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.
Accidental Reality

Ring of Fire

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By Ed Staskus

   Many bands came to Cleveland, Ohio in the 1980s, bands like Queen, Guns N’ Roses, and Journey. I didn’t see or hear any of them. Besides, they just played the same song over and over again. I couldn’t afford arena rock, even if I wanted to squeeze myself into their sold-our shows. What did they do with all their money? Freddie Mercury didn’t spend much of it on his five-and-dime white tank tops.

   I did see and hear Wall of Voodoo when they played the Agora Ballroom, shortly before the band broke up. They were the second-to-last group I saw at the downtown music hall before it burnt down. After the fire the Agora moved thirty blocks uptown into what had been the Metropolitan Theatre, built in 1919. It had been home to the Cleveland Opera until 1929. Twenty two years later, when the prima donnas were long gone and the building was housing the WHK radio station, disc jockey Allen Freed coined the phrase “rock-and-roll” on the air there.

   The Agora was on E. 24th St. across the street from Cleveland State University. It had been there since 1968. It was the brainchild of local entrepreneur Henry LoConti Sr. “Monday Night Out at the Agora” showcased new bands like ZZ Top, Meat Loaf, and Talking Heads. “Live From the Agora” was broadcast on the radio. There were many affiliated stations. Bruce Springsteen’s show at the Agora in 1978 was heard by more than three million listeners. On Sunday nights it was reserved for home-grown bands like the Raspberries and the James Gang. 

   Iggy and the Stooges hit the music hall one night during a thunderstorm. “Iggy came out in a jock strap,” Henry LoConti Sr. said. “He had a razor and cut himself on stage, all kinds of crazy things. A girl and her boyfriend were in the front row. Iggy jumped off the stage on her face. Her boyfriend and his friends started beating on him. Our guys finally got him out of it, dragged him back, and he finished the show like nothing had happened.” The Stooges, however, spent the rest of the night slipping and sliding on Iggy’s blood on the boards.

   Wall of Voodoo was a Los Angeles band fronted by Stan Ridgway, who had been running a film score business before getting into the emerging punk scene in the 1970s. He picked up a bass player and a keyboardist from the Skulls and a drummer from Black Randy and the Metrosquad. They started playing at the Masque, a club underneath the Pussycat Theatre in Hollywood. They mixed electronica with country and western with Ennio Morricone movie music. There were junkyard riffs and percussion effects galore. 

   It didn’t always go over well. “This electronic music quintet makes self-proclaimed nightmare music,” John Swenson wrote in The New Rolling Stone Record Guide. “I pass on this stuff,” he declared in black and white, not writing another word.

   When asked by Dick Clark on American Bandstand to describe their music, Stan Ridgway said, “I’m just as confused as anyone else as to what to call it.” The band released an EP in 1979 featuring a synthesizer driven cover of “Ring of Fire.” It wasn’t what the songwriter June Carter had ever intended. It had a spaghetti western twang to it. It was strange and surreal. Their album “Call of the West” was released in 1982. The catchy single “Mexican Radio” from the album became a big hit. It was about hot desert winds and border blaster radio stations.

   By the end of the 1970s Henry LoConti Sr. had built twelve more Agora music clubs around the country, turning himself into a corporation. He went buttoned down in a no button business. He was awarded Billboard’s Steve Wolfe Award in 1979, presented to the person who had contributed the most to music entertainment the previous year. Billboard’s “Best Club in the Country” award was awarded to him in 1980. 

   For all that, the original Agora in Cleveland was always a rough and tumble place, awards or no awards. The audience was young. The music was loud. The drinks flowed all night long. There were bouncers. They kept their eyes and ears off the stage and more on the disturbances on the floor that erupted time and again.

   The word “bouncer” comes from an 1875 book by Horatio Alger. A young man has a hearty breakfast, claims he has no money to pay for it, whereupon his waiter is ordered to “bounce” him. “A well-directed kick landed him across the sidewalk into the street.” But before there was the word, there were the Romans. In Rome a bouncer was known as an ostiarius. His job was to remove unwanted people from places they were trying to get into. In the Old Testament bouncers protected temples from “illegal entry into sacred places.” In the United States, starting in the mid-19th century, saloons and whorehouses hired them to remove drunk as a skunk, noisome, and violent patrons from the premises.

   The Agora didn’t necessarily call their security staff bouncers, but that is what they were. They checked entrants for underage drinking. They refused entry to those already the worse for wear. Their duty was to maintain some semblance of order. Their No. 1 task was to deal with hot-headed behavior.

   Wall of Voodoo opened their show with “Me and My Dad” followed by “Red Light” followed by “Call of the West.” Everybody’s ears perked up. “Got a green look about ya, and that’s a gringo for starts, sometimes the only thing a western savage understands are whiskey, rifles, and an unarmed man.” It was easy enough to follow the bouncing ball because Stan Ridgway had a clear as a bell voice. He sounded like a revved-up Hank Williams. The band was in fine fettle but didn’t drown him out.

   They finished their first set with “Lost Weekend.” The song was Lou Reed-inflected, about a couple driving home after a losing streak in Las Vegas. “She was in the backseat while he was at the wheel, all the money from the store they’d gambled away. He said the best laid plans often go astray. She lit a cigarette, she didn’t make a sound. I know if we’d had just one more chance, he said. I know, we’d finally hit the big one at last, she said.” It was Wall of Voodoo’s bad dream of the American Dream.

   The club was a haze of never ending cigarette smoke. The ceiling was barely visible. Music lovers elbowed their way to the front of the bar the minute intermission began. I was chronically short of cash and rarely drank at bars. I drifted outside for whatever fresh air there was. Cleveland was a smokestack city and the Agora was just two miles from the smokestacks. Beggars can’t be choosers.

   The front doors were behind a makeshift garage door of corrugated metal. When the sidewalks finally rolled themselves up after a show the corrugated metal door came down. Even though the club was next door to Cleveland State University, it wasn’t in the best neighborhood. When the sun went down it was more along the lines of a bad neighborhood. I stood to the side minding my own business until saying hello to the bouncer by the door, with the idea that it is never a bad idea to get on the good side of bouncers.

   He was younger and taller than me, about twenty pounds heavier, and appeared to be between a WWE wrestler and a bull fighter. He was wearing dark pants and a short-sleeved shirt. He looked like he did bicep curls for a living. He didn’t talk much until I asked him how he had gotten into the bouncer business.

   “My great grandfather was a bouncer before he got into the New York City ganglands,” he said. “His name was Monk Eastman. I’m named after him.”

   “Your great grandfather?” I was dubious. The young usually can’t remember that far back. Their memories go in one direction, which is forward, not backward.

   “Yeah, he was a bouncer from 1894 to 1899, after which he got into the rackets. Back then there were saloons from one end of New York City to the other. He was seventeen years old when he got his first job. The saloon he went to, the manager told him he was too young, and besides, he already had two good men. My great grandfather asked if he could meet them. When they met, he quickly took care of both of  them and got the job on the spot. He worked alone, although he always carried a truncheon.”

   “You mean like a club?”

   “Just like a club. It had notches carved into it for every man he made mincemeat of. Family legend has it, one slow night before he retired from bouncing, he threw his eyes on the bald spot of a man drinking at the bar. He couldn’t take his eyes off the bald spot. He walked up behind the man and clubbed him. ‘I had forty nine nicks in me stick and I wanted to make it an even fifty’ is how he explained it.”

   “You said he got into the rackets after that?”

   “Feet first, free-lancing in the beginning. He charged $15.00 for ‘ear chawed off’ and $19.00 for ‘leg broke.’ It was $100.00 for doing what he called ‘the big job.’ He put together his own gang soon enough. They got into it with another gang. One night he crossed a boundary line by mistake and got jumped. He carried a blackjack and was holding his own until he was shot twice in the stomach. He plugged the holes in his belly with his fingers and found a doctor. Two years later the other gang and my great grandfather’s gang went at it for real in Manhattan under the tracks of the 3rd Avenue Elevated line. It went on all night, fifty or sixty men firing at each other with Colts from behind cast iron arches. The police tried to stop the fighting but they had to retreat. Five men died and dozens were wounded.”

   “It sounds like Iggy Pop,” I said.

   “Iggy Pop has got a screw loose,” he said. “He would have shot himself in the foot.”

   “What happened when the shoot-out was over?”

   “A boxing match happened.”

   “They put their guns down and put up their fists?”

   “My great grandfather and the other man decided to settle matters with a boxing match. The other man was good with his hands but mine had arms long as an ape. In the end they fought for two and half hours to a draw. A month later they were shooting it out again. It was too much for the city fathers. Both of them were finally arrested, convicted of something, and both of them got eleven years in Sing Sing. When my great grandfather got out of prison his gang was gone, up in smoke. He volunteered for the army and was sent to Europe towards the end of World War One. My father told me he never took a prisoner if he could help it. He came home with a medal and told everybody there were plenty of saloons in New York City tougher than what everybody called the Great War.”

   “What did he do after he got home?”

   “Not too much, to be honest. He was found dead behind a dance hall in Brooklyn on New Year’s Eve in 1920. Somebody emptied a revolver into him. There were six bullet holes in him.”

   “That’s too bad,” I said.

   “Yeah, although he probably deserved it,” the bouncer said.

   When I heard the band start their second set I took leave of the bouncer and went back into the Agora. On the cover of the album  “Call of the West” there is a crooked door, slightly ajar, inviting everybody into Wall of Voodoo’s world. A standing room only crowd had squeezed into the Agora. It looked like all of them were still there.

   Wall of Voodoo were pioneers of a kind. Their sound was plenty original. For all that, they were never going to be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

   When Huey Lewis and the News played the Agora in 1981 they played to a sold-out crowd. “We always heard that the heart of rock and roll was Cleveland, and we’d say ‘Wow, we’re from San Francisco. We had the Grateful Dead! We had Jefferson Airplane! What’s Cleveland got?’’’ The enthusiastic audience inspired Huey Lewis to write “The Heart of Rock & Roll.” He meant Cleveland was the heart of it. Fourteen years later the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame opened in Cleveland, not New York City or someplace in California, or anywhere else. 

   Wall of Voodoo finished their second set with “Mexican Radio” and came back to do an extended version of “Ring of Fire” for their encore. “I fell into a burning ring of fire, I went down, down, down, and the flames went higher, and it burns, burn, burns, the ring of fire.” When they were done the band looked wiped out. They got a big hand and most of the audience shuffled out. Some stayed to reminisce over a last drink.

   I went home to crack open Nathaniel West’s “The Day of the Locust.” I had read it in an English class at Cleveland State University and there was something about the music I heard that night that reminded me of the book. Wall of Voodoo’s songs seemed to be about those with little in the way of hope and getting by on illusions, just like the book. Their songs were not all about hard luck and dark times, but enough of them were for me to get a handle on what thread was being woven. The thread was about one small-time lost in time tragedy after another.

   For all that, I wasn’t about to cue up the arena rockers, or the likes of Madonna or Boy George, now or ever. Better the real deal than deals from the bottom of the deck. Better rough and tumble than a bag of old baloney.

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. 

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

A Mid-Century Crime Thriller

“A once upon a crime whodunit.” Barron Cannon, Adventure Books

“Captures the vibe of 1950s NYC.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction

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

Late summer and early autumn. New York City. A Hell’s Kitchen private eye. The 1956 World Series. President Eisenhower at the opening game. A killer in the Brooklyn Dodger dugout.

Accidental Reality

Rolling With the Punches

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By Ed Staskus

   I was surprised and dismayed the day my father told me that, other than Ausra, the two-week sun and sand Lithuanian camp in Wasaga Beach, and our one-week boy scout camp, I would be working at the newspaper Dirva the rest of the summer. I shouldn’t have been surprised, since my father believed in the work ethic and worked like a dog himself, but I was. He gave me a grave stern annoyed look when I blurted out it would screw up my time off from school. 

   He and I weren’t on the same page, so I kept my dismay to myself.

   It wouldn’t have helped, anyway. I knew once he told me, I would be working at Dirva from Memorial Day to Labor Day. Thank God it was only part-time. I would be home by three o’clock and didn’t have to work on Fridays. I was going to be getting three-day weekends before I even knew what three-day weekends were.

   Before the newspaper Dirva, which means field, was Dirva, it was Santaika, which means peace. Kazys Karpius was the editor, and stayed on the job for thirty years, from the end of World War One through the Great Depression to the end of World War Two, getting the weekly editions out without fail. The paper was anti-communist, pro-democracy, and true-blue the homeland.

   Kazys Karpius wrote poems, plays, and histories about Lithuania, especially about beating off the Vikings and Teutonic Knights back in the day. The Teutonic Knights were always tramping into the Baltics for plunder and conversion, not their own conversion, but that of the natives they regarded as pagans. The Lithuanians didn’t see eye to eye with the Germans about it, insisting it was none of their business. They fought with longswords, battles axes, crossbows, maces, picks and war hammers, knives, clubs, slings, and hand-to-hand.

   The first day I slouched into work was a brisk early summer morning. I was down on Dirva but resigned to my new job. I rode the CTS bus from St. Clair to East 105th Street over Liberty Boulevard down Superior Avenue. It was the same bus and same route I took going to school, to St. George’s, on East 67th and Superior.

   Lithuanian immigrants came to Cleveland, Ohio, on the south shore of Lake Erie, in two waves, the first one in the late 19th century. They were cheap labor for emerging industries. They needed their own newspaper and church. At the turn of the century Father Joe Jankus threw up a small wooden church near downtown. The next pastor bought the land St. George’s was going to stand on and after it was built Father Vincent Vilkutaitis ran the parish for forty years. His last year was my first year of five years there.

   The church was on the top floor of the 2½ story brick building, the grade school on the middle floor, and the community hall on the ground floor, which was partially below ground.  Since it was the Atomic Age, and the Cold War was in full swing, the hall doubled as a Nuclear Fallout Shelter. Every few months we had a Civil Defense drill and had to file out of our classes and down to the hall, where we shuffled around until the drill was over.

   If we had somehow survived the blast, even though we all brought our own sandwiches in Flintstones and Dudley Do-right and Jetson lunch boxes, we would have all slowly starved to death trying to live on crumbs and apple cores. Dudley wouldn’t have helped, snug in his bunker under the White House.

   Jonas Ciuberkis was our neighbor two houses down from where we lived at the corner of Bartfield and Coronado, in a Polish double my mom and dad had bought with my dad’s sister and her family, all of us getting started in the United States. He was the editor of Dirva, in a small office at the front. A quiet man, balding, careful in manner, he was married to a woman fifteen-some years his junior, a woman who had given him three children, and who was fleshy vivacious gregarious.

   Regina Ciuberkiene had an opinion about everything and could talk your ear off. It didn’t matter that we were just kids. We avoided her. My mother never called her Regina. She called her Ciuberkiene, even to her face. Many of his friends called Jonas Janis, which is Latvian for Jonas. He had studied law in Lithuania and worked in Latvia before the war. Their two daughters were either too old or too young, but their son, Arunas, was just right, and we played together.

   Dirva was in a one-story brick building on Superior, next to the haunted house that was next to St. George’s. The Lithuanian Hall Society was next door. It was where all the civic and cultural business was done. It was also where there were dances and heavy drinking. Jonas Ciuberkis wasn’t sure what to do with me, so the first few days I didn’t do anything. After that I started cleaning up the mess, starting with the bathroom. After that I helped with the press and folding and mailing.

   My job was to do this do that, whatever I was told to do.

   The printing press looked like it belonged in a museum. It worked, sort of, but it was my archenemy, always threatening my mitts. It was a hand-fed flat-bed cylinder press. There was metal type for headings and an intertype machine for news and features. When the paper was ready for print, I got the machine rolling, crossing my fingers, and hoping for the best. As the copies came off the belt, I changed hats, becoming the press-boy who checked for defects. If and when the press got everything done, I became the mail-boy, wrapping the papers in bundles. Then I became the push-boy, carting them to beside the back door for pick-up.

   I was always amazed that the week’s news always fit exactly into that week’s edition.

   By World War One there were almost ten thousand Lithuanians in Cleveland. St. George’s was their church. Dirva was their newspaper. It was put out by the Ohio Lithuanian Publishing Company, which was run by Apdonas Bartusevicius. In 1925 Kazys Karpius gained a controlling interest.

   He was involved in Lithuanian projects all his life, including the Unification of Lithuanians in America and the Lithuanian National League of America. He helped found the American Lithuanian Cultural Center. After World War Two boatloads of displaced Lithuanians made it to Cleveland. Dirva published local, national ,and international news, as well as keeping everybody informed about what was going on back in the land. We sent the paper to Detroit and Pittsburgh and other places wherever there was a church or a bendruomene.

   Our editor went out most days for lunch and sometimes came back smelling like whiskey. One day he was walking out the door, I was sitting on a crate doing nothing, when he waved at me and said, “Ateik.” I must have been daydreaming, because he had to say it again before I realized he wanted me to go with him.

   He usually wore a white shirt and brown pleated pants. His thin hair was gray brownish. He drove a brown car. The interior was tan, clean, and anonymous. No one would ever have suspected he had a wife and three kids. He turned right on Norwood Road, six blocks later turned right on St. Clair, past the Slovenian National Home, to the Maple Lanes Bowling Alley and Tavern. It took five minutes. He parked on the street, and we went in.

   Nothing was going on in the bowling alley, but he wasn’t going to the bowling alley, anyway. He walked into the bar, checking to see that I was trailing him, and took a stool at the bar.

   “Atsisesk,” he said, adding, “Don’t tell your mother.”

   I sat down next to him. The bartender stepped up. He was wearing a bow tie and looked like as big as a new mattress wearing a bow tie. I couldn’t see around him.

   Jonas Ciuberkis ordered a shot and a water back and asked me what I wanted. I wanted an ice-cold Coca-Cola. It was in the 90s and humid. There was a big glass jar of pickled eggs at his elbow. He took one out for himself and nodded at the jar, looking at me. I said aciu, but no thanks.

   Pickled eggs are eggs hard boiled, the shell removed, and submerged in a solution of vinegar, salt, spices, and seasonings. The eggs are left in the brine anywhere from one day to several months. They get rubbery the longer they are in the pickling solution.

   “They’re Pennsylvania Dutch,” my boss said. “Try a bite.”

   Pennsylvania Dutch style means whole beets, onions, vinegar, sugar, salt, cloves and a cinnamon stick are used as the brine. The eggs look pink purple from the beets and have a sweet and sour taste.

   I took a bite, gingerly. It wasn’t bad. It was actually good, far better than the koseliena, chopped meat in cold aspic, like headcheese, my mother was always trying to get us to eat. Some food from the old country should have been left in the old country, dead and buried.

   When the bartender moved to the side, I saw the painting. It was on the wall above the paneling and top shelf of liquor bottles. It was of a half-naked woman reclining on her side on a chaise, her head up, looking down on the drinkers, her long golden hair hanging loose. Her eyes were wide set and her lips pouty luscious red.

   It was Lili St. Cyr, a burlesque dancer forty-some years ago. She was a pioneer in the striptease trade, known for her cutting-edge performances. One of her most famous tricks was ‘the Flying G.’ While she was doing her burlesque striptease, the lights slowly going down, just at the instant when everything went completely dark, a man in the wings with a fishing pole would snag her G-string and pull it off. Even if you didn’t blink it looked like it had disappeared just like that.

   A man who had seen her perform many times painted the mural in 1954. Maple Lanes paid him off in beer. Above the burlesque queen’s legs in the painting was an English proverb, “A woman is an angel at ten, a saint at fifteen, a devil at forty, and a witch at fourscore.”

   Jonas Ciuberkis flicked his eyes at the painting ten twenty times, while I narrowed my St. George altar boy eyes. Some gals are like the highway from Akron to Cleveland, no curves. She wasn’t one of those gals. I was an altar boy at St. George’s on the side. The boss had another shot, this time with a beer chaser. My mother always told us an apple a day, not a bottle of pop, kept the doctor away, so, I turned down more Coca-Cola.

   He talked about the “Great Books,” one of his favorite subjects, so I didn’t tell him about my reading habits, and about Lithuania, his other favorite subject, its history, the commies, and how to restore its freedom. I didn’t tell him it was going in one ear and out the other. He talked in a gloomy milk and water way. It was hard to pay attention, so I gave up, and set my sights back on Lili St. Cyr.

   She started looking familiar. I finally realized, if she were wearing clothes, she looked just like Regina Ciuberkiene, wide set eyes and full mouth, buxom, calves of salami.  She wasn’t a spitting image but as close as spit got.

   I noticed the TV on the wall in a corner was re-run broadcasting a boxing match. The two men were jabbing hooking punching but not landing much of anything. When one threw a punch the other one rolled with it.

   My boss had to drag me away and never invited me to Maple Lanes again. Mondays through Thursdays the summer crawled by, while Fridays through Sundays flew by. I messed around with my friends, rode my bike, and played a boatload of pick-up sandlot baseball.

   By the time my employment was coming to an end, Labor Day fast approaching, I had come to an accommodation with my job. The printing press and I were on speaking terms. I was no longer down on Dirva. I almost enjoyed it. I asked about my paychecks. I hadn’t seen a single one of them.

   “I gave them to your father every two weeks,” Jonas Ciuberkis said.

   “Oh,” I said.

   I didn’t ask my father about the paychecks. My mother and he were fanatical savers, putting every spare penny in the bank. I knew what he was going to be doing with the money, which was clothes and tuition for school.

   By the next year we had moved past Five Points to the Lithuanian neighborhood on the farther east side. Everybody was moving there because, with urban renewal in full swing, black people were slowly steadily shifting east, moving into our neighborhood. “We like them less than the Americans,” my mother told me. “They’re lazy.” If you weren’t a workaholic my parents thought you were lazy.

   The first Lithuanians in Cleveland lived near downtown, but fifty years later were relocating to the Superior-St. Clair area around St. George’s. The new community emerged in the Collinwood-Nottingham neighborhood, near the church of Our Lady of Perpetual Help on Neff Road off East 185th Street. Most Lithuanians are Roman Catholic, although some are Jews, and a few are Lutherans. A small group of Cleveland’s Lithuanians broke off to live among working-class Poles on the south side, even though there is no love lost between Poles and Lithuanians.

   I enrolled in St. Joseph’s High School where the main road, a couple of miles of every kind of shop and store, intersected Lakeshore Boulevard. It was an all-boy’s school. It was still summer, the next summer, but fall was coming up. I looked at Dirva now and then, but when classes started all I read were my schoolbooks and Doc Savage adventure books from the library. I read them on weekends. There were twenty-four of them in all. I read them all. My favorite was “The Secret of Satan’s Spine.”

   Jonas Ciuberkis was fired from his job and Vytautas Gedgaudas took over. I didn’t know him and nobody I knew ever told me anything about him. He expanded the publication schedule to three times a week, but it went back to its original weekly frequency soon enough. Working that much must have driven the printing press crazy, and driven whoever was operating it crazy, too.

   Maple Lanes Bowling Alley and Tavern was sold that same summer of 1964. Ann Abranovich and Josephine Reeves, sisters and working mothers, bought it so they could make more money and spend more time with their sprouting growing families. Josephine lived a few blocks from the bowling alley and walked to work. Ann moved her family into the apartment upstairs. The noise downstairs was money in the bank.

   When I heard the St. Joseph’s bowling team was going there for a tournament, I told them I knew all about the bowling alley and they let me tag along. Everybody asked me about the painting, which the new owners hadn’t messed with. I told them I knew everything about it.  I didn’t know bowling from polo, although I knew you rolled the ball trying to knock all the pins down, so I sat in the back and watched. The St. Joe’s and Padua and Ignatius teams rolled the worst scores of their lives.

   The kingpin kids from upstairs were the pinsetters. You had to be careful not to roll while they were still setting up. They screamed and sent pins flying at you if you did. The alleys weren’t even and smooth. They were wood, not laminate, old wood, and there were warps bumps gouges divots waves from one end to the other. It was hard if not impossible to tell what your ball was going to do. The talk was that no one had ever rolled a three hundred score perfect game at Maple Lanes, and that no one ever would, unless they made a deal with the devil.

   That was unlikely to happen, because everybody in that old neighborhood neck of the woods went to church on Sundays. There weren’t as many churches as bars, but it was close enough. There would have been talk, the news would have spread like wildfire, and there would have been hell to pay if you did roll a perfect game.

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. 

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

A Mid-Century Crime Thriller

“A once upon a crime whodunit.” Barron Cannon, Adventure Books

“Captures the vibe of 1950s NYC.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction

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

Late summer and early autumn. New York City. A Hell’s Kitchen private eye. The 1956 World Series. President Eisenhower at the opening game. A killer in the Brooklyn Dodger dugout.

Accidental Reality

Eye on the Prize

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By Ed Staskus

   I was planting Japanese yews in our backyard when our next door neighbor KJ came out his side door with a fistful of Husky trash bags. It was late April and storms were predicted for the next couple of days. The weather forecast suited my purposes. Every new yew got a handful of slow release fertilizer and a promise of plentiful rain. KJ swung the bags up and into the trash bin. I hadn’t seen him since December. He told me he had been in Los Angeles all winter, pitching a movie idea.

   “What’s the idea?” I asked.

   “One-Eyed Charley is the idea,” KJ said.

   “Who is One-Eyed Charley?” 

   “Charley was a woman in the 19th century who pretended to be a man so she could drive stagecoaches.”

   My ears pricked up. My wife and I had just watched a restored version of John Ford’s 1939 movie “Stagecoach” on the Criterion Channel. John Wayne was the Ringo Kid. He talked low, talked slow, and didn’t say too much. A roly-poly man called Buck handled the reins and whip on the way from the Arizona Territory to Lordsburg, New Mexico. He sounded like a teenage girl whenever he spoke. Curly Wilcox rode shotgun. He sounded like a he-man. The only people who messed with him were the local savages, who swore by cheap whiskey and unarmed men. By the time they found out Curly was armed to the teeth it was too late for a last shot of rotgut.

   When I first met KJ it was the late 20-teens and he had just moved in. We talked for a few minutes, getting acquainted. He was easy to talk to. He was also girlish looking. When I mentioned him to my wife I told her a young woman who was a teacher with a Ph.D. was our new neighbor. The last person who rented the second floor of the two-family house next to us on the west end of Lakewood had not been a good neighbor. The only Ph.D. he had was in headbanging with an undergraduate degree in weed. KJ looked like a big improvement.

   “She specializes in gender studies at Oberlin College,” I told my wife.

   “She drives all that way every day?”

   “I thought it was far, too, but KJ says it only takes her about a half-hour.”

   KJ Cerankowski teaches Comparative American Studies and is a writer with interests in asexuality, queer theory, and transgender issues. He has authored numerous articles, including the 2021 Symonds Prize winning essay “The ‘End’ of Orgasm: The Erotics of Durational Pleasures.” His poetry and prose have been published in Pleiades and DIAGRAM. He is the co-editor of “Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives” and the author of the recently published book “Suture: Trauma and Trans Becoming.”

   “I read and tell in order to be upset, in order to live,” KJ says. “I gather the fragments that will never fit together to make a whole. I want the trauma to be poetry, but I cannot find the right timing, the right words, the right image. I ask how this constellation of events makes me desire or not desire, makes me desirable or undesirable, makes me like a man or a man.”    

    The year after I met our neighbor was when I began to realize she was a gal on her way to becoming a guy. She told me it was a long process, but she was committed to it. For people transitioning from female to male, the process includes hormonal therapy and surgery. Gender-affirming surgery includes chest surgery, such as a mastectomy, and bottom surgery, such as a hysterectomy. I knew there was loads of antagonism in the land about transgender anything, but it didn’t make any difference to me. She looked like she minded her p’s and q’s and didn’t run red lights, which was more than enough for me.

   When somebody runs a red light in front of me and I have to stomp hard on my brakes, I don’t think about what gender they are. I don’t wonder or generalize about their race or income or social status. The first thing that pops into my mind is, “What an asshole!” After that I take a deep breath and go my way.

   “You went to Hollywood to beat the drum for making a motion picture?” I asked KJ again, even though I knew there is no real place called Hollywood where movies are made. Hollywood is a state of mind, a global business, not a place.

   “Yes, a friend of mine and I have an idea for a movie about One-Eyed Charley,” KJ said. “We had a meeting with Sony. They liked our idea and were encouraging but said it wasn’t right for them. ‘Don’t give up,’ they said. They sent us to their TV division where they thought it might work better. We are teaching ourselves how to write a screenplay.”

   The Cambridge Dictionary last year revised their definition of “man” and “woman” to include people who do not identify with the sex they were at birth. “Man” now includes the definition “an adult who lives and identifies as a male though they may have been said to have a different sex at birth.” The updated definition of “woman” is “an adult who lives and identifies as female though they may have been said to have a different sex at birth.” It made sense to me since sex and gender identity don’t always adhere to one another.

   Talking heads far and wide went ballistic. Daily Caller writer Mary Rooke said, “Fucking traitors to the truth. Cambridge Dictionary is only the latest. If we don’t stop them from erasing women our civilization is ngmi.” I knew what ‘fucking traitors’ meant. I had no idea what ‘ngmi’ meant. Mary Rooke didn’t bother defining it since she was too busy cursing up a storm.

   “Remember, if you control the language, you control the population,” Steven Crowder, a popular conservative TV pundit, posted on Twitter. Since many former employees claim he runs an “abusive” company, where he often spits and screams at the hired hands, including his own father, makes underlings wash his dirty clothes, according to the laundromat, and exposes his genitals, according to the New York Post, I ignored his tweet.

   “Transgenderism is the most dangerous extremist movement in the United States,” Tucker Carlson said on FOX News. Since he has a laundry list of most dangerous extremist movements, I ignored what he said, too. I would never get any sleep if I paid attention to the never-ending warnings of his kind. The end of the world is always near on FOX News.

   Charlotte Parkhurst was born in New Hampshire in 1812. She was orphaned early in life and delivered to an orphanage. She soon enough dressed up like a boy and ran away. She ended up near Boston cleaning stables. A livery owner took her in, raising her as his own, and trained her to handle horses and drive coaches. When the Gold Rush started happening in 1848 she went west to find her fortune. Instead, no sooner did she get there but a horse spooked by a rattlesnake kicked her in the face. She lost her sight in one eye but didn’t lose sight of the prize. She realized she could do better as a skilled stage driver than panning for gold in some God-forsaken stream bed in northern California. She put on a black eyepatch and rode both whip and shotgun for the California Stage Company. She got so good with her whip that she could slice open the end of an envelope from twenty feet away.  She could cut a cigar out of a man’s mouth without drawing blood.

   She became One-Eyed Charley. Some called her Cockeyed Charley, but only behind her back. She became a ‘Jehus,’ one of the best and fastest coach drivers in California. Jehu was a Biblical king who in the second Book of Kings is described as a man who “driveth furiously.” She carried goods and passengers up and down the state for nearly twenty years, mainly on the passages between Monterey and San Francisco, and Sacramento to Grass Valley.

   She was short and stout and a hard-living son-of-a-gun, a loner who chewed tobacco and drank like a fish. She could curse like the devil. Charley had more than her fair share of manpower and could handle all takers in a fight. She slept by herself in station relay stables, curling up with her horses. She kept her whip close beside her. It was a five-foot hickory shaft with buckskin lashes 12 feet long. She kept the lashes well-oiled so they stayed as limber as a snake in the sun.

   One-Eyed Charley dealt with would-be thieves whenever she had to. She was hauling gold bullion for Wells Fargo when she shot and killed Sugarfoot, an infamous road agent, near Stockton after he tried to hold her up. Wells Fargo rewarded her with a solid gold watch and chain. “Indians and grizzly bears were a major menace,” the New York Times wrote in 1969. “The state lines of California in the post-Gold Rush period were certainly no place for a lady, and nobody ever accused One-Eyed Charley of being a lady.” Even though the introduction of thorough braces to the underside of coaches created a swinging motion, making traveling easier and more comfortable, stagecoach work was hard work. Anything might happen trying to control a six-horse team over mountain passes.

   “How in the world can you see your way through this dust?” a passenger asked her one bone-dry summer day.

   “I’ve traveled over these mountains so often I can tell where the road is by the sound of the wheels,” she explained. “When they rattle, I’m on hard ground. When they don’t rattle, I gen’r’lly look over the side to see where I’m agoing.”

   Talking to KJ over the backyard fence I noticed he was sounding more like a man than I had noticed before. He was looking more like a man, too. His hair was cut short. He wore a form-fitting t-shirt that only betrayed a flat stomach. He looked more handsome than womanly.

   “Only a rare breed of man could be depended upon to ignore the gold fever of the 1850s and hold down a steady job of grueling travel over narrow one-way dirt roads that swerved around mountain curves, plummeting into deep canyons and often forded swollen, icy streams,” wrote historian Ed Sams in his 2014 book “The Real Mountain Charley.” On one trip over Carson Pass her horses suddenly veered off the road and the rare breed of woman was jolted off the box. She landed between the wheelers, the two horses at the rear of the team. She hung onto the reins as she was dragged on her stomach in the dirt and gravel. She somehow managed to regain control and got the team back on the road, saving the stagecoach and its passengers. She spent the night soaking and disinfecting her wounds in a tub of carbolic acid.

   Brother Whips were the road warriors of their day. “I think I should be compelled to nominate the stage-drivers, as being on the whole the most lofty, arrogant, reserved and superior class of being on the coast, that class that has inspired me with the most terror and reverence.” Henry Bellows, president of the United States Sanitary Commission, said during a trip to California.

   One-Eyed Charley wore gauntlet gloves to hide her womanish hands and a wide-awake hat to keep the sun off her face. She wore a loose linen duster to conceal her figure and fend off rain. She carried a bugle to announce stage arrivals. She could be testy, for good reason. She blew a  horn but didn’t blow her own horn. Gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender were all of them illegal at the time. “It was a crime,” Mark Jarrett, a textbook publisher, spelled out in plain English. “People didn’t go around professing what their real identities were. They hid them.”

   After transcontinental tracks got to the west coast, railroads branched out and muscled out stagecoach businesses. One-Eyed Charley put her driving days behind her, opening a saloon, among other ventures. She retired to a ranch near Soquel in the early 1870s, raising chickens. She voted in 1868 even though women didn’t win the right to vote until 1920. When her one good eye perused the ballot and she decided on Ulysses S. Grant, she became the first woman to vote in a federal election in the United States. She would have used her whip on any man who tried to keep her from the polls. Stepping over his prone body she doubtless would have unleashed a stream of tobacco juice on the unfortunate creature.

   “Why this woman should live a life of disguise, always afraid her sex would be discovered, doing the work of a man, may never be known,” the Santa Cruz Sentinel wrote in their 1880 obituary. “The only people who have occasion to be disturbed by the career of Charley Parkhurst are the gentlemen who have so much to say about ‘woman’s sphere’ and ‘the weaker vessel,’” the Providence Journal wrote soon after her death. “It is beyond question that one of the soberest, pleasantest, most expert drivers in this state, and one of the most celebrated of the world-famed California drivers was a woman. And is it not true that a woman had done what woman can do?” The Journal didn’t want to speak ill of the dead but no matter how expert One-Eyed Charley was in the saddle, she was not a sober nor a pleasant person.

   “How does a nice Polish girl from Parma know how to pitch a movie in Hollywood?” I asked KJ. “That’s not to say you’re a girl anymore, but you’re still from Parma.” Alan Ruck, an actor who portrayed Ferris Bueller’s best friend almost forty years ago, is the best known movie personality from there. The Miz, a famous wrestler, is the most famous person from Parma nowadays.

   Parma is a southern suburb of Cleveland. It is the biggest suburb in the state of Ohio. It where scores of Ukrainians as well as Poles live. There is a district called Ukrainian Village and another district called Polish Village. Eastern Orthodox Christians like Ukrainians are conservative about sex. Roman Catholic Christians like Poles are even more conservative about sex. There is no Transgender Village. There are no plans to found one anytime soon.

   “I’ve been taking Polish language lessons,” KJ said. “I was taking weekly in-person classes until the pandemic shut everything down. After that I kept up on Zoom, but now that I’m working on our movie, I’ve had to put that to the side.”

   “Now that you’re back in town, what are your plans for the summer?” I asked.

   “I’m going to Chicago this June for a year on sabbatical,” he said. “In fact, I’ve got somebody from Oberlin coming to look at my place any minute now.”

   “I don’t figure you’re going to be pulling out a horsewhip for my asking, but you’re not going to be sub-leasing to any One-Eyed Charley legends, are you?” 

   “No, but he or she might be a Two-Eyed Charley,” KJ said.

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. 

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

A Mid-Century Crime Thriller

“A once upon a crime whodunit.” Barron Cannon, Adventure Books

“Captures the vibe of 1950s NYC.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction

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

Late summer and early autumn. New York City. A Hell’s Kitchen private eye. The 1956 World Series. President Eisenhower at the opening game. A killer in the Brooklyn Dodger dugout.

Accidental Reality

Winter Wonderland

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By Ed Staskus

   It is 11 miles as the crow flies from E. 42nd St. in Newburgh Hts. to E. 125th St. and St. Clair Ave. in Cleveland, Ohio. A streetcar in the 1950s would have made the trip in about 40 minutes and a car in about 20 minutes. A brisk walk on a summer day would have taken about 3 hours. When Hal Scott left work at American Steel and Wire in Newburgh Hts. for home on Friday November 24, 1950, in the middle of the Great Thanksgiving Blizzard, no streetcars were running anymore, and he didn’t have a car. He started walking. He didn’t see a crow that day or the rest of the weekend.

   The storm started on the long holiday weekend when an arctic air mass barreled into town and temperatures fell to below zero. The next day low pressure from Virginia moved into Ohio. When that happened a blizzard with high winds and heavy snow got up to speed. By the end of the day two feet of snow had fallen and the airport had to close. Mayor Tom Burke declared a state of emergency and called out the National Guard. Snow plowing was hampered by more than 10,000 abandoned cars. The mayor declared a state of emergency. Unnecessary travel was banned. Everything nonessential was forbidden from trying to get downtown. The car ban lasted for a week until the last Cleveland Transit System line was back on the line. By then the temperatures had hit the 50s and all the snow melted. Creeks and rivers flooded far and wide.

   Hal was born in 1903. He had a sister, Eleanor, and a brother, LeGrant. His brother made it as a pro baseball player nicknamed Babe, after Babe Ruth, although he never made it out of the minor leagues. Hal married a local girl, Jennie O’Connell, and they had six children. Jennie died of pneumonia twenty years later leaving Hal with six kids under the age of eighteen. A year-and-a half later he married his next-door neighbor and they had two more kids, Mike and Teen, or Harold Jr. Teen was killed when he was four years old. He was sitting on a curb on a sunny day waiting for his brother to get home from school when a delivery truck backing up ran him over. Not long after the funeral Hal’s hair turned white.

   When he started walking home as the Great Thanksgiving Blizzard was raging, he walked up E. 49th St. and then zigzagging to Guy Ave. to Hamm Ave. to E. 55th St. to St. Clair Ave. From there, he only had seventy blocks to go. It was a slog. The snow was deep and getting deeper. Nobody was shoveling any sidewalks. He walked in the street more than on any sidewalk. He stopped every so often to catch his breath. It was dark as a squid’s world by 8 o’clock. The sky was a mass of heavy clouds. He was wearing a heavy wool coat, gloves, a hat, and buckled rubber galoshes. He pulled his collar up. Hal was dressed for bear, but it was hard going.

   “Everything came to a standstill,” said Burt Wilfong on the east side of town. He got to his feet off his sofa, bundled up, and went outside to shovel his walk and driveway. There was a hitch, though. “The garage doors were the kind that opened out. There was about 5 feet of snow that drifted around in front of the garage, and the snow shovel was inside.” He went back to his sofa, plopped himself down, and stayed there.

   By the time Hal got to Orey Ave. and E. 55th St. he was more than ready to sit down in the hole in the wall bar on the corner and warm himself up. He could use a bite and a drink, too, or two drinks. He sat down. A barfly a stool down next to him had a bowl of black olives and a bottle of Blatz in front of him.

   “Hell of a night to be out,” the barfly said.

   “That’s the God’s truth,” Hal said.

   He ordered chicken soup in a pot with homemade noodles and hard-boiled sliced eggs. He thought about a draft beer but had a shot of rye whiskey instead. Halfway through his eggs he ordered another shot. He got a cottage cheese and pickle relish sandwich to go and stuck it in his coat pocket. He left $3.00 on the bar, buttoned up his coat, and started north up E. 55th St. again. He felt much better, although the storm was getting worse.

   He took short steps shuffling now and then when the going got icy. He walked bent slightly forward as much as he could, with his center of gravity directly over his feet. The wind made it tricky. It was worse than the snow. He stayed ready for falling on his face as gusts came and went. The wind was unpredictable, buffeting him from all sides.

   “I was born during that storm,” Fred Rothhauser on the west side of town said. “My parents told me I was a miracle baby coming into the world the day hell froze over.” Every leafless branch of every tree was in motion. Twigs littered the snow. Hal stepped over branches that had cracked off. As the wind swept over roofs their tiles shook and flapped. When they were ripped away, they went sailing and disappearing. Overhead the electric and telephone wires whistled. The infrequent passing cars all looked like they were on the verge of sliding and veering crazily off somewhere.

   Flo Ellis was two years old when she, her four brothers and sisters, and parents drove from North Collinwood to Willoughby for Thanksgiving dinner. “We stayed overnight, then the blizzard hit, and it turned into almost a week. My grandma had to cut head holes and armholes in pillowcases to make nightgowns for us kids.”

   When he got to Fleet Ave. Hal saw two bars. One was on the opposite corner and the other one on his side of the street. He took the path of least resistance.  He might have gone to Krejci’s Tavern down the street but he didn’t. Krejci’s was “Where the Fishermen Meet” and where he often met his pals for drinks. It would have been full of fishermen, anyway, telling tales about the Great Lakes Storm of 1913 that sank 30 freighters and killed more than 200 mariners. He wasn’t up for snow storm stories from the past.

   There was a three-story cupola over the front door he went through and lots of windows on the Feet Ave. side. A yellow sign said “Parking in the Rear” in red letters. There were two cars in the lot. How they got into and were planning on getting out of the lot was their business. The windows on the second and third stories were brightly lit. Whatever children and boarders the bartender and his wife, who was the bar’s cook, had up there were staying snug as bugs.

   The watering hole was full of people. The tables were all taken. He sat down at the bar alongside a group of six. When he asked the bartender, the man said, “It’s the local folks, they’ve been walking in all night, except for this group. They’re from Lakewood. I guess everybody has had their fill of turkey.”

   Gus and Eva Stanik were sitting closest to Hal. “We were going to Pennsylvania to do some deer-hunting,” Eva said. “We got up in the morning, and there was a load of snow, and we decided that maybe we’d better not go.” Her younger brother, Gomer, disagreed and talked them into making the trip.

   “Oh, yeah, we can still do that,” he said in the afternoon. “It can’t keep snowing much longer.” Gus and Eva fired up their 1946 Buick Sedanet with her brother’s friend in the back seat. Gomer rode with his uncle Ivan and their friend Mack in a second car, which was Ivan’s 1941 Ford Super Deluxe. Their bags, blankets, gear, and guns were in the car trunks. They had strong coffee in thermoses.

   “We were young,” Eva said. “There were six of us all together in two different cars. So, we helped one another. But everywhere we went, my uncle got stuck.” They passed one deserted car stuck in a snow drift after another. “My husband was the only one who had chains on.” After the two cars went slip sliding out of the parking lot behind the bar, Ivan’s car got stuck in the street. Hal helped push it out. When they drove off, they followed snowplows east. Hal waved goodbye as he set off on E. 55th St. again. 

   “When we were going through Sharon in Pennsylvania, we came to a standstill,” Eva said. “Gomer got out of the car and went across the street to a place that sold peanuts in the shell. We ate peanuts the rest of the day.” They threw the shells out the windows. Their four-hour trip turned into a twelve-hour trip. They labored on to Coalport, found their motel, shoveled out parking spaces, and fell into bed.

   “Hell, yeah, I shot my deer the next day,” Gus said, finally triumphant..

   Hal walked the rest of the night. The bars had all closed. The whole city was closed. He stopped for shelter in doorways now and then, watching plows waste their time. No sooner were they gone than snow started piling up again. The sun came up at 7:30 in the morning, what there was of it. The light looked like old milk. When dawn happened, he turned the corner on to St. Clair Ave. When he did, he saw U. S. Army Pershing tanks hauling away broken-down busses and delivery trucks.

   “Hundreds of motorists abandoned stalled autos,” the Lakewood Sun Post wrote in its morning edition. “Stuck streetcars were strung along main arteries for miles. Bus routes were littered with coaches blocked by enormous drifts. Most plants closed, and some employees who did manage to report in were marooned on their jobs. Trucks laden with food couldn’t deliver. Babies were without milk and grocery stores able to open were rationing it as well as bread.”

   Lakewood is Cleveland’s closest western neighbor, just across the Cuyahoga River. The far side of Lakewood butts up to the Rocky River. No neighbors were visiting neighbors that weekend, even though they could have skated across the frozen river. By the end of the day snow was wall-to-wall and drifts were 25 feet high. Some buildings collapsed under the weight of snowpack. More and more wires and trees were blown down. Bulldozers cleared roads so ambulances could reach those in need. The National Guard delivered food in their Jeeps to the out-of-the way. 

   Hal stopped at the first open diner he saw for breakfast. He was hungry as a horse. The diner was the kind that never closed, no matter what. He sat on a stool at the counter across from the galley kitchen. He had eggs, sausage, hash browns, pancakes, and two cups of coffee. When he was done, he folded his arms and lay his head down. A waitress woke him up when he started snoring.

   He trudged on as far as E. 69th St, where he stopped again. His legs were heavy. He was more tired than a month of overtime. He walked into the Maple Lanes Tavern and Bowling Alley. Nobody was bowling, but a handful of men were at the bar. One of them was a snowplow driver. He looked exhausted. Hal sat at the bar and had a hot toddy. When he felt warm again, he went out into the cold for the last stretch to home.

   The bone-chilling cold created a run on woolen clothing, long underwear, and flannel pajamas. A department store hosiery clerk took a telephone call asking for fleece-lined women’s hose. “I don’t know that there is any such thing,” she told the caller. Funerals and burials were delayed because cemeteries were neck-deep in snow. Hearses were unable to navigate roads to churches for services. An undertaker watched a body being unloaded from a commandeered milk truck for its much-needed embalming.

   After Hal got home late Saturday afternoon, 24 hours after leaving work, his wife bombarded him with questions, but he was too cold and too tired to talk. He spoke to his son Mike for a few minutes, telling him everything was all right, took a long hot bath, and fell into bed. His wife threw an extra quilt over him. He slept the rest of the day, all day Sunday, and called off work on Monday. The National Guard went home on Wednesday November 29th. Schools stayed closed all that week. When Hal got out of bed, he checked all his fingers and toes. He didn’t have a speck of frostbite on him.

   While he was on his long trek, the Big Ten championship game in Columbus between Ohio State and Michigan went ahead as planned. A trip to the Rose Bowl was at stake. Fifty thousand fans, just about half of the tickets sold, were in their seats for the kick-off. There was heavy snow, 40 MPH winds, and the temperature at game time was 5 degrees. Michigan won the Snow Bowl, even though they didn’t get a single first down and only gained a total of 27 yards. There were 45 punts between the two teams in the 60 minutes of playing time.

  “I was a teenager when the blizzard hit,” Irene DeBauche on the south side of town said. “It was something you never forget. We thought it was exciting and fun although our parents thought differently.” The Great Thanksgiving Blizzard impacted 22 states, killed 383 people, and caused almost $70 million in damage, equivalent to about $800 million today. Insurance companies paid out more money to their policy holders for damage than for any previous storm of any kind up to that time. 

   When Hal’s second wife died in 1964, he looked around the neighborhood again. He married another next-door neighbor in 1969. After he went blind in his later years, he spent summer days on his porch. When his children and grandchildren visited, and the neighborhood kids ran over, everybody sat on the steps and porch. Hal always had a paper bag filled with taffy and candy bars. The younger kids snacked while the older kids counted the number of times he cursed while telling tales. When they ran out of fingers to count on, they counted on their toes.

   Hal cursed up a storm whenever he recounted the Great Thanksgiving Blizzard of 1950, right up to the day he died in 1976. If he had lived a couple more years, he would have experienced the White Blizzard of 1978. When that storm was over everybody in Cleveland agreed it was the Storm of the Century. If he had made it that far, Hal would have had a golden opportunity to expand his store of descriptive words about winter wonderlands. 

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. 

A New Thriller by Ed Staskus

“Cross Walk“

“A once upon a crime whodunit.” Barron Cannon, Adventure Books

“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. A Hell’s Kitchen private eye. The 1956 World Series. President Eisenhower at the opening game. A killer in the dugout.

Baltic Place

Knife in the Water

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By Ed Staskus

   The Prussians called the town Memel. We called it Klaipeda but only among ourselves. The Prussians were in charge. They had been in charge for hundreds of years so we didn’t argue with them. They lived in the town. We lived on the flatlands outside of town, although some called it the bogs. They had built a railway station of yellow brick not long ago. The town was spreading out. None of us ever rode on the trains. We worked on the docks. The port was on the mouth of the Neman River and was the gateway onto the Baltic Sea.

   The Curonian Spit shielded the harbor from storms. Dunes soaked up wind and waves. The Neringa Fortress had been built 15 years earlier to protect the harbor from marauders. A hospital was established to treat sailors with infectious diseases. It was the last resort for ailing seadogs. Most of them died there.

   We spent our days loading grain and lumber for export. After work we stopped in at the taverns and bawdy houses up and down Heydekrug Strasse. It was mostly us single men. It was a bad neighborhood to be living in if you had good intentions. We stayed in shabby boarding houses, two men to a closet of a room, during the week and only went home on weekends. We walked home on Sunday mornings and walked back to town early Monday mornings.

   It was on a Friday night in the middle of summer that I first laid eyes on Ignas Radzvilas. He was known as the Pig Sticker. Everybody knew all about him. He was rumored to have killed two or three men in knife fights. It was the same night that Dominykas Norkus left town and never came back. It was the last time any of us ever saw the back of his head, his hair shiny with fear.

   I was smoking outside of Grazina Kleiza’s paleistuve, leaning against a brick kiln, when I saw Ignas Radzvilas come marching up the street. His face was set in stone and he was dressed in black like an undertaker. His belt buckle was silver. I couldn’t see where he kept his knife. I knew it had to be somewhere handy, but couldn’t spot it. I thought, maybe it’s up his sleeve, but I knew that couldn’t be right. Ignas Radzvilas didn’t hide his reputation. He wore it on his sleeve for all to see.

   Grazina Kleiza was part Lithuanian and part Tatar. She traced her ancestry to Grand Duke Vytautas the Great, who brought more than ten thousand Tatars back from a campaign in the Ukraine in the early 15th century to serve him as mounted fighters. They were small dark men who knew how to raise hell. Grazina Kleiza’s eyes were the color of water. She wore lace-up boots and her hair loose. Nobody knew what kept her dress in place. A red light burned at the front of her business building, which looked more like a warehouse than a pleasure house. It was as much about loaded dice on the gluckshaus board and cheap moonshine as it was about anything else. Her place was in the shadow of the ruined Klaipeda Castle. The castle was where the dead went to cast shadows.

   Ignas Radzvilas walked past me without seeming to notice I was there. I could tell he had something on his mind. I tossed my cigarette aside and followed him through the door. What he had in mind was Grazina Kleiza. She had once been his girl. What he didn’t know was that she was another man’s girl now, not that it mattered even if he had known. Dominykas Norkus could have been a Polish prince and it wouldn’t have mattered.

   When I went through the door behind him, the door bumped him on the backside. He reached behind him without looking and swung the door back into my face. I reached for the knife I kept in the lining of my vest. “Don’t,” he said, slapping the knife out of my hand and brushing me aside like I didn’t matter anymore than a bug.

   Grazina Kleiza was dancing a polka with Dominykas Norkus. An old bag wearing a magpie feather hat was on a piano and a skeleton of a man was on an accordion. We all made the sign of the cross when walking past the piano. The woman believed wearing magpie feathers was a sign of fearlessness. We knew it was a sign of witchcraft. Dominykas was known as the Brakeman. He worked for the Prussians. Nobody ever insulted him to his face since he was the best man with a knife in our neighborhood. When the Pig Sticker walked up to the Brakeman and took Grazina Kleiza’s arm, pulling her away, the dancing and music stopped. The piano player turned on her stool and scowled..

   “I’m all done hating you,” he said to Grazina. “Saying goodbye is like dying a little. When I said farewell to you I died a lot. Pasiklydau ta diena. It was a mistake.” The couples on the dance floor near them moved away, shuffling their feet and staying quiet. The talk at the bar drifted off. One man made a quick grab for more krupnickas. 

   “I’m looking for the man I hear is the best with a knife in these parts,” Ignas Radzvilas said, looking straight at Dominykas Norkus. “I am probably not as skilled as him, but I’d like to find out what I’ve got.” He didn’t say anything about love and hate, but everybody knew what he was talking about. In the next instant everybody saw the knife in his hand, although nobody knew where it came from. We couldn’t take our eyes off it.

   The Brakeman had a smoldering butt at his side held between his thumb and forefinger. It burned down and he let it fall to the plank floor. We thought he was going to fill his hand with his blade any minute, but one minute after another passed and his hand stayed empty.

   “Do you know I’m talking to you?” Ignas Radzvilas said, stepping closer to Dominykas Norkus. If it was a question, the Brakeman didn’t have an answer. The Pig Sticker’s breath was sour in his face. The deaf geezer in the corner, the corner that was reserved for him, was listening closely like everybody else.

   Grazina Kleiza stepped up to her man. She reached for where he kept his knife and put it into his empty hand. “This is what you’ve been looking for,” she said and stepped aside. He looked at the knife in his hand like he had never seen it before. Was he playing the fool to buy time? The knife slipped from his fingers, hitting the floor with a thud, playing dead. The air went out of the room.

   “I thought you were a man, not a yellow dog,” Ignas Radzvilas said.

   Grazina Kleiza wrapped herself around the Pig Sticker’s arm. “Forget him,” she said. “He’s got a white liver.” They walked arm and arm to the back and through a private door. We watched them stroll to the room of the rising sun. When we turned back to Dominykas Norkus, he was gone. The window behind where he had been standing was wide open.

   We all hated him from that moment on. He hadn’t just let us down. He had betrayed us. The skeleton pumped up his accordion and the magpie hat began banging on her piano keys. The drinkers went back to their drinks, pounding the bar for doubles. On the dance floor the polka dancing was frenzied, like everybody was trying to burn something off.

   I got overheated dancing with one girl after another until I finally had enough. I shrugged the last girl off me and went outside. I stopped at the well for a cool drink. The water tasted hot. The dirt street and the clean sky were the same as they had always been, but everything was different. I heard a horse snort softly. It was asleep on its feet at the front of the gate into Klaipeda Castle. 

   Somebody almost knocked me over. “Stay out of my way, half-wit,” Dominykas  Norkus said walking towards his horse. I stayed out of his way. He wasn’t worth the trouble. I watched him riding away until I saw Ignas Radzvilas and Grazina Kleiza come out a side door. I followed them past the brick kiln down the street toward Wilhelm Strasse. The moon lit my way. They were talking in low voices. She laughed and he gave her a pat on the behind.

   Later, when I got back to the bawdy house, everybody’s spirits were low. What dancing was still going on was laggard. The piano player was slumped over her keyboard. A group of men were playing cards, trying to make out who had the more crooked cards. When Grazina Kleiza came in through the door she was crying. She looked over her shoulder like she was being followed by a ghost.

   The ghost was Ignas Radzvilas. His face was the washed out color of dried mud. He stumbled onto the dance floor and fell down on his side. We rolled him over and when we did our hands came away wet with blood. “You’re looking at a man doomed to hell,” he said and groaned.

   “What happened?” everybody asked Grazina.

   She said Ignas Radzvilas and she were walking past the Church of St. Jacob when they saw somebody coming towards them from the far side of the bell tower. “I couldn’t tell who it was,” Grazina said. The Pig Sticker waited for the stranger. 

   “Oh, it’s you, the nobody,’ he said, his thumbs hooked on his belt buckle.

   “He was young, I could tell that, but his face was hidden by the darkness,” Grazina Kleixa said. “He said to Ignas, ‘I hear you’re looking for a fight.’ He walked right up to my man and before I knew it he stuck him with a knife, just below the heart there. A Jew ragman was passing in a wagon. We got him into it and brought him here. I didn’t want him to die in the street.”

   Everybody could tell Ignas Radzvilas was dying. He was going fast. The knife must have cut into his lungs. There was a bloody froth bubbling on his lips. He asked Grazina to cover his face. When he took his last breath her handkerchief went limp. It was stained a bright red. A handful  of flies began buzzing around him. Somebody said we should send for the police. “Don’t be a damned fool,” somebody else said. Somebody with one eye said Grazina Kleiza must have done it. That man was even more of a damned fool. I couldn’t take what they were saying since I knew they were wrong.

   “Look at her,” I said, stepping up beside her. She was trembling. “Does she look steady enough to kill a man. Her heart was his to take. She didn’t want to stop his heart from beating. Whoever killed the Pig Sticker must have been a real knife fighter since he didn’t want to get into a real knife fight. Those kinds of bona fide men only want to cut you. They will do anything to take you by surprise and finish you off before you even know what is going on.” 

   A stranded Argentine sailor killing time in town lifted his glass and saluted my little speech. He went by the name of Jorge Borges, although we called him Luis. As soon as I finished we heard the sound of horses. When we looked we saw the police coming, even though none of us had hailed them. Maybe the Jew ragman told them what had happened. It didn’t take long for everybody to be gone in all directions through the back doors and windows. The only one who stayed behind was the deaf man in his corner. He had fallen asleep, stuck in a dream that was stuck in a labyrinth.

   I walked back to my boarding house, slow and easy. I was in no hurry.  The town was quiet the same as a dark forest in the middle of the night. The moon had slipped behind a cloud. When I got to the front stairs I stopped before going up to my room. I pulled out my knife. It wasn’t a big knife but it had a stabbing tip and a sharp edge. I gave it a close look-over by the light of a stick match, rinsing it in a cistern at the corner of the house. I dried it on my sleeve, making sure there wasn’t the least smudge of blood on it.

Image by Gustav Klimt.

A version of this story appeared in Cowbell Literary Magazine.

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. 

“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

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 Cold War shadows.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Accidental Reality

Furnace Room

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By Ed Staskus

   Abner Vance first got a peek of Odessa Ballard through a second-floor window at the Majestic Hotel. She was fiddling with her skirt standing waiting on the corner of Central Avenue and East 55th Street for the CTS streetcar. It was a sunny summer day. Odessa did pantry work and was on her way home. She didn’t see him. He spotted her from behind his venetian blinds.

   “I had just gotten back from Woodland Cemetery, where I sometimes did patrols on foot, which was whenever my sergeant thought there was some small thing I did he didn’t care for.” It was how Abner came to be known as Gravedigger Vance. “She was a sight for sore eyes and my worn feet. I put my Colt Positive away in the dresser drawer and stepped outside.”

   During the winter the Majestic let Abner, who was a policeman, have a small room on the E.55th St. side of the hotel. Whenever it got below zero, he ducked into it for ten minutes to warm up. He helped the house man when help was needed. His room was a half-dozen steps from a secret door beside the drug store in case anything bad happened. After a few years he kept the room in the summer, too. The Majestic was called the apartments, but it was a hotel. Abner started going there when he was in his early 20s and the jazz club off the lobby was called the Furnace Room.

   “Meeting your mother was a lot like jazz, it was improvised,” he told his son Lavert. “That was it, go ahead and see what happens.” The club had dancers and crooners and bands that came through Cleveland on tour. The restaurant serving food, to the club and rooms, was Mammy Louise’s Barbeque Café. Their house specialty was braised beef short ribs in gravy. The ribs were like soul music in your mouth.

   Abner was from a small town in the Florida Panhandle and never thought twice about eating chicken fried steak, candied sweet potatoes, and cheesy grits. He ran it off when he was a boy. He walked it off when he was a cop.

   “We went to Mammy Louise’s for dinner and then next door to the club,” he said. “The International Sweethearts of Rhythm were there the night we stepped out. They were an all-girl all-color orchestra. ‘Slick Chicks and Hot Licks’ was what it said on the billboard outside the doors. They raised the roof and we kicked up our heels, dancing up a storm.”

   The Furnace Room became Elmer Waxman’s Ubangi Club, but when Abner first took Lavert there in the 1950s, when he was twelve years-old, it was the Rose Room Cocktail Lounge. Before the Hough riots and Glenville shoot-outs in the 1960s, even though it was already mostly a colored neighborhood, the audiences were every which way. Judges and politicians from downtown brought their wives to the Rose Room. It was the black and tan saloon scene. It was its own world in the nighttime. But by then no one danced to jazz anymore. That had already changed. It wasn’t that jazz changed, even though it had. There was a new music and new dancers in town.

   When Abner applied to the Cleveland Police Department after high school the merit system broke down, like it always did, because he was a Negro. They told him he had poor eyesight, even though he didn’t start wearing glasses until he was in his 70s, almost fifty years after joining the force. He had to ask for help from his ward leader to have the rejection overruled.

   He hunted bootleggers in the 1930s, before they gave him his own beat. It was dangerous work. They carried more guns than the police. He had to prove himself. “You could always tell whether the moonshine was good if you set it on fire and blue flames were what you saw. That’s when you knew it wouldn’t make you go blind.”

   There weren’t many men of color on the police force, and most of those who made the department had to get certification from outside doctors to get past the official exam of the police doctor. Jim Crow was sneakier in the North than it was in the South. The department kept separate eligibility lists, so when one Negro died, resigned, or retired, his replacement might or might not be another Negro. When a white policeman died, his replacement was always another white man.

   Duke Jenkins and his group were the house band at the Majestic. They were the first jazz band Lavert ever heard. Every Tuesday night was Cha Cha Night and on Thursdays Mambo Night was the hot ticket. But the big attraction was the before dawn Blue Monday Party.

   “People lined up to get into those jam sessions. Sometimes you couldn’t even get a seat. All the players, the girl singers, the quartets, entertainers like Erroll Garner and Arthur Prysock and Nancy Wilson, they’d be there performing. People went crazy when Nancy Wilson was there because she was so good,” Abner said.

   Lavert stayed overnight with his father at the Majestic on Sundays and went to the Blue Monday parties with him when they got going, which was at five in the morning. Afterwards Abner drove his son to school. If they stayed too late at the jam session, soaking up the sounds, he would call and ask for a squad car to race Lavert to school, its lights flashing and siren whooping.

   “Eyes lit up like flashbulbs on a camera whenever that happened,” Lavert said.

   There were only a handful of Cleveland hotels listed in the Negro Green Book. The Majestic was one of them. All the rooms had two beds and a radio on every bedstand, although Abner only had one bed. He had the other one removed so Lavert and he could have a table to eat at on Sunday nights. Lavert slept on a folding rollaway his father kept in the closet.

   When he was a baby, his mother kept his playpen next to the upright piano in the front room. It was so she would know where he was. So long as she heard him picking out notes she knew he wasn’t getting into trouble. When he was in third grade, he found out they had music classes at his grade school. He was eight years old.

   “I’d like to do that,” he told his mother. He lived with her and his grandparents. It was a surprise to all of them. “That’s just what my place was,” he said. But he found out even the status quo can change.

   He put his name down for piano lessons at the Miles Standish School. He learned to play a Chopin waltz sitting beneath a painting of Miles Standish, after who the school was named. The portrait was of a soldier accompanying the Pilgrims when they came to the New World. In the painting he wore armor and carried a matchlock rifle. He didn’t look like he knew a piano from a peace pipe. 

   Lavert played the organ and piano because his grandmother wanted him to. She was the matriarch of the family and conservative about everything under the sun. She didn’t believe in bell house music. She was strict about church music, too, so she had a man, who was the organist at the New Liberty Hill Baptist Church, come to their house and give him lessons. Years later, when he was older, Lavert played there himself.

   Paul John was the man who came to their house. He worked in the steel mills in the Flats. He was a friend of Lavert’s’s grandfather, who sang in the male chorus in the mill that Paul John led on a Salvation Army five rank pipe organ. The chorus went to Detroit and Pittsburgh to perform on holidays.

   “Mr. John could play Rachmaninoff, and all, but he was ahead of his time, so he had to give lessons,” Abner told his son. “That was the incentive for him when he came to your mother’s house and got you started. You put food on his table.”

   Lavert played sacred music for most of his life and jazz music the rest of the time. The sacred music came from his mother and grandmother, and the jazz music came from his father, who took him to uptown clubs like the Tijuana Café Society.

   “When the Four Sounds came to audition at the Tijuana, they were just re-opening, and they didn’t even have a piano on the stage. It was in the corner. I helped them lift it up on the stage to do the audition,” Abner said. He was a tall strong man. “They had been the Four Sounds until they asked me to talk to the saxophone player one night. He had a habit of carrying a gun in his horn case. He wouldn’t listen to a lick of sense. When he said he didn’t want to leave it behind, they finally left the saxophone out and became the Three Sounds.”

   Most days anybody walking around the neighborhood could hear a horn through an open window down the street from Doan Square, where all the action was. It was a jazz musician reading his lines in the afternoon. Hotels weren’t open to musicians of color, so they stayed in rooming houses. They minded their own business.

   “You couldn’t even go to the Five and Dime store and have a quiet lunch,” Lavert said.

   His grandmother went to buy a hat one Saturday and when she tried it on, she had to buy it. She had put it on her head to see if it fit and when a salesclerk saw her, she had to pay for it. His grandfather was a mulatto from Cuba. Whenever a white man came to their house, selling something, or on some errand, his grandfather was polite, but as soon as the white man left and was out of earshot he would spit and call the man a cracker.

   They lived on Pierpont Avenue in Glenville, what everyone called the Gold Coast, before Glenville fell apart and the Gold Coast moved to Lakewood in the 1960s. His grandmother died in 1968 and his mother sold the house, moving to Lost Nation Road. His grandfather moved into a rented room. By then Lavert had finished studies at the Boston Conservatory and was playing the big organ at the Christian Science Mother Church. In the summer he played piano at jazz clubs in Provincetown and Martha’s Vineyard.

   When he was a boy Glenville was crowded with immigrants, Negroes, and Jews. There were orthodox Jews all over the place. He thought they were Santa Claus’s in black suits. There were churches for men of faith, like the Cory United Methodist Church, which had been the Park Synagogue, and the Abyssinia Baptist Church, which had also been a synagogue. There were clubs, movie houses, and department stores.

   There were mom and pop restaurants run by the Jews. There were no bad sandwich shops in Glenville, but Abner always ate at Pirkle’s Deli. He said if he ever stumbled on a good-looking Jewish woman from his window at the Majestic, he was going to track her down so he could get up Sunday mornings and stroll out to the deli with her.

   “Those folks never invented anything so fine as deli food,” he said.  “The corned beef at Pirkle’s is as tender as a young lady’s leg.”

    Lavert’s father and mother were never together as a family. “There were two different families, his and ours,” he said. Abner and Odessa had their room at the Majestic some nights, but in later years she stayed away. She felt he betrayed her. “My father said he wanted to marry my mother, and she thought he was going to divorce his wife, but he never did that.” Over time she had a hard time seeing Abner as a soul mate.

   “Your mother shot a hole in my soul,” Abner said.

   Lavert lived with his mother and after she married another man, she bore two more boys who became his brothers, the boys sharing her. He became Lavert Stuart. Abner came to their house many times, often in his police car after he was promoted. He parked in the driveway for everybody to see. It wasn’t as if they were cut off from him.

   He was one of the first colored farmers in Twinsburg, where he kept fowl and pigs. Every November the family got a turkey for Thanksgiving. He had a smokehouse, too, and when time came to slaughter some of the fattening pigs, he would do it himself. He castrated the males a month beforehand. The family had bacon and ham all winter and into the spring.

   Abner picked Lavert up in his Ford pick-up on Friday and Saturday nights to help him forage for feed. The father and teenager drove up and down Euclid Avenue, on the south side of Glenville, from E. 110th to E. 95th Street, picking up refuse from barrels and dumpsters behind the clubs and restaurants on the strip. Abner stuck his gloved hands into the slop and nosed around for metal and glass before filling up his barrels.

   “Pigs will eat anything you give them. They can be stink and filth, even though their sausages smell great. I would rather cut myself than injure my animals.” The Hebrew meaning of Abner is “father of light.” He was a good father to his pigs.

   When their barrels were full, they drove to the farm. The pigs would hear the truck coming and know it was time to eat. “They started doing what pigs do, getting feisty and greedy. He dumped the food in the trough, let them loose, and they would go at it,” Lavert said. That was why Abner picked through the fruit vegetables scraps of meat greasy bits and pieces, because they would have cut themselves, biting into anything.

   Lavert Stuart stopped gleaning garbage when his mother told him he had to be careful about his hands. She didn’t want him hurting them, hurting his chances. Odessa wanted him to go places, better places than scrounging for leftovers behind eateries in the middle of the night.

   He learned more sacred music and less blue notes after his mother put him in Empire High. Eleanor Bishop, his music teacher, had been there since the school opened. She had a trim hourglass figure and the only thing that gave her away was that she wore old lady comforters. But she was spry and walked fast. She could catch bad boys anytime she wanted to.

   She was an old maid because she had become a teacher long ago and wasn’t supposed to marry, and by the time the times changed it was too late for her. One afternoon Lavert found a dedicatory book for Empire High, which was built in 1915. He leafed through it. He took it to her office.

   “I see your name in this book, and your picture,” he said.

   She looked at him.

   “Is this you?”

   “Yes.”

   “But you’re old, not like this.”

   “Everybody was once new,” she said, her face pinched. Lavert was sure she wanted to pinch him, hard, like she did when he hit a wrong note. But she didn’t put any concern to what he said. She made sure he practiced faithfully and later helped him get a scholarship to Ohio University, where he studied the organ. After he graduated, he never lived in Glenville again.

   He lived in Chicago, New York, and Boston. He learned to live alone, like Duke Ellington, who said music was a mistress. He lived in his own world, detached and determined, so he could practice. He had friends who kept him in tune to the here and now, but on weekend nights he didn’t go anywhere. He had to be ready for Sunday services. That kept him out of wrongdoing. He tried mischief a few times but decided it’s bad when you’re not feeling well in a church after a hard Saturday night. He decided he had to do it his way.

   He didn’t see much of his mother, who moved to California to live with one of his brothers, who had become a minister, and saw his father only when he was passing through the Midwest. They visited and had lunch at one or another deli in Cleveland Heights, where all the Jews had moved. Pirkle’s Deli had burned down. 

   Abner was an industrious man his whole life. When he retired and his lawful wife passed on, he bought the last commercial building, next to Whitmore’s Bar-B-Q, on Kinsman Road where it starts to snake up into Shaker Heights. It was a barbershop and beauty salon side-by-side. He lived upstairs in a one-bedroom apartment. He could have lived in a house, since he owned five of them, but didn’t want to.

   “I don’t want to get too comfortable because I may not be here long,” he said. His apartment had one bedroom and one bathroom. It had one table with two chairs, one sofa, and one half-empty closet. It looked like no one lived there. He was becoming his own gravedigger.

   “He had been industrious but changed into a careless custodian of his properties. He got short stingy and mean. He patchworked instead of getting things done the best way, so everything slowly deteriorated. He wasn’t willing to pay the price to get things done the right way. When a man has that mindset, he ends up losing more money than he’s spent,” Lavert said.

   Abner lost his eyesight when he was visiting Texas. He stepped on a splinter and after a few days his big toe got infected. He had surgery for it, but in the end, they had to amputate the toe. Afterwards he lost feeling in his leg. While he was still in the hospital convalescing, he woke up one morning and had gone blind. He stayed in Texas for a month, and when he came back, he moved in with Lavert’s sister on the other side of the family, who took care of him.

   He never recovered his sight, which was hard on him because he had always lived by his senses. The biggest problem, though, were the visions and nightmares he suffered, which were part of the side effects from the medication he was taking. He had them at night when he went to bed. He heard things and saw craziness and wasn’t able to sleep.

   Lavert never got his father and mother together, even when Abner was dying, and Lavert was staying with him, playing old jazz records. His father listened to music all day long towards the end. He stopped sleeping and eating, drinking cold lemonade, instead. The last time his mother visited Cleveland Abner was near death. Lavert took her to places in Glenville, some that were still there and others that weren’t anymore, trying to get her to go to the facility on Rockside Road where his father was. 

   She fought him all the way, and in the end wouldn’t go. Odessa just didn’t want anything to do with Abner. “That’s all over, a long time ago,” she said, shaking her head.

   Abner and Odessa did what they had to do from beginning to end. “I was just a cameo in the business they had between themselves,” Lavert said. After his father died there was nothing left to do anymore about the torn seam in the family fabric. He said goodbye to his mother, who went back to California. Abner Vance left behind six children by his wife Amanda, 11 grandchildren, and 18 great grandchildren. The rest didn’t make the cut.

   When he moved back to Cleveland, Lavert Stuart played sacred organ music three seasons of the year. In the summer, he played jazz and popular tunes in clubs on Cape Cod. On Sunday mornings when the weather was good, sitting on the bay, he brewed a pot of strong coffee and warmed up a plate of spiced buns. On his balcony in the light of the rising sun, he looked for what was behind the blue brightness, on the blue note side of the sky.

A version of this story appeared in Literary Heist Magazine.

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. 

A New Thriller by Ed Staskus

“Cross Walk“

“A once upon a crime whodunit.” Barron Cannon, Adventure Books

“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. A Hell’s Kitchen private eye. The 1956 World Series. President Eisenhower at the opening game. A killer in the dugout.

Atlantic Canada

My Aim is True

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By Ed Staskus

   “I think all the farmers on the island did it,” Linda Hewitt said. What all the farmers on Prince Edward Island used to do was squirt a stream of milk in the direction of whatever barn cat was hightailing it into the barn during milking time. “We used to enjoy watching them line up for their treat.”

   Even though milk is not ideal for grown-up cats, because it can cause gassiness once they are of age, squirt milk in the direction of a clowder of cats and they will come running. They drank milk non-stop when they were kittens. When they grow up they remember the familiar smell and taste of it. Their sense of smell is closely linked to memory, more so than the other senses, the same as in people. Straight from the source is their No. 1 comfort food. 

   “Granny Matheson my cousin’s grandmother squirted milk to the cats,” PEI native Anne Fuller said. “They loved it.” Seen from the sky Prince Edward Island lives up to its moniker “Million Acre Farm.” It is known by several different names, including Spud Island, but is most commonly called PEI. The natives including grandmothers on down the line call themselves islanders with a capital “I”.

   Almost all cows nowadays are milked by automatic suction machines. The devices increase the yield of milk and reduce the labor involved. Milking by machine draws about 5 liters of milk. Milking one cow takes between 5 and 7 minutes. Milking by hand draws about 3-and-a-half liters and one cow takes 15 to 20 minutes. The machines go back to the late 1800s. It took decades for them to gain the upper hand. Many cows in North America were still being milked by hand well into the 1940s. Some cows on Prince Edward Island were still being milked by hand even later than that.

   “I did that every time we milked the cows,” PEI native Cecil Wigmore said about the squirting.

   Milking cows on Prince Edward Island in the 21st century is a highly mechanized operation. The total number of cattle on the island is more than 60,000 head. 13,900 of those are dairy cows and 6,300 are dairy heifers. 170-some farms ship their milk to cooperatives and the volume amounts to 120-some million liters. The milk is known for its good taste and high quality.

   Cows Ice Cream makes some of the world’s best ice cream. They have been making it on the island since 1983 with island milk. They won the award for Canada’s Best Ice Cream in 2015. Their frozen confections were recently named the World’s Best Ice Cream by Tauck World Discovery. 

   “Yes, I sure do remember doing that for cats on visits to my grandfather’s farm,” PEI native Norma MacLean said. “I have many special memories.”

   One of dairy farmer Bloyce Thompson’s cows won the award for Top Holstein in the World in 2011. He is a third-generation farmer in Frenchfort, in the middle of the island, with a sizable herd of purebred cows. He serves as Deputy Premier of Prince Edward Island and has long opposed NAFTA-mandated dairy imports. Why mess with a good thing when you’ve already got the best?

   The dairy business on Prince Edward island is made up of dairy producers, who operate farms and produce raw milk, and dairy processors, who process raw milk into butter, cheese. yogurt, ice cream, and condensed milk. ADL is the major processor, by far. Island cheese is known and celebrated worldwide. Avonlea Clothbound Cheddar, made by Cows Creamery on the island, won the Super Gold of the World Cheese Awards at the 28th annual BBC Good Food Show in 2015. 

   Milking by hand isn’t rocket science. It is easy enough to do. “I used to do that,” PEI native Tom McSwigan said. While milking a cow he would wait for his cat to rise up on its hind legs and then give it a squirt right from the cow’s udder. “If I missed and hit the cow’s leg she kicked viciously. Not only that, if I got caught doing it I got the heavy hand of justice from my grandaunt, for because me doing it free of charge.”

   Neolithic farmers in northern Europe were among the first to milk cattle for human consumption. They put hand to teat about 6,000 years ago. It was around that time that the ability of human beings to digest milk was slowly but surely accomplished. It was accomplished by the spread of a genetic mutation called lactase persistence. It was what allowed post-weaned human beings to continue to drink and digest milk.

   Heath McLennan milked cows from the 1930s until his death in 2021.The family farm is in Port Hill on the west end of the island. Heath lived across the street. “He couldn’t wait to get over and that was the highlight of the day,” his son Hilton said. “It was in his blood.” The farm has thirty Holsteins who are milked by machine. “We used to milk them out in the field,” Heath said. “It wasn’t a very excellent job when it was raining. The water was running off the cows.”

   When asked if he ever milked cows by hand anymore, Heath said he wasn’t sure if it would be a good idea to try milking their cows that way anymore. “I wouldn’t want to touch them when they’re not used to it now. They might kick the head off you.”

   Hand milking is done one way or the other, by stripping or by full hand. When stripping the teat is held between thumb and forefinger and the hand glides in one smooth motion down the teat while applying pressure to draw the milk out. When employing the full hand method, the teat is held with all the fingers and the teat is pressed against the palm. The full hand method is thought to be the better of the two methods because it applies a more consistent pressure on the teat and simulates the sucking action of a calf.

   “I can still see my father doing it by hand,” PEI native Adele Shea said. “The cats loved it.”

   Before the machine age children played a big part doing what had to be done on the family farm. They gathered eggs, cleaned, fed, and watered the stock, made butter, made lard and soap, weeded the garden, and went berry picking. They helped with planting and harvesting. One thing they did all year round was milk the cows. When they did, sitting on a stool or balancing on their haunches, they made an immediate connection to one of their most important food sources. Kids being kids, they shared the food source with whatever was wandering in for a taste of white..

   “Me when I was younger did it to the cats,” PEI native Ken Macleod said. “I also did it to the dogs.” 

   Even though cows are by nature easygoing creatures, they can sometimes be buttholes. They can be irascible and stubborn. They can even be dangerous. A cow kick can be deadly. It takes the form of a sharp blow. Most cow kicks are brush-offs, but some lead to a trip to the Emergency Room, and a few are fatal. Always move slowly around cows. Always announce yourself when approaching a cow. Never approach a cow from behind. Always be patient. Never flap your arms. Stay a kick away is the way to be. Stay safe getting your glass of milk.

   “Daddy would squirt the barn cats when we were kids,” PEI native Joanne Creamer said. Cats are much faster than cows and even faster when a cow kicks at them. They are rarely overmuch bothered so long as they get their milk. “Me, when I was squirting milk, sometimes I hit the wrong end of the cat,” PEI native Dwight Llewellyn said.

   “I exactly do remember doing that,” PEI native Brian Trainor said. “The cats would sit there waiting while we milked.”

   Fathers milking cows by hand and directing squirts at cats was an island-wide practice back in the day. “Oh, yes, my dad did it all the time!” PEI native Helen Verhulp said. “My dad always done that and sometimes to us, too,” PEI native Caroline MacLean said. “My father did it,” PEI native Joan Coulthard said. “He did it to us kids as well. It was warm sweet milk.”

   Not all parents were as generous. “I always did it until my father caught me,” PEI native Erroll Jon Campbell said. Waste not want not was his father’s motto. The Scottish are notoriously thrifty. They preach the smart thing to do is be more frugal than not, cats or no cats.

   Milking machines are made of a vacuum pump, a vacuum controller, a pulsation system, a milk transport system, and a milker cluster. The machines apply constant vacuum pressure to the tips of a cow’s udder, mimicking the way milk is naturally drawn. The vacuum tubes are attached to a container where milk is collected. The machines also squeeze the udder periodically so that blood circulation is maintained.

   Milking by hand instead of techno milking is more time-consuming but it is simpler. What’s needed is a milking pail, a wash bowl ,white towel rags, a filter, a funnel, and storage jars. Mason jars are preferred. Glass jars are preferred. Plastic jars are discouraged. They are harder to disinfect. White wash rags are used to clean the udder. Wash bowls are used for cleaning the wash rags. Funnels are used to direct milk from the pail into the storage jar.

   Not all milk ends up where it should. “I remember being sprayed by Shawn and Brian Shea when Granny Trish still had cows,” PEI native Krista Dillon said. “Oh, my God, that was so long ago. I loved that house and farm.”

   Hand milking isn’t coming back anytime soon. Time marches on. Hand milking lives on in the memories of those who made it happen every morning and every afternoon, but there is no squirting anymore. Machine milking is more efficient. Dairy farmers don’t miss the good old days. Who misses the good old days are the island’s cats. The Industrial Age means nothing to them. A stream of warm cow’s milk straight from teat to mouth twice a day is what meant everything to them.

   “Oh my, yes,” PEI native Clara Ross said. “All the barn kitty’s loved it.”

Photograph by Nat Farbman.

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. 

A New Thriller by Ed Staskus

“Cross Walk“

“A once upon a crime whodunit.” Barron Cannon, Adventure Books

“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. A Hell’s Kitchen private eye. The 1956 World Series. President Eisenhower at the opening game. A killer in the dugout.

Paperback Yoga

Hot Pants

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By Ed Staskus

   There’s nothing new about scandals, be they personal, political, academic, corporate, celebrity, religious, or financial. They are a dime a dozen. The reason they are so cheap is because there are so many of them. Crack a newspaper, turn on a TV, open a browser, and there they are, today and every day. They take all shapes and sizes, not just nowadays, but way back when, too.

   Back when the Olympics were the Greek Olympics, an Athenian pentathlete bribed his opponents to secure victory. He was found out and both he and his hometown were fined. He paid his fine, but the hometown of Athens refused. It took the Delphic Oracle threatening in no uncertain terms that there would be no more oracles for them to pay up.

   Five hundred years ago the Borgia’s, two of whom ruled the Holy City as Popes, were conniving entrepreneurs who bought their way to the top, and poisoned friend, foe, and family alike. They didn’t suffer competition. At the Banquet of Chesnuts in the Vatican in 1501 they encouraged their guests to enjoy the “fifty honest prostitutes” they had procured for dessert.

   More recently, during the Gilded Age, there were more corporate shenanigans than you could shake a stick at. Somebody should have read James “Jubilee Jim” Fisk the Ten Commandments, but instead he became entangled in blackmail and was shot to death by his business partner in broad daylight in the lobby of New York City’s Grand Central Hotel.

   Everyone’s always got their reasons for falling into the tar pit. Even the ever bad have their good reasons. More often than not it’s not anybody’s fault, either, especially in our own exculpatory day and age.

   “It’s because as a child Cinderella got home after midnight, Pinocchio told lies, Aladdin was a thief, Snow White lived in a house with seven men, I saw Tarzan practically naked, Batman drove 200 MPH without a license, and Shaggy was a mystery solving hippie who always had the munchies,” we explain in song and dance about how we became good-time Charlies.

   Sex scandals are nothing if not ever new. They are the bedrock of dirty linen. Many a man has fallen into the hamper. Grover Cleveland fathered a child out of wedlock and during the 1884 presidential campaign was dogged by Republican chants of, “Ma, Ma, where’s my Pa?” After he won, Democrats answered, “Gone to the White House, ha, ha, ha.”

   Bill Clinton had sex out of wedlock on top of the father of our country’s desk in the Oval Office, was almost impeached for it, but shrugged it off as though the disapproval was a misunderstanding. When Donald Trump lays down with whores, it’s not a skeleton in the wedlock closet, for several reasons. First, he’s done it many times before, so there isn’t anything scandalous about him doing it again. Second, he’s a consummate philanderer, so there’s nothing unusual about it. Lastly, no one cares, not his evangelical brain-addled base, nor the country’s liberals, for whom it’s the least of his foibles, nor the rest of the world, for whom it’s just a punchline. No one holds him to any kind of standard, anyway, high or low.

   When yoga gurus, masters, and teachers, on the other hand, go sex crazy, it is a scandal, for many reasons, not the least of which is they are held to a higher standard. They are expected to hold firm to the ethical high ground, not rut around in the trough. Stand above reproach. Steer clear of the web of corruption. Practice what you preach, for goodness sake.

   It isn’t necessarily what everybody calls you, but what you answer to. Rules guide the everyday. Right conduct guides the better man. Nevertheless, stick to what it says in the job description. “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be,” Kurt Vonnegut observed. If you can’t trust an honest-to-God yoga teacher, who can you trust?

   It is a long list of bad boys who have practiced a common vice, amounting to antics in the back room, inducement and seduction, and sometimes something darker. It can be a crime punishable by law or at other times simply an offense that outrages the public conscience. It ain’t the Hall of Fame. It’s more along the lines of the Wall of Shame.

   It includes Kriyananda and Rodney Yee. Akhandananda Sarswati was charged with 35 counts of sexual abuse in 1987, convicted, and sent to prison. It also includes Osel Tendzin, Dechen Thurman, known as the “yoga gigolo,” and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi – whose relationship with the Beatles came to a sudden end over allegations he tried to rape the actress Mia Farrow. The “Giggling Guru” got away with it, expanded his TM empire, and ended up living in his own 200-room mansion, where he could transcendentalize whatever he wanted in whatever bedroom he wanted to.

   It includes Satchidananda, Muktananda, and Rama, founder of the Himalayan Institute of Yoga Science and Philosophy, whose estate had to pay almost $2 million in 1996 to a woman who claimed she was forced to have sex with him. Easy come, easy go, seems to have been the institute’s corporate philosophy.

   It includes Sathya Sai Baba, K. Pattabhi Jois, and Amrit Desai, who founded the Kripalu Center in Massachusetts, and was compelled to resign after confessing to several affairs in 1994. Kripalu took a low profile on the whole sordid business, stating blandly for the record, “Yogi Desai resigned as spiritual director of Kripalu.” It’s like saying he had other things besides the spirit on his mind, or loins, as the case may be.

   The royal family of yoga got caught up in the fun. In 2012 allegations of emotional and sexual abuse were made against Kausthub Desikachar, the grandson of the godfather of modern yoga, Krishnamacharya. Evasions rang forth. The next year Desikachar finally  confessed.

   “I realize that some of the decisions that I have made in the past have not been consistent with the high standards that I usually set for myself. I also fully understand and acknowledge that these have had far reaching effects, way beyond myself. There is no way of changing the past. I wholeheartedly repent for what has happened.” There’s nothing like slapping yourself on the wrist.

   The list includes Osho, John Friend, and Bikram Choudhury.

   During his lifetime, Osho, a self-proclaimed spiritual guru, was otherwise known as the sex guru. He made no secret of it. Osho was always on the pull, day and night. He did make a secret of everything else, however, including allegations of drug-running and a prostitution racket. He was deported from the United States in 1985 as the result of complicity in a murder plot, among other things. He was arrested on board a Learjet in North Carolina with $1 million in cash and valuables on board, trying to escape to Bermuda. Although 21 other countries denied him entry, India finally took him back.

   He was welcomed by his disciples with a clap on the back. “We must put the monster America in its place,” he declared. He complained of being the victim of “evil magic.” He died five years later of a heart attack, the victim of clogged arteries. Amazingly enough, he is more popular today than he ever was back then.

   John Friend, who studied long and hard with B. K. S. Iyengar, and who labored long and hard to create and establish Anusara Yoga, a new kind of heart-centered practice, stepped down from his leadership role in 2012. Two years earlier The New York Times had proclaimed him the “Yoga Mogul.” Thousands of teachers and hundreds of thousands of people around the world practiced his style of yoga.

   A year later it was all gone, gone up in smoke. The yoga gear supplier Manduka got stuck with a warehouse full of John Friend-branded mats.

   Besides smoking a boatload of pot, which was illegal at the time, and slyly dipping into pension funds that weren’t his, which is still illegal, he slept his way through his closest female acolytes, married and otherwise. He dreamed up a Wiccan coven, calling it Blazing Star Flames, to keep things on the up and up, at least in his own mind. It was a kind of tantric dodge to explain himself.

   Tantric sexual expression is said to be a God-like weaving and expansion of energy creating a mind-body connection leading to powerful orgasms. If only we could be gods is the idea behind the idea.

   “On a chilly New Year’s Eve in 2009, John Friend—the popular and charismatic founder of Anusara Yoga—lay naked on a bearskin rug in front of a blazing fire at his home in Texas while three underwear-clad women hovered over him, massaging his body with sweetly scented oil,” Lizzie Crocker wrote in the Daily Beast. “One rubbed his head, neck, and shoulders, another worked on his hands, while a third rubbed his inner thighs and pelvic region, her whole body writhing sinuously to the new-age sitar melodies playing in the background.”

   The man himself didn’t see that what he did with his friend mates was anybody’s business. “The Anusara scandal to me was focused on my sex life,” John Friend said. “My sexual relationships with women were private and consensual in my eyes, but the community considered my private life as something that they should judge. So, it was like a 21st century social media witch trial, which judged me as being unfit to teach yoga.”

   Not everybody agreed. They wanted to say, save your breath to cool your soup. “Attending a yoga class where a teacher is generating bed-buddies while expounding on spiritual matters is like attending church only to find out the priest is bonking the altar boys,” said Kelly Morris, founder of Conquering Lion Yoga.

   Sometimes you have to change yoga teachers when they just rub you the wrong way. In the event, Anusara Yoga went by the boards. John Friend has since rebranded himself with another kind of alignment-based yoga called Sridaiva.

   Bikram Hot Yoga was the brainchild of Bikram Choudhury, born and bred in Kolkotta, and transplanted to Beverly Hills, where he founded the Yoga College of India. In time it became a big success. He claimed his one-size-fits-all system cured everything from arthritis to cancer, although the talk was largely snake oil. By 2006 there were 1,650 Bikram Yoga studios worldwide. He was training hundreds of teachers annually at $10,000 a pop for the privilege. There was no snake oil in his sign on the dotted line business model. He attempted to copyright the poses that constituted his modus operandi, but his claim was thrown out of court when the judge determined touching your toes wasn’t copyrightable.

   Bikram owned more than forty Bentley and Rolls Royce automobiles. He jet-setted with the beau monde. He toured Las Vegas, dressing like a gangster, and claiming to have testicles as big as “atomic bombs.” In 2013 it all started to unravel, when several women accused him of false imprisonment, sexual battery, and rape.

   In 2016 Bikram lost a civil lawsuit in California for sexual harassment and was fined $7.4 million. In response, he closed up shop, sold off everything he could, and went back to the sub-continent. The judge issued a warrant for the lothario, but to this day he’s going, going, gone. In an interview with ABC News Nightline’s David Wright, Bikram said, “I never hurt another spirit. I’m the most spiritual man you ever met in your life.”

   “You find out who your real friends are when you’re involved in a scandal,” said Elizabeth Taylor, who was involved in her fair share of them. During his reign of steam and sweat, many studio owners said they loved the 26-pose take-it-or-leave-it regimen, even though they were equivocal about the man on the platform, turning a blind eye and keeping the other eye on the bottom line.

   It was the king’s new clothes, outfitted in white silk suits and fedora. “If you look at his values and his lifestyle, there’s nothing spiritual about it. The cars and the watches and allowing people to fawn all over him, it’s disgusting,” said Stephanie Schestag, “He treated people like shit. But the truth was, he was like the Wizard of Oz. It was all a smokescreen.”

   When push came to shove, Bikram Choudhury found out he had few real friends. Most of the world’s Bikram Hot Yoga studios have either closed or changed their names to something else not-so-hot. His wife divorced him. It has even been rumored his gold Rolex found another wrist to call home. Sometimes it seems like only our dogs will never betray us.

   It can take a scandal, or two, or even a dozen, to bring about reform. Maybe yoga will be practicing what it preaches from here on out. It’s not rocket science. The culture isn’t corrupt, even though some of the culture’s icons were and are. Trying to get it right isn’t like trying to dam up Niagara Falls with toothpicks. It’s about living for a principle, not always trying to make yourself the principal of the gimmies and swinishness.

   Love of men, women, and humanity in general may be part and parcel of yoga practice, but not necessarily “gimme your lovin’ you sweet lookin’ thang.”

   One thing all the sex-crazed yoga masters of our times have had in common is they all claimed they were someway somehow the best divines and what they were doing was divining the sacred word, intent, and  purpose for the way we live today, for your greater good, especially if you are a babe in the woods. The hand of the man will show you the way out of the woods and down the garden path. The path can get thorny, though. Hero worship isn’t always everything it’s cracked up to be.

   “I’m breaking eggs to make an omelet because I see the big picture, and you don’t,” they all say, sly and sincere, straight-faced if not straight-laced, Tricky Dick’s to a man. It’s the classic refrain of self-styled masters of the universe, lady-killers one and all, but what can one say in the breach?

   All one can say is, don’t be a four-flusher. Don’t be a Donald. Stay in your lane bro’.

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. 

A New Thriller by Ed Staskus

“Cross Walk“

“A once upon a crime whodunit.” Barron Cannon, Adventure Books

“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. A Hell’s Kitchen private eye. The 1956 World Series. President Eisenhower at the opening game. A killer in the dugout.

Ebb Tide

Down to Sea Level

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   By Ed Staskus

   There was a window seat midway back in the Boeing 737. JT Markunas parked himself there. The plane looked old but smelled clean. It had been built in 1969 with an expected lifespan of 20 years. It was 20 years old in 1989 on the day JT buckled his seat belt. He was on the one daily Canadian Airlines flight from Ottawa, the capital of Canada, to Charlottetown, the capital of Prince Edward Island. Crossing over the eastern end of New Brunswick, he looked up from his Car and Driver magazine. He took a look through the porthole window at the crescent-shaped island in the distance. The land wasn’t small, but it wasn’t big, either. It was blanketed by snow. He had been told his new posting was mostly farm country. He wondered what it looked like from outer space.

   Seen from outer space Prince Edward Island can barely be seen. The solar system is a speck in the galaxy. The earth is a speck in the solar system. Prince Edward Island is a speck on the earth. When the sky is clear and the sun is shining it is a green and red speck under a dome of blue. When it is cloudy and stormy everything gets wet and gray until the sun comes back. It is the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Where he came from, which was Sudbury, Ontario, the sky was always either getting cloudy or it was already cloudy.

   The lay of the land formed hundreds of millions of years ago. Creeks and rivers deposited gravel, sand, and silt into what is the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. Before the last ice age, Prince Edward Island was part of the mainland. After the glaciers melted it wasn’t a part of it anymore. The Northumberland Strait became what separates it from the rest of Canada.

   The province is one of Canada’s Maritime provinces, the others being New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Newfoundland and Labrador are nearby but more on their own than not, which is the way they want it. There are 225 kilometers from one end of the island to the other. It is 3 kilometers at its most narrow and 65 kilometers at its most wide. It is twice as far as the Kulloo flies from the island to Walt Disney World in Florida as it is to the Arctic Circle. Walt Disney World is far away and for pretend. The Arctic Circle is nearby and for real.

  There are farms from stem to stern of Prince Edward Island. There are so many of them the province is called the “Million-Acre Farm.” Jacques Cartier discovered it in 1534 and Samuel Champlain claimed it for France in 1603. The French explorers called it Île Saint-Jean. When they landed the native Mi’kmaq’s tried to explain they had been there for thousands of years, but all they got for their trouble was wasting their breath. They switched gears and tried singing some of their Top 10 songs. They sang “The Eagle Song” and “The Honor Song” and “The Gathering Song.” They accompanied themselves on rattles and hand drums.

   “Try singing a different tune,” Samuel Champlain finally said. “I’ll teach you the words.” He meant for them to sing “The Giveaway Song.” The Mi’kmaq glared and reached for their bows and arrows. The French strapped on armor and reached for their swords. They were more savage than the savages and knew how to prove it. The natives grumbled to themselves and drifted away. They thought they could make it right later. They were wrong about later.

   Kulloo could have set them straight, but he didn’t. He spoke in riddles, anyway. Hardly anybody ever understood his riddles. Over the centuries it had gotten so he held his tongue more often than not. He didn’t believe in explaining himself, anyway. He believed, being terse, say it once, why say it again? No matter what the  Mi’kmaq’s thought he was, or meant to them, he was a lone wolf. He was big enough to hook a grown man with his talons and carry him away. If push came to shove, and the man couldn’t explain himself, Kulloo was strong and predatory enough to eat him. Men were his least favorite meal, being bitter and hidebound, bur he was never going to shortchange himself dinner.

   He was at least a millennium old. Nobody knew how old he really was, not even Kulloo himself. The day he saw Jacques Cartier’s two ships come from France in 1534 he didn’t know what century it was. He lived by the seasons and the rotation of the stars. The ships and their crewmen piqued his interest. The Mi’kmaq had small boats that hugged the coastline. The big sailing boats had come from the other world, from the other side of the ocean. Kulloo had gotten word about that world long ago, but had never seen it. He suspected the Old World was intent on making the New World their world. He thought it  best to take a closer look to see where he stood.

   When the British took control of Canada East they changed the name of the island from what the French had called it to St. John’s, then changed it to New Ireland, and again on the eve of the 19th century to Prince Edward Island. It was named after Prince Edward, who later became the father of Queen Victoria. He was beguiled by the island, even though he proposed transferring sovereignty of it to Nova Scotia. He visited his namesake five times. The journey took almost a month to sail one way. 

   It became a separate colony in 1769 and the seventh province of Canada in 1873. Charlottetown was named after the wife of King George III. Queen Charlotte barely spoke a word of English and never visited the capital city. She stayed home in Buckingham House and played her harpsichord. She liked chartbusters like Bach’s “Concerto in the Italian Style in F Major” and Handel’s “Keyboard Suite No. 5.”

   “She ain’t no beauty, but she is amiable,” King George said about his wife. Queen Charlotte smiled slyly. She played “By the Light of the Moon” on her harpsichord for the man of the house.  It was a lullaby. King George took a nap in his queen’s lap.

   The province is the smallest and most densely populated Canadian province, although outside of Charlottetown and Summerside, where half of everybody lives, the habitants and their communities are spread far and wide. Most of everything is in the way of out of the way. Forests once covered the island. Trees still covered half of it. The red oak is the provincial tree. There are pine, beech, and spruce. There are no deer, moose, or black bears. There are rabbits and skunks, muskrats, and plenty of foxes. The red fox is the provincial poster boy. In early summer pink and purple lupins, weeds that are an invasive species, line fields and ditches. The Lady Slipper, an out-of-the-way orchid that grows in shady woodlands, is the provincial flower.

   JT was looking out the porthole window when he saw Kulloo. The bird was bigger than an albatross and more stern-looking than an eagle. If it was sowing the wind it was going to reap a whirlwind. The plane was cruising like it had been for the last hour-and-a-half. The big bird was keeping pace with the plane off the tip of the wing. JT rubbed his eyes and looked again. It was still there, soaring. He scanned the aircraft cabin. Some passengers were reading while others napped. Nobody was looking out at the wide blue yonder. When JT blinked the bird was gone. When he blinked again it was back.

   Farming is the number one way of life on the island, followed by the enterprises of fishing and fish mongering. There are a wealth of fields full of potatoes, grains, and fruits. There are cows everywhere, their snouts in the turf, waiting to be milked or slaughtered. There are boatloads of mussels, oysters, and lobsters to be had. Cod had been overfished to near extinction. There was talk of importing it from Iceland.

   Tourism was growing and Liam Foyle and his Japanese girlfriend Mariko were building cottages on family land in North Rustico to get in on the summer trade. In the meantime, they stayed at Sandy’s Surfside Inn most of the time. It was on the Gulf Shore Parkway. It was on the park road but not in the National Park. They had never sold their land. His brother Conor was his only neighbor. Liam and Conor were Kieran Foyle’s descendants, more than a hundred years after the Irish triggerman from the Old World landed in the New World, his Beaumont-Adams revolver tucked into a sailor’s bag. 

   In 1989 the pickings were good for the Liberals. They swept the elections. Andrew, the new Duke of York, and Fergie, his wife and Duchess, visited, flying in on a Canadian Armed Forces jetliner. George Proud, one of the new Liberal members of the province’s parliament, stood on a bench for a better view of the royals as they were driven up University Ave. “We’re the commoners, and they’re royalty, and I think people in a strange way must secretly like that,” he said. 

   “It’s a great day,” declared John Ready, the mayor of Charlottetown. Not everybody agreed. A woman in the crowd groused, “I was talking to a friend this morning who said, ‘I don’t know why we should have to curtsy to a person who a few years ago was living with a race-car driver.’” During the parade the Duchess climbed over a rope barrier to talk to a group of senior citizens. “What are these ropes for?” she asked. “I can’t believe you’re penned in.” The senior citizens were polite but baffled.

   Scouts Canada held their annual jamboree on the island that summer, honing their outdoor skills and running riot in the woods. The TV series “Road to Avonlea” went into production. The last train on Prince Edward Island made its last run, coming to a dead stop in living time. The tip-to-tip railway had been operating for one hundred years. The minute the clock struck the century mark it was done for good.

   Poison’s “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” was the top song on the radio. Malcolm “Monk” Kennedy was a thorn on the island that year, but nobody knew it until the Boy Scouts had all gone home. They were always prepared, it being the scouting motto, but nobody was prepared for Monk. Nobody was prepared for Jules Gagnon and Louise Barboza, either. They were hired guns from Montreal who came to the island looking for Monk and two million missing dollars.

   Jules and Louise were good as gold at what they did, but didn’t know they were going to end up paddling upstream to get their work done. Monk didn’t know two million dollars was going to be so hard to spend. They didn’t like the stumbling blocks in their way, but by then they had picked their poison. The Hunter River was going to flow through North Rustico and out to the ocean, no matter what. They were going to have to find that out for themselves. They weren’t prisoners of fate. They were prisoners of their own minds. Monk couldn’t change his mind, no matter what. Jules and Louise wouldn’t change their minds, no matter what.

   Kulloo peeled away from the Boeing 737 and swooped landward. He saw Louie the Large near the coastline. Hunkered down on a rock shelf not far from shore, the big shellfish was sizing up Monk, Jules, and Louise. Monk was scrawny. He was off the dinner table unless there was a famine. Jules looked better. He had some meat on his bones. Louise looked the best. He wouldn’t mind getting his claws into her, not at all. They shared a name. He liked that. He would like it even better if they shared some flesh and blood.

   Louie the Large loved the ocean, deep and blue, the tides rising and falling. It was where all life came from. He understood the primal fear men and women had of it, which he encouraged with every click clack of his crusher claws. He knew Kulloo was laying low overhead. He kept one eye open for him. He knew all about the bird. He was dangerous as a switchblade. He knew the creature never slept and woke up every morning dangerous as ever. Everything on land and sea was fair game to him.

   JT looked out the porthole window again, as the plane started its approach to the Charlottetown Airport, and saw that the bird was gone. He didn’t think he had imagined it. He wasn’t a fanciful man. He prided himself on thinking straight. He wasn’t especially impulsive or emotional, although he had been in love once and knew he could be as irrational and emotional as anybody. He didn’t believe any bird could be that big and that fast. It must have been a mirage of some kind, like in the movies. 

   He checked his seat belt to make sure it was snug. He looked down at the sea level he was going down to. Five minutes later he was landing on the Atlantic Canada land that was going to be his new RCMP posting.

Excerpted from “Ebb Tide.”

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. 

“Ebb Tide” by Ed Staskus

“A thriller in the Maritimes, out of the past, a double cross, and a fight to the finish.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

Available at Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CV9MRG55

Summer, 1989. A small town on Prince Edward Island. Mob money on the move gone missing. Two hired guns from Montreal. A constable working the back roads stands in the way.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Cross Walk

Cheap Seats

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By Ed Staskus

   It was hot and humid all up and down the east coast. It was hotter and more humid in Hell’s Kitchen. It was in the 90s and sluggish as an old bayou. The heat was trapping humidity in the air. It didn’t matter to Dottie Riddman. She was playing stickball in the street. That was all that mattered.

   The street wasn’t West 56th, which was her street. Her father had told her to never play stickball on their own street. The fronts of buildings were ruled home runs in the game of stickball. Stan Riddman didn’t want any broken windows near where they lived. Dottie and her friends always played on West 55th or West 57th.  She wasn’t about to break into a sweat about it.

   A boy bigger than her teased her about it the beginning of summer, knocking her over and pushing her to the ground. “You always do everything your old man tells you to do, boobie?” he said, straddling her with his legs. From where she lay he looked like Godzilla. “You going to wear that trainer of yours the rest of your life?” he asked, looking at her boobies.

   Dottie had her broom stick in her hands. She had moxie in her eyes. Looking up from the gutter she whacked him as hard as she could between his legs. When the boy’s father showed up at their apartment that night to complain that his son might never grow up to be a father, her father threw the man out, dragging him down the stairs by the collar, threatening him and his son with bodily harm if they ever laid hands on his daughter again.

   “You think I’m fooling, look up my police record,” he yelled, red in the face, inches from the  ashy face of the sputtering father when they were on the sidewalk. “Go back to where you came from.” He calmed down in an instant the instant he was back in the house. He jogged upstairs and sat his daughter down.

   “You did the right thing Dottie,” Stan said. “If somebody says something rotten to you, be a lady about it. Be the bigger man. But if somebody pushes you, or grabs you, or hits you, you hit them back as hard as you can. You always do that. That’s so they won’t push you again.”

   “OK, dad,” she said.

   It was a good day for stickball. Ten kids showed up, some her age, some younger. They picked their teams. Willy, her friend from Sacred Heart of Jesus Catholic School, brought a new pinky ball. It wasn’t a Pensy, either. It was the cream of the crop. It was a Spalding Hi-Bounce.

   “Spaldeen!”

   They drew a rectangle in chalk on the brick wall at the back of an empty lot on West 55th to represent the strike zone. The buildings on both sides were the foul lines. They chalked first base and third base onto the building walls and second base was a manhole on the sidewalk. If a batted ball hit any of the buildings across the street, it was a home run. If it hit a roof it was a home run-and-a-half. If it hit a window they ran like jackrabbits.

   “There ain’t no runs-and-a-half,” a kid from Chelsea, who was visiting his cousins, sneered, shooting his mouth off.

   “If you’re going to play stickball on West 55th, you better learn Hell’s Kitchen rules,” gibed Willy.

   Dottie was batter up. She smacked a hot grounder, but it was caught on the first bounce, and she was out. Willy got as far as third base, but three strikes and you’re out finished their inning. By the time they came back up in the second inning they were behind by five runs. It wasn’t looking good for the home team.

   “All right, all right, let’s pick it up, let’s get some roofies,” Willy yelled clapping his hands, urging his team on. “But chips on the ball. I mean it.” He meant that if his new Spaldeen was roofed, and couldn’t be found, everybody would chip in to pay for a new ball.

   Hal came up to the plate, wagging his broom handle menacingly, and planted his high-top rubber soled Keds firmly in the hot squishy asphalt. They were new and felt like Saturday shoes. His batted ball hit the side wall at third base where the wall met the ground and bounced back to home plate in a high slow arc.

   “It’s a Hindoo,” he shouted.

   “No, that ain’t a do-over, it’s a foul ball, so it’s a strike,” shouted back Dave Carter, who everyone called Rusty because his hair was red.

   “What do you know?”

   “I know what I gotta know.”

   “Go see where you gotta go,” Hal retorted.

   “No, you stop wasting my time,” Rusty said. “It was a foul ball.”

   “Ah, go play your stoopball,” Hal said, peeved.

   Stoopball was throwing a pinky against the steps of a stoop, and then catching it, either on the fly or on a bounce. Catching the ball was worth 10 points. Catching a pointer on the fly was worth 100 points. A pointer was when the ball hit the edge of a step and flew back like a line drive, threatening to take your eye out. When you played stoopball, you played against yourself.

   “You got a lotta skeeve wichoo,” Rusty yelled back at Hal.

   “All right, already, strike one,” said Willy, exasperated.

   He knew Rusty would never give in. He was a weisenheimer. He was somebody you had to keep your eyes on, too, or your Spaldeen might grow legs. It wasn’t that Rusty was a thief. He just kept his nickels in his pocket, and everything else, too. Willy had heard he was such a tightwad he still had his communion money from two years ago. Rusty had been born in Philadelphia. That was his problem. Willy sympathized, not too much, but slightly.

   Hal hit a cheap on the next pitch, a slow roller, but when Rusty let his guard down, reaching down leisurely for the Spaldeen, it went between his legs, and the next instant Hal was standing at first base, smirking.

   “Comeback stickball,” he shouted at Rusty. “Our game.” Eleven batters later Dottie’s team was on the plus side of the scoreboard. Rusty was beside himself. He  wasn’t going to complain, but he could have spit.

   The woman sitting on the stoop across the street, watching her windows, watched Dottie and her friends walk down the sidewalk when the game was over, one of them bouncing his pinky, all of them talking happily.

   “We killed them, just killed them,” Willy said.

   “We sure did,” Hal said.

   “What a game!” Dottie said.

   “Yeah, we were down, then you put some Chinese on that ball between Rusty’s legs, they got rattled, and then we score a boatload just like that, and it’s all over.”

   “Did you see him, the putz, pulling that long face?” Hal asked.

   “Oh, he’ll be back, no biggie, he loves playing on the street,” Dottie said.

   Dottie was beyond glad her team had fought hard and won. They scrapped for every run. It was worth it. She didn’t mind losing once in a while, but she liked winning better. She stripped off her sweaty clothes, rubbed down with a cool sponge, and put on a fresh pair of shorts and a t-shirt.  

   She put her broom stick away in a corner beside her bedroom window. In the summer she loved her friends, no matter what team they were on, and loved playing stickball with them more than anything in the world. When it was wet and cold, and the wind was windy, the pinky and chalk and sticks all stashed away, and they were clambaking the grapevine, the talk always made its way back to playing ball. It was the way of their world.

Excerpted from the crime novel “Cross Walk.”

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. 

A New Thriller by Ed Staskus

“Cross Walk“

“A once upon a crime whodunit.” Barron Cannon, Adventure Books

“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. A Hell’s Kitchen private eye. The 1956 World Series. President Eisenhower at the opening game. A killer in the dugout.