Category Archives: Home Movies

Rocket From the Tombs

September 1, 2023 Edward Staskus Leave a comment

By Ed Staskus

It was sometime during the Me Decade that I discovered I was poor as a church mouse. I owned lots of dog-eared books, some clothes, and a car I didn’t dare drive. I didn’t own an alarm clock. I didn’t have any money in the bank because I didn’t have a bank account. I was living at the Plaza Apartments on Prospect Ave., where the rent was more than reasonable. I got by doing odd jobs and taking advantage of opportunities, although I was far from being a capitalist.

The Plaza was in a neighborhood called Upper Prospect. There were about thirty architecturally and historically significant buildings there, built between 1838 and 1929. The Plaza was one of the buildings. Upper Prospect had long benefitted from Ohio’s first streetcar line that connected it to the downtown business district. Those days were long gone.

In the 1870s Prospect Ave. advanced past Erie St., which is now E. 9^th St., and kept going until it reached E. 55^th St. That’s where it stopped. “Lower Prospect, closer into downtown, went commercial long ago, but Upper Prospect stayed residential longer,” says Bill Barrow, historian at the Michael Schwartz Library at Cleveland State University. Lower Prospect is where lots of downtown entertainment is now, including Rocket Arena, where the Cleveland Cavs follow the bouncing ball, and the House of Blues, where music fans have a ball.

The Winton Hotel was built in 1916 on the far side of E. 9^th St. It was nothing if not grand. It was renamed the Carter Hotel in 1931, suffered a major fire in the 1960s, but was renovated and renamed Carter Manor. I never set foot in it. The Ohio Bell Building went up in the 1920s before the Terminal Tower on Public Square was built. When it was finished it became the tallest structure in the city. I never set foot in it, either. It was the building that Cleveland’s teenaged creators of Superman had the Man of Steel leap over in a single bound. The cartoon strip first appeared in their Glenville High School student newspaper, which was the Daily Planet.

Before Superman ever got his nickname, the first Man of Steel was Doc Savage. There were dozens of the adventure books written by Lester Dent. When I was a child I read every one I could get my hands on. Doc Savage always saved the day. Nothing ever slowed him down, not kryptonite, not anything.

In the 1970s Prospect Ave. wasn’t a place where anybody wanted to raise children. Nobody even wanted to visit the place with their children in tow. The street was littered with trash, dive bars, hookers, and bookstores like the Blue Bijou. There was heroin in the shadows and plasma centers that opened first thing in the morning. The junkies knew all about needles and got paid in cash for their plasma donations.

The Plaza was around 70 years old when I moved in. There was ivy on the brick walls and shade trees in the courtyard. There were day laborers, retirees, college students, latter day beatniks, scruffy hippies, artists, musicians, and some no-goods living there. “The people who lived in the building during my days there helped shaped my artistic and moral being,” Joanie Deveney said. “We drank and partied, but our endeavors were true, sincere, and full of learning.” Everybody called her Joan of Art.

Not everybody was an artist or musician. “But anybody could try to be,” Rich Clark said. “We were bartenders and beauticians and bookstore clerks with something to say. There was an abiding respect for self-expression. We encouraged each other to try new things and people dabbled in different forms. Poets painted, painters made music, and musicians wrote fiction.”

The avant-garage band Pere Ubu called it home. Their synch player Allen Ravenstine owned the building with his partner Dave Bloomquist. “I was a kid from the suburbs,” Allen said. “When we bought the building in the red-light district in 1969, we did everything from paint to carpentry. We tried to restore it unit by unit.”

The restoration work went on during the day. The parties went on during the night. They went on long into the night. “I remember coming home at four in the morning,” Larry Collins said. “There would be people in the courtyard drinking beer and playing music. We watched the hookers and the customers play hide-and-seek with undercover vice cops. In the morning, I would wake up to see a huge line of locals waiting in line in front of the plasma center.”

When I lived there, I attended Cleveland State University on and off, stayed fit by walking since my car was unfit, and hung around with my friends. Most of us didn’t have TV’s. We entertained ourselves. I worked for Minuteman whenever I absolutely had to. The jobs I got through them were the lowest-paying worse jobs on the face of the planet, but beggars can’t be choosers.

I spent a couple of weeks on pest control, crawling into and out of tight spaces searching for rats, roaches, and termites. My job was to kill them with poison. The bugs ran and hid when they saw me coming. I tried to not breathe in the white mist. I spent a couple of days roofing, hoping to not fall off sloping elevated surfaces that were far hotter than the reported temperature of the day. The work was mostly unskilled, which suited me, but I got to hate high places. My land legs were what kept me upright. I didn’t want to fall off a roof and break either one of them

I passed the day one summer day jack hammering, quitting near the end of my shift. I thought the jack hammer was trying to kill me. “If you don’t go back, don’t bother coming back here,” the Minuteman boss told me. “Take a hike, pal,” I said, walking out. I wasn’t worried about alienating the temporary labor agency. Somebody was always hiring somebody to do the dirty work.

The Plaza was four stories tall and a basement below, a high and low world. Some of the residents were lazy as bags of baloney while others were hard-working. Some didn’t think farther ahead than their next breath while others thought life was a Lego world for the making. There was plenty in sight to catch one’s eye.

“I had a basement apartment in the front,” Nancy Prudic said. “The junkies sat on the ledge and partied all night long. But the Plaza was a confluence of creative minds from many fields. It was our own little world. Besides artists, there were architects and urban planners.”

Pete Laughner was a hard-working musician. He was from Bay Village, an upper middle class suburb west of Cleveland. He wrote songs, sang, and played guitar. He was “the single biggest catalyst in the birth of Cleveland’s alternative rock scene in the mid-1970s,” Richard Unterberger said. He led the bands Friction and Cinderella Backstreet. He co-founded Rocket from the Tombs. “They were a mutant papa to punk rock as well as spawning a number of famous and infamous talents, all packed into one band,” Dave Thomas said. After the Rockets crashed and burned, Pete teamed with Dave to form Pere Ubu.

Dave Thomas was nicknamed the Crocus Behemoth because he was ornery and overweight. He went against the grain by occasionally performing in a suit. He was a tenor who sometimes sang and others times muttered, whistled, and barked. “If nobody likes what you do, and nobody is ever going to like what you do, and you’ll never be seen by anyone, you do what you want to do,” he said. He commandeered the street in front of the Plaza for middle of the day open air concerts. “He never let the lack of any musical training get in his way,” said Tony Maimone, Pere Ubu’s bass player.

Pere Ubu’s debut pay-to-get-in show was at the Viking Saloon in late 1975. Their flyer said, “New Year’s Eve at the Viking. Another Go-damn Night. Another year for me and you, another year with nothing to do.” Pete had a different take on it. “We’re pointing toward the music of the 80s.”

When he wasn’t making his stand on a riser, Pete was writing about rock and roll for Creem, a new monthly music magazine which was as sincere and irreverent as his guitar playing. The magazine coined the term “punk rock” in 1971. “Creem nailed it in a way that nobody else did,” said Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth.

Pete played with the Mr. Stress Blues Band in 1972 when he was 20 years old. They played every Friday and Saturday at the Brick Cottage. Mr. Stress called the squat building at Euclid Ave. and Ford Rd. the “Sick Brick.” When he did everybody called for another round. Monique, the one and only bartender, ran around like a madwoman. “The more you drink, the better we sound,” Mr. Stress said and picked up his mouth organ.

The harmonica man was a TV repairman by day. The lanky Pete was in disrepair both day and night. He wasn’t a part-time anything. He wasn’t like other sidemen. His guitar playing was raw and jagged. While the band was doing one thing, he seemed to be doing another thing.

“He only ever had three guitar lessons,” his mother said. Pete was in bands by his mid-teens. “He was my boyfriend when we were 15,” Kathy Hudson said. “He still had his braces. He was with the Fifth Edition. They were playing at the Bay Way one time and he wanted them to bust up their equipment like The Who. The others weren’t down with it.”

“He was so energetic and driven, but his energy couldn’t be regulated,” said Schmidt Horning, who played in the Akron band Chi Pig. “It could make it hard to play with him. He was so anxious and wouldn’t take a methodical approach.”

Charlotte Pressler was the woman Pete married. “From 1968 to 1975 a small group of people were evolving styles of music that would, much later, come to be called ‘New Wave’. But the whole system of New Wave interconnections which made it possible for every second person on Manhattan’s Lower East Side to become a star did not exist in Cleveland,” she said. “There were no stars in Cleveland. Nobody cared what they were doing. If they did anything at all, they did it for themselves. They adapted to those conditions in different ways. Some are famous. Some are still struggling. One is dead, my Pete.”

Not long before everything fell apart Pete stepped into a photo booth in the Cleveland Arcade, one of the earliest indoor shopping arcades in the United States. He was wearing a black leather jacket and looked exhausted. His eyes had the life of broken glass in them. He sent the pictures and a note to a friend. “Having a wonderful time. Hope you never find yourself here.”

He played his kind of music at Pirate’s Cove in the Flats, along with Devo and the Dead Boys. “We’re trying to go beyond those bands like the James Gang and the Raspberries, drawing on the industrial energy here,” Pete said. He played at the Viking Saloon, not far from the Greyhound station, until it burned down in 1976. Dave Thomas was a bouncer there, keeping law and order more than just an idle threat. He wasn’t the Crocus Behemoth for nothing.

“I’m drinking myself to death,” Pete wrote to a friend of his in 1976. “No band, no job, running out of friends. It’s easy, you start upon waking with Bloody Mary’s and beer, then progress through the afternoon to martinis, and finally cognac or Pernod. When I decided I wanted to quit I simply bought a lot of speed and took it and then drank only about a case of beer a day, until one day I woke up and knew something was wrong, very wrong. I couldn’t drink. I couldn’t eat. And then the pain started, slowly like a rat eating at my guts until I couldn’t stand it anymore and was admitted to the hospital.”

The rat was pancreatitis. If you lose a shoe at midnight you’re drunk. Pete lost shoes like other people lost socks in the dryer. He didn’t need any shoes however, where he was going. It was the beginning of the end of him. It didn’t take long. He wouldn’t or couldn’t listen to his doctor’s orders. He went back to his old pal, which was booze.

“Pete could do whatever he wanted to do,” said Tony Mamione. “He was instrumental in crafting the Pere Ubu sound, but, even at such an early age, had a deep understanding of all kinds of music.” Tony and Pete met when they lived across the hall from each other on the third floor of the Plaza Apartments. “I had just moved in and would play my bass and Pete heard it through the walls and knocked on my door. We started talking and he went back and grabbed his guitar and some beer, and we started jamming right away.”

Pete was as good if not better on the piano than the guitar, even though the guitar was his tried and true. One day he found a serviceable piano at a bargain price and bought it. He and Tony picked it up to take back to the Plaza. “Here I was driving his green Chevy van down Cedar Ave. and there he was in the back of the van rocking out on the piano,” Tony said. “He was so special, a pure musician.” After they dragged, muscled, and coaxed the piano up to the third floor, they had some beers and the next jam session started.

“I want to do for Cleveland what Brian Wilson did for California and Lou Reed did for New York,” Pete said in 1974. “I’m the guy between the Fender and the Gibson. I want a crowd that knows a little bit of the difference between the sky and the street. It’s all those kids out there standing at the bar, talking trash, waiting for an anthem.”

They would have to wait for somebody else. Pete Laughner died in 1977 a month before his 25^th birthday. He was one year younger than me when he met his maker. He didn’t die at the Plaza Apartments. Neither of us was there anymore. He died in his sleep at his parent’s home in Bay Village. There’s nowhere to fall when your back is against the wall, except maybe where you got up on your feet in the first place.

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.

Home Movies

Maybe Later Baby

May 1, 2023 Edward Staskus Leave a comment

By Ed Staskus

“The end is always near,” Greg Smith said, sinking back into the firm as Jell-O bench seat. Flying bugs recently alive littered our windshield. One of them left a big yellow blob behind him the instant he hit the glass. It was a fine summer day. Jimi Hendrix’s song “Stone Free” was playing on the car radio.

Greg’s driving hand was easy on the steering wheel. His other hand was wiggling in the outside air. He was driving well enough to keep us on the road, but his eyes were like pinwheels. The magic mushroom he had popped into his mouth a half hour earlier was working its magic. I couldn’t tell him to slow down because he was going slower than a horse-drawn buggy. I reached for the seatbelt, anyway. When I did I found out the top drop Chevrolet Impala SS didn’t have seatbelts.

I had taken a Greyhound bus from Cleveland down the hillbilly highway and hooked up with my friend Greg in Athens. It wasn’t Greece. It was southern Ohio in the northern Appalachians. I called him Jonesy for fun, even though he didn’t think it was funny. “I don’t like glibness,” he complained like an offended grade school teacher.

SS stood for Super Sport. There was nothing super about the car anymore, which came off the assembly line in 1961, except for the engine. It was still super when it had to be. The rocker panels were rusting out, the front of the hood was gashed, and the tires were bald as baloney skins. The car was Roman Red on the outside while the interior was scuffed black leather. I reached for the grab bar attached to the padded dashboard.

“Do you know this car was built by union labor right here in the United States?” Greg asked, apropos of the Japanese and German cars we had been seeing here and there.

“No, I didn’t know that,” I said.

“It’s got a V-8 engine. One of my uncles might have built it.”

“Is that right? By the way, what do you mean the end is always near?”

“Like they say,” he said, “the future’s uncertain and the end is always near.”

At the moment the Chevy Impala SS was running on one of the V-8’s and none of Greg’s car-making relatives were in sight. What was in sight was the future. There was a flashing red light behind us. It was the kind of light that always looks makes you feel blue. The Meigs County policeman didn’t have any trouble getting on our tail. He had some trouble pulling us over, however, even though the road was straight and narrow as a preacher. The manual steering took several turns of the steering wheel to go from lock to lock. In the state he was in it took Greg a few minutes and a mile-or-so to master the mechanics of pulling off onto the shoulder.

The policeman didn’t bother asking for his driver’s license. “Step out of the car, son, and let me smell your breath,” he said.

Greg didn’t like being called son. He scowled patting himself down for his wallet. He huffed and puffed in the policeman’s direction.

“You smell all right,” the policeman said. “It don’t seem like you been drinking or smoking stinkweed.” The Chevy had a vacuum powered ash tray that sucked ashes to a container in the trunk. “Why are you going so slow when you got that power horse under the hood?”

“I know this road doesn’t go anywhere but I’m looking for the end of it,” Greg said. “I don’t want to miss it.” The policeman wasn’t fazed by the nonsense. “It don’t go nowhere but it always brings you back again,” he said. Greg was flummoxed for a minute. The policeman looked the Chevy Impala SS up and down. “This is the car the Beach Boys wrote a song about, son.”

The song was a big hit in its day. “Nobody can catch her, nothing can touch my 409, giddy up, giddy up, my four speed dual quad 409,” Brian Wilson sang in his big falsetto while the rest of the boys layered the harmonies. The fired-up 409 was fitted with a 4-barrel carburetor and a solid lifter camshaft. The pistons were made from forged aluminum. The heads and engine block were made from cast-iron.

“Those were the days, boys. Make no mistake, that Impala is a real fine car. Try to put some giddy up into your driving. And keep it on the yellow line.” He got back into his black and white Dodge Coronet patrol car and u-turned, going the way he had come. He drove away in good order.

I was along for the ride on Greg’s ride that day. I had spent the spring, summer, and fall of the previous year in a nearby town called Carpenter living with Virginia Sustarsic in an abandoned general store. She wasn’t my girlfriend, but we got along, even though she was a dyed in the wool hippie and I wasn’t. She rolled her homegrown delicately and deliberately. We kept two goats, gleaned plenty of food, and brewed our own beer. I drank most of the beer. A stray kitten made us his crash pad. The town wasn’t a town so much as a whistle stop. The railroad had long since abandoned the place, though. There were maybe a dozen residents, including us. There were dust balls in all the corners of the crossroad. At night every star in the universe twinkled in the nighttime sky.

Carpenter was in Meigs County. It was named after Return Meigs, Jr., who was the fourth governor of Ohio. The county is on the Appalachian Plateau in the southeast corner of the state. The Shade River and Leading Creek drain into the Ohio River. Leading Creek ran right through Carpenter. In the 1970s the county’s population was less than 20,000. As far as I could tell there were no Asians, Native Americans, or African Americans anywhere. There were trailer trash on every other hillside.

Greg was a friend of John McGraw’s, who was Virginia’s on-again off-again boyfriend back home. They both lived on the bohemian near east side of downtown, near Cleveland State University. John was a part-time writer and drank whiskey straight from the bottle. Greg came from a more polite class and drank from a glass. He and John had planned on sight-seeing Meigs County, but at the last minute John bowed out. Greg went anyway, cruising all the way from one end of the state to the other in his big Chevy SS.

Virginia dressed like it was still the Summer of Love while John more like the Age of Beatniks had never ended. Greg wasn’t any better off than them, living half on and half off the American Dream, but he dressed like a preppy. He read the classics. He was studying Latin so he could read Ovid and Seneca in the original. Nobody ever suspected he kept magic mushrooms in his wallet.

Something came over him the minute the policeman was out of sight. He fired up the Chevy SS. He spun gravel getting back on the asphalt. The next minute we were doing eighty in a forty. The Doobie Brothers came on the radio belting out “Rockin’ Down the Highway.” I took a peek in the rearview. There was nobody behind us. I looked through the windshield at what was in front of us. All the danger was in front of us.

“We should maybe slow down,” I calmly suggested as loud as I could.

The Chevy SS was a four on the floor. She wasn’t good on gas and burned some oil. Greg picked up speed. We were doing a hundred in no time. There were no more gears to shift up into. His eyes weren’t pinwheels anymore. They glinted like icepicks. He leaned over the steering wheel. The car wasn’t sloppy, nor was Greg’s handling of it sloppy, but we were headed for trouble. We were blasting down a back road. It was cracked and rough and more gravel than not. Meigs County didn’t have the tax base to keep its roads in any kind of Daytona 500 shape.

“I’m not asking for a miracle, Lord, just a little bit of luck will do,” I whispered.

“Every minute counts,” Greg shouted above the wind noise.

“Keep your eyes on the road,” I shouted back. “You never can tell what’s around the corner.”

He waved at the outdoors with his left arm. Southeastern Ohio on a sunny day in the summer is beautiful. When we roared around a blind curve there wasn’t anything there, to my relief, until there suddenly was. It was a roadhouse with some cars and pick-ups in the front, which was a small parking lot full of potholes. The sign said Frank’s Roadhouse. There were worn-out antlers nailed to the outside wall above the front windows. We pulled in, skidding in three or four different directions. A long-tailed weasel ran the other way. There were half a dozen bungalows in the back.

Inside there was a bar, a kitchen, some tables, a dance floor, a riser protected by chicken wire, and a pool table. A man and a woman were having mashed potatoes with pulled pork at one of the tables. A bottle of BBQ sauce stood at the ready between their plates. There was some action going on at the pool table but none on the dance floor. Before I knew it Greg had found unexpected action at the bar, where a cute brunette was sitting, a lowball glass half full of red wine at her elbow and a paperback book in front of her.

There was an oblong mirror on the wall behind the bar. It was too smudged to see into. There was a hand-written warning on a greasy piece of cardboard below it. It said, “Don’t eat the big white mint!” I didn’t ask what it meant. I didn’t want to know. What’s a simple man to do? I looked around for something to do. I put a dollar on the lip of the pool table marking my turn in line. There were two men playing nine ball. It was the middle of the day on a Thursday. Neither of them was on union soil. Neither of them was being especially efficient. There were seven or eight bottles of Burger Beer on a small round table behind them.

One of the men looked me up and down. “I’m a pretty big man around these parts,” he said, flashing a Mighty Mouse grin. He had sharp yellow teeth. He was shorter than me, but I knew what he meant. “I thought you’d be bigger,” I said. He didn’t laugh. He had the sense of humor of a circus strongman. The other man laughed his head off. My man broke the rack. He was no Minnesota Fats. When my turn came I ran the rack and took my dollar back. I collected a dollar from the local yokel. He tried his luck two more times and paid me two more dollars. He didn’t know, and I didn’t tell him, that I spent more time than I wanted to admit, even to myself, shooting snooker at Joe Tuma’s Pool Hall back in Cleveland.

I bought them both beers, they clapped me on the back, the circus strongman harder than he needed to, and I went back to the bar, joining my friend and his new friend. He wasn’t paying any attention to her book. He gave me a wink, suggesting the main drag from the eye to the heart doesn’t go through the intellect, or words to that effect.

Her name was Annie. She was a third-year student at Ohio University in Athens, 20-some miles to the northwest of where we were. She was majoring in English. She wasn’t enrolled in classes that summer but had stayed in Athens instead of going home to Cincinnati. She spent her spare time exploring. She had found Frank’s Roadhouse by accident, liked the looks of it, and stopped in for the afternoon.

“What do you like about this dump?” I asked.

“It looks real,” she said.

I was willing to grant her that. When the bartender approached I ordered a Vernors Ginger Soda. Between the earlier psychedelics and shots of roadhouse whiskey stirring up my tour guide, I knew one of us had to stay on the wagon.

“Who is Frank,” I asked the bartender.

“There ain’t no Frank, at least not no more,” he said.

“What happened to him?”

“Nobody knows,” he said.

The middle of nowhere is as good a place to disappear as any.

I reminded Greg we had promised our farmhouse friends where we were staying we would stop at the grocery store in Pomeroy and pick up milk, cheese, and toilet paper. Toilet paper was like gold where they lived. Greg’s eyes had gone soft and fuzzy in the meantime. He needed reminding. I had to remind him twice. He finally slid off the bar stool glowing like a full moon in a clear sky.

Annie followed us out to the Chevy SS. “I like your car,” she said. Greg asked her if she wanted a ride back to college town. She pointed to a VW Beetle. “Fontasse postem infantem,” she said, jotting her name and phone number down on a scrap of paper. She pressed it into his open hand. She rose up on her tiptoes and gave him a kiss on the cheek. I never saw a man go head over heels as fast as he did that day.

Once we were in the car, humming along Route 143 on our way to Pomeroy, I asked him what Annie had said.

“Maybe later baby,” he said. “That’s what she said.”

The Milky Way was in his eyes. “Keep your eyes on the road and your hands on the wheel,” I reminded him for the last time. I didn’t have to remind him to keep his hands off the magic mushrooms in his wallet. He was riding high on a different kind of magic. Love may not make the world go round, although it can make the ride around the world more worthwhile.

Photograph by Elaine Mayes.

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.

Home Movies

Stand and Deliver

December 1, 2022 Edward Staskus 1 Comment

By Ed Staskus

The law office’s front door was meant to be a ten-thousand-dollar door, but I got lucky, and got in and out for only two hundred fifty dollars. I never went back. One shake down is more than enough. I found out the door was the entrance to a dog and pony show. There weren’t that many apples on my tree that I could afford to give bushels of them away for flimflam in return.

I was at the law office to make sure, even though I had lived in the United States for decades, that I was a citizen. My immigrant parents had naturalized in the 1960s, but it was unclear, at least to me, whether their citizenship extended to me. My father, who knew how to read contracts like the back of his hand, said I was a full-fledged citizen, but I wanted to make sure.

When I first started going to Toronto by myself in my late teens it was by Greyhound. I rode the bus to Buffalo and walked across the Peace Bridge. When I got to the Canadian side, the border police asked me where I was from and for identification. I showed them my driver’s license. They waved me through. When I went home I did the same thing. The American border police waved me through, the same as the Canadians.

After I got married my wife and I often went to Canada, to Wasaga Beach, to Penetanguishene, to Nova Scotia, and finally to Prince Edward Island, which we liked and made a habit of returning to. We did, at least, until Osama bin Laden’s towelheads went jihad and flew jetliners into NYC’s Twin Towers. We had just gotten back from Prince Edward Island a few days earlier. I was standing in line in a drug store when I saw it happening on a TV above the cash register. After that, crossing borders slowly but surely became more officious. We found out soon enough we would need passports to get into Canada and back into the USA.

My wife applied for and got her passport in five weeks. I didn’t apply at first because I wasn’t absolutely certain of my status. I had never been sure, no matter how sure I sounded at the border, asserting I was an American citizen. My parents grew up in Lithuania, fled the Red Army to Germany in 1944, emigrated to Canada after the war, and finally settled in the United States in the late 1950s. They were naturalized in the mid-1960s. I knew my brother and sister were citizens, but was uncertain because of my age when my parents became citizens.

When we decided the red sand beaches and blue water of Prince Edward Island was the place to go in the summer, I resolved to settle my body politic issue. Push came to shove and I asked one of our Lithuanian American community’s bigwigs if she knew anybody she could recommend to help me out. She told me about a friend of hers who was a lawyer. The lawyer had been in the resettlement business for more than 30 years and was herself an immigrant, she said.

I made an appointment and went to the lawyer’s office. The lobby was sizable and almost full, full of worried-looking people sitting and waiting their turn. Some of them were Latino’s. The rest of them looked like they were from Asia or the Indian sub-continent. The citizenship business seemed to be booming. When my number was called I was shown into the boss’s office. That was my first surprise. I had not thought I would be talking to the main man, even though she was a woman.

The boss was a squat woman with a round face. Her hair was jet black. Her lips were dolled up in red. She glanced at the paperwork and documentation I had brought with me and said, “I will be your helping hand.” She shot me a cherry bomb smile. “Thanks,” I said. I thought she would be working on my behalf going forward. I found out later she was trying to work me over.

She told me I had a big problem with my citizenship and might be deported at any minute. She said she wanted to get started right away before that happened. She explained the initial consultation fee was going to be $250.00 and the balance to resolve my problem was going to be $9,750.00.

“This is going to cost me ten thousand dollars?” I asked, incredulous. It was my second surprise. It was an unwelcome bombshell. Back in the day highwaymen stuck a gun in your back and hissed, “Stand and deliver, your money, or else.” Nowadays they tell you to sit down and stick a fountain pen in your face.

I was in her office for five minutes before she ushered me out. “Time is money,” her red lips said. It took me fifteen minutes to drive home, where I mulled over the problem of finding ten thousand dollars. It was winter and we weren’t planning on going back to Canada until the next summer, so there was no rush on that account. But what she had said about being deported was worrisome. I had fond memories of my hometown of Sudbury, Ontario, but being uprooted was not what I wanted to happen. We had bought a house which we were renovating, and I had both full-time and part-time jobs. We had a mortgage and friends and family in town. We had a cat who would miss chasing birds in our backyard.

I went back to the law office the next month. I was introduced to a young associate and escorted to a small room in the back. A table and two chairs were in the room. I sat down in one of the chairs and the associate sat down in the other chair. He handed me a contract for the work they were going to be doing. I handed him the same paperwork and documentation I had shown to the woman in the corner office. He started to peruse the contract. After a few minutes he looked up, cleared his throat, and said, “I don’t exactly know why you’re here. According to what I’m looking at, you already are a citizen.”

That was my third surprise. “Are you sure?” I asked.

“I think so, but I better doublecheck with my boss,” he said, quickly backtracking, but the cat was out of the bag.

“All right,” I said, and as soon as I said it I made ready to be gone.

“I can’t stay,” I said, lying and standing up. “I’ve got to get to work. Let me know what you find out and in the meantime I will read this contract.” We shook hands, I gave him a watery smile, got into my car, and drove the other way..

The next day I drove to the Rocky River post office where I knew they processed passport applications. When the line in front of me inched forward and I finally found myself at the counter, I said I wanted to apply for a passport. A middle-aged woman in a drab uniform walked up from the back and motioned me towards a chair and a camera. She handed me an application and told me how much applying for safe conduct was going to cost. It was ninety-seven dollars.

“All right, but would you look at my birth certificate and this other paper work first. I was born in Canada and I’m not sure I am actually an American citizen.” She spread everything out on the counter and looked it over. It didn’t take her long. Less than five minutes into it she said, “Sure, honey, you’re a citizen, no doubt about it.”

I filled out the application, got my picture taken, paid the fee, and thanked the post office woman for her help. ”You’re welcome,” she said. I got my passport in the mail about a month and a half later. The passport had my stone-faced picture in it and was good for ten years. I could travel anywhere in the world with it.

A week later the associate I had talked to called. He wanted to know if I had read the contract and was ready to go ahead with it. “No, I am going to pass on that,” I didn’t say I had thrown the contract in the trash long since.

“That could mean a lot of problems for you,” he cautioned. “The State Department is cracking down, what with all this terrorism.”

“I don’t think so,” I said. Nevertheless, he kept up his patter. I hung up.

Somebody else from the law office called me the following week. I hung up the minute he started into his song and dance. After that the phone calls stopped. We went to Prince Edward Island for two weeks the following June. Except for the long lines at the border, everything went off without a hitch. The Canadian border police said, “Welcome to Canada.” Two weeks later the American border police said, “Welcome to the United States.”

My wife and I bumped into our Lithuanian American bigwig at a get together a few years later. I mentioned my immigration lawyer travail. My wife tugged on my sleeve, urging me to be polite. I told my adviser how her legal beagle had tried to pull the wool over my eyes. I told her about getting my passport in the end with no run around. I told her ten grand was hard cash and how fortunate it was I hadn’t lost more than the consultation fee, never mind the lawyer’s vexing trickery. It is often the case that the only way to beat a lawyer deadest on your money is to die with nothing.

“I know her well, she’s a friend, and she would never do anything like that,” the bigwig said, huffing and puffing. She might as well have called me a liar. “She’s nationally known for helping immigrants. She’s helped thousands of people and is one of our city’s leading citizens. Who do you think you are? Don’t say bad things about her.”

She wasn’t somebody who ever listened to anything I said, so I didn’t argue. What would have been the point? It would have been in one ear and out the other. It was her way of letting you know you didn’t matter all that much. After that, though, I never took anything she said at face value, the same as I never took anything any lawyer ever said at face value.

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

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

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

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

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Home Movies

From Here to Someday

December 1, 2022 Edward Staskus 1 Comment

By Ed Staskus

Sly and the Family Stone drifted into the kitchen where I was making pancakes, stood up on his hind legs, and slapped his tongue against the side of my face. I didn’t mind too much. His mouth was cleaner than that of most of my friends. His kiss was less risky than kissing another person, like my girlfriend. Whatever germs were in his mouth were mostly incompatible to human beings. I never caught the flu from him since his nose never ran. Sometimes it seemed like he had more of a soft spot for me than any living being I knew.

My brother left his Great Dane behind when he moved out. The dog cost me an arm and a leg to feed. I had to walk him twice a day. I had to shove him out of my bed whenever he tried to sleep next to me. His germs might have been harmless, but his bad breath was sewer gas. He was good-natured, though, and we got along. I called him Sly for short. He called me the man, by which he meant the grocery deliveryman. He didn’t know how to talk, but I always knew what he meant when he barked.

Sly was in his formative years and fascinated by cars. He was reckless chasing them. I put a stop to it by sitting him down on the tree lawn and driving slowly past with a squirt gun in my lap. The gun was loaded with vinegar. Whenever he lunged at the car, I squirted him in the face through the open window. It only took five minutes to teach him cars were dangerous and guns were even more dangerous. After that I rarely had to put him on a lead when we walked to the pocket park on Lake Erie for runaround time. He walked beside me and the only time I reached for his collar was when I spied another dog coming our way.

I was living upstairs in a Polish double on the west end of North Collinwood, on a forgotten street, a couple of blocks from the lake. Ray Sabaliauskas lived downstairs with his prize German Shepherd and the woman he brought back from the Vietnam War. He was Lithuanian like my brother and me. I was going to Cleveland State University and paying for it by taking a quarter off every now and then to work for an electro-static painting outfit. We did most of our work on-site out of town. Ray fed and walked my dog whenever I was on the road.

The day Sly became my dog was the week after my brother’s fiancée Brenda Watson, a girl from Vermont who my brother met while in the U. S. Army at Fort Riley, was killed on Rt. 20 coming home from her part-time job at a restaurant in Mentor. She had been enrolled full-time at Cuyahoga Community College the rest of the time. She didn’t spend much time fooling around.

The night Brenda didn’t come home was the night I woke up at two in the morning from a bad dream with a bad feeling. I got up and sat looking out window. It had rained earlier and the worms were out. The backyard grass glistened. The lettuce in the garden was glistening. A stray cat sat under the eaves of the garage, keeping an eye out for late-night snacks.

When I noticed Brenda’s Subaru station wagon wasn’t in the driveway, I somehow felt certain something bad had happened to her. I couldn’t shake the feeling. I stayed up, sitting by the window, until I finally went back to bed, thinking it was the dream that had upset me. Even so, I couldn’t fall back asleep, and when I did, I slept fitfully.

The next morning a Cleveland Police squad car pulled up outside the house and broke the news to my brother. At first, I thought he hadn’t heard what the policeman said. He stood stock still. But then he asked where Brenda was and reached for his car keys. I didn’t see him the rest of the day or the next day. Brenda’s parents arrived later in the week and took her back to Vermont for burial in the family’s hometown cemetery. When my brother got back from the funeral he moved out.

Brenda fell asleep at the wheel coming home the night she died, but that wasn’t what killed her. She wasn’t even hurt when the car drifted off the highway and halfway down the embankment. She was able to hit the brakes and stop the car from overturning. She even coaxed it back up to the shoulder, where she discovered she had a flat tire. She turned on the flashers and was getting the jack and spare tire out of the back of the car when a drunk driver going her way drifted out of his lane and rear-ended her. She was propelled into and over the Subaru. She died on the spot, blind-sided, never knowing what hit her.

When I finished my pancakes, I took Sly for a short walk. Brenda and my brother were gone and the dog was my only roommate now. He didn’t say much, which suited me, but he needed tending. I was running late for school. Back home I left him on the front porch to sleep the day away and made my way to Lakeshore Blvd, where I caught the 39B bus downtown for a class. It was cheaper than driving my bucket of bolts and paying for parking. It was Friday and I was babysitting a friend’s motorcycle for the weekend.

Saturday morning I scarfed down a cream cheese bagel and a glass of Joe Wieder’s. The motorcycle was in the driveway behind the house where nobody could see it. Our streets were sketchy. Brothers from the hood and home-grown hoodlums prowled for loot at night. The bike was a 1950s Vincent Black Shadow, only a couple of years younger than me. My friend had dropped it that spring when the front wheel locked up. One of the handlebars was bent and made tight right turns tricky. Even though it was beat up, it handled well, and had great acceleration.

Thirty years earlier Rollie Free, wearing a helmet, swimming trunks, and tennis shoes, broke the motorcycle land speed record riding a Black Shadow at the Bonneville Salt Flats. He did it lying outstretched flat on his stomach and hanging on to the handlebars for dear life. Two years later he did it again, breaking his own record.

I tied my backpack down across the handlebars, turned the key, and kicked it into life. The air-cooled V-twin engine made a happy sound. I dropped it into gear. At the sidewalk I nodded at a blonde walking by. She turned her nose up at me but looked the bike up and down. I rode west on Lakeshore Blvd, halfway through Bratenahl, and turned south on East 105^th St. I meant to connect with Euclid Ave. I wanted to sneak a peek at the urban decay in Glenville I had been hearing about. It was still there. I took in the ruins. The mess was a place, I thought, but not the best place to live.

I met my former roommate Carl Poston at Mary Jane McGinty’s rented clapboard house on East 33^rd St. off Payne Ave. Carl was with Mary Jane, taking it easy in her deep-set backyard. It was a tangle of overgrown hedges, monstrous bean plants, sunflowers, roses run riot, and dwarf trees, all trying to make sense of it all.

Twin blue-eyed albino cats ran past us, across the lawn, and over a low fence. One of them was cross-eyed. They were from next door. The hippie artist next door let them do their own thing. They were rolling stones who only ate and slept at home. Carl’s motorcycle was in the driveway. It was a 1965 Harley Davidson. We decided to ride west along the lake, nowhere special, just drifting in the direction the sun was going.

We gassed up on the other side of the Cuyahoga River and stopped at an Ohio City diner for coffee. Carl was a bean counter but had taken some philosophy classes at Cleveland State University that year and was in a frame of mind all summer, trying to realize something that might or might not matter as a way of exercising his mind.

We rode on Lake Rd. through Lakewood, Rocky River, and Bay Village. We were riding into a strong headwind, but it was no match for our motorcycles. The sun reached its zenith and kept going. We kept going, too, until we reached Vermilion. There were crowds milling in the streets. We slowed down to almost nothing. Children gamboled here and there. We inched our way to the harbor. A stout lady with a perky freckle face told us it was the annual Fish Festival.

We caught a break coming into town that day. There were vintage cars on parade, men wearing fezzes and sashes, marching high school bands in starched uniforms, a covey of Boy Scouts, floats carrying gals looking like movie stars, garish looking clowns, and oafish looking town officials. Brenda had been an outdoorsman. She would have jumped at the chance to cruise the Fish Festival. She had just turned legal that year. Now she was gone with no future. I couldn’t get her out of my mind. She was like the opening pages of a good book whose remaining pages had been torn out and thrown away.

We had heaping plates of buttered perch with potatoes and sage. Carl wanted to talk about the future, but I didn’t. I was in a state. I thought of the past as nothing but debris and the present as grist for the mill. I left the future in God’s hands. Carl was becoming a thinking man, so he told me I was being irresponsible.

“Mind your own business,” I said. He sounded like my father who sometimes knew everything about everything.

“That kind of attitude is even more irresponsible,” he said.

“You’ll be an old man soon enough. Wait until then to talk that way.”

“I’ll have to look you up when that happens,” he said.

A shapely young woman wearing a bikini with ruffles came our way. She was topped off with a peaked hat two feet high, four feet wide, made of wire mesh, and adorned with red, white, and blue rosettes. We admired her glide. When we left Vermilion, we followed a road along the lakeshore winding past small frame houses and cottage resorts. There were big trees everywhere and the air smelled sweet.

After we reached Marblehead we took the ferry to Kelly’s Island. We saw sailboats bobbing up and down, leaning to one side of the wind. The ferry rode rough on the choppy water. Carl’s Harley didn’t have a center stand and he had to lean on it to keep it from falling over. A tow-headed boy getting soaked at the bow laughed like Soupy Sales every time a wave crashed onto the deck. When he saw Perry’s Monument he jumped and pointed that way.

Don’t Give Up the Ship” was on Commander Oliver Perry’s battle flag during the Battle of Lake Erie in 1813. It recapitulated the dying words of a fellow commander who fell in an earlier naval engagement against the British. Oliver Perry didn’t give up and the British squadron was sent packing.

We rode around the island aimlessly with our helmets off and the wind in our hair. The blacktop dipped and curved. There were boats stashed in harbors tied to docks all over the place. We took a break at a public beach, ogling skin sizzling in baby oil from behind our sunglasses. Back on our bikes we rode across a field to an abandoned baseball field. The chain link of the backstop was rusted and the painted stands were weathered, cracking, and peeling. The pitcher’s mound was overgrown with weeds.

We shared some reefer sitting on the outfield grass. Carl started expounding on the problem of good and evil. I suspected I was in for it and took a short drag on the reefer. “The Nazi’s thought what they did to the Jews was righteous, but at the same time many other people didn’t,” he said.

“Especially the Jews,” I said.

“Who was right?”

I said we both knew Adolf Hitler and his henchmen were insane monsters.

“Sure, but that’s not the point,” he said.

“What is the point?”

“Just trying to touch on something metaphysical here.”

“All right, but metaphysics is more fantasy than not. Arguments about good and evil are useless. Just about everything except food, water, and breathing is relative. Most of it is all made up.”

“What about your brother’s girlfriend who got killed? Was that relative? Did the drunk driver have the right to decide her life and death?”

“I hope they hang that guy like they hung the Nazi’s.”

We took a quarry road back to the ferry dock. We were early for our return ride and walked to a nearby tavern. It had a Louisiana ceiling and wide plank floor. Fishing paraphernalia filled the walls. Teenagers were playing pinball and yakking it up. They looked too young to drink but had bottles of Blatz at hand. Over the cash register somebody had scrawled in magic marker that an Irishman was not drunk so long as he could hold on to a blade of grass and not fall off the edge of the planet.

Carl and I each had a Blatz while we waited for the ferry. Back on the mainland, we took secondary roads as far as Avon, where Carl waved goodbye and roared off for home. I laced up my skates and got on the highway. I crossed the Flats going 75 MPH. Passing the Municipal Stadium I fell in with three other motorcyclists who were making good time. I hit 105 MPH keeping up, then taking the lead, leaning low over my handlebars. Every part of me was focused on the road flowing backwards in front of me. I had never gone that fast on a car or motorcycle or anything else other than a jet plane. Nothing mattered except keeping my tail on the seat and not wiping out.

Hunter Thompson once said, “If you ride the Vincent Black Shadow at top speed for any length of time, you will almost certainly die. That is why there are not many life members of the Black Shadow Society.” It took less than three minutes to pass the Cleveland Aquarium and veer away from the pack down the ramp of my exit onto Waterloo Rd. I caught my breath at the stop sign before an impatient horn behind me made me jump and I tapped the gear shift.

Back home I chained and tucked the Vincent out of sight in the backyard. I watered and fed Sly before throwing myself down on the sofa. My legs felt like worn out rubber bands. My left palm was sore from handling the clutch all day. I wasn’t used to it. I wasn’t used to anybody my age dying, either, but Brenda had died and there wasn’t anything anybody could do about it.

A good idea is to die as young as late in life as possible. It hadn’t worked out for Brenda. Her life was still in the memory of the living. Nobody had forgotten her, at least not yet. When that happens, it happens slowly, counting down to zero, until nobody remembers. It was a shame, I thought, before I stopped thinking about time and fate and fell into a simple as ABC sleep while Sly and the Family Stone snored on the floor at the foot of the bed.

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

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

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

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Home Movies

Down to the Waterline

October 1, 2022 Edward Staskus Leave a comment

By Ed Staskus

The summer of 2001 Jeff Saghy and I flew to New York City for a long working weekend it is doubtful we would have gone to check out the Twin Towers. They were just two more office skyscrapers in skyscraper city. We would not have gone to eat at Windows on the World, the restaurant on the top floors of the North Tower, either. Our expense account would have put up an objection. But, it had been a long Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, and our boss surprised us by announcing dinner was on the company. We walked over from the Marriott Hotel next door, where we were staying, and took one of the jumbo elevators up into the sky.

The hotel had been collateral damage eight years earlier. Diehard towelheads parked a rental truck loaded with 1,500 pounds of explosives in the World Trade Center’s underground parking garage. They weren’t interested in becoming martyrs, no matter the reward of each of them personally getting seventy two virgins in heaven, so they set the timer and left for jihadi snacks of halvah and qahvah. The explosion mangled the lower and sub levels of the World Trade Center complex and damaged the Marriott, as well. It was two years before the hotel reopened.

Windows on the World opened as a private club twenty five years before we ever set foot in it. Everybody who was not a member had to pay $10.00 in dues on the spot before eating there. New York Magazine called it the “most spectacular restaurant in the world.” They put the food on a pedestal and gushed about the view.

“Every view is brand-new, a miracle. When in the Statue of Liberty Lounge, the harbor’s heroic blue sweep makes you feel like the ruler of some extraordinary universe. All the bridges of Brooklyn and Queens and Staten Island stretch across the restaurant’s promenade. Even New Jersey looks good from here. Down below is all of Manhattan. Everything to hate and fear is invisible.”

We were wearing pressed slacks and our monogrammed trade show shirts. Our slacks passed muster, but our shirts sans jackets were verboten. The maître d’ rustled up spare sports jackets for both of us. Mine was several sizes too small. It was checked, too, the kind a burlesque comedian might once have donated to the Salvation Army. “All you have to do is wear it walking to your table,” the front of the room man said when I gave him an unhappy look. “Once you’re in your seat you can take it off and your server will bring it back to me.”

I squeezed into the sports jacket, making like Mr. Magoo, enduring amused looks on the way to our table. It was set inside a curved half wall. The dining room was large and quiet, almost hushed. The tablecloth was actual cloth. The waiters wore white jackets and black pants. They were as soft-spoken as funeral directors. We ordered several appetizers. Jeff had roast sirloin of beef for dinner and I had salmon, which was very good. The charge we put on the company credit card, in due course, would have paid most of my home mortgage for the month back in Ohio.

After we finished our bottle of fine wine we stepped over to the nearest window to take in the vaunted view. There wasn’t any view, however. All we saw was a murky sky above us and heavy clouds below us. There wasn’t a gap in the clouds to see any part of the world anywhere. We had tortes sprinkled with ground nuts and coffee for dessert. The waiter told us the coffee was from Yemen. “It is made from heirloom beans.” he said. I told him it was delicious, which it was.

Jeff did most of the talking over dinner and through dessert. He wasn’t overly interested in anything I had to say, although he was polite about it, in a smarmy sort of way. He was an outstanding salesman and like all outstanding salesman could be unctuous at the drop of a hat. Take it or leave it was my sales strategy. I was less than outstanding.

I woke up in the middle of the night with an upset stomach. The dinner at Windows on the World had been first-rate, the dessert even better, and the wine more than drinkable, smooth and balanced, but something wasn’t agreeing with me. I dressed and went downstairs, where I found a ginger ale. I went for a walk. It was big-city dark, like an undying twilight. The streets smelled bad, but I felt better. I walked down to the waterline on Liberty St., ending up at Pumphouse Park.

It wasn’t listed in my New York City Parks Department guidebook. It was just there, next to a small marina of mega-yachts, lots of trees and flowers around an oval-shaped lawn. I walked to where there was a grove of shrubs and birch trees. I kicked back on one of the benches. In a city of eighteen million people, I didn’t see another person for the next hour, although a tough-looking cat tramped past me without giving me a glance.

Jeff and I had flown to the trade show with Chris Hayes and Doug Clarke, landing at JFK International Airport in Queens in the late afternoon on Thursday. Construction of a new people-mover system at the airport was going on, three years along, so we walked the mile-or-two to the baggage claim. We checked into the Marriot Hotel and took a cab to the Jacob Javits Convention Center to set up our display. The Javits Center was enormous, more than three million square feet of floor space.

The reason we were there was the International Beauty Show. “Stock up on all your salon needs at show-special pricing,” was the way the razzmatazz went. “Top notch education to boost your skills and business. Products and tools that will boost your business and streamline your craft. Network with like-minded colleagues and professionals.”

We were there to showcase a new tanning bed a branch of Efficient Lighting, under the name of Ultraviolet Resources International, had developed. Chris Hayes was the nominal brains behind the product. Doug Clarke, the boss and owner, was married to Kathy Hayes, who was second-in-command. She was the louder by far of the couple. Some of her other siblings, in addition to Chris, Kevin and John and sister Maggie, were the the in-charge team. Doug was like Zeus, somewhere up there on Mt. Olympus. Maggie was sneaky mean and always bore watching. Other brothers and sisters from the Hayes family of thirteen came and went, getting in on the gravy train when they weren’t at each other’s throats.

Doug Clarke had rolled out a state-of-the-art 45,000 square-foot multi-million-dollar warehouse and offices on nearly three acres in Brook Park, next to Holy Cross Cemetery, the year before, after ten years of leasing and outgrowing space in the Lake Erie Screw Building in Lakewood. It was a new building for a new millennium. Efficient Lighting sold lots of stuff under lots of names, commercial lighting to restaurants and municipalities, saltwater fish lights, grow lights, sign lights, disinfectant lighting, but its bread and butter was tanning bulbs. We sold gazillions of the fluorescent tubes to dealers and end users. The phones never stopped ringing. Doug and Kathy built a McMansion in North Ridgeville on the back of the bronze look.

The wine room in the basement of their McMansion looked like the bottles snug on climate controlled racks were worth more than Doug was going to pay me if I continued working for him the rest of my life. I wasn’t planning on hanging around for a pat on the back and a gold-tone watch, but in the meantime I was a wage slave. I occasionally reconsidered the merits of anarchism. I was surprised the wine he poured wasn’t better. It tasted hollow to me.

The trade show boomed, although we scuffled. The last-minute space we had been assigned was near the back of a dead-end walkway. We spent more time talking to the other vendors around us than we did talking to prospects. The end of the day Friday didn’t come soon enough. Jeff could talk all day and night, prospect or no prospects, but I had long since run out of anything to say to our neighboring nail and hair folks, who weren’t selling much, either.

Doug and Chris were busy with big shots Friday night, the heavy hitters who called the shots at Wolff and Light Sources, so Jeff and I went to dinner by ourselves in Greenwich Village. We didn’t know one eatery from another. All of them were busy. We finally found a table at Pico, a Portuguese restaurant. The inside of the place was exposed brick and beams. We were seated next to a six-foot tall wire sculpture of a rooster. The hostess told us it was a Portuguese good luck symbol.

I was staring at our pemeiro prato, which included bacalao cakes with a radish salad, steamed cockles, and foie gras, when our waiter came back. He asked if we would mind sharing our table with two women, since space was at a premium. Jeff said he didn’t mind and the next thing I knew there were two more chairs squeezing in at our table.

The young women were in their mid to late 20s, both blonde, one of them from London and the other one from South Africa. We shared what was left of our appetizer with them while we got acquainted. The woman from London was working in NYC and living at a YWCA. The woman from South Africa was visiting her friend. Her family had emigrated to Savannah, Georgia from the dark continent five years earlier, after the Afrikaners lost their argument with the African National Congress.

The Londoner had been to Pico before and made a recommendation for the segundo prato. I ordered the dish. It was duck braised in terra cotta and roast saddle of rabbit with chickpea cake. Our newfound friends told us more about themselves while Jeff told them all about himself. Was he that dashing with a wife and two children in tow? Even though he and I had worked in the same office for about ten years it was news to me.

He ordered another bottle of wine midway through dinner. We talked into the night. It was fun. Before I knew it, it was after midnight. We ordered coffee and sonhos, which are miniature doughnuts, cinnamon-dusted puffs of dough dipped into molten chocolate and fruit fondues, for dessert. Sonhos means “beautiful little dream” in the lingo. Nobody needs to speak Portuguese to describe their goodness.

Jeff had been looking and talking up the cutie-pies non-stop. I didn’t like the look in his eye, wondering if he was angling for some fun in the city that never sleeps. I wasn’t a back door man, though. Besides, tomorrow was another working man’s day. The gleam in his eye dimmed when I hailed a cab and coaxed him into the back seat. He was disgruntled all the way back to our room.

Saturday was more of the same at the trade show. We finished up mid-afternoon on Sunday. We had brought our suitcases and were ready to go as soon as the end of day whistle blew. Unfortunately, everybody else had the same idea and by the time we were out the door the plaza in front of the convention center was swarming with people. There wasn’t a yellow cab to be had for love or money.

We were standing around looking lost when a thick-set man in a black suit approached us. He was wearing a white shirt, a black tie, and a newsboy cap. His eyes were bloodshot. He was a gypsy cabbie, driving a black four-door Volvo.

“Airport?” he asked.

“JFK,” I said.

“$50.00,” he said.

“Let’s go,” I said, dragging a protesting Jeff behind me. He didn’t like the John Doe black car and the black hole of no license, no regulations, and no insurance. The man was from Nigeria. “They call our kind of driving kabu kabu there,” he said. He drove more than sixty hours a week. He drove fast, ignoring red lights several times. He stopped some distance from the cab stand at the airport.

“I got to be careful about the medallion guys,” he said.

It was just getting dark when we took off, circling northwest back over Manhattan, the lights of the city twinkling in the dusk. We flew through a booming thunderstorm that had rumbled up from the Ohio Valley, but landed at Cleveland Hopkins Airport safe and sound, where our wives picked us up.

The back end of summer heated up, getting ungodly hot and humid on the south shore of Lake Erie. I went to the office Monday through Friday and did my private enterprise service work evenings and weekends. I would have quit my day job long since if I could have, but I needed both jobs. The office work was easy enough, and so long as I kept my head down, I could put up with my fellow salesmen. The rest of the guys and girls who punched the clock were no problem.

My job wasn’t especially high paying since I worked for a family firm. Their motto was “Family First.” They said it included all of us, but what it meant in practice was the immediate family was first, last, and always. We had first-class health insurance, though, and I was socking money slowly but surely away in a 401K. I got two weeks paid vacation.

My wife and I drove to Prince Edward Island in Atlantic Canada in late August, chilling out on the north coast. Prince Edward Island is about 5 times the size of New York City, but the city is home to 47 times as many people as the province. We didn’t have any trouble keeping ourselves to ourselves on the shores of the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

We got back the second weekend of September. I took Monday off to unpack and unwind from the 22-hour drive home. The next morning I was in line at a Drug Mart cash register, while on my way to work, when I looked up and noticed the Twin Towers on a TV that was blaring a news bulletin. One of the buildings was gushing smoke.

“Christ,” I thought. “How did that happen?”

By the time I got to work everybody in the building was in the lunchroom, eyes glued to the flat screen mounted on the back wall. We found out what happened was that passenger jets slammed into both buildings. We watched the 110-floor towers collapse. The Marriott Hotel disintegrated into a pile of rubble. It was unnerving watching where Jeff and I had slept disappear. It looked surreal to all of us, even those of us who weren’t sure what surreal meant. Doug walked in looking somber and told everybody to go home. It was just after 11 o’clock in the morning. The last fires at the World Trade Center site were finally extinguished in December, exactly one hundred days after the terrorist attacks.

I drove home on largely empty streets. It was a sunny day, mild and pleasant. My wife and I watched the grim news on TV the rest of the day. We had never seen anything like it, airplanes flying into skyscrapers. Even Snapper our cat sensed something wasn’t right and spent the day sleeping in the basement.

The next evening I rode my mountain bike on the all-purpose trail in the Rocky River Metropark. The only people I saw in the valley were an older couple strolling arm in arm. There were no dog walkers, baby carriages, rollerbladers, runners, or any other bikers besides me. There were no cars on the Valley Parkway. I could have coasted down the middle of the road blindfolded. I saw flashing red and blue lights of police cars on every bridge I rode under. There were military jets screaming overhead, not that it mattered. The horse was out of the barn.

I stopped on the far side of Tyler Barn, on the other side of a small bridge, where I spotted a fisherman going after steelhead trout. I rode through the empty parking lot to where he was walking out of the river. He was wearing flesh-colored waders and carrying an eight-foot rod. I could see some big fish in the creel bag slung over his shoulder. He sat down at a picnic table and started gutting them on a copy of yesterday’s newspaper.

He was wearing a baseball cap and a week’s worth of whiskers. His forearms were heavily tattooed. The letters ‘HOLD’ were knuckle tattooed on one hand and the letters ‘FAST’ on the other hand. We shot the bull for a minute and talked about the terrorist attacks in New York City. I told him about having stayed at the destroyed Marriott Hotel.

“I’ll tell you what, it’s a tragedy, those working people, poor souls, dying for no good reason, not expecting it to be their last day, but I wasn’t born no yesterday,” he said “That’s what happens in this world we have made. Society ain’t a disease, it’s a disaster. I say if folks concentrated on the important things in life, there would be a shortage of fishing poles, not a shortage of skyscrapers.”

“Are you saying we should concentrate on biological reality and forget about constructed reality?”

He fixed his knife into the top of the picnic table and fixed a look at me. “I don’t know about any of that, pilgrim, but I know all our plans and dreams get scattered in the wind.” He sucked on a Lucky Strike without taking it from his lips. A gust of wind wafted cigarette ash away into what was fast becoming the early end of summer.

I got back on my mountain bike, pushed up the long slog of Hogsback Lane out of the valley, and rode home in the dusk. My wife was making dinner when I got home, meat loaf, mashed potatoes, and buttered carrots. The kitchen smelled good.

“We’re having comfort food tonight,” she said.

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

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

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

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Home Movies

Working Up an Appetite

October 1, 2022 Edward Staskus Leave a comment

By Ed Staskus

New York City’s George Washington Bridge is to this day the busiest bridge in the world. More than 100 million cars and trucks cross it every year. The double decker suspension bridge spans the Hudson River. It opened in 1931, was widened in 1946, and a lower deck was added in 1962. Since then, billions of drivers have sat on the overpass, chewing the cud, their engines idling.

The speed limit at the toll gates is 25 MPH. The speed limit on the bridge is 45 MPH. During rush hour, when my wife and I drove across it, on our way north from Virginia to Cape Cod, it was 0 MPH, or less. There are innumerable stops and starts that stretch time out like silly putty and test a man’s patience. We were glad we had empty bladders, a full tank of gas, and weren’t on any kind of schedule.

We were on a 2-week end of summer road trip. We first drove from Cleveland, Ohio to Chincoteague Island, planning on Cape Cod the second week. Chincoteague is a barrier island, on the Atlantic Ocean shoreline due east of Richmond. We did it in one day, leaving early and getting there late. All the roads in town have signs saying “Evacuation Route” in capital letters and red arrows pointing the other way. When we pulled in the lady at the front desk of the Waterside Inn told us the only place still open to get a bite to eat was the Ropewalk. When we walked up to it most of the wait staff and some of the kitchen staff were on the front steps kicking a group of unruly patrons out.

We waited for the fuss to die down and found a table. It was a sports bar with flat screens everywhere. Baseball was ruling the roost. We had walked in blind and hoped we weren’t going to be blind-sided. Our waitress was from New Jersey, there for the summer with her boyfriend. She was friendly enough but hard to see, hidden behind tattoos and piercings.

“I might stay here,” she said about her new home, “except nobody can live here. It’s too expensive.” She lived on the other side of the causeway on Route 175. She wasn’t the first or last person to tell us there wasn’t enough island housing, and what there was of it was too expensive. There were many retirees who had cashed in and too many old hippies who had cashed out. They had snapped up the real estate from Archie Cove to Hammock Point.

Ropewalk was on the water. “How cute it would be to sit by the bay,” my wife said, pointing to the side deck. “The deck is closed,” our waitress said. We ate at a table next to a window looking out on the deck. Our pints of eastern shore IPA were good, and the appetizer crab egg rolls were tasty. It went downhill from there. “This poke bowl tastes like nothing,” my wife said. Our poke bowls were tuna, corn, rice, and avocadoes. “The corn looks weird, too.” It was about as bland as could be, which was surprising in the home of many flavors.

We went to Assateague Island the next day. My wife went running on the Wildlife Loop that goes around Swan Goose Pool while I walked some of it. I was breaking in an after-market hip and could only go so far. “No running,” my surgeon had told me. The next day, when we went back, a man warned us not to hike on the Marsh Trail. “Too many bugs,” he said. While my wife went back on the Wildlife Loop for another 3-mile run, I tried the Marsh Trail. That was a mistake. I was wearing shorts and a t-shirt. I didn’t know one hundred mosquitoes could land on a human being’s arms and legs all at once and all start biting at once. I didn’t know I could walk back to our car as fast as I did, hop-a-long hip and all.

We went to Captain Zack’s that night. Their motto is “Yum Yum Getcha Some.” The deck was full of diners, so we stepped to the side where there was a take-out window. The kitchen was behind the slide-to-the-side glass. The man in line in front of us said, “Honestly, everything is good.” An older woman in a Mother Goose dress took our order. “I’ll call your cell phone when it’s ready,” she said. We waited at a picnic table on the near side of the gravel parking lot. Mother Goose could have called our names out from where she was.

The soft-shell crabs were good. The sides were too much, literally. There was enough to feed a troop of teenagers. We nibbled on some of it, although most of it was disappointing. They had somehow messed up the hush puppies. “How can something soggy be so dry?” my wife asked, adding, “They are supposed to be crispy on the outside and fluffy on the inside.”

We ate at Bill’s on Main St. two nights later. It’s been there for more than sixty years, a squat brick building with windows on three sides and raised slightly up from the sidewalk. The tablecloths and napkins are cloth and the waitresses come dressed in black and white. Our waitress had apple cheeks. “I’ve worked here since I was 21-years old, which was 21 years ago,” she said. She was a single mother and lived on the other side of the causeway.

We had oyster stew soup, which was oysters, country ham, butter, and heavy cream. The heavy cream set the tone. The richness of the food on Chincoteague Island was by now not a surprise. It may not always have been tasty, but it was rich, for sure. My wife had crab imperial stuffed shrimp and I had flounder. The crab died drowning in the mayonnaise. The waitress brought twice as much tartar sauce as we needed. By the time we were done and looked around we discovered we were the last patrons still in the restaurant. We waddled back to our inn.

We spent the next afternoon on the beach at Tom’s Cove. The parking lot butts up to the dunes and the dunes slope down to a long beach. We eventually went for a walk, picking up rocks and spiral seashells. We met a German lady from Hamburg who had moved to Virginia forty-some years earlier. “The beach is washing away,” she said. “It’s the storms. The park service brings sand in on barges every year now to keep it from disappearing.”

Before we left, as we were brushing sand off our feet and getting into our car, a seagull walked up and started squawking. It sounded like maniacal laughter. We had a half-bag of waffle cone bits and pieces in the back seat, and I emptied them in front of the bird. When I did the food fight was on. Twenty or thirty more birds swooped in out of nowhere and the waffles were gone in seconds. The gulls were crying for more as we drove away.

We had coffee and croissants several mornings at the Amarin Coffee Shop on Maddox Ave. The only other thoroughfare on Chincoteague Island is Main St. The coffee shop was where the causeway from the mainland joins the island. At the other end of Chincoteague Island is another causeway that leads to Assateague Island, which is mostly a sanctuary for migrating birds, wild ponies, and a standing army of mosquitoes. We were sitting on the front deck of the coffee shop when a trim man in his 50s sporting a couple weeks’ worth of beard asked us how we liked the coffee. He turned out to be the proprietor.

His name was Bernard and he had been in the armed forces, specializing in counterterrorism, until he retired. He served in the Middle East and the Far East. “I was in the swamps in the south of Iraq for a while,” he said. “Our job was nabbing foreign fighters trying to sneak into the country from Iran.” He spoke fluent Arabic and knew full well how to say “Hands up.”

He met his wife-to-be in Vietnam, got married, and went into his new family’s coffee-growing business. It’s labor-intensive work, grown from seed. Trees take about 5 years to bear fruit. The family grew beans in the Central Highlands, north of Ho Chi Minh City. The French introduced coffee there in 1857 when a priest brought one arabica tree into the country. After the Vietnam War ended the newly unified nation became one of the world’s largest coffee producers.

Bernard was from Grand Rapids, but when he came back to the United States he settled in Virginia, working for NASA near Chincoteague Island. When he and his wife started importing the family’s coffee beans, he set up a roasting operation. They had a food truck, too, parked in a gravel lot behind the coffee shop. A man named Oz made the Vietnam-themed sandwiches.

Oz was a stocky man in his 40s who had lived in Vietnam, where his father had gone to run a furniture factory. Oz had advanced degrees in philosophy and history. “What that means is I know all about unemployment lines,” he said. He taught English as a second language in Vietnam until the 19 virus and his impending divorce back in the homeland brought him back home. He was pining to return to Southeast Asia.

“It’s my beautiful place,” he said, bringing us spring rolls and a crispy pork belly sandwich on a ciabatta roll. The sandwich was the best food we had in the land of cotton, even though it was the land of corn and crabs. There wasn’t a road without a field of corn planted alongside it and there wasn’t a pit stop without crab cakes. The food in the south wasn’t bad, except when it was, but it was too rich for our northern palates. Everything seemed to revolve around butter and mayonnaise. When we went to Steamers for our last supper, we knew enough to split the plates.

Steamers wasn’t anything to look at. The front of the house had a hostess station and some desultory tables. Farther inside was a bar and lots more tables. It sounded like a party was going on back there. We sat outside on a slab of concrete surrounded by aluminum fencing. Our waitress was a middle-aged black woman who had lived there her whole life. “I live across the causeway,” she said. We had littlenecks on the half-shell with breadcrumbs and bacon. Then we had flatbread topped with clam dip. We took the waitress’s recommendation and finished up by sharing deep-fried rock fish.

The day we left Chincoteague Island we saw a Mennonite woman in a cape dress ride by on Main St. on a bicycle. We had seen the sect’s women every day here and there, usually with a civilian-looking husband in tow. Three of them with digital cameras and long lenses were on Tom’s Cove taking pictures of the surf one windy afternoon, tugging on their haubes to keep them in place on top of their heads. The weather was the same the day we left as it had been the past six days, 80 degrees, sunny, and more humid than not.

When we left for Cape Cod we crossed New Jersey and had to cross the George Washington Bridge. There was a slow as molasses traffic jam on the approach. It didn’t get any better any time soon. There were too few lanes and too many cars. We inched forward like snails. I started seeing pairs of Central American-looking women on the shoulders of the roadway hawking mangoes in large, lidded plastic cups. They had coolers at their feet. When our turn came, we got a cup of them. They were the right refreshment at the right time.

Mangoes are the national fruit of India. Apples are New York’s official fruit. We didn’t see any apples in the Big Apple. We saw lots of mangoes. They are a stone fruit. The name comes from the Portuguese word manga from back in the 16^th century. The ones we ate were red, although they also come in yellow and orange.

“Don’t sit at home and wait for the mango tree to bring mangoes to you,” Israel Ayivor once said. “It won’t happen.” He was right. We had driven a long way to get our mangoes. The Central American women had gone far out of their way to sell their mangoes. They stood on the sides of the road breathing in exhaust fumes and dealing with tempers fuming.

A few months earlier, on Mother’s Day, a woman by the name of Maria Falcon was arrested for selling mangoes in a New York City subway station. She didn’t have a permit to vend. “She’s served her customers for more than 10 years,” her supporters said. “Those permits can be near impossible to obtain. There’s even an underground market where permits go for up to $20,000 each.” The police threw her fruit away and let her go. “She took a few days off to recover from her ordeal but is back out there today because she can’t stop working,” said another supporter of the mango rank and file.

It was sunny and cool when we pulled into North Truro on Cape Cod. We stopped at a fish shack and bought a pound of scallops. We cut corn off the cob, sauteed them in olive oil with diced Portuguese sausage, added seared scallops, drizzled squeezed lime juice with maple syrup over the top, and sat down to eat. We had white wine with dinner. The next night we boiled a pot of fresh linguine, sauteed a bag of clams, and tossed the linguine, sliced garlic, and a handful of parsley into the frying pan with the shellfish. The following night we had pan-fried cod filets with redskin potatoes. We didn’t mix in any fat-based sauces of any kind. We didn’t even have salad so that we wouldn’t have salad dressing. We had cleansed our palates on the George Washington Bridge and were keeping them that way.

We watched the sun go down into Cape Cod Bay every clear night. We were on the water and watched the sun sink into the water. My wife and I had been swimming upstream like fish out of water down in Dixie but were back in the Yankee groove. After the red sun sank at night, we went to bed snug as fishermen cruising in with their holds full of fruit of the sea.

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

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

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

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Home Movies

Public Enemy

September 1, 2022 Edward Staskus Leave a comment

By Ed Staskus

There were seven of us on the elevator, which was the size of a box truck, going up to the fourth floor of the Global Center. One of us asked the others if we were all on the way to jury duty. All of us said yes, or something along those lines. “This is a royal pain in the butt,” one young man grumbled while slurping something out of a stainless steel mug.

“Better to be on this side of things than the other side of them,” the man next to him said.

“You got that right, brother.”

The Global Center was at the corner of Ontario St. and St. Clair Ave., across the street from the Justice Center, part of the Medical Mart and Convention Center that made history in 2011. Six buildings were demolished to make way for the development. Half a million tons of debris were removed and more than 12,000 tons of steel was used to create the infrastructure of the new complex. It was the most steel used on any one project in Cleveland’s history.

When we got off the elevator I immediately regretted being almost on time. The line snaked from the elevator backwards then forwards to the sign-in tables. It looked like everybody was in line all at once. I took my place and shuffled forward like everybody else. If I need to come back tomorrow, I thought, I’m showing up late. The next day, when I did arrive late, there was hardly anybody in line.

The Global Center was mostly about conventions and industry conferences. It had been the media center for the 2016 Republican National Convention, held in downtown Cleveland, when the far-right spun fantasies and the fantastic happened, a bunko landing at the top of its ticket. The fourth floor is where those called for jury duty report every Monday morning every week of every month all year long. Crime never sleeps. The pool of jurors is usually between three and four hundred people.

Before I went through the full-body scanner I told one of the policemen, “I’m breaking in an after-market hip, so I’m going to set off your fire alarm.” He said all right and told me to go ahead. When I did, nothing happened, except the light blinked green for GO. The high-tech scanners are supposed to detect a wide range of metallic indicators in a matter of seconds. “Essentially, the machine sends waves toward a passenger’s insides,” said Shawna Redden, a researcher who studies the devices. “The waves go through clothing and reflect whatever might be concealed, and bounce back a signal, which is interpreted by the machine.”

“Do you want me to try again?” I asked.

“No, go ahead,” the policeman said, not giving me a second look.

Six feet apart and masks were back in effect, even though there was no official ruling in Cleveland about it, where hardly anybody was paying attention to the pandemic anymore. Only the odd man and woman wore a mask in the lobby or anywhere else. But all the hard-backed chairs in the big room were in rows a social distance apart and everybody was required to wear a mask while there. You can’t fight City Hall. Almost everybody kept their heads down staring at their cell phones. Some people read books. A few went to sleep on the sofas backed up against the walls.

When the jury pool bailiff stepped to the front of the room everybody perked up. The boss lady looked casual but was anything but, even though she sprinkled in some stale jokes. She wore a short-sleeved blouse. Her forearms were thick with ink. The first thing she did was thank us for coming.

She explained that since we were on the voting rolls we had been randomly selected. She thanked us for opting into our civic duty. She showed a video about the history of juries and what jury duty amounts to. A judge from Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court showed up and thanked us some more. She was a looker in a black robe. Who knew the long arm of the law could be pretty as a postcard? When she was done everybody went back to their cell phones and books. The sleepy heads went back to their sofas.

The bailiff said she would be calling groups of eight for civil cases and groups of twenty-and-more for criminal cases. I didn’t mind serving on either kind of jury but was hoping I wouldn’t be called to serve on a criminal case. I especially didn’t want to be on the jury that was going to convict Tamara McLoyd for shooting and killing Shane Bartek, a Cleveland policeman.

What would be the point? She looked like she was guilty as Machine Gun Kelly. Somebody closely matching her looks had been caught on surveillance video pulling the trigger. Her DNA was on the .357 Magnum. She confessed to the crime after being arrested. Why she pled not guilty and was demanding a jury trial was beyond me.

I had brought my Apple tablet with me and read “Empire of the Scalpel” on it all morning. It was about the history of surgery. No matter the modern surgical skills that restore life and limb, however, there was no bringing Shane Bartek back to life. He was gone for good. Several groups of jurors trooped out when they were conscripted. I looked up from my tablet whenever the lists were read out, but not being called went back to reading about how we are becoming increasingly bionic.

The criminal complaint against Tamara McLoyd was that she walked up to the off-duty Shane Bartek on Cleveland’s west side on New Year’s Eve and tried to rob him at gunpoint. He was outside his apartment on his way to a Cleveland Cavs game. When he grabbed at her gun she shot him twice during the struggle. After the shooting, she stole the policeman’s car and fled. Shane Bartek was taken to Fairview Hospital and pronounced dead. He was 23 years old. She was 18 years old.

Tamara McLoyd gave the stolen car to a no-good friend of hers who was hunted down later that night by a swarm of suburban police. After a high-speed chase he lost control of the car and slammed into a fence. He didn’t bother saying he was innocent. The police didn’t bother being polite. They tracked Tamara McLoyd by watching videos of her getaway that she was posting on Instagram. She was nothing if not clueless about crime and punishment. She was run to ground, doing her best to eff and blind her way out of it, and unceremoniously hauled off to a jail cell. Her handgun was found hidden in the back seat of her not so joyful joy ride.

She had been Public Enemy No. 1 for a day. The next day the young woman went back to being just an enemy to herself. She had been on a crime spree most of the year. Two months earlier, five days after she was sentenced to probation in Lorain County on firearms and robbery charges, she and two accomplices robbed a man in Lakewood, robbed a woman in Cleveland Heights, and robbed Happy’s Pizza in Cleveland. They had worked up an appetite robbing people.

City Hall and the Cuyahoga County Court House are both on Lakeside Ave. I took a self-guided tours during lunchtime and walked around Mall C. I looked down at the Cleveland Browns stadium and the Science Center across the railroad tracks on the other side of Route 2. There are small parks beside both City Hall and the Court House. I checked out Claes Oldenburg’s rubber stamp sculpture in Willard Park. I checked out John T. Corrigan’s statue in Fort Huntington Park. The over-sized stamp sculpture is whimsical. The life-sized Corrigan statue is stone-faced.

Tamara McLoyd made her first court appearance on murder charges two days after New Year’s Day. “I didn’t know he was a cop,” she explained, even though nobody was asking for explanations. Police forces are like the armed forces, who don’t leave their wounded or dead behind. Killing a policeman is a one-way ticket to the Big House, if not Old Sparky. A city prosecutor read her admission to shooting Shane Bartek into the record. The judge set bail at five million dollars and told her to find a lawyer. She hadn’t stolen enough money to make bail. She stayed locked up in the Justice Center for the next seven months.

John T. Corrigan, stone-faced in life and death, was Cleveland born and bred, graduating from a local high school and university and law school. He served in the Army during World War Two, losing an eye during the Battle of the Bulge. He was elected Cuyahoga County’s prosecutor in 1956 and re-elected repeatedly, serving for thirty-five years. “It is a large office with hundreds of employees. It’s the second largest public law firm in the state of Ohio,” said Geoffey Means, a former federal prosecutor. John T. Corrigan was a stern man when it came to law and order. He even sent his former law partner to jail. Hoodlums knew there wouldn’t be any sympathy coming their way from the one-eyed legal eagle.

Nothing had changed since his retirement. When murder was the charge, the prosecutor’s office was no-nonsense going forward. When the murder of a policeman was the charge, the prosecutor’s office was bound and determined to get it done. While locked up Tamara McLoyd talked to her friends and mother by jailhouse phone, telling them exactly what happened, and saying she expected to be famous for shooting a policeman. Her lawyers tried to suppress her original confession, but after hearing recordings of her phone calls, gave up on the idea. “After consulting with our client, she has authorized and instructed us to withdraw the motion to suppress,” her lawyers said at a hearing.

She was bound and determined to say it was an accident. “This shit wasn’t no aggravated,” she told her mother after she was charged with aggravated murder. “This shit was an accident.” Later in the month she told a friend, “We was tussling, that’s all, he reached for the gun, he fell, and then pow.” She made it sound like the coyote and roadrunner cartoon.

When Monday came to an end at 3 o’clock and I went home, well more than a hundred of us had been picked for actual jury duty. The rest of us came back on Tuesday. More of us were picked, lunchtime was again announced, and I went for another walk. We filtered back at 1 o’clock. I dove back into my Apple iPad. A few more of us were picked for a civil trial. Just after 2 o’clock the bailiff cleared her throat.

“The last judge has just sent word that his trial has been postponed until next week,” she said. “Thank you for coming and you are free to go.”

We all cheered, collected our certificates of appreciation, and marched away to the elevators. I walked to the lot on W. 3^rd St. where I had left my car. It was a cloudless day. There weren’t many people on the sidewalks. The tables and chairs of downtown’s Al Fresco dining spots were empty. Everybody had gone back to work after eating.

Al Fresco comes from the Italian and loosely means “in the cool air.” Unlike everybody else, Italians don’t use the term for eating outside. In Italy it means “spending time in the cooler.” When they say cooler, they mean jail, not a free and easy lunch.

Tamara McLoyd was found guilty of theft, grand theft, aggravated robbery, felonious assault, murder, and aggravated murder. It didn’t take the jury long. The courtroom was packed with Cleveland police officers and Shane Bartek’s family. Some of the dead man’s relatives broke into tears. Tamara McLoyd turned 19 years of age during the trial. She was a cold fish, standing unblinking when the verdict was read.

“What would you think after being found guilty of aggravated murder?” her lawyer Jaye Schlachet explained, grasping at straws, even though she didn’t seem to be thinking about anything special. Shane Bartek was probably the last thing on her mind, if he was even in line to be on her mind.

“The tragedy is that this individual who committed this crime was on a spree of violence through our community,” Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Michael O’Malley said. “We see it every day in our county. She had opportunities to get on track. At every crossroad she could have turned her life around. She declined that opportunity. She was a terrorist on our streets, and for our community’s sake she is going to face the music for all the crimes she committed over those several months.”

A sheriff’s deputy put the convicted killer in handcuffs. She was led away. She was facing a life sentence. The judge would decide at her sentencing the following month whether there was going to be the possibility of parole after twenty or thirty years, or whether it was going to be life without parole.

“We are quite confident that the only thing she will see for the rest of her life are bars,” police union chief Jeff Follmer said.

Tamara McLoyd tried to explain away the shooting of Shane Bartek, darting like an eel one way and another. I was glad I wasn’t there to hear it. After a while it’s sickening having to listen to lies. Nobody wants to be murdered, not even killers. She thought she was just brushing away somebody who was getting in her way, like brushing away a bug. She didn’t realize she was figuratively killing herself as well as literally killing somebody else. She was 1-2-3 down for the count. She was going to Marysville Prison where nobody cared whether jailbirds lived or died, where she could kill time day-in and day-out until the end of time.

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

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

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

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Home Movies

Don’t Scare the Fish

September 1, 2022 Edward Staskus Leave a comment

By Ed Staskus

I never thought I would be spending two weeks in East Texas in the middle of a blast furnace summer but there I was. I was deep in the heart of Dixie. It rained every afternoon for a half hour and was bone dry a half hour later, racing right back up to 100 degrees in the shade. But by that time, we were on our way to work.

Tyler, Texas was the second last leg of a month-long job. The last leg would be Louisiana and then back home. I was working for American Electro Coatings, a Cleveland, Ohio outfit that refinished desks, files, and cabinets on site. We traveled in three-man crews in white Ford Econoline vans, carrying our gear and luggage. There were two bucket seats and a custom-made bunk that doubled as storage behind the seats. The van was big enough for a sofa if we wanted to. One of us was always sleeping. We rotated the driving.

We started in Chicago, went to Des Moines, OK City, Tyler, slowing down in Louisiana for crawfish, and then got on the hillbilly highway back to the Buckeye State. Our ride never broke down because Ralph, the crew leader and painter, made sure it never broke down. He did an all-points inspection beforehand, had it tuned up, oil changed, and confirmed the steel belts were on the newer side. He didn’t believe in 4-60 air conditioning, four windows open going 60 MPH, and made sure our on-board AC was in perfect working order. The van looked like a creeper on the outside but ran like an angel.

Our workday started when everybody else’s workday was ending. We worked from about six to about two in the morning. Ralph was an old hand. He always got a motel as close as possible to where we would be working to cut down on drive time. “Efficiency is doing things right,” he said. Effectiveness is doing the right things. Ralph was both, not that anybody could tell by looking at him. He looked like a skinny chain-smoking Jackie Gleason.

I wasn’t a full-time employee and didn’t work with the same crew all the time. I always asked for Ralph, though. He was fifteen-some years older than me, testy but steady, smoked too much, but drank less than he smoked. He had a wife and two kids and was as stingy as Scrooge. He didn’t spend much of his own money on the road. When we got back to our motel room in the middle of the night it was lights out, Ralph’s orders. In the afternoon we were free to do whatever we wanted, but he expected us to be ready to go at five o’clock.

Some of the employees were Americans at American Electro Coatings. The rest weren’t. They were from Mexico and Central America. Some of them got paid cash on payday. Jose was Ralph’s right hand man. We always got a room with two beds which meant, since I was the odd man out, I always slept on a rollaway. Some of them were better than others. The first thing Ralph and Jose did when they woke up was hack up a storm and have a cigarette. They shared an ashtray on the bed stand between them.

When they asked me if I wanted to join them in a smoke, I said, “Thanks, but I don’t need one of my own. I’ll just breathe the air.”

Our job in Chicago was smooth sailing, some old-time law office, but we hit a bump in the road in Des Moines. It was a downtown bank and the first day we started on the first floor, which was the lobby. Jose and I were cleaning and taping desks. He called me over to one of them. There was a kind of fancy doorbell button screwed to the well of the desk and wires coming and going to it.

“What we gonna do about this?” Jose asked.

We were going to have to do something to be able to move it to the painting tarp. There were several screws that the wires were attached to. “Let’s make a drawing of where the wires go, unscrew them, and put them back later,” I suggested.

“OK,” he said

Five minutes later three police cars screamed up to the front doors and five seconds later a half dozen cops with guns drawn were bellowing, “Down on the floor, face down!” We couldn’t go flat fast enough. It got straightened out after a while but not before a stern warning from the peace officer in charge to stop messing around with alarm wires.

Every night we drove down East Grand Ave. back to our motel near the State Fairgrounds. The streets were always deserted. We could have burgled anything we wanted. We navigated by the lit-up gold dome of the early-20^th century Iowa State Capital building.

OK City was a two-day job like Chicago. We didn’t like short jobs, so when we got to Texas, we were glad to unload our gear and settle in for two weeks. We were going to be working at the Kelly Springfield tire plant. The factory went back to 1962 and was on the order of a million square feet. A rail spur ran alongside an inside platform from one end to the other end of the factory, bringing raw materials in and hauling new tires away.

The front offices were routine, all of them together, and no fuss about setting up and getting it done. The other offices were on the factory floor on raised platforms. It was where foremen worked. We had to wheel our gear there and carry it up. We got a platform-or-two done a night. We met Barry and Skip on one of them. They kept their eyes open on the down below. They got us acquainted with Tad, another one of the foremen, a friend of theirs who worked at ground level. He had gotten his legs shot out from under him at the Battle of Xuan Loc, the last major battle fought during the Vietnam War. He was discharged with a Purple Heart and a wheelchair.

One night we had lunch just past midnight in the cafeteria with the three of them. I noticed all the white men were sitting at one end of the eatery and all the black men were sitting at the other end. The brown men and yellow men sat where nobody else wanted to. I knew black people were held in low esteem in Cleveland. They were held in no esteem in East Texas. If they weren’t outright hated, they were disliked and shunned.

“We can’t call them niggers no more, so we don’t,” Barry said. “But we don‘t got to eat with niggers. They can’t make us do that. Besides, they don’t want to eat with us either.” Their racism was a great time saver. They were busy men at work, home, and church. They could stick to their long-held beliefs without bothering about the facts.

Barry invited us to go night fishing with them on their next day off. We had been at it at the plant for seven days and were ready for a day off. Barry picked us up in his GMC Sierra Grande pick-up. It had plush carpeting, a padded front seat, and an AM/FM radio. The only stations in town were AM. We listened to a radio minister whoop it up. Ralph sat up front with Barry and Skip and the gun rack. Jose and I hung on to Tad’s wheelchair strapped down to the bed of the truck.

Their 28-foot deck boat was docked at Lake Palestine, west of Tyler. Besides rods and reels hooks bobbers sinkers and bait, they brought lots of ice and a couple hundred cans of Lone Star beer. They did their best to drink it all. We helped out but couldn’t keep up.

We fished for crappie and catfish. Tad was deadest on crappie and used minnows. There were more catfish than anything else. We drift fished for them using worms and chicken livers. Skip was targeting blue catfish using cut fish as bait. The best catfishing is done at night. Flats, river bars, shorelines, and weeds are good places to find them.

Everybody caught a load of everything, tossing them into five-gallon buckets half full of water. Tad forgot to chock his wheels and almost went over the side before Barry grabbed him by the nape, saving his neck.

“We can’t have him yelling and splashing,” Barry said. “The number one rule of fishing is to be quiet. Don’t scare the fish!” We did some firefly and star gazing and lots of mosquito swatting. There was a full moon. I looked carefully and steadily for the Swamp Thing to surface, but he never did.

The next day was Sunday. Barry invited us to his house for a fish fry. We ate our fill. The fish was fresh and tasty. The catfish weren’t as scary dead as alive, their heads cut off. Ralph had a Lone Star, but Jose and I had sworn off it for the Lord’s Day. The Texans were unfazed and drank their fill. Barry brought his family Bible out to the backyard. It was as big as a suitcase and had all the names of his known forebears inscribed on the inside cover.

It was hot and swampy the day later. The tire factory was noxious, like it was every day. We were lucky to be working in the air-conditioned offices. There were enormous exhaust fans for the working men, but the only fresh air was the air that flowed from one end of the railroad tracks to the other through the big bay doors.

The plant reeked of rubber, special oils, carbon black, pigments, silica, and an alphabet soup of additives. Banbury mixers mixed the raw materials for each compound into a batch of black material with the consistency of gum. It was processed into the sidewalls, treads, or other parts of the tire. The first thing to go on the building machine was the inner liner, a special rubber resistant to air and moisture penetration. It takes the place of an inner tube. Next came the body plies and belts, made from polyester and steel. Bronze-coated strands of steel wire, fashioned into hoops, were implanted into the sidewall of the tires to form a bead, so there was an airtight fit with the rim of the wheel. The tread and sidewalls were then put into position over the belt and body plies, and all the parts pressed firmly together.

The result was a green tire. The last step was to cure the tire. Working at the Kelly Springfield factory for two weeks cured me of any inclination I might have ever had about working for a tire manufacturer.

The day before we were due to be done and gone, Barry found us and led us to the open west end of the track platform. He and Skip had rigged up a sail and mounted it to the back of Tad’s wheelchair. There was a stiff breeze blowing through the bay door heading due east from the other open bay door. “We got him some new rubber on those wheels of his,” Barry explained. “He wanted to give them a good test, so we arranged a scoot.”

They pivoted the sail, Tad let go his chokehold on the wheels, and set off rolling down the platform. He picked up speed and we started walking fast. He picked up more speed and we started jogging. He picked up even more speed and we started running. Before long we couldn’t keep up and watched him becoming a crazy fast speck in the distance.

Then he disappeared.

When we got to the other end of the plant and looked down from the platform to the railroad tracks below, we gawked at the runaway. He and his wheels were a mess. Tad had old rail grease all over his work shirt. He rolled off the overturned wheelchair and cursed up a storm. Barry and Skip jumped, got Tad back up to the platform, lifted his dented wheelchair, and set him back to rights. The sail was a shambles. They left it where it lay.

“You sons of bitches ain’t going be doing that again anytime soon, believe you me,” Tad grumbled.

We loaded up the next day and headed for Louisiana. It was a three-day job. We stayed at a motel with a pool and ate crawfish at a roadhouse next door. “You got to suck on the head first thing, before you peel the tail, honey,” our waitress said. We drank Falstaff beer kept cold in galvanized bins full of ice water and salt. We stayed an extra day for more crawfish and to hear a zydeco band everybody said was the best in the parish.

The day we left for home was the hottest most humid day in the history of the world. We rolled up the windows and cranked up the air conditioning. Jose tucked himself in on the bunk behind us and was asleep in no time. I glanced back at him as we drove north up through Mississippi.

“I’ll take the next turn at the wheel,” I told Ralph. “Jose is sleeping like a baby.”

“That’s because he doesn’t have his baby here with him,” Ralph said. “He’ll be making noise on his old squeezebox soon enough.”

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

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

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

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Home Movies

Over the Rainbow

August 1, 2022 Edward Staskus Leave a comment

By Ed Staskus

The mid-summer day I walked across the Rainbow Bridge the sky was getting dark and stormy. I had gotten to the border by leaving the driving to Greyhound. The driver wore a uniform and cap. It made him look like a mix of state trooper and doorman. Since the bus had no acceleration to speak of, once he got it up to speed he drove all-out all the way from Cleveland, Ohio to Niagara Falls, New York. We passed sports cars and muscle cars.

The driver’s seat was high up with a vista vision view of the highway. The transmission was a hands-on four-speed. There were four instruments visible on the panel on the other side of the steering wheel, a speedometer, air pressure gauge for the brakes, oil pressure gauge, and a water temperature gauge.

When I stepped foot on the Canadian side of the bridge it wasn’t raining, yet. The Border Patrol officer asked me where I was from, where I was going, for how long, and waved me through without any more questions. I found the bus station and bought a ticket for Toronto, where I was going. I was going to see a girl, Grazina, who I had met at a Lithuanian summer camp on Wasaga Beach a couple of years before.

It rained hard all the way there, past Hamilton and Mississauga on the Queen Elizabeth Way, until I got to the big city, where the clouds parted and the sun came out. Everything smelled clean. I picked up a map of the bus and subway system and found my way to my friend Paul’s house where I was going to stay. His family was friends with my family from back when we lived in Canada.

The Kolyciai lived in a two-story brick row house off College St. near Little Italy. I was polite to his parents and ignored his two younger sisters. I roomed with Paul, but ditched him every morning after breakfast, hopping a bus to Grazina’s house. Girls came first. It wasn’t far, 5-or-so minutes away near St. John the Baptist Church. Lithuanians bought the church in 1928 and redesigned it in the Baltic way in 1956. They tore the roof off and replaced it with a traditional Lithuanian village house roof with a sun-cross on top.

Grazina, whose name meant “beautiful” in English, met me on her front porch and took me on a guided tour of Toronto. We went by tennis shoe, streetcar, and the underground. We looked the city over from the observation deck on top of City Hall and went to the waterfront. We strolled around Nathan Philips Square. We had strong tea and swarm cones at an outdoor café. Grazina popped in and out of shops on Gerrard St. checking out MOD fashions. At the end of the day I was dog tired. I begged off a warmed-over dinner Paul’s mother offered me back at home away from home and fell into bed.

The next morning, she had a surprise for me. We weren’t going wandering, even though I felt refreshed. We were going to a funeral.

“Who died?” I asked.

“Nobody I probably know and for sure nobody you know,” she said.

She was dressed for death, all in black. I wasn’t, wearing blue jeans and a madras shirt. We stopped at a second-hand clothes store. I bought a black shirt so I wouldn’t stick out like a sore thumb.

“Why are we going to this funeral?” I asked.

“Because it’s Friday and it’s a Greek funeral,” she said as though that explained everything.

I was an old hand at funerals, having swung a thurible at many of them when I was an altar boy at St George Catholic Church. I had only ever been to Lithuanian funeral services. “Because it’s Friday and a Greek funeral” were obscure reasons to me, but I was willing to go along.

Toronto was full of immigrants. Immediately after the World War Two both war-time brides and children fathered by Canadian soldiers showed up. Post-WW2 refugee Italians, Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, Central Europeans, and Balts poured in. In 1956 after Soviet tanks rolled through Budapest, Hungarians came over. Through the 1950s and 60s the old-stock Anglo-Canadianism of Toronto was being slowly transformed.

The church, Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox, in the former Clinton Street Methodist building, was somewhere up Little Italy way. We got on a bus. When we got there a priest sporting a shaggy beard, Father Pasisios, was leading the service. He wore a funny looking hat. The church was small on the outside but big on the inside. We sat quietly in the back. When the service was over I finally asked Grazina, “Why are we here?”

“For the repast.”

“What’s that?”

“Food, usually a full meal.”

“Doesn’t your family feed you?”

“It’s not that,” she said. “I went to a Romanian funeral with a friend a few months ago, and they served food afterwards, and it was great, the kind of food I had never had before. After a while I started going to different funerals whenever I could, always on Fridays. It didn’t matter if they were Sicilian, Czechoslovakian, Macedonian, only that I could sample their national food.”

“How do you know where to go?”

“I read the death notices in the newspaper.”

I had heard of wedding crashers, but never a funeral crasher.

The repast was at a next-door community hall. Grazina was dodgy when asked, telling both sides of the family she was distantly related to the other side of the family. “Memory eternal” is what she always said next, shaking somebody’s hand. She knew the lingo. The lunch was delicious, consisting of moussaka, mesimeriano, and gyros. We had coffee and baklava for dessert. By the time we left we were well fed and ready for the rest of the day..

We went to Yorkville and hung around the rest of the day. It was like going to another country. There were coffee houses and music clubs all over Yonge and Bloor Streets. The neighborhood went back to the 1830s when it was a suburban retreat. Fifty years later it was annexed by the city of Toronto and until the early 1960s was quaint and quiet turf. Then it morphed into a haven of counterculture.

“An explosion of youthful literary and musical talent is appearing on small stages in smoky coffee houses, next to edgy art galleries and funky fashion boutiques offering trendy garb, blow-up chairs, black light posters and hookah pipes, all housed in shabby Victorian row houses,” the Toronto Star said.

It was fun roaming around, hopscotching, ducking in and out, even though a police paddy wagon was parked at the corner of Hazelton and Yorkville. There had been love-ins, sit-ins, and so-called “hippie brawls” in recent years. Some of the leading citizens were up in arms. The politician Syl Apps said the area was a “festering sore in the middle of the city.” There were wide-eyed teenagers and tourists, hippies and bohemians, hawkers and peddlers, and sullen-looking bikers.

A young man was slumped on the sidewalk, We stopped to take a peek at him lying dazed against a storefront. An old woman wearing a babushka and walking with a cane crept carefully past him. I couldn’t tell who was more over a barrel. We went our own way.

We weren’t able to get into the Riverboat Coffeehouse, which wasn’t really a coffeehouse, but a club with the best music in town. We peeked through the porthole windows but all we saw were shadows. The Mynah Bird featured go-go dancers in glass cases. Some of the glass cases were on the outside front of the club. We saw Rompin’ Ronnie Hawkins perform back flips across the stage while doing guitar solos at Le Coq d’Or.

Starvin’ Marvin’s Burlesque Palace was somewhere upstairs, but we didn’t go there. All the clubs were small and most of the doors open to catch a breeze. We sat on curbs and heard a half-dozen bands free of charge. We stayed until midnight. By the time I got back to Paul’s house I was more than tired again and fell into bed. I caught more than forty winks.

The sky on Saturday morning was clear and bright over Lake Ontario. Grazina and I went to the Toronto Islands. We took the Sam McBride ferry and rented bikes. There were no cars or busses. We stopped at the new Centreville Amusement Park on Middle Island and rode the carousel. When we found a beach we changed, threw a towel down, and spent the remainder of the afternoon in the sun. We had bananas and threw the peels to the seagulls, who tore them apart and downed them like it was their last meal.

Grazina invited me over for dinner. She told me her mother was a bad cook, but I went anyway. She set the table while her mother brought platters of cepelinai, with bacon and sour cream on the side, serving them piping hot and covered with gravy. They were fit for a king. I told Grazina her mother was the queen of the Baltic kitchen.

The next morning was Sunday. After going to mass with Grazina and her family I caught a bus for home. At the border I waited my turn to answer the Border Patrol man’s questions. I had all the answers except one. When he asked me for I. D., I said I didn’t have any.

“How did you get into Canada?”

“I walked over the bridge.”

“Didn’t they ask you for I. D.?”

“No,” I said.

“Jesus Christ! Well, you can’t come into the United States without identification.”

I was born in Sudbury, Ontario and had returned to Canada many times since for summer camps, but had never overconcerned myself with the legalities. I left that to whoever was driving the car, who were my parents or somebody else’s parents.

I was speechless. Distress must have showed on my face. The Border Patrol man told me to call my parents and ask them to bring identification. It sounded like a good idea, except that it wasn’t. My father was out of town on business and my mother worked at a supermarket. Even if she was willing, she had never driven a car that far in her life.

“Is there any place I can stay?”

“Do you have any money?

“Just enough for a bus ticket home.”

He said Jesus Christ a few more times and finally suggested what he called a “hippie flophouse” on Clifton Hill. He gave me directions and I found it easily enough. I used the pay phone to call my mother, reversing the charges. After she calmed down, she said she would send what I needed the next morning by overnight mail. I was in for two nights of roughing it.

The flophouse was an old motel advertising “Family Rates.” It was next to a Snack Bar selling hot dogs and pizza by the slice. There were young guys and girls loitering, lounging, and smoking pot in the courtyard. One of them offered me a pillow and the floor. I accepted on the spot before he drifted down and out. It was better than sleeping in the great outdoors.

I spent the next day exploring Niagara Falls. There were pancake houses and waffle houses. There were magic museums and wax museums There were arcades and Ripley’s Odditorium. I took a walk through the botanical gardens and to the Horseshoe Falls. That summer the Horseshoe Falls were tilting water over the edge like there was no tomorrow. The American Falls, on the other hand, had been shut down by the Army Corp of Engineers to study erosion and instability. They had built a 600-foot dam across the Niagara River, which meant 60,000 gallons of water a second were being diverted over the larger Canadian waterfall. It was loud as a mosh pit and a vast mist floated up into my face.

The Niagara River drains into Lake Ontario. I lived in Cleveland a block from Lake Erie. If I threw myself into the Niagara River I would first have to avoid the falls and then swim upstream all the way to Buffalo before I could relax and float home on Lake Erie. It was an idea, but the practical side of me discarded the idea.

Many people have gone over the falls. As far as anybody knows the first person to try it was Sam Patch, better known as the Yankee Leaper, who jumped 120 feet from an outstretched ladder down to the base of the falls. He survived, but many of the daredevils who followed him didn’t. The first person to successfully take the plunge in a barrel was schoolteacher Annie Taylor in 1901. Busted flat, she thought up the stunt as a way of becoming rich and famous. The first thing she did was build a test model, stuff her housecat into it, and throw it over the side. When the cat made it unscathed, she adapted a person-sized pickle barrel and shoved off. It was her birthday. She told everybody she was 43, although she was really 63.

After she made it to safety with only bumps and bruises she became famous, but missed out on riches. Everybody said she should have sold tickets to the show, but it was Monday morning quarterbacking. She never tried it again. Two years later the professional baseball player Ed Delahanty tried it while dead drunk. The booze didn’t help. He drowned right away. About twenty people perish going over the falls every year. Most of them are suicides. The others amount to the same thing.

The last person in the 1960s to go over the falls with the intention of staying alive was Nathan Boya in a big rubber ball nicknamed the “Plunge-O-Sphere.” When it hit the rocks at the bottom it bounced and bounced. He didn’t break any bones, although he had friction burns all over him.

I got my official papers on Tuesday, dutifully displayed them at the border, and walked into the United States. I bought a bus ticket home. I sat in the back of the Greyhound and stretched my legs out. When it lumbered off, I took a look back, but it was all a blur through the smudgy window.

Grazina and I wrote letters to one another that winter until we didn’t. We slowly ran out of words and by the next year were completely out of them. She was enrolled in a Toronto university full-time by then while I was working half the year and going to Cleveland State University the other half of the year. She found a hometown boyfriend and I found an apartment on the bohemian near east side of Cleveland.

It was a few years later that Henri Rechatin, his wife Janyck, and friend Frank Lucas rode across the Niagara River near the downstream whirlpool on a motorcycle, riding the cables of the Spanish Aero Car. The friend piloted the motorcycle while Henri and Janyck balanced on attached perches. Since they didn’t have passports, when they got to the far side, they hauled the motorcycle and themselves into the aero car and rode back in comfort.

The Border Patrol was waiting for them. They were arrested for performing a dangerous act, but formal charges were never filed. They were free to go. For my part, I made sure to always have something official with my picture on it whenever I went anywhere foreign after that. I had learned my lesson in Niagara Falls. Getting stuck in limbo, no matter if it’s one of the ‘Seven Natural Wonders of North America’ or not, is captivating for only so long.

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

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

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

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

The end of summer, 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 torpedo waits in the wings. A Hell’s Kitchen private eye scares up the shadows.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

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Mexican Stand-Off

August 1, 2022 Edward Staskus Leave a comment

By Ed Staskus

The day my nephew, who was going to be known by the name of Ike from that day on, told me he was changing his name to Wyatt, all I could think of saying was, “Why?” He looked up from his Xbox. He was sitting in a special gaming chair. There was carnage all over the big screen. The game was called Legends of War. It looked like everybody was losing.

“What do you mean, why?” he asked.

It turned out he had watched the horse opera “Tombstone” the night before and been enchanted by Wyatt Earp.

“That might not work,” I said.

“Why not?”

“Wyatt Earp was a lawman through and through. Your law-abiding ways are sketchy at best.”

“Oh, right, I see what you mean. How about Doc, like Doc Holliday? He was smack.”

“He was that, but he’s more along the lines of a Greek tragedy. I don’t see you as tragic.”

“Hell no, I’m not tragic. The girls wouldn’t like that.”

“How about Ike?” I suggested.

“Who’s that?”

“He was one of the cowboys in the movie, fast with a gun.”

“OK, that sounds good. Ike it is from now on.”

I didn’t tell him Ike was one of the bad cowboys who had tried to kill Wyatt Earp at the OK Corral.

Ike was smart enough to make the grade and get admitted into St. Edward High School but scatterbrained enough to get suspended. St Ed’s is a Catholic school in Lakewood, Ohio in the Holy Cross tradition. Thousands of teenage boys apply to get in every year. A couple of hundred make it. Ike had enough applesauce in him to not get expelled. He made it to graduation day by the skin of his teeth.

He wasn’t so lucky at Cleveland State University. CSU is a state school. So long as your high school grades are somewhere near consciousness there is no problem getting admitted. After one thing and another he was told in no uncertain terms he had to find another school. When he left CSU, leaving his student housing apartment in need of disaster relief, he started looking for another place to live.

His problem was no landlord with even a grade school education would rent to him. He camped out at his sister’s apartment until she said he had to go. His father suggested his uncles. He stayed with one after another until the last one told him he had to go. He stayed at my mother’s house, throwing parties for his friends whenever she broke a leg and was recovering at the Cleveland Clinic or had a stroke and was recovering at the Welsh Home in Rocky River.

When my brother asked me to throw some work his son’s way, I was of a mind to say no. It was almost the first thing I said. It was what I should have said. I had already hired Ike to waterproof our basement walls and repaint the concrete floor some months earlier. Every time I looked, he was easing himself down onto one of our lawn chairs and lighting up. He liked to smoke reefer rather than attend to the job at hand. When he wasn’t blazing, he was talking on his cell phone. In the end it was such a makeshift effort that I spent almost as much time in the basement as he had done, following up on his no effort work.

I thought, that’s the last time. What I said, though, when my brother asked, was OK. I could have kicked myself.

I worked more-or-less full-time for Light Bulb Supply in Brook Park. There were no brooks or parks anywhere in Brook Park. The biggest greenspace was Holy Cross Cemetery, 240 acres of it, across the street. I went there for walks instead of taking lunch whenever the day was dry and sunny. The office work more-or-less paid the bills. It was a family business, however, and I wasn’t a part of the family. I wasn’t going to get anywhere by relying on their good will, of which there was little. It was like my paycheck, on the stingy side.

I got ahead by repairing tanning equipment part-time, on my own time, stand-ups and lay-downs, at tanning salons, beauty salons, gyms, and people’s homes. Indoor tanning was booming. I bought a tool box and electrical tools. I taught myself how to do it. My hourly rate was more, by far, than what Light Bulb Supply paid me. If it was an insurance job, I raised the price. If the insurance agent protested, I hung up.

Allstate Insurance sent me to Dearborn, Michigan to inspect a tanning bed that had been under water for a few days in a family’s basement rec room. They found out their sump pump had failed when they got home from vacation. I drove there on a Saturday morning. It was going to be an all-day job getting there and back.

Dearborn is just west of Detroit. and home to the most Muslims in the United States. It is also home to the largest mosque in the country. I thought I would stop and check it out. I got my signals crossed, missed the turn-off off I-75, and missed the mosque. When I got to Detroit what I saw was an exit for Dearborn St. I took it. It was the wring exit. When all I saw were bars, funeral parlors, beauty shops, empty lots, and no white faces, I parked, found a phone booth, and called the folks with the soggy tanning bed. I told them where I thought I was.

There was a pause. “Get back in your car and drive away from there right now,” the man of the house said. “It’s not safe.” There was no sense in tempting fate by sightseeing. I got back into my car and followed the Rouge River to Dearborn.

I told Ike I had a job at a big tanning salon in North Royalton south of Cleveland. There were some repairs involved and re-lamping 9 or 10 tanning beds. It was going to take Ike and me a weekend and two or three nights. In the end it took me closer to a weekend and a week of nights. Ike was supposed to re-lamp during the day, since he was unemployed and had the free time, while I did the repairs at night, except he only showed up once and didn’t finish even one of the tanning beds.

One day he wasn’t feeling well. His stomach hurt. Another day his garage door broke with his car inside it. Another day he didn’t bother to call me to say he needed a mental health day. The last time before I told him not to bother anymore, he said the laundromat was closed and he didn’t have any clean clothes to wear to work. In the end I chalked it up to experience.

“Nobody wants to hire me,” he complained, one of his many complaints. He seemed to think he could get the job done without going to work. He liked to say, “I don’t want to be tied down.” He didn’t want to be another cog in the wheel. There was little chance of that. Who wants a buzzkill of a cog?

My brother asked my sister to let Ike move into her house. She lived nearby, had the space, but was reluctant. There was finally some peace and quiet in her house. She and her husband had split up. He had moved out and was on the road most of the time working as a long-haul trucker. Her daughter had graduated from Miami University and struck out on her own. There were two empty bedrooms. She could use the rent money. I suggested she get it up front.

She told my brother she had reservations, especially since everybody knew Ike wasn’t just smoking reefer. He was selling reefer and branching out into fun pills. She didn’t want a drug dealer in her house.

“He doesn’t have anywhere else to go,” my brother said.

“What about your house?”

“My wife doesn’t want him in our house.” His wife was Ike’s foster mother. She was a schoolteacher. Ike had been a student in her class during middle school. She probably knew what he was up to, although she was close-mouthed about it.

Ike was arrested strolling down Detroit Rd. on the Cleveland side of its west side border in the middle of the night. He was puffing on a stogie-sized spliff. It was before reefer was legal. He was packing pills and cash in his pockets and having a high old time. A year later he appeared in court and was rewarded with intervention instead of jail time. My brother spent a small fortune sending him to assessment counseling treatment and prevention classes. I drove Ike to the classes now and then. He was chill as a cottonmouth.

When he moved into my sister’s house, he brought clothes, shoes, and a safe with him. He kept the key to the safe on his person at all times. He moved into one of the vacant bedrooms. My brother paid his rent occasionally. Ike kept his clothes within easy reach and his shoes on display. “He thought nothing about buying $150.00 tennis shoes,” my sister said. “He had lots of them.”

She didn’t ask what he kept in the safe. She didn’t want to know. One day she noticed one of the floorboards in his bedroom had been pried up and put back in place. When she looked under the board, she saw a green stash. She put the board back in its place. Boys and girls drove up to her house day and night, leaving their cars running at the curb. When they did, Ike ran outside, handed them something through their open car windows, and they gave him something in return.

He texted his girlfriend a photograph of tens, twenties, and fifties fanned out across his bed cover. “Top of the world,” he seemed to be saying. When he was done with the display, he neatly packed the dough up and put it back in his safe. He was feeding the crocodile, hoping it would eat him last.

My sister had told Ike, “No friends in the house.” A week later, pulling into her driveway after work, she saw more than a dozen boys and girls on her front porch and front steps. Two of them were sprawled over a railing. They were waiting for Ike. My sister called my brother.

“Get over here right now and tell your son’s friends to leave.”

I happened to be driving by and stopped to see what was going on with the crowd on the front porch. When I asked if they were waiting for somebody, one of the youngsters on the railing said, “We are the ones we’re waiting for.” I assumed it was a smarmy Millennial trope. “Never talk to the monkey when the organ grinder is out of the room,” I said. “I understand,” the youngster said, which surprised me. I barely understood it myself. I left when I saw my brother’s car coming down the street and my sister storming down the driveway

When Ike showed up, she asked him, “What do you not understand about no friends?”

He was fluent when it came to complaining and explaining. Before he was done my sister cried uncle. “Just don’t let it happen again,” she said. He promised it wouldn’t happen again. It happened again and again. Ike could be sincerely insincere when he had to be.

The driveway was delineated by the two houses on its sides. It wasn’t a wide driveway by any means. There was a grass strip on one side of the driveway but no buffer on her house’s side. Fortunately, Ike drove a compact car. Unfortunately, he had forgotten what he learned in driver’s education. He bounced off the house several times, denting his car, and ripping vinyl siding off the house.

He liked to text my sister, asking if she needed anything done around his crash pad. When he wiggled down the driveway and hit the house he texted her, promising to fix it right away. He never did. He never did anything else, either, except breaking into the house through the back kitchen window whenever he locked himself out. Every time he did my sister had to replace the screen. A neighbor called the Lakewood Police Department when they noticed one of the break-ins, but Ike was able to explain it away.

After the intervention went bust, he was arrested again and charged with drug possession, possessing criminal tools, and a trafficking offense. He pled guilty since law enforcement had the goods on him. His charm, good looks, and a silver tongued lawyer carried the day. He was ordered to be drug tested on a week-to-week basis.

Something needed to save the day for my sister. She wanted Ike gone but didn’t know how to get it done. He was a blood relative and needed a place to live, even though he wasn’t willing to do what it takes to civilize an apartment and stock the shelves. It was a stand-off. My brother insisted there wasn’t anywhere else Ike could go. He had burned one bridge too many. She bit the bullet, but it tasted bitter.

The magic bullet turned out to be the court-mandated drug-testing Ike was obliged to undergo. When spring turned to summer and summer turned to fall, he fell over his up-market tennis shoe laces and tested positive. Boys just want to have fun, even though I had told him not to squat with his spurs on. It meant the slammer. It meant he was packing up, shoes and safe and all. It meant my sister could slam and lock the door behind him the minute he left, which is what she did.

The state of Ohio has the power to seize cash and property involved in drug trafficking. Asset seizures and forfeitures are a deterrent and a tool to take down criminal activity. “We generally seize assets that are believed to be the fruits of drug trafficking or used to facilitate the crime of drug trafficking,” Paul Saunders, a senior police official, said. “The courts have a litany of rules that are applied to each case to determine whether assets will be forfeited.”

The last thing my sister needed was to have her home seized and taken away from her because of somebody else’s bad behavior. Fortunately, no searchlights were searching for her. She went back to mowing her lawn, walking her dogs, and watching “Law and Order” on TV. When the crime drama wrapped everything up on a happy note, she went to bed snug as a bug with nothing bristling in her bonnet.

I chewed on the idea of telling Ike who Ike really was, but never got around to it. It’s been said the truth will set you free. Sometimes it can feel good. Other times it can feel bad. I wasn’t in the advice business, however. I thought it best that Ike take whatever fork in the road he thought best.

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

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

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

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

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

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