a ‘Surprise Inside’ every box of Cracker Jack, Frank thought.

   They walked to the end of the deck leading to the side lot. Fluorescent lights blazed in the windows of the kitchen. Dishes clattered in sinks, the kitchen staff having a gab fest as they cleaned up. They heard high-spirited laughter, which followed them down the steps and a stretch of parking lot gravel to their car. A red fox chasing a brown rabbit ran past them into the bushes. 

   “You know how they say you are what you eat,” Frank said.

   “Of course.”

   “This is as good a place to be what you eat as any.”

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street  http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

“A Cold War thriller that captures the vibe of mid-century NYC.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

Late summer, New York City, 1956. The Mob on the make. The streets full of menace. President Eisenhower on his way to Brooklyn for the opening game of the World Series. A killer waits in the wings. A private eye working out of Hell’s Kitchen scares up the shadows.

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CRPSFPKP

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Made in Cleveland

Head Over Heels

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By Ed Staskus

   It was wetter than not wet the front end of summer and too muddy to ride the single tracks in the Rocky River valley. It rained on nine days the first two weeks of July. Instead of the single tracks, I rode my Specialized on the all-purpose trail and left my Schwinn hanging in the garage. The Schwinn was outfitted for dirt, with front shocks and a low stem. The Specialized was outfitted with road tires, knobby on the outside and smooth rolling on the flat side, making for better riding on asphalt.

   It made for even faster riding down Hogsback Lane, which is the entryway off Riverside Dr. into the valley. It is laid down on a steep shale hill. It’s about a half mile to the bottom. When the shale slumps and slides, the two-lane surface crumbles, and it’s then prudent to keep your eyes fixed on the road. Hunched over the handlebars I could hit 40 MPH downhill, no problem, unless I feathered the brakes, which I usually did, lessening the chances of flying over the handlebars. That would have been a grave misadventure.

   I rode alone most of the time, especially that summer because my brother Rick, with whom I occasionally rode, was getting married. He said he didn’t have much time to get on his bike anymore. “I’ve got a lot going on,” he explained. He had been married once before, but it only lasted two months. He wanted to make his next marriage work out better.

   “I don’t want him racing that crazy hill and crashing,” his fiancée Amy said. She didn’t want a train wreck walking down the aisle with her. She and Rick had met earlier in the year on a blind date. One whirlwind after another led to the one-way street they were on.

   “You be careful, too” my wife said watching me hitching up in the backyard.”

   The summer of 1995 was hot, in the high 80s when it wasn’t in the high 90s. I could have ridden the single tracks, since they had dried up going into August, but I stayed on the all-purpose trails. Towards the end of one week, after getting home from work, I rode twelve miles out, almost all the way to Berea. It was on the way back that I passed a man wearing a red helmet. Inside a few minutes the red helmet was behind me, drafting, but when I slowed down for a car at the crossroads to the entrance of Little Met, he slipped past me when the car paused to let us go by. The trail went up a long hill. I finally caught up at the top.

   He tucked in behind me and we rode to where the trail zigzagged through some curves  where he got sloppy. He tried to pass two women on roller blades, except on an inside-out curve, and when another bike came up on the other side, he had to slalom wide onto the grass. He had to loop back. I waited for him to catch up.

   “That was a good pace,” he said before I peeled away to go home, while he kept going his own way. Pedaling up Hogsback Lane is a long slog, which is what I did, shifting into lower gears. By the time I got close to the crest I was on the verge of stalling. When I made it to flat land I sucked air.

   The next weekend Rick had an appointment for a haircut at Planet 10, on W. 9th St., and wanted to ride there. We rode through Ohio City to Church St. He pointed out an old church whose rectory had been converted into a recording studio.“That’s where we’re having our reception,” he said. Amy was a sometime actress and sometime singer. She had the looks and the voice. She made a living doing nails, since nailing roles in Cleveland wasn’t a paying proposition. Her sometime showbiz was her drinking money.

   Rick was Catholic and of Lithuanian stock, like me, but they were getting married in an Episcopalian church instead of the ethnic church where we had grown up. Even though Amy was an atheist, her well-off grandmother wasn’t and wanted her to be married in a house of God. Amy didn’t like the old Lithuanian church in North Collinwood, so it was going to be someplace else.

   We went south on W. 25th St., crossed the bridge to Jacobs Field, and rode to the Warehouse District. The bride-to-be was still all right with Rick riding city streets, but not any farther into the near east side, which I often did, to Cleveland Hts. through the ghetto along Cedar Rd. She quashed that by stamping her foot. “I don’t want him getting killed by any porch monkey,” she said.

   Rick pushed his bike into Planet 10’s lobby and I rode away. After zigzagging around downtown, on my way home, stopping at a narrow strip of grass near the Hope Memorial Bridge, squeezing a drink from my water bottle, I saw a black woman with shopping bags easing herself down to the ground in front of an RTA sign. She looked up at me and smiled. One of her teeth was chipped. The woman might be going back to the ghetto where she would draw up plans to ambush Rick if he rode his bike past her house.

   I was standing outside my garage when Rick and Amy pulled up in her baby blue Ford Tempo. His bike was sticking out of the trunk. The trunk was bungee corded shut. “Jerry screwed up Rick’s appointment,” she complained. “He’s so unprofessional.” She jabbed the air with a finger. She was angry. Planet Ten was owned and operated by a gay man named Jerry who was a junkie. He lived near Gordon Square where he could score smack in the blink of an eye. He was up-and-down on any given day. He was good with clippers and shears, though, when he was on the up-and-up.

   It was mid-week before I rode back into the valley and got on the dirt trails that branch off from the horse stables at Puritas Rd. They were dry where they were level, but they weren’t level over much. I had to ford a stream where a tree had fallen. I jumped some baby stumps, and went sideways once. When I got home I got the hose and sprayed cold water on myself. It was a hot day and I had gotten hot.

   My wife and I drove to Amy’s bridal shower that weekend, which was at her best friend’s house in Avon Lake. Wendy was a big-faced woman married to a ruddy-faced Englishman who was a barge pilot on the Mississippi River. It was very steamy even though it was just barely August. I was sitting on a leather sofa in the air-conditioned family room when I noticed a small dog on the coffee table. I couldn’t tell if it was a dog dead asleep or a dead dog who had been stuffed. When I reached for whatever the thing was, it snapped at my fingers.

   “You better watch out,” Wendy said. “He’s blind, so he bites at everything.”

   I went for a ride after we got home. Twilight was turning to dusk by the time I got back. Snapper, our Maine Coon cat, came running out of the neighbor’s backyard. Just when I was ready to close the garage door, Rick pulled into the driveway. Snapper ran the other way. He didn’t trust my brother. I had gotten to not exactly trusting Rick anymore, either. He was always explaining something or other.

   “Can I borrow your lawn mower?” he asked.

   “All right, but bring it back.”

   My brother was notorious for never returning borrowed tools. He had Kate, Amy’s three-year-old, with him. I picked her up, held her upside down, and spun her by her heels in circles. When we were done, we talked about a nickname for her, finally settling on Skate.

   “It rhymes with Kate,” I said. She waved goodbye through the window of the car as Rick pulled out with the lawn mower. If the child hadn’t been with him, I wouldn’t have lent him the mower. That was probably why he brought her along, I thought. He was crafty that way.

   By mid-August cumulus clouds were dotting the sky and the weather was surprisingly cooler than it had been. I rode my Schwinn down Hogsback Lane and got off the all-purpose trail at Mastick Woods, veering onto the dirt track there. I rode the track and then double-backed on the horse trail. As I did, I noticed somebody was coming up. When he went by, I saw he was wearing a baseball cap instead of a helmet and was on a Trek. He was riding fast, and even though I followed him as best I could, I couldn’t catch him until he suddenly slowed down. I saw why when he pulled up. Horses were coming around a bend. We waited as the horses cantered past.

   The Trek turned to the right and rode into the trees toward the river and the single tracks on the bank. I followed him, bumping over ruts and logs and through underbrush, but soon lost sight of him. He pushed up the hill running along Big Met, then down, and as he came into the clear jumped onto the trail. He had gone around and was riding faster than before. We sped through a thicket, then across a baseball field where he widened the gap by jumping a wood guardrail, something I couldn’t do, even if I tried as hard as I could. It would have ended badly. I went around. It went well enough.

   I thought I might catch the Trek on the Detroit Rd. climb out of the valley, except he climbed so fast I lost more ground. I finally caught up to him where he was waiting at a red light on Riverside Dr.

   “I wasn’t planning on doing much today, but it ended up being a fun ride,” he said. “I saw the Vytis decal on your fender.” There was a red decal of the Lithuanian coat of arms on my rear X-Blade fender. 

   “Not many people know what that is.”

   “I know my Baltic heroes,” he said, waving goodbye.

   A week before the wedding my Rick called and said JoJo was out as their maid of honor. She was Amy’s ex-friend-to-be who had arranged the blind date when Amy had been on the prowl after her latest divorce. She was promised she could be maid of honor if the date led to anything. JoJo was a travel agent. Amy gave her a cash down payment for a Cancun honeymoon. Then the travel agency called and said they were getting anxious about the down payment, since they hadn’t received it, yet.

   When Rick telephoned JoJo, she said she hadn’t gotten any cash, but when Amy overheard that she rushed to the phone. There was a long argument and JoJo somehow found the money. The honeymoon was back on. JoJo as  bridesmaid was off.

   The next day my brother called. “Are you going riding?” he asked.

   “I’m just going out the door,” I said.

   “I’ll be there in ten minutes. I need some fresh air.”

    I was working out the kinks in my lower back when Rick rode up the driveway.

   “Amy’s sick,” he said.

   “What’s wrong with her?”

   “Cramps,” he said. “I think it’s nerves.”

   “Let’s go,” I said.

   The sky was overcast and gusts from the southwest pushed us around as we rode on the rim of the valley. We glided down and rode single tracks. The dirt was dried out and the ruts were bad, but we rode fast enough. My back wheel went in wrong directions a few times. Rick held back. He didn’t want to face plant.

   “A little out of control there,” he said when we crossed over to a horse path and relaxed.

   “Maybe a little,” I said.

   “I want to make it to the altar in one piece,” he said.

   “Getting married is a risky business,” I said. “Take a look at you and Amy. You were married once and it only lasted for two months. Amy’s been married twice. She’s got a kid by one of the husbands and another kid by a free agent. You might want to throw caution to the wind between now and the wedding day.”

   “I don’t think so,” he said, throwing me an aggrieved look. 

   “Then keep your eyes wide open before the wedding and half-shut afterwards.”

   Leaving the valley Rick suddenly slowed down ahead of me. I got tangled up in his back tire and went over the handlebars. I skinned my knee, but we were going too slow for much else to happen. “Crash test dummies!” a crow watching squawked. It took me longer to put my derailleur chain, which had fallen off, back on than it did to get over my injuries. The chain was trapped against the frame. I had to loosen the rear wheel. I cleaned my greasy hands on some of last year’s fallen leaves.

   The morning of the wedding, while my wife went shopping for a gift, I rode down into the valley. I felt good, but a strong crosswind was blowing and I got tired. The bike felt sloppy, too. Going home I pushed hard because I didn’t want to be late for the ceremony. When I finally got home, I found out I had been riding on a nearly flat back tire.

   The wedding went off without a hitch, but during the reception, when my wife was congratulating him, he made the shape of a handgun with his hand, with his index finger pressed to his temple. The next day I drove to his house with the gift we had forgotten to bring to the reception. Amy was lounging in the living room in a thick white bathrobe, poring over Cancun brochures. Skate was in her pajama’s. 

   “How’s the new life?” I asked my brother.

   “Fine,” he said. 

   By the beginning of October, the valley was starting to glow with maple red. One Sunday morning my wife and I had breakfast at the Borderline Café down the street and went for a walk on the horse trails behind South Mastick. That night, while we were watching a movie on TV, Rick called.

   “I won’t be able to ride anymore,” he said.

   “Amy?” I asked.

   “No,” he said. “It’s my shoulder.”

   I had noticed how he couldn’t lift his right arm above his head without trying hard. “After any ride,” he said, “any ride at all, potholes or no potholes, my shoulder is in a lot of pain. I’ve been taking Celebrex, but my doctor told me it’s rubbing bone on bone. There’s almost no cartilage left. He said sometime in the next couple of years, depending on how fast the rest of it goes, I’ll need a replacement shoulder.”

   “Oh, man!” I exclaimed.

   The last Saturday of the month was the last day of the year I rode in the valley. It was getting too wet and cold. I was adjusting the strap on my helmet when some neighborhood boys and girls came walking up with rakes, brooms, and a wagon. They asked if they could rake our yard for $5.00. They started pushing wet leaves into piles. The biggest of the girls walked up to me.

   “Mister, can I ask you something?” she said.

   “Sure,” I said.

   “That small boy,” she said pointing to a small boy. “He’s having a potty emergency.”

   I rang the doorbell for my wife. She came outside, saying she would take care of the boy and supervise the raking. “Go before it gets dark,” she said. It was getting dark earlier and earlier. It would soon be dark the minute I got off work.

   Where Hogsback Lane intersects with the Valley Parkway, I cut across a field and rode onto a single track. The track was littered with slapdash. A flock of Canadian geese went by overhead. They honked at me. I came around a quick bend and the branches of a fallen tree on the side of the track jabbed at my face. I swerved to the left and pulled on the brakes, jumping off the bike when the tree I was going to run into became the tree I ran into. I landed on my feet. The bike was good to go when I picked it up.

   On the way home I rode on the road, instead of the trail, hugging the shoulder’s white line. A man in a Ford F-150 pick-up leaned on his horn behind me, and when he went past, tried to shrug me off the road, giving me his middle finger for good measure. Some people are sons of bitches. There’s no getting around it. At home I hosed off the Schwinn and hung it up in the garage. I checked the tires. They looked good, although I knew hanging upside down in the garage all winter long the air would slowly seep out of them.

   When you ride with somebody else you’ve got to wait until they’re as ready as you are. When you ride by yourself you can go whenever your bike is ready. Nobody wants to be alone, but sometimes you just need to be left alone. I did yoga at home that winter to give my lower back a helping hand. I went to classes sometimes even though I couldn’t abide the pie in the sky talk. I had an indoor bike and pedaled on it. I would have to pump up my road bike tires the coming April, before going back into the valley. When I did, I would keep my eyes on the road ahead, not looking back, watching for the springtime after a long winter.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street  http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

“A Cold War thriller that captures the vibe of mid-century NYC.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

Late summer, New York City, 1956. The Mob on the make. The streets full of menace. President Eisenhower on his way to Brooklyn for the opening game of the World Series. A killer waits in the wings. A private eye working out of Hell’s Kitchen scares up the shadows.

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CRPSFPKP

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Home Movies

X Marks the Spot

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By Ed Staskus

   As many times as I met Matt X. Sysack was as many times I didn’t meet his father Russell X. Sysack. Matt was my brother-in-law’s best friend. They met during their freshman year at St Ignatius High School on Cleveland’s near west side. My wife and I and my brother-in-law and Matt often went out together to weekend breakfasts, to shows, and to haunted houses. We went to honky-tonks to listen to the rock and roll band my brother-in-law played lead guitar for. After the two young men finished college and started on career tracks, they decided to not be too serious about life, at least not just yet. They decided to be fun guys while there was still some fun to be had.

   Neither of them lived on their own at the time. When they bought motorcycles they kept them in our garage. When they bought a Jet Ski together they kept it and its trailer in our garage. They launched the Jet Ski from Eddy’s Boat Harbor in the Rocky River Metropark a couple of minutes from our garage. We called the Metropark by its local name, which was the Valley. There was a bait shop at Eddy’s that sold ice cream. I had a cone one day while I watched the Sunday sailors launch their craft.

   It was only a couple thousand feet down the river to Lake Erie and fun riding the waves, except when they ran out of gas a half-mile out on the lake. When they did they discovered there wasn’t a paddle on board. A Good Samaritan in a power boat threw them a towline and got them safely to shore. It wasn’t long after that before they stopped cranking the throttle on the craft’s impeller. 

   Both Matt and my brother-in-law eventually sold their motorcycles and their Jet Ski and mothballed fun and games for the foreseeable future. “Hustle it up” is what they said. They put their noses to the grindstone. Matt’s father, Russell, always had his nose to the grindstone. He was a hard-working man with a family to support. At the same time, he never put his irreverent sense of fun away. He wasn’t going over the hill anytime soon. He knew over the hill meant picking up speed on the other side.

   Russell X. Sysack was born in Cleveland and went to John Carroll University, a Jesuit school in University Hts. After graduation he became co-owner and manager of the family business, Sysack Sign Co., in Old Brooklyn on Cleveland’s near west side. He sported a Waylon Jennings beard and overalls at work. The work he did was hand-painted signs, from small displays to big-size displays. When Russell’s father Harry X., who opened the business in 1940, punched the time clock for the last time, Russell took over. Over the years the Sysack Sign Co. gave the high life to innumerable storefronts.

   Russell mixed business with pleasure. He was a libertarian and provocateur, more in your face than subtle. He was outspoken. He was subtle as a sledgehammer. His signs were everywhere around northeastern Ohio. In the meantime, he had his own op-ed billboard at the front of his sign shop. It was across the street from a public library. His work for others expressed what their goods and services were about. His personal billboard was where he expressed himself. It was where he expressed himself In 2002 when he compared Martin Luther King, Jr. to Osama bin Laden. The comparison let the terrorist play his own tune; it insulted Martin Luther King, Jr. The billboard was set on fire one night. The Cleveland Police wrote up an incident report and filed it. Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones led a protest march. 

   “Mr. Sysack has said that over the years he’s been sued and received bomb threats because of his signs,” the Sun Press reported. Russell explained his resilience by saying “I take the right of free speech very seriously.” Stephanie Tubbs Jones wasn’t having any of it. “The right to free speech is limited,” she said. Nobody is allowed to falsely shout “fire” in a crowded theater, she added. The First Amendment doesn’t protect words “that incite people to violence.”

   The community was divided. “Those signs were the highlight of my day when I was stuck in traffic on W. 25thSt.,” Anna Namoose said. For some, his words were signposts. “I love his truthfulness,” Dale Bush said. “Sorry if the truth hurts.” Some were perplexed. “Every time I see his signs I’m struck with the same thought,” ‘Silent Dot’ said. “Sir, what do you think happens next? Do you think that someone driving by will stop and read your sign and go ‘Holy cow!’ this guy with the sign is a genius. I’m going to drive to the State House to speak my mind right now!” Others were outraged. “I hope your racist business closes,” Monica Green said. Some took an art school approach. “This is a special kind of batshit insane outsider art,” Adam Ohio said.

   One man, at least, took a philosophical approach. “Russell Sysack has been in our consciousness since the ’80s,” Tim Ferris said. “He really got going on issues in the ’90s when Mayor Mike White began compromising the public interest. He might be extreme, but he’s necessary. He forces us to think back towards a middle position. By temperament, perhaps by training, he’s a cartoonist, and it’s his purpose to distort and amplify so as to reveal or enlighten. We shouldn’t take cartoons too literally. Those who do, do so with the intent of silencing him. We also need to realize that we can’t look for good taste when it comes to addressing outrageous or extreme abuses. He speaks to big problems, and he uses strong talk.”

   He posted his strong talk on his personal billboard year after year and appeared regularly on local mouth-foam talk radio. His targets were Martin Luther King, Jr., the city’s African American mayors, and Black History Month. Politicians weren’t his favorite creatures. If they were Democrats, so much the worse for them. He celebrated Edward Kennedy’s death on his personal billboard, despite the Massachusetts senator being still very much alive. Public education and the Catholic church were targets of his ire. Anything new-fashioned was fair game. He compared environmentalists to Nazis. “The only way to make the earth green and stop global warming is for all humans to die” was what one sign said.

   The near west side sign man worked in the “Simon Sez” tradition even though he worked outside of the tradition.  Buddy Simon was the sign man on the near east side of town. He hung a “Simon Sez” sign outside his Carnegie Ave. shop every week for more than 30 years. They were usually wry and funny observations about the way we live today. He kept his nose out of race, religion, and politics. He stayed on the Mr. Rogers side of the street. Nobody ever set any of his signs on fire. 

   Russell X. Sysack was more of a soapbox man than Buddy Simon, although his soapboxing was more diatribe than not. He was a worried man singing a worried song. He was worried about how the present was going to affect the future. He stood by Abraham Lincoln, who said, “You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.”

   Splashing his op-ed sign on the street where everybody could see it, he wasn’t holding back.  He said he standing up for the taxpayer and the small businessman. He told anybody who would listen he was a defender of the American way of life, by which he meant capitalism. He said he was a patriot. He was met with threats, vandalism, and litigation. There were widespread complaints of racism. “I’m just expressing my opinion,” he told the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the city’s morning newspaper. 

   In this corner, still undefeated, it was Russell X. Sysack’s long-held opinions and beliefs. He didn’t need a referee. He gave as good as he got, even though his facts weren’t always reliable. Free speech advocates argued he was entitled to his own opinion. His detractors said he wasn’t entitled to his own facts. “Opinion has caused more trouble on this earth than plagues and earthquakes,” said the French Enlightenment writer Voltaire. The trouble with opinion is, more often than not, the fewer the facts the stronger the opinion. The White House under the thumb of a latter-day rabblerouser testifies to the trouble that can ensue.

   In retirement, Russell X. Sysack became a crossing guard for the Parma schools, working the streets in his neighborhood. He helped children cross the street safely. His presence made parents feel easy in their minds about their children walking to school. He reminded drivers in no uncertain terms of the presence of underage pedestrians. Nobody was ever run down on his watch. Pity the fool who tried to barrel down the road at 21 MPH.

   After he stepped aside from the sign company his sister Nancy took over the business, She lived in a house attached to the back of the sign shop. She was a chip off the old block. She kept up the family practice of posting the Sysack point of view on the op-ed billboard in front of their building. One of them had to do with migrants.

   “The head of DHS is a Communist & a Treasonist. On May 11th he will open the southern border. No illegal will be refused entry. US troops will transport them to every city in the US. They went to Panama to organize this invasion using NGO’s & the cartels with taxpayer money. 8 million will enter this country by year’s end from 150 countries. China has warships in the Bahamas. The plan is to overwhelm our system, crash our economy, and create a national emergency. There will be a fundamental change of our country into Communism. What are u going to do about this invasion?” 

   As it happened, nobody did anything because there were no Chinese warships in the Bahamas and no US troops were escorting anybody anywhere. The secret messages and conspiracies went up in smoke. The invasion was a nonstarter. Nancy went back to the drawing board.

   Her “Ugly Ugly Ugly” sign ruffled more than one feather in 2017.  It featured a woman’s wide open Rolling Stones-like mouth outlined in bright red lipstick. It said “All Women Are Beautiful Until They Open Their Mouth” and listed some women the sign maker considered loudmouths. It was in the tradition of bad taste making more millionaires than good taste.

   “The sign suggests women only have, or their mouths in particular, only have one purpose, and I find that greatly offensive,” said Christopher Demchak, one of the organizers of a demonstration. “Particularly in this political climate and particularly when young children and families are driving by.” The protestors were hoping a demonstration would influence the sign company to stop posting offensive content. They didn’t know who they were going up against.

   “We don’t want to cover up this message and stop somebody’s voice, since this was a woman who put this message out, interestingly enough,” said Christen DuVernay, the other organizer. “But, we do want to provide alternative messages for young girls in the community to say ‘your voice does matter.'” 

   President Barack Obama became the dartboard for Nancy’s darts when he was elected. “Now that red-necked and facist America elected Obama on a campaign of change, will blacks show their gratitude & change? Hell no. Will Jesse Jackson & Rev. Al stop being racists? Hell no. Will blacks stop using slavery as an excuse? Hell no.”

   When Russell invoked the First Amendment one of the things he meant was, if you can guarantee never offending anybody, you don’t need the amendment. It doesn’t guarantee you the right to be heard, though. Nobody has to read or listen to anything you have to say. All media has an on-off switch, even billboards, Look the other way if it rubs you the wrong way. You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the message blows.

   Russell X. Sysack died in 2009. He was in his mid-60s. He had run whatever race he was running. Wherever he has ended up, with the stand-up saints or the fallen angels, he is undoubtedly making his idiosyncratic voice heard, loud and clear.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street  http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

“A Cold War thriller that captures the vibe of mid-century NYC.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

Late summer, New York City, 1956. The Mob on the make. The streets full of menace. President Eisenhower on his way to Brooklyn for the opening game of the World Series. A killer waits in the wings. A private eye working out of Hell’s Kitchen scares up the shadows.

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CRPSFPKP

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Baltic Place

All in the Family

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   By Ed Staskus

   Matt Poska twisted around in his seat, glaring at and swatting his brother’s hand off his shoulder. “Keep your hands off me” he said. “Who the hell do you think you are? You touch me again, there’s going to be trouble.” He couldn’t have been more to the point, although he didn’t necessarily want there to be a fight. He wanted his brother, however, to know exactly how he felt. Matt hadn’t trusted him for a long time and now disliked him on top of it. He knew having finally sold their mother’s house that push was coming to shove. The sooner the better, he thought.

   Ignoring Matt, his brother extended a warm salesman’s smile and a firm hand to the attorney on the other side of the big desk. “Call me Ray,” Raimondas said. He shook hands with the attorney. Ray’s new teeth glistened like Chiclets. His thinning hair was combed straight back.

   “You’ve got a nice tan for this time of year,” the attorney said. His hair was streaked with gray, his skin was grayish, and he was wearing a dark suit that might have been gray. A blizzard was blowing in from Lake Erie. The attorney’s back was to the window. Matt glanced through the window at snow whirling in the cold.

   “The wife and I just got back from two weeks in Jamaica,” Ray said. “We had a great time, great place.”

   “How’s the new car?” Ruta asked, shooting a venomous glance at her brother.

   “Couldn’t be better, drives like a charm, no problems.”

   “Just so I am clear about this, you three are related, brothers and sisters?” the attorney asked.

   “We used to be related,” Matt said.

   Their mother Irena’s problems began the day after their father’s funeral. She lost her appetite and couldn’t sleep. She had been married for sixty four years. She met her husband-to-be in Germany in a refugee camp after World War Two. They met again after both of them emigrated to the same small mining town in Canada. There had been no future for them in Europe. There were good-paying jobs in the Sudbury Basin. They got married in 1949 and were able to get into the United States in the late 1950s. It was where they raised their three children. They had been hard-working and by and large happy.

   Irena fell down in the kitchen in the middle of the night two years after her husband died. She had been thirsty and looking for something cold in the fridge. She fractured her right leg and lay on the ceramic tile floor until Ruta found her in the morning. She spent ten days at the Cleveland Clinic in Avon, two weeks recuperating at the Welsh Home in Rocky River, and a month of physical therapy at home.

   A year later she was back on her feet. She and Ruta visited relations in Toronto. She drove some of the way there and back on the New York Thruway. But the next year she had a mini-stroke and never drove again. Ray’s son Tyler convinced her to give up her Ford Taurus, telling her it was unsafe for her to be on the road. “You shouldn’t be driving,” Ray piped in. She signed it over to Tyler, but was sorry to see it gone. The car had represented independence, whether she drove it or not.  After it was gone she rarely left the house.

   Tyler immediately sold the Ford Taurus, even though it was more new than not. He bought a Toyota 4Runner. “This is more like it, not like that granny mobile,” he told his girlfriend. She didn’t like it when he told her to keep her dog out of the SUV, especially when he called her dog a mutt.

   When Irena caught Covid-19 she spent three weeks at the Cleveland Clinic in Avon. She was never the same after she got home. She had been in good health all her life, having grown up on a farm in Lithuania, but she was in her 90s. She craved salt, even though she had high blood pressure. Ray indulged her craving for it.

   “Stop bringing her those salted nuts,” Matt told his brother every time he saw a bowl of them in the house. “Are you trying to kill her?” He was exasperated. He threw the nuts away, but they always came back, along with bags of Malley’s chocolates and bottles of Gatorade.

   When she died the cause of death was listed as natural causes. Her last week was spent talking with ghosts during her wakeful hours and lost in dreams the rest of the time. Broken mirrors littered her memories. The real world no longer meant anything to her. Her greatest desire was to join her husband. Her last day was spent shutting down. She was tired and died of old age.

   Matt, Ray, and Ruta were in Saul Ammon’s legal office in the Marlowe Building on Detroit Ave. in downtown Lakewood, Ohio. Matt and Ruta both lived in Lakewood. Their mother had lived further west in well-heeled Rocky River. Their brother Ray lived in a new development in Sheffield Lake, even further west. They had sold their mother’s house, but Ray hadn’t lived up to their mother’s will. He had given Matt and Ruta half of what the will spelled out. He told them he was the trustee and had power of attorney and was doing what he thought best.

   “You mean best for you, like stealing all of mom’s savings and CD’s,” Ruta said. She was seething.

   Ray shrugged it off like it was something everybody did. He was never going to give his siblings access to their mother’s financial records. He wasn’t going to give them any of the nearly two hundred thousand dollars he had realized on the sly in the past two years. He wanted it to be understood he had his reasons, but he wasn’t going to talk about them. They didn’t need to know anything, although he wanted everybody to know he was honest as the day was long. 

   “Mom said she wanted to pay me for everything I was doing for her.”

   “You’re saying she paid you so much in two years that on the day she passed away she had less than nine thousand dollars left in the bank,” Ruta said. “She wasn’t a fool and I’m not a fool, either. Where are all her savings? If she hadn’t died she would have found out she was a pauper. How was she going to pay her bills?”

   “I have to take care of Tyler.”

   Ray’s son Tyler was a part-time drug dealer and a full-time party boy. He wasn’t able to stay out of jail or hold down a steady job. He had been fired from one job after another for thievery and lack of effort. Ray had been paying Tyler’s rent and bills for almost a year.

   “I took care of mom 24/7,” Ray said.

   “You are a liar,” Ruta said. “I was at her house every day. When she broke her leg I lived with her for a month. When she got a stroke I lived with her for another month. When she got the Covid I lived with her again. All I ever saw you do was run in, make her the same ham and cheese sandwich day after day, make sure she had taken her medications, and run out. You never stayed more than ten or fifteen minutes.”

   “How about all the times I took her to see doctors?”

   “I took her most of the time.”

   “I did everything for mom but nobody appreciates it. Matt didn’t do anything.”

   “Let’s stop arguing and get down to business,” Matt said. “I’m not going to go after you for what you did with mom’s Third Federal accounts. Our lawyer has told us it would be costly and time consuming. I don’t want it preying on my mind for however many years it might take.”

   Ruta didn’t say anything. Matt had asked her to sit tight until they wrapped up getting their share of the proceeds from the sale of their mother’s house. She had agreed, although she hadn’t told him she had talked to the Lakewood Law Department about elder abuse. She was going to someday make Ray pay for what he had done.

   Ray had been a problem for a long time. In the 1980s he fell deep in debt to a bookie who worked out of a back room at the Mentor Diner. Day after day none of his horses paid off. His bookie kept a strict ledger and got impatient. When Ray got married to a rich girl from Columbus their wedding reception was a gala. At the end of the day they had collected nearly forty two thousand dollars. Ray paid his bookie the thirty nine thousand dollars he owed him but neglected to tell his wife about it. When she started shopping for a house, planning the down payment, he had to spill the beans. They had been married fifty eight days on that day. She left him on the fifty ninth day and went home to Columbus. He never saw her again. The divorce was certified by mail.

   He dated several women after that, each one of them breaking it off with him after a year-or-so. He finally married Anita, a Jayne Mansfield with a family, who were two children by two passing boyfriends. They had a third child, who was Tyler. Anita was a beautician and a part-time actress. She was also an alcoholic. Three years after they divorced she drank herself to death. Ray married a woman named Karen soon afterwards. They both believed greed was good and lived the good life together.

   Ray put his greed to work when it dawned on him his mother had dementia and was dying. Her trustee was a second cousin who had long worked for Jones Day, one of the biggest law firms in the United States. Ray’s wife had a nephew who was an ambulance chaser in Pittsburgh. He drew up new trustee paperwork. Irena signed the documents without knowing what she was signing. The ambulance chaser also drew up new power of attorney paperwork. Irena signed those documents, too. Ray became the trustee and got power of attorney into his hands.

   He took the new power of attorney paperwork to a hair salon. Ray knew the manager from his marriage to Anita. He asked her to witness the document. She did, and so did a customer they asked, in return for a bottle of shampoo. Ray was pleased with his work that day, although he didn’t know his sister Ruta got her hair done at that same salon. One day, in passing, the manager told her about Ray and the documents. Ruta wrangled affidavits from her and the customer.

   “We have got two separate affidavits that swear you got their signatures on the power of attorney documents fraudulently,” Matt said. “They say mom was never present for them to witness her signature.”

   The lawyer pushed the two affidavits across his desk. Ray didn’t look at them. He looked at Matt.

   “What do you want?” he asked. 

   “You used your power of attorney to empty mom’s accounts at Third Federal but I don’t want to drive myself crazy over that,” Matt said. “What I want is, I want you to pay us the full amount that Ruta and I are due from the sale of the house, like it says in mom’s will.”

   “And if I don’t?”

   “If you don’t I will leave this office, go to City Hall, and file a criminal complaint with the Clerk of Court.” 

   “Can we make a deal?” Ray asked.

   “I’m not selling any alibis,” Matt said.

   “Remember me? I’m your brother.”    

   “I’ve got better things to do than remember you. Save your breath to cool your soup.”

   “Give me a break.”

   “No,” Matt said. “The banks are open right now. We’ll wait one hour. Bring certified checks. If you’re not back in an hour, I’ll go straight to City Hall.”

   “You know I didn’t do anything wrong,” Ray said, beside himself. “This is just a rip-off. I need that money. Tyler needs it, too. Karen might divorce me if she finds out about this, do you know that? Is that what you want? You want to see me homeless? The two of you, you’re both evil.”

   “Is that so?” Matt said. He knew Ray’s talk was horseradish.

   Ray shot Matt a dirty look. He was the kind of mother’s son who got mad when anybody didn’t believe whatever he was saying. Ray believed everything he conjured up, no matter what. He couldn’t distinguish between truth and lies anymore and so he couldn’t distinguish between right and wrong anymore. To be on the safe side, whenever he caught himself telling the truth, he reflexively told an untruth to keep his hand in. 

   It was a few minutes short of an hour when Ray returned and tossed two certified checks down on the lawyer’s desk. Matt slid one over to his sister.

   “You know we’re never going to see each other again after this,” Ray said, vexed and angry. Everybody’s got plans until you get hit in the face, he thought to himself bitterly.

   “That doesn’t make any difference anymore,” Matt said. “Go away and stay away.”

   “I can’t believe he would do that to mom,” Ruta said when Ray was gone. “Everything about this is too bad, really bad, but I don’t think he’s ever going to change. He’ll just find somebody else to fleece and blame whoever is handy.”

   “You’re probably right,” Matt said. “At least the joker has left the building,”

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street  http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

“A Cold War thriller that captures the vibe of mid-century NYC.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

Late summer, New York City, 1956. The Mob on the make. The streets full of menace. President Eisenhower on his way to Brooklyn for the opening game of the World Series. A killer waits in the wings. A private eye working out of Hell’s Kitchen scares up the shadows.

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CRPSFPKP

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Baltic Place

Flesh and Blood

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BETWEEN THE WARS.jpeg

By Ed Staskus

   The day Angele Jurgelaitis knocked on her aunt’s door in the spring of 1944 the sky was clear and sunny. Ona Kreivenas lived on a farm near Alvitas, where she taught grade school and had a family on her hands. There were four children, Mindaugas, Carman, Ramute, and the youngest, Gema. None of them were older than Angele. Even Mindaugas, the eldest, was three years younger than their sixteen year-old cousin from Gizai.

   Gizai is twelve miles from Alvitas, which is a village on a lake of the same name. It is on a main road. Angele had walked there. There was a parish church built of stone, an elementary school, more than thirty houses, a general store, neighboring farmsteads, and almost four hundred inhabitants. None of them knew what was coming, although they all knew.

   When Ona came to the front door she was by herself. She had been deprived of her husband. He had been transported to Siberia by the Russians. “He was a police chief,” Angele said about her uncle, Jonas Kreivenas. “The Russians took him. He didn’t do anything bad. It didn’t matter, they just took him away.”

   Ona had since then become austere. “She was pretty, like a doll, but I was afraid of her. She could be very mean. I broke a dish one day and was scared to death of what she would say when she found out.” Her aunt welcomed the teenaged girl, who she had been half-expecting, if not warmly, at least with a measure of relief.

   Angele had spent the day walking to her aunt’s house from her family’s farm, where she had decided she could no longer live with the stepmother her father had married two months before, six months after her mother’s death from pneumonia. She left three older brothers and a sister behind. Ona put her to work caring for her young children, among other things.

   The Russians initiated arrests and deportations in 1940, after the Red Army occupied Lithuania and the adjacent Baltic countries. The Russians targeted government officials, nationalists, the well-to-do, Catholics, policemen, and everyone else they dubbed an “anti-Soviet element.” If you were a party member, you were going to prosper. If you weren’t, a Siberian slave labor camp might be in the cards.             

   “I had a friend not far from our farm whose father was a blacksmith, who couldn’t even read or write. When the Russians came they threw out the mayor in the town where they lived and made the blacksmith the mayor because he was a communist. Everyone high up, they threw out.”

   Mass arrests began a year later on the night of June 13, 1941. when NKVD men fanned out across the country, scooping up men and women and entire families, carrying them to Vilnius. Jonas Kreivenas was among the first arrested. Nearly twenty thousand Lithuanians were forced into the boxcars of trains on June 19th  and railroaded to the far end of Russia. Three days later the Wehrmacht invaded Lithuania, the Luftwaffe catching the Soviet air force unaware on the ground and destroying it. By mid-week the Germans had swept all resistance aside. The Russians were out. The Germans were in. 

   “The Germans weren’t good, but life was better for us. At least they didn’t deport us. Most of us hated the Russians.”

   A puppet Lithuanian government was put in place. It soon became clear that the German occupiers held all the power. Lithuanian Jews began to bear the brunt of the occupation. They were forced to wear yellow stars and their money and property was taken away. Worse was in store.

   Before Jonas Kreivenas was deported by the Russians he had gotten everything he needed to build an indoor bathroom, lumber, tiles, fixtures, a sink, toilet, and a bathtub. It was going to be his summer project. When World War Two ended the second floor was still torn up and the bathroom was still not a bathroom, but by that time nobody was living in the house.

   The house was brick instead of clapboard or notched logs, fitted with large front windows, four rooms on the ground floor, a kitchen and dining room and two bedrooms. “My aunt lived on a farm that was bigger and much nicer than my father’s. It wasn’t primitive.” Her father had been a landless peasant until the Land Reform of 1922 when large Polish owned estates were confiscated and redistributed to farmhands and soldiers.

   “Everyone where we lived had either a big farm or a small farm, although almost everyone had small farms. My aunt had a large farm. She sometimes had men come and do work, but I still ended up having to work much harder than I ever did at my family’s farm.”

   There was a cellar where dried, pickled, and canned food and barrels of  apples were kept in the winter. There were chickens, cows, two work horses, another horse for a buggy, and many pigs. “She had a herd of them. She had one of them slaughtered whenever we needed food.” Angele had to feed the pigs while they lived and fattened. “We kept a pot in the kitchen where I boiled potatoes for the pigs every day. I had to bring all the water in from the well, not just for the pigs, but for everything.”

   In the summer of 1941, within days of the Red Army’s collapse, the Einsatzgruppen followed the Wehrmacht into Lithuania, their mission being to exterminate Jews. Synagogues were set on fire and thousands of Jews killed in the streets. The German authorities claimed rioting was a menace to public order and rounded up the country’s Jews, isolating them in ghettos to “protect them.”  

   By the middle of summer Angele was still working hard but tired of being a hired hand. “I was young, and I had a lot of energy. I didn’t get tired. I watched the kids. I loved Gema the most. Carman was my best friend. Ramute cried too much. She bent her own fingers backwards until they hurt and then started crying, saying that her hand hurt. I had to work all the time.”

   She worked from before sunup to sundown. “I was the cook and made soup every day. I made the beds and I had to work all around the farm.” She washed dishes and put them away. She washed clothes by hand and hung them on a line outside to dry. She washed the children, too, keeping them spic and span.

   “I was her sister’s daughter, but I was her house maid.”

   She made the fire that had to get going every day. Mindaugas was a strong boy and helped as much as he could. Carman helped, too. Ramute was unwilling to do much and Gema was too small to do anything. Ona went to town to teach school every day, although in the summer she worked in the fields. 

   Angele put feed and water out for the chickens. She gathered eggs early and often. She collected them twice a day, so they stayed clean. Twice a day also kept the chickens from eating them. She herded cows to their milking stalls. She wore knee-high boots when walking knee-deep in pig mire. She put pebbles in the manger with the oats so the horses wouldn’t eat too fast. She mended fences the best she could when the pigs and cows bumped into them.

   One day she was on the second floor and overheard through an open window her aunt talking to a man in the front yard about next spring’s seeding.

   “I have a servant, but she’s still young, and only so good to me,” Ona said.

   Angele realized her aunt was talking about her, about her being more of a servant and less of a niece. “I promised myself from that moment that when I grew up I would never be anyone’s servant, that no one would ever say that about me again.”

   One day she and her father were sitting together in the yard of the family farm in Gizai. The dusk was gathering. “My father always called me Aneluke.” He told her his plans for the future. “Aneluke, when I die, I am going to leave the farm to you.”

   Her aunt had talked to her about vocational classes at a nearby farm school, where she could learn animal husbandry, vegetable production, and seasonal planning. But after working on her father’s farm, and then working on her aunt’s farm, she had made up her mind farming wasn’t in her blood. “I didn’t like animals, and I hated the ground, the earth. I was never going to grow up to be a farmer.” She was sixteen years old. She didn’t say anything to her father about the vocational classes, but she told her aunt no.

   When Angele’s grandfather died, Ona and her children went to Gizai for the funeral, but Angele had to stay behind and watch both Gemas and the house. “I was so unhappy,” she said. She thought about her future, even though in the here and now a war going on all around them. She thought about meeting boys. She thought about changing her name.

   “I never liked my name. My father understood. That’s why he called me Aneluke.”

   Her youngest brother didn’t like his name, either. Even though he been christened Mindaugas, after the legendary king, he changed it. When he told everybody far and wide, young and old, that his new name was Jozukas, everybody went along with him and he became Jozukas from then on.

   She made friends with a boy she met at a dinner at a neighboring farm. They sat next to each other and talked. “I liked him, but one day Mindaugas and I were going to town in the buggy when I saw him on the road. He was on a bike and a girl was walking beside him, walking towards us. They were holding hands. After that, I didn’t like him at all.”

   Her aunt decided to bring electricity to the farm. Although electricity was available in the cities, voltage drops over distance often made rural electrification too costly or simply impossible. When farmers had the chance to tap into a network they often jumped at the chance. She arranged for the work to be done, making plans through her relations. They found an electrician to do the work for her. “My aunt sent me to Vilkaviskis to pick him up, the electrician from Kaunas, who was coming on the train.”

   Until 1941 Vilkaviskis had a large Jewish community. That summer SS death squads, assisted by Lithuanian auxiliaries, killed more than three thousand Jews. It was virtually every single one of them in the town. In 1943 many Jewish ghettos in Lithuania were demolished and the still living were transferred to concentration camps. When the war ended almost none of them were alive anymore. The genocide rate in the country, where anti-Semitism had been endemic for generations, was more than 90%, the highest in Europe.

   Vilkaviskis, on the banks of the Seimina River, is eight miles west of Alvitas. After Angele hitched up the horse to their buggy, it took her and her cousin Mindaugas several hours to get there. They skirted the ruins of the Jewish quarter. That night they slept in the wagon and the next morning set off for home, taking the electrician with them.

   “He was hard to understand,” she said. Lithuanians from different regions of the country have accents and dialects and often have their own way of saying things. “There was a man from Zemaitija once, we could hardly understand anything he was saying. They drop the endings of their words.”

   There was a severe shortage of sugar throughout Europe, disrupted by worldwide conflict and blockade. The German military needed it to support its armed forces and its war effort at home. Sugar beet planting in Poland and the Baltics was ramped up. In 1942 more than 20% of Lithuanian farmers, the most ever, cultivated sugar beets. Production was expected to increase by 25% in 1943. Potatoes were in high demand. Grain was in high demand. The Third Reich paid in Reichsmarks, better money in Europe than anybody else’s.

   Ona Kreivenas invested her bounty from sugar beets into electrification. “The electrician put in wires and lights. The black box was in the kitchen.” The children were warned to never touch it. “We didn’t have to use oil lamps anymore. We were so happy.”

   Carman, Ramute, and Angele slept in the dining room, an improvised bedroom in the four-room house. To the left of the foyer was the kitchen and to the right was the dining room. Ona had the large bedroom and Mindaugas the small one. Gema slept with Ona. At the back of the house stairs led to the root cellar.

   “We read books at night until Ona told us lights out. She was a strict mother. We had to turn the light off right away. She knew when we did because she had a blinking light in her room which told her when the lights had been turned off. We pretended being quiet until we knew she was asleep and then turned the light back on so we could read some more. After we got tired of reading we turned the light off and talked until we finally fell asleep.”

   In March 1943 the Germans closed the Academy of Education and all Lithuanian schools of higher education. Ona taught grade school and wasn’t affected. She continued going to work. Everybody was uneasy. The war on the Eastern Front wasn’t going well for the Wehrmacht. They were losing the ability to mount offensive operations.

   “I couldn’t go to school because I had to work so much. I finished six grades and I wanted to learn, so my aunt found a tutor for me. I went to her house, studying high school.” She wanted to be somebody other than a maid or a farmhand.

   Two months later in May the Gestapo shut down Lithuania’s local electorates. In September the last Jews in the ghetto of Vilnius were dragged out of their homes. Those who could work were sent to labor camps. The rest were shot and buried in pits they were forced to dig themselves beforehand,

   When the new year of 1944 came, news was broadcast that Antanas Smetona, the first and last president of independent Lithuania, who had fled his home and country in 1940, had died in a house fire in Cleveland, Ohio. His death closed the chapter on the interwar years, when Lithuania had been free and independent.

   “We had a radio and listened to the news every day. We knew it was bad for the Germans all that spring and summer. We knew the Russians were coming back.” Everybody was worried and scared about the return of the Red Army. “We all knew something bad was going to happen.”

   In early August 1944, the Wehrmacht was driven out of most of Lithuania by Soviet forces and Russian hegemony was re-established. They were the same days that marked the Battle of Normandy in the west, which soon led to French liberation and the invasion of what was left of the Third Reich.

   “When the Russians came it all happened in one day. In the morning we got our wagon, the horses, the four children, and a cow. We needed the cow to give milk for Gema. We left as fast as we could.” They and hundreds of other families camped at a large farm a few miles from the East Prussian border, biding their time. When the Red Army again pushed west in September, and the remnants of the Wehrmacht forces fled before them, the refugees crossed the frontier.

   “We got across the border into East Prussia at night. It was a wet cold night. There wasn’t a single border guard. Nobody else in my family, none of my brothers or my sister, nobody, made it out before the border was closed by the Russians.”

   She was free in Germany for the moment, and would stay for four years, in and out of DP camps until finally securing a Canadian work visa, but her kinsmen and friends and the rest of the country stayed under the  thumb of Moscow for the next nearly fifty years. She never saw her parents again and by the time she saw her brothers and sister again, after the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev in the mid-1980s, they had all grown old and their own children had all grown up.

Photograph by Antanas Sutkus.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street  http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

“A Cold War thriller that captures the vibe of mid-century NYC.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

Late summer, New York City, 1956. The Mob on the make. The streets full of menace. President Eisenhower on his way to Brooklyn for the opening game of the World Series. A killer waits in the wings. A private eye working out of Hell’s Kitchen scares up the shadows.

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CRPSFPKP

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Home Movies

Sonic Youth

1 Comment

By Ed Staskus

   I was in my mid-teens when I started nodding off at Sunday mass. Before long I was snoozing at the drop of a hat, no matter what time I had gotten to bed the night before. My mother was a go-along Catholic but my father was a true believer, so the whole family went to church weekly. Part of my problem was familiarity. I had been an altar boy and knew the ceremony inside and out. I even knew the Latin, what was left of it, not that I knew what any of it meant. The other part of my problem was my growing belief in deism. I didn’t disbelieve the Roman Catholic theology but I didn’t believe it, either. I thought the Golden Rule and the Ten Commandments were good ideas, but that was as far as my commitment went.

   The Sunday in 2005 I first saw Jane Scott she was in a back pew at the First Church of Christ in Rocky River, Ohio, one suburb west of where my wife and I lived in Lakewood. I wasn’t a member of the congregation but my wife was. I went to services with her sometimes. Jane was wearing red glasses and a wide-brimmed church crown. She was out cold. I recognized a kindred spirit when I saw one. 

   When the service was over my wife made her rounds, saying hello and goodbye, chatting with the churchgoers she knew best. I stayed to the side. By the time we were ready to go Jane Scott had shaken off the sandman. My wife talked to her for a minute before we left for home.

   “That lady you were talking to, the one with the red glasses, she looked familiar, even though I don’t think I’ve ever met her before,” I said.

   “That’s Jane Scott,” she said. “She used to write for the newspaper. She was their rock ‘n  roll reporter until she retired a couple of years ago.”  She was in her early 80s the day she retired. She had long been known as “The World’s Oldest Rock Critic.”

   She went to work for the Cleveland Plain Dealer in 1952, three days after Alan Freed hosted the Moondog Coronation Ball, the world’s first rock ‘n roll concert. She covered the local social whirl through most of the 1950s. Starting in 1958 she wrote the “Boy and Girl” column. It targeted seven-and eight year-olds. She wrote “Senior Class” about issues relevant to senior citizens. “I covered everything from pimples to pensions,” she said. 

   She reviewed the Beatles concert when they first appeared in Cleveland in 1964 and two years later interviewed them before their sold-out rock fest at the 80,000 seat Municipal Stadium. “I never before saw thousands of 14-year-old girls, all screaming and yelling. I realized this was a phenomenon. The whole world changed.” She was going on nearly fifty years of age when her interview with the Fab Four appeared in the newspaper.

   When she became the rock critic for the Plain Dealer the newspaper became the first major newspaper to have a full-time music critic on staff. “Once I found rock I was never interested in anything else.” Not everybody considered rock ‘n roll to be music. Many considered it to be noise for the neck down. “This rock and roll stuff will never last,” said Mitch Miller, a maestro of the singalong. Others thought it was the “Devil’s Music.” They didn’t like hips gyrating and lyrics on the other side of pious. 

   Jane Scott was a Christian Scientist as well as a boogie on down correspondent. I don’t think she gave a damn about Satan. She knew full well he wasn’t interested in music of any kind unless it was the funeral march kind. He marched to the beat of doom and death. She was a live wire.

   “My husband Harry was Jane’s first boss when she started at the Cleveland Plain Dealer,” said Doris Linge. “Since she and Harry worked together, I would often get invited to her wonderful annual holiday party. She was a character, quirky and real.”

   Jane Scott was born in Cleveland less than a year after the end of World War One. She graduated from Lakewood High School and later from the University of Michigan. She tried out for the college newspaper but didn’t make the grade. During World War Two she enlisted in the Navy, rose to lieutenant, and worked as a code breaker. After the war, back home, she got a job as Women’s Editor for the suburban Chagrin Valley Herald, a community rag. 

   She went to Sunday services. She taught Sunday School. “Jane was a member of the Fifth Church, which was on the border of Lakewood and Cleveland,” said Doris Carlson, a member of First Church in Rocky River since 1957. “When it closed she came to our church. I remember seeing her on the TV news once in 1962, when she performed at an honorary birthday party here in town for President Kennedy. She was a hoot. She sang ‘Happy Birthday’ the same way Marylin Monroe did, even though she was practically a middle-aged woman. She could be sexy when she wanted to be.”

   The 1960s came and went and she missed her chance to go to the Woodstock Festival. Twenty five years later she went to the 25th anniversary show at the age of seventy five, tramping through the same kind of mud on the same kind of wet weekend. “I am going to try to make the 50th anniversary in 2019,” she said. If she made it she would be one hundred years old, she was reminded.

   “I don’t like the word retirement,” she said “Rock ‘n roll is excitement. It’s that unity of feeling you get when the audience is loving and sharing the music together. It’s the unexpectedness and the swift changes. You go from pop to hip-hop. It all melds into rock somehow. It keeps you on your toes.”

   Covering shows night after night, being on the short side, she always tried to get up front so she wouldn’t have to stand on her toes to see over fans. She always carried the same hefty bag slung over her shoulder. “I call it my security kit,” she said. “It includes ear plugs, Kleenex, because when you are at a show with 80,000 people they are sure to run out of toilet paper, safety pins to pin my car keys and backstage pass on, at least four pens because people borrow them and don’t return them, and two notebooks, one for interviews and one for observations.” She always had a peanut butter sandwich in the bag. “Peanut butter doesn’t spoil and sometimes you don’t have time to stand in line for food.” 

   When it came to rock ‘n roll, she always had ants in her pants for the next show and the will power to see her chronicles of the new music through. “She was allowed to take the rock beat because the newspaper thought it was trivial at the time, and a woman could have it,” said Anastasia Pantsios, a Plain Dealer writer and photographer. She had good energy, keeping at it for nearly forty years. “She literally did it ‘my way,’ independent, not afraid to go places by herself, with so much tenacity and work ethic,” her friend Mary Cipriani said.

   Jane made it a point to interview music makers with opinions, contentious musicians like Lou Reed and Frank Zappa. Lou Reed and she were close friends from the late 1960s until their deaths two years apart. “She was one of the only ones to treat me with respect in the early years,” Lou said. “Always fair, always interested.” The man who became the Grandfather of Punk called her Sweet Jane after his song of the same name.    

   The first time Jane saw the Velvet Underground hardly anybody in town noticed they were in town. There might have been as many people in the audience as there were in the band. The band was Lou Reed, a bad-tempered young man from Long Island, Sterling Morrison on guitar, the violist John Cale who doubled on bass, drummer Moe Tucker, who did her drumming standing up, and the partially deaf actress Nico, who sang in deadpan English with a German accent. 

   “I don’t know just what it’s all about but put your red pajamas on and find out,” Lou Reed said.

   Jane Scott was smitten the minute she heard the sound the band made. The man she had been waiting for sounded somewhere between Bob Dylan and Sonic Youth with some Andy Warhol thrown in. The band was about Beat poetry, Pop Art, and the French New Wave. Jane was good with the offbeat but kept the beat steady in her head.

   The Velvet Underground lasted until the early 1970s. When Sterling Morrison left the band he put his guitar down for a foghorn. He found work as captain of a tugboat and later earned a PhD in Medieval Literature. Moe Tucker formed her own one-gal band playing proto punk. The old Lou Reed became the new Lou Reed.

   Before the Velvet Underground there was L. A. and the Eldorados, back when Lou Reed was a student at Syracuse University. His friend Allan Hyman, who had been his friend since third grade, was tasked with getting him to frat party gigs on time. “He’d be asleep under three hundred pounds of pistachio nut shells, because Lou loved pistachios, so I’d have to shake him awake, throw him in the shower, and physically get him dressed,” Allan said. “He would be surly, but he’d play.”

   “Lou Reed was a prick,” said Rich Mishkin, the bassist for L. A. and the Eldorados. “He was not the kind of guy who would be nice to people in most circumstances. We got a lot of beer thrown at us over the years.” Rich drove the band around in his tail-finned white Chrysler with red guitars emblazoned on the sides.

   “It’s no secret that he has lived as well as walked on the wild side, the demi-world of drugs and violence and despair,” Jane said about Lou Reed. “’Heroin’ and ‘White Light, White Heat’ were two of the most popular songs of his first major group, the Velvet Underground in 1967, the same year of ‘I’m a Believer’ by the Monkees and ‘To Sir With Love’ by Lulu. He is wild, changeable, streetwise, poetic, cynical, and offbeat sensitive, maybe.”

   Jane wasn’t wild, although she was plenty streetwise, in a matronly kind of way. “We’re talking about some of the most depraved people in the world,” said Michael Stanley, who played heartland rock ‘n roll for donkey’s years in the Rock Capital of the World. “But with Jane, it was like they were talking to their mom or their grandma. It was, ‘Yes, ma’am’ and ‘No, ma’am.'”  

   Behind her trademark red-rimmed trifocals and dyed-blonde hair, she was unflappable. She was a fan as well as an advocate of the sound. “Since I was a little girl, I remember my dad, whose name was Pepe, enjoyed Jane’s reviews and would read them to my brothers and me after dinner,” said Callie Paris Rini. “We were music lovers. When the Beatles first came to Cleveland, Jane gave my dad a newsprint plate of them, and I still have it. I still have Jane’s review when Jimi Hendrix came to Cleveland, too. I read her articles whenever I went to concerts in the 60s and 70s.”

   The Beatles broke up in 1970. Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, and Janet Joplin all died, all three of them at the age of 27. Rock concerts moved from clubs and small theaters to sports arenas. Disco and glitter rock came and went. Jane Scott went to all the shows, even the new wave ones, where guitars were unplugged and synthesizers were plugged in. “I sat next to her for nearly three years of concerts back in the late 70s,” said Rick Weiner. “She would always ask me if I was enjoying myself. Jane stood out like a sore thumb, but once you conversed with her you knew there was a reason she was there.” 

   Her favorite musician of all time was Bruce Springsteen and her favorite album of all time was ‘Born to Run.’ When she reviewed his show at downtown Cleveland’s Allen Theatre in 1975 she wrote, “His name is Bruce Springsteen. He will be the next superstar.” Before the year was out the Boss was on the covers of Time and Newsweek. At a later Cleveland concert, he dedicated “Dancing in the Dark” to Jane Scott, who was in the audience. “If you can meet Bruce Springsteen, who wants to sit around and play bridge?” she asked tongue in cheek.

   When it came to her job, it was the more the merrier. “Jane was the first to welcome me to the news room when I came to Cleveland in 1979 as a Plain Dealer feature writer,” said Janet Gardner. “After I returned to New York, she would call me between sets from the Peppermint Lounge, breathless with enthusiasm. She was a truly ‘The World’s Oldest Teenager.’”

   In the 1980s superstars continued to sell out, selling out stadium concerts. Alternative rock emerged. Synth-pop got more and more popular. Dance-pop got hot. Hip-hop popped up. Olivia Newton-John recorded one number hit after another. Jane Scott covered them all. The older she got the younger she got. “I met Jane in 1984 when she was covering a Husker Du show at Pirate’s Cove,” said Rev Recluse. “She was the sweetest, kindest person to everyone and melted this too-cool-to-exist teen hipster’s heart by the encore.” The Pirate’s Cove was in the Flats when it was still a rough-and-tumble place featuring a shot and a beer. There were real shots sometimes down dark back alleys. Olivia Newton-John never set foot there. She kept it in the sugar bowl.

   “Jane didn’t critique music,” said Pere Ubu’s frontman Dave Thomas. Pere Ubu was a Cleveland-area avant-garage band. “She reported facts. And, subversively, she demystified the art. She peeked behind the curtain and rooted out the parochial. Every musician sees the media as gullible rubes. Well, Jane just didn’t cooperate. She laid the haughty low with enthusiasm.”

   The 1990s saw rap and reggae get popular. Urban-style music blended jazz, soul, and funk. Fusion genres came and went. Jane Scott stayed on top of it, reviewing everything that came her way. If it was going to be a long night she packed two peanut butter sandwiches in her hefty bag.

   “I had the privilege of attending several concerts with Jane in the 80s and 90s,” said Emile Knud-Hansen. “It was amazing to watch her interview some covered-in-black with safety pins in the eyebrows teenage rocker. She never judged anyone but gave performers ample time to explain their music. I was surprised to learn that she had never gone to a rock concert as a guest. So, my friends and I took her to see Huey Lewis and the News at the Blossom Music Center. We were in front of the amplifiers, right up front. She was happy in spirit and ruffled in appearance.”

   After Jane Scott retired from the Cleveland Plain Dealer and her long-time companion Jim Smith died, her legs started to go bad. She bought a walker and moved into Ennis Court, a small assisted-living facility in her hometown of Lakewood. When she did, Danielle Rose began visiting her, keeping her company.

   “I met her at First Church where we were both members,” Danielle said. “I lived up Detroit Ave. and could walk to where she was living. We started car-pooling to Wednesday Testimony Meetings. One summer night going home we were pulled over by a Lakewood cop car.” The policeman was a woman. She asked Jane if she knew why she had pulled her over.

   Jane thought for a moment. She fiddled with her hefty bag. She finally said, “No.”

   “Your lights aren’t on.”

   “Oh.”

   “Don’t forget to turn them on and drive safely,” the policewoman said.

   Jane had been pulled over in front of one of her favorite ice cream shops. When she noticed the lights were still on in the shop she left the running car where it was and stepped onto the sidewalk. 

   “Do you want to join us?” Sweet Jane asked the policewoman. 

   “She loved ice cream. She was just a big kid. Her car knew where every cone on the west side of town could be gotten,” Danielle said.

   “Thanks, but I’m on duty,” the policewoman said.

   “Maybe next time,” Jane said. 

   “She had a young spirit but she really shouldn’t have been driving anymore,” Danielle said.

   True to her spirit Jane Scott died on Independence Day in 2011. The next month a memorial service was held for her at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which was attended by nearly a thousand people. A year later the museum unveiled a life-size bronze memorial statue of her sitting on a bench and taking notes, created by Dave Deming, past president of the Cleveland Institute of Art. It was permanently installed in the Reading Room of the Rock Hall’s Library and Archives. 

   All it took to get Jane Scott to sit still in one spot while the beat went on was for the clock to run down. “Walk it on home” is what Lou Seed sang in her ear. There was a hell of a band waiting for her in heaven.

Photograph by Janet Macoska.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street  http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

“A Cold War thriller that captures the vibe of mid-century NYC.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

Late summer, New York City, 1956. The Mob on the make and the streets full of menace. President Eisenhower on his way to Brooklyn for the opening game of the World Series. A killer waits in the wings. Stan Riddman, a private eye working out of Hell’s Kitchen, scares up the shadows.

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CRPSFPKP

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Baltic Place

Change of Heart

1 Comment

By Ed Staskus

   There was no love lost for Jews among my father’s generation. He was born and raised in northwestern Lithuania. His father was a police chief and his mother was a schoolteacher.  They weren’t empty-headed, but they were full of the zeitgeist of the times. The general consensus in Lithuania before and during World War Two was that Jews were no good. It was partly economic. Most Lithuanians were farmers then. They saw Jews as middlemen exploiting them. It was partly nationalist. Many saw them as against the country for siding with Russian and Polish interests. It was partly because Lithuanians in general aligned with Germanic beliefs, including their hatred of Jews, which the Germans had kept alive from the Middle Ages on.

   Most of the time it was simply traditional Christian antisemitism. Lithuanians were the last Europeans to give up paganism and take up Christianity. It wasn’t always a blessing for Jews. Grand Duke Jagiellon expelled all of them from the Grand Duchy in 1495. They eventually returned, but in the mid 17th century the Khmelnytsky Uprising and Deluge Wars led to the deaths of many of them.

   In the 19th century pogroms came and went. Jews had to endure smashed up and burned down houses, public beatings, and some murders. Half-baked blood libel stories ran rampant, especially in Panevizys and Siauliai. My father was from Siauliai.

   When in the summer of 1996 he told me he was going to Kaunas to deliver yarmulkes, tallitots, which are prayer shawls, and three thousand dollars to an impoverished synagogue in Kaunas, Lithuania’s second largest city, I was dumbfounded. He had never been loud-mouthed about his animus for Jews, but I had heard enough over the years to know exactly how he felt.

   “Does this have something to do with the $!8.00 Rita took to a synagogue two years ago?”

   “Yes, it’s the same synagogue.”

   My sister, Rita, had gotten the ball rolling in 1994. She was working at a travel agency  called Born to Travel. It was in Beachwood, on Cleveland’s east side, and was owned by two sisters. They were Jewish. It got started when Sally Steiger, another travel agent, asked Rita to deliver what is called a chai of $18.00 to the first synagogue she saw in Lithuania, where she was going to visit relatives. The $18.00 is symbolic. The toast “L ‘Chaim” means “To Life!”

   During the interwar years there were more than two hundred thousand Jews living in Lithuania. When World War Two ended there were fewer than two thousand left alive. There were eight hundred in Vilnius, seven hundred in Kaunas, and handfuls scattered here and there. The rest had been killed by Nazi death squads and Lithuanian auxiliaries. They called it extermination, as though Jews were bugs or mice. The victim rate was the highest of any country where the Holocaust happened.

    “I was walking around with a friend of mine in Kaunas checking out the sights while at the same time in the back of my mind I was searching for a random synagogue,” Rita said. No one she had asked knew whether there was one in the city, or not. “We turned a corner and suddenly right before us was an old synagogue.”

   It was the Ohei Jacob Synagogue. It was built in the mid-19th century and featured a two-story classical façade. By 1910 more than thirty thousand Jews lived in Kaunas, almost 40% of the population. The city became a center of European Judaism. They had their own seminary, prison, and kosher slaughterhouse. There were twenty five active synagogues in the city before the war.  

   The Nazis used the synagogue as a warehouse during their occupation of Kaunas, which ironically led to its survival. The other synagogues were destroyed or fell into disrepair. The Ohei Jacob Synagogue was the only one left. There had once been a school and an orphanage, but by the 1990s both were long gone.

   In 1941 Lithuania’s Jews began to find themselves locked up in ghettos. The Nazis, led by their number one killers the Einsatzgruppen, transformed them into death camps. It was during this time that the vast majority of the country’s Jews were murdered. Those that weren’t had somehow made themselves scarce.

   “I went inside and found a few elderly men in prayer,” Rita said. “The synagogue looked poor and the prayer books the men were holding were ancient and tattered. I gave them the chai.”

   Two years earlier, faced with a financial crisis, Rabbi Yecheska Zach had gone to a nearby Catholic church and asked for help. The synagogue was at the point of closing. The Catholic priest gave him enough money to keep the shul’s doors open.

   Before she left she met Rabbi Zach. When it came time to leave she extended her hand to shake hands with him. “That was a mistake.” Orthodox rabbis don’t shake hands with women outside their immediate family. “It was kind of awkward.”

   When she returned home and went back to work, telling her co-workers about the synagogue, they decided to adopt it. They set up a collection box wrapped in glossy blue paper at the front of the office. ”Some people mailed in checks, Others brought in cash. One man slapped a hundred dollar bill down on my desk. I opened an account in the bank next door.”

   A local synagogue invited her to speak about her experiences in Lithuania. A group of Hebrew genealogists asked her to speak to their group. The Park Synagogue, an historic modernist landmark in Cleveland Heights, invited her to address their congregation. ”More than three hundred people were there, all looking at me. it was an out of body experience. Some people had questions when I was done. One lady stood up and said, ‘You know, you Lithuanians killed all the Jews.’ I didn’t know what to say. An older man stood up and said, ‘Leave her alone. If it wasn’t for her we wouldn’t even know about any synagogues in Lithuania.’ At the end a collection was taken. There was nearly a thousand dollars in the bag when they gave it to me.”

   My father had already planned a trip to Lithuania, partly to visit relatives, some of whom, after the Iron Curtain had been drawn shut, he hadn’t seen in more than forty years, and partly on business. He agreed to take material and money with him. “It got to the point that, before he left for Lithuania, he would call my office and ask, ‘Where’s the chai money to give to the shul?’ I didn’t know he even knew what shul meant.”

   When he set off from Vilnius to the synagogue in Kaunas he took a suitcase full of yarmulkes and prayer shawls with him. He wore a money belt stuffed with thousands of American dollars. The yarmulkes were white, left over from a wedding. The Park Synagogue donated two dozen used prayer shawls.  D. O. Summers dry cleaned them at no charge. When he delivered them the congregation would at last be properly dressed.

   “I told him to not go on a Sunday because nobody would be there,” Rita said. “I told him to go on a Saturday. I didn’t know it was going to be Rosh Hosana, but it was.”

   Rosh Hashanah is the Jewish New Year. It is a two-day holiday that begins on the first day of the Hebrew month of Tishrei. It ushers in the Days of Awe, ten days culminating in Yom Kippur. It is a time for prayer, repentance, and self-reflection. The holiday celebrates the creation of the world and is observed with special ceremonies like sounding a shofar. The shofar is a hollowed out horn made from a ram’s horn. The person who blows it is usually called the Master of the Blast.

   There is food and drink. Everybody has some symbolic foods like challah and apples dipped in honey and then gets down to business. Dishes include matzo ball soup, chicken, and  brisket washed down with grape juice or wine. When my father showed up they put out the feedbag.

   “Those guys were very friendly,” he said. “They clapped me on the back, brought me more food than I could eat, and kept refilling my wine glass. I thought they were going to take down the picture of the rabbi that was on the wall and replace it with my picture.” He went back to Vilnius filled with good cheer, in more ways than one.

   After my father got back to Cleveland he toned down his long-time antisemitism. It got so he only had neighborly things to say about Jews. It was a change of heart, an old dog learning a new trick.

   Rita went  back to Lithuania the following year, visiting uncles, aunts, and cousins. She delivered more garments and money to the Ohei Jacob Synagogue in Kaunas. “What impressed me most about Rabbi Zach was that he never asked me for anything. He just said how appreciative he was.” He took a picture of her standing with a clutch of congregants. She was the only one in the photograph legally blonde.

   Before she left Lithuania she visited the Paneriai Memorial outside of Vilnius. It is where a village and railway station had long stood. In 1940 the Red Army began work on a fuel storage base there. They didn’t finish it, interrupted by the German invasion in the summer of 1941. The pits that had been dug for fuel were repurposed. In December 1941 thirty three thousand Jews from Vilnuis were killed there and thrown into the pits. More than five thousand Red Army prisoners of war were also killed and thrown into the pits. 

   In 1944, before the Nazis retreated from the Baltics, they began digging the pits out, burning the corpses, and mixing the ashes with sand. They were trying to hide the evidence of what they had done. The corpse burners were all Jews brought to the pits from forced labor camps. It was a choiceless choice for them. Machine guns compelled them to do the work. The Nazis called the corpse burners Sonderkommandos.

   “When I got there I took a tour, but it was too much. I sat down on a bench by the railroad tracks that came from the nearby main line. They used to bring the Jews to the pits packed in boxcars. It was eerie sitting there and even more eerie when I heard a train whistle and saw a train going past in the distance. That was all I could take.”

   A letter from Kaunas arrived at Born to Travel after Christmas.  “A Happy New Year,” Rabbi Zach wrote. “The Jewish Association of Kovno has received tallitots, yarmulkes, and money.” Kovno is what Jews called Kaunas. “We now have all the Jews in our synagogue wearing the tallitot you brought us and everyone is happy about it. We thank you again. We hope you won’t forget us.”

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street  http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

“A Cold War thriller that captures the vibe of mid-century NYC.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

Late summer, New York City, 1956. The Mob on the make and the streets full of menace. President Eisenhower on his way to Brooklyn for the opening game of the World Series. A killer waits in the wings. Stan Riddman, a private eye working out of Hell’s Kitchen, scares up the shadows.

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CRPSFPKP

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Telling of Monsters

Fishing for Mr. Babadook

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By Ed Staskus

   Emma was dozing in the back seat, her head slumped on her brother’s shoulder, the night they discovered the truth about Shadow Man. Oliver had heard of him, but since they were leaving Prince Edward Island in a few days, going home to Ohio, he had almost given up hope of running into him. Even though he was only ten years old, he was as a rule prepared for the worst when it came to monster hunting, but always hoped for the best.

   Oliver was an accomplished monster hunter. His older sister Emma was his right hand man. Their parents were in the front seats, their father driving and their mother scrolling through her cell phone. It was nearing eleven o’clock. They had been in Charlottetown, at the Irish Hall, where they had seen the band Fiddler’s Sons. They were returning to the Coastline Cottages in North Rustico, where the family had been staying for nearly two weeks.

   They took a wrong turn leaving Charlottetown and ended up on Rt. 15 instead of Rt. 223. “No matter,” their father said. “We’ll drive up to Brackley Beach and from there all we have to do is turn left to North Rustico.” Getting back to their cottage from there meant going through Rustico, Rusticoville, South Rustico, and Anglo Rustico, which were along the way.

   North Rustico was founded in the late 18th century. Nobody is sure exactly when. It is on a natural harbor on the Gulf of St. Lawrence. There is a food market, a hardware store, a Lions Club, and about six hundred people live there. René Rassicot, a French pioneer, was one of the first settlers in North Rustico. All the rest of the nearby Rustico towns take their name from him.

   They were driving down a stretch of Rt. 6 near South Rustico when the road was engulfed by green fog. Suddenly, out of nowhere, there was somebody in front of their car. He was a tall man wearing an old-fashioned flat brim hat and a long black coat. Their father slammed on the brakes but it was too late. The car hit the man and sliced through him like he was nothing.

   “Stay here,” Oliver’s father said, coming to a stop and jumping out of their Jeep Cherokee. He was shaken. He scanned the ground with a flashlight. Nobody was lying dead on the road or in the bar ditch. Oliver twisted around and peered through the rear window.

   Emma woke up. “What’s going on?” she asked.

   “I think dad hit something,” Oliver said. He climbed out of the back seat. Emma followed him. Their mother kept her hand on her cell phone, ready to call 911.

   “He came out of nowhere,” their father said. “He was in the middle of the road but now he’s nowhere.”

   “I have nowhere else to go,” a voice said.

   Oliver, Emma, and their father looked in all directions, looking for the voice. A man walked out of the fog towards them. He was still wearing his old-fashioned flat brim hat. He was more silhouette than flesh and blood. He didn’t look hurt in any way. He was carrying a mace in his right hand. It was an aspergillum, a liturgical implement used to sprinkle holy water. 

   “It’s my double-edged sword, in case my sacred water doesn’t work on the fiend,” he said. “In that case I will send him back to Hell by smashing him with God’s instrument.”

   “We thought we hit you in the road. Are you all right?”

   “Yes, I am all right,” the man said. He had a French accent. His voice had a slight echo to it

   “Who are you?”

   “He’s the Shadow Man,” Oliver said. He knew his phantoms.

    “I am the shade of Rene Rassicot, after who these lands are named,”  the man said, fog rolling off his shoulders. “Some call me the Shadow Man. I do not terrorize the living. I watch over those on my lands, especially at night, when their dreams leave them exposed to danger.”

    “Are you immortal, or something?” Emma asked.

   “All creatures, except for man, are immortal because they are ignorant of death. Being a man, I am not immortal, although I was once threatened with immortality, which is more terrible than being threatened with death.”

   “Are you alive now?”

   “Yes and no, my young girl. My advanced age has resigned me to being Shadow Man. I miss my wife. I miss my family. I miss the smell of coffee and tobacco.”

   “What are you watching out for?” Oliver asked.

   “I am watching out for Mr. Babadook. He prowls these coastal lands from Brackley Beach to Stanley Bridge. He is furtive and cold-hearted. He strikes a pose in a beaver pelt top hat. He wears black mouth paint and his long spindly fingers are knife-like claws. He feeds on bowls of worms.”

   “I’ve never heard of Mr. Babadook,” Emma said.

   “He is the fiend who has oppressed me these past one hundred years,” Shadow Man said. “I have sometimes been confused with him since 1925, when Mr. Babadook was brought to this island in a children’s book.”

   “He came here in a book?” Oliver asked.

   “Yes, a pop-up book.” 

   The first pop-up book was “Little Red Riding Hood” published in 1855. It was called a scenic book. Seventy years later the Big Bad Wolf had become Mr. Babadook. He and the wolf shared the same kind of teeth and unholy appetites.

   “What does he do?” Oliver asked.

   “He knocks on your door, disappears, but leaves behind his red pop-up book meant for children’s night stands.”

   “What happens if children read the book?”

   “When they open the book they read, ‘You can make friends with a special one.’ By the time they get to the middle of the book they read, ‘You cannot get rid of me!’ After that they can’t help turning page after page. When they finish the pop-up book Mr. Babadook moves into their basement and gains control of the house and the family. In the end what happens is madness.”

   “That sounds terrible,” Emma said. “Why hasn’t anybody stopped him?”

   Their father wanted to say there isn’t any such thing as dream police, although he conceded there were dream monsters. Before he could say anything, however, Oliver piped up.

   “Dad, can Shadow Man come with us? He could sleep in Cottage No.1 since it’s empty. We could search for Mr. Babadook tomorrow. Maybe if we put our heads together we could put a stop to what he has been doing. We don’t have anything planned, do we?”

   His mother was all set to say they had plenty planned and Shadow Man should go back to where he came from, but before she could get a word out her husband said, “Get in the back. My son and you can go look for Mr. Babadook tomorrow, although you should know you won’t have much time since we are going home to Ohio in a few days.”

   “What about me?” Emma said, knowing full well she would be in on the hunt, no matter what.

   “We three will find him,” Shadow Man said.

   What he didn’t say was that Mr. Babadook might find them first. The top-hatted bogeyman was always on the prowl for children. Shadow Man looked at the two youngsters in the car and thought he must make a plan.

   Oliver and Emma spent the next day at Cavendish Beach on the Green Gables Shore. That night they went to MacKenzies Brook. The Shadow Man was with them. Their parents were asleep at the Coastline Cottages in North Rustico, two miles away. Their father was snoring lightly. Their mother was dreaming. In her dream she was staring into a green fog and hoping nothing monstrous walked out of the sea fret. When something did she sprang awake in a cold sweat.

   Shadow Man, Oliver, and Emma had quietly left and gotten on the all-purpose path three hours earlier. It was now near dawn. The mice and rabbits were still asleep. The foxes who hunted them were asleep, too. The all-purpose path paralleled the Gulfshore Parkway that ran along the Gulf of St. Lawrence. MacKenzies Brook was on a bluff with a dirt track down to a beach. Fishermen often cast for sea bass there. Oliver and Emma weren’t after fish. They were after Mr. Babadook. When they had gotten there they looked for the Cactus Pot rock formation they had heard about, but it wasn’t there anymore. Hurricane Fiona had blown it down in 2022. It  was the most intense storm to ever hit Prince Edward Island. 

   “You said this was the best place to find Mr. Babadook on this exact day,” Oliver said to Shadow Man.

   “Yes,” Shadow Man said.

   “Why is that?”

   “Once a month a new moon rises above the eastern horizon at sunrise. On that day the moon then travels across the daytime sky with the sun. At the moment when night and day are evenly spaced is the moment when Mr. Babadook stands on the beach and makes his plans for the coming month. It is an order of business with him.”

   Mr. Babadook lived rent free eighteen miles away in a damp corner in the basement of the Haunted Mansion in Kensington. He lived rent free because nobody was aware he was there. The Haunted Mansion had been a potato warehouse when trains used to run past its back door. When the railways on Prince Edward Island were abandoned it was sold and converted into the Kensington Tower and Water Gardens.

   The new owners were anglophiles and rebuilt the potato warehouse into a Tudor-styled manor house. In the early 2000s it was sold to the owner of the Rainbow Valley Amusement Park. He converted it into a spook house. The one-time potato warehouse became spooky and scary.

   Mr. Babadook is a thoughtform that comes from the collective unconscious. He is like a living being who lives inside another living being’s head. He haunts those who read his pop-up book, which is disguised as a children’s book. He is a shape shifter, taking the form of any person, animal, or insect. He has been known to take the form of a woman’s dead husband and convincing her to give him her son so he can destroy him. Moving about at night he often takes the form of a Norwegian rat. 

   “If Mr. Babadook has been on the island for a hundred years, like you said yesterday, how old is he?” Emma asked.

   “As old as the bogeyman,” Shadow Man said. 

   Mr. Babadook was a bogeyman who wore a black coat and top hat. He was long in the tooth. He had claw-like hands and a chalky face. He haunted those who read the pop-up book that he hid inside of. As they became more frightened he became more real and horrible.

   “What are we going to do with him if he shows up?” Emma asked.

   “I don’t know,” Shadow Man said. “My plan didn’t get that far.”

   “I know,” Oliver said. “Since he’s a thought he can’t be whipped by ordinary means. But, since he’s an avatar of fear, Mr. Babadook can be put to an end through acceptance.”

   “What is an avatar?” Shadow Man asked, his 18th century brain drawing a blank about the word.

    “It’s sort of an impersonation created to manipulate others, like Mr. Babadook does,” Oliver said.

   “What do you mean when you say defeated through acceptance?”

   “What I think I mean, if you stop being scared of him, and come to terms with those bulging eyes of his staring you in the face, he loses his power over you. He‘s a master of inciting fear, so I’m not saying it’s easy to do. It can be like trying to hold back a flood with toothpicks.”

   Oliver, Emma, and Shadow Man were hiding inside a clump of Marram grass on the side of a dune when an Ambush Bug flew past them and landed on the beach. Ambush Bugs are part of the Assassin Bug family. They are yellowish things, usually living among sunflowers. They are not picky eaters, but prefer other insects. Any other insect that gets too close is grabbed with strong front legs and held fast. The Ambush Bug jabs its sharp peak into the other bug and sucks out its insides.

   As soon as the bug landed there was a flash and in an instant Mr. Babadook was himself. He pulled a pair of sunglasses out of an inside pocket and stood facing the rising sun. The sky was clear as glass. Oliver, Emma, and Shadow Man walked down the dune and stopped behind Mr. Babadook. Nobody said anything, although Shadow Man knew their archenemy knew they were there.

   When Mr. Babadook whirled around, lashing at them with his claw-like hands, Oliver and Emma jumped back. Shadow Man stood his ground, The claw-like hands went through him without leaving a scratch.

   “If I had known it was you I wouldn’t have wasted my time,” Mr. Babadook said. “But I have other ways of dealing with you, as soon as I’m done with these children.”

   “There isn’t going to be any dealing,” Oliver said. “You’ve overstayed your welcome on this island. It’s time for you to go.”

   “I’m not going anywhere, my young man, and that goes for your little sister, too.”

   “Hey,” Emma said. “I’m the older one, mister.”

   “Yes, you are going somewhere, because once we let everybody know there isn’t anything to fear but fear itself, your days here will be numbered,” Oliver said.

   “Where have I heard that before?”

   “I don’t know, but you’re going to hear a lot of it from today on.”

   Without warning, Mr. Babadook shape shifted into a wolf and snarled. He advanced on Oliver and Emma, who had a jackknife in her back pocket, but quickly realized it wasn’t going to do them any good.

   A fisherman had pulled into the parking lot a few minutes earlier. He had unpacked his gear from his pick-up truck. He was just starting down the dirt path to the beach when he spied the wolf threatening Oliver and Emma. He cast his line and hooked the butt of the wolf, who yelped in protest. There was a flash and the wolf shape shifted back into Mr. Babadook. 

   “Let me go if you know what’s good for you!” he roared.

   The fisherman knew what was good for him. He reeled the black-clad fiend in, dragging him through the beach sand and up the dirt path. A catch is a catch. When he had him at the top of the bluff he grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and tossed him into his wicker fish basket. Mr. Babadook raged inside the basket, trying to slash his way out of it, threatening doom to everyone seen or unseen, known or unknown. Before he could tear the bag apart the fisherman overturned it into a cooler and secured the lid.

   “What are you going to do with him?” Emma asked.

   “He’s going back into the deep, from where he came,” the fisherman said. He threw the cooler into the ocean. The tide took it. It floated up the Gulf of St Lawrence, past Red Bay and Port Hope Simpson, past Newfoundland and out into the Labrador Sea. It floated past Greenland and finally landed on the northwest coast of Iceland at Samuel Jonsson’s Art Farm at the tip of the Westfjords near the town of Selardalur. 

   Mr. Babadook spent the rest of his days there, having lost his pop-up book, fishing for herring, which he ate with caramelized potatoes, and  painting portraits of himself. He sold the paintings to the occasional tourist who took the time and trouble of driving the hundreds of miles from Reykjavik.

   The locals assumed he was a troll, come down from the mountains, since he only ate after it got dark. Everybody knew trolls had issues with sunlight. Since losing his pop-up book, he told anybody who asked that his mother was Gryla, the most feared troll in Iceland, so nobody messed with him. Parents warned their children to be vigilant around the top-hatted creature, and that is what all the children of the Westfjords did from then on, like they did with all trolls.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street  http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

“A Cold War thriller that captures the vibe of mid-century NYC.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

Late summer, New York City, 1956. The Mob on the make and the streets full of menace. President Eisenhower on his way to Brooklyn for the opening game of the World Series. A killer waits in the wings. Stan Riddman, a private eye working out of Hell’s Kitchen, scares up the shadows.

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CRPSFPKP

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Home Movies

Kingpin of the T

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By Ed Staskus

   The one and only time I met Daffy Dan was at a party in a fourth floor warehouse studio on Superior Ave. between downtown Cleveland and the Innerbelt. It was the ArtCraft Building. There was a car-sized freight elevator in the back, but the front stairs were what all the partygoers used. Nobody knew how to operate the old-fashioned elevator controls. They were ready for a drink by the time they got upstairs. The studio belonged to Joe Dwyer, somebody I had gone to high school with. He was an artist and was making artworks in the studio. He also threw parties there, especially on Halloween, which it was the night I met Daffy Dan. No sooner did I meet him than the lady friend I had come with wandered off.

   When I was introduced to Daffy Dan I realized who he was right away, if only because I had just seen the custom-made fifteen-foot tall caricature of him on the front of the warehouse building across the street. The sign next to the cut-out said, “The Creative Studio of Daffy Dan’s.”

   He was on the short side and wore his hair long, over his shoulders, and parted in the middle. He was 28 years old, slightly older than me. He had a handlebar mustache. It was the kind of mustache lawmen and outlaws wore in the 19thcentury. He wasn’t wearing a costume for the Halloween party. He had on faded blue jeans and a sports jacket over a  t-shirt. The t-shirt featured WWMS-FM, the city’s favorite rock ‘n’ roll radio station. Their buzzard logo, a top hat in one hand and a walking stick in the other hand, was in the middle of the t-shirt. “Ohio Tuxedo” was in bold red letters above the smiling blonde-haired buzzard.

   A campaign-style button was pinned to the lapel of his jacket. It said, “If your t-shirt doesn’t have a DD on the sleeve, it’s just underwear!!” The two exclamation points meant he meant business. Daffy had a can of beer he wasn’t drinking in his hand. Every few minutes somebody stopped and said hello to him.

   “How did you get into the t-shirt business?” I asked. I was interested because I wasn’t in any business of any kind. I floated from one job to another and was consequently relatively poor. Even though Daffy didn’t have a degree of higher learning, after a few minutes of talking to him it became clear he wasn’t a sandwich short of a picnic.

   “I dropped out of high school my senior year and went to work in the record store business,” he said. “I started to carry some rock group t-shirts. I got a catalog of shirts from who knows where. Other record stores started coming to me and asking me where I got them from, and rather than telling them, I looked up a dealer and started to wholesale them.”

   Even though he looked as counter cultural as the best of them, he was bright as a button when it came to commerce and capitalism. He was the city’s top dog of t-shirts. He knew how to circle his way around a dollar. “Before long I started to realize, wait a minute, those dealers aren’t doing it right. I can do it better. The rock group t-shirts just took off like a rocket. We located our storefront over on Clifton and West 104th St., and that’s where we really started. From the beginning we marketed ourselves as Daffy Dan’s from Cleveland, Ohio. We opened a single store in 1973.” There were now five of them, with four more planned. “It isn’t tourists, either. It is Clevelander’s buying Cleveland-themed t-shirts and merchandise. It’s a phenomenon.”

   The slogan of Daffy Dan’s first store was, “If You’ll Wear It, We’ll Print It.” By the time I met the man behind the phenomenon he was moving more than forty thousand t-shirts annually. One of his most popular offerings displayed the legend “Cleveland: You Gotta Be Tough.” On another best seller Andy Gibb’s face was the hot potato plastered on bosoms far and wide. It was followed in popularity by Darth Vader and Farrah Fawcett-Majors. 

   “It’s not a fad,” Daffy said. “Blue jeans and t-shirts have become the American way of life.”

   Back in the day t-shirts were called tunics. Well into the 19th century they were simply called undergarments. The first t-shirt was created when a union suit was cut in half with the top long enough to tuck into a waistband. The U. S. Navy put them into circulation as crew-necked, short-sleeved undershirts during World War One. Naval work parties in steaming hot engine rooms took to wearing them all the time. Farmers adopted them during the Great Depression. They were cheap and lightweight. The first printed t-shirt was an Air Corps Gunnery School t-shirt issued in 1942. In the 1960s they got popular as souvenirs, advertisements, and self-expression billboards. A friend of mine had one, featuring an angry Micky Mouse, that said, “My parents went to Disneyland and all I got was this lousy t-shirt.”

   Plain t-shirts were going out of fashion, even though they are versatile, like a blank canvas. Everybody has got something to say. If you don’t get what’s on your chest out on your chest you end up looking like nobody. That’s why you get a t-shirt with an iron-on monkey and the caption, “Here Comes Trouble.” There is no sense messing around. One of Daffy Dan’s t-shirts went in the out door. It said, “I Am a Virgin. This Shirt Is Very Old.” Another one of them was an entreaty for hugs and kisses. “Turkeys Need Love Too.” One got right down to its own bad-tempered point. It said, “Go to Hell.”

   “I love you, Daffy Dan,” Marsha Greene said years later. “You were with me through my teenage hood. I loved wearing your t-shirts. They made me feel proud and you were considered one of the cool kids when you wore a DD t-shirt back then. They helped my self-esteem.” Like they say, is a hippopotamus a hippopotamus, or just a really cool opotamus?

   The Halloween party had gone into overdrive. There were no quiet corners. Smoke from marijuana and tobacco lowered the ceiling. Joe threw an LP by Bobby “Boris” Pickett & the Crypt-Kickers onto the turntable. They started in on their smash hit ‘Monster Mash.’ The singer had a British accent with a sniff of Transylvania. “They did the monster mash, it was a graveyard smash, it caught on in a flash, they did the monster mash.” The speakers weren’t the greatest, but they didn’t have to be. They just had to hold out until the end of the night.

   “You silk screen a lot of rock ‘n’ roll t-shirts,” I said, pointing out the obvious. 

   “Yeah,” he said. “When I was starting, the Agora was packing them in every night. I saw rock ‘n’ roll t-shirts as an absolute natural.”

   “Do you listen to much music? Do you go to shows?” Cleveland was often touted as the Home of Rock ‘n’ Roll.

   “I go to music clubs or concerts every night of the week,” he said. “The offerings are spectacular. The Agora, of course, is at the top of my list, but there are a hundred clubs and concert venues, the Hullabaloo Club, It’s Boss, the Viking Saloon, the Roundtable, Utopia, Atomic Alps, and the Plato. I go to them all. The music scene in Cleveland is like being a kid in a candy store.”

   Joe  slid another record on the turntable. It went round and round. It was the Rolling Stones belting out ‘Sympathy for the Devil.’ Mick Jagger was in fine form. “Just as every cop is a criminal, and all the sinners saints, as heads is tails, just call me Lucifer.” It was a kind of Halloween theme song for the times.

   “Did you really drop out of high school?” I asked. “I thought that’s something you’re not supposed to do anymore, unless the Devil makes you do it.”

   “I was walking down the hall between classes at Shaker Heights High School when the baseball coach grabbed me,” Daffy Dan said. “He grabbed me by the peace sign hanging around my neck on a leather strap and led me to the principal’s office proclaiming that I would not be allowed to graduate with my class in June without a haircut. Mind you, this is 1968, and my hair barely touched my collar and was just a tad over my ears, but according to the coach, not up to the school dress code. The gauntlet had been thrown down and I promptly withdrew from school. That was a proud moment in our household. Not! I was plumb nuts back then.”

   After the Summer of Love in the late 1960s became a fact, entrepreneurs in California started producing t-shirts featuring motifs and emblems, especially anything associated with hippies, the Grateful Dead, and Che Guevara. They silk screened their t-shirts, just like Daffy Dan was doing. When screen printing, a design is separated into individual colors. Water based inks are applied to the shirt through mesh screens, limiting the areas where ink is deposited. The most important factors are making sure the t-shirt is on a flat surface and that the stencil is positioned exactly where the artwork is supposed to appear.

   T-shirts with glow-in-the-dark charts of the periodic elements were silk screened by special order. “My customers are individualists and eccentrics who want something a little different from what you can buy off the rack,” Daffy said. “They want a work of art.”

   The lady friend I had come with was still sight seeing, God knows where. Story of my life. The smell of marijuana was everywhere, even though it was decidedly illegal. Richard Nixon had declared a ‘War on Drugs’ a few years earlier. He said drugs were Public Enemy Number One. He didn’t say what was Public Enemy Number Two, although I might have suggested Tricky Dick himself. Daffy and I had to raise our voices to be understood, especially when Jimi Hendrix got going. “Purple haze all in my brain.” We lowered our voices between songs.

   “How did you get your nickname?” I asked. He told me he had been at a friend’s house pitching his idea of imprinting t-shirts. He was trying to raise capital. His friend’s wife didn’t think much of his business plan. “You’re daffy, Dan,” she said. It made him, Daniel Roger Gray, sit up straight. 

   “I stopped, speechless for a moment. That was it, Daffy Dan’s!”

   It was going on midnight when Joe slipped some Screamin’ Jay Hawkins under the needle. “I put a spell on you because you’re mine, stop the things you do, watch out, I ain’t lyin’, I can’t stand no runnin’ around, I can’t stand no puttin’ me down, I put a spell on you because you’re mine.”

   I said good night to Daffy Dan and looked around for my lady friend. I didn’t find her. I didn’t care all that much. She was slumming, anyway. She was a rich girl with conservative suburban parents. I wouldn’t have minded being rich, but not on her father’s terms. His terms were my way or the highway. She was going to become him sooner or later. I had dinner with her family one time and it was plain as day. 

   Out on the sidewalk it was starting to rain. I looked across the street at Daffy Dan’s Superior Ave. nerve center. His cut-out caricature was lit up by a floodlight. He had been lit up at the party, although not by marijuana or beer. He was glowing with going his own way. He had probably taken some wrong turns along the way but he seemed to have his eye on the prize. His path to flying colors looked somewhat different than most but that didn’t mean he was going in circles. He was no Daffy Duck, that was for sure.

Photograph by Heather Hileman.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street  http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

“A Cold War thriller that captures the vibe of mid-century NYC.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CRPSFPKP

Late summer, New York City, 1956. The Mob on the make and the streets full of menace. President Eisenhower on his way to Brooklyn for the opening game of the World Series. A killer waits in the wings. Stan Riddman, a private eye working out of Hell’s Kitchen, scares up the shadows.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Baltic Place

Motor City Breakdown

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By Ed Staskus

   Antanas Kairis was two years older than me, sure of himself, and quick on the uptake. He was even quicker when things took a twist. I met him at a party at a small mansion on Magnolia Dr. in University Circle, around the corner from the Music Settlement. Dalia and Algis Nasvytis, who were near my age and who I knew through the community, lived there with their younger sister, Julia, and their parents. It was two weeks before Christmas.

   They threw their house open occasionally, clearing the big room in the back for kids, teenagers, and young adults to dance to records. The grown-ups mingled, smoking and drinking and chatting. The house was brick, two stories with a front facing slate roof and gables and windows galore. Mid-December was cold and it had snowed for days. All lit up the house sparkled in the frosty night.

   Antanas was from Boston and had come to Cleveland, Ohio, to see his girlfriend, who was from Dearborn, Michigan. When I called him Antanas he said, “Call me Andy.” His girlfriend Aida was blonde and beautiful and visiting friends. She didn’t know our hosts, but her friends did, and she knew Andy.

   I didn’t know I was standing next to him until Aida sauntered off to dance with another boy. “What do you know, I drive all day, and she slips off with somebody else,” he grumbled, grinning devilishly. It took me a second to realize he was talking to me. I was wall flowering more than dancing. At least he had a girl to complain about. The field I was playing was empty. I didn’t often strike up conversations with strangers. Andy was more silver-tongued than me, by far.

   He wanted a cigarette. We went out on the back terrace and he lit up. He offered me one but I didn’t smoke. He did most of the talking. By the time we went back inside it seemed like we were fast friends. I didn’t see much of him the rest of the night. He had eyes only for Aida. He clapped me on the back when I was leaving with my ride, saying he hoped we would meet again. I said sure, even though I didn’t expect to ever see him again.

   I don’t know how Andy got my phone number but two months later I found myself on the phone with him. He was driving to Dearborn to see Aida the next weekend and wanted to know if I wanted to go along. I cleared it with my parents, even though they didn’t know him or his family. It was enough for them that he was Lithuanian. He picked me up the next Friday morning. When he arrived he looked like he had driven all night.

   He was driving an almost new hardtop GTO 428. GTO stands for Grand Turismo Omologato. It was red, what Pontiac called Montero Red. It was a cool car inside a hot color. It had street cred, and more. I waved goodbye and jumped in. When we got to the corner of our street, he asked me if I minded driving. I said I didn’t mind and drove all the way to Dearborn while he slept. Dearborn was one hundred and seventy miles away. We made it in record time in the smooth as silk muscle car. The engine had a throaty sound and handled like doing simple arithmetic.

   Henry Ford was born on a farm in Dearborn and later built an estate there. He pioneered the mass production of automobiles and his world headquarters was based there. He forged the River Rouge Complex there, the largest factory of his industrial empire. He had a reconstructed historic village and museum built nearby, immortalizing his youth. The back lot was planted with sunflowers and his favorite crop, which were soybeans. The crops were never harvested.

   There were lots of Poles, Germans, and Lithuanians in Dearborn. If there were any African Americans, I didn’t see them. “Negroes can’t get in here. Every time we hear of a Negro moving in, we respond quicker than reporters do to a fire,” said Orville Hubbard, the mayor of Dearborn for thirty two years. “As far as I am concerned, it is against the law for a Negro to live in my town.” 

   The Michigan Civil Rights Commission found him guilty of posting racist newspaper clippings on City Hall bulletin boards. However, he never saw jail time. He was an equal opportunity bigot. He complained that “the Jews own this country” and that the Irish “are even more corrupt than the Dagos.” When Middle Easterners started moving into Dearborn after the Six-Day War he said “the Syrians are even worse than the niggers.” In 1970 his son John Jay Hubbard ran for mayor against him but got beaten to a pulp. The unofficial slogan of the town was “The Sun Never Sets on a Negro in Dearborn.”

   We got to Aida’s house without too much trouble, except for stopping at several gas stations to ask for directions. Her parents had reservations about Andy but brushed me off as a harmless sidekick. They agreed to let us sleep in their furnished basement that night and Saturday night and made supper. It was cold beet soup with black rye bread and kugelis. I wasn’t surprised it wasn’t burgers and fries. They were true blue Baltic folks.

   We went out on the town, visiting the Automotive Hall of Fame. We went to the Henry Ford Museum and rode in a Model-T. We went to the Fairlane and sat in an old bus. We went to the movies and saw “In the Heat of the Night.” We stopped at a tavern with a neon sign in the window saying “EATS.” Andy explained I was with him and they let me in. We had burgers and fries. Andy had a beer. Aida and I had cans of Sprite.

   On the way back Andy and Aida rolled around in the back seat making out. We were at a stop light minding our own business, waiting for the green light, when a car pulling up next to us got too close and broke off the GTO’s sideview mirror. There wasn’t one to begin with on the passenger side which meant now we didn’t have any. The young woman driving the white Chevy Corvair looked at me, looking chagrined. She put the car in park and got out. I noticed her compact car didn’t had side mirrors from the get-go. The Corvair is on most lists of “The Ten Most Questionable Cars of All Time.” 

   I was standing beside the driver’s door looking at the broken mirror lying in the road when I noticed Andy bolting out of the back seat and making a beeline to who-knows-where. He hit the pavement running and disappeared down a side street. When the police appeared, I pointed to the broken mirror and explained what happened. Aida and I stood next to the GTO while they went about their business. They wrote a ticket and gave it to the guilty girl. She drove away in her Corvair waving goodbye.

   “We’ve called your parents and they’ll be here to pick you up soon,” one of the policemen told Aida. She looked stricken. 

   “Are your parents strict?” I asked. She nodded yes.

   “What about me?” I asked one of the policemen.

   “You’re coming with us,” the policeman said.

   “Where are we going?”

   “You’re going to jail,” he said.

   “Why? I didn’t do anything.”

   “This is a stolen car,” he said.

   The city hall, the police station, and the district court were all in a row on Michigan Ave. I was taken to the police station, photographed and fingerprinted. They put me in a holding tank. It smelled bad, like a toilet with a dead rat in it. A man in a suit showed up and took my statement. 

   “I didn’t steal that car,” I said. “Find Andy. He’ll tell you.”

   “We already found him.”

   “And?”

   “He said you stole the car.”

   “What! That’s not true. Why did he run away if he didn’t steal it? I didn’t steal anything. He did all the stealing, the rat.”

   “Have you ever been to Massachusetts.”

   “No, except once a couple of years ago when there was a Boy Scout Jamboree there.”

   “All right, sit tight,” he said.

   I sat tight that night and the next night and the night after that until my court appearance on Monday. I was stuffed into a cell with three other men, two of them there for drunk and disorderly and one of them, an African American, for being in Dearborn after the sun went down. He called us honkies every so often. After a while we ignored him.

   “I don’t trust anyone that hasn’t been to jail at least once in their life,” the movie director John Waters once declared. “You should have been, or something’s the matter with you.” I was in jail for the first time in my life, working on my trustability.

   I was suspicious of the two drunks and slept with one eye open. My fears were put to rest the next day when they sobered up. They built Ford Mustangs at River Rouge. The complex included ninety three buildings with nearly sixteen million square feet of factory floor space. It had its own docks on the dredged-our Rouge River, one hundred miles of interior railroad track, a private electricity plant, and an integrated steel mill. It was able to turn raw materials into complete cars all within its own space. 

   “You leave your brain at the door,” one of the men said. “Just bring your body, because they don’t need any other part. It’s a good thing, otherwise I would lose my mind. They tell you what to do and how to do it. No thinking allowed.”

   “Hey, there ain’t a lot of variety in the paint shop either,” the other one complained. “You clip on the color hose, bleed out the old color, and squirt. Clip, bleed, squirt, clip, bleed, squirt, stop and scratch your nose. Only now the bosses have taken away the time to scratch my nose.” 

   “Yeah, the line speed used to be forty-some cars an hour twenty years ago but now it’s working its way up to a hundred cars. A lot of the time I have to get into the car and do my job sitting on base metal. I was always going home with black and blue marks on the back of my legs. I made a padded apron to wear backwards so I would be more comfortable.”

   “I was a two-bolt man for a while,” the painter said. “There were two bolts and I put in one and secured it. Then I put in the other one and secured it. They came pretty fast, so it was time after time all of the time. I always had a sore shoulder. It just wears you down in your bones.”

   A rolling rack of paperback books came by and I grabbed a couple of Perry Mason mysteries. We were fed morning, noon, and night. I took naps whenever I wanted to. Being behind bars was better than it was cracked up to be. By Monday morning I had gained a pound or two, was working on my jailbird tan, and was well rested.

   On the way to the courtroom I saw Andy in another group and jumped him, only to be separated from him by force of arms. I spit out curses, calling him a dirty liar. He gave me the finger and that ended our so-called friendship on the spot. In the courtroom I saw my father, who had taken the day off and driven to Dearborn. He was poker-faced. When my turn came a police detective and an assistant district attorney talked to the judge. When they were done the judge crooked his finger at me to approach the bench.

   “Your friend has admitted stealing the car in Boston to go joyriding and so we are dropping all charges against you,” he said.

   “He’s not my friend,” I said.

   “In any case, you’re free to go.”

   Automobile theft was rampant all over the country, with almost a million of them going missing every year. Michigan was one of the states that led the way. My case was open and shut, thank God. Stealing cars was a trap door to prison. I left with my father, who wasn’t at all happy, but was happy I had been sprung loose.

   “I still can’t believe another Lithuanian would do that to me, especially lying about stealing the car,” I said on our way back to Cleveland.

   My father brushed my naivete aside. “In Lithuania, whenever anyone is driving, they are cautious of people on the side of the road trying to flag them down, trying to get them to pull over,” he said. “Those are usually up to no good.” The only time anybody had to stop, he said, no questions asked, was when a Russian in a uniform told them to stop.

   The Russians had their clamps on Lithuania in those years. They didn’t care whose car you stole, as long as it wasn’t one of their cars. When that happened they got their commie private eye kits out and went looking for the thieves. When they got their ma it was payback time.

   “More often than not it’s a trick to get you out of your car so that a second man can either steal what’s in it or drive off with it,” my father continued. “Everybody knows that if you absolutely must leave your car, let’s say you are involved in an accident, be sure to turn off the ignition, take the keys, and lock the car. Lithuanians are not all saints, believe me.”

   He was from the homeland. He knew the score better than me. He tapped out a Pall Mall, lit it, and drove in silence while he smoked.

   “What do you think the moral of your lost weekend might be?” he asked ten minutes later while stubbing out his cigarette.

   I looked at the pivoting globe compass and the small painted statue of St. Christopher on top of the dashboard, wiggling slightly on their magnetic bases. Even though the compass told him what direction he was going, my father was terrible with directions, often getting lost. He didn’t like asking for them, in any case, and relied on St. Christopher, the patron saint of travelers. Unfortunately, St. Christopher never said a word about anything.

   I couldn’t think what the moral of my weekend in Motor City might or might not be. I was sure there was going to be some kind of sermon. He surprised me, though, tempering sternness with advice.

   “Trust everybody, but always cut the cards.” He was a very good bridge player. He knew when to bid and when to pass. “Be careful when somebody calls himself your friend, no matter whether he’s Lithuanian, or not. You never lose when you lose a false friend.”

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street  http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

“A Cold War thriller that captures the vibe of mid-century NYC.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

Late summer, New York City, 1956. The Mob on the make and the streets full of menace. President Eisenhower on his way to Brooklyn for the opening game of the World Series. A killer waits in the wings. Stan Riddman, a private eye working out of Hell’s Kitchen, scares up the shadows looking for a straight answer.

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CRPSFPKP

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

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