Constructed Reality

Animal Crackers

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By Ed Staskus

   Dave Bloomquist ran the show at the Plaza Apartments, trying to make it work on the near east side, on the fringe of downtown. The apartment building we called the house was on Prospect Ave., a $.25 fare on a rundown Cleveland Transportation System bus about five minutes from Public Square. The ghetto was uptown and all around us. Liquor, deadbeats, hookers, old cars, and  boarded-up windows were the order of the day. The house, however, was its own enclave.

   Dave was from Sandusky. “The town, which is sluggish and uninteresting, is something like an English watering-place out of season,” Charles Dickens wrote after visiting it. A hundred years later it was known for Cedar Point, an amusement park on a peninsula jutting out into Lake Erie. After high school Dave moved to Cleveland to study visual and fine arts at Cleveland State University.

   “Art held a natural attraction for me, and it was something I wanted to pursue,” he said. “My dad was an electrician. II helped him run wires and other simple tasks. I also worked during college, renovations, painting, things like that. After graduation, my business partner and I scraped together a down payment on the 48-unit Victorian-style Plaza. We decided to restore it ourselves.”

   Dave was always in in and around the building. Whenever anything went wrong, it didn’t take long to find him. He was the owner, superintendent, and maintenance man. If he wasn’t nearby, his ex-wife-to- be, Annie, tall and slim, her hair done up in braids, was right there cooking, cleaning, and taking care of their baby boy. Built in 1901 for middle-class residents, something was always making trouble at the Plaza.

   “We learned to sweat pipe, patch the roof, and fix windows,” Dave said. “We had to operate with just rent money. We couldn’t afford to call on anyone for help.”

   Back in the day Upper Prospect was the second most prestigious place to live in Cleveland, next to Millionaire’s Row on Euclid Ave. Prospect Ave. and Euclid Ave. were where to be, the smoking rooms of the city’s economic and social elite. Most of the homes on Prospect Ave. were brick two-story single-family houses in the Italianate style. The street was lined with elm trees.

   By the time I moved onto Prospect Ave., as the 1960s leaked into the 1970s, all the rich folks were long gone, and Dutch elm disease had killed most of the trees. It was killing most of the elms in all but two states east of the Missouri River. Those that hadn’t died were being sprayed with DDT or removed. The entry point for the bug was Northeast Ohio in 1929, on a train bringing in a shipment of elm veneer logs from France. The train stopped south of Cleveland to load up on coal and water. Not long afterwards elm trees along the railroad tracks started to die. The elm bark beetle doesn’t kill the tree, but the fungus it carries is deadly.

   There were rowhouses scattered among the single-family homes, which included the Prospect Ave. Rowhouses that Dave was throwing his eye on. He had more than enough work on his hands, but he was a no slouch go-getter. Preservation and restoration efforts on Upper Prospect were beginning to pick up steam.

   Before moving in I walked to Mecca Keys on Rockwell Ave. off East 9th St. and had a key for my apartment made. The Plaza was home to students, secretaries, both beatniks and hippies, machinists, artists, bikers, clerks, musicians, court reporters, dogsbody men, anarchists, and writers, some shaking and baking, others simply doing their best to keep the wolf away from the door. 

   “We were urban pioneers before the term was coined,” said Scott Krauss, a drummer for the art-rock band Pere Ubu. “Like the Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead had their band houses, we had the Plaza.”

   “There were scores of wonderful community dinners, insipid and treacherous burglars,” Dave said years later when it was all over. “Innocence was lost. There were raucous outrageous parties. Families were formed and raised and there were tragic early deaths of close friends. But music, art, and life were in joyful abundance all the time.”

   There was plenty of old-fashioned seediness, too. “I remember coming home at four in the morning and there would still be people in the courtyard drinking beer and playing music,” said Larry Collins. “We would watch the hookers and their customers play hide-and-seek with the undercover vice cops.”

   One of the first friends I made there was Virginia Sustarsic. I had seen her around Dixon Hall up the street when I lived there before I moved to the Plaza. She was close to John McGraw, a trim bohemian who lived alone on the third floor, read obscure European poets, drank Jack Daniels from the bottle, and drove a 1950s windowless Chevy panel truck. It was a black panel truck.

   Virginia had interned at the Cleveland Press, worked on Cleveland State University’s’s student newspaper, and wrote for the school’s poetry magazine. Since she was settled in at the Plaza, was friendly, and worked for herself, she made friends easily, and I subsequently made friends at the Plaza by hanging around with her.

   She knew all about art. I didn’t know much about anything. When she showed me a reproduction of a Jackson Pollack painting, I thought, what a mess. When she showed me a picture of an American flag by Jasper Johns, I found a ragged old flag and thumbtacked it to the wall at the head of my bed. I thought I was being au courant.

   Virginia made candles, incense, and roach clips for a head shop on the near west side. The owner of the shop, Jamie, was a little older than us. He wore fake glasses to disguise a pear-shaped nose. He wore a red checked bandana and liked to go barefoot. He pulled up in a mid-60s VW T2 bus, Virginia delivered the goods, he would say he had a great idea for going someplace fun, as many people as could fit would pile into the Splittie, and he would drive to a park, a beach, or a grassy knoll somewhere.  

   Jamie always played The Who’s “Magic Bus” at least once every trip, there and back. “Thank you, driver, for getting me here, too much, Magic Bus, now I’ve got my Magic Bus.” The speakers were tinny, but the volume made up for it.

   We went to see “Woodstock” the movie at a drive-in, since none of us had gone to the music festival. Virginia’s roach clips came in handy. The Splittie’s back and middle seats could be pulled out. It was useful at drive-ins, backing the bus in to face the screen, some of us in the seats on the ground, others in the open rear of the bus, and Jamie with his gal on top of the VW, an umbrella at the ready. 

   Nobody wanted to be sitting behind Mike Cassidy, who was skinny enough, but had a massive head of long electrified red hair. Virginia got him a shower cap to keep his mop top under control, but he refused to wear it.

   Virginia was hooked on photography and showed me the ropes, letting me use her camera. When a photography contest was announced at Cleveland State University, she entered a picture she had taken in San Francisco. I entered a picture of Mr. Flood.

   Bob Flood lived on the second floor, like me. None of us knew what he did, exactly, although he wore a hat suggesting he was a locomotive engineer. Virginia thought he was a professor of some kind. Everybody called him Mr. Flood. Nobody knew why. He was a lanky careful man, sported a shaggy looking beard, was divorced, but had visitation rights to his two children, who came and played in his apartment on weekends.

   My picture was a portrait and Virginia’s a full-scale shot of two homeless men in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, passing a bottle of booze between them. The trees in the background disappeared into a triangle. After I won the blue ribbon, Virginia went to the Art Department and talked to one of the judges. She told him she had been trying to conjure the Pointillism of Georges Seurat.

   “Well,” he said. “The portrait and your picture were our top picks. But yours was kind of grainy.”

   “That was the whole point,” she groused. 

   Virginia’s best friend at the Plaza was Diane Straub. Diane had a straight job. She was a secretary downtown. She got up every morning, got on the bus, went to work, and came back at night. Monday through Friday she took care of her apartment and her cats. On weekends she got loose. She got dressed up as Bogie’s old lady.

   Bogie was Diane’s live-in boyfriend. He was fit and strong and always wore black, tip to toe. He had a Harley Davidson he kept in the back lot. Nobody ever tried to steal it, because everybody knew that would be a big mistake.

   He was one of the Animals, although he and the other Animals had been forced to go freelance. They used to have a clubhouse, its walls pockmarked with bullet holes, on Euclid Ave. in Willoughby, until the day the Willoughby police raided it. “The police couldn’t get anything on us, so they hot-wired the landlord to force us out,” one of the Animals, Gaby, told the Cleveland Press, which was the afternoon newspaper. “We never did anything worse than use the clubhouse walls for target practice.”

   Gaby knew full well there was more to the story. His biker clubmate Don Griswold had been arrested the day before for being involved in a shooting with members of Cleveland’s Hells Angels that left two dead. “The Angels were going to take care of me if the cops didn’t do it first,” he said. “Misery loves company.”

   The spring before my first full summer at the Plaza, Cleveland’s Breed and the Violators got into it at a motorcycle show at the Polish Women’s Hall southeast of the Flats. The 10‐minute riot with fists, clubs, knives, and chains left 5 men dead, 20 Injured, and 84 arrested. The dead were buried, the injured rushed to hospitals, and the arrested hauled away to the Central Police Station on Payne Ave. The Black Panthers were always demonstrating outside the front doors, but they had to make way that day. Armed guards were posted in the hallways of the station as a precaution. When the injured bikers recovered, they were arrested at the hospital’s exit door.

   Art Zaccone, headman of the Chosen Few, said the fight broke out because of trouble between the two groups going back to a rumble in Philadelphia two years earlier. The biker gangs didn’t ride on magic busses. They rode hogs. They made their own black magic. They had long memories and nursed never forgotten or forgiven grievances.

   After Bogie moved out, Diane took up with Igor, a math wizard. He was tall, had long wiry hair, and played air guitar. Even though he was egg-headed about numbers, he often looked like he was only half there. He was vivid but baffling.

   “We all thought he was tripping a lot,” Virginia said.

   I lived in a back apartment on the second floor, although I avoided the back stairs and porches. They were falling apart in their old age. Virginia lived in a courtyard-facing apartment on the same floor and an older Italian couple, Angeline and Charlie Beale, lived in the front. They always had their apartment door open. Charlie was short and stout, a retired mailman. He read newspapers and magazines all day long. Angie was short and stout, too. She stayed in the kitchen in a black slip cooking and drinking coffee from a Stone Age espresso machine. 

   They had an orange and green parrot. Whenever Angie spied Virginia walking by, she called out, “Oh, honey, come in, let me see if I can get him to talk to you.” She would coo and try to convince the bird to talk. He never did, even when she poked him with a stick. When she did, he whistled and squawked, sounding offended.

   “How long have you had that parrot?” Virginia asked, thinking they were still training him.

   “Oh, we’ve had him for sixteen years, honey.”

   Angie and Charlie went shopping for foodstuffs twice a week. They walked down Prospect Ave. to the Central Market. “They always started out together, but ended up a block or more apart,” Dave said. They both carried handmade cotton shopping bags, one in each hand.

   The Central Market was on E. 4th St., nearly two miles away by foot. The only people who went there were people who couldn’t get to the West Side Market. It was grimy and the roof leaked. “Some panels are out, and when it rains, we got to put plastic tarp down, which looks like hell,” said produce stall owner Tony LoSchiavo.

   “She always ended up walking twenty feet behind him,” Virginia said. “A couple of hours later, same thing, both of them their two bags full, he would be walking twenty feet ahead of her as they came back to the Plaza.”

   He waited at the front door, holding it open for her. She trudged up, he followed her, and the parrot every time said, “Welcome back!” when they stepped into their apartment. Angie returned with vegetables like asparagus and nuts like filberts for the thick billed brightly colored bird.

    Most of the tenants at the Plaza were on good terms with one another. Many of us were single and sought out company up and down the floors and down the hallways, especially in January and February when snow piled up unshovelled. We swung by unannounced and chewed the fat.

   “Friends would just drop in,” Virginia said. ”All the time.”

   One Siberian Sunday afternoon Mr. Flood’s children were visiting and went exploring in the basement. They found a Flexible Flyer. Their father bundled them up and carried the sled outside. When they got tired of pushing each other back and forth in the parking lot, they found a shovel and scooped snow onto the back stairs as far up as the first landing. They shoveled enough snow on the stairs to make a ramp and spent the rest of the day running across the landing, throwing themselves on the sled, racing down the ramp, and zooming across the icy lot.

   Mr. Flood and I watched them from the second-floor landing. “They’re up to snow good,” he said when they hit bottom, bumped upwards, and got some air under their sled. Mr. Flood was the kind of man who talked low, talked slow, and didn’t say too much. He wasn’t, for all that, above cracking a joke.

    “They’re on their own magic carpet ride,” I said.

   “Animal crackers!” the children whooped back at their father, living it up without a care in the world.

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Ohio Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

Barron Cannon

Fixing the Frankenstein

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By Ed Staskus

   The day Frankenstein walked into Barron Cannon’s yoga studio in Lakewood, Ohio, Barron could tell he wasn’t a happy monster. He walked as though he had never gotten over the rigor mortis of all his lives and deaths before being resurrected by Victor Frankenstein. He was dirty as all get out and wet. His boots were caked with muck and mire. He needed a haircut and a shave. He looked like he could use ten or twelve square meals all at once.

   “You look like hell,” Barron said. 

   “I feel like hell,” Frankenstein said.

   “I thought you were dead and gone, and only alive in the movies,” Barron said. “The story is you killed yourself up on the North Pole after Victor died. That would have been a couple hundred years ago.”

   After being chased and pelted with rocks, flaming stave torches shoved into his face, shot at and thrown into chains, Frankenstein had sworn revenge against all mankind. They hated him so he would hate them. He had hated himself, as well, for a long time.

   “I was going to end it all when I floated off on an ice floe, but I froze solid, and it wasn’t until twenty summers ago that I defrosted.”

   A heartwarming result of global warming, Barron thought to himself.

   “After defrosting I lost track of time,” the creature said. “It’s either all day or all night almost all the time. I built an igloo and learned to hunt seals. I caught and beat their brains out with my bare hands. I meant to go back to Geneva. But after living on the ice safe and sound, I changed my mind. There wasn’t anybody anywhere trying to kill me, which was a blessing. But then I got lonely.”

   “How did you get here?” Barron asked.

   “I walked.”

   “It’s got to be three, four thousand miles from the pole to here. How long did it take you?”

   “I meant to go back to Germany, but I took a wrong turn at the top of the world. Canada looked like Russia until I got to Toronto. By then I didn’t want to turn around. I had been at it for five months. I kept walking until I reached Perry, on Lake Erie. I met a boy and girl there. They were riding pedal go-karts on the bluffs. The girl said her brother was the Unofficial Monster Hunter of Lake County. It was hard to believe. He’s nothing more than a tadpole. When I asked him whether he thought I was a monster, he said I looked monstrous, but was sure I wasn’t a monster.”

   Frankenstein had seen his own reflection in water. He was aware of what he looked like. He didn’t like it any more than passersby did, throwing him wary nervous glances and scuttling away. 

   “Was his name Oliver?”

   “Yes.”

   “You didn’t throw him and his sister down a well, or anything like that, did you?”

   “No, and I’m glad I didn’t. They helped me. They gave me some of their homemade granola bars.”

   “Don’t underestimate the boy. He’s taken on banshees and trolls, the 19 virus, Bigfoot, Goo Goo Godzilla, and the King of the Monsters himself. I don’t know how he does it, but he’s no ordinary child to mess with.”

   “He told me to come here and talk to you, that you were a yoga teacher and could unstraighten me. I’m stiff as a board all the time.”

   “I can see that,” Barron said.

   “I want to be able to touch my toes. I want to be a better man.”

   “I can help you with that,” Barron said. “Except the better person part. That’s up to you.”

   “I was benevolent and good once,” Frankenstein said. “Misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.”

   “I’ll do my best.”

   For once, Frankenstein had the feeling he had found a true friend.

   After Barron got back from the Goodwill store with XXL shorts and muscle t’s, pants and shirts, and threw away Frankenstein’s clothes, which hadn’t been washed in centuries, they got started on the yoga mat. Barron told him to get barefoot. When he did the smell was bad. Barron turned on the studio’s fans and opened both the front and back doors. He took the creature’s boots outside and tossed them in the dumpster. The dumpster burped and spit the boots back out. They landed in the parking lot with a clomp. Barron doused them with gasoline and burned them.

   “We’ll start with the twelve must-know poses for beginners,” Barron said.

   Frankenstein had no problem doing the mountain and plank poses, but that was the beginning and end of what he could do. He couldn’t do down dog or a lunge to save his life. Triangle, dancer’s pose, and half pigeon pose might as well have been rocket science. When he tried seated forward fold, he folded forward an inch or two and farted.

   “More roughage in those granola bars than you’re used to?”

   “I lived on seal blubber for a long time,” Frankenstein said.

   He could do some of the hardest poses easily, like headstand. He balanced on his flat head like nobody’s business. He chanted like a champ, his baritone voice deep and rich.. He did dead man’s pose like he was born to it. 

   When the lesson was over, however, he wasn’t able to get up out of laydown. His muscles were in knots. Barron pulled out his Theragun and went to work. It took all the percussion device’s battery power to get Frankenstein on his feet and into the storeroom, where Barron prepared a bedroll.

   “It doesn’t look like you’re in any condition to go anywhere, but make sure you stay here. I have three classes back-to-back-to-back. I don’t want you barging through the door and causing any heart attacks.”

   Frankenstein groaned and rolled over. He slept the rest of the day, that night, and part of the next day. Barron took him to the barber shop next door. Frankenstein had never gotten a haircut. His hair was halfway down his back and his beard down to his belly button. The barber gave him a taper fade crew cut and a shave. He trimmed his eyebrows and the tufts of hair growing out of his ears. He unscrewed the electrodes in the creature’s neck.

   The incisions around his neck, wrists, and ankles had long since healed. Barron found a pair of size 34 sneakers and second-hand bifocals for him. Frankenstein was out of practice, but he enjoyed reading. Barron bought two dozen thrillers, biographies, histories at the Friends of the Library sale.

   Monday morning dawned warmand bright. Barron and Frankenstein walked to Lakewood Park, where they could unroll their mats outdoors on the shore of Lake Erie. Barron had sewn two mats together for the big guy. Barron’s one goal was to make the creature more flexible. His unhappiness with the human race would have to wait. He wasn’t killing anybody anymore, at least. Frankenstein’s problem wasn’t a desk job and never exercising. He wasn’t rigid with chronic tension. He had been on an all-blubber diet for decades but enjoyed the plant-based diet Barron was converting him to. They started having breakfast at Cleveland Vegan. 

   He had never stretched in his life, which contributed to his discomfort and stiffness. His poor muscles were as short as could be. On top of everything else he was close to three hundred years old, counting his own lifetime and the lifetimes of the men he was made of. His synovial fluid was thick as mud.

   Barron and Frankenstein worked on standing forward bend hour after hour day after day. At first the creature could only bend slightly, placing his hands on his thighs. He did it a thousand times. He huffed and puffed. When he was able to touch his knees, he did it two thousand times. He broke out into a sweat. One day Barron brought blocks, setting them up on the high level. Frankenstein folded and got his fingertips to the blocks. The day came when Barron flipped them to their lower level.

   “Don’t be a Raggedy Ann doll, just flopping over,” Barron told him. “Do it right.”

   The gold star moment finally arrived when Frankenstein folded forward without blocks. His upper back wasn’t rounded, his chest was open, his legs were straight, and his spine was long. He was engaged but relaxed. He took several steady breaths as the space between his ribs and pelvis grew.

   “Great job, Frank,” Barron said with encouragement.

   Frankenstein did the pose three thousand times. He was looking lean and not so mean. His skin was losing its yellow luster. He was getting a tan in the sunshine at the park. According to B.K.S. Iyengar, Uttanasana slows down the heartbeat, tones the liver spleen kidneys, and rejuvenates the spinal nerves. He explained that after practicing it “one feels calm and cool, the eyes start to glow, and the mind feels at peace.”

   They walked to Mitchell’s Homemade Ice Cream in Rocky River. Barron had a scoop. Frankenstein had eight scoops. Children gathered around him asking a million questions, asking for his autograph, and asking for selfies with him in the picture. He was a ham with glowing eyes and never said no.

   From standing forward bend it was on to more beginner poses, then intermediate poses. By the end of the month Frankenstein wasn’t a yogi, yet, but he was more human than he had ever been. He joined Barron’s regularly scheduled classes. He was two and three feet bigger than anybody else. Barron put him in a back corner by himself where he wouldn’t accidentally clobber anybody while doing sun salutations.

   When the time came for Frankenstein to move out of Barron’s storeroom into his own apartment, Barron made him a gift of B.K.S. Iyengar’s book “Light on Yoga.”

   “This is the book that will make you a better person, Frank. I’ve read it twice.”

   “I’ll read it a hundred times,” Frankenstein said.

   “What do you plan on doing with your life?” Barron asked.

   Frankenstein thought about becoming a barber like the man who tended to him but bending over the tops of heads all day long would lead to lower back pain sooner or later. He knew full well he had arthritis. He threw that idea away. He thought about becoming a house painter. He could reach more areas compared to a shorter man. He could cut in walls and ceilings without using a ladder. That would save hours over the course of a job. The downside was having to paint low, like skirting boards. Stooping would do a number on his back. He threw that idea out the window, too.

   When he finally decided what to do, he was surprised he hadn’t thought of it earlier. It was a natural. It was how he had been granted a second life. He would be become an electrician.

   An electrician is a tradesman who repairs, inspects, and installs wires, fixtures, and equipment. Much of the job involves installing fans and lights into ceilings. Being tall would free him from the need to go up and down a ladder for every install. It turns the work from a two-man job into a one-very-tall-man job. Homeowners in Lakewood were always restoring and upgrading their houses. He would advertise himself as “Call Frank – He Knows the Power of Electricity and Will Save You Money.”

   If he ever made a mistake, he knew he could absorb the bust-up of voltage. He had already been hit with more of the hot stuff than any mortal man and lived to tell the tale. He would look for another Bride of Frankenstein, too, a nice girl with a slam-bam bolt of lightning in her hair. They would make little Frankie’s.

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Ohio Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

Constructed Reality

Bat Out of Hell

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By Ed Staskus

   What I didn’t expect the hot summer night my wife, brother-in-law, and I went to the Lorain County Speedway was how loud the cars were going to be when the drivers stepped on the fast pedal, how bad the oil, gasoline, and rubber smelled in the humidity, how many crashes there were, and the fight that broke out on the track immediately after one of the crashes.

   The minute my brother-in law Matt sat down he pulled a pair of earplugs out of his pocket and pushed them firmly into his ears. We tried asking him where ours were, but he couldn’t hear a word we were saying. My wife and I finally decided to soak in the full experience, not like some people who couldn’t bear to enjoy the primal roar of engines going all out.

   The Lorain County Speedway is more-or-less in South Amherst, 30-some miles west of Cleveland, Ohio. It opened in 1949 as a third of a mile dirt oval. It was paved over in 1960. The night we were there the track had long since been upgraded to a 3/8-mile oval with 12-degree banking in the turns and a slight bank on the straightaways. It wasn’t NASCAR by any means, although NASCAR was the reason we were there.

   The racing at the Speedway that night was billed as street stock. I had never been closer to race cars than a TV screen, and the only reason I had ever gotten that close was because Matt came over our house every Saturday afternoon during the racing season, plopped himself down on our sofa, and for the next three, four, five hours watched brightly decaled handmade cars built from sheet metal with engines assembled from a bare block and frames constructed from steel tubing take tight left turns over and over and over at 200 MPH. The NASCAR four-wheelers resembled street stock about as much as cheetahs resemble wart hogs, even though both kinds of cars were essentially doing the same thing.

   The big story that summer was Jeff Gordon going up against Dale Earnhardt until it became the only story. Dale Earnhardt had won his seventh Winston Cup Championship in 1994 tying Richard Petty’s record for Cup Championships. Everybody was looking for him to win his eighth in 1995 and make history. It wasn’t to be, not with Jeff Gordon burning up the tracks.

   Jeff Gordon was young, only 24, but he had won the Coca-Cola 600 and the Brickyard 400 the year before. He wasn’t exactly wet behind the ears. He was off to the races. He landed in victory lane in three of the first six races of 1995. As the season wore on, he racked up 14 straight top ten finishes. Earnhardt was game, but the game was up. Gordon finished at the top of the board, the youngest champion since 1971. He toasted “The Intimidator” with a glass of milk instead of champagne, a nod to being barely legal.

   When he wasn’t watching NASCAR on TV, Matt and a school friend of his spent weekends driving to and camping out at nearby NASCAR events. They went to the Miller Genuine Draft 400 at the Michigan International Speedway, the Bud at the Glen at Watkins Glen, and the Mountain Dew Southern 500 at the Darlington Raceway. One weekend Matt asked if we wanted to go see some slam bang racing. We said alright, we’re not doing anything tonight, so long as it’s not out of state. He said it was close-by.

   The grandstand at the Lorain County Speedway was right on top of the racing. The bleacher seats were half full, like a high school football game where the fans are family and friends. There was a protective screen between the front row and the track. When I looked it up and down, I thought it might keep a flock of seagulls from assaulting us, but not a crate engine or the whole 3000-pound car. 

   “If one of those cars rolls and flips and comes up into the stands, that screen is going to stand the same chance as toilet paper,” I told my wife.

   “What?” she asked trying in vain to hear me over the noise.

   Five years earlier a man was killed and five people hurt when a race car went out of control and crashed into the pit area of the Lorain County Speedway. The man who was killed was another driver from another race. The driver of the wayward car said the accelerator on his car stuck, causing him to lose control on a turn. Eight years earlier at Talladega, Bobby Allison’s car going at the speed of light ran over debris and a tire burst. His car went airborne and smashed into the safety catch wall. Shrapnel sprayed the fans. From then on restrictor plates, which cap engine speeds from climbing too high and keep all race cars at around the same speeds, were made mandatory.

   The thought of shrapnel gave me the heebie-jeebies. My brother-in-law must have thought it through because he had led us to the second-to-last row. Even though the stands were only some twenty rows deep, it was better than nothing. The group of guys in front of us had their own cooler of hop juice. They offered us some. My brother-in-law didn’t drink, and my wife didn’t drink beer.

   “What the hey,” I said, accepting a Budweiser, my least favorite beer. Beggars can’t be choosers. In the heat of the night, to my surprise, the cold tasteless suds were delicious.

   My brother-in-law was a chemical engineer working in a General Electric lab in Willowick, but was transitioning to mechanical engineering, which meant going back to school part-time. He didn’t have a girlfriend, which meant he had time outside of work and school to take up a hobby. He bought a hulk of scrap metal that was once a 1970 Monte Carlo. His plan was to tear it apart piece by piece and rebuild it. Unfortunately, he didn’t have the space to get it done. Unfortunately, we did. The next thing I knew our two-car garage was a no-car garage. The hulk of scrap metal took up all the space. What space was left was devoted to a worktable, a tool locker, and an air compressor.

   He took the engine out. He took the seats out. He took the dash out. He took everything out and off the car. He built a rotisserie on wheels and fitted the frame to it, so he could wheel it in and out of the garage, working on it in our driveway. He sanded all the rust away and primed it. When the time came, he had the car hauled away and professionally painted. The color was Tuxedo Black.                                               

   When the weather turned foul, he turned a room in our basement into a work room, working on the engine and God knows what all else. He fabricated a new dash from scratch. He slowly but surely bought original parts and started to put the Monte Carlo back together. It took years and tens of thousands of dollars. Some nights, drifting off to sleep, we could hear him through our back window still working in the driveway in the glow of a bank of lights he had fixed up for the purpose.

   NASCAR race cars have almost nothing in common with street cars. By the 1990s they were being built to optimize aerodynamics. The focus was on speed. They stopped looking like stock cars. Stock car racing uses production models somewhat customized for racing purposes. It got started in the 1930s when moonshiners transporting white lightning souped up their Fords to evade revenue agents. One thing led to another, and they started racing each other on weekends on tracks carved out of corn fields.

   Street stock is racing a car that can be bought off a dealer’s lot. It is sometimes called hobby stock or showroom stock. Most of the tracks are short ovals, less than a mile. The speeds at the Lorain County Speedway that night hit 80 to 90 MPH on the straightaways, but slower in the turns. There were crashes galore in the turns. One of them happened in the turn coming around to the grandstand, when two cars bumped, tangled, and tore into each other. The driver on the outside track ran out of talent halfway through the turn. They both slid skidded to a stop in front of us. The drivers got out of their cars unhurt. When they did one of the drivers got hurt. 

   What happened was, when the two drivers got out of their banged-up cars, they started arguing. “What the hell, bumping me like that,” one of them yelled, his face red and splotchy.

   “I didn’t bump you,” the older of the two drivers said, calm as a fighting fish swimming back and forth in a tank. “I rubbed you. Rubbin’, son, is racin’.”

   They started pushing each other The younger driver got pushed too far out on the track and a car going slowly by under the caution flag ran over his foot. He fell to the ground and banged his head. Blood flowed down his chin. When he fell a woman bolted out of the stands, down the stairs, over the catch wall, and onto the track. She made a beeline for the older driver still standing.

   “This here is going to be trouble,” one of the men in front of us said cracking open another King of Beers.

   My brother-in-law’s 1970 two-door Chevrolet Monte Carlo was on a 116-inch wheelbase A-body platform with the longest hood Chevy had ever made. It stretched from the windshield to tomorrow. The styling was influenced by the Cadillac Eldorado, which came out in 1967. The Monte Carlo borrowed its firewall, dashboard, windshield, decklid, and rear window from the Chevelle. Matt’s model was an upgrade with a console-shift four-speed manual and a four-barrel-topped Turbo-Fire V-8 350 rated at 300 horsepower. It weighed in at 4,000 pounds curbside. It wasn’t built for baby showers. Shotgun weddings were more its speed. When I first heard the engine fire up so did all my neighbors within two or three blocks. Some of them came outside, standing on their lawns and in the street, looking up our driveway.

   “Mommy, what is that?” a boy driving a Little Tikes Cozy Coupe asked his mother.

   When the angry woman running onto the track got to the spot of the crash, she leapt onto the back of the driver who had pushed the other driver, screamed like a banshee, wrapped her legs around his midsection, and started to pummel the top and back of his head with her fists. It took half a dozen drivers and security staff to pull her off and keep her off. A policeman finally handcuffed her to a fence post.

   An ambulance showed up, the driver with the pancaked foot was put on a stretcher and put in the ambulance, wreckers drove onto the track, removed the damaged cars, and before we knew it the race was back on like nothing had ever happened. A policeman came back mid-way through the rest of race to retrieve the fists of fury, still handcuffed, who everybody had forgotten about. They put her in a squad car, legs kicking and lips flapping, and drove away, lights flashing. Everybody gave her a King of Beers salute.

   Thirteen years after Matt started work on the Monte Carlo it was ready to go. It was 2003. The day he put license plates on it was the day he asked me if I wanted to go for a ride. 

   “Sure,” I said.

   It looked like a new car inside and out. It smelled like a new car. He turned the key in the ignition and flipped a rocker switch. It was like cracking a bullwhip. The car rumbled to life. It sounded like something going after prey. He backed it out of the driveway and set off for Lake Rd. We went west through Rocky River, Bay Village, nearly to Avon Lake, and then to the Huntington Reservation, where we turned around. When we got to the Clifton Blvd. bridge that crosses the Rocky River, he pulled over to the shoulder.

   “Do you want to drive it?” he asked.

   “You bet,” I said.

   As I got out of the car to walk around to the driver’s side, I noticed a red fire extinguisher bolted down in the back. It was a Kidde dry chemical vehicle extinguisher. “Are you expecting something?” I asked.  “Great balls of fire?”

   “You never know,” he said. “If it happens, pull, aim, squeeze, and sweep.”

   I buckled up, buckling the five-point harness belt. The car was a bat out of hell of muscle and acceleration, but no matter how fast it went I wasn’t going anywhere. The five-point belt was the kind used to restrain madmen. I waited until there was no traffic. I put the car in first, got started, burned rubber, put it in second, third, then fourth, and flew across the bridge. The engine was just as loud driving the car as it was standing next to the car. I got it up to sixty in about ten seconds before starting to down shift. The bridge was far behind us by then.

   “That was fun,” I said. 

   It was like being Buckaroo Banzai for a couple of minutes. I checked for flashing red lights in the rearview mirror. We drove halfway through Lakewood before turning around. Heads turned when we approached, and heads followed our progress. At a red light a graybeard next to us said through his open window, “That is some meat and potatoes.” 

   “So long as you don’t mind getting nine miles to the gallon,” I said. He was driving a brand-new Toyota Prius. The Monte Carlo was AC/DC to its folk singing purr. 

   We got the car back in our garage without a scratch. That would have been a nightmare. My brother-in-law was fussy as a newborn with his old car made new. Even though he kept it bedded down indoors, he secured a waterproof car cover over it, just in case.  As the garage door was closing itself, I noticed the vanity license plate mounted on the chrome rear bumper.

   “NGHTMRE,” is what it said.

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

Cross Walk

Mean Streets

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By Ed Staskus

   When Stan Riddman took the stairs two at a time coming up from the basement of the Flatiron Building it wasn’t an old dark city, yet. The new night was still on its way. The sky was a hazy lemon and smoggy blue. It was the first day of the second week of fall, but felt more like the middle of summer, except for the shorter days. Stan wore a short sleeve shirt and linen trousers. The wallet in his back pocket was flush with more tens and twenties than it was with its usual ones and fives. 

   He gave the leather in his pocket a friendly pat. The seven-card stud he had played in the dingy room next to the furnace room had been good to him. He could buy his kid some new clothes, stash some away for the office rent for when work was slow, and score tickets for the Series.

   The Socialist Labor Party used to have offices in the Flatiron Building, but not down in the basement. They had their heads in the clouds. They thought they were in the cards back then. They didn’t know they were shooting snake eyes. He wondered if they would have banned poker, making it out like it was exploitive, if they had ever come to power. You took your chances at cards, but it was only exploitive if you had no skill at it. You deserved to be taken if you played dreamland. Stan never played dreamland. He never shot craps. He never put himself at the mercy of cubes of white resin bouncing around at random. He walked down 22nd Street to Lexington Avenue, turned right, walked through Gramercy Park to Irving Place, and looked for a phone booth.

   The reckoning for a Subway Series was coming up fast. The Yankees were in, and the Indians were out, that was for sure. The Redlegs were running on an outside track. The Braves were neck and neck with the Dodgers. The Bum’s ace Sal Maglie had no-hit the Phils earlier in the week at Ebbets Field and the Cardinals were going hard at the Braves out in the boondocks. It was going to come down to this weekend as to whether there was going to be a Subway Series, the same as last year, or not.

    Last year’s Fall Classic went seven games, and the queer thing about it was the Yankees won their three games at Ebbets Field and the Dodgers won their four games at Yankee Stadium. Neither team won on their home field. Nobody had taken that bet because it wasn’t in the cards. Nobody took the backside odds on the seventh game, either, especially since Jackie Robinson wasn’t penciled in to play the deciding nine innings. At least, nobody took the odds except Stan and Ezra Aaronson, and anybody else who flipped a coin.

   Who would have thought the Cuban would be the difference-maker in the deciding game when he took over the right field spot in the sixth inning last year? Stan was in the upper deck with his partner, Ezra. The Yankee dugout was on the first base side, so most of the Bum fans were on the third base side. A client who was a Yankee fan, after Stan had gotten him the black and white proof he needed to get his divorce done, gave him a pair of passes. They ended up on the wrong side of the rooting section, but by their lights were rooting for the right team.

   “Beggars can’t be choosers,” Ezra said, sitting in a sea of Bronx Bomber fans.

   When Yogi Berra hit an opposite field sure-fire double, Ezra sprang out of his seat, like everybody else, but suddenly the lightning-fast right fielder Sandy Amoros caught it coming out of nowhere. He fired a pill to Pee Wee Reese, who relayed it to Gil Hodges, who doubled up the retreating Gil McDougald off first, ending the last threat Stengel’s Squad made that afternoon. 

   Casey Stengel managed the Yankees. Back in his playing days, when he still had legs, he had been a good but streaky ballplayer. Fair bat, good feet, great glove. “I was erratic,” he admitted. “Some days I was amazing, some days I wasn’t.” When he wasn’t, he played it for laughs, catching fly balls behind his back. One afternoon he doffed his cap to the crowd and a sparrow flew out of it. Another day, playing the outfield, he hid under the grate of a storm drain and popped out of the drain just in time to snag a lazy fly ball.

   Whenever he stood leaning over the front top rail of a dugout, he looked like a scowling Jimmy Durante dressed up in pinstripes. He was called the “Ol’ Perfessor” even though he had stumbled through high school. He graduated only because his high school didn’t want him back for another year. He managed the Braves and Dodgers for nine years and chalked up nine straight losing seasons. Casey Stengel might not have been a for-real professor, but he knew enough not to give up. After the New York Yankees hired him in 1948, the only year he hadn’t taken them to the World Series was 1954.

   Stan and Ezra were the only men in their section who had not fallen back into their seats, stunned, after the Cuban snagged Yogi Berra’s liner. Stan had to pull the clapping and cheering Ezra down so there wouldn’t be any hard feelings. As it was, Ezra was so excited there were hard feelings, after all, and Stan had to drag him away to a beer stand.

   “This beer is bitter,” Ezra complained, looking down at the bottle of Ballantine in his hand. Ballantine Beer was featured on the Yankee Stadium scoreboard, its three-ring sign shining bright, flashing “Purity, Body, Flavor.” Whenever a Yankee hit a homer, Mel Allen, the hometown broadcaster, hollered, “There’s a drive, hit deep, that ball is go-ing, go-ing, gonnne! How about that?! It’s a Ballantine Blast!” 

   The Brooklyn Dodgers, Ezra and Stan’s team of choice, played at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn. Their scoreboard boasted a Schaefer Beer sign, with the ‘h’ and the ‘e’ lighting up whenever there was a hit or an error. Below the beer sign was an Abe Stark billboard. “Hit Sign, Win a Suit”. Abe Stark was a men’s wear man.

   “That’s some kosher beer, that Schaeffer’s,” Ezra said, giving his bottle of Ballantine a sour look. “The Yankees don’t know good beer from spitballs.” He threw the half-finished bottle towards a trash can. It bounced away but didn’t break. Nobody paid any attention to the bottle rattling and rolling past them.

   Stan had a home but not a home borough. His apartment was in Hell’s Kitchen, up from Times Square and down from the Central Park Zoo. He wasn’t from New York City. He was from Chicago, although he wasn’t from there, either. He had been born in Chicago, but when his mother died two years later, in 1922, his father moved the family, which was himself, his new Polish wife, two boys, two girls, two dogs, and all their belongings a year later to a small house behind St. Stanislaus Church in Cleveland, Ohio. It was in the Warszawa neighborhood south of the steel mills, where his father ended up working the rest of his life to provide for his family.

   The steel mills were where Stan worked for three years while still living at home. He volunteered for the armed forces the minute World War Two started. He wasn’t working on anything at the moment that he thought might get him free World Series passes this year like last year. As long as I put most of this away, he thought to himself, walking down Irving Place, thinking of the jackpot in his pocket, I can blow some of it tonight, and still have enough for ballgames and some more card games. Stan had stopped being his steel mill father’s son long ago.

   His daughter Dottie was at Marie’s for the weekend. Marie had once been Stan’s wife. Her taking an interest in Dottie happened about as often as the World Series. It wasn’t too early or too late tonight, and if Vicki hasn’t taken any work home, and is at home, and picks up the phone, maybe she could meet him for dinner. He found the phone booth he’d been looking for and called her. It rang almost twice before Vicki answered. That’s a good sign, he thought.

   “Hello.”

   “Hey, Vee, it’s Stan.”

   “Stan, my man,” she laughed.

   “How’s the Stuy tonight?” he asked.

   “Hot, quiet, lonely,” she said. What Stan liked about Vicki was she didn’t talk about what didn’t matter. She didn’t talk overmuch at all, even though her workday life revolved around words. She wasn’t a sexpot, but she liked sex well enough. Marie had been romantic as a pair of handcuffs. Towards the end she had taken to shaking her leg shaving razor at him.

  “How about meeting me at Luchow’s for dinner?” he asked. “I’m buying.”

   “Stan, I love you for the dear Polack or whatever you are, but the food at Luchow’s is not so good, even if you can ever get though that insanely long menu of theirs.” 

   “That’s what I’m for,” he said. “A sharp-eyed PI like me will make sure to look into everything the kitchen’s got to offer and find what’s edible.”

   “More like a dog-eared PI,” Vicki said. “All right, but the other thing is, since they seat more than a thousand people, how am I going to find you? And by chance, with that strolling oompah band of theirs, if we do bump into each other and maybe get a table in that goulash palace, we’ll only be able to make ourselves heard some of the time and not the rest of the time.”

   “We can always take our coffee and their pancakes with lingonberry over to the square after dinner and chew the fat,” he said. “It will be quiet enough there.”

   “Chew the fat? What it is I like about you? Sometimes I just don’t know.”

   “I’ll take that for a yes.”

   “Yes, give me a few minutes to change into something fun,” she said making merry. “I hope there’s no goose fest or barley pop festival going on.”

   “Meet me at the far end of Frank’s bar. He’ll find a spot in the back for us. He says the new herring salad is out of this world.”

   “Don’t push your luck, Stan, don’t push your luck,” she said. Herring always made her feel like throwing up. Just the thought of the silvery fish made her want to heave.

   Luchow’s was a three-story six-bay building with stone window surrounds, pilasters, and a parapet on top, while below a red awning led to the front door. The restaurant was near Union Square. It looked like the 19thcentury, or an even earlier century, dark and heavy Teutonic. A titanic painting of potato gatherers covered most of a wall in one of the seven dining rooms. Another of the rooms was filled to the rafters with animal heads, their offspring being eaten at the tables below them, while another room was a temple of colorful beer steins. There was a beer garden in the back.

   “Welcome back to the Citadel of Pilsner,” Frank the bartender said. He gestured Stan to the side. “Did anybody tell you Hugo died?”

  “No, I hadn’t heard, although I heard he wasn’t feeling well,” Stan said. Hugo Schemke had been a waiter at Luchow’s for 50 years. He always said he wasn’t afraid of death. He had firmly no ifs ands or buts believed in reincarnation.

   “Did he say he was coming back before he left?”

   “He did say that, but I haven’t seen him, yet.”  

   “How’s Ernst doing?” Stan asked. 

   Ernst Seute was the floor manager, a short stout man both friendly and cold-hearted. He had been at Luchow’s a long time, too, since World War One. He was deadly afraid of death. He didn’t believe in reincarnation.

   “He took a couple days off,” Frank said. “Remember that parade back in April over in Queens? They’ve got some kind of committee now, and he’s over there with them trying to make it an annual thing here in Little Germany, calling it the Steuben Parade.”

    “You going to be carrying the cornflower flag?”

   “Not me, Stan, not me.” Frank was from Czechoslovakia. “I’m an American now.”

   Frank led Vicki and Stan to a small table at the far end of the bar. He brought them glass mugs of Wurzburger Beer and a plate of sardines. Vicki ordered noodle soup and salad. “Hold the herring,” she commanded. Frank looked puzzled. Stan asked for a broiled sirloin with roasted potatoes and horseradish sauce on the side.

   “I saw Barney the other day,” Vicki said, cocking her head. “He told me you’ve made progress.”

  “I didn’t think there was anything to it the first day I saw him, that day you brought him over to the office,” said Stan. “I didn’t think there was much to it that whole first week. Then there was all that action, and Betty finally got the business end of it worked out, that it was the shrink. So, we know who did the thing to get Pollack to drive himself into that tree of his up in Springs. We know how they did it. What we don’t know is why they did it.”

   “Do you know who they are?”

   “No, I don’t, even though one of them, a sicko by the name of Ratso Moretti, who roughed up Ezra, is being held at the 17th. He doesn’t seem to know much, but what he does know says a lot. The head shrinker might be the key. He is going to tell me all about it soon, at least what he knows, and what he doesn’t know, too. He hasn’t gotten the news flash about the talk we’re going to have, yet, but he and I are going to have a sit down.”

   “You don’t think Jackson Pollack had anything to do with it?”

   “He was the wrong man in the wrong place, that’s all, if you look at it from his point of view. Betty and I think he was a test run. We think they’re up to something bigger. It’s hard to figure. It’s got to be big, but we can’t see the pay-off in it. You know Betty, though. She’ll piece it together if she has to tear it apart.”

   After dinner they looked at the dessert menu, but their looks only amounted to a glance. Vicki shook her head no. “How about coffee and dessert at my place?” Stan asked. “We can stop and get pastry at that Puerto Rican shop on the corner and eat up on the roof.” The smog had blown away. It was a clear starry night. 

   “I can’t pass up that tasty-sounding pass,” Vicki said.

   They hailed a Checker Cab. “Take us up 5th to 59th, to the corner of the park,” Stan told the driver. 

   “Gotcha, bub,” the cabbie said.

   He dropped them off at the Grand Army Plaza and they walked into the park, following the path below the pond towards the Central Park Driveway and Columbus Circle. Stan liked Vicki’s breezy walk. He liked everything about her. They didn’t notice the two teenagers, as they quietly strolled down a path south of Center Drive, until the two of them were in front of them, blocking their way.

   One was taller and older, the other one shorter and younger, their jet black hair oiled and combed back. Both of the dagos were wearing high tops, jeans, and white t-shirts, one of them dirtier than the other. They had left their leather jackets at home. The younger boy, he might have been fifteen, had a half-dozen inflamed pencil-thick scratches down one side of his face and more of them on his forehead. Small capital SS’s topped with a halo drawn in red ink adorned the left sleeve of his t-shirt. The older boy had LAMF tattooed on his neck above the collar line to below his right ear. Stan knew what it meant. It meant “Like a Mother Fucker.” He kept his attention fixed on LAMF’s eyes and hands.

   “Hey, mister, got a double we can have for the subway, so we can make it back home,” the older tattooed dago asked Stan, smiling like a hyena, his teeth big and white as Chiclets. One of his front teeth was chipped.

   They were Seven Saints, JD’s whose favorite easy pickings was holding open the door of a subway car just before it was ready to leave the station, one of them grabbing and running off with a passenger’s pocketbook, while the other one released the door so the woman would be shut tight inside the train as it moved away from the platform. Every Seven Saint carried either a knife or a zip gun for when the pickings weren’t easy.

   “Where’s home?” Stan asked, stepping forward a half step, nudging Vicki a half-step behind him with his left hand on her hip. 

   “You writing a book, or what?” LAMF asked. The other boy laughed, sounding like he was impersonating Sal Mineo on Halloween.

   Stan asked again, looking straight at the older boy.

   “East Harlem, where you think?”

   “Why do you need twenty dollars? The fare’s only ten cents.”

   “The extra is for in case we get lost.” 

   “It’d be best if you got lost starting now. “

   “I mean to get my dub,” LAMF said, smirking, reaching into his back pocket.

   Stan took a fast step forward, his right foot coming down on the forefoot of the boy’s sneaker, grabbing his left wrist as it came out of the back pocket a flash of steel, and broke his nose with a hard jab using his right elbow. He let him fall backward and turned toward the other boy, flipping the switchblade he had taken away from the gangbanger on the ground so its business end was facing front.

   “Go,” he said to the younger boy. “Go right now before you break out into a sweat and get sick.”

   The boy hesitated, looked down at the other Seven Saint on the ground, splattered with blood, and ran away like a squid on roller skates. Stan let the switchblade fall to the ground and broke the blade of the knife, stepping on it with his heel and pulling until it cracked at the hinge. He tossed it at the older boy who was getting up. It hit him in the chest and bounced away. 

   “The next time I see you,” he sputtered in a rage, on his feet, trying to breathe, his nose floppy, his mouth full of blood.

   “The next time you see me, you fill your hand with a knife, I’ll break your face again,” Stan said. He said it matter-of-factly. He took a step up to the boy, grabbed his ear, holding tight, and spoke into it. “Actually, it won’t matter what you do, nosebleed, what you’re doing, who you’re with, where you are. The minute I see you is when I’ll stack you up. Make sure you never see me again. Make sure I never see you.”

   He took Vicki by the arm, shoved the Seven Saint to the side, and they walked away.

   “You didn’t have to do that,” Vicki said. “You won plenty of hands at the Flatiron tonight. You might have given them a dollar-or-two.”

   “I know,” Stan said. “But they were working themselves up to be dangerous and that had to stop. The sooner the better.”

   “They are just kids.”

   “You saw the scratches on the face of the kid who ran away.”

   “Of course, the whole side of his face was gruesome.”

   “The Seven Saints have an initiation to get into the club,” Stan said. “They corral a stray cat and tie it to a telephone pole, about head high. The kid getting initiated has his hands tied behind his back and he gets to become a Seven Saint if he can kill the cat, using his head as a club.”

   “Oh, my God!” Vicki said, stopping dead in her tracks. “How do you even know that?”

   “I make it my business to know, so I don’t get taken by surprise,” Stan said. “I don’t give a damn about them. I care about you. They can go to hell.”

   They passed the USS Maine Monument. Stan pushed a memory of the war away. It had been more than ten years ago. “I don’t like psycho’s in my face when I’m off the clock,” he grumbled under his breath. He had gotten enough of them in Germany where he had been an Army M. P.  It had gotten to be non-stop the year after the war. The whole country was in ruins. Some cities had been reduced to rubble. Expanses of forest were bare. Most of the trees had been cut down for fuel. The black market was dangerous as an Arab bazaar run by lunatics. There were let-go prisoners of war and refugees everywhere. Faith healers popped up on street corners. It was a stew of good and evil.

   They walked out of the park under a quarter moon, crossing Columbus Circle and strolling down Ninth Avenue. At West 56th Street they turned towards the river, stopping in front of a four-floor walk-up with a twin set of fire escapes bolted to the front of the flat face of the brick building.

   “Anyway, maybe it will do those greasers some good,” Stan said, fitting his key into the front door lock. “Not everybody is as nice as I am. Someday somebody might go ballistic on them.”

   “Ballistic?” she asked.

   “Like a rocket, a missile that goes haywire.”

   “I wish we had a rocket to take us upstairs” she said, as they took the stairs up to the fourth floor. “Oh, darn, we forgot to get pastry.”

   “Next time,” Stan said. “The Boricua’s aren’t going anywhere, except staying here.” 

   At the door of the apartment, he slid his key into the lock, opened the door, reached for the light switch, and let Vicki go around him as he did. In the shadow at the back of the room there was a low menacing growl and a sudden movement. It was Mr. Moto. His eyes were glowing.

   Mr. Moto was no great sinner, but he wasn’t a saint, either. He thought saints were more honored after life than during their lifetimes. That wasn’t for him. He was alive and kicking and had his own code of honor. If push came to shove and he ever had to get his claws into a Seven Saint, there would be hell to pay for their sins. Mr. Moto meant what he said. He crossed the room fast. He lunged at Vicki’s lead leg as she stepped over the threshold.

   “Hey, watch my stockings,” she cried out. She was wearing Dancing Daters. “I’ll smack you right on your pink nose if you make them run.” Mr. Moto skidded to a sudden stop a whisker length from her leg. 

   “That’s better,” Vicki cooed, bending down to rub his head. The big black cat arched his back and purred.

Excerpted from the crime novel “Cross Walk.”

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

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

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

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

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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.

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Constructed Reality

Law of the Land

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By Ed Staskus

   When I moved from the near east side of downtown Cleveland to Carpenter, Ohio the post office there had been gone more than ten years. The Baptist church was still standing, but the minister didn’t live in the whistle-stop. He drove in on Sundays, performed his mission, and drove away after shaking a few hands. I went to the service one morning, but the minister looked like the talent scout for a graveyard, and it was the last time I went. The general store had closed even before the post office, which was good for Virginia Sustarsic and me, because that is what we moved into, staying the spring summer and into the early fall.

   The post office was opened in 1883 and stayed there until 1963. Nobody knew who the town was named for, although three men who had been natives of the place took credit. There was Amos Carpenter, an old geezer who talked too much, Jesse Carpenter, a farmer who hardly ever talked, and State Senator J. L. Carpenter, who only talked when it counted. He brought tracks and a railroad station to the town. Those were long gone, too.

   It wasn’t my idea to go live local yokel on the banks of Leading Creek, but Virginia argued living in the country was the way to go. She was a hippie and wore its ethos of going back to the roots on her sleeve. I countered that the hippies happened in coastal cities like San Francisco and New York, flowered in college towns like Austin and Ann Arbor, and were trucking along in cities like Omaha, Atlanta, and Cleveland. We were both from Cleveland, born of immigrant stock, she Slovenian and me Lithuanian.

   My reasoning fell on deaf ears.

   A friend of ours with a van drove us and our stuff to Carpenter, dropped us off, and waved goodbye. I had never been there before. Virginia had been there twice, having a friend who lived in that neck of the woods. It took less than ten seconds to look the town over. There wasn’t much to see. We stashed everything away in the sturdy but dilapidated 19th century-era store and walked up Carpenter Hill Rd. to Five Mile Run, detouring down what passed for a driveway to a small house where Virginia’s friend and his bloodhound lived.

   He was somewhere between not young and middle-aged, lean and scraggly, literate and friendly. He was the kind of man who was a hippie long before there were hippies. He read lots of books and smoked lots of weed. There was a Colt cap and ball pistol on his coffee table, laying there as relaxed as could be. It was a Walker .44. It was big, old as dirt, spic-n-span workable. 

   “That’s an imposing handgun,” I said.

   “They call it the Peacemaker,” he said. “Even though it can get you into a load of trouble the same as not. I call it the Devil’s Right Hand.”

   He shot rabbits with it for his stew pot. The large percussion revolver could have taken deer in season. He let me shoot it at a tree later that summer. It was heavy when I lifted it. I shot it stiff-armed expecting more recoil, which turned out to be modest. What I didn’t expect was the “BOOM!” at the end of my arm. I was glad I missed the tree. Even though it was a full-grown maple the ball hitting it might have put it on the woodpile.

   We spent a week sweeping dusting cleaning arranging the ground floor front room of the general store. There were two storerooms in the back and an upstairs we didn’t mess with. Two long broad oak tables served as platforms for working and preparing food. We ate in rocking chairs we set up at one of the windows. We found a braided round rug in a closet, beat the hell out of it, and rolled it out in the middle of the floor.

   After laying in a garden, we stuck a scarecrow of Grace Slick on a stick to guard the plot. The scarecrow, however, fell down on the job. Birds shat on her and rabbits ran riot. We ended up hunting and gathering.

   A kitten walked in out of the blue one morning, worn out and hungry as a horse. He was white with a black blob on his chest and a masked face. Virginia gave it a bowl of water, but we didn’t have cat food. “We should go into town, get some, and some food for us, too,” I said.

   Virginia was a genius at living off the land, but we still needed some store-bought stuff, salt pepper coffee pasta peanut butter and pancake mix, as well as toilet paper. The outhouse was bad enough without the comfort of Charmin.

   There were two municipalities within driving distance, Athens, which was 15 miles northeast of us, and Pomeroy, which was 17 miles southeast. Ohio University was in Athens, had several grocery stores, and plenty of citizens our own age. Pomeroy was on the Ohio River, was notorious for being repeatedly destroyed, and there was nobody our age there. We never went to Pomeroy except once to look around.

   The town was consumed by fire in 1851, 1856, 1884, and 1927. The floods of 1884, 1913, and 1937 were even more disastrous. 1884 was an especially bad year, what with fire and flood both. Why the residents kept rebuilding the place was beyond us, although we speculated they must have been plain stubborn.

   We stopped at the courthouse to lay eyes on the excitement. We had read in “Ripley’s Believe or Not!” that there is a ground floor entrance to each of its three stories, the only one of its kind in the world The sight of the phenomenon wasn’t all that exciting. A plaque explaining that the courthouse served as a jail for more than 200 of Morgan’s Raiders after their capture in the Battle of Buffington Island during the Civil War caught our attention. It was exciting to learn that Ohio boys had gotten the better of Johnny Reb when they ventured north.

   The county seat of Meigs County is mentioned in Ripley’s a second time for not having any cross streets. We took a stroll and didn’t see any. It didn’t seem deserving of mention in Ripley’s, but what did we know?

   Once he had a steady supply of food, out kitten got better and bigger. He spent his days outside and after sunset inside. He learned fast there were plenty of hungry owls, racoons, and coyotes in the dark. At first, when he was a tyke, he slept on top of my head at night. As he grew, I had to move him to the side. It was like wearing a Davey Crocket racoon hat to bed. 

   Meigs County, in which Carpenter lay, is 433 square miles with a population of around 20,000, or 54 people per square mile. Where we came from, Cuyahoga County, it was more like 3,000 people per square mile. At night in the middle of Meigs County it often seemed like 2 people per square mile, Virginia and me.

   There wasn’t much crime in the county, thank goodness, because the law enforcement amounted to one sheriff, one lieutenant, one sergeant, and six deputies. We had been in town a week-or-so when the sheriff stopped by to say hello. He was a pot-bellied man with fly belly blue eyes. He made sure we had the cop and fire department phone numbers even though we didn’t have a phone. He warned us not to mess around with the marijuana market. Virginia made roach clips for sale in head shops, but only smoked so much, and said so. 

   “No, I don’t mean that girlie,” he said. “I don’t care what you do on your own time. What I mean is, don’t mess with the growers. They’ve got it tucked in all around here. Some of them have been to Vietnam and back, and they learned a thing or two from Charlie. Even the DEA is careful when they chopper around these hills spraying their crop.”

   He pronounced Vietnam like scram.

   Meigs County is on the Allegheny Plateau. It is especially hilly where we were. The soil isn’t the greatest. The top crop by far is forage, followed by soybeans and corn. Layers and cattle are the top livestock. The marijuana growers hid their fruitage in corn fields, where it was hard to spot.

   Moonshine was made from the first day Meigs County was settled, for themselves and for whenever a farmer needed hard cash in a hurry, as long as they were near water and could haul a barrel of yeast and a hundred feet of copper line to the still. The yeast is stirred with sugar and cracked corn until it ripens. When the mash is ready it’s poured into an airtight still and heated. When it vaporizes it spirals through copper pipes, is shocked by cold water, returns to its original liquid form, and drips into a collection barrel.

   After that it is ready to go and all anyone needed was a fast Dodge to get it to market.

   The marijuana growers were mostly young, a loose-knit group known as the Meigs County Varmits, which was also the name of their championship softball team. They drove Chevy and Ford pick-ups. They stopped by and said hello, just like the sheriff. One of them told us to keep our heads down the middle of October.

   “What’s that all about?” I asked.

   “That’s when we harvest our green and that’s when the state cops and Feds get busy. You’ll see their cars and spotter planes. They ask you any questions, play dumb. You hear any noise, ignore it.”

   They had a hide-out in the woods where they had private stoner parties. Hardly anybody knew where it was, although everybody called it Desolation Row. It was some bench car seats thrown down on the ground and a rude shelter.

   Meigs County Gold was high quality highly sought weed. It was the strain of choice for the Grateful Dead and Willie Nelson when they toured Ohio and West Virginia. Meigs County folk learned to not lock their cars and to keep their windows partly rolled down when they went to the Ohio State Fairgrounds in Columbus or Kings Island near Cincinnati.

   When I asked why, a man said, “Because people see the Meigs County tag and it’s almost for sure you’ll have busted windows if you don’t. They will be looking for your pot.”

   Our pots and pans were always filled with grub Virginia gleaned in the forest lands where she found nuts greens fruits and tubers. She collected walnuts chestnuts papaws raspberries blueberries and strawberries. She dressed up salads with dandelions fiddleheads and cattails. In the late summer she hunted for ginseng, selling it to a health food store in Athens.

   She kept two goats in a shed. I fed them and cleaned up after them. They were more trouble than they were worth, especially after one of them head butted the minister who walked over late one Sunday morning inquiring about my spiritual frame of mind. The goat lowered his head and got him from behind, in the butt, knocking him down. He scuffed up his hands breaking his fall and got mad as the devil. He told the sheriff about it and the sheriff had to stop by and warn us to keep our goats civil.

   “Yes, sir,” I said.

   Carpenter was the kind of place where tomorrow wasn’t any different than a week ago. But it had its moments. A week-or-so after the sheriff paid us his official visit, we watched him drive slowly past our grocery store summer home on State Route 143 dragging an upright piano on rollers behind him, chained to his rear bumper. A deputy was walking beside the piano trying to keep it from falling over. It looked like a bad idea on the way to going wrong. We waved but didn’t ask any questions.

   Our nearest neighbor was Jack, his two brothers, and their mother, on the other side of Leading Creek, a quarter mile down the state route. Velma looked like she could have been their grandmother, but Jack Jerome and Jesse called her mam. It was a one-story house with a front porch. They had running water and a bathroom, but no cooking stove or furnace. Velma did the cooking in the fireplace and they heated the house with the fireplace and a cast-iron potbelly stove. It was more than we had, which was just the potbelly thing.

   “Food cooked in a fireplace tastes better than food cooked any other way, including charcoal grills,” Velma said. It was big talk, but she backed it up. She might not have been able to whip up a cake or a souffle, but she made just about everything else. We never turned down an invitation to dinner.

   There were always half-dozen-or-more barely alive cars and trucks in their backyard, which was more like a field. There was a chicken house and a pen for pigs. They slaughtered and smoked their own pork. There was a big deep pond near enough to the house and they let us go floating and swimming in it whenever we wanted. They had an arsenal of rifles and shotguns, even though they didn’t mess around with marijuana. Moonshine might have been a different matter. 

   “How come you’ve got all those guns?” I asked Jack.

   “That’s how our daddy raised us,” he said.

   They were born and bred right there. The folks in the ranch-style houses up Carpenter Hill Rd. avoided them. Sometimes when we went swimming the sheriff’s car was there. I had the impression he wasn’t there on lawman business, but rather visiting.

   By the end of summer, we realized we couldn’t stay. The Velma family already had enough cords of dried wood beside their house to keep themselves warm if winter went Siberian in Ohio. We didn’t even have a pile of twigs. We could have ordered coal, which was plentiful, but neither of us had ever started and stoked a coal furnace. We didn’t know anything about air vents. All we knew was dial-up thermostats for gas furnaces.

   Our friend returned with his van and helped us move back to the Plaza Apartment in Cleveland. Prospect Avenue was the Wild West, but winter was coming, and it would be quiet for a while. We wouldn’t need a Peacemaker. We said goodbye to Virginia’s hippie friend and his bloodhound, and to Jack up the hill. Jerome and Jesse had gone hunting waterfowl, the first day for it. Velma gave us an apple pie for the drive home.

   The cat, who was left-handed and so went by Lefty, decided to stay. He wasn’t a city boy. He wouldn’t have been able to make sense of the Cuyahoga River catching fire. Lefty had made friends with all the cats and dogs a half-mile in every direction, knew how to sneak into the grocery store closed doors or no doors, and had grown up enough to take care of himself. We slit open the 20-pound cat food bag and opened it like a book. We left it on the floor so he and his friends could have a party.

   When we drove away, he was sitting on his haunches on the gravel in front of the store’s double front doors. I watched him in the rearview mirror and Virginia waved goodbye through the open passenger window. The last I saw of him he was sauntering into the high Meigs County grass.

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

West Park Blues

Jumping the Traces

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By Ed Staskus

   Maggie Campbell’s father was a stockbroker, an investment advisor, and a vice president at Prudential Bache in the 1980s. He worked downtown with the other moneymakers. He believed in capitalism but didn’t let it go to his head. He was shrewd, keeping his greed engaged, although not always prudent. Sometimes he tripped over his sense of humor.

   Everybody called him the Margin King. His wife called him the King of Fools. When Fred and Alma got married, he was a gambling man, but Alma didn’t want him doing that after the wedding. She said it was time he became a family man. “The gambling stops now,” she declared, stamping her little feet.

   Fred Campbell decided to become a stockbroker. That way he could still gamble, except now it would be with other people’s money. He raked in a boatload of loot. He bought a house in Bay Village due west of Cleveland near Lake Erie. He wasn’t just one-sided about the almighty dollar, though. He told jokes all the time. He was a shaggy dog man. Getting a good laugh was like hitting the jackpot to him.

   He was a prankster as well as a jokester. He appeared on the “Hoolihan and Big Chuck” TV show now and then, doing skits with them. Hoolihan was Bob Wells. He was Hoolihan the Weatherman on the CBS affiliate. After Ghoulardi left Cleveland for Hollywood, Hoolihan still did the weather, but became the other half of the “Hoolihan and Big Chuck Show.” It was what replaced Ghoulardi’s “Shock Theater.” They showed low-budget science fiction and cheesy horror movies late at night and did comedy skits in between the commercials.

   The show always started with the Ray Charles song “Here We Go Again” and ended with the Peggy Lee song “Is That All There Is.” Hoolihan played a trumpet with a toilet plunger mute and Big Chuck played a small uke. That’s where Maggie’s dad came in. Fred couldn’t carry a tune, so was never invited to raise his voice in song. He brought his gorilla suit instead.

   The Soul Man, Lil’ John, and Mushmouth were on the show, too, more than Fred was. That’s how he met them. Once they met, they became fast friends in no time. Fred and Alma went to Hoolihan and Big Chuck’s house parties. They used to have Lil ‘John over to their house for spaghetti dinners. Lil’ John was a small man who could eat many plates of spaghetti. He was a hungry Hank.

   They did skits on the show like Ben Crazy, from the “Ben Casey” TV series, Parma Place, which was like “Peyton Place,” and the Kielbasa Kid, which was like a Polish cowboy misadventure. The skit Fred was most famous for was the “When You’re Hot You’re Hot” skit, which was based on a Jerry Reed song.

   “Well now me and Homer Jones and Big John Taley, had a big crap game goin’ back in the alley, and I kept rollin’ them sevens, winnin’ them pots,” was how the song went. “My luck was so good, I could do no wrong, I just kept on rollin’ and controllin’ them bones, and finally they just threw up their hands and said, when you hot, you hot.”

   They acted out the words to the song. Big Chuck rolled the dice. He had a Kirk Douglas face, if Kirk Douglas had been Polish. Fred was the sheriff. He had an honest face. The Hoolihan no-goods would be shooting craps on the street and Fred busts them. Later when they are in court the judge tells them he is going to throw the book at them, except when he throws the book, he hits Fred, who is the sheriff, in the head by mistake.

   “That hurt!” he shouts.

   “You’re out of order.” the judge declares, pounding his gavel like a madman. “Arrest that man immediately!”

   Shake and Bake Nights were when there were double features featuring first-class movies like “Earthquake” and “The Towering Inferno” back-to-back. That was when Alma got into the act. She was in a skit with Big Chuck. They are sitting on a park bench on a first date under a full moon and he turns into a werewolf. He reaches for her. She starts screaming and runs away, but falls face first into a cream pie. He shrugs and turns back into sheepish Chuck.

   Fred did most of his skits wearing a gorilla suit. But not all the skits were on the “Hoolihan and Big Chuck Show.” Some of the time it was unscripted. It was their own unreality show. He would wiggle into his suit and he and Big Chuck drove around Cleveland in a Buick Regal Sedan looking for hitchhikers. Big Chuck handled the wheel while Fred hid in the back seat. They would pick somebody up and after a few minutes Fred would suddenly pop up out of nowhere with a roar, reaching for their passenger’s neck.

   That always scared the hell out of the hitchhiker in the front seat. One of them passed out. Another one jumped out of the car while it was still moving. Maggie remembered being a youngster listening to their scarefest stories and thinking, “You guys are really strange.” It felt funny to say it about her own father.

   Sometimes they would go out at night and roof jump in Lakewood. The houses and apartments are close together, often separated only by a driveway. They would run across the roofs, swinging from the chimneys, jumping from one roof to the other. They whooped it up as householders in for the night wondered what the thumping above them was all about.

   As they got older and wiser the gang got more socially correct. They had mystery parties, which were parties on a bus on which they would have dinner and drinks with their friends, not knowing where they were going, and at the end of the night everyone would have to guess where they were. The winner got to be on the show. It was the Me Decade. Everybody wanted to be seen and heard.

   Maggie’s dad was a prankster even at home, which was quiet Bay Village. He played jokes on the neighbors on their street. He hired the Bay Village High School Marching Band to wake up one of their neighbors at five in the morning. They did it by marching up and down their driveway and playing a fight song. All the other neighbors for blocks around woke up, too. Some of them thought it was funny. Most of them didn’t. They called City Hall, even though City Hall wasn’t open for business that early in the morning.

   One of their neighbors had dogs like them and Maggie dog sat them when they were out for dinner or at a show. “Can you take care of our babies?” Mrs. Butler would ask. One day Fred took advantage of Maggie having the Butler family house keys. He snuck into their house and filled every glass, cup, vase, sink, whatever it was, with water and a single goldfish. When they got home there was a glut of goldfish waiting for them, even in the toilets.

    From then on it was buttheads on the loose at the Butler house every few months. Once when they were taking a walk on Huntington Beach after dinner, Fred and his friends got into their garage, picked up their car, and turned it sideways. The man of the house couldn’t go to work the next morning.  There wasn’t anything he could do. Everybody on the street thought he might have to tear the garage down.

   “I am going to sue that son-of-bitch,” he roared. He was a corporate lawyer. His funny bone was more along the lines of a crazy bone. He couldn’t prove who had done it and had to resort to fuming.

   Fred crept into their house late on a summer night wearing his gorilla suit and scared their kids so much they screamed their heads off and peed on the floor. He thought it was great laughs, giving them nightmares. That was fun to him. It didn’t matter what anybody thought or threatened. Whatever he thought of doing he did it. He was always pranking the poor Butlers. When they complained to the Bay Village Police Department, the cops just shrugged it off.

   Maggie and her sisters and little brother were never out of prankster range. Their father would crawl under their beds at night and wait silent as a snake until they got warm and cozy and dozed off. When he was good and ready, he reached up and around and suddenly grabbed their arms or legs, yanking.

   “Oh, yeah, while we were sleeping!” Maggie said. ”I found out your worst fears can come true at any minute. I’m a grown woman and I still can’t hang my feet out over the edge of my bed at night to this day.”

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

Constructed Reality

Summertime Blues

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By Ed Staskus

“Well, I called my congressman, and he said I’d like to help you, son, but you’re too young to vote, there ain’t no cure for the summertime blues.”  Eddie Cochran

   “Mom said you’re not leaving and you’re coming to my birthday party this year,” Maggie said, putting down her ear of corn, her lips peppered with flecks of salt and smeary with   butter.

   “That’s right,” said Frank Glass.

   Vera Glass’s brother, sister-in-law, nephew and niece, Frank’s sister and her new boyfriend, a policeman who lived nearby, were visiting on the Fourth of July, in the backyard, a breezy sunny day in the shade, crowded around a folding table-clothed table doing double duty, food and drink and board games.

   Independence Day has been a federal holiday since 1941, but the tradition goes back to the American Revolution. Since then it’s been celebrated with festivities like fireworks parades concerts big and small and family barbecues. This year the fireworks parades concerts were scratched.

   Maggie was born seven almost eight years earlier. She was due to officially come to life the third week of September, four five days after Frank and Vera expected to be back from Atlantic Canada but was born on the first day of the month.

   She was a once in a blue moon baby. To do something once in a blue moon means to do it rarely. It is the appearance of a second full moon within a calendar month, which happens about once every three years.

   “Where do you go in the summer?” Maggie asked.

   “We go to Prince Edward Island, a small town called North Rustico, but we stay in a cottage in the National Park, a family owns the land, they’ve been there for almost two hundred years. We leave in mid-August and stay through the first couple of weeks of September, which is why we miss your birthday party.”

   “You always send me a present. I like that. But last year you sent me a sweatshirt with a red leaf on it that was ten times too big.”

   “You’ll grow into it,” said Frank.

   “Maybe I will, but maybe I won’t,” said Maggie. She was a genial child but could be a testy cuss. She thought she knew her own mind rounding out her seventh year, although it could go both ways.

   “Do you like it there?”

   “Yes, we like it a lot.”

   “Why aren’t you going? Is it the virus?”

   The 20th century was the American Century. The United States led the way socially economically brain-wise learning-wise and in every other wise way. In 2020 it led the way in virus infections, far outpacing the next two contenders, Brazil and India. The flat tires in charge nowadays can’t get anything right, from building their useless wall, all three miles of new wall, to securing a useful virus test.

   North Korea and Iran keep making atom bombs, there’s no China trade deal, the deficit has skyrocketed, and race relations have gotten worse. All that’s left is for the other shoe to drop. On top of that, Hilary Clinton still isn’t in jail.

   “Yes, the bug,” said Frank. “The Canadian border is closed, and even if we could get into Canada somehow, the bridge to the island is closed except for business.”

   In May President Trump said, “Coronavirus numbers are looking MUCH better, going down almost everywhere, cases are coming way down.” In June he said the pandemic is “fading away. It’s going to fade away.” On July 2nd he said, “99% of cases are totally harmless.” Four days later, on July 6th, he said, “We now have the lowest Fatality Rate in the World.”

   John Hopkins University subsequently reported that the United Sates has the world’s ninth-worst mortality rate, with 41.33 deaths per 100,000 people. It was a bald-faced report. They didn’t capitalize the numbers.

   “Are you sad that you can’t go?”

   “Yes.”

   “They built a new bridge to our house. I know all about it, we drove over it two weeks ago. Mom was so happy. It’s a big bridge, too, the other one was small and always breaking.”

   “You know the bridge you go across from downtown, when you go up the rise past the baseball stadium where the Indians play ball, on your way to Lakewood?”

   “That’s a long bridge.”

   “It’s called the Main Avenue Bridge and it’s two miles long. The bridge that goes from Canada to Prince Edward Island is almost 5 times longer than that. It’s as long as the distance from downtown to our house.”

   “That’s far!”

   “That can’t be,” Frank’s nephew Ethan blurted out. “That bridge is too long!”

   “How do you know, Bud, you can hardly count,” said Maggie. She called Ethan Bud. They were buddies, although they didn’t always see eye-to-eye.

   “I can so count, I know all the dinosaurs, there are a million of them,” said Ethan.

   “I’m going into third grade and we’re going to learn division. You’ve been learning to finger paint.”

   “What’s a million and a million?”

   “2 million.”

   “OK, what’s the biggest dinosaur ever?”

   “The Brontosaurus.”

   “No! It’s the Argentinosaurus, and he weighed a million pounds.”

   “That can’t be,” said Maggie.

   “My math is my math,” Ethan simply said.

   “If you can’t explain it simply you don’t understand it well enough,” said Albert Einstein.

   As of July, there were more than 300,000 cases of the virus reported in children since the start of the pandemic. The Executive Office of the Federal Government has repeatedly maintained it poses almost no threat to them. “The fact is they are virtually immune from this problem,” President Trump said.

   “How do you know about the virus?” Frank asked.

   “Everybody knows about it. The whole world knows.”

   “They even know in Antarctica,” said Ethan.

   “Do you know anybody who got it?”

   “A girl in school got it from her mom,” Maggie said. “I took piano lessons with her.”

   “That’s too bad,” Frank said.

   “Are there going to be fireworks tonight?” Maggie asked.

   “No, the city cancelled them.”

   “Where we live, too.”

   “Here there were fireworks last night, we sat on the front porch, until after midnight, but it was just people in the street or their yards. There were some big pops over there by Madison Avenue. I think they were shooting them off from the empty lot. We could see bottle rockets over the trees.”

   “Wow!”

   “You said you knew about the virus, but how do you know?” asked Frank.

   “The news about it is on every day on TV,” said Maggie.

   “That’s right,” said Ethan.

   “We have a TV, but we don’t have TV,” said Frank. “We only have a couple of streaming services for movies.”

   “We have real TV,” said Maggie, “and it’s on all the time. The news is on every single hour every single day and all the news is about the virus.”

   “Do you watch TV all the time?”

   “We don’t watch TV, but we watch it all day,” said Ethan.

   “We don’t really watch it, but it’s always there,” said Maggie.

   Parents are urged to pay attention to what their children see and hear on radio online television. They are cautioned to reduce screen time focused on the virus since too much information on one topic can lead to anxiety in kids. Talk to them about how stories on the web might be rumors and wildly inaccurate.

   “That’s OK, it’s all in your head, anyway,” said Maggie.

   “All in your head?”

   “That’s what dad says.”

   “Well,” Frank said, “your father knows best.” He wasn’t going to get into a no-win argument with his brother-in-law. His sister’s boyfriend was a policeman at Metro Hospitals. Frank didn’t want his ears pricking up. He wouldn’t understand it’s all in your head.

   “Are you worried about the virus?” Frank asked.

   “Would that help?” Maggie asked, biting into a burger. “This is yummy good.”

   “No, it would probably just make you crazy.”

   “Dad said your name wasn’t always Frank Glass.”

   “Yes and no,” said Frank. “My given name has always been Frank, which is short for Francis, like we call you Maggie even though your name is Margaret, but my family name, what they say is your surname, used to be Kazukauskas.”

   “What happened to it?” asked Maggie. “Why is it different now.”

   “When my father came here, to America after World War Two, the immigration people said he should change it to something other people could pronounce, that they could say without too much trouble, so he changed it to Glass.”

   “Where did he come from?”

   “Lithuania, a little country, north of Germany.”

   “That’s a nice name,” Maggie said. “I like Glass.”

   “At least he didn’t have to climb another brick in the wall once he got here.”

   “What does that mean?”

   “I’ll tell you when you’re older. Are you staying home more because of the virus?”

   “Yes!” both of them exclaimed.

   “Do you have to wear a mask when you go somewhere?”

   “We cover up,” Maggie said. “My face gets hot, my head gets hot, and my hair get hot. It makes my glasses fog up.”

   “I have a tube mask with rhino’s and bronto’s on it,” Ethan said. “But I can’t breathe, so I just rip it off until mom sees.”

   There was a box of Charades for Kids on the table. “Three or More Players Ages Four and Up.” Frank pointed at it.

   “Are you ready to play?”

   Maggie rolled around on the lawn, flapped her arms, rolled her eyes, and hugged herself. Nobody had any idea what she was doing.

   “Going to bed!” she yelped.

   Ethan did a somersault.

   “Somersault?”

   “Yes!”

   Maggie rolled on the ground holding her head and grimacing like a mad chipmunk. Everybody watched with blank faces, stumped.

   “Headache!” she blared.

   Ethan slashed the air with his hands.

   “Karate?”

   “Yes!”

   Maggie jumped, waved her right arm in circles, flapped it back and forth, and licked her lips. As the one-minute hourglass dropped the last grain of sand to the bottom, she fell down on the grass. Everybody was stumped again.

   “Frosting a cake! I can’t believe nobody got it.”

   Ethan got on all fours like an anteater, pretended to be eating something with great chomping motions, and clomped to the driveway and back.

   “Argentinosaurus?”

   “Yes!”

   Summer signals freedom for children. It’s a break from the structure of school days, a time for more days spent at the pool, a time for more play, for exploring the outdoors.

   One day his mom asked Ethan if he wanted to go out on his scooter.

   “So much,” he said. “I have got to get out of this house.”

   “Every single day I see the Amazon truck and the FedEx and the white trucks go past me,” said Maggie. “They turn around at the cul-de-sac thing, they just rush back, driving crazy. I run to the backyard.”

   “There’s a big field and woods past our backyard,” Ethan said.

   “We’re stuck at home but it’s summer, it’s nice outside, the sun is shining, and we all go for walks,” Maggie said.

   She hadn’t been to school since April, studying remotely. Ethan hadn’t been to pre-school for just as long.

   “Are you going back to school in the fall?” asked Frank.

   “I hope so,” said Maggie. “I miss it.”

   “I’m supposed to start first grade,” said Ethan.

   About two months away from hopes there will be a return to school, many parents were looking to new findings which suggest children are less likely to get and spread the virus. In late June the American Academy of Pediatrics, which advocates for “having students physically present in school,” published reopening guidelines. They stated that children “may be less likely to become infected” with the coronavirus and to spread the infection.

   Living and breathing in-person face-to-face time is what makes school a school. “Better than a thousand days of diligent study is one day with a great teacher,” is what a Japanese proverb says.

   “I want to play something else,” Maggie said. “Can you teach us how to play Pictionary?”

   “Sure,” Frank said.

   They put the never-ending news of the pandemic away, cleared one end of the table, and unfolded the game board, setting out the pencils note pads special cards. “Quick Sketches, Hilarious Guesses” is what it said on the yellow box, and that is what they did the rest of Independence Day, the clear sky going twilight, lightning bugs flashing on off on off, and neighborhood kids shooting off Uncle Sam Phantom fire flowers in the alley behind them.

   There wasn’t a dud in the caboodle, not that they saw. Uncle Sam got it right, rockets red glare.

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Ohio Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

Made in Cleveland

From the Ground Up

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By Ed Staskus

   By the time Dave Bloomquist set foot on Prospect Ave. the street had been there for more than a century. It is one block south of Euclid Ave. Between 1870 and 1930 Cleveland’s Euclid Ave. was known as Millionaire’s Row. Nearly 250 houses ran along its four miles. Some of the mansions were as big as 50,000 square feet on lots of six acres. One of them owned by Sam Andrews employed one hundred servants to make sure the mansion made it through the day.

   On Sundays everybody paraded to church dressed in their best. At the time Euclid Ave. was called “The Most Beautiful Street in America.” High-spirited sleigh races in winter attracted thousands, lining the thirty blocks between East 9th and East 40th Streets to watch. In the spring children busted out to the many small parks within running distance.

   Prospect Ave. was a second cousin to Euclid Ave., but the cousin was well-to-do in its own right. It housed the upper middle class, lawyers, doctors, and businessmen. Rowhouses were built between 1874 and 1879 near East 36th Street in Gothic Revival, Italianate, and Second Empire styles. A grand house was built in 1883 for Sarah Benedict, the widow of Cleveland Herald publisher George Benedict. The five-story Plaza Apartments, acquired by Dave Bloomquist in 1973, was built in 1901.

   Dave grew up in Sandusky, in northern Ohio on the south shore of Lake Erie, midway between Toledo and Cleveland. Back in the day the native Wyandots called his hometown Soundustee. It means cold water. Today Sandusky is known for the Cedar Point amusement park and its many roller coasters.

   “I was recruited my senior year in high school by Findlay University on a basketball scholarship, but was disciplined and dismissed after the winter semester of 1968,” he said. He quickly pulled up his dorm room stakes and went to Colorado. “I was avoiding arrest on a possession and sales charge but was eventually picked up and extradited back to Ohio. When I got out on bond I petitioned for probationary enrollment to Cleveland’s Tri-C community college.”

   It was one of the only higher education schools of any kind in Ohio that offered that kind of re-entry opportunity. Keeping his nose clean and finishing with a 3.5 GPA he was able to transfer to Cleveland State University. In the meantime, in between classes, he needed a job. When the Auditorium Hotel posted a stock boy position on the community college’s job board, he went downtown.

   “The manager’s assistant assumed I was there for another posting, for night auditor, since I showed up in a jacket and tie. I fabricated math and accounting skills on the spot.” He was hired on the spot.

   The 10-story hotel built in 1927 was on the corner of East 6th Street and St. Clair Ave. There were 420 rooms. It was close to everything because everything was close-by. “Most of the rooms stayed mostly empty, except when the Metropolitan Opera came to town,” Dave said. “That’s when my limited skills with the NCR auditing machine and the Lilly Tomlin-style switchboard became obvious. The three manual elevators were operated by retired prostitutes. The second shift bell captain was a city supervisor during the day, but at night became the procurer for all the shady desires of the guests. The hotel had off-duty policemen moonlighting as security. They were good at raiding the restaurant refrigerators for steaks and regaling me with crook stories.”

   He was the last night auditor at the Auditorium. Six months after he started the hotel closed. Soon after that it was demolished. Married and with an infant son, Dave dropped out of school for a quarter to work full-time. When he went back to Tri-C, he worked as a student assistant in the Art Department and the night shift at a local psychiatric hospital. When he moved on to Cleveland State University, he found work in their Art Department and became director of the university’s daycare, as well.

   The psychiatric hospital hadn’t driven him crazy. Infant crying and irritability at the daycare didn’t tip the scales, either. When he became the janitor at the Plaza, it tested him. The work can be messy and the mess is always back the next day. It can drive a good man crazy. Janitors work odd hours and are prone to a high risk of trips, slips, falls, repetitive motion misery, and musculoskeletal injuries caused by overexertion. More than 46,000 janitors suffer work-related mishaps every year requiring time off, according to the National Safety Council.  

   “Ruby and David, the janitors at the Plaza, had moved out and Betty Basil, the manager, offered me the job. I had to sweep the halls, shovel the snow, cut the grass, and empty the three big trash barrels. I was also paid $50 for every room that I painted. Overall, most things were dutifully taken care of. It just took patience.” When you have the patience to do simple things well you get the hang of doing the dirty work.

   Keeping the grounds and premises clean gave him a window into the workings of the Plaza. When he met Allen Ravenstine, he knew as much about the building as anybody. Allen was mulling over what to with the inheritance he had secured after both his parents died in an accident. He had since abandoned college life and was re-inventing himself as a musician.

   “It started the day Bob Bensick moved into the suite below me in a house in Lakewood,” Allen said. “Bob used to take these fuzztones and rewire them so they were oscillators. He had these little black boxes and he played them for me. They made neat noises. I had tried to be a guitar player but I hated all that crap of putting up with bloody fingertips until they got calluses. But I liked the idea of playing music. So, I fooled around with Bob’s black boxes. After a while there were three or four of them. One day Bob said, ‘Hey, you know when you get a whole bunch of these little black boxes in one big box, they call it a synthesizer.’”

   Music wasn’t the only thing Allen was engaged with. “He was keen on being more personally engaged with his recent windfall,” Dave said. “He was concerned that his investments were helping IBM and other blue-chip corporations that were supporting a government and a war.”

   The Vietnam War had gone fire and brimstone. The ten-day Christmas Bombing of 1972, targeting Hanoi and Haiphong, was accomplished by B-52 Stratofortress’s. They were the biggest strikes launched by the United States Air Force since the end of World War Two. During the Asian war more tonnage was dropped on Vietnam than all the tonnage dropped on everybody everywhere during World War Two. Other than blowing up lots of earthlings and infrastructure it didn’t get anything done to end the hostilities. 

   After all the blood spilled, and the countryside a wreck, 1973 dawned with a new peace agreement. It was repeatedly violated by both sides as the struggle for power and control continued. Nobody figured that by the end of the year there would hardly be any American combat forces left in the country. When that happened, it was just a matter of time before Charlie won the war.

   Dave and Allen brainstormed all that winter. “With the help of some wine and some smoke, Allen and I discussed a wide variety of investments. We talked about publishing and selling stories and poetry like City Lights, opening an art gallery, or getting an experimental music venue in the works. But as these interests were unlikely to go beyond a hobby that drained Allen’s resources, which were meant to sustain him into full adulthood, and some kind of career, one by one they were tabled.”

   After more talk and more ideas tabled as no good, Dave floated the notion of buying the Plaza and using the revenue from it to support their art enterprises.  At the time it was owned by the family who also owned Blonder Paints at East 39th St. and Prospect Ave. Blonder Paints went back to 1918 when a cigarmaker and a paperhanger teamed up and got it off the ground. They sold paint, varnish, and paperhanging supplies, both wholesale and retail. By the 1950s it was the country’s 6th largest wholesaler of wallpaper. 

   “We learned the family might be open to a purchase offer, so we got started,” Dave said. “It was the days of red lining and white flight. We had difficulty finding an appraiser who would even look at the building. Of course, no banks would talk to us.” A white shirt and tie didn’t obscure his Grateful Dead full beard and shoulder-length hair.

   Working with an inner city realtor and appraiser with an office on Cedar Ave., they got a number on which to base an offer. “Everett Pruitt helped us draft a land contract that was reviewed by Allen’s attorney and his older brother, who both thought we were nuts. We then manned up, dressed up, and made an offer. After a little back and forth we struck a deal. We got the Plaza, the Victorian house next door, and the parking lot for $62,500.  I put in every penny my wife Ann and I had, which was $1,000, and Allen contributed the remaining amount, which was $9,000. The balance was amortized over 15 years. We formed Corona Unlimited, a partnership agreement based on a handshake and a toast.”

   They paid themselves $75.00 a week and lived rent-free. When a six-room front apartment on the top floor came open, Dave, Ann, and their son moved into it from their small second floor rooms. It didn’t pay to have a bad memory at the Plaza and have to go up and down the stairs all the time for something you forgot, although that was how the family got their exercise.

   “Mike Roccini had been living in that suite,” Dave said. “He was a writer, some magazine articles and a novel. He graduated from the University of the Americas in Mexico City with a degree in pharmacology and a taste for tequila and cigars. After coming down with a heart ailment he retired from dispensing drugs and spent most of his time at the Plaza in what he called his Moose Hall writing, with breaks to check the mail and report to his off-the record office at the bar of the Sterling Hotel.”

   His wife Speedy was a schoolteacher.She kept him flush in pencils and paper. It was when the fourth-floor walk-up became too much for Mike that he and Speedy moved to a chicken farm east of Cleveland. None of the chickens complained about his cigar smoke, fearing for their heads. Dave opened all the windows and aired out his new digs.

   To make ends meet Dave tended bar weekends at the Viking Saloon, helped out at the Mistake Saloon, and filled in at the Library Saloon when they were short-staffed. The best thing for a case of nerves is a case of beer. The Library was popular with Cleveland State University students and local bohemians. It was at East 37th and Prospect, in what had been the Benedict House. It was long past its glory days. The students who went there tried to pick up girls, drank too much, and got into arguments, even though it never mattered who won or lost the wrangling. The girls usually steered clear of polemics. The bohemians stayed chill.

   He found work at the Round Table, an old downtown German restaurant. “It had become a tired-out attorney’s bar with most of the grand old rooms empty. A young hustler from Lakewood convinced the owner to convert all three floors to a music venue. It was wildly successful. But bar tending was tailor made for my increasingly flagrant infidelities. After we purchased the Plaza, my wife Ann grew tired of it and found sympathy and comfort with Allen.”

   Even so, infidelities notwithstanding, the partnership continued for a dozen-and-more years. They used the rental income from the 48 apartments for operating expenses and renovations. With a 30% vacancy rate, a mortgage at 17%, insurance for a troubled building, taxes and utilities, it ate up most of their income. Renovations meant DIY for almost everything. 

   “There was an old hardware store on Euclid just east of 55th Street, owned by a Mr. Weiss. Before buying the Plaza, I got to know him and his helpmate Jimmy in my role as janitor of the building. Their stock of plumbing and building supplies dated back at least 50 years, which is a great resource when keeping an 80-year-old building alive.” It was the kind of old-school hardware store where you could buy dynamite fuse by the foot. “Since I was limited in my knowledge of trade skills it meant I would frequently go to there for information on how to sweat pipe or wire a switch. They were  generous with their knowledge, if sometimes humored by my ignorance. They knew we were committed to the neighborhood.”

   The downside of living it up on the late-night bar life roller coaster finally proved to be too much. He left his old haunts to tend bar at the Elegant Hog on Playhouse Square. “It had an older crowd that tipped much better and they closed much earlier.” He put his nose to the grindstone and the Plaza got one step ahead month after month. The vacancy rate went down and the waiting-to-rent list went up.

   Taking risks doesn’t mean shirking responsibilities. It rather means embracing possibilities. Dave Bloomquist wasn’t Lord of the Manor, not by a long shot. Upper Prospect wasn’t anybody’s magic kingdom. Those days were done and gone. He was more like the Prince of Prospect, a hammer, wrench, and screwdriver on his coat of arms. When the roof leaked or the boiler faltered, he put on his dab hand gloves and got down to work.

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Ohio Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

Sudbury Ontario

Kitchen Party

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By Ed Staskus

Some years later living in a Polish double in Cleveland, Ohio, the last winter we lived in the old neighborhood off St. Clair Ave., before moving to the new neighborhood in North Collinwood where a school and convent adjoining the Lithuanian church had just been built, I watched my 9-year-old sister Rita walk up the stairs in her new American winter coat and remembered the blimp-style snow suit my mother made for her in Canada.

   She looked like one of the astronauts in ‘Destination Moon.’ I had seen the Technicolor sci-fi movie on a 15” black and white “Atomic Age” Zenith. It had a sharp picture, at least until it warmed up, when it would sooner or later start arcing and hissing. It was always on the verge of blasting off.

   It was space, the new frontier, brought to life by space the old frontier, at least until the TV went black. Rockets were hot. Project Mercury was done and gone, launching the first American astronaut on a suborbital flight in 1961. John Glenn lifted off on an Atlas rocket in 1962 to become the first American to orbit the Earth.

   Rita wore her space suit winters in Sudbury, Ontario. It was where my mother Angele Jurgelaityte married Vytas Staskevicius in 1949 and gave birth to me in 1951, my brother in 1952, and my sister in 1954. It was the trifecta. When she did, she gave up her job as a nanny for the Lapalme’s, known as “The Largest Family in Sudbury.” The Lapalme’s had 13 kids. She went to work raising her own family in her own house. 

   “I spent all my time cooking, cleaning, doing laundry, and watching my kids,” she said.

   The day she got married she was good at boiling pork and making soup. That was about it. “I didn’t know how to make any other food.” The first time she bought ground meat for a meatloaf, she bought too many pounds by far of it. “We didn’t have a refrigerator and I had to ask one of our neighbors to keep it for me.” She learned to stick to the basics, fruit in season, fresh meat from a butcher shop, eggs, cheese, bread, milk, and coffee.

   “No matter how much I ate I couldn’t put on weight,” she said. “I was thin as a pencil.” She saw a doctor who told her not to overthink nor overeat her slender figure. “You’ll want it back some day,” he told her.

   My mom and dad rented an upstairs room to a German couple who were recently arrived in the country, Bruno and Ingrid Hauck, in order to bring in some income. They charged $11.00 a week and soon converted a second upstairs bedroom to accommodate more boarders. There was a half bath.

   “I don’t know where they went for a real bath,” my mom said. Our family lived on the ground floor. We had a full bath. Once a week in the tub was de rigueur at our house.

   “I loved having kids, but we still had to go out sometimes,” she said. My dad bought her a fur coat after Rita’s birth. Fur was more a north country necessity than a big city luxury, and didn’t cost an arm and a leg, especially since it wasn’t mink and came from the nearby outdoors.

   They couldn’t afford a babysitter but made friends with the Hauck’s, who helped out. “Ingrid loved the kids, especially Rick. She watched them so we could go out.” They walked to the movie theater on Elm Street on Saturday nights. After the movie they took a stroll.

   When she worked for the Laplame’s it was as a mother’s helper for a year. J. A. Lapalme, a local businessman, promised her he would help get boyfriend out of Germany and into Canada. He went to his office every day and every day she waited for word about the sponsorship.

   “One week he was in Montreal,” she said. “When he got home, he didn’t say anything about it. I was in the kitchen washing dishes. I asked him if he had done it, sponsored Vytas, but he said he forgot. I got so mad I threw the washcloth on the floor.”

   She ran upstairs, down the hallway to the back, into her room, slammed the door, and threw herself on the bed.

   He knocked on the door a minute later, came in, and said, “I’ll fix it tomorrow.”

   “He did it the next day,” she said.  

   Vytas went to work in the nickel mines. Sudbury was a mining town. Either you worked underground, or you worked in an ancillary business. He wasn’t low man on the totem pole, like pick-axe men, but he had to watch his step in the 3,000-foot-deep dim damp mineshafts. A wrong step could be a last step. His first job was packing black powder. He worked as a blaster, the man responsible for loading, priming, and detonating blastholes, breaking rock for excavation, creating rock cuts.

   Sudbury is the regional capital of northeastern Ontario, 230 miles north of Toronto and 140 miles east of Sault Ste. Marie. It lays in a 200-million-year-old crater, surrounded by the Canadian Shield, and has hundreds of lakes within its boundaries. Lake Wanapitei is the largest city-contained lake in the world.

   Sudbury’s economy went boom and bust through the years as demand for nickel fluctuated. It was high during World War One, fell sharply when the war ended, and rose again in the 1920s and 30s. It was one of the richest and fastest-growing cities in Canada through the 1930s. During World War Two one mine alone accounted for all the nickel used in Allied artillery. With the advent of the Cold War Sudbury supplied the United States with most of its military grade nickel.

   Angele and Vytas lived in an old two-story clapboard house on Pine Street after their wedding and a one-day honeymoon at a nearby lakeshore park and local hotel. They saved everything they could and couldn’t afford, and with the help of a loan from J. A. Lapalme, were able to buy a new house on a new dead-end stretch of Stanley Street.

    Stanley Street stretched four blocks from Elm Street, a commercial thoroughfare, past Pine Street to Poplar Street. When it was extended to the nearly sheer rock face on top of which the Canada Pacific ran hauling ore, it became five blocks. Several new homes were built. All of them had basements and coal furnaces.

   “There were three on our side of the street and three on the other side when we moved in,” said Angele. There were no sidewalks. “One of the houses on the other side was bigger. It was the builder’s home.”

   Storm windows had been neglected on their new house, regardless of the long winters.  “We hadn’t signed for the house, yet, and Vytas insisted he put in second windows. He put them right in.” They might have been immigrants, DPs from Eastern Europe, but they didn’t need a weatherman to know which way the icy wind blew.

   The builder had four children, two of them boys. I played with them in the summer, climbing the sloping rock hills behind our house, and planning on how to someday climb the steep cliff at the end of the street. Our parents forbade us the fantasy, while we bided our time, waiting for them to turn their backs for a second.

   My mother spoke Lithuanian fluently, Russian and German competently, English just barely, and French not at all. Everybody in Sudbury spoke English and French. It was hearing it on the grapevine and listening some more for her to be able to go shopping.

   “I listened to people. I learned English by talking to them.”

   The first Lithuanians came to Canada in the early 1900s to work in Nova Scotia’s mines. They established a parish and built a church in 1913. Another wave of immigration, tens of thousands, took place after World War Two. Most of them went to Ontario. They spread out to London, Hamilton, and Toronto. Some of them went to Sudbury. There was ready employment there.

   For all its work and prosperity, the mining town was known as one of the ugliest cities in Canada. Logging for the reason of roasting ore on open fires and the smoke that resulted despoiled the landscape, leaving behind scattered poplars and birches, the only trees able to endure the harm. The small city and its vast environs were often compared to the landscape of the moon. What birds there were carried their nut and seed lunch boxes from tree to tree because the trees were so far and few between. They never said goodbye, though. The nest is where the heart is.

   “The summers were short and steamy,” my mom said. “There were no trees anywhere. There was one here and there. The rocks got hot and made everything hotter. Winter started in October, and it was cold.”

   When spring came, there wasn’t much to it. Decades of indiscriminate logging, massive mining operations, and smelter emissions had wiped out almost all the vegetation. The pollution poisoned lakes and streams. The dearth of trees meant a dearth of mulch, leading to widespread soil erosion. As a result, frost was severe in the winter, and it was too summery in the summer.

   It was colder than cold in winter. The average temperature was below zero. “Our best friends, Henry and Maryte Zizys, had to go home on the bus one weekend after visiting us and it was 45 degrees below zero.” The average snowfall was above average for northern lands. The last frost in spring was in May. It came back early in autumn, if it had ever gone away in the first place.

   In the winter, once she got the hang of it, my mom sewed clothes. When she started, she had sewn little except a button back on a shirt or skirt. “But when you have to do something, I did it,” she said. She learned to sew the same way she learned to speak English. She rummaged cheap clothes from second-hand stores and took them apart to see how they had been put together. She cut up adult pants, reusing the zippers, and made children’s pants. “The zipper in pants was hard to figure out.” She learned by doing what she was doing.

   “I found out it was just common sense,” she said.

   She bought a used foot-powered Treadle Singer sewing machine in good condition. A rubber belt operated it. It stretched from the balance wheel to a flat metal bigfoot pedal at the bottom. The power came from the rhythm of the sewer’s feet. The stitch length couldn’t be adjusted. Only a single straight stitch is possible with treadle machines. But once she got into the swing of things, both delicate and durable stiches become more workable. Within a few years she was making curtains and tablecloths for herself and her neighbors.

   She sewed dresses for her friends. She made a dress for Irma Hauck. “I sewed a coat for Maryte Zizys and other Lithuanians.” She learned to make pants for the men, cuffs and all. She sewed winter suits for us. I got a German army winter field coat and matching wool pants. Rick got a Space Cadet zip up one-piece suit. Both of us wore snug form-fitting hats based on “Atomic Rulers of the World.”  Rita’s snow suit was puffed up like a dirigible, cinched at the waist, and paired with a white rabbit furry hat. She was “The Thing from Stanley Street.” We chased her with make-believe ray guns.

   When my father learned how to ice skate at a local rink, he bought us skates. He flooded the front yard with hose water, and when it froze solid taught us how to skate. Whenever Rita fell she never felt a thing, her puffy suit protecting her. But sometimes she couldn’t get back up, lacking leverage, the sharp gusty wind rolling her over and over.

   “When I lived in Nuremberg, at the Army Hospital, one of my roommates, Monica, read my palm, and said I would have three children, but one of them would die young,” my mom said. “When it was time to take the taxi to the hospital for Rita, my third child, I was so scared I fell down on the living room floor and couldn’t go.”

   Vytas got her to her feet and inside the car. In the event, my sister survived, fortune teller or no fortune teller, ray guns or no ray guns, rock solid rink ice or not.

   In the spring, between pregnancies and births, Angele performed in plays resurrected from the homeland. She danced with a folk-dance group. They practiced in the church hall and did turns on local stages, once going to Sault Ste. Marie for an outdoor dance jamboree.

   “Rimas Bagdonas was always my partner,” she said. “He was tall and a good dancer.”

   Vytas and Angele met Rimas and Regina Bagdonas in Sudbury. They met everyone they knew for the first time in Sudbury, since everybody else they had known in Lithuania was either stuck behind the Iron Curtain or had emigrated to one corner of the wide world-or-other. Many of them died in the war.

   Rimas worked for Murray Mines and hosted a Lithuanian radio program in his spare time on Sundays. He sang and danced and played the piano, violin, harmonica, and accordion. He was one of the church organists and one of the accordionists for folk dancing performances.

   He worked deep down in the rock for eight years. In 1957 he was told in order to get promoted he would have to change his last name. A manager suggested Rimas Bags or Rimas Bagas. He didn’t like the idea, at all. He worked in the dark but was beginning to see the light.

   “My dad told them he was born a Bagdonas and would die a Bagdonas,” his daughter Lele said. “So, a family decision was made that he would leave to find a job. We stayed in Sudbury. That November after he found work, we moved to Hamilton. My dad’s first job was at the Ford plant in nearby Oakville.”

   By 1957 most of the Lithuanians in Sudbury were thinking about talking about planning on leaving or had already left for greener pastures. They were moving to Toronto Montreal and the northern United States. My father made a foray south of the border, exploring where we might go to live and work.

   Mining has been and is one of the most dangerous occupations in the world. Some of the worst workplace disasters ever have been collapses and explosions. The most common accidents are the result of poisonous or volatile gases and the misuse of explosives for blasting operations. Especially dangerous below ground is mine-induced instability. It is a major threat for all miners. None of the DP diggers wanted to be dug out of rubble after surviving WW2.

   At the start of the 1950s Sudbury had a population of about 40,000 and of the 14,000 men in the labor force more than 8,000 of them worked in mining and smelting. Ten years later, due to the high demand for labor, the population of the city doubled. But at the outset of the 2000s Sudbury had the smallest proportion of immigrants of any city in Ontario, the Italians, Ukrainians, and Lithuanians almost all gone.

   In the meantime, Sudbury modernized its mining and reclaimed its landscape. They changed the climate. Nearly 9 million trees were planted over a 30-year period. It was one of the largest re-greening projects in the world. Better late than never.

   “I hated my husband having to work in the mines,” my mom said. “Whenever a miner died, you never heard it on the news or read about it in the newspaper. We only ever found out by word- of-mouth.”

   My sister’s godfather moved to Chicago. My brother’s godfather moved to San Diego. My godfather moved to Los Angeles. Henry and Maryte Zizys moved to Montreal. The Hauck’s moved to Detroit. Almost every DP who came to Sudbury for the chance to get out of Europe and for the available work went somewhere else.

   “My husband worked nine hours a day for two weeks and then nine hours a night for two weeks,” Angele said. His days of getting up, shoveling coal into the furnace on bitter mornings, having breakfast, walking or hitching a ride to the mine, working his shift, getting home, having dinner, seeing his kids for few minutes, took up most of his day. 

   “When he worked nights, we barely saw him. He would come home in the morning, have a bite to eat, and go to bed.”

   Refugees and displaced people believe in hard work as the way to get ahead. It’s often the only thing they have to believe in. Everything else has been left behind.

   “When the men were working day shifts, we had parties on weekends at our house,” my mom said. “We had a big living room and the Simkiai, Povilaiciai, and Dzenkaiciai would come over.” Rita, Rick, and I got shoved into a bedroom to fend for ourselves.

   The husbands played bridge in the kitchen long into the night, drinking beer and homemade krupnickas, which is a kind of Lithuanian moonshine, smoking Export “A” and Player’s Navy Cut cigarettes until the card table was under a pall of smoke. The wives put food out, mixed cocktails, and kibitzed the card players. They danced to records. They kicked back and talked.

   “We didn’t have TV’s so we talked.”

   They talked about their kids, their neighbors and friends, their baznycia and bendruomene, who was getting married and who was getting dumped, the movies, shopping cooking the butcher baker and candlestick maker. They talked about the local doings. The men talked about their jobs, who knew and didn’t know what they were doing. They put us back to bed when they spotted us listening. They talked long into the night in the living room.

   When it got dark outside, and started snowing, the black rock face of Sudbury got muffled in white. When the wind picked up drifts built up against the side of the house and the windows. After that there wasn’t much to see. They didn’t talk about what had been, but about what was going to be. Up ahead was what mattered to them.

   “One day a door will open and let the future in,” Angele said. In the meantime, she made sure the front door was securely latched. There was no sense in letting Old Man Winter crash the party.

Photograph by Vytas Staskevicius.

Ed Staskus posts feature stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Ohio Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

Atlantic Canada

It Takes 2 to Tango

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By Ed Staskus

   “I’ve always been obsessed by weddings,” said Marsha Weeks. “I used to buy wedding magazines when I was 7-years-old and dream about planning a wedding.” We have to dream before our dreams come true.

   Most kids don’t grow up to be the firemen and rock stars, much less the heroes and explorers they dreamt about. It’s a long shot when it comes to becoming a hero, or even a wedding planner. Most children, because of ups and downs, twists and turns, turn out becoming and doing something else, mechanics, working in stores, teachers, and doctors.  

   Marsha Weeks grew up in Fredericton, a small community in Queens County on Prince Edward Island. The province is Canada’s most bantam, made up of only three counties. It is the only province with a capital that isn’t a metropolis. Most islanders live in the country and small towns.

   After graduating from high school, she moved west, almost three thousand miles west, enrolling at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology. She stayed for ten years. “I did hospitality management and managed restaurants,” she said. When she moved back to PEI she worked in hotels in Charlottetown, the capital, then went into sales and marketing at the Stanley Bridge Resort, not far from where she grew up.

   “I now work for the Children’s Wish Foundation,” she said. She is a wish coordinator. “We grant wishes to children from the ages of 3 to 17 who have been diagnosed with life-threatening illnesses.” Founded in 1983, the charitable organization has chapters in every province and territory of Canada. It has granted more than 25,000 wishes. The most popular ones include travel and meeting celebrities.

   Super-heroes are splashed across the pages of comic books and IMAX screens, battling super-villains and saving the world. Real heroes are usually real people helping another real person. She helps kids hitch their wagons to a shooting star.

   She also helps grown-ups get hitched to their sweethearts. Since returning to Prince Edward Island, she has become a licensed marriage commissioner and officiant. Dreaming about weddings and watching re-runs of “Say Yes to the Dress” has finally paid off.  

   “The provincial government started licensing it in 2006, because there was a demand for same-sex marriages,” said Marsha. “There was the church, too, which doesn’t allow marriages outside of the church. A priest wouldn’t be allowed to marry somebody on the beach.”

   When 90 people flew to the island last summer for the wedding of Matthew MacDonald and Katie Shaver, they landed at a wedding officiated by Marsha Weeks and staged on a red cliff overlooking the Northumberland Straight. “It was important to us to showcase the island and have a real east coast feel,” said Katie.  

   “We were blessed with perfect weather, a great late summer PEI day!” 

   Although you have to take the birds and bees into consideration, as well as inclement weather and the buffet table surviving the wind, nothing beats tying the knot outdoors. Unless you mistake the lay of the land and your car gets waylaid. “Someone from Ontario coming to a wedding here decided to drive over the dunes on to the beach,” said Marsha. “They got stuck in the sand and had to be towed out.”

   In any event, the flowers are already there – pink and purple lupins line the fields, roads, and ditches in June and July – and your photos will look great.

   Almost 900 marriage certificates were issued in the province in 2018, according to PEI Vital Statistics, nearly 400 of them going to couples with a relationship to the island, but not necessarily living there. The Marriage Act was simplified in 2016, allowing people off-island to wed with passports alone, doing away with the need for birth certificates. There are almost one hundred marriage commissioners licensed to conduct a legal marriage ceremony. Marsha Weeks is one of the busiest of them.

   One summer day last year she officiated five weddings on one Saturday.

   “I started at Cavendish, a destination wedding, went to Fox Meadows Golf Course, a farmer’s field in Brookfield, into the woods at Clinton Hills, and ended up on a back road on the Trout River, at a private residence.” 

   For once, she hired somebody to drive her. “I didn’t want to risk being late, and I wanted to be able to give them as much attention as I could,’ she said. “I didn’t want to just jump out in time for their ‘I do’s’”

   It isn’t only traditional wedding season bells, either.

   “I officiated a large wedding in western PEI,” she said. “The bride and groom chose to incorporate their children with a sand ceremony to symbolize the blending of their two families into one and presented the children with necklaces as their own special gifts. It was a reflection on how important a big happy family meant to the couple.”

    Most people, as recently as ten years ago, used to get married in a church. Nowadays most people get married in a civil ceremony. “I think it’s going to continue that way,” said fellow commissioner Marlo Dodge. “You can get married wherever you want, whenever you want. You can tailor the ceremony to the way you want.”

   So long as you include the legal parts, you can write your own ceremony. 

   Not many people, however, write their own music. There are scores of wedding ceremony songs, from the traditional to the modern. “All You Need Is Love” by the ever-popular Beatles is still popular, as are Josh Groban’s “The Prayer” and “Fairytale” by Enya. “The Wedding March” by Felix Mendelssohn has stayed a Top 10 on the soul music charts since it was first played in 1858 as a recessional for a royal wedding.

   Marsha started making soul music on her own when she moved back to Prince Edward Island. She had gotten the hang of the pump organ as a tot sitting at her grandmother’s feet. “One of the fondest memories I have growing up is of her playing hymns. She loved playing for herself. I’m like that. I get something out of it on the inside.” She started taking fiddle lessons six years ago from Gary Chipman.

   “Someone recommended him,” she said.

   She couldn’t have tied the bowstring knot with anybody better. Gary Chipman learned to play the fiddle when he was 5 years old. His father, a well-known Charlottetown-area fiddler, taught him his first tunes. By the 1960s he was being featured at local dance halls. He toured with Stompin’ Don Connors and is well known for his down east Don Messer style of fiddling.

   “The Cape Breton style is rhythmic, with Scottish cuts,” said Marsha. “The down east style is melodic, it flows, it’s a lot faster.” If Don Messer played with little ornamentation and great assurance, Gary Chipman plays with expressiveness and great assurance.

   “I was taking lessons from him, but I had not heard him play,” said Marsha. She heard him one afternoon at Remembrance Day. “I couldn’t see the stage, but I could hear a person playing. That is amazing, I thought. Who is playing that fiddle?”

   It was her music teacher. She had only ever heard him play scales. She didn’t know he had played on the folk musical TV variety show “Don Messer’s Jubilee” when he was still a youngster. “My chest swelled so much I thought it would burst, it was so exciting,” said Gary. The half-hour show at the time was second in viewership only to “Hockey Night in Canada.”

   “These are the good old days, today,” said Gary. “I’m going to keep playing until I can’t play anymore.” What Louis Armstrong said is, “Musicians don’t retire. They only stop when there’s no more music in them.”

   “The Don Messer show was near and dear to a lot of people in Atlantic Canada,” said Marsha. ”When they cancelled it, there was a huge protest. Not riots, but a huge uproar.”

   Since brainstorming is the marriage of ideas, Marsha put on her thinking cap. She went to the beach on the national seashore. She went for a walk by herself. She went home and took a hot shower. It’s where some people do their best thinking. She let her thoughts take center stage. 

   “I’ve always had an element of promotions and event planning in my career. Gary’s natural ability to play music, my entrepreneurial spirit, it was a kind of natural fusion, and I decided I wanted to organize a show.”

   They put together a performance, and then did another one, and ”it kind of blossomed after that.” They spent two seasons doing shows at Avonlea Village and two seasons after that at Stanley Bridge.

   Avonlea Village is in Cavendish, the small town that Lucy Maud Montgomery called Avonlea in “Anne of Green Gables.” It is a re-creation of the 19th century village, merging purpose-built with heritage buildings. The Women’s Institute in Stanley Bridge is 4 miles up the main drag on Route 6. There are ceilidhs at the community hall six days a week in the summer. 

   “The Stanley Bridge hall has such a soul,” said Marsha.

   Two years ago Gary Chipman spent summer nights there playing with Keelin Wedge, a hairpin turns wizard on the fiddle, and Kevin Chaisson. Last year he played Mondays with the Chaisson Family Trio and Wednesdays with the Arsenault Trio. Jordan Chowden, a world-class step-dancer, made the stage boards go percussive. The Chaisson’s from Bear River have deep roots in PEI’s music scene They are part of the spearhead keeping traditional fiddling alive and well on the island.

   Marsha hosted the shows, joining in when the opportunity arose, although keeping up with the Arsenault’s was no mean feat.

    “Their liveliness is amazing,” she said. “If we are playing ‘St Anne’s Reel,’ they definitely add more notes to it. They put their own spin on everything. It’s their Acadian style and it’s fast.” 

   Before the shows Marsha does all of the social media, organizes the schedule, takes notes during rehearsals, and types up the play list in capital letters. She makes sure the doors of the hall are open, the lights are on, and the soundboard is right on.  “I’m always so proud to hand them their play list, although by the end of the night they might have done only a few songs on the page,” she said. “It’s just the way it is. Most of the time it works.”

   During the shows Marsha is the emcee and stage manager. “Everybody likes the sound of their instruments through the monitors a certain way. They’ve got to have water. Gary has to have his guitar on his right side, or else he gets all tangled up.”

   She is also the timekeeper. “It seems like I’m the boss of it, but that’s only because they never think to look at the clock. They would keep going all night if they could. Gary is the biggest offender. I don’t necessarily want the music to stop, either, but I’m the one who knows the show has to end at 9:30.”

   Marsha’s own fiddle has become an extension of her. “I understand now what I was missing,” she said. “It’s a part of me, a part of who I am. It’s a part of what makes myself me. You don’t have to be the best. You just have to feel it.”

   It’s her own soul music.

   “I make soul music,” explained Louis Kevin Celestin, a Montreal DJ and partner in the hip hop duo the Celestics. “I don’t think of it as a genre. It’s more of a feeling.” 

   “Don Messer was my idol when I was a kid,” said Gary Chipman. “I thought his band was the best kind in the world.  I had a dream of doing my own tribute show.”

   The dream came true in 2015 when he did a tribute show at Winsloe United Church, on the road between Oyster Bed Bridge and Charlottetown. Gary’s daughter was in the band and the Charlotte Twirlers, a square dance group, hoofed it up.

   Two years later Marsha and Gary took “A PEI Salute to the Music of Don Messer and His Islanders” farther down the road. They took the toe-tapping jigs and reels to National Fiddling Day in Charlottetown and the Harbourfront Theatre in Summerside. They took the show to Harvey, New Brunswick, Don Messer’s hometown.

   “It’s of real sentimental importance to me, having tried to emulate the sounds of Don Messer my entire fiddling career,” said Gary. 

   “The older the fiddle, the sweeter the sound,” is what they say.

    In September 2017 they took the show to Walter’s Dinner Theatre in Bright, Ontario. “I didn’t even know where Bright was, but we found it,” said Gary. When they got there, they sold out all the nine performances they did during their week’s run at the show hall and watering hole.

   “Gary plays old tunes in new ways,” said Marsha. “He’s the real deal. He puts his own twist on things.” 

   Sometimes Marsha puts her own twist on weddings. Sometimes stepping up to the altar and step dancing happen all on the same day. Sometimes somebody’s first dance is in the center aisle at the Stanley Bridge community hall, to the soul music of three or four island fiddlers getting the action going.

   “There were the two moms, the couple, their son, and me,” said Marsha. “It was an intimate wedding.” The couple from Alberta had come especially to PEI the middle of last summer to get married. 

   “I try to personalize it. I want them to have an amazing experience when they’re making their forever promises to each other.” There’s a diverse high kind of happiness in commitment. The first event many couples plan together is their wedding. There’s nothing unfun about it, either.

   “Marsha brought a genuine joyful vibe that is priceless. We felt she was truly happy for us. We are so glad we chose her to officiate our ceremony. That joy is something one can’t pay for.“

   Even though the sunny season is generally mild thanks to the warm water out in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, summer is short, and winter is long on Prince Edward Island. When it starts to snow it lasts until April. Harbors can be frozen solid into May. 

   “I’m a bit of an old soul,” she said. “I work full-time, but in the winter, I slow down and recharge. I write, do projects, and plan for the spring. I practice my fiddle. I practice every day.” Winter is when wishes are made and organized and saved up.

   “If I could just do weddings and fiddles all the time, it would be my perfect life,” said Marsha Weeks.

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Ohio Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

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