All posts by Edward Staskus

Edward Staskus is a freelance writer from Sudbury, Ontario. He lives in Lakewood, Ohio. His crime thrillers "Cross Walk" and "Bomb City" can be found on Amazon.

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Flying the Coop

March 1, 2025 Edward Staskus Leave a comment

By Ed Staskus

“Hey, what the hell do you think you’re doing?” Juozas Bankaitis barked coming back to his delivery truck. He had just dropped off three orders of fried chicken to a law office on the corner of 3^rd St. and Yesler Way on Pioneer Square. Yesler Way was named after Henry Yesler, the founder of Seattle. A Negro man was tearing the spare tire cover off the back of his truck.

“Who the hell do you think you are calling us coons?” the man yelled back.

What is he griping about? Juozas wondered. Everybody loves coon chicken.

Juozas was new to Seattle, Washington. He had come from Cleveland, Ohio. He had emigrated to the United States from Lithuania a year after the Great Depression parked itself for the long haul. None of the work he found in Cleveland ever lasted and he decided to take his chances out west. When he got to Seattle he liked what he saw. It reminded him of his home on the Baltic Sea. He changed his name to Joe Baker. He worked for the Coon Chicken Inn making deliveries and filling in whenever the kitchen needed him. He didn’t belong to the Church of Fried Chicken, but he was good at seasoning them and making sure the cooking oil temperature never dropped below 325 degrees.

“Give that back to me,” Joe said.

“Come and get it,” the man said. His name was Joseph Stanton. He worked for the Northwest Enterprise, a local Negro newspaper. The newspaper had been founded in 1920 by William Henry Wilson. By the time Joe Baker arrived in town William Henry Wilson was thought to be the most successful Negro in Seattle.

Joe Baker and Joe Stanton each got their hands on the spare tire cover and started tugging. Before long the canvas cover tore in half. A policeman on foot patrol heard the commotion and broke up the tug of war. He arrested Joe Stanton. The Negro was booked for vandalizing an automobile. The next day in court the judge asked to see both parts of the spare tire cover. When a court attendant brought them out, the judge put the parts together and chuckled. It had Coon Chicken Inn printed on it in bold letters. Darkies could be sensitive.

There was a color picture in the middle of the spare tire cover. It was the head of a grinning bald black man with enormous lips, a winking eye, and wearing a cockeyed porter’s cap. The same bald black man’s head formed the restaurant’s 12-foot high front entryway. The door was through his grinning mouth. The logo was on every menu, dish, and piece of silverware.

“Well, I’ll just fine you three dollars and you go on home,” the judge said settling the matter by banging his gavel. Joe Stanton’s newspaper paid the fine. They padded his paycheck with a bonus the following week.

The first Coon Chicken Inn came to life in 1925 in Salt Lake City. The eatery took off the day its doors opened. Two years later the deep-fat grease-soaked place caught fire and was reduced to ashes. Fifty carpenters worked day and night for ten days building a newer bigger restaurant. An overflow crowd showed up on the eleventh day. Everybody got free dessert when they ordered the Coon Chicken Special.

The Seattle restaurant opened in 1929 on Bothell Highway, not far from Henry the Watermelon King, who sold king-sized watermelons. Just like in Salt Lake City, it was an instant success. “Anyone who has lived below the Mason-Dixon line knows that ‘coon chicken’ is the way the fowl is cooked by the old-fashioned southern mammy,” the Seattle Times reported, heedless that there were no old-fashioned southern mammy’s in the kitchen. The following year another one of the restaurants opened in Portland, Oregon. A cabaret, dance floor, and orchestra were soon added to the Salt Lake City and Seattle locations. The dance floor was where Joe Baker met Helen, who became his wife.

“I’ve always said, never put a sword in the hands of a man who can’t dance,” Helen said. “But, oh boy, you can dance.”

“I always say, if you can dance, you’ve got a chance,” Joe said. “Never mind that chicken, let’s shake a leg.”

The fried chicken restaurants were owned and operated by Maxon Graham and his wife Adelaide. Maxon had been barely 16 years old in 1913 when he answered an ad for the Metz Automobile Company. They were looking for car dealers. Maxon wrangled financing from a local bank and got distributorship rights for Utah, Idaho, and Nevada. When he did, he became the youngest car dealer in the United States. Twenty years later Maxon and Adelaine were looking for a new opportunity. They settled on fried chicken.

Most of the waiters, waitresses, and busboys at the Coon Chicken Inn were Negroes. “Their service to whites is preordained by God,” was the feeling of the day. Everybody knew, though, that they were thieving chicken-lovers. Everybody had seen their rascality in the movie “Rastus and the Chicken.” The birds were kept under strict supervision. The cooks were a mixed bag. The rest of the staff was white, especially the cashiers, bartenders, and everybody front-of-house. There were no Chinamen.

A Nevada periodical published an interview in 1972 with the grandfather of a waitress who worked at the last of the restaurants in Salt Lake City, which closed in 1957. “I was ridin’ out one day and comes across the Coon Chicken Inn. Seems like that ol’ coon head just sort of winked at me like it always done, and I’ll be dad blamed if I didn’t just wink right on back. I reckon de past ain’t all full of meanness. You got to laugh at some parts.”

Seattle’s Coon Chicken Inn often hosted meetings of clubs and civic organizations. The Democratic Club met there. Weddings, anniversaries, and birthday parties were celebrated there. There were always an array of drinks at the catered meetings and celebrations, but the food was without fail fried chicken. In 1942, long after Joe Baker had left Seattle, Coon Chicken Inn was listed in ‘Best Places to Eat,’ the nationwide guidebook of auto clubs.

Joe was filling in one busy Saturday night frying chicken one after the other when one of his friends in the kitchen pulled him aside. His name was Ernie. “You hear what the Chinamen are up to?” he asked.

“No, I haven’t heard anything.”

“They are planning on applying for work here at half our pay. It won’t be long before none of us has got no job anymore. Why don’t you join us tomorrow? We’re having a rally about what to do.”

“OK, I will,” Joe said.

The rally the next day was in a cleared field on the outskirts of Seattle. It was Sunday night. There were a thousand more men and women there than worked at the Coon Chicken Inn. Most of them were dressed in white robes. They were the rank-and-file. A few of them were dressed in green robes. They were the Grand Dragons. A dozen of them wore black robes. They were the Knighthawks, a kind of bouncer. Some of those in white had emblazoned their robes with stripes and emblems.

Almost all of them were wearing a conical shaped hat. They were dunce hats with a mask flap. Round eye holes had been cut out of the front of the mask. The eye holes were stitched to prevent fraying. There was a red tassel attached to the pointy top of the hat.

“Is this the Ku Klux Klan?” Joe asked Ernie.

“Yeah, that’s who we are,” Ernie said handing him a robe. “I couldn’t find a hood for you, but that’s all right. You’ll make do.”

Joe knew hardly anything about the Ku Klux Klan except that they hated Negroes so much they burned down their houses in the night and lynched the survivors. What he didn’t know was they hated Chinamen almost as much as Negroes. He found out later they hated Jews and Catholics as well. When he found out they hated immigrants he was offended, but by then he was no longer living in Seattle.

“I thought the Ku Klux Klan was against Negroes.”

“Chinamen are the same as niggers, lazy and shiftless.”

Joe was puzzled. It didn’t make sense. If they were lazy and shiftless, why were they trying to take everybody’s jobs? He was also puzzled that the Ku Klux Klan was in the Pacific Northwest in the first place. He thought they lived and died in Dixie.

“No, it ain’t just there. We’ve been here since right after the Civil War, the same as back home. Hell, we were here before there even was a Klan.” Before the Civil War a group calling itself the Knights of the Golden Circle promoted the cause of the Confederacy. During the war they were a Fifth Column. They meant to spread slavery and take California, Oregon, and Washington out of the Union. They planned to form a Pacific Republic allied to Dixie.

In 1868 in the Livermore Valley outside of San Francisco a circular was in wide circulation. “Action! Action! Action!” it said. “Fellow members of the KKK the days of oppression and tyranny is past, retribution and vengeance is at hand.” The circular threatened to impale those “who seek enslavement of a free people.” Their target was the Chinese. Anti-Chinese sentiment up and down the coast eventually led to the first race-based anti-immigrant laws in the United States. “ I believe this country of ours was destined for our own white race,” Senator John Hager said.

“How are you going to keep the Chinese from taking our jobs?” Joe asked.

“Stick around, you’ll see,” Ernie said. “We got the manpower to get it done.”

In the summer of 1923 200,000 Klansmen gathered in Indiana for a mass rally. There were more Klansmen in Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana than there were south of the Mason Dixon line. That same year 50,000 of them rallied at Wilson’s Station in Oregon. “Over a green sloping hill on which stand four huge crosses an endless line of white-robed Klansmen move in single file and closed ranks,” is how the magazine Watcher on the Tower described it. “They form a square covering the space of five acres standing shoulder to shoulder. Suddenly a figure appears on the brow of the hill riding a horse. A voice heralding the stars passes the word ‘Every Klansmen will salute the Imperial Cyclops.’” Two years later almost 40,000 Klansmen paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D. C. in broad daylight in full regalia.

The rally started when the sun was down and the moon was up. Ernie elbowed his way to the front, Joe following in his wake. There was a 21-gun salute. A cohort of Klansmen paraded in military formation with red, white, and blue torches. A fireworks display exploded into three gigantic K’s and parachuted hundreds of small American flags. The first speaker declared that “our progress is the phenomena of the age. It is the best, biggest, and strongest movement in American life.” A troupe of actors reenacted scenes from D. W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation.” A local minister gave a sermon, calling for “an army of Christ to demand the continued supremacy of the white race as the only safeguard of the institutions and civilization of our country.”

The imperial Cyclops was the last to speak. “We believe that the mission of America under Almighty God is to perpetuate the kind of civilization which our forefathers created. It should remain the same kind that was brought forth upon this continent. We believe races of men are as distinct as breeds of animals and that any mixture between races is evil. Our stock has proven its value and should not be mongrelized. We hold firmly that America belongs to Americans. Within a few years the land of our fathers will either be saved or lost. All who wish to see it saved must work with us.”

At the end of the rally a three story wooden cross was set on fire. Everybody watched as it slowly started to lean and toppled to the ground. The traffic jam leaving the Konklovation was long, clogging the rural roads. Sheriffs from Seattle helped direct traffic.

Ernie drove to the heart of the city and stopped in front of the Merchants Cafe on Pioneer Square. It was the oldest bar in town. They had never stopped serving booze, Prohibition or no Prohibition. It was built long ago by W.E. Boone, who was a direct descendant of Daniel Boone. The upstairs had once been a brothel. The whores were known as seamstresses. It was their codeword.

Joe and Ernie sat down on the last two stools at the bar and ordered mugs of beer. ‘Here’s to You!’ was emblazoned on the stoneware mugs. The beer was a top-fermented local ale. It was cold and refreshing.

“I watched the parades, listened to all the speeches, and I saw the cross burn, but I still don’t understand how the Ku Klux Klan is going to save our jobs,” Joe said. “Nobody said a word about it.”

“All the words were about saving our jobs,” Ernie said. “You got to listen between the lines. First, we’re going to jump some of the Chinamen and teach them a lesson. If they don’t learn their lesson then we’ll burn some of their shacks down. If they still won’t listen to reason, we’ll string one or two of them up. That should take care of it. They’ll be out of Seattle soon enough.”

Later that night, snug in bed, Joe and Helen talked about what was going on and what was in the works. Neither of them liked it. Helen’s grandparents had come from Poland, which like Joe’s Lithuania, had been an unwilling unhappy colony of Russia for a long time. Both countries had gotten their freedom back only after World War One, after a hundred and fifty-some years of tyranny.

“My father told me all about the Russians,” Joe said. “They treated us like the Ku Klux Klan treats Negroes and Chinamen.”

The Lithuanian legal code, originating in the 16th century, was quashed. Russian apparatchiks occupied all the posts of power. Arrests and detention were at their discretion, no matter if a crime had been committed, or not. Russian was the only language allowed to be spoken in public. Teaching the Lithuanian language in schools was forbidden. No arguments were brooked. Books and magazines could be printed only in the Cyrillic alphabet. Latin script was forbidden. Books in Lithuanian in Latin script, printed in East Prussia, had to be smuggled into the country. When they were caught, some of the book carriers were shot on the spot. The rest were exiled to Siberia. The term of exile was 99 years to life.

“What should we do?” Helen asked.

“I think we should leave this place,” Joe said.

Joe and Helen packed two suitcases and a sea bag early the following Saturday morning. Joe had cashed his weekly paycheck the day before and consolidated their savings, which he entrusted to a money belt. He had warned the head man of the Chinamen in Seattle about what the Ku Klux Klan was planning. He didn’t bother warning the police. Enough of them were Klansmen to make telling them unwise. Joe and Helen took a ferry to Vancouver Island, landing in the town of Victoria after a three hour ride. They took a bus to Port Hardy on the northeast tip of the island, just inside the Arctic Circle.

At first they both worked at the Bones Bay Cannery, but within two years had saved enough to open their own business. The business was a bakery. They called it Baker’s Bakery. The first employee they hired the next year, after getting their legs under them, was a Chinese immigrant willing to work for low pay.

“Why you use same name twice?” he asked looking at the sign above the front door.

“Because our bread is twice as good,” Joe said.

“You pay me more when I make it three times as good?”

“You be square with me and I’ll be square with you.”

No man is an island, but Vancouver Island suited Joe and Helen. He wrote a letter to his parents in Lithuania telling them where he was, but the letter was lost and never delivered. She got pregnant and pregnant again. Their children were born Canadians. Growing up they would have laughed their heads off if anyone had told them about the KKK, about their variety show antics and Halloween-style hoods and robes. They would have hung their heads if anybody had told them about the KKK’s deadly serious night rides. As it was, nobody ever told them, at least not until they came of age and had a better understanding of gods and monsters.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street at 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.”

Help support these stories. $25 a year (7 cents a day). Contact edwardstaskus@gmail.com with “Contribution” in the subject line. Payments processed by Stripe.

“Telling of Monsters” by Ed Staskus

“21^st century folk tales for everybody, whether you believe in monsters, or not.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction

Available on Amazon:

Oliver and Emma live in northeast Ohio near Lake Erie. The day they clashed with their first monster he was six years old and she was eight years old. They fought off a troll menacing their neighborhood. From that day on they became the Monster Hunters.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Chasing Infinity

Pulling Up Stakes

March 1, 2025 Edward Staskus Leave a comment

By Ed Staskus

Hal Schaser was born in July 1931, in Cleveland, Ohio. His mother Agnes and his father Mathias were Saxons from Transylvania, where they married in 1929. His father was a minister’s son and his mother was a local beauty. The Great Depression was making a hard life after the Great War harder. They emigrated to the United States. Hal got free passage traveling unseen in his mother’s belly.

In time three more children rounded out the family, his younger brother Willie and younger stepsisters Suzanne and Joanne. The family dog was the youngest and went by Buddy. He was everybody’s friend, unless you were trying to burgle the house.

“My grandparents got married in the town of Hamlish in Romania, which Transylvania was a part of then,” said Vanessa, Hal’s daughter. “One of my great grandfathers was a minister who kept horses and grew grapes for wine.” The church was built for worship and battle both, especially for protection against marauding foreign armies. “My other great grandfather was the local banker.” Their children were second cousins. The banker bought cases of wine from the minister for his table.

Hal attended Cleveland public schools, graduating from East Technical in 1949. He acted in historical pageants while in high school and through the 1950s was often seen on stage at the Karamu House Theater and Chagrin Little Theater. “It was how I met gals,” he said. He met Terese Stasas at Karamu. “The first thing I noticed was that he looked like Paul Newman,” his wife-to-be said. “I liked that right away.”

Mathias Schaser opened a corner grocery store on the near west side of Cleveland. Two years later, two days after the birth of his second son, he was robbed and shot by two teenaged stick-up men. He was pulling overtime after visiting his wife and newborn in the hospital. “You mustn’t stay here any longer,” Agnes had told him. “You go back to the store. We will need to have more money now.” He was pronounced dead the next day two floors below where his wife was still nursing their son. Twenty-three years later the two by now middle-aged stick-up men were paroled from the Ohio State Penitentiary.

“I taught my sons to be forgiving, not bitter,” Agnes said in 1955. “We got along all right. They started delivering newspapers when they were ten. They finished high school, although they always worked at a bakery and other places around the neighborhood. I have a happy life with my children. I hope those two men can find jobs and become good citizens.”

She eventually remarried after her first husband’s murder, but her second husband died of a heart attack within a few years. She never married again, raising four children on her own, on a Mother’s Pension, which was $90.00 a month, and pins and needles work.

“My father’s stepfather passed on when he was 7 years old,” Vanessa said. “His mother was a devout Lutheran and she instilled in them Christian values, which our father carried with him all his life. He may not have been religious all his life, but he knew his Bible. He drove his mother to church every Sunday until the day she died.”

“He grew up a true city kid through and through,” said Matt, Hal’s son. “He built and raced in the soap box derby, walked with friends to baseball games at League Park, and trained and sparred at his local gym.”

“He was no dead-end kid, though,” Vanessa said. “When violin lessons were ordered by his mother, he endured them with grace.” Grown up he put the violin down and took up the guitar, playing the backbeat tunes Cleveland’s DJ the Moon Dog was making popular.

Hal survived the East Ohio Gas explosion in October 1944, when a tank containing liquid natural gas equivalent to 90 million cubic feet blew up in their neighborhood, setting off the most disastrous fire in Cleveland’s history. Hundreds of homes, churches, and businesses were engulfed by a tidal wave of fire. His mother saved their house, less than a mile away from the blast, by spraying it with a garden hose until the water pressure gave out.

“I was walking home from school and the blast almost knocked me off my feet,” he said. “It was like all at once the sky blew up with thunder balls.” His dog Buddy ran inside and stayed in the basement for a week.

Hal boxed as a teenager, training at gyms on the near east side, reaching the finals in his class at the Golden Gloves in 1949 staged at the Cleveland Arena. He served in the United States Army during the Korean War as an artilleryman in a front-line battalion and later as a spotter. “Spotting was a suicide mission,” one of his friends who fought in the Vietnam War said. “If the other guys didn’t get you, your own guys would. How he made it home alive, I don’t know.”

During one mortar firefight his radioman was wounded. He carried him to safety. He had a grudging respect for the courage of Chinese soldiers. “No matter what we hit them with, they always kept coming in their quilted coats,” he said. “We couldn’t kill them fast enough.”

He gave up fighting after coming home, going to work for Palmer Bearings, selling ball bearings to the city’s steel and automobile industries. He often lunched with clients at the Theatrical on Short Vincent, mixing with city leaders, businessmen, and hoodlums. The Theatrical was a high-class dive.

“He became Vice President of Sales where his smile and enthusiasm for life and helping others was his formula for becoming a success,” Vanessa said. “Honesty and integrity led his work, something that isn’t always easy for a salesman, but it was natural to him.”

Hal married Terese Stasas in 1959. The couple had two children, Vanessa and Matt, raising them in the Indian Hills neighborhood near South Euclid. Their backyard was the woods of the Euclid Creek Reservation. “Our mom was a ballerina, an artist, and a chef, and our pop was a boxer, a fine ice skater, and a salesman,” Vanessa said. “I think it must have been their sense of hope and freedom that attracted them to one another.”

“He loved to read,” Matt said. “He had his favorite chair in the living room and read classics and plays after dinner. He read the newspaper front to back in the morning.”

His other great love, besides his family, was golf. He always traveled with clubs in his car trunk. He played with clients after work and friends on teams in city leagues. He played courses all over Ohio. Whenever he had the chance, he took short vacations to play famous links nationwide. “Good golf depends on strength of mind and a clean character,” he said. He didn’t shortchange the front nine or back nine. He didn’t shortchange himself.

Hal wasn’t entirely a religious man, although he was. He had his reasons, among them the twists and turns of the game that was nearly a religion to him. “My prayers were never answered on golf courses,” he explained. One lesson about the divine, however, stood him in good stead. Whenever he was on a fairway and got caught in a lightning storm, he always held his 1-iron up in the air.

“Not even God can hit a 1-iron,” he said.

He never stopped walking golf courses, never riding a cart, even when he played two rounds and was well into his 80s. “My father golfed ever since I knew him,” Vanessa said. “Oh, did he golf. He played with a red ball when it snowed. He loved being with people and playing with his friends. Sometimes mom said he loved golf more than he loved us.”

He lived alone after his wife divorced him, taking their kids with her, although he never left his children or grandchildren behind. It wasn’t any back street girl that came between husband and wife. It was Hal’s career and the golf monkey on his back. He never paid enough attention to his wife or what she wanted. After becoming a single man again, he ate like a buck private and stayed fit into his later years. He lived in Lakewood for 25 years, across the street from St. Ed’s High School.

In the run-up to the 2016 presidential election Hal fell in love with Donald Trump. He started wearing a veteran’s cap, saying bad things about immigrants, denigrating blacks and Jews, and talking down anybody young who demonstrated against anything. He decried the federal government as a conspiratorial deep state and stuck his fork in the scrambled eggs of QAnon.

He believed the new boss man was battling a cabal of Democratic Party pedophiles and only he could get the job done. Only the President himself was dirty enough to do the dirty work, no matter that POTUS didn’t know one end of a pop gun from another, since he thought khaki was for suckers whenever target practice was mentioned.

He watched Tucker Carlson on FOX. He reckoned the newsman’s idea of unvaccinated people getting fake vaccine cards to avoid mandates was good reporting. “Buying a fake vaccination card is an act of desperation by decent, law-abiding Americans who have been forced into a corner by tyrants,” the FOX man said. Hal refused to be vaccinated the first time, the second time, and didn’t even bother thinking about the booster shot. He didn’t know where to get a fake card. He called Tucker Carlson, but the line was busy. He left a message, although he never heard back from America’s Voice of Grievance.

Hal put his golf clubs away and kept them away, while POTUS went golfing in Scotland. Saving America from itself became his passion. It was a fire that burned bright in his retiree’s small apartment.

When Rush Limbaugh died from lung cancer, after smoking stogies for decades and sounding off that cancer was just a notion, and Dan Bongino took over, he stopped listening to Rush and started listening to Dan. When Rush had said wearing a mask to protect society from COVID was a conspiracy against the freedom-loving and God-fearing, Hal paid attention and never wore a mask, unless the grocery he was trying to get into denied him entry without one. An empty stomach almost always trumps ideology. When Dan took up the mantra that the mask was Democratic BS, he gave Dan a thumbs up, but didn’t stop going masked man grocery shopping. He wasn’t that foolish.

“My brother and I asked him to wear a mask every time we saw him,” Vanessa said. They asked him to get vaccinated, but he wouldn’t do it. He said there was something untrustworthy about the vaccines. He had heard Bill Gates was putting nefarious things into the shots.

“I told him he had to wear a mask when visiting the kids, or he couldn’t visit them,” Matt said.

Whether they knew it or not the right-wing radio poohbahs Hal listened to were playing with fire. Ranting and raving about unwed mothers and welfare cheats and the half-dozen voters who cheated is one thing. Ranting and raving about pandemics is another thing. It can be hazardous to life and limb conflating the two. Unwed mothers are not nearly as dangerous as man-eating viruses.

“I’m Mr. Anti-Vax,” Marc Bernier told the listeners of his talk radio program. After the first vaccines were approved, he declared the federal government and the CDC were “acting like Nazis” in urging people to get vaccinated. The Nazis rolled over in their graves and died laughing. Six months later the whacky broadcaster died of COVID. So did Jimmy DeYoung, a nationally syndicated Christian radio preacher, and Dick Farrel, a talking head for Newsmax TV. They lived by crying wolf, screaming their lungs out, and died when they couldn’t breathe anymore.

Hal played with fire for almost two years. It was miserablel listening to an old man listening to half-witted carnival barkers. He got burnt towards the end of 2021 and by the morning after New Year’s Day could barely walk. Vanessa and Matt tried for a week after Christmas to get him to go to Fairview Hospital, but he refused. He said he felt fine, even though he looked terrible. He had a kitchen cabinet full of supplements that peddlers on the internet had been selling him to combat COVID, but the mystery pills had suddenly lost their magic.

Matt called 911 the day after New Year’s and paramedics took Hal to Fairview Hospital. Only one person at a time once a day could visit him. When Vanessa or Matt visited him, they had to wear bio-hazard bunny suits and masks. One day Hal felt good but the next day felt bad. He complained about being brainwashed. He tried to walk out. He refused to take his medication. The nurses gave it to him, anyway, making sure he took it. One day after three weeks in the hospital he said he was feeling terrific. The next day he suffered a stroke and died three days later.

Two weeks later a memorial service was held for him in the Rocky River Memorial Hall. His grandson played a French children’s song on the baby grand piano and his granddaughter played “Amazing Grace.” A bugler played “Taps.” Sunlight poured in through the floor to ceiling windows.

Vanessa said a few words. “He valued his friends and loved his children and grandchildren, watching them laugh and enjoying their creativity and joy,” she said. “I’ll never forget an early childhood memory of him holding me with my feet on top of his while we waltzed to records in the living room.”

Bob, one of Hal’s oldest coffee klatch friends, said a few words, too. “He was part of our group at McDonald’s every morning. He was the only Republican among us, so there were plenty of disagreements, but he was a great guy, the kind of guy who would give you the shirt off his back. They don’t make them like Hal anymore.”

The next day his golfing buddies gathered for a minute at a local course. It was a cold January day. They saluted him with their 1-irons held high to Heaven. Nobody got struck by lightning. Even if God wasn’t paying attention, Hal was watching over them.

Help support these stories. $25 a year (7 cents a day). Contact edwardstaskus@gmail.com with “Contribution” in the subject line. Payments processed by Stripe.

“Bomb City” by Ed Staskus

“A Rust Belt police procedural when Cleveland was a mean street.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F1LM1WF9/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2MYAQAOZIC2U9&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.hTm7BGbiQbSe5ZapFwYPPfcwOpTe-Vdg6VLE4aGyTyk.Z0R-VNBWWEcvKcNaO9LdCOUnNIOOXgvYkRS_FXiXuHk&dib_tag=se&keywords=bomb+city+ed+status&qid=1742136726&sprefix=bomb+city+ed+staskus%2Caps%2C84&sr=8-1

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. Nothing goes according to plan.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Sudbury Ontario

Being Three Isn’t Easy

February 1, 2025 Edward Staskus Leave a comment

By Ed Staskus

The day push came to shove I had no idea what was going on. I was born 9 months 7 days and some hours after the day my mom and dad were done with the art of romance on a smile of a summer night. The day before I was born everything was so far so good. I was curled up warm and cozy in my mom’s womb. But before the day ended I was unexpectedly twisting and turning. I was restless all evening. The next thing I knew my mom and dad were in a taxi in the middle of the night on their way to the hospital.

I was born in the Sudbury General Hospital of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Everybody called it ‘The General.’ The hospital had opened the year before. There were 200 beds, and it was modern as could be. The Sisters of St. Joseph used their own money to get the region’s first English-speaking hospital built. They mortgaged all their properties to get the loan for the construction.

“They used to do this cool thing,” Ginette Tobodo, a Sudbury mother, said. “On the walls they painted certain colors, one color for the lab, another color for the cardiac department, and you just followed the color to where you needed to go. It was easy to find your way around.” My dad was sure I was going to be a boy, so he followed the color blue. It took him to the cardiac department where he explained he was going to have a heart attack if he didn’t find the maternity ward.

In the end, when I was born a boy, he was on cloud nine. Courtney Lapointe’s three brothers were born at the same hospital. She was down in the dumps every time after the births. “I wanted a sister so bad, I bawled my eyes out at the hospital when each one of the boys was born.”

Being born is no business for babies. It’s a man’s job. When the squeezing and pushing were all over, and I looked around, I didn’t see anything recognizable. There were plenty of colors and shapes. The colors and shapes moved and made sounds. Everything more than a foot away was a mystery. I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. I was washed and swaddled and went to sleep. After I woke up I wanted to suck on something. When I smelled my mother’s milk I liked the smell and then the taste of it.

My parents had moved to a new house on a new length of Stanley Street. It was just west of downtown and dead ended at a cliff face of nearly 2-billion-year-old rock. They had emigrated to Canada in the late 1940s, like many other Lithuanians after World War Two. Canada was admitting migrants who were willing to do the dirty work. My dad was a miner for INCO. He loaded bore holes with black powder charges and stood back. My mom had been a nanny for a family of 13 but was now her own homemaker.

Sudbury is not a large city, but it is the largest city in northern Ontario. It is about 70 miles north of the Georgian Bay and about 250 miles northwest of Toronto. There are 330 lakes within the city limits. It came into being after the discovery of ore in 1883. The Canadian Pacific Railway was being constructed when excavations revealed vast stores of nickel and copper on the edge of the Sudbury Basin. Something crashed there from outer space a long time ago. Few craters are as old or as large anywhere else on the planet. It wasn’t long before mines were being dug and men were arriving to work in the mines. 42,000 people lived in the city the year I was born.

My first two years of life after coming home were uneventful. In the event, I couldn’t remember much of what happened from day to day, much less the week before. I was like a yoga master living in the moment. I was about two and a half years old before I came into my own. I started busting out of my toddler bed so often my dad thought about putting a lock on it.

I found out there were some rules. One rule was no climbing on the radiators. Another rule was no going into the basement. The basement was where the coal-fired boiler was. A third rule was absolutely no scaling the rock cliffs at the far end of our backyard.

“Behave, or Baubas will come and get you,” my mom repeatedly warned me, giving me a stern look.

Baubas is an evil spirit from Lithuania with bloodshot eyes, long skinny arms, and wrinkly fingers. He came from the Old World to Canada with the migrants to keep their kids in line. He wears a dark hat and hides his face. He supposedly slept in our basement behind the octopus-armed furnace. According to my mom he kept a close watch on my behavior. I had never seen him and never wanted to see him. Whenever I balked at eating my cold beet soup, my mom would knock on the underside of the kitchen table, pretending somebody was knocking on the door, and say, “Here comes Baubas. He must know there’s a child here who won’t eat his soup.”

When I told my friend Lele about Baubas, she laughed and tried to steal my security blanket. She lived one block over on Beatty St. We played together every day when we weren’t fighting. Whenever we fought it was always about my blanket. Whenever I was hard on her heels trying to get it back, she waited to the last minute before laughing maniacally, tossing it to the side, and running even faster, knowing full well I would rescue my blanket first before trying to exact revenge on her.

Most of my friends were Lithuanian kids like her. The man who built our house lived across the street in a house he built for his own family. He was French Canadian. Sudbury was the hub of Franco-Ontarian culture. He had two sons who were my age. We ran up and down the street playing make believe. There weren’t many cars and even less traffic. The Palm Dairies milk delivery truck rolled up our street every morning going about 5 MPH. The driver drove standing up. The throttle and brake were on the steering column. Their bottles of chocolate milk had tabs on the top through which a straw could be stuck.

In the wintertime we skated in our yards when our fathers flooded them to make rinks. Sometimes in the morning in the sunlight hoarfrost sizzled. We practiced falling down and trying to get back up hundreds of times a day. I only spoke Lithuanian. My two friends spoke French and English. I learned to speak English from them. We never spoke French on the street. They said it was for art critics.

They slept over one night when their parents went out to dinner and later to a wrestling match at the INCO Club. Dinty Parks and Rocco Colombo were the gladiators that night. They bumped heads hard in the third round, and both went down. Rocco shook it off but was drop kicked by Dinty when he tried to get up. The next second Dinty got the same treatment from Rocco. It went back and forth, each man pinning the other for a two-count until the referee finally called it a draw. When he did the two wrestlers violated one of the most holy canons of pro wrestling by shaking hands before leaving the ring. Nobody in the audience could believe it.

Sometime after dinner my two friends showed me what they had brought with them. They were magic markers. We drew a picture of Baubas pierced with arrows. We drew a picture of him running on the Canadian Pacific tracks behind our house being chased by a locomotive. We drew a picture of him hitchhiking out of town in the direction of Gogama way up north, never to be seen again.

“Do you remember the mean green dinosaur?” my friend Frankie asked. His name was Francois, but he got red in the face whenever anybody called him that. We had seen “The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms” earlier that summer at the Regent Theatre on Elm St. We walked there with some older boys and girls and paper bags full of popcorn my mom popped for us. We sat in the front row so we could see as much as possible. The movie was about a hibernating dinosaur woken up by an atomic bomb test. When he wakes up he becomes ferocious. He ends up in New York City where he terrorizes everything and everybody.

When we got tired of drawing pictures they convinced me to strip down to my skivvies and drew wavy lines all over me with a green magic marker. They drew a life-size dot on the tip of my nose. When they heard my mom outside the door the next thing I knew the marker was in my hand and my mom was demanding an explanation from me. I tried to tell her it wasn’t my fault, but she had no patience for explaining and complaining.

“Go wash that off,” she said and pointed to the bathroom.

The green marker, however, wouldn’t wash off. The ink was indelible. I called to my friends for help, and although they tried they were more hurt than help. They scrubbed enthusiastically until those parts of me not green were red with irritation. When they were done I was red and green all over.

The tenth or twelfth time I climbed on a chair on the sly to get on top of the radiator to look out the side window was the time I lost my balance and went over the side. I stuck my arm out to break my fall and broke my collarbone. Before I knew it I was on my way back to ‘The General.’ I had to wear a sling for two weeks. That wasn’t the worst of it, though.

My mom never bought anything from the Rawleigh salesman who went door to door selling snake oils. The next time he knocked on our door she did buy something, however. It was a bottle of PolyMusion, a yellow syrup with a horrible orange rind after taste. The Rawleigh man said it was a cure-all. There was no hiding when my mom came looking for me with a tablespoon of the thick liquid. She was nice enough afterwards to serve me blueberries soaking in a bowl of Multi-Milk.

My brother was born when I was a year and a half old. After he got home our mom unretired our enameled diaper pail. When the time came, his poop got scooped away and his diapers went into the pail to soak in water and bleach. The pail had a lid. We were thankful for that. When he went off his liquid diet after six months she put him on baby pablum, which was like sweet-tasting instant mashed potatoes.

My arm was feeling better by Canada Day, what we called Firecracker Day. One of the bad boys on Stanley Street got his hands on a pack of Blockbuster firecrackers. They were five inches long and a half inch in diameter. “Do not hold in hand after lighting” was printed on top of the 4-pack. We snuck past the last house on the other side of the street and behind some bushes at the base of the cliff. One of us had brought an old bushel basket and another of us brought an old teddy bear. The bear had a hard rubber face. We lit a Blockbuster, turned the basket upside down over it, and ran to the side. The Blockbuster blew the basket to smithereens. When it was the teddy bear’s turn we pushed a Blockbuster into a rip in his belly and ran to the side. The blast blew the stuffing out of the bear, which caught fire, some of it starting the bushes on fire. The man who lived in the last house put the fire out with his lawn hose. There was hell to pay up and down Stanley Street that night.

No matter how many times I was warned to stay away from the rock cliffs was as many times I went scuttling up them. There were Canadian Pacific tracks at the top that curled around the backside of Stanley Street. One day I was exploring and lost track of time. My pockets were full of black pebbles by the time I realized what time it was. One of them was different. It was a shiny pinkish gray. Sudbury’s rock, which was everywhere, wasn’t naturally black. It was naturally pale gray. Smelter emissions contain sulphur dioxide and metal particulates. Sulphur dioxide mixed with atmospheric moisture creates acid rain that corrodes rock. A coating of silica gel trapped particulates that coated Sudbury’s rocks black as pitch.

I ran home, jumped the railroad tracks, and scrambled down the rock face. When I burst through the back door into the kitchen I saw my mom sitting at the kitchen table. She looked distressed.

“Where have you been?” she asked, angry. “I’ve been looking for you for hours. I was worried sick.” She looked like she wanted to hit me. I pulled the shiny rock from my pocket.

“I was searching for treasure,” I said. “I found this. It’s for you.” After that everything was forgiven, thank God.

The day I screwed up my courage to find out what was down in the basement was the day I turned stunt man. My dad was blasting rock deep in the mines and my mom was taking a nap on the sofa. My brother was in a Moses basket next to the sofa. He had been crying his head off lately and the only thing that stopped the flood of tears was the basket. One of my mom’s arms was over her face and her other arm was unconsciously rocking the basket. I snuck past to the basement door. I quietly opened the door. I took a step down, which turned out to be a misstep, and tumbled down the rest of the stairs to the bottom. When I came to a stop after backflipping the last step I was surprised I hadn’t cried or screamed. I was also surprised to find I was unhurt. I looked in all directions for Baubas. I thought I saw something move in the shadows. I heard hissing and whispering. It felt like something was pulling my hair. I raced back up the stairs and burst into the living room. I was in a cold sweat. My mom was still asleep. My brother opened his eyes and winked at me.

When I looked behind me there was no Baubas anywhere in sight. I closed and fastened the door to make sure. I needed fresh air. I went outside and sat on the front steps. Frankie and his younger brother Johnny came over. Johnny was short for Jean. The towhead had a dime in his hand.

“Look what I found,” he said. A sailboat was on one side of the coin and King George VI was on the other side.

“Let’s go to the candy store,” Frankie said, taking the dime. There was a store around the corner on Elm St.

“There’s a monster in our basement,” I told Frankie and Johnny while we were walking there. “We almost got into a fight.”

“I have nightmares sometimes about an unstoppable monster,” Johnny said.

“The way to fight monsters is with your brain, not your fists,” Frankie said.

“How do you do that?” I asked.

“You think up a plan.”

“What’s thinking?” I asked.

“It’s what you do with your brain,” he said. “No problem can stand up to thinking.”

Frankie was almost a year older than me and knew everything. Johnny was half a year younger than me. He didn’t know much. He stared at the dime not in his hand anymore. I liked what Frankie had said. I could stay out of the basement but still do battle with old Baubas. I couldn’t wait to get home and outwit the monster. I was going to use my newfound brainpower to think him back to where he came from.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Atlantic Canada http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com.

Help support these stories. $25 a year (7 cents a day). Contact edwardstaskus@gmail.com for details.

“Bomb City” by Ed Staskus

“A Rust Belt police procedural when Cleveland was a mean street.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Made in Cleveland

Bumping Into Big Al

February 1, 2025 Edward Staskus 1 Comment

By Ed Staskus

I hadn’t seen Al Ezerskis for fifteen-some years, so when we met I hardly knew what to say. We bumped into each other on the corner of Ontario St. and Lakeside Ave. opposite the Lakeside Court House. I had come out of the court house where I had gone to drop off a document. As I was leaving I noticed an inscription carved in a wall. It said, “Justice is the end of government. It is the end of Civil Society. It ever has been and ever will be pursued until it be obtained or until liberty be lost in the pursuit.” It seemed both quaint and appropriate in the Age of Make America Great Again.

The Republicans had controlled Washington, D.C. more often than not in my lifetime. How had they managed to screw things up so much that America’s greatness evaporated? Gasbags are always complaining. It was time for them to stop complaining and start explaining.

Downtown Cleveland was back up and running after the thunderstorm and high winds that had torn through the metropolis a week before. Five tornadoes and widespread straight-line winds wreaked havoc across Northeast Ohio. Thousands of trees and utility poles were knocked down. Hundreds of thousands were left without power. The shoreline of Lake Erie, near where I lived, was hit especially hard, with more than half of everybody experiencing power outages. Many of them still didn’t have power five days later. It was the worst storm to hit the city in thirty years.

Al had come out of the Justice Center across the street. “How are you doing?” I asked when I unwittingly happened upon him.

“I’m between everything annoys the crap out of me and I don’t give a rat’s ass,” he said.

He had gotten cranky after coming into his maturity. He hadn’t changed, although he had gotten older. He was the same age as me. We both grew up in North Collinwood’s Lithuanian community. We were both in Boy Scout Troop 311. We both went to St. Joseph’s High School in the 1960s, although he was an Honor Student and I wasn’t. He was walking with a slight limp. I had walked with a limp, at first slight and then full-blown, for five or six years before I finally had joint surgery two years earlier. I was never overly concerned about the limping, but the pain of the arthritis in my left hip finally drove me to distraction. After the surgery I walked more than ever, breaking in my after-market replacement.

The Cleveland Clinic’s Lutheran Hospital had been as high-tech as it could be. The operating theater looked like the flight deck of the USS Enterprise. The road to recovery, however, was strikingly old fashioned. “Walk as much as you can every day” was what all the physical therapists said. It was a no-tech solution.

“What are you doing downtown?” I asked.

“Jury duty,” Al said. “Although all I’ve been doing for the past two days has been sitting in a room with a couple hundred other people waiting to hear if I’ve been chosen to be on a jury. If I get picked, whoever did whatever they did is going to be sorry to see me.”

The jury pool had been released for lunch. It was a breezy mid-August day. The storm had broken the oppressive humidity of the past few weeks. Al was on his way to the Warehouse District. “I have an hour and a half before I have to be back to decide somebody’s fate,” he said.

I was of the opinion that there never was anybody worth a damn who wasn’t irascible, except for maybe Mother Teresa and Willie Mays. Perhaps Al was worth a damn. He was irascible enough. On the spur of the moment I asked if I could join him for lunch.

“We can catch up on old times,” I said.

He gave me a peevish look, but said all right. I fell into step with him. He took long strides, one stride with a hitch to it, and I recalled that we had called him Big Al back in the day. He was six feet and a few more inches tall. He had been lanky as a teenager but wasn’t lanky anymore, He was still big, though, and bigger still. He had packed on 40-or-more pounds. We walked down Lakeside Ave. and then up W. 9^th St. The Warehouse District’s eateries were buzzing. Curbside tables were filling up. Waitresses were taking orders. Lawyers were tossing back booze.

“There’s a place here called Taza,” I said. “My wife and I eat there sometimes. It’s a Lebanese grill.”

“I don’t eat food made by Arabs,” he said.

We went to Cleveland Chop on St. Clair Ave., a sports bar where they served steaks and handcrafted burgers. Al ordered bacon wrapped shrimp and a Tom Hawk pork chop. The pork chop looked to be at least a pound of pig. I ordered a plate of Ahi Poke tacos, even though I had no idea what Ahi Poke was.

“What do you think about that Harris wanting to be president?” he asked out of the blue, stirring the Manhattan in front of him with a swizzle stick. I wanted to say “Shaken not stirred” like James Bond, but I didn’t. Big Al had never been known for his sense of humor. He had been class president in high school and twice ran for mayor of Brecksville, a south side suburb where he had long lived. He had twice lost but never lost his preoccupation with politics.

I was of the Mark Twain school of politics. “Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress, but I repeat myself,” the writer once said. I didn’t repeat that bit of doggerel at the lunch table. I suspected Al would be sensitive about that kind of wisecrack.

“I haven’t thought much about the election” I said. “I’ll think about it in a month-or-two.”

“You still have that beatnik attitude,” he said, spearing a shrimp.

I let it pass. I had long ago lost whatever concern I ever had about what people thought of me. Everybody is entitled to their own opinions, if not necessarily their own facts, although that was changing.

Joe Biden, the incumbent in the Oval Office, had decided to not run for a second term and his vice president, who was Kamala Harris, had thrown her bonnet into the ring. “I will say this,” I said, “she’s got about three months to campaign while Donald Trump has been campaigning for almost four years. I don’t see that she has much of a chance. Donald Trump can’t beat another man at the polls, but he’s gangbusters when it comes to beating women.”

“I’m glad to hear you say that,” Al said.

“Why is that?” I asked.

“The last thing this country needs is a half breed broad in the White House,” he said. “Or any broad, for that matter.”

“How’s everything?” our waitress asked, gliding up to our table. She was a looker. Al looked her up and down. He didn’t keep it a secret. He wanted to be her long lost pal. I watched him while he watched her.

“This country is going to hell,” Al said, cutting his pork chop into bite-sized pieces. It reminded me of what mothers do for their small children at the dinner table. He was a fastidious man. There probably wasn’t much that satisfied him.

“Take that waitress,” he said. “What is she doing in this country? You know she’s from down there somewhere.” He pointed at the floor with his fork. The waitress was brown skinned with black hair. I couldn’t tell if she was Mexican or Middle Eastern. “They’re lazy and shiftless. All they want to do is live on welfare, which we have to pay for. They’re stealing our jobs.”

I wondered why she was working if she was lazy and shiftless. Why was she taking jobs from Americans? Why wasn’t she on welfare, instead? Was she all mixed up?

“I tell you, they’re polluting the blood of our country.”

“Your parents were immigrants, just like mine,” I said.”They made this country better, not worse.”

“That was different,” Al said. “They weren’t Latinos, they were Lithuanians.”

I was aware that many people conflated the word ‘immigrant’ with the word ‘Latino.’ Immigrants from Europe were acceptable. Immigrants from anywhere else were either suspicious-looking or unacceptable.

“There’s millions of them here, tens of millions, undocumented, smuggling in drugs, committing crimes, raping our women. They’ve got to be kept out, one way or another. Kamala Harris will let them in. Donald Trump will make sure we keep them out.”

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was one of the earliest pieces of legislation aimed at excluding foreigners based on their nationality. Congress said the Chinese were “lowering the cultural and moral standards of American society.” The law stayed in effect for more than 60 years. Even though it was eventually repealed, anti-immigrant sentiment remained alive and well. Fans of the sentiment routinely cite national security, the economy, and cultural preservation.

When the play “The Melting-Pot” premiered in 1908 it portrayed America as a land “where all races and nations come to labor and look forward.” Ellis Island that year admitted nineteen hundred foreigners into the country every day, day after day. The New York Times called the play “sentimental trash masquerading as a human document.” A few years later the newspaper complained that “the melting pot, besides having its own color, begins to give out its own smell. Its reek fills New York City and floats out rather widely in all directions.”

In our own day the Know Nothing Party of the 19^th century had become the Make America Great Party of the 21^st century. Their aim seemed to be to keep the home of the brave and land of the free on edge day and night by menacing it with non-stop threats about scary immigrants.

“Damned right, we should all be scared,” Al said, ordering another Manhattan. The Manhattan demands respect. It is a heavy pour of bourbon, sweet vermouth, and bitters. It is strong stuff. Big Al seemed to be hanging in there. I was impressed with his capacity for the bottle.

“Donald Trump is doing God’s work. God knows somebody’s got to do it.”

He wasn’t the only one doing the heavy lifting. From 2020 to 2024 there were hundreds of anti-immigrant proposals across 45 states. During the 2021-2022 legislative session there were 145 proposals, which ballooned to 365 proposals in the 2023-2024 session. For every anti-immigrant proposal in 2020 there was an average of 4.6 proposals in 2024.

“What about the economy” I asked. “It seems to me that immigrants are one of the driving forces when it comes to that. They only have one thing on their minds and that’s improving their lot on life. Isn’t their new blood and new energy exactly what’s good for this country?”

“Grow up!” Al blurted, spitting some of his Manhattan on his shirt. “They’re lazy and rotten, I’m telling you.”

The National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine released a report in 2017 called “The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration.” The report found that new immigrants tended to earn less than the native-born and so were more costly to government, but their children exhibited higher levels of upward mobility than the native-born and “are among the strongest economic and fiscal contributors in the population.”

I could have grown up there and then and told him about the report, but I didn’t. I thought he would probably dismiss it as “fake news.” I didn’t think Big Al was big on hearing anything he disagreed with. I could have cheered him up by telling him that Benjamin Franklin had proposed restrictions way back when on Germans coming to America, saying, “We’re going to be overrun by them.” I could have, but I didn’t. Al’s forebears had lived in Prussian Lithuania Minor on the Baltic Sea coast for generations.

He ordered a triple chocolate cheesecake. I ordered coffee. When he was done with dessert he stretched his legs out, almost tripping the waitress as she walked past. “Watch your step,” he said. She gave him a wary look.

“They game the system,” Al said. “Believe me, I know.” I wondered if he knew it first-hand. Was he gaming the system himself? “They get paid in cash, don’t pay taxes, but still want government benefits. Their kids go to our schools which have to cut programs to free up room in the budget for their special classes. Our kids suffer while their kids get ahead. It’s not fair. They fill up our hospitals and our prisons. Who pays for that? We do. You can’t deny the financial toll. It’s got to stop.”

“Immigrants have always come here to work,” I said. “America was built by immigrants.”

“You’re a fool,” Al said.

I don’t like being insulted anymore then the next guy, although it did mean I didn’t have to be friendly anymore. I stood up and looked down at Big Al. He looked like a rosy cheeked troll with the Manhattans in his blood stream. Maybe he would go easy on whatever poor sap he was going to be sitting in judgment of at the Justice Center, but I doubted it.

“It’s been fine having lunch with you,” I lied, walking out of Cleveland Chop without paying my share of the bill. I don’t know if I meant to stick Al with the bill, but that’s what happened. I knew that wasn’t going to put me on his good side, but I didn’t expect to bump into him again anytime soon. Besides, by then I would know better and it wouldn’t be any more than a close call.

“Bomb City” by Ed Staskus

“A Rust Belt police procedural when Cleveland was a mean street.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Home Movies

King of the Surf Guitar

January 1, 2025 Edward Staskus Leave a comment

By Ed Staskus

When I saw Dick Dale at the Beachland Ballroom in 2003 I didn’t know he was dying. If somebody had told me that after the show, I would have said they were crazy. By the time he was done with the encore he had put on a set piece of steel string twang. He had a bass player and a drummer with him but he was essentially a one man band. I had to stand in a shoulder-to-shoulder crowd from beginning to end. I was tired of standing by the end of the night. He was more than fifteen years older than me and spent the show the same as me, standing, except he did it while putting on a three ring circus on his Stratocaster.

“I’ve been performing since 1955 and I’m going to keep performing until I die because I’m not hoping to die in some rocking chair with a beer belly,” he said. “I’ll never die, not that way. I’ll just explode, right before your eyes, onstage.” He spent 60-some years performing before he went kingdom come.

What I didn’t know was he had been diagnosed with cancer more than thirty years earlier. When that happened, he went to Hawaii for sunshine and treatments. It sidelined him for years. “You know what the doctors call me to this day? They call me ‘The Cancer Warrior.’” He stayed in trim through thick and thin, playing his guitar upside down and backwards. He was born a lefty.

Before Jimi Hendrix was the Jimi Hendrix Experience, he was the bass player for Little Richard. He was in Little Richard’s back-up band the Upsetters. “We were both left-handed, Jimi and me, but we would use a right-handed guitar held upside down and backwards. He developed my slides and my riffs. He used to say, ‘I patterned my style after Dick Dale.’”

Dick Dale cut his teeth and made a name for himself at the Rendezvous Ballroom in Orange County. The ballroom was built in 1928 and had long been a swing and big band music hall. He started playing there in 1961. Seventeen people showed up at his first show, all of them surfer friends of his. Less than a year later thousands of fans were attending his nightly gigs. The shows were called “The Surfer Stomp.”

The Rendezvous Ballroom burned down in 1966. It happened the day after the Fresno band the Cindermen performed there. Although it was a suspicious coincidence, nobody blamed them. When the surf guitar craze died down in the mid-60s, Capital Records declined to renew their contract with Dick Dale. His father Jim and he went back to pressing their own singles. The British Invasion was in full swing. The Beatles were on the throne. The Monkees were on the horizon. Dick Dale took a back seat. “You’ll never hear surf music again,” Jimi Hendrix sang on his 1967 song “Third Stone from the Sun.”

In the 1970s Dick Dale suffered an accident on his surfboard that almost cost him a leg. It took him a long time to recover. He stopped performing, trying to get his feet back under him. He scored his first comeback in the 1980s when he was nominated for a Grammy alongside Stevie Ray Vaughn for their cover of the Chantay’s “Pipeline.” It was back to the beach and his Stratocaster.

Satan’s Satellites opened for him when he came to Cleveland. When they were done stirring the pot it was time for the mainline. Dick Dale was dressed like a cowboy, mostly in black. He had an aquiline nose and his hair had gone white. The Stratocaster being driven to a reverb-heavy frenzy in his hands was yellow. The guitar was nicknamed “The Beast.” It was fitted up to be played loud, with thick gauge strings. “I call them cables,’’ he said. “That’s what gives me my fat sound.’’ He was compelled to use heavy picks to make an impact on the strings. His staccato picking led to him breaking dozens of picks every show. He kept many of them in his back pocket. The Stratocaster didn’t have tone controls. What it had was a master volume and a toggle that activated the neck and middle pickups.

“My philosophy is the thicker the wood, the thicker the sound,” he said. “The bigger the string, the bigger the sound. My smallest string is a 14 gauge.”

Dick Dale wasn’t born “The King of the Surf Guitar.” He was born Richard Mansour, the son of a Lebanese father and a Polish mother. He learned to play the piano at an early age and moved on to the ukulele. His uncle played the oud and the tarabaki and taught them to his nephew. In his teens he bought a used guitar and it was off to the races. He blended tarabaki drumming with guitar playing, developing a picking technique he called “the pulsation.” When his family moved to southern California, he learned to surf on weekends. He took his board to the beach from sunup to sundown. One thing led to another and the Middle Eastern music he had grown up with became the emerging genre of surf music.

Surf music popped up seemingly out of nowhere in the late 1950s. It didn’t morph out of anybody else’s sound. The first wave was instrumental surf, played by the likes of Manuel and the Renegades, Eddie and the Showmen, and Dick Dale and His Del-Tones. Dick Dale pioneered the surf sound, folding his boyhood influences in with rock-n-roll, a spring reverb, and rapid alternate picking. His 1961 song “Let’s Go Trippin’” was a big hit and launched the popularity of the new beat.

The second wave was vocal surf, coming out of the mouths of bands like the Beach Boys, Jan & Dean, and Ronny and the Daytona’s. It was the kind of music meant to stir the hearts of teenage girls and get them to buy records. “Little surfer little one, made my heart come all undone, do you love me, do you surfer girl, surfer girl my little surfer girl,” is how the Beach Boys put it. They weren’t above repeating “surfer girl” four times in one verse.

Dick Dale wasn’t an old geezer, but he wasn’t a young geezer, either, the night I saw him perform. He was in his mid-60s, an inch or two shorter than six foot, and looked fit as a fiddle, although a little thick around the middle. He wasn’t fiddling around, though. He looked like the kind of guy who knew his way around. He looked like he might have a switchblade somewhere on his person. He looked like the kind of guy you wouldn’t want to get into a knife fight with in a phone booth.

“I can be a mean maniac,” he said. “Someone once threw a firecracker at a show and I jumped off the side of the stage and whacked them on the side of the head.” He knew how to whack hotheads, having raised wild animals for many years on his ranch. “When I was surfing, I would get a rumble sound,” he said. It was the sound he tried to capture on his guitar. “At the same time, I was raising forty different exotic animals. So, when my mountain lion, he’d go, ‘Waaah!’ I’d imitate that on my guitar. When my African lion wanted his dinner, he’d go, ‘Ooowwwahhhhrrrgh!’ They were matching the sounds of what you go through when on a 15-foot wave.”

He started the show at the Beachland Ballroom with “Misirlou,” an old Middle Eastern song originally known as “Egyptian Girl.” It was from where his father and uncle came from. He learned it as a boy from his uncle who played it on the oud. “I started playing it,” Dick Dale said, “but I said, ‘Oh no, that’s too slow.’ And I thought of Gene Krupa’s drumming, his staccato drumming. When we moved to California, I got my first guitar, but I was using this rocket-attack, Gene Krupa rhythm on the guitar.”

The reason Dick Dale was in Cleveland was the movie “Pulp Fiction.” The director Quentin Tarantino used the song “Misirlou” in his mid-90s movie and just like that surf music was back in the spotlight. He released a new album and hit the road again. He announced from the stage he had another new album out called “Spatial Disorientation.” It sounded just about right.

The Beachland Ballroom hadn’t always been home to the most wide-ranging rock ‘n roll on Lake Erie’s south coast. The building was built in Cleveland’s North Collinwood neighborhood in 1950 as the Croatian Liberty Home. It came with a ballroom and a bar. It was where local Croatians celebrated weddings and lamented deaths. After a shot and a beer, it was time to live it up on the dance floor grooving to the gajde. A kitchen and back bar were added in 1976. During the Age of White Flight most of the Croatians moved farther east to suburban Eastlake and built a new National Home. The old building was boarded up. It became the Beachland Ballroom in 2000.

Surf music is usually played on electric guitars in straight 4/4 time with a medium to fast tempo. It is known for its use of a spring reverb incorporated into Fender amps. The Fender Reverb Unit developed in 1961 was the first to feature a wet surf reverb tone. It is the effect heard on Dick Dale recordings from that time on.

“People just loved the sound,” he said.

They loved the sound in California, for sure. “Kids called it surf music, although I didn’t call it that,” he said. “I didn’t go to Julliard. I’m into just chopping, chopping at the strings. That’s the sound, the sound of the waves chopping. The surfing sound is not the reverb. When so-called music historians say reverb’s the surf sound, they don’t know what they’re talking about. It’s the heavy machine gun, the staccato sound. It’s the waves.”

Halfway through the show, halfway through “The Wedge,” he grabbed a pair of drumsticks and played part of the song on his guitar’s fretboard with them. Music historians everywhere shook their heads. “Where’s the reverb?” they asked. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland stuck by their decision to not induct him into their museum. They inducted the Ventures instead. It was a wise decision.. Museums are for the antiquated. Dick Dale wasn’t museum fodder. He was a live wire.

His staccato sound was a loud sound. Leo Fender was the man who made it loud and louder. He created the first eighty five watt transformer especially for the plank spanker. It peaked at a hundred watts. Leo Fender called it the ‘Showman.’ “It was like going from a little VW Bug to a Testarossa,” Dick Dale said. The Ferrari Testarossa was a championship-winning racing car in its day. The name means “red head” in Italian, referring to the red-painted cam covers on the 12-cylinder engine. In time the ‘Showman’ became a hundred watt transformer peaking at one hundred and eighty watts. Leo Fender called the new deal the ‘Dual Showman.’ Everybody hearing it called it a game changer.

“Leo is the guru of all amplifiers,” Dick Dale said. “It was him who gave me a Stratocaster. He became a second father to me.” He became Leo Fender’s quality control tester. If an amp could survive his show, it was ready to go big-time. Along the way, Dick Dale destroyed fifty-some standard 30-watt boxes. “Dale and Leo would continue to work together on upping the ante, building a speaker cabinet that could house two 15-inch speakers to sustain his vicious riffage,” is how the Fender folks put it.

After he ripped through “Misirlou” to open the show, Dick Dale ripped through “Shake ‘n’ Stomp” and “Rumble” and “Jungle Fever” and “Hava Nagila” and “Banzai Washout” and “Shredded Heat.” He slowed it down for a minute playing “Caterpillar Crawl.” The drummer got to be excited on “Surfing Drums.” After that came “Tidal Wave” and “Ghost Riders in the Sky.” There wasn’t much banter between songs. When one was over and done with it was on to the next one.

“I’m going to play my goddamn guitar and that’s all there is to it,” he said. “I’m going to make people happy. I’m going to make them forget about all their pains.” He meant get happy and forget your troubles for two-and-a half hours.

When the show wrapped up after one encore, we shuffled out into the springtime night. There was a full moon in the empty sky. My friends and I wandered along the half mile of storefronts towards East 185^th St. The neighborhood had been the headquarters of the Irish Mob in the 1970s. Motorcycle gangs showed up after the Irish were gone. The neighborhood was slowly turning the corner, though. It was becoming the Waterloo Arts District, bustling with art and entertainment.

Dick Dale died sixteen years after I saw him at the Beachland Ballroom. He was fast off the starting line when I saw him, all the while suffering from diabetes, kidney disease, and heading towards more cancer. What sustained him getting to the finish line was beyond me. Maybe the music kept him going. He said as much when he said, “I make my guitar scream with pain or pleasure. It makes people move their feet and shake their bodies. That’s what my music does.”

Like the reggae man Bob Marley once said, “One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain.”

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

A Cold War Thriller

“Captures the vibe of mid-century NYC.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction

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

Late summer and early autumn, New York City, 1956. Stickball in the streets and the Mob on the make. President Eisenhower on his way to Ebbets Field for the opening game of the World Series. A killer waits in the wings. A Hell’s Kitchen private eye scares up the shadows.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Cross Walk

Bump in the Night

January 1, 2025 Edward Staskus Leave a comment

By Ed Staskus

Bumpy Williams had a receding off-center chin and green eyes. They were a colorless shade of green. They were always dead set on the prize whenever he was doing a job of work. He rarely missed what he meant to see. When he saw it he tucked it away in the back of his mind. It was a sunny steamy day the last week of summer. He was on a job. The back of his mind was ready.

He was wearing a brown single-breasted jacket with brown pleated trousers, but his shoes were gaudy City Club two-lace two-tones. His face was what made him good at what he did. There was a jagged scar on one side of his chin. Nobody wanted to get caught staring at his crooked chin or the scar and nobody ever looked in the vicinity of his eyes, which when he was working had a one-dimensional look to them. Nobody wanted to ever get into a knife fight in a phone booth with him, where calling for help would always be too late.

There were those who couldn’t even say whether he was a white or black man, even though he was a Negro. Some men and women avoided him, hugging the gutter side of the sidewalk. It was Thursday, a week before the end of summer, and he could hear Doris Day singing ‘Whatever Will Be Will Be’ on a car radio, the car’s four windows wide open, easing down the street. White people are always down in the damned dumps, he thought. Little Richard had ‘Rip It Up’ and ‘Ready Teddy’ on the Billboard 100 chart. That was his kind of slippin’ and slidin’ music.

He had a dog-eared copy of All-Negro Comics in his back pocket. He had five dollars and change in his wallet, a 6-ounce stainless steel flask with a picture of a roller-skating chimp on it, and a Vest Pocket Colt .25 in a vest pocket. The small handgun was only good at close range, but it was better than nothing.

He stood still and looked at the four-story building on the other side of the street. Queen Stephanie’s man had said the snooper worked on the second floor. A sign on the building said ‘Duluc Detective’ in green and white neon letters. He was at the right place. The building was one back from the corner of West 48^th Street and 10^th Avenue.

Bumpy looked into the parking lot behind him. This is going to be easy, he thought. He would put the glad hand on a car nearby, and park it in the lot where he could spy on the front door, keeping track of the comings and goings. A separate door on the side in plain sight led up to the private eye’s office. There was a cobbler’s shop and a barbershop on the ground floor and apartments on the top two floors.

He could see an oversized gold register and a line of shoeshine chairs with brass pedestals. The repair shop was probably in the basement. The heels of his two-tones needed repairing, but he didn’t like the idea of leaving his shoes in Hell’s Kitchen. Bumpy took his to Romeo’s Shoe Repair in mid-town, in the garment district, off Seventh Avenue, even though there wasn’t a Romeo anymore. Romeo was the man who opened the store in 1928 and sold it six years later to another man named Gaetano. He kept the sign, so he became the second Romeo, even though he wasn’t a Romeo, and his son Marco became the third one.

There was a barbershop next to the show repair shop. It was the No Embarrassment Barber Shop. A sign said, ‘Hair Cut Only 75 Cents.’ The barbers were two Italian men. It was the kind of barber shop that didn’t offer shaves, singes, shampoos, tonics, or scalp treatments. It only cut hair.

There were Poles, Greeks, and Irishmen in Hell’s Kitchen. The cops were all Irish. There were Italians and Puerto Ricans. Everybody talked a foreign language. There were drivers, factory men, and longshoremen. There was stickball and stoopball on the streets. There were too many boys on scooters. There were too many girls in roller skates. There were too many tough kids. They didn’t carry weapons though, no guns, no knives. They thought they were tough enough to fight natural, with their hands. He had gotten into a beef with one of them, not even shaving age, with unexpected hands like boxing gloves, fingers as thick as thumbs. He hit the boy in the face, and nothing happened, except the second finger on his own hand got the worse of it. He backed away, smelling trouble. His hurt finger was still bent, a year later.

When Stan Riddman walked past Bumpy, espresso in hand and biscotti in a bag, and went in the side door, Bumpy went looking for a car to steal. By the time Stan and Bettina were sitting opposite one another at Stan’s desk, biscotti spread out on the torn open bag, espresso still hot, Stan’s notes and Bettina’s notebook at hand, Bumpy was back in the parking lot with somebody else’s car. He would leave it behind when he left. He always did that. It would be cleaner than when he stole it, too. He didn’t like spending all day in a dirty car, so he always tidied it up first thing.

Stan swept crumbs off his desk into the palm of his hand and shook them into the trashcan next to his desk. Sunshine poured in through the windows. Dust motes floated in the light. The cleaning lady was overdue.

“’He looked like an old dead tree lying in the brush,’ was what one of Pollack’s neighbors said,” Stan said. “The man helped the police search the woods with a flashlight. ‘There was a little blood run down from the forehead, no other damage except for the neck swollen like a balloon,’” he read from his notes. “I talked to the undertaker up there who handled Pollack and the dead girl. He said Pollack died of a compound fracture of the skull and the girl died of a broken neck.”

“What do our friends the police think?” Bettina asked.

“They think he was a hell of an unhappy man, they think he had a hell of a lot to drink, and they think it was a hell of an accident. I talked to an Earl Finch up there. He was the patrolman on the scene.”

“I knew he was dead from the look of him,” Patrolman Finch said. “It was so dark up there I don’t think I even covered him up.”

“Oh, hell!” Dr. William Abel said when he was led to the body of Jackson Pollack and looked at his broken head. He didn’t bother searching for a pulse. He put his Gladstone bag down and reached for a notepad.

The East Hampton police report noted that Patrolman Finch radioed back to the station at 10:30 PM. It was less than twenty minutes after the accident. “Two dead at scene of accident,” was what he radioed. One girl was crushed by the upside down Oldsmobile, the other girl fractured her pelvis, and Jackson Pollack died of a head injury, was how the rest of the report put it.

Jackson Pollack was wearing “a black velvet shirt, gray pants, a brown belt, blue shorts, brown socks, no shoes, no jewelry, and no ID.” Officer Finch knew who it was without having to look at the mangled face. He didn’t have to sniff out footsteps. He knew the Oldsmobile as well as anybody, having ticketed it a half-dozen times.

“Who called in the accident?”

“Three or four people. One of the neighbors said he heard the car barreling down the road and told his wife, ‘That fool isn’t going to make the curve.’ The other ones heard the car horn after the accident happened.”

“After, not before?”

“Yeah, I guess the horn got stuck and started blowing and wouldn’t stop.”

“What bothered us was that horn blowing,” said one of the neighbors. “We jumped in the car.” They drove to the crash. “There wasn’t anyone around, just this girl with her head toward that piled-in car and blood coming out of her scalp. We had to holler at her with the horn blaring.”

“It sounds like a small town. What is Springs like?” Bettina asked.

“It’s a small town,” Stan said. “It’s sort of a thumb of land stuck out into a bay, so there’s water on three sides. There’s a lot of land and scattered houses in the middle of nothing there. The locals call themselves Bonackers.”

“I’m going to be a Bonacker same as you some day,” Jackson Pollack declared to George Sid Miller one day, reaching for a beer at the Joe Loris bar in the East Hampton Hotel. “You live long enough you’ll get ‘er done,” George Sid Miller said. “You only got to wait a hundred years and three or four generations.” It was something he had been telling other barflies since he started drinking at Joe Loris. He never got tired of talking about it.

“Everybody says he drank phenomenal amounts of beer,” Stan said. “They say it had been going on for about four years. Before that he’d been good, although he seems to have always drunk plenty. One of his neighbors said if he hadn’t killed himself in that car, he would have killed himself with drink, sooner rather than later.”

“How about the car? Did anybody check to see if it had been tampered with?”

“No, it was turned over, busted, and a wrecker hauled it away first thing. It wasn’t the first car he had driven into a tree, either, He had a Caddy, did it about five years earlier. I talked to a Jim Brooks, one of his friends. He said, ‘I expected him to kill himself in an automobile, and I knew he wanted not to do it alone.’’’

“So, he was suicidal?”

“Not that anyone said so, but some of them said he was self-destructive. They seemed to think there was a difference. One guy at Jungle Pete’s said Pollack was too much of a coward to kill himself.”

“What is Jungle Pete’s?” Bettina asked.

“A tavern, restaurant, and social club, all wrapped up in one dump. It’s rough around the edges.”

“He came to my restaurant every day for eggs and home fries, toast and coffee,” said Nina Federico at Jungle Pete’s. “He bought a second-hand bike and would come over evenings on the bike for beers. He didn’t always get home on the bike, though.”

“There’s a married couple who live right there behind Jungle Pete’s,” Stan said. “Whenever Nina gave them the high sign they would take him home. The beer is a nickel. I spent some of my nickels there. The locals bring their kids in their pajamas, the kids fall asleep on the floor, and their parents dance and party all night.”

“It sounds like a house party,” Bettina said. “What was their house like there in Springs?”

“There was a lot of paint in a studio, a converted barn, it looked like to me, but you wouldn’t know he was a famous artist by his house, even though I found out he was famous enough that the New York Times ran the story of his death on the front page.”

“Did he have any problems in the neighborhood?”

“No real trouble, not that way. He seems to have had a soft spot for kids and dogs. Somebody said he had a pet crow for a while. One lady said he was an innocent, childlike person, except when he was in a car. Everybody had seen him falling down drunk, more than once. I talked to a doctor neighbor of his who said Pollack would put away two, three cases of beer when he was on a bender.”

“He must have worn out a path to the toilet,” Bettina said.

“Found Jackson Pollack outside on the sidewalk lying down,” reported the East Hampton police blotter more than once. They propped him up on his bicycle and sent him home more than once. If he didn’t get home they looked for him in the morning in ditches along the road.

“He could be mean, got into fights, broke his ankle just a few years ago fighting with some other artist, but I didn’t talk to anybody who disliked him, although not everybody liked him. There were more people than not who felt sorry for him. I almost felt sorry for him by the time I left.”

“Did anything look funny about the crash?” Bettina asked.

“Not to anybody up there,” Stan said. “Not to me, either. They seemed surprised it happened but not surprised at the same time. It was like they had been making book on it happening.”

Getting comfortable in his stolen car Bumpy Williams cracked open an All-Negro Comics and balanced it on the steering wheel. Ace Harlem was the private detective of the cover story and the bad guys were zoot-suited back alley muggers. He was planning on re-reading “Sugarfoot,” which was about the traveling musicians Sugarfoot and Snake Oil on the prowl for a farmer’s daughter.

He had brought a double-decker sandwich and a thermos of coffee with him. He peeled back the parchment paper the sandwich was wrapped in and spread it out on his lap. He poured a cup of coffee and put the cup on top of the dashboard. It was after two o’clock when he finished eating and flicking crumbs out of the car. “Remember – Crime Doesn’t Pay, Kids!” Ace Harlem admonished on the back cover of the comic book. Bumpy folded it and slipped it into the inside pocket of his jacket.

“While you were re-discovering that Pollack drank like a fish and finding out what he was wearing when he died, I talked to the death-car girl,” Bettina said. “Maybe everybody up in Springs expected or didn’t expect something like that accident to happen, but she says it wasn’t an accident. She says Jackson Pollack deliberately swerved off the road and accelerated into the oak tree he smashed into.”

“She thinks he was committing suicide?”

“No,” Bettina said. “She calls it his death-day.”

“What’s the difference?”

“At the moment he died I believe his soul came into my body,” Ruth Kligman explained to Bettina. “When I was convalescing in the hospital, his spirit came and visited me. I’m like Cleopatra and he was like Marc Anthony. He was a very deep soul mate. The minute I met him I felt I had known him for years.” The minute Ruth met Jackson they were off to the races. Only Ruth believed there would be a winner. Jackson Pollack knew there was poison in the gravy.

“He visited her?”

“His ghost.”

“You don’t believe any of that any more than I do, do you Betty?”

“No,” she said. “But she was right there, and she believes he deliberately drove off the road.”

“There were no skid marks, on or off the road, according to the police report,” Stan said. “The police sergeant I talked to estimates he was going at least seventy when he hit the tree.” The Oldsmobile fishtailed off the road almost two hundred feet through underbrush before colliding with the guts of the forest, pivoting, going end over, a hubcap rolling away, empty cans of Rheingold flying into the dark. Three of the cans landed upright in a staggered row, like three blind mice.

“If we take it for granted it wasn’t an accident, and we take it for granted he wasn’t trying to commit suicide, what do we have?” Stan asked.

“We have him driving into the tree on purpose, but not for any suicidal reason,” Betty said.

“If that’s what we have, that’s crazy. Why would he do that?”

“We’ve got to go with whatever we have is what we have. Maybe somebody brainwashed him into doing it.”

Stan gave it some thought. “If that’s what we’ve got, then who would have done the brainwashing? Who had the means and opportunity to lead Jackson Pollack down that path? I can’t see that getting done out there in Springs.”

“Barney Newman told us he had been in and out of therapy for a long time,” Bettina said. “We could start with his doctor. We know Pollack came into the city often, did business with his dealers, went drinking with his pals at the Cedar Tavern, and ran around with his girlfriend. I would expect his doctor to be here in the city if he’s anywhere.”

“All right, let’s find out who he was, try to get a line on him.”

“Does that mean me?”

“That’s why you make the big bucks,” Stan said.

“When did that happen?” Bettina asked.

At the end of the day, outside Stan’s apartment, Bumpy found a phone booth and called in his day of watching the detective. “He didn’t do nothing all day. He’s got some girl, probably his office girl, and a Jew man came and went. Other than that, he was in the office all day and then went home. I didn’t see a wife, but he’s got a little girl. That’s it, ain’t no more. I’m gonna head to the barbershop, get a wig chop, maybe stop up at Joe Wells’ for some fried chicken and waffles.”

Wells’ Restaurant, sometimes an eatery, sometimes a nightclub, was on Seventh Avenue between 132^ndand 133^rd. Bumpy Williams was from South Carolina but had grown up and still lived on 132^nd Street. He lived on the top floor of a brownstone. Benta’s Funeral Home was on both the first and parlor floors of the building.

“We like your looks,” they said when they rented the rooms to him after the war. “The crow’s nest is yours.” He had lived there ever since, ever since 1946. He kept his rooms as neat as he kept stolen cars.

Benta’s buried famous, infamous, and nobody Negro’s. If you had plenty of dead presidents, you could order a gold, green, or red hearse, with a colored coffin to match. If you were short on folding money, George Benta made all the arrangements. Nobody was ever turned away. Everybody got to meet their maker with a modicum of dignity.

It wasn’t that the funeral director was over generous. Going up the stairs one day Bumpy heard George behind him. “Don’t forget to turn that hall light off when you turn in. My name is George Benta, not Thomas Edison.” George wasn’t a stingy man. He was a frugal man. Bumpy had no problem with that.

“Stop by the shop and we’ll pay you for the day,” the soft voice on the other end of the line said. “The Queen says it best we pay you by the day. She says there’s something queer going on, so we’ll keep it close. We maybe will need you again the next couple of days.”

Queenie Johnson ran the numbers in Harlem. She was the uptown arm of Umberto “Albert” Anastasia’s Italian Hand. Bumpy knew if he was doing work for her, he was doing work for them. That’s where the money came from. “The Mad Hatter says there’s no such thing as good money or bad money,” Queenie said one day when they were smoking on a stoop after Bumpy had come back from making a delivery to her runners and controllers. “There’s just money, is what Albert says.”

Benta’s had buried Alain Locke, a big-time Negro, two years ago. W. E. B. Du Bois, Charles Johnson, and Paul Robeson’s widow all came and paid their respects. Nobody could find a place to park. Nobody stayed over long. There wasn’t enough standing room to stand. The stale air in the grieving chapel started to run out. Bumpy was standing at the front door with George after it was all over, and the casket coach was pulling away. George was in his work clothes, a long coat, pinstripes, and gray gloves. His wife, Pearl, was accompanying the funeral procession.

“Do you know that Alain Locke kept sperm samples from all his man lovers in a small box? One of them tried to slip it into the coffin. I slapped his hand away. I wouldn’t touch that box, though, not on your life.”

Bumpy looked down the street at the departing train of black cars, imagining them to be a line of wiggling sperm.

“You pay me what you said, I’ll lean on a light pole every day of the week,” he said to Queenie’s man before hanging up. “I’ll check with you in the morning. King Cole is supposed to be in town for that new TV show he’s doing, and word is he might be singing it up at the supper club tonight.”

Bumpy replaced the receiver, stuck two fingers into his mouth, and whistled up a cab.

“Harlem,” he said, getting in beside the driver. He knew sitting up front was like going to an afternoon matinee and sitting next to the only other person at the movies, but he liked riding shotgun. He was looking forward to seeing a show tonight. His favorite summer show was the Bums at Ebbets Field. He and a friend liked sitting in the lower section along the third base line, except Bumpy’s favorite place to park his behind was the concrete stairs between the seats. As soon as he could he sat there. The view was the best. There were never any fat heads or funny hats in front of him. Hardly anybody except the ushers complained. When they did he gave them a hard look with his indifferent green eyes.

“Big night tonight. Nat King Cole is in town.”

“Never heard of him, pal,” the cabbie said.

“When I perform it’s like sitting down at my piano and telling fairy stories,” Nat King Cole said before a show in Birmingham, Alabama.

It was five months since he had been attacked in Birmingham, during a show, when half-a-dozen white men jumped over the footlights and rushed him, grabbing his legs, wrenching his back, taking him down to the floor of the stage before the police were able to break up the melee and the baritone with perfect pitch was able to go back to telling fairy stories.

“Alabama is no place for immoral nigger rock and roll music,” Willie Hinson said the next morning standing in front of the storefront office of the White Citizen’s Council. He had a slight sunburn lighting up his freckles and was wearing a tie. Bumpy had heard it all before. He had already killed one white man. It had not been an accident. He thought he might have to kill another one someday, if not for any particular reason, then on principle alone.

Excerpted from the crime novel “Cross Walk.”

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

A Cold War Thriller

“Captures the vibe of mid-century NYC.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction

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

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Cross Walk

Gone to Flatbush

December 1, 2024 Edward Staskus Leave a comment

By Ed Staskus

Tony de Marco had a bad headache. It got up to full speed the second he got up from an unsound sleep. When he stood up he was swept by a wave of nausea. He had to grab the headboard to keep from falling over. He felt sick and slaphappy eating breakfast. He was unhappy walking to the newsstand to get a copy of the Daily Mirror. He was unhappy riding the train to Ebbets Field. He hadn’t been able to jump the turnstile and had to pay the full fare.

He couldn’t shake the headache off. Turning his head to either side even slightly made it worse. It felt like his brain had gotten too big for his head, like it was swollen. He closed his eyes. He tried to read the tabloid but couldn’t concentrate. He closed his eyes again. A minute later he was getting some shuteye, lulled to sleep by the rocking of the train. He slept through a ten-minute nightmare of Korea. It wasn’t hard. He had dreamt hundreds of them about what went on in the cold hills north of the border.

He woke up when his station was called. He knew he wouldn’t miss the call when he dozed off, which is why he could doze off. He never missed his stop, even though his hearing was bad. It was like his mind screened out the talk of the passengers but was tuned in to hear the voice of the PA system. He felt better. He wasn’t on the sunny side of street, but he was out of the dark clouds. Stepping off the train, crossing Bedford Avenue, the ballpark came into sight.

“Goddamn that Robert Moses,” he cursed under his breath, a shadow crossing his face.

Everybody knew somebody was going to have to blow up the Moses bus before the Dodgers ever got a new stadium. Ebbets Field was the smallest park in the National League. The seats were bad. The toilets were bad. Nobody ever went to the bathrooms unless it was an emergency. There was practically no parking anywhere. Even sold-out games didn’t help, although they helped. The Atlantic Yards was where the team wanted to go. But Moses wanted them to move to a city-owned stadium in Queens. Moses was the city’s all-powerful mover and shaker. If anybody could make it happen, he could make it happen.

But for once what he wanted wasn’t going to happen. “We’re the Brooklyn Dodgers, not the Queens Dodgers,” the boss had said. Nobody in Brooklyn wanted to be a Queen Bum.

Walter O’Malley was the boss. He was determined to get a bigger ballpark somewhere else. The stink of relocating was in the air. He’d been planning it for ten years. They were already playing some of their home games at Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City. They had played the first one there almost two weeks ago, edging the Phillies by a run.

O’Malley was going to beat down Moses, no matter how many commandments he had to break. There was no doubt about it. The big man was going to move the team, that was for sure, maybe move out of Brooklyn, maybe even move to the west coast, even though there wasn’t a team anywhere west of Kansas City. It would be like moving to the moon.

“Jeez, Jersey City, already!” Tony muttered and spat on the sidewalk.

The King of Hanky-Panky of Jersey City was gone, he wasn’t the mayor anymore, but his gang was still running things, and he was still living like a millionaire. Anybody who said anything about it to him was told he was a rotten commie. Then he was punched in the nose. Then he was thrown out of town.

The drive to the ballpark in Jersey City was terrible. There were no shoulders on the Pulaski Skyway over the Hackensack and Passaic rivers. The breakdown lane was in the middle of the bridge. Everybody called it the suicide lane. They were finally building a concrete median to put a stop to the head-on accidents. Once you got over the bridge everything smelled like soap and cheap perfume, especially the closer downwind you got to the Colgate Plant on Hudson Street.

It was the first day of May. It was sunny, in the low 50s, the sky a faraway blue. By the time he got to work on the field it might hit 60. The team was in Cincy playing the Redlegs. The grounds crew had the rest of the week and more to get the home field in tip-top shape. After that it was nothing but rule the roost games the rest of the month. Tony was sure the Bums would be in first place the beginning of June.

He walked past the ballpark, crossed Flatbush Avenue, and strolled into Prospect Park. He had a half-hour to kill. When he got to the shore opposite Duck Island, he found a bench and sat down, looking over the water. He pulled a pack of cigarettes and a Ronson lighter from his jacket pocket. His headache wasn’t any worse. It was probably a little better. He wasn’t sure but hoped so.

“L & M filters are just what the doctor ordered!” is what the ads said. Maybe a smoke would make him feel better. He leaned back and lit up, watching a duck and a line of ducklings waddling into the water. One of the ducks stayed on the shore, standing sideways, keeping the business side of his eyes on him.

There was a wall of six and seven-foot-high butterfly bushes flanking and to the back of the bench. In the summer, once it got good and hot and the red lilac-like flowers bloomed, the bushes attracted butterflies and hummingbirds. Now that the ducks were back in town, he would have to remember to bring a bag of stale bread to the park.

Tony sometimes ate lunch in Prospect Park when the team was on the road. When they were at home there was too much work to do. He was on the work gang that rolled the tarpaulin out when rainstorms loomed, when it was all hands on deck, and he had his own assigned work, but he never did any mowing. The head groundskeeper made sure the grass was cut everyday if the team was in town. He might cut the infield grass shorter than usual if a bunt happy team was on the schedule. When Jackie Robinson had been younger and faster than just about anybody the grass was always kept long and the dirt in front of home plate watered down for him. The Colored Comet’s first ever hit for the Dodgers had been a bunt single.

One of Tony’s jobs was laying the foul lines, the coaching boxes, and the batting boxes. Jackie Robinson still stole home two and three times a year. Tony made sure the chalk line from third base to home was straight as an arrow, leading the way to the promised land.

He took a drag on his lung dart and felt better. He would have to tell the doc about his headaches. The medicine man had been able to help him with his bad dreams without shock treatments or talking about combat fatigue and all the rest of their psycho crap. He knew most of the VA shrinks yakked it up about hostility and neurosis aroused by warfare. They didn’t know anything about bad weather in Korea that never stopped, mud frozen solid, and no sunlight day after day. They didn’t know anything about gooks with burp guns that never stopped. They didn’t know anything about feast that never stopped. They didn’t know what the hell they were talking about. They didn’t know how goddamned horrible it was.

He was lucky to have found Doc Baird, although when he thought about it, it was more like Doc Baird had found him. He couldn’t remember exactly how it happened. Besides the ear doctor in Japan, who told him he had lost some of his hearing, Doc Baird was the only medicine man he had talked to the past three years who made sure to face his good ear when they were talking.

“They didn’t have earplugs or nothing for us,” Tony told Doctor Baird.

“They’d say, you just have to live with it. Put paper or cotton in your ears. They didn’t care about us. I had to go to a MASH hospital one time. There was something wrong with me. I thought it might have been pneumonia. That night they brought in a bunch of guys who’d been in a firefight, crying and hollering, all mangled up, bleeding like stuck pigs. I couldn’t stand it. I left and hitchhiked back to my outfit.”

The ducklings swam in a broken line behind their mother duck, who was putting up a racket to keep her brood together and safe. He had once seen a turtle rise up and gobble down a duckling. It was gone in the blink of an eye, just like that.

“When did you serve in Korea?” Doctor Baird asked.

“I was there from the start, at Inchon. I got drafted in 1949, right after I turned 21, when the new law said everybody over 18 had to register. I didn’t have any luck. Only ten thousand guys got drafted that whole year and I was one of them. I didn’t want to go. My doctor wrote them a letter saying I had a bad back and they couldn’t use me. My boss wrote a letter saying we can’t spare him, we need him for the team, but they didn’t listen to nothing.”

“You didn’t want to join up?”

“No, but when my number was up, I went down to the draft board. There was a big Marine there. He got us all lined up in a row. He’d hit a guy in the chest. Marine! A couple more guys, he would hit another one in the chest. Marine! When he got to me, he looked me up and down, and went to the next guy. He didn’t want me. I weighed less than 130 pounds then. They pushed me into the Army on a two-year plan and sent me to Fort Dix. We had a newspaper there, the Stars and Stripes. It said, ‘Fort Dix Turns Out Killers’. They called us killers. I didn’t know what it was all about. I wasn’t mad at anybody. I wasn’t any kind of killer.”

The ducks dipped their heads underwater as they swam, scooping up plants and insects. The drake on the shore walked off looking for land bugs and dandelion greens. Waddling away he twisted his head around and grunted, then whistled at Tony. He didn’t hear the whistle, just like he didn’t hear birdsongs, not if they went into his bad ear.

“You lost some of your hearing in the one ear while you were in the artillery?”

“I lost a lot in the one ear, yeah. I wasn’t supposed to be in that racket, but that’s what happened,” said Tony. “Most of the guys I trained with went to Europe, where they didn’t have to do nothing. Three squads of us got sent to Korea. I had to fly to Seattle, wait thirty days, and then they put us on a ship across the Pacific, which took another twenty days. When we landed in Yokohama, we thought, maybe we’ll just stay in Japan, but the next thing I knew I was landing at Inchon in a barge. Nothing went right for me after that.”

“What went wrong?” the doctor asked, doodling on a notepad with no notes in it. He was listening with half an ear. He knew everything about Tony he needed to know. The sessions were for show and reinforcement.

“I was trained for the infantry, but after we landed, they said, we have enough infantry guys, we need guys in the artillery. They sent me to the 37^th Field Artillery Battalion, the Second Division. They gave us a patch for our sleeves with a star and an Indian on it. We used to say, ‘Second to None!’ Right away they put me in a gun section, and we got orders for a fire mission. We had twelve guns, 105’s, loud as hell, just boom, boom, boom hour after hour. When it was over and the guys were talking, all I could hear was lips moving. I couldn’t hear a damn thing for a half hour. I wasn’t used to that kind of noise.”

“How did you get captured?” asked Doctor Baird.

“What happened, after about four months, after Inchon, they said, you’ve got infantry training, right, we’re going to make you a forward observer, so I had go back to the infantry. My job was to tell our guys where to shoot the stuff. If there were a thousand gooks in the open, we’d say, shoot the stuff that explodes in the air. It would rain down on those guys, the shrapnel getting them. Other times it was quick shells, the kind that explode the instant they hit the ground, or delays, the kind that stick in the ground and blow up later.”

“You were fighting the North Koreans?”

“No, we were fighting the Chinese, tough guys, small, always blowing bugles, padded up in quilt coats. They knew how to stay warm, not like us, with the summer outfits MacArthur sent us. They were good with mortars. If a round landed in front of you, and right away another landed behind you, we always said, get the hell out of the middle. There wasn’t anything but one hill after another in Korea. We would lob over the hills to the other side when our infantry was going up the near side to take it. We tried to shoot over them, down on the gooks, but sometimes it would land on our own guys.” It was friendly fire gone suddenly unfriendly fire.

“That’s what happened to me and my buddy. We got caught in some wire. You always had to watch for incoming rounds. As long as you heard a whistle, you’re OK. The one that gets you, you never hear it. My buddy got killed, and I got all cut up. I couldn’t get off the wire. I still have scars on my arms. The Chinese picked me up. They had me for about three weeks. It was bad, and I got sick, something in my stomach, and when there was a prisoner exchange, they sent me back. I got flown to Japan and was in a hospital for a month, but I made it out alive.”

Tony stubbed the L & M butt under his heel. He tucked his lighter away. It was time to go to work. He thought about the Greek kid. It was the kind of thing that happened when you were doing some killing while the other guy was trying to kill you at the same time.

“There was a Greek kid in my outfit, he was a baseball player, but he got a leg blown off. They gave him an artificial leg. The thing hurt him where it was attached. He took aspirins all the time. He drank whiskey when he had to. He didn’t tell anybody about it and tried to get back into the game. He had an arm like a cannon, but what can you do on one real leg? He was still trying to make it in the minors after I got home, but, of course, he never made it.”

The home plate entrance to Ebbets Field was an 80-foot rotunda made of Italian marble. Tony never went in the front door. He went around the back, to a door behind the bleachers in center field. He checked in with the watchman and went to his locker.

“When I got healthy, they said, you can go home unless you want to re-up. We’ll give you $300.00 if you do that. We made $90.00 a month and they paid us $45.00 extra whenever we were in combat. But they didn’t want to pay me for the couple of months I still had left on my two years, so I said, no way.”

“You went home after you got better?” asked Doctor Baird.

“Yeah, I came home to Brooklyn, got my old job back, except my old job was turned into cleaning in the aisles and bleachers, but I worked my way back up. All the real bums sit in the bleachers. I’m doing maintenance work now, better pay.”

After Tony changed into his work clothes in the grounds crew locker room, he walked out to the field. They were raking the sand clay mix today, including the infield, foul lines, and on-deck plot. His headache was gone, thank God. The ballpark was going to look good for the Giants next week.

“Hey Tony, big night tonight with Phil?” asked one of the three men with rakes resting on their shoulders as he walked up to them with his own rake.

“You bet,” he said. “It’s Bilko time tonight. He gets it over on the con men who try to gyp one of his guys. Ike’s going to like this one”

Dwight Eisenhower was a big fan of “You’ll Never Get Rich.” Earlier in the season the Master of Chutzpah had gotten a telegram from Ike’s press secretary. “The Old Man missed last night’s show,” it said. A print of the show was immediately shipped to the White House.

“I bet you saw it filmed,” one of the men said.

“That would be a good bet. They made everybody roll around on the floor before the show, except for Silver, because their uniforms came in looking too crisp, too starchy, for them being in the motor pool. They looked scruffy enough when they were done.”

The show was filmed live in Chelsea in a building that used to be the armory for the Ninth Mounted Cavalry. It was shot like a play and recorded to film. It was a comedy and Phil Silvers ad-libbed like a man lost in his own thoughts. Tony had been in the audience more than a dozen times. He always looked forward to the comedian coming up with something off the top of his cue ball head. It was why Tony de Marco’s nickname was Tony the Phil.

Tony was a buff of Master Sergeant Ernest Bilko, who was named after Chicago Cubs first baseman Steve Bilko. “Bingo to Bango to Bilko” was the way the Chicago radio play-by-play man called double plays executed by shortstop Ernie Banks, second baseman Gene Baker, and Steve Bilko. Tony never missed a show, unless the Dodgers were playing under the lights, when it was Fernandez to Robinson to Nelson.

He wasn’t the only fan of the show among the crew, but he was the show’s biggest fan among them. Sergeant Bilko was a crafty devil whose get-rich-quick schemes almost always fell flat on their face. His tips for success and riches never panned out either, but nobody ever bad-mouthed him for trying. They loved him for trying.

“They always lose, sure, but they don’t blame me, because to a gambler a bad tip is better than no tip at all,” Phil Silvers said with a straight face..

A short man wearing a plaid cap, a stogie stuck in his thick lips, standing on the far side of the pitcher’s mound in a pair of green knee-high rubber boots, waved a hand at Tony. “Hey, go out there and check the drainage in center,” said Max Ringolsby, the crew chief, pointing over the top of the second base bag. “Duke said something about the grass being damp out there. Maybe the drain is clogged.”

The Duke of Flatbush was the team’s best outfielder, usually assigned to roam center field. He was money in the bank when a deep line drive had to be caught at all costs. The year before he had been the National League’s MVP runner-up. Nobody wanted to see him go head over heels on a slick spot.

Tony walked off the infield, into the outfield, to the middle of center field, and found the drain. He got down on his hands and knees. The ground was more waterlogged than it should have been. Drainpipes crisscrossed the field and water flowed down a slight fall to a larger drainpipe that ran into the storm water system. The pipe was about four inches below the sand, clay, and gravel that was below the grass.

Tony cut a block of sod from around the drain and dug down to the drain grate. It was stopped up with debris. He retrieved a screwdriver from the tool room and removed the cover. He put it on the ground beside him and started cleaning it. He had the feeling somebody was watching him. He looked around the field. Almost everybody was working at something. Nobody was watching him. He could smell a rat when he saw one.

He bent forward and looked into the drain. A brown rat leaned up and looked back at him. He might have been a foot-and-half stretched out. His teeth were long but ground down. Rats chewed on anything, including cement, brick, and lead pipes. One of the guys fed scrambled eggs to the rats that hung around their locker room. Tony wondered what he was doing in the middle of the day, when he should have been napping. He didn’t wonder that the rat was in the sewer. They could tread water for days.

They bred and lived and bred and died in Ebbets Field. They never left. Why would they leave? Everywhere except the ballpark was a menace. They had been there since the stadium was built in 1913, generation after generation of them, because there were always leftover hot dogs, soft pretzels, and Cracker Jack beneath the seats and around overflowing trash bins.

“Boo,” Tony the Phil said softly.

The brown rat blinked, twitched, and skittered back into the storm drain.

Excerpted from the crime novel “Cross Walk.”

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

“Captures the vibe of mid-century NYC.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction

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

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Made in Cleveland

Monkey Business

December 1, 2024 Edward Staskus Leave a comment

By Ed Staskus

Kevin Rourke was an engaging young man with handsome eyes, handsome hair, and a handsome man’s love for all women, from Plain Jane’s to Jane Russell’s. He was charming but unscrupulous, especially when it came to sexpots. He was slowly going to paunch but still young enough that nobody noticed it except us, his roommates, who saw him flip flopping to and from bedroom and bathroom every morning with a towel wrapped around his spreading mid-section.

He was in his late-20s, but his belly was going on late-40s. He liked food as much as he liked women. He was always eating sirloins and plucking daisies. The only time he wasn’t was when he went to Florida, which he did for one week twice a year. When he did he only took toothpaste and a toothbrush, two pairs of clean socks and underwear, and a fistful of cash with him. He had a small safe in his closet full of paper money.

He always wore a baseball cap, safari shorts, and a yellow shirt on the flight. He wore the baseball cap because his hair was thinning.

“Why yellow?” we asked.

“It’s a cheerful color,” he said.

“What do you do there?”

“I don’t do anything. I hardly ever leave my room. I sit on the balcony sometimes at night.”

“How about getting some sun?”

“No,” he said. “I keep the outside where it belongs, which is outside.”

“What do you mean? There’s a beach right there.” He always stayed in the same hotel, the Pier 66 Hotel, within sight of the Atlantic Ocean. “What do you do in your room?”

“I sleep, and other things,” he said.

“What about food?”

“It’s my week to diet.”

“You can’t lay around doing nothing all day every day for a week.”

“I’ll take that bet,” he said.

His Lebanese fiancée Leyla took the bet and won. When she did she wouldn’t take his calls for three weeks, but he wormed his way back into her good graces after he got back to Cleveland and their wedding back on track, except when it wasn’t. They had been engaged for more than a year. Day after day went by and they were unable to set a firm date. In the meantime, Kevin kept hedging his bets, sowing his wild oats.

He took more showers than anybody we knew. He showered every morning and again in the evening after work. He even showered those nights he wasn’t going out but staying in. He wrapped his dampness up in a bathrobe those nights and watched TV. Neither Matt Lavikka, our other roommate, nor I minded. We didn’t watch much on the boob tube, anyway, except in the fall when the Cleveland Browns were launching pigskins.

When he was spic and span, Kevin worked for ABF Freight Systems, which was a national LTL motor carrier based in Arkansas. We called it All Broken Freight. After calling it that to his face a few times and seeing frown lines break out around his mouth, we eased off and stopped with the buzz talk. His paycheck meant everything to him.

He was an orphan, or at least said he was an orphan, and had thrown in with ABF like it was a second family. He had a desk in a bare bone’s office in Brook Park, although he hardly ever went there. His paycheck depended, since he was largely commissioned, on being on the road. He never missed a day of work. Most of the time he worked overtime, pressing the flesh day and night. Some nights he slept in his car in his suit when the drive back to Cleveland from Akron or Canton was going to take too long. When he showed up in the morning he took a shower, changed his clothes, and went back to work.

Even though he was making a boatload of money, he didn’t seem to own anything except half a dozen expensive suits, a rack of long-sleeved starched white shirts, a trove of status symbol ties, comfortable Italian leather shoes, and a 1980 Mercury Marquis. The car was nearly new and was reddish purple with a leather-and-velour interior. It featured split-bench seats and the driver’s seat reclined. We called it the land yacht. He kept it even cleaner than he kept himself. If there was anything he loved beyond any doubt, it was that car.

I was taken aback the first time I saw Leyla, Kevin’s girlfriend and treasure chest in the making. She was dark-skinned like she had just crossed the Jordan River, with black hair and a hook nose. Her nose was problematic, but he wasn’t marrying her for that. She was swank the night I met her, with some kind of fur wrapped around the top of her. Her dress was cream-colored and designer. She wasn’t half as good-looking as Kevin. I pegged her at about ten years older.

Kevin lived by the mantra that when he found a woman with millions of dollars, who would sign over most of it to him, and promised to be dead within a couple of years at the most, that was the woman he was going to marry. “It’s just as easy marrying a rich woman as it is marrying a poor one,” he explained. Leyla didn’t look like she was going to drop dead any time soon, although she looked like she had a million dollars, for sure. We found out her father was a big-time import-export businessman.

The groom-to-be knew that married couples become in the eyes of the law one person, and that one person was going to be him. Even though it is true enough that one shouldn’t marry for money, since it is cheaper to simply borrow it, he had a one-track mind. He had a bad case of the gimmes. He ran the rat race day and night.

I was dating a queen bee by the name of Dana Price the year I roomed with Matt and Kevin. Her family lived in a new house in a new development in Solon, a bedroom suburb about twenty minutes southeast of Cleveland. She was a saleswoman for IBM, selling hardware systems to banks, and lived in an apartment twice as large as she needed at the top of Cedar Rd. in Cleveland Heights. Her father was the head honcho of Mrs. Weiss’ Noodles.

The business had been another family’s business for more than forty years. They were Hungarian, churning out Ha-Lush-Ka noodles for casseroles and dumpling-style Kluski egg noodles at their Woodland Ave. plant. When it burned down in 1961 they built a new plant in Solon. By 1968, after they merged with American Mushroom, they were a multi-million-dollar company and still growing. After the Hungarians retired, and ten years after the merger, Dana’s father Jim Price became president.

I called him Big Jim because he was a big man with a big mouth. He knew everything about everything. There was no mistaking where you stood with him. He told me so himself when he told me to stay away from his daughter. He didn’t want her marrying an immigrant son with nothing in the bank and anarchist leanings. But she was as stubborn and determined as her father and ignored him.

We talked about her father’s concerns. She wasn’t planning on marrying me or anybody else to reform them. “That’s what reform schools are for,” she said. Dana was like the highway between Akron and Cleveland, no curves, being up-to-date fit and trim, but I liked her for sticking up for me.

Kevin hated Dana. She had swagger to spare, and he knew it. She wasn’t curvier than his Lebanese steady but was better-looking by far. He resented her faux Boston accent. He resented her family, her family’s wealth, and their lifestyle. The family house in Solon had four bedrooms and a hot tub on the back deck. Big Jim drove a Caddy. It seemed like it was a new model every year. Kevin hated all of Big Jim’s Caddy’s.

Dana had gone to college in Boston and flew there every two months-or-so to get her hair done by her favorite stylist. That winter, when I was thinking of breaking up with her, she asked me if I wanted to go to Aspen for some skiing. Before I could say anything, she stuck an airline ticket in my hand and said she would meet me there. She was going a few days in advance. She was more like her father than she knew.

“I’ve only down hilled a few times,” I told her. “I mostly cross-country ski on the golf courses around town, which are mostly flat.”

“You’ll get the hang of it,” she said. She was a can-do gal. She could be unconsciously smug.

I felt like I was being hung out to dry with a broken leg in the making. Aspen Mountain is almost 12,000 feet up and has a vertical drop of more than 3,000 feet. The ticket was like an albatross around my neck. I went for a walk around the block to work it out. I couldn’t work up an angle to get out of the suicide mission.

“Why don’t you give the plane ticket to Matt?” Kevin suggested. “He’s always skiing. He would love to go to Aspen.” Matt’s parents were from Finland, where skiing is second nature. They always said, “One cannot ski so softly that the tracks cannot be seen.” It was some kind of Finnish proverb. I had no idea what it meant.

That’s what I did. I gave the ticket to my roommate. I didn’t say a word to Dana about it. She could be a hothead. After he got back from Aspen, Matt told me Dana was dumbfounded when he arrived in my place, his gear in tow. After she got her feet back under her, she swore up a storm and swore it was over between us. She was true to her word.

“How was the skiing?” I asked.

“It was great,” Matt said. “You should try it.”

The on-again off-again wedding of Kevin and Leyla was back on when spring began to bust out all over. They planned to get hitched in June. I had majored in English at Cleveland State University and when my school days were over was minoring in unemployment, and so had time to spare for errands and lending a helping hand. I addressed all the invitations, sealed, and stamped them. I mailed them out. The replies started coming back the beginning of May. It was shaping up to be a sizable wedding followed by a chock-full reception. Kevin was opting out of hot wet love and into cold hard cash.

I thought all his talk about marrying for money was just talk since a lot of what he said was all talk. I found out otherwise. He was going to marry for money. He was inviting anybody and everybody, no matter how distantly related by blood or friendship, adding up what their envelopes stuffed with fifties and hundreds might amount to.

Kevin was like the Three Musketeers of repartee. There was nothing any woman could say to him that he didn’t have a better retort for. That was his number one problem. What woman was going to put up with a smart-ass day in and day out, much less for the rest of her life? The second problem was he never dated anybody who was better looking than him. When that became clear to whoever was princess for the day, she chopped his head off with words and moved on. Leyla was willing to put up with both problems. She wanted Kevin so she could make him into what she wanted him to be. The wedding was supposed to be at St. Marion’s, which was a downtown Maronite church. The congregation had been around since before World War One. It was the center of Lebanese culture in Cleveland, both religious and ethnic.

Kevin was still wrestling with doubt and indecision a week before the wedding. When he went down for the count, he called it off. He was giving up the task of loving his lady love. He had enough money in his safe so that he could stay a playboy for a few more years. Leyla was going to find out soon enough she had been made a monkey of.

Matt and I were watching the Kardiac Kids on an old black and white TV when we found out what was happening. The Kardiac Kids were the exciting new version of the Cleveland Browns. They snatched victory out of the jaws of defeat most Sundays. Kevin walked in on the broadcast and tried to break his news flash to us. Brian Sipe was lofting a Hail Mary Pass. We motioned for Kevin to wait. When the Dawg Pound erupted, their prayers answered, we turned to him.

“What’s that you were saying?” we asked, high fiving each other.

“The wedding is off,” he said.

“It’s off?” we asked, flummoxed.

“Finito,” he said in an Italian accent phony as a bag of baloney, making a slashing motion across his throat. “You’re going to have to let everybody know.”

“Hey, that’s all right,” I said turning back to the football game, making sure Don Cockcroft had kicked the extra point. “No man should get married until he’s studied some anatomy and carefully dissected the corpses of one or two women, so he knows exactly what he’s going up against.”

Matt and I were at his parent’s house the next Sunday. They were from the old country. They had gotten a new Philips color television and we were watching the adventures of the Kardiac Kids again. The game hung by a thread. In the middle of the drama a slew of commercials interrupted the action. We told the old folks all about Kevin’s misadventure.

“Life is not a waiting game for better times,” Matt’s dad said when the commercials were wrapping up, the game coming back on, and we were done with our account of the no-wedding.

What does that mean? I wondered. I thought it had to be another Finnish proverb. What about all good things come to those who wait? “Even in Helsinki they don’t keep a maid on the dresser too long,” Matt’s mom said as though she had read my mind. I didn’t have to parse that. Matt and I went back to watching Brian Sipe side-stepping a defensive bull rush and pitching a tight spiral. It was flying colors right, left, and center.

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

“Captures the vibe of mid-century NYC.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction

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

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Sudbury Ontario

Fried Eggs on Toast

November 1, 2024 Edward Staskus 3 Comments

By Ed Staskus

The first language I spoke was Lithuanian and until I started meeting other kids on the street it was the only language I spoke. All my Baltic friends in Sudbury, Ontario, were other small change in the same boat. We brushed up on our language skills while their Old World parents visited my Old World parents. When spring broke early my second year of life, I started meeting other children, boys and girls living on the block of nine houses on our dead-end street.

They all spoke English and most of them spoke French., too. We spoke English on the street, which was how I picked up enough of it to get by. French was for talking about cooking, girls, and fashion. We didn’t know anything about those things, so we stuck to English.

My friend and arch-enemy Regina Bagdonaite, who I called Lele, lived a block away. She and I played together, burning up the pavement, except for those times that she saw me dragging my favorite red blanket behind me. When she tried to take it away and I resisted, starting a tug of war, she resorted to biting me on the arm. It was then squabbling and pushing started in earnest, all hell breaking loose.

Lele didn’t begin learning English until the first day she went to school. “All my friends were Lithuanian during my childhood in Sudbury,” she said. “When I started kindergarten, I didn’t speak a word of English. Many people over my lifetime had a chuckle when I told them I was born in Canada, but English is my second language.”

Time is money is the watchword in the grown-up world, but time is candy is what works for many children. The young lady who lived next door to my parents had a daughter my age and they visited some afternoons. She always brought candy and while our mothers talked, Diana and I sat at the kitchen table with a paper bag full of candy between us. Whenever one of us was ready for another piece, we jiggled the table like crazy before making a grab for the bag.

My parents, who were an immigrant couple, bought a house as soon as they could, the same as every other Lithuanian who ended up in Sudbury. They had three children inside of five years. They didn’t have a TV, but they had a telephone and a radio, as well as a washing machine and a fridge. They knew their neighbors, but all their close friends were other post-war DP’s, most of them working in the nickel mines. Sudbury was a municipality, but it was a company town first and foremost.

By 1950 it had long been associated with mining, smelting, and a broken-down landscape. The environment was said to be comparable to that of the moon. Decades of mining and smokestacks had acidified more than 7,000 lakes inside a circle of 10,000 square miles.

“I never liked Sudbury,” my mother said. “All the trees were dried up and dead. It was god-forsaken as far as the eye could see.” More than 50,000 acres of the hinterland were barren. Nothing grew there. Another 200,000 acres were semi-barren. There was erosion everywhere. It wasn’t a wasteland, but it was a wasteland. All anyone had to do was walk up a rocky promontory and look around.

As early as the 1920s “The Hub of the North” was open roasting more than twice as much rock ore as any other smelting location in North America. The result was poisoned crops far and wide. The aftermath made it one of the worst environments in Ontario. It blackened the native pink granite, turning the rose and white quartz black.

“My husband worked two weeks during the day and two weeks during the night,” my mother said. “He walked to work, except when it was too cold. Then whoever had a car would pick him and others up. In the morning he left at seven in the morning and got home at seven at night. When he worked nights, he got home at seven in the morning. The kids and I would wait by the window for him to get back.”

Sudbury lies within a gigantic basin. It is the third-largest impact crater on Earth. It was created about 200 million years ago when an enormous asteroid rocketed through the atmosphere and hit the ground with a blast. World-class copper and nickel deposits are found there and mined extensively.

The city’s reputation as a rocky badlands was known far and wide by the time my parents, Angele and Vytas, got married in 1949 and bought their house on Stanley Street a year later. Despite the industrial blight of the past half-century, there was a growing working-class population. They were a part of that population. The newlyweds were two of the wartime displaced willing to take whatever work was offered in return for getting out of the Old World.

“All our friends, the Zizai, Simkai, Bagdonai, all had children,” my mother said. “Since our living room was a little bigger than most, they often came over on Saturday nights. The men played bridge while we made dinner. The kids ran around. We drank and danced. We put the kids away and talked all night.”

Whoever had the opportunity to get married got married as fast as they could. There wasn’t an overabundance of eligible women in Sudbury. Henry and Maryte Zizys saw each other three times before they got hitched. The Simkai and Bagdonai stretched it out for a few months. The married men drank at home. The single men drank in bars, usually with other single men.

The early Lithuanians who went to the New World weren’t Lithuanians, since the country didn’t exist at the time. It had once been its own realm but had since been taken over and was part of the Russian state. Many who fled to the United States were mistakenly documented as Polish, since the Russians had banned the Lithuanian language in the homeland and scores of them spoke Polish as a second language.

The first Lithuanians in Canada were men who fought in the British Army against the Americans in the War of 1812. For the next 130 years most of those who left the Baltics and went to Canada did so for economic reasons. After World War Two they fled toil and trouble after the Soviet Union reincorporated Lithuania into its evil empire.

“All of us hated the Russians for what they did” my mother said. They deported hundreds of thousands of Lithuanians to Siberian labor camps during and after the war. Sometimes they had their conniving reasons. Other times the reason was slaphappy. The neighbors might have complained about you. The new Communist mayor might have taken a dislike to you. A cross-eyed apparatchik might have thought you were somebody else. It didn’t matter, because if you ended up in a boxcar going east, your future was over.

The house Vytas and Angele moved into was on a new extension of Stanley Street north of Poplar Street. It wasn’t in any of the city’s touted neighborhoods, but Donovan was nearby, and so was Little Britain. Downtown was less than two miles to the east. Stanley Street started at Elm Street where there was a drug store, a tobacconist, five-and-dime, fruit market, bakery and butcher shop, restaurants, a liquor store, and the Regent movie theater. The streetcars were being replaced by busses and the tracks asphalted over. The other end of Stanley Street dead-ended at a sheer rock face on top of which were railroad tracks. The Canadian Pacific ran day and night hauling ore. When the train wailed, we wailed right back.

My mother and her friends shopped on Elm Street. When I was still a toddler, I rode in a baby carriage. After my brother and sister were born, they rode in the carriage. I didn’t fit anymore, having become a third wheel. I was unhappy about it.

“I told him he was a big boy now and had to walk to help his brother and sister, but he still didn’t like it,” my mother said. “He made a sour face.”

My father spread topsoil in the front yard of our new house and threw down grass seed. The backyard was forty feet deep but sandy and grass wouldn’t grow there. He built a fence around it to discourage us from climbing the rocky hill over which the railroad tracks curved west.

Even though children imitate their elders, they don’t always listen to them. “We always told the kids they weren’t allowed to climb the rock hills,” my mother said. “One day I couldn’t find Edvardas. He wasn’t in the house or in the yard or anywhere on our part of the street. I called and called for him. When he didn’t answer, all I could do was wait outside. When he finally came home, he had pebbles in his pockets. Where have you been? I asked him. I was angry.”

“I was looking for gold, mama,” I said, handing my mother pebbles that had a glint of sparkle to them. “I found some and brought them back for you.”

Our house on Stanley Street was ten blocks from the vast open pits on the other side of Big Nickel Mine Drive. Logging and farming were what men had worked at through the middle of the 19^th century, but after 1885 big copper and nickel deposits were discovered in the basin. The impact of decades of roasting ore on open wood fires killed most of the trees not being logged for the fires, except poplar and birch, which dotted the city and our street.

“We had two bedrooms, a small kitchen, and a nice living room,” my mother said. “Upstairs was a half bath and two rooms. We rented those rooms. We usually rented to women or a couple who were new to Sudbury. Where they took a bath, I don’t know. We charged $11.00 a week for a room and saved all the money we got. Right before we left for America, my husband was able to buy a used car.”

When Bruno and Ingrid Hauck came to Sudbury from Germany, they rented a room for several years. “She watched the kids sometimes, so Vytas and I could go to the Regency to see a movie,” my mother said. They saw “The Greatest Show on Earth” and “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.” My friends and I saw “Lady and the Tramp” and fell in love with the movies.

When I was four years old my parents had a New Year’s Eve party at our house, inviting all their friends. A few minutes before the magic moment my mother cut her eye adjusting the elastic strap of a party hat under her chin while sliding it up over the front of her face. “I had to lay down and didn’t see New Year’s Day,” she said, disappointed.

When she woke up my father and Rimas Bagdonas, her dancing partner in the local Lithuanian folk dancing group, were washing the night’s dishes. Rimas worked in the mines, and wrote plays in his spare time, staging them in the hall of the nearby French Catholic church hall. “I was just in my twenties, but in one of Rimas’s plays I was the mother of a dying partisan,” my mother said. “I made myself cry by thinking about the time I cut my eye.” We all went to church once a month when the visiting Lithuanian priest made his rounds. It cost ten cents to sit in a pew. My brother, sister, and I sat for free. Piety and silence were mandatory.

September through November are cold, December through February are freezing cold, and March into mid-May are still cold in Sudbury. The first snow by and large falls in October, but it can show up as early as September. The season’s last snow comes and goes in April, although May sometimes experiences a late icy shower. There are never any flurries in June, July, or August.

My father knew how to ice skate and taught us on an improvised rink in the front yard. He hosed water out on the lawn on bitter cold days where it started freezing in minutes. When it was frozen hard as rock, we laced up our skates and went skating. Whenever all the kids on the block joined in it got pell-mell fast. My two friends from across the street and I entertained ourselves with our figure 8s.

In the 1950s in Sudbury sulfur dioxide was an opaque, cloud-like formation across the horizon as seen from a distance. There was lead, arsenic, and God knows what else in it. The ground-level pollution wasn’t as bad, more of a gray haze, but was worse on some days than others. When it got worse, my father built an igloo for us to play in.

It snows a hundred and more inches in Sudbury. After the streets and sidewalks are cleared there is plenty of building material. He formed blocks 4 inches high and 6 inches thick. When there were enough blocks to start, he made a circle leaving space for a door. After he stacked them, he used loose snow like cement, packing it in. He put a board across the top of the igloo door and another at the top of the dome for support. Halfway up were small windows and around the top several air holes. As long as there was daylight there were daylong Eskimos in the igloo.

Our furnace in the basement ran on coal. It was delivered once a week by truck, the coal man filling up the bin in the basement down a chute. Every morning my father shoveled coal into it, lit the fire, and stoked the coal. At night either my mother or he banked the furnace, salvaging unburned coal and putting the ashes in bags. They saved some in a container on the front porch for the steps whenever they got iced over.

My mother told us to never go in the basement. She didn’t invent a Babadook lurking down there, but she didn’t want us in the basement messing around. One day I started down the stairs to see what it was my dad did there every morning. I tripped over my own feet and tumbled the rest of the way down. I was back on my feet in a second, ran up the stairs and into the kitchen, and started to bawl, even though I was unhurt.

The furnace heated a boiler that created steam delivered by pipes to radiators throughout the house. We were forbidden to stand on the pipes or scale the radiators. It was the basement all over again. “I didn’t have to worry about Richardas and Rita, they were too small, but Edvardas was always trying to climb up on the radiator in the living room,” my mother said. “I told him he was going to fall off and one Sunday night, while I was cooking, he fell off and broke his collarbone, although he didn’t cry when it happened. He seemed more surprised than anything else.”

For the rest of the next week, my arm in a sling, my mother fed me my favorite food every morning, fried eggs on toast. I was the envy of my sidekicks, the two Canadian boys across the street from whom I had learned most of my English. After finishing their porridge, they ran over to our back porch and watched me through our kitchen window go one-handed at my sunny side up breakfast.

I saluted my pals with my fork before getting back to business.

Photograph by Rimas Bagdonas.

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

Home Movies

High and Low

November 1, 2024 Edward Staskus Leave a comment

By Ed Staskus

When your back is to the wall, you’ve only got one place to fall, which is face down. I didn’t want to do that. I had gotten married the year before and it was time to buckle up. I needed a steady job. I called Doug Clarke and asked if I could see him. I was looking for a piece of the pie.

“Absolutely,” he said.

“What’s a good time?”

“Any time after lunch.”

We made a time for the following Monday. I made sure to be on time. Doug was behind his desk at the back of the office, which was a bullpen style office. A half-eaten sandwich lay at his elbow. He was a few years younger than me and at least a hundred times the capitalist I was. He had his own Gilded Age going. Phones were ringing off the hook. Merchandise were being talked up. Money was being made, by hook or by crook.

I first met Doug when he was in a small building on Linda St. in Rocky River, Ohio. It was going on the late 1980s. He had been set up in business by his father, who was an account manager for Philips Lighting. Doug was selling commercial lighting and had lately started selling tanning bulbs. Philips had developed fluorescent tanning tubes for the European market. They were new on the American market. They were going like hot cakes.

Light Bulb Supply was three of them in the beginning, Doug, the owner operator, his salesman Marty Gallagher, and Chuck Pampush, who ran the warehouse and did the driving. The company truck was a red F150 Econoline and was called the Lightmobile. Doug had an office, but Marty’s desk was in a hallway leading to the warehouse. They had been friends growing up, but weren’t going to stay friends for long. As tanning bulb sales grew by leaps and bounds Marty jumped ship and set up his own distributorship. The split went to court, there were claims and counterclaims of theft of trade secrets, but in the end, they both stayed in operation, personal enemies and business rivals.

Randy Bacon, Chuck’s brother-in-law, helped in the warehouse now and then unloading deliveries and stocking shelves. He had a tattoo inside his mouth under his front lip. It said, “Fuck You.” I gave him a wide berth whenever I saw him. I gave his junkyard dog a wider berth. The pooch was unusually tense and snarled all the time.

By the time I sat down with Doug he wasn’t in Rocky River anymore. He had outgrown his start-up warehouse. He had moved five miles east to Lakewood on the third floor of a hybrid industrial and commercial building, renting space and then more space.

“What can you offer us?” he asked me.

“I can offer you 20-some years. After that it’s up for grabs.”

“Steady Eddie, is that right?”

“Whatever you say,” I said unwittingly, saying something I ended up saying over and over for a long time.

“All right, you’re hired.”

We shook hands. Doug clapped me on the back. It ended up being twenty-two years of the daily grind. In the end I didn’t get a handshake on my way out, although I had not expected one, given the family business I had signed up with. I wasn’t part of the family.

When Doug was still in Rocky River I had teamed up with a friend of mine and set up a small tanning salon across the street from the Cleveland State University campus. We were in a five-story brick building at East 21^st St. and Euclid Ave. The Rascal House Saloon was across the street. It was where concert goers at Peabody’s Down Under went for a middle of the night fest after shows. The Plain Dealer called it “Cleveland’s Best Pizza.” I went there whenever I was famished and down to a couple of bucks.

We were on the lower level. Bill Stech, an architect, and the landlord, was on the top floor. He always wore the same black suit, white shirt, and black tie. He had black hair that looked phony. He always made promises and usually broke his promises. After a while I stopped taking it personally. Whenever he didn’t want to see me, his receptionist said he wasn’t in, even though his car was parked in the back lot in its customary space. Sometimes I could even see him in his office, at his desk, his back turned to me.

My business partner was a full-time fireman in Bay Village, so I did most of the full-time work at the tanning salon. I also drummed up side jobs at other salons, trying to make myself useful, doing repairs, selling, delivering, and installing bulbs. I kept my head above water, but I was treading water. When Doug hired me for part-time sales, I opened a savings account.

Doug had moved to the Lake Erie Screw building in Lakewood. Madison Park was in front of the building and Birdtown was all around us. The neighborhood was not the greatest. Everybody made sure their cars were locked up tight in the parking lot. One day after work, as I walked to my car, I saw a dead bird stuck headfirst in my front grill. I hadn’t heard or felt him hit the car that morning. He was stiff and there were flies buzzing around him. I pulled him out, rolled him up in a newspaper, and took him to the park, where I laid him down in a pile of rotting leaves.

The brick pile we were in was going on a hundred years. It was on 18 acres with plenty of parking. From 1917 to 1924 it had been the Templar Automotive Plant. They built cars, trying to compete with Detroit. Dave Buehler, a Lakewood native, collected cars and had more than a dozen of the Templars. He restored them and kept them stashed in our building on the same floor where they had first been assembled. I sat in one of them one day. It was sizable enough but uncomfortable. The steering wheel was king-size and the mirrors were tiny. It looked like it would transition into a coffin at the first whiff of an accident.

The building became Lake Erie Screw in 1946 when John Wasmer took it over and started manufacturing fasteners. In the 1970s he added large bolts to their line-up and growth accelerated. When most fastener manufacturers moved to China, the Wasmer family kept up the beat of the hometown and their growth continued apace. By the mid-90s the company was doing about a hundred million dollars in annual sales, all of it in cap screws and structural bolts.

In the beginning my job was as thankless as it gets in the world of commerce. I had a cubicle the width of a toilet stall and was expected to make cold calls until the end of time. I got sick of it every day at the beginning of the day. There were few overworked business owners who wanted to talk to an eager beaver trying to sell them something. The other salesmen sat back and waited for calls to come to them. They racked up commissions while I racked up zeros.

It took longer than I wanted, but I finally went full-time, got a real desk, and got to answer in-coming calls. I sat between Betty the typist and Jim Bishop. Betty was a looker who never looked at me, except when she had something obnoxious to say. She was doe-eyed about Doug. Even though Doug had a girlfriend who was going to be his wife soon enough, the gossip was that he and Betty were close.

He had a bedroom through a locked door behind his desk.. There was an immense waterbed and a mini fridge. There were posters of muscle cars and hot girls on the walls. There were piles of dirty clothes and old mail everywhere. He wasn’t especially tidy. Being the boss, he didn’t need to be.

One day when I was on the phone with a customer, Betty broke into her song and dance about what I was doing wrong and what I should be doing right to win more friends and influence people enough to make them buy our goods. She didn’t stop even when I finished the call and was writing up the sale. I finally got fed up and said so.

“Look, shit for brains,” I said loud enough for anybody listening to hear. “You take care of your business at that typewriter over there and I’ll take care of mine over here.” Nobody dropped a pin in case I had more to say. Betty sniffed and went to the bathroom. I went to Doug’s desk and apologized for the outburst. He laughed it off. I never apologized to Betty. She was never going to be Mrs. Doug Clarke, anyway.

We were riding the wave of the tanning boom. We had more sales than we knew what to do with. Doug rented additional space to stock our bulbs and hired more packers. They worked overtime day after day. Trailer loads of bulbs from Cosmedico, Wolff Systems, and Light Sources rolled in every Friday. We sent small orders out by UPS and FedEx, and pallet orders out by LTL. We were busy as bees.

Doug started out as Light Bulb Supply selling run-of-the mill commercial lighting. The tanning bulbs we sold under the name of Ultraviolet Resources were making him rich, but we still sold all kinds of incandescent, fluorescent, and high-pressure bulbs. I got into the swing of it and lent a hand, even though the commissions were less. Jim Bishop was the lead man. He sat on the other side of me. Betty hated him more than she hated me. He never stopped baiting her, no matter what, staring intently at her while twisting a strand of hair.

I couldn’t make him out. He looked like hell, even though John Elias, another salesman one desk down, told me he was trying to “hold on to his youth.” That horse was out of the barn. He lived in the Warehouse District, in the Bradley Building, which was an early pioneer of downtown Cleveland’s revitalized housing. He wore his hair long, down to his shoulders, dressed better than anybody else in the office, and only took calls when he wanted to. He snorted coke on his lunch hour and was always more personable when he got back to the office.

He was never personable to Betty. Coming back from lunch he liked to stop at her desk and hover over her without saying a word and breathing heavily.

“What do you want now?” she asked.

“What if I told you I was gay?” he asked.

“Just go away, please,” she hissed.

Kathy Hayes was Mrs. Doug Clarke in the making. There was no mistake about that. She was Doug’s pit bull sales manager. She brought her sister Maggie into the business, then her brothers Kevin and John. Kathy came from a family of thirteen. More brothers and sisters came and went as the need arose. Kevin, John, and Maggie stayed. Kevin and John became Archie and Jughead in my mind. Maggie became the Wicked Witch of the West. I put her out of my mind.

Kathy was the Queen of Mean. She was a mix of go-getter, unapologetic yuppie greed, and a hair trigger temper. She calmed down after her kids were born, but never lost the mean streak. She was my immediate boss, so I watched my step. She was a sharp gal. I was fake polite to Archie, Jughead, and the Wicked Witch. They were easy enough to do that to, like pretending to water fake plants.

After I cold called myself into Kathy’s good graces, I settled into a routine of Monday through Friday. It wasn’t what I wanted to do but it was what I had to do. The only concession I was able to wrangle was a starting time of 11 AM to be able to work at my part-time job, which was more remunerative but not as steady. My steady job meant I would be getting a predictable paycheck every two weeks, making good on my bills, and paying into a 401k, which were good things. I never worked overtime and never volunteered for anything. They didn’t pay me enough to go an extra inch, much less a mile. The American Dream is only real for those who say so.

Towards the end of the millennium Doug broke ground on a new state-of-the-art warehouse and offices in Brook Park. He spared no expense. It was 45,000 square feet next door to the 230-acre Holy Cross Cemetery. There were dedicated 18-wheeler loading docks and a separate dock for the delivery services. The head honchos had sizable offices with windows. There was a gym and a party center on the second floor. The lunchroom was all stainless steel and a huge flat screen. Christ on a cross was fixed to the wall above the front entrance doors. The cross looked like a cactus. Jesus looked like he needed to scratch an itch.

It rained money like nobody’s business. One day a Middle Eastern man walked in with a paper bag stuffed with more than $50,000 in cash. He was setting up a tanning salon. We were outfitting it with the equipment. I wrote up the sale but didn’t bother counting the loot. I left that to the Wicked Witch, who scowled testily when I poured the legal tender out on her desk.

We moved into our new building, shiny and up to date, at the beginning of the new century. It was the beginning of the end. It took five or six years but Light Sources, whose tanning bulbs were Doug’s meal ticket, decided they wanted a bigger slice of the pie. They offered Doug a choice. He could sell the tanning division to them, they would send somebody from headquarters to run things, or he could decline their offer, in which case they would open their own operation somewhere else, bypassing him entirely . Doug went with the flow. Everything and everybody stayed put.

It didn’t do any good. Inside a few years Light Sources moved themselves to Westlake. Archie, Jughead, and the Wicked Witch jumped ship and went with them and Doug was left holding the bag. He lost a boatload of money in the stock market downturn of 2007. As the second decade of the century unfolded, he had to shed most of his remaining staff, including me, sell his deluxe building, find an older, smaller building, then find something even smaller, until he finally ended up in a strip of mom-and-pop shops in Avon selling odds and ends. His kids didn’t re-enroll at their private schools. He lost his McMansion in North Ridgeville. His rich friends became his former friends.

In life Doug bore a resemblance to the late-night TV talk-show host Johnny Carson. He had a warm smile and went out of his way to make most people feel good, even though he was as oriented to the bottom line as any manhunter. He was elected president of the Brook Park Chamber of Commerce, where everybody was a manhunter. He spent money on himself and his family like he had money to burn. The money ran out slowly but surely. By the time he died there wasn’t much left to burn.

Doug died when he was struck by a semi-truck trailer on Interstate 90 near his mom-and-pop. It was 2018 in the middle of a sunny day at the beginning of summer. He was taken to University Hospital in Avon where he was pronounced dead. He had been standing outside of his car on the shoulder for a few minutes before he walked onto the marked lanes of I-90, according to the Ohio State Highway Patrol. They couldn’t explain why he had stepped into oncoming traffic.

It happened so fast the truck driver didn’t have a chance to touch his brakes. “I feel bad for the victim,” Dan Darko of nearby Elyria said. “It sucks to feel pushed to that point. But I feel worse for the driver. One person’s choice will affect him for the rest of his life to the point where he may never be able to do his chosen profession again.”

It was hard to believe it was an accident, but it was harder to believe Doug had deliberately stepped onto the highway. He was a Roman Catholic, taught Sunday School at his church, and was a member of Religious Readiness. According to Rome, death by suicide is a grave matter. The church holds that one’s life is the property of God and to destroy that life is to wrongly assert dominion over God’s creation. I never knew how sincere Doug was about his faith. I knew he sincerely valued prosperity. I don’t know if he had lost his faith. I knew he had lost his prosperity.

The funeral was at St Clarence in North Olmsted. He left a wife and four kids behind him. All his in-laws who had bailed on him when Light Sources swallowed the golden goose were there. I didn’t go to the service. I had never been close to Doug or Kathy, anyway, keeping my distance. His in-laws liked to talk loud about what they were contemptuous of. The less I saw of them the better.

If Doug stepped in front of the semi-truck trailer on I-90 on purpose, I wondered if he did it for his kids. He probably had a locked and loaded life insurance policy. There might have been a suicide clause limiting the payment of benefits. Maybe he thought he could kill two birds with one stone if it looked like an accident. He could stay in the good graces of the church and still provide for the future of his family.

Nobody never does not have a good reason for ending it all, especially if they believe hope is gone and not coming back. My memory of Doug is dulled by how he died. The chief thing I now remember about him is how his determined drive for riches and status in this life came to an end on a stretch of godforsaken concrete.

“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

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

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