Monthly Archives: September 2026

Chasing Infinity

The Last Transylvanian

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BY Ed Staskus

   When Agnes Schaser lost her balance on the rolling deck of the SS Stuttgart as it steamed into New York Harbor in 1931 she was 22 years old. It was windy and raining. She had barely been able to make out the Statue of Liberty in the fog. She reached for and kept a firm grip on the arm of Mathias Schaser, her new husband. When she walked down the covered gangway she had, unbeknownst to her, a bun in the oven. The voyage had taken seven days. The first day on the ship had been a honeymoon. She had been seasick the next six days in a row. She was glad to get her land legs under her when she set foot on North American soil.

   Mathias had brown eyes, brown hair, and was five foot five. Agnes had blue eyes, brown hair, and was five foot three. He had emigrated from Transylvania to the United States midway through the Roaring Twenties and was naturalized in 1929. He did well for himself and when the day came he went back to his hometown of Hamlesch to fetch the girl he had been marking time to grow up. Their marriage had been arranged years before. Among the Transylvanian Saxons marriage was more of an economic contract than a romantic union. 

   He was born in 1888. She was born in 1909. He was twice her age. The difference didn’t matter to either of them. They were second cousins. The genealogy didn’t matter to their Lutheran brethren. A week before the wedding they  put on traditional folk costumes and went door-to-door inviting guests. Mathias carried a big wooden invitation stick. All the invitees brought food to the wedding feast, milk, butter, lard, and bacon. Every household brought one obligatory chicken. Women rolled out and cut dough for noodles. Many yeast cakes, called Handlich’s, were baked and topped with egg custard. Everybody was meant to get a slice.

   A wedding flag was decorated with tassels, ribbons, and kerchiefs. It was carried by a Fahnrich, Mathias’s closest friend, who led the wedding procession.  A ceremonial tree was crafted for the feast. It symbolized life and prosperity.  Mathias and Agnes exchanged vows in the big church in Hermannstadt, which was near their hometown. He wore a black suit. She wore a white dress. Agnes Kloos became Agnes Schaser on that day.

    Hermannstadt was one of the original seven Transylvanian Saxon towns. According to legend, the Pied Piper brought the towns to life with his flute. Fate leads everyone who follows it. He lured a hundred and thirty children from the German town of Hamelin with his tunes, led them into a mountain, and guided them underground the length of Europe until they finally emerged from a cave in Transylvania. The children separated into groups and founded the first seven Saxon towns in the land.

   All the towns in the Saxon lands of Transylvania were fortified. On top of that, all the churches were even more fortified. There were more than three hundred of the fortified churches throughout Transylvania, both Romanesque and Gothic, built of brick and stone, and most of them featuring a red tile roof. The village hall, school, and grain storage barns were clustered around the church. The churches were always built in the middle of town, often on a mound or a hill, with water tranches, multiple walls, and at least one tower. The tower was for observation, a warning bell, and for throwing rocks and pouring boiling oil on the heads of invaders. The fortified churches were the last refuge of the townsfolk.

   The Saxons came from the Low Countries and Germany, before there was a Romania. It wouldn’t become a country until the late 19th century. When they arrived it was a part of the Kingdom of Hungary. The colonization of Transylvania by Central Europeans, who later became known as Transylvanian Saxons, began during the reign of King Geza II in the 1140s. He recruited them to farm the valleys and exploit copper and iron ore mining in the northeast. 

   They were also expected to help defend against marauding steppe tribes. They weren’t successful against the Mongols, but learned their lesson. When the Ottoman Turks showed up, they were ready for them. They made their stand in their fortified towns and churches. After the Battle of Breadfield the Ottoman Turks complained to their God, but all he said was “Try again.” The Transylvanian Saxons thanked their God. It was every man for himself and God against all.

   Mathias and Agnes took a train from Bucharest to Berlin, made their way to Bremen, steamed up the Weser River, and crossed the Atlantic Ocean. Whenever Agnes wasn’t throwing up over the side, Mathias sat her down trying to teach her the English language. It was a slow go. They landed in New York City in mid-May, where they spent the rest of the week seeing the sights, going to the top of the newly built Empire State Building, strolling the length of Central Park, and feasting on Nathan’s hot dogs at Coney Island. On the Monday morning of the next week they took the Empire State Express to Cleveland’s Union Terminal.

   Until she got to Berlin, Agnes had never seen a train station bigger than a platform. Berlin was big, but she was struck dumb by New York City’s Grand Central Terminal. When she got to Cleveland she was struck again by the size of the train station there. More than two thousand buildings had been demolished in the early 1920s to make room for the underground station and the 52-story Terminal Tower built on top of it. It was at the time  the second-largest excavation project in the world, after the Panama Canal. When the Terminal Tower opened to its first tenants in 1928 it was the tallest skyscraper in North America outside of New York City. The Carpathian Mountains that surrounded Agnes’s homeland were large, but the United States was larger than life.

   Although she realized she might never see her family again, she was relieved to be gone from Transylvania, where trouble was brewing. The problem was, Transylvanian Saxons weren’t Romanians. The ethnic minority was one of the oldest German-speaking groups of the German diaspora. Before 1867 Transylvania had sometimes been autonomous and sometimes in union with Hungary. After the Compromise of 1867 it was incorporated into the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. When the uneasy royal alliance came to an end at the end of World War One, the Romanian majority in Transylvania clamored for unification with the Kingdom of Romania. The Treaty of Trianon in 1920 ratified it. The nationalist aspirations of the Romanians, however, ate away at the independence of the Transylvanian Saxons. The handwriting was on the wall.

   Saxons had been leaving Transylvania, regardless of the political turmoil, in sizable numbers since the late 19th century. Many of them emigrated to Cleveland, where they formed a fraternal organization called Erster Siebenburgen Sachsen Kranken Untersteutszung Verein, which meant First Transylvanian Saxon Sick Benefit Society. It was a mouthful no matter the language. The immigrants were determined to take care of their own. They purchased a sprawling old house on Denison Ave. in 1907 and converted it into what they called the Sachsenheim. They renovated it in 1925, adding two bowling alleys, a ballroom, a music room, a dining room, and a restaurant. They expanded the bar so more beer could be served.

   The married couple settled down on the west side of Cleveland, which was the side of town where most of the city’s Transylvanian Saxons lived. Mathias operated a corner store on Clark Ave., a fifteen minute walk from the Sachsenheim. He sold Big Hunks, Tootsie Rolls, and Chick-O-Sticks. There was chocolate galore. There was a soda counter and all the latest magazines. Agnes gave birth to their first son Harold at City Hospital. Everybody called the boy Hal. Mathias and Agnes scrimped and saved, setting money aside for a new house. She gave birth to their second son William in November 1933. Everybody called the boy Willie. Two days later, after the baby was safely delivered, her husband Mathias was shot twice in the chest at point-blank range. He died in the middle of the night in City Hospital where Agnes was still recovering from Willie’s birth.

   “You mustn’t stay here any longer,” Agnes had told her husband when he visited her earlier that day at City Hospital. She was supposed to stay in the hospital a few days more. “You go back to the store. We need to have more money now.” He went back to the store. He planned to return for his wife and child and bring them home by the end of the week.

   Two teenagers, Pete Wanach and Pete Hansinger, walked in when Mathias was closing the store for the night and demanded the day’s receipts. It was a hold up. When Mathias refused to give it to them, balling up his fists, one of them pulled a handgun and shot him dead. They scooped up all the bills and change in the till and fled. The Cleveland Police apprehended them soon enough. They were tried, found guilty of murder, and sentenced to life imprisonment in the Ohio State Penitentiary. Pete Hansinger had a teenage wife who was pregnant. She gave birth soon after he started serving his life sentence,

   Pete Wanach offered Agnes a one hundred savings bond after his conviction. It was his way of saying sorry. She refused to take it. Pete Hansinger sent her a Christmas card from the penitentiary. She returned the favor every holiday season. “Maybe it will make him feel better,” she said.

   Needing a father for her two sons Agnes married again, tying the knot with Joe Levak, a Slovak from the east side. They moved to that side of town and rented a small house. She decorated the house with cheap landscapes from Woolworths and fine Bavarian China. She gave birth to two daughters one right after the other. The house was filled to the gills with life. She and her husband had their hands full. After five years of marriage Joe Levak dropped dead in 1940. Agnes never remarried. She raised her family on a Mother’s Pension, which was $90.00 a month, and piecework on the side.

   “I taught my sons to be forgiving, not to be bitter,” she said. “We got along all right. They started delivering newspapers when they were 10 years old. They finished high school even though they always worked part-time at a bakery.” On top of that, her sons had to play the violin. Agnes played it and her sons had to learn the instrument at her insistence, although Willie threw a temper tantrum and was soon excused.

   “You can’t carry a tune, anyway,” Hal, singing the blues, told his younger brother.

   Hal was 13 years old in 1944. His middle name was Mathias, the same as his father’s given name. It was an Indian summer day in October. He was walking home from his 7th grade class at Wilson Junior High School. He was looking forward to a bowl of potato tarragon soup. Agnes had brought the recipe from Transylvania. She made it with smoked ham. Hal was nearing his house when he was almost knocked off his feet by a thunderous blast. When he steadied himself and looked around, he saw roofs on fire.

   “It was like the sky blew up all at once, like blood and guts,” he said. Thick black smoke turned the day to night. Hal’s dog Buddy ran up the front steps and pawed at the door. Agnes bolted out of the house. Buddy ran into the house and straight down to the basement. Agnes’s daughters stood in the doorway bawling. Willie came running from the backyard. Hal ran to his mother on the front lawn. They all looked up at the red and black sky.

   The explosion and subsequent fires far and wide were caused when an East Ohio Gas liquefied natural gas storage tank started leaking. The gas flowed onto the concrete lot below the tank and began to vaporize. It turned into a thick white fog. It somehow ignited. It might have been a spark from a passing railcar or somebody lighting a cigarette. The deafening blast blew the tank and everything in sight of it to smithereens, starting with the two men working on top of it. 

   It happened at the foot of East 61st St. near the New York Central Railroad tracks. When the gas exploded it blew up at about twenty five million horsepower, the same as the combined output of all the hydroelectric plants west of the Mississippi River in 1944. One hundred year old oak trees were knocked down. Cleveland streets convulsed as far as four miles away. Flames reached 3,000 feet high and the heat reached 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Birds were turned to charcoal and fell out of the sky.

   Agnes and her children lived on East 66th St. and Lexington Ave., less than a mile from the East Ohio Gas tank farm. White ash trees on their street were on fire. Agnes was dead set on not losing her house. She started spraying garden hose water on it. From the front lawn she watched a tangled multitude of cars, busses, and Clevelanders on foot fleeing from the fire. Police, fire, and civil defense cars and trucks raced towards the fire, which was spewing gas, molten steel, and rock wool into the sky. 

   Housewives were caught unaware as flames spread through sewers and up their drains. When that happened, homes caught on fire. “I was getting ready to do some housework” said Alice Janos, one of Agnes’s neighbors. “Suddenly it seems like the walls turn all red. I look at the windows and the shades are on fire. The house fills with smoke. I think the furnace has blown up, but then I see smoke all around the neighborhood.”

   Gas ran into the streets, into the gutters, and down catch basins, igniting and blowing up wherever it pooled. Manhole covers were sent flying like bottle rockets. Utility poles bent in the heat. Fire trucks fell into sinkholes. Less than a half hour after the first explosion a second tank exploded. It knocked Agnes down, but she got back on her feet right away. Whenever things were going to hell she kept going. She had lost both her husbands. She was determined to not lose her house. She sprayed it with the garden hose until the water pressure turned to nothing. The land of dreams had turned into bad dreams, but her house was saved. The family didn’t have to shelter at Wilson Junior High. It was one of the schools where the Red Cross ended up taking in thousands of suddenly homeless men, women, and children. It was more than a week before children were able to go back to school.

   By Saturday morning the fire department had the inferno under control. In the afternoon, even though Agnes had told them to stay near the house, Hal and Willie went exploring. All the stop signs and traffic lights were gone, but there was no traffic, anyway. Soggy hulks of cars and trucks were pell-mell everywhere. Dogs sniffed at flotsam. Fire hoses littered every intersection.

   “What happened to this place?” Willie asked. “It’s a mess. Do you think it was the Martians?”

   “I don’t think it was the Martians,” Hal said. “Why would they come all this way to blow things up? Mom said it must have been Nazi sabotage.”

   “This wouldn’t have happened if Superman had been here,” Willie said.

   “Yeah, him and Captain America, too,” Hal said. “They got the moxie.”

   Agnes spent the weekend airing out the house, washing the curtains, beating the rugs, and clearing the front and back yards of debris. She swept clumps of ash into the street. When she was done her yard, at least, looked like not much had happened. The framed wedding picture of Mathias and her, taken in a photography studio in Hermannstadt in 1931, had fallen off the fireplace mantle. The glass was broken. She walked seven blocks where she found an open hardware store and replaced the glass. When she got home she gave her long-gone first husband a kiss and put the picture back on the mantle.

   Pete Wanach and Pete Hansinger, who had shot and killed Mathias Schaser, were paroled in 1955. They were middle-aged men by the time they were released. When Agnes was told the news she wished them well. “I have a happy life and my four children. I hope these men have changed and can find good jobs and become good citizens.” 

   Her life changed when she was compelled to sell her house in the early 1960s. She had fallen behind and her real estate taxes were in arrears, as well. The Transylvanian Saxons in her hometown of Hamlesch had a saying, “Et as Wasser am Brannen, awer em mess et schepen.” It meant, “There is water in the well, but one must scoop it up.” Her piecework on the side and Mother’s Pension only went so far. The water in the well was scraping the bottom. She started living with her children.

   “She lived with my father and mother after they were married, from before I was born,” her granddaughter Vanessa said. Agnes’s son Hal had married Terese Stasas, a Lithuanian girl from North Collinwood. Terese eventually put her foot down. “What’s the difference between a mother-in-law and a storm? You can wait out a storm until it passes. I got tired of waiting.” Agnes had to move in with a daughter instead of a daughter-in-law. 

    “After she moved, she visited us sometimes. One morning when I was three years old, she was making eggs for me. I was standing on a stool next to her telling her exactly how I wanted them done. I told her the whites should be cooked a certain way, and the yolks should be soft and pink, not orange. But I must have said too much because she suddenly turned, looked down at me, and said, ‘Halt die klappe!’”

   The little girl didn’t know German but knew exactly what her grandmother meant. Agnes had raised four children and buried two husbands in her time. She didn’t need or want a three-year-old telling her how to fry eggs. She had done all the cooking in her own home all her years and wasn’t in the mood for a food critic.

   Agnes Schaser died two years later. She was sixty years old. She had lived in Cleveland for thirty eight years. She was buried in an out of the way local cemetery. In the meantime, Nicolae Ceausescu, the dictator of Romania, was scaling up his plan of moving the country’s Transylvanian Saxons to West Germany. His communist economy was struggling. He needed hard currency. West Germany was offering ransoms. By the early 1970s the plan evolved into a human trade agreement. Hundreds of millions of Deutschmarks were paid to the Romanian state and by 1990 a half million ethnic Germans, nearly all the descendants of who had long ago settled in the Southeastern European country, had been ransomed and there were no more Transylvanian Saxons.

Studio Photograph: Mathias Schaser and Agnes Kloos, 1931, Transylvania

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.” His books are available on Amazon and Apple Books.

“Bomb City”

Cleveland, Ohio 1975. The John Scalish Crime Family and Danny Greene’s Irish Mob are at war. Car bombs are the weapon of choice. Two police detectives are assigned to find the bomb makers. It gets personal. Revenge is always personal.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

School Days

Jack in the Box

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By Ed Staskus

   My name is Jack, but I go by my middle name, which is Wyatt. My father was a big fan of Wyatt Earp movies back in the day. He wanted me to grow up and become a lawman, but we have agreed that is never going to happen. He’s disappointed, but I reminded him that when you have expectations, you are setting yourself up for disappointment.

   I wake up on school days before everybody else, while they are snoring their heads off, stare at the ceiling in the dark, wonder whether the sun blew up in the night, and mess around with Blackie. He’s my cat that sleeps at my feet. Sometimes he curls up under my arm with his face pressed into my armpit. I wonder how he even breathes. I shouldn’t wonder, though, since he’s the Chuck Norris of everything that goes on in the neighborhood. I never trim his claws. Nothing messes with him twice.

   When it’s time to rise and shine I throw on a sweatshirt. I like going outside first thing, so I always do that right after I get out of bed. Otherwise, somebody would tell me to do something else. Most mornings I walk Scar, our Beagle, although he won’t go out in the rain. We stay on the back porch and chill when it rains. We got him from the Animal Protective League. He’s like a hound with short legs and long ears. He has a bad habit of biting strangers. I never interfere with that. He’s got a chase reflex, too, especially if they’re chipmunks, squirrels, cats, or any dog smaller than him. 

   We jog down Riverside Dr. to Hogsback Ln. and into the Rocky River Metropark, but I have to be watchful, because if he sees a badger in the park it’s all over. He doesn’t believe it’s a revenge obsession, but he’s mistaken. He got torn up when he was still a puppy. There was a badger with cubs in our backyard, behind the garage, and Scar got too close to them. There was an explosion of yelps, screeches, and barking when it happened. His face was ripped open and we had to rush him to the Animal Clinic.

   I used to eat breakfast with my parents. It was always a butt load of something. “Take your elbows off the table and pass the ketchup. Did you do your homework? Is that a clean shirt?” There would be a quiz about what I did yesterday and what I was going to be doing today. They hardly eat together anymore, anyway. Both of them are always in a hurry to get to work, even though my dad hates his job because of the toads whose business it is. My stepmom teaches at the new middle school down the street. She loves it because she can boss everybody around and make big money doing it. She talks about her paycheck and pension all the time. She made sure all of our neighbors voted her way when a school tax levy was on the ballot last year. 

   The first thing I do after I’ve showered and gotten dressed for school is call the Red Door Deli and order two Bagel Bacon Bagel Specials. There’s a yellow man who works there. He has a thick accent. My father hates immigrants, but the yellow man makes a mean bacon bagel, so he’s in my good book.

   “Hallo!”

   I’m, like, “Hi.”

   “Yes?”

   “I want to order two Bagel Bacon Bagel Specials.”

   When he repeats my order, I can barely understand him. “That’s right,” I always say no matter what he says. Everybody there knows me, but he pretends it’s the first time he’s ever talked to me, even though he answers the phone every morning. He’s the one who hands me my bagel specials at the counter, too.

   The Red Door is across the street from St. Ed’s High School in Lakewood, in a pint-sized strip shopping center, squeezed between Bubbles, a pit stop for dirty laundry, and Sassy Beauty, a hair salon. I go to the Red Door every morning and since they know me my main man just hands me my paper bag without a word and I fork over four dollars.

   What time I get there for my bagels depends, although it’s never later than eight o’clock. It depends on Noah’s father, who drives both of us to school. Noah lives next door. His father works at a garden center in Avon, even though their yard isn’t any better than ours, which is surprising. Noah calls my cell phone when they’re ready to go and I run right over.

   “Pick it up, pick it up,” his father grumbles, shrugging his way into their gigantic SUV. He always sounds peeved about something. He drops us off at the Red Door. I get my breakfast sandwiches. Noah and I walk across the street to school.

   The cafeteria is at the back of the building, which is the new part of the school. We cross the street, squeeze between the chapel and main classroom, and go in through a side door. Our chapel is boss, topped with a gold dome, just like Notre Dame. It glows in the sun. You can see it from blocks away.

   Every morning there are a butt load of guys in the cafeteria. The TV’s are all on and everybody is watching whatever, which is mostly the news. The flat screens are on every wall except the far wall with the windows. There’s destruction and disaster every morning on the FOX Morning Show, major scariness everywhere, but it doesn’t mess with anybody’s breakfast.

   I don’t watch too closely. It’s all just a lot of crap, a sour lollipop without the handle. But sometimes I pay attention, especially if the news is about an airplane crash, since I’m always in the middle of major crashes when I play video games.

   My father and stepmom watch FOX News every night. They agree among themselves that every word the talking heads say is true. It’s doing to them what they say video games are doing to me. It’s making them slow and stupid. What they don’t know is video games make me fast and smart, although my stepmom doesn’t want to hear it. I’ll leave her in the dust soon enough.

   I wouldn’t want to be body slammed while inside an airplane hitting a hillside. It’s an instant emergency room, all broken bones and gore. It only takes a second, but forever can happen in a split second. Everybody’s so burned up and busted to pieces that dentists have to be brought in to find out who is who.

   One day there was major terrorist news that caught my eye, except it wasn’t on the news. It was on the internet. It was too gruesome for the news. Towelheads captured some scruffy looking people and wouldn’t let them go. It was holy war time. They tied them to posts and blindfolded them. They shot them one at a time, although they didn’t shoot to kill. They shot them in the legs. Then they went back and shot them in the arms. It was weird. The internet loves weird.

   They filmed it while they were doing it, too. They are sick butt turds. Our military is totally rad and could take them out, but nobody is going to win that war. It’s an epic fail over there. It’s been going on forever. I hope they try to come here. We would rumble on their butts. It’s cammo, ammo, and Rambo. Our family has plenty of guns in the attic, and we have ammunition, too. I’m not sure about everything we have, though. Billy Boy is the only one who knows for sure.

   “I have two 12-gauge’s, a semi-automatic pistol, a .22 Sig Sauer, a big bore 14-gauge, and an AK-47 semi-automatic,” Billy says, looking smug. “I have more, but the rest of it isn’t any of your business.”

   Billy is like that. He’s my older half-brother. He lives on the third floor and doesn’t let anybody in his room. It’s all under lock-and-key, starting with his bedroom door. My stepmom is good with it. It wouldn’t be good for me if I tried it. He wears tight-fitting clothes and goes to Cleveland State University. He wants to be a policeman or an army man. He’ll be gone in two or three years. I can’t wait for that.

   His arsenal is technically my father’s, because he bought most of it, but they’re totally my half-brother’s. Billy Boy buys guns for himself now that he’s turned eighteen and become an adult. Before that he wasn’t allowed. He was still a child. 

   We go shooting at Scooterz-N-Shooterz in Uniontown and on my grandfather’s farm in Michigan. The family goes to the farm every summer. My grandfather says that whenever anybody says you don’t need a gun, you’d better make sure you have one that works. “They always want to take guns away from the people who didn’t do it,” he says, cackling like something is stuck in his craw. Last summer I shot so many rounds off at the farm, at targets, at trees, even at nothing, that I got a blister on my hand. It was big and nasty.

   I have my own gun, although it’s not exactly a real one. It’s a G & G Carbine air soft gun. It’s not real, but it looks feels acts like the real deal. It shoots BB’s instead of bullets. Ted Nugent said the BB gun is the most important gun in the history of American weaponry. He should know. He has his own name brand BB’s. Air soft ammo is plastic, not metal. They leave a welt when they smack skin.

   My father bought it for me. He didn’t tell my stepmom. He worries about smackdown on a daily basis. It’s not from Target or anyplace like that. It cost almost four hundred dollars. My friends, Nick and Jake, and I use Grudge Tactical pellets when we’re out and shooting each other. The pellets are coated with powder, so they leave a mark on your clothes. It’s not just some toy. It’s fully automatic and awesome.

   Nobody talks about guns at St. Ed’s, not us, and not our teachers. Even though everybody runs guns down, when they say anything at all, Mr. Rote, our religion teacher, told us the church says self-defense is cool, and told us about St. Aquinas and taking care of business. Mr. Rote said it’s best to shoot first and ask questions later. He said the Dalai Lama says the same thing. Nobody asked him who that was, not that anybody cared about any Lama.

   “It’s your responsibility to defend your faith, your family, and your country,” he said. “It’s a duty to defend church and country from evil men.” He didn’t say much more than that. He plays the guitar. He’s probably never had a gun in his hands his whole life. What does he know? We don’t have metal detectors at St. Ed’s like they do at public schools, but if anyone ever brought a gun to our school that would be the end. They would be expelled and never be allowed back.

   You can wear pajamas to public school, but at St. Ed’s we have to wear a dress shirt and tie, pressed pants, and black shoes. You can’t even have too much style in your hair. When you’re in a Catholic school there’s more expected of you. If you’re a St. Ed’s man, or if you go to St. Ignatius, or any Catholic school, everybody expects you to be a good person. What you do in public school is up to you, which isn’t always a good thing. Not everybody is a good kid, no sir. There are plenty of rotten apples.

   When I was in middle school big kids would make fun of small kids with learning disabilities. They picked on the younger specimens. They would walk right up to them, start being mean, and push them around. They would go after the ones with ADHD or Tourette’s, edge on them, and make fun of them.

   From sixth grade on it was all about bullying kids who were shy or different, especially in gym class. There was a posse of bullies, led by Tristan and Justin. They were complete dirtbags. I would try to help, as long as the monsters weren’t there, the ones who say they don’t punch you in the back, they punch you in the face.

   “You shouldn’t act up like that,” I said them whenever I could.

   “Shut up.”

   “Leave them alone, make fun of somebody else.”

   “Yeah, sure, beat it.”

   They wouldn’t stop. It wasn’t like they were in class, so they could keep doing it and doing it. They thought they were so superior. That’s how they got the stupid kids to like them. That’s the thing about Catholic schools and public schools. Guys don’t do that at Catholic schools. I’m sure some do, but not like that. So many public school kids are dipsticks. They learn English by watching cartoons. 

   If a teacher at a Catholic school got wind of bullying like that there would be no problem seeing the trouble you were in. All hell would break loose. When you’re in a Catholic school there’s a lot more expected of you. You’re expected to be a better person. You have to take charge of yourself and carry the cat by the tail. It’s a big change when you leave public school for good. It was a big change for me. I didn’t go to a parochial grade school. I went to a public school. I didn’t have eight years of dress rehearsal.

   The food is better at St. Ed’s than it is at public schools, where it’s mostly grown in boxes and cans. Their cooks carry X-Acto knives instead of spatulas. At St. Ed’s we have real cooks and we’re served real food, whole grains, fruits, and vegetables. No sugar drinks are allowed. The milk is low fat. It doesn’t pay to be fat at St. Ed’s. It’s the Breakfast of Champions, but I still bring my Bagel Bacon Bagel Specials most mornings, because we don’t get enough food.

   There are rules about everything, even about how many calories we’re allowed. I don’t get enough for cross-country and the football players always bellyache about their portions. Football is the most important thing at St. Ed’s. Everybody knows where the goalposts are. We won states last year, so this year we are the defending state champions.

   When school started in the fall we were 5th in the USA Today poll and 6th in the ESPN poll. That’s in the whole country, not just Ohio. That’s how good we are. At St. Ed’s it’s either football season or it’s waiting for football season. We say it’s faith, family, and touchdowns. Sometimes it almost seems like it means more than Heaven and Hell. It puts pep in everybody’s step when we win. I tried football in grade school, but it didn’t work out. I was under-sized and then I broke my collarbone. Now I love running.

   The football players boycotted lunch one day. It was a big stir. My friend Rick, who is a 6-foot-3-inch 220-pound linebacker, said he burns more than 3,000 calories during three hours of weight training and practice after school. “We are getting hungry even before the practice starts,” he complained to one of the vice-principals. “Our metabolisms are all sped up.”

   “I could not be more passionate about this,” the food supervisor said, making a speech the next day before lunch. Grown-ups are always making speeches, masterminds on their soapboxes. “I want to solve this problem,” she said, looking smug and serious. She had everybody fill out cards about what we did and didn’t like about our meals. We all laughed about it. Everybody knew nothing was going to change. They’re always trying to put it over us with their plans and schemes. Grown-ups do what’s good for them, not for anybody else.

   Our cafeteria is the nicest one I’ve ever seen. There are skylights over the atrium, polished wood floors, oblong tables, and ergonomic chairs. Everything is super modern. Somebody’s father died and he gave the school a ton of money, millions of it, the minute he was six feet under. The whole school is up-to-date, even though it was built in 1949, on land that used to be a feeding stop for cattle trains. Back then if you got a detention you had to help dig out the new basement with a shovel. Punishment was being made to be blue collar for the day, made to work with your hands.

   When I check my cell phone and it’s 8:25 I wolf down what’s left of my Bagel Bacon Bagel Specials and pop up fast because my first class is at 8:30. Being late for Mr. Rote’s Roman Catholic religion class would be the worst thing I could do to start my day. If I did there would be persecution. When we hit the hallway it’s every freshman for himself and God against all.

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. 

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

“Captures the vibe of mid-century NYC, from stickball in the streets to the Mob on the make.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction

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

Late summer and early autumn. New York City, 1956. President Eisenhower on his way to the opening game of the World Series. A hit man waits in the wings. A Hell’s Kitchen private eye scares up the shadows.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication