Paperback Yoga

Paint It Black

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By Ed Staskus

   “Everybody needs a helping out, if that ain’t what it’s all about, tell me what.” Amy Grant

   Going 9000 miles anywhere is a taxing no picnic undertaking. All roads may lead to the same end, but if you are an Iowa farmgirl since transplanted to Cleveland, Ohio, going to India is not the same as going to Seattle or Boston or someplace in between. It’s going halfway around the world to another continent culture world view.

   Despite economic progress, India remains a poor country. Someone is always begging you for a hand-out. Pushing and shoving is a way of life. Personal space isn’t personal, it’s public. There are a billion Indians. Pick pocketing is common. Grab and go is even more common. Getting anything back after the fact is uncommon. Sanitation and hygiene are lacking. Among other things, Delhi Belly is a pain in the butt.

   If you are a Western woman, staring and unwanted attention are par for the course anyplace anytime day or night.

   When Deanna Black went to India last month, she made the trip look easy. She didn’t stand still for anything. She kept her eye on the prize.

   “I’m not surprised,” said Frank Glass.

   “The first class I ever took taught by Deanna was by accident, it was the hardest yoga class I ever took, and I had to sit out going to Inner Bliss the rest of the week.”

   This from a man who three times a week for three years went to Bikram Yoga classes until he had no more sweat to give.

   Deanna Black is a yoga teacher and holistic fitness trainer. Her point of view is far and wide. She studies engages practices aerobics, Prana Flow, Ashtanga, strength training, TRX, kettle ball, Insanity, Zumba, spinning, West African Dance, hoop dance, slacklining, stand up paddle board yoga, and “any other movement and activity that connects you with your body, your mind, your soul, and the nature around you.” She also assays positive psychology, which comes in handy when you are at the front of the room.

   “Deanna was subbing that class. No one expected what we got,” said Frank. “She wasn’t bossy or demanding. She was actually encouraging, but she kept at it. She’s nothing if not relentless. I remember wondering if I was going to make it.”

   She has studied with Shiva Rea and her Prana Vinyasa teacher training program since 2004. “The classes I create are designed to empower you to do more than you thought possible,” she says. “The benefits are more than meet the eye.”

   She is an old-fashioned modern kind of gal, “balancing and aiming for what I want while leaning on the history of what worked and did not work from the past.”

   The class was a mix of sheer effort vinyasa, endurance strength work, and baling hay, even though Deanna Black has done undergrad and grad coursework in advanced exercise physiology and psychology at Iowa State University. Making your way in the class, however, wasn’t about classwork and observation reading study reflection.

   “It was about peeing on the electric fence for yourself,” said Frank Glass.

   She can back off the pedal to the metal if she has to, as when she volunteers for teaching dance fitness to seniors at the Westside Community House.

   Born and bred in a small town in Iowa, living in the big city of Cleveland since 1995, Deanna describes herself as a “farm girl whose DNA is filled with farmers, teachers, trailblazers, and travelers, and an adventure yogini, thrive activist and bucket list catalyst.”

   It’s a lot to be. It’s a lot like mixed farming.

   Mixed farming is a blend of multiple crops and livestock, maximizing light, moisture, and nutrients, complementing land and labor demands across the year. Erosion is minimized, biodiversity is maintained, water is conserved, and habitats preserved. Monocultural farming may better increase production levels, but capitalism isn’t always the bottom line.

   She goes back to Iowa often, especially during harvest time. Although she isn’t Old McDonald Had a Farm, she helps out in her own way.

   “I can’t even call it a job, it’s so much fun,” she said. “I am taking care of the farm animals, which includes emceeing pig races and goat yoga. I am recess patrolling jumping pillows pedal karts apple slingshots and mazes. I am lifeguarding the corn pool, which includes acro yoga sessions. I am making delicious apple cider donuts and taste testing from our scratch bakery. And I have a team of farmtastic people to help.”

   When she went to the subcontinent she went on behalf of the 88Bikes Foundation.

   “They continue to be instrumental in my trips to India,” said Deanna. “For all the work they do with girls who are survivors or at risk for human trafficking. It is the timing of me doing this work with them on International Women’s Day, to empower, to educate, to let the world know that the female spirit is not to be suppressed. It is to be respected and honored.”

She arrived in Allahabad in early March. It was the day after the Kumbh Mela wrapped up. It had been going on since January 15th, although it’s been going on for centuries. The Kumbh Mela is a mass pilgrimage. In 2013, the last time it was staged in Allahabad, an estimated 120 million people came to it over a 2-month period.

   “Flags were still flying from each country represented,” she said. “Even with many tents and porta potties still up, the area felt abandoned. Still, a feeling of peace washed over me, particularly after I stepped into the Ganga with prayers and gratitude. Afterwards, I visited the birthplace of Indira Gandhi and learned not only how remarkable she was, but how the women of India stood strong all together and made a significant difference. It was an inspiration for leading into International Women’s Day.”

   Indira Gandhi was the first and only female Prime Minister of India. Even though a politician, she had once been a child revolutionary, leading the Monkey Brigade at the age of 12 as part of India’s struggle against the British Empire for self-determination. Despite often criticized as a “goongi goodiya” – dumb doll – she was twice prime minister and was named “Woman of the Millennium” by the BBC.

    She was assassinated by her bodyguards in 1984.

   The brainchild of Dan Austin, a writer, filmmaker, and one-time bicycle deliveryman, the non-profit 88Bikes was born in 2007. In return for a sponsorship of $88.00, a bike is delivered to someone somewhere in the developing world. The child gets a photo of the person who donated the bike, and the donor gets a photo of the child who received it.

   “We feel strongly that you can connect people across the world like this,” he has said. “I think that’s the root of what 88Bikes is about, this one-to-one connection.”

   It’s many thousands of bikes going to Peru, Cambodia, Mongolia, Ghana, India, two wheels at a time.

   Deanna is aware of how much awareness it takes to get a bicycle into the hands of a kid with little chance of scoring one for him or herself. That’s why she goes halfway around the world. “It’s joy-based philanthropy,” she said. “What brings us joy? Connection!”

   “The happiness they deserve is now within reach,” says Dan Austin.

   Before she could get 88Bikes on the road, however, she found herself speaking in front of a large group in Allahabad gathered for the Run4Niine.

   “The race is in recognition that thoughts and views on menstruation in India need to change,” said Deanna. “To say that this conversation is taboo is to say a conversation about women is taboo. To say menstruation is dirty is to say a girl or woman is dirty. It is beyond time to change this thinking.”

   Even though menstruation is a natural phenomenon, like blinking heartbeats hairiness and breasts filled with milk, it is problematic in many parts of India. “Close to 70% of Indian women risk getting severe infection, at times causing death, due to poverty, ignorance, and shame attached to their menstruation cycle,” said Swapna Majumdar, a New Delhi journalist who writes on gender and development.

   When they are menstruating, Indian women are not supposed to touch a holy book, handle kitchen utensils, or look at pickles. Demystifying what is supposedly taboo about periods and creating awareness about hygiene has been an uphill struggle in the country. More than 30% of girls in northern India drop out of school after they start menstruating.

   “It is connection with birth and the cycle of life,” said Deanna. “It’s not something to be left unsaid. It’s part of the sacred flow of womanhood.”

   The next day was the day to get into the flow of pedal power.

   “I’m super excited,” she said. “Tomorrow one hundred girls are getting their own bicycle.” She and her companions, Ruby and Ramon of the Blossomy Project, were outside Kolkotta. About 500 miles east of Allahabad, on the Bay of Bengal, it used to be Calcutta, once an East India trading post, now the capital of West Bengal state, India’s third-largest city with nearly 5 million inhabitants.  It is regarded as the artistic, cultural, and intellectual center of the country.

   It’s also the home of Mother House, headquarters of the Missionaries of Charity, founded by Mother Teresa, who is buried there.

   The Blossomy Project is a non-profit organization that works to empower survivors of human trafficking through art-based programs. Since riding a bike is as much an art as a skill, they were partnering with 88Bikes.

   Deanna had a big envelope full of donor cards.

   “Each card is one of who donated to 88Bikes. I am taking a road trip to meet these girls and give them their cards with their bikes.”

   It was bright day in the 90s. March is the sunniest month of the year on the northern east coast of India, although it is also one of the wettest. A heavy rain and hailstorm had passed by a few days earlier.

   “Watch out boys,” said Deanna, giving a donor card and bike to the first young girl. “This girl has got a bike with things to do and places to go.”

   The first girl hopped on her bike and raced away.

   “She took off immediately to school to take a Sanskrit exam. With her bike she can get to school much more easily. These girls also use their bikes to patrol the neighborhood and visit communities and bring awareness about how to stay safe.”

   Ruby and Ramon and Deanna exchanged high fives.

   “Each time I come to Kolkotta, these two have been instrumental in getting me and the bikes connected with girls,” said Deanna. “So happy to have the Blossomy Project. Shout out to Ruby acting as translator and all-out rock star making things happen.”

   “I can go anywhere,” said another girl, getting on her bike.

   Deanna showed her the back of the donor card that came with the bike.

   “You can go anywhere,” it said.

   “I love moments like this,” said Deanna.

   Sunday night was Funday night in Kolkotta. Everyone went out to a show by Tanmoy Bose, a percussionist and tabla player. A native of the city, he was one of the first Indian musicians to meld folk songs and tribal drumming into a large band setting. His own band, the Taal Tantra Experience, signifies worship through rhythm. The music is nothing if not spilling over with life.

   “I’m still amazed with that violin,” said Deanna. “If anyone in Cleveland knows of concerts like this, let me know, I wanna go.”

   After the bikes were distributed, it was time to go home. The return flight to the United States from India doesn’t take two three days, but it might as well, when you’re on the way back to your own digs. Once on native ground, she exclaimed, checking out the run-up to the NCAA tournament, “Yeeeaaasss!!! Nothing like coming back to the States during March Madness!”

A few days later she got a Facebook message from Amita Gour, one of the girls who had    gotten a bike.

   “Thanks for your visit to Allahabad, Deanna,” she wrote.

   “So happy to spend time with you and your family,” Deanna wrote back. “Thank you so very much for all the time you spent with me showing me around. And thrilled about your new bike.”

   The thrill is in lending a helping hand.

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.”

Paperback Yoga

Throwing Down the Hammer

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By Ed Staskus

“I’m all lost in the supermarket, I can no longer shop happily, I came here for their special offer, a guaranteed personality.”  The Clash

In the United States Congress is made up of two chambers, the House of Representatives and the Senate. They are both in Washington D. C. The chambers are filled by direct elections in the fifty states by the American voting public. Statutory law is proposed and created by Congress, with the White House stage-managing business as usual.

Many of those laws have been progressive, from the activism at the turn of the 20th century to the New Deal in the depths of the Great Depression to the Civil Rights bills of the 1960s.

Most of them have been regressive, such as the marriage and property laws of the 19th century, the Smoot-Hawley Act of 1930, among other protectionist laws, and just about everything the GOP has done in living memory, bad laws in lieu of good ideas. Many lawmakers live on the wrong side of fear.

Some of them have been bone-headed, from the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 to Prohibition to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, the last based on glib lies eagerly believed by the eager beavers ready to make a buck on waving the flag.

There are laws Congress makes that are homeland lifestyle laws. They are about America, about our allegiance and attachment to its ideals, interests, and traditions. They are about embracing a way of life. When they address the way we live now, they are about what makes life liberty and the pursuit of happiness a real way of life, not just foggy notions from long ago.

They are stale toast when they try to recreate the past.

The most up-to-date attempts to fossilize American values are from the font of the Make America Great Again Wall of Shame Rantings of POTUS. The Big Man in the Oval Office is a race-baiting tax-dodging whore-loving atheist mouthing Christian platitudes, of all things, although it doesn’t seem to matter to his zany supporters. They rally around the ranting and red hats. It’s spooky Americanism in the Haunted White House.

Homeland legislation has often been the purview of the good old boys in love with the good old days. Their guiding principle is “In God We Trust” and God forbid anything change anytime soon. Even though change has accelerated by leaps and bounds in the past one hundred years, and even though Orange Julius can’t keep his mouth shut, the conservative order in the United States is not very much different today than it was one hundred years ago during the reign of Silent Cal.

Thank God Congress is coming back into session next month, the week of Labor Day. They may only work 138 days a year, but they have their work cut out for them. If the United States stands for anything, it stands for free enterprise. It stands for capitalism. It ultimately stands for consumerism. In the mid-1950s the President of the National Sales Executives was already blithely declaring, “Capitalism is dead, consumerism is king.”

Even President Trump, with his crazy fast thumb on social media, and incredibly busy with issues such as body-shaming Senator Elizabeth Warren, trying to remember his wife’s name, and the mental health menace of xBox, is cognizant of what really makes America great.

“The WTO is BROKEN. NO more!!! Today I directed the U.S. Trade Representative to take action so that countries stop CHEATING the system at the expense of the USA!”

Make America Great Again!

“I built the greatest economy in the World, the best the U.S. has ever had. Best stock market, economy and unemployment numbers ever! Most people working within U.S. ever! Low interest rates, very low inflation! Country doing great!”

Make America Great Again!

“Did you hear the latest con job? President Obama is now trying to take credit for the Economic Boom taking place under the Trump Administration. He had the WEAKEST recovery since the Great Depression, despite Zero Fed Rate & MASSIVE quantitative easing. NOW, best jobs numbers.”

Make America Great Again!

President Trump has raced Air Force One to one trade junket after another over the past year, burning up the carbon, and sent proposals to Congress, and taken to Twitter, going hard after Europe South America China with tariffs tariffs tariffs to protect American jobs workers businesses, humping the notion that the business of America is business. He has gotten on top of the mountain of nationalism and shouted his message for all to hear, both prophet and salesman and head honcho of the lunatic fringe.

“I have the absolute right to PARDON myself!” he tweets again and again.

It is hard to believe incredible bewildering just about impeachable that he hasn’t focused his tweeting laser-like eye on yoga. It might not be long, though. When Dhvani, an athletic-wear company from Oregon that makes yoga clothes, put up a 30-foot billboard in Times Square criticizing the president, the response was swift and sure.

“You’re just full of shit,” said Donald Trump Jr.

There are many things that threaten the American economy, from unemployment to energy prices to fiscal crises to cyber-attacks to data fraud to extreme weather events to large-scale involuntary migration to illicit trade to asset bubbles. There’s always something. If there is one thing that is a clear and present danger to the well-being of Main Street and Wall Street, it is yoga.

Although yoga pumps tens of billions of dollars into the economy, it is only one of the arms of the practice, the arm that is the spigot, the physical aspect of it, from studios to mats ‘n’ stuff to groovy lulu outfits, as well as ancillary products and services like seminars supplements physical therapies alternative regimens and R & R.

The danger yoga poses to the American economy lies in the other seven arms of the practice, some of which are so antithetical to the American way of life as to be nearly treasonous. Even though the commodification of yoga is a done deal, even the body beautiful, the face on the myth of beauty health success, is on shaky ground, since one of the aspects of traditional yoga is acceptance of one’s body, to be at one with it, in all its imperfections.

The body can be improved upon, but it’s not a lump of clay in search of aesthetic perfection. At least, not if you exist outside the star-studded world of the stars and pro sports. They’ve got the dough to work on the clay they are. Its objectification only serves the merchandiser, not necessarily the consumer. It is buyer beware, just like it’s always been.

Tom Brady, the star quarterback of the New England Patriots, makes about $40 million a year. His football fans far and wide ultimately are the ones who fork over the dough. When it comes to being careful with the merchandise, Tom Brady pays all the attention in the world to his body. Practicing yoga is partly exercising the body, but the million-dollar part of the practice is exercising the brain.

Practicing yoga is having a fan base of one, you.

Old-school yoga is a stuck in the craw problem for the United States. If it ever gains a foothold it could be dangerous. If it got out of hand it could threaten the consumer society that makes America as great as it is. At the very least, Aparigraha – meaning non-covetousness – should be outlawed immediately. The consumer society is predicated on coveting a bigger house bigger car bigger clothes and the newest devices, never being satisfied. The new minimalism is the old maximalism. It’s a wild goose chase, but it’s what makes the world go around.

“There’s nothing I’d ever buy, but I love consumerism,” said Johnny Rotten of the punk band the Sex Pistols. “I like being there, in the shopping malls. It’s wacky.”

What is hare-brained, and what Orange Julius and Congress need to understand, is that buying into non-consumerism is the same as throwing the flag into the mud and trampling on it. The American government has often intervened interfered intruded into life in the United States in order to advance and preserve what it considers the aims and ambitions of its people. The country may be doing great now, business is booming, but if the growth of yoga is left unchecked, and its precepts go invasive on native soil, it could cast a spell, causing a downward spiral in the economy.

The virtuous cycle is all about disposable income demanding more stuff and manufacturers ramping it up to meet the demand. Business spending on technology, productivity, and capital goods is a significant factor in sustaining the economy and raising the standard of living, but the mainstay is consumer spending. It is 70% of gross domestic product. It is the most important driving force of the economy.

When consumer spending drops off growth slows, prices fall, and deflation creeps in. If it goes on too long, and the economy steadily contracts, the result is hard times, recession and depression. The White House, and all our houses, start looking ragged at the edges.

The ground rules of yoga are anathema to capitalism and consumerism. It’s not just Aparigraha, either. The eight-fold path is meant to lead to a purposeful and meaningful life, by way of truthfulness and continence, among other things. There is little in the way of truthfulness on Madison Avenue and almost no continence. Self-discipline and spiritual observances are a big part of yoga. They’re a big part of going shopping. Samtosa is defined as contentment. If that concept ever got adopted, there would be hell to pay at Amazon. They would have to resurrect Stonewall Jackson to fight that battle.

In the United States, society is structured in such a way that many people are regarded and regard themselves as profit-generators. Everyone else is either helping or hindering you on the yellow brick road to Fort Knox. It is a selfish way of life, but a way of life that has led to the good life.

No one wants to go back to the Great Recession, much less the Great Depression, or any bust of any kind. President Trump has got his quick thumb on that button. His arch-enemy Hillary Clinton practices yoga, which he has pointed to as unacceptable.

“She does a lot of yoga, right?” he said. He mocked her for justifying deleting e-mails as an ethical result of yoga practice. “I think that one of the great crimes committed is Hillary Clinton deleting 33,000 e-mails after Congress sent her a subpoena.”

Yoga has been integrated into the fabric of life in the United States, but only the get up stand up part of it. The other parts don’t fit well. They fit so badly, indeed, that alarm bells are clanging coast to coast. Parents and school boards in Georgia, Alabama, and California have gotten yoga expelled from programs in their states, for good reason. They understand the treat at ground level.

Orange Julius and Senator “Moscow” Mitch McConnell and the rest of the GOP need to take a hard look at the Russian city of Nizhnevartovsk, where yoga in all its forms was banned in 2015, under the rubric of it being foreign and subversive. The owners of the city’s yoga studios received letters telling them to close up shop and “stop spreading new religious cults and movements.”  Classes at a stadium and public meeting hall were suspended. Schools and local physical culture centers were advised in no uncertain terms to cut out the asana and meditation practices of “an occult character.”

That’s the spirit, comrade!

President Trump has torn more than one page out of the Russki playbook. Ronald Reagan said “Tear down the wall” in the 1980s, referring to the Berlin Wall. President Trump has repurposed the phrase, saying “Build the wall” in our own times. It is time he includes the practice of yoga, and its foreign influences, to the same blacklist where all the other foreigners his wall is designed to keep out of the homeland are listed in black and white.

Bad ideas are as bad as bad people. The president knows that. The Trump Wall is meant to keep bad people out of the United States. The president needs to build it higher. It needs to be built higher to keep out bad ideas. The ideas and beliefs that make up the practice of yoga are a menace to the zeitgeist of the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave in the 21st century.

The Trump Tower might fall like the Tower of Babel, for Christ’s sake!

The activist Alyssa Milano has called on removing the president from office with “the power of yoga.” She proposes chanting a reality-altering mantra every day for throwing him out. That’s going to backfire. President Trump knows a bugbear when he sees one.

Consumerism and affluence may be a corruption of the American Dream, but it’s all we’ve got. Yoga would have us believe it’s best to never buy anything you can’t carry in your tote, the tote your children are carrying. They think that’s the future, but there’s no future in that. Bigger is better and more is more, not the other way around. Loyalty and permanence are undermined by consumerism, but that’s the way it is. It’s every man for himself and God against all.

Get to work, Congress. Do the right thing by the homeland. Send a bill up the hill. Since the commander-in-chief is still the commander-in-chief, at his command yoga can go back to where it came from. With a tweet and a fountain pen President Trump can outlaw yoga and restore American values.

Build the blockade make the stonewall make the country great again make the mats go away throw down the hammer bust those yoga blocks to bits no more standing on your head and ban foreign ideas foreign ethos foreign beliefs, once and for all!

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.”

Paperback Yoga

Ditching the Back Seat Driver

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By Ed Staskus

   Most people don’t care if you’ve taken a million yoga classes, or not. If you do something bad to them, they aren’t going to say, “That fella needs more yoga classes.” They are going to say something less kind and understanding. If you do something good, they’re not going to say, “It’s because of all the yoga classes that fella has taken.” Saints get taken for granted. Nobody cares where the crown of light came from. 

   They aren’t going to say you are a saint because you’ve spent your savings at the local yoga studio. They will probably say something along the lines of, “That fella needs to put his halo away and start living in the real world.” It begs the question, but a $16 billion dollar business in the USA is about as real as it gets, unless it’s as unreal as a sideshow.

   When you apply for a job your prospective employer, unless it’s a yoga studio, isn’t going to ask if you’ve taken a bazillion yoga classes. If you can’t or won’t lift that bale and tote that barge you are not going to get your foot in the door, no matter what kind of a yogi you think you are. Capitalism doesn’t care about high-mindedness.

   If yoga studios had their druthers, they would be full to the gills seven days a week, except on the birthday of B. K. S. Iyengar, the man who got the ball rolling. That day is a holy day. Studios would like to be so full of folks 24/7 that even their most loyal customers would have to display VIP passes to get in the door. That’s why more than less classes are barn burners with a rocking soundtrack and the hands of a nubile assistant adjusting your pose. When the playlist is blasting with the hammer down, and the adjustments are flowing, speed traps are for suckers.

   Yoga is big business. Anybody who thinks otherwise need only spend a few minutes checking out Facebook pages. “Welcome to the universal family of yoga jobs and yoga retreats,” says Global Yoga Community. The Yoga Teacher Resource Community describes itself as “helping yoga instructors in their yoga business.” Members and administrators post about topics including how to select liability insurance and navigating advertisement options. Yoga Jobs All Over the World proclaims they are “kind of like a global yogi Craigslist.”

   God save us from the crap that is Craigslist, global or otherwise.

   In between, from the West to the East, from Hoboken to Madras, yesterday today tomorrow, somebody is peddling something every minute of the day on the back of the practice. Yoga teachers often say, “It’s all yoga.” They say it with a smile. If they are right, it explains everything about the one-time spiritual path. The path today isn’t so much metaphysical as it is “Turn Here for Your Friendly Walmart Superstore.”

   Everybody is your friend in the world of yoga, and all your friends are peddling videos and books. There is the “7 Day Yoga Crash Course.” They don’t say what is going to happen on the 8th day. Probably crash and burn, but that is beside the point. Other courses pay off faster, in 4 and 5 days.

   There are many people who take yoga classes month after month, year after year. It’s hard to say if they are slow learners or simply devotees. If they are slow learners, they deserve a pat on the back. If they are devotees, they need a slap in the face. Somebody needs to remind them life is not lived inside a classroom. If they are yoga teachers, they get a pass. Paychecks are what keep the wolf away from the door.

   Life is lived out in the wide world. It’s one thing to listen to the steel belts humming pleasantly on the asphalt from the cocoon of a studio. It’s another thing to stand on the side of the highway, 18-wheelers loaded up and rolling, rubber smoking and diesel fumes acrid, drivers tossing down little white pills in the glow of all-night diners, the radio tuned to crazy talk show stations.

   What’s the point of taking endless yoga classes? The practice is not rocket science. Learn a few asanas, a few flows linking them, how to breathe, how to meditate, the yamas and niyamas, and you’re all set to go back down the beanstalk. The overarching claims of wellness will only make you go in circles.

   It’s easy to fetishize yoga teachers. It’s easy to idealize and glamorize idols of all kinds. Who doesn’t want to shrug off responsibility and stay on the yellow brick road of life with the hand of a guru at your elbow? If you’re young and naive, or a seeker seeking a better way, it’s the way to go. But at some point, it time to ditch the teacher and stand on your own two feet.

   Yoga teachers are full of aphorisms like “Reach higher. It will steady you.” Why it would steady anybody is unclear, but if you are afraid of heights, don’t do it. The air is thinner up there. Down in easy pose they say, “Open up your palms if you want answers from the universe. Put your palms face down if you want answers from within yourself.” It got so I started making fists of my palms and shaking my fists at them.

   An eager beaver instructor with a taste for tall tales liked to tell us, “Take the Hanuman Leap.” I always let that one lay. I wasn’t about to monkey see monkey do. “If something in your life isn’t serving you, quietly thank it for the lesson, and let it go,” was something I heard a million times in the ten-or-so years I took yoga classes. On behalf of everybody who ever worked nine to five to pay the mortgage and feed the kids, I say let the cliches go down the drain. Nobody I ever knew ever quit because the job wasn’t serving them. In most cases the no serving part was a given. They either made the best of it or screwed up to the extent they needed firing. Anybody who quit did so because they could go somewhere else where they could make more money, where they could sooner rather than later let it go, once and for all.

   One day a yoga teacher said, “Let that shit go.” Everybody in the class laughed. She was talking about friendships relationships what somebody did or didn’t say and how we hope things will get better. I scowled and did a down dog, letting the shit go and the platitudes slide down my back.

   “The only moment that really matters is right now,” is an all-time favorite mantra of yoga teachers. It makes sense now and then. Most of the time it doesn’t. If it was true, yoga would be one of the unhealthiest healthy practices of all time. Standing on your head right now before you are ready can be more than a pain in the neck. There is no saving your neck if it goes wrong because you don’t know what you are doing. Full speed ahead isn’t what standing on your head is all about. Planning in advance is what really matters, making sure what has a lasting impact on you isn’t the wrong end of a baseball bat. Nothing would ever get done, including breakfast lunch and dinner, if right now was all there was.

   One command that made me gnash my teeth was “Be your authentic self.” Nobody is their authentic self in a yoga classroom. A warm and fuzzy refuge is all well and good but there comes a time in every man and woman’s life when it’s best to become your own man or woman. Otherwise, we become Pee-Wee Herman. Becoming your own true self isn’t possible if you are baloney in somebody else’s slice of life. We are not all in the same boat. We are all in different boats in the same ocean. 

   In classrooms you become what the teacher is, what the teacher is saying, what you hope will get you somewhere. You become like the yogis in class who you admire. You buy into the ethos and the ethic becomes you. You buy into the chalk talk and that’s that. After a while whoever you were is beside the point. It’s a brave new world, but it’s not a world you had a hand in making. Your thinking becomes whatever yoga is thinking, like how people become what they learned in school, what they do at work, and what they see on TV. You go into people-pleasing mode, otherwise people might not like who you are.

   Making an authentic self can be a slog through hell or a dance in the sun. Not everybody is good with it happening to their spouse, siblings, and friends. They wonder how it will impact them. But when you are being authentic you are being all parts of yourself, the good the bad the super-duper awesome and the ugly. It’s the only way to find true acceptance rather than a phantom hug from a make-believe friend. It’s better to be a first-rate version of yourself rather than a second-rate version of somebody else.

   Everybody gets a temporary driver’s license first. Then they get their permanent driver’s license. After they have gone through a used car-or-two, they get a new car. Getting behind the wheel by yourself, ditching the back seat driver, is the way to go to get somewhere good.

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.”

Paperback Yoga

Shock and Awe

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By Ed Staskus

   “You’re early,” Barron Cannon said.

   “I know, but I wanted to come in before class and ask if you would help me navigate my new electric pants,” Zadie Wisniewski said. She was wearing cherry pop yoga pants.

   “I don’t think you need any help from me,” Barron said. “Your pants look high voltage enough to navigate themselves.”

   “What do you mean?”

   “The color, you can’t beat that red.”

   “Oh, right, they are bright. They’re a special pair. They’re usually black.  No, what I mean is, they’re actually electric.”

   Barron Cannon taught yoga classes, usually at the crossroads of Lakewood and the west side of Cleveland near where he lived. Zadie was there for a Hot Yoga class. Her pants were hot looking enough to fit right in to the theme of the class.

   She was wearing spanking new Nadi X yoga pants. The X pants are high-tech high-performance yoga wear, trumping Perfect Moment, Lululemon, and Runderwear. They are up to date. They are like wearing a self-driving car.

   There is a battery attached to a port on the pants. Wires are woven into the fabric. Sensors sewn throughout the pants are synced to an app that collects data as the wearer practices yoga. If a pose is going wrong, the app makes that part of you that is getting it wrong vibrate with a low-voltage electrical charge. When you make an adjustment, the app pipes up with praise. If you keep getting it wrong, the app keeps buzzing you and saying, “Please try again.”

   “Are you pulling my leg?” Barron asked.

   “No, of course not,” Zadie said. “These pants cost me two hundred and fifty dollars.”

   “They’re cool,” said Folasade Adeoso, an influencer with 86,000 followers, the day she first pulled the pants on and pranced on a pretend runway at her yoga studio.

   “That’s an arm and a leg,” Barron said about the bleeding-edge pants designed to make you bleed money.

   “So, I wonder if I can roll my mat out in front of you, and if you would handle my phone, keeping it next to you in case I need an adjustment?”

   “Sure,” Barron said. “I’ll do my best.”

   “Great!”

   “You said navigate. What does that mean?”

   “The app is supposed to do it all on its own, but I would feel better if you kept your eye on it.” She handed Barron her iPhone. It was an iPhone 16 Pro Max. It was the most phone Barron had ever seen.

   “It would be super if you would put it on your mat where both of us can see it.”

   “All right,” he said. “But I’ll be damned if I like this. You should be paying attention to what you’re doing, not relying on an app. Besides, when you come to my class, supervision is my responsibility.”

   “I know,” said Zadie, “but this will usually be for at home, for when I do yoga in my spare room.”

   Nadi X yoga pants are the brainchild of Billie Whitehouse, a fashion and tech designer. She has developed vibrating underwear that buzzes for its own reasons, never mind what’s going on with your private parts. She has developed a driving jacket that vibrates right side left side to alert you to turn right or left. The latest thing she and her tech team thought up were the new vibrating yoga pants.

   “The vibrations on the body cue you about where to focus and the app lets you know how you went at the end of each pose. Get the smartest yoga experience!” is how the experience is described. “Nadi X guides your yoga practice through the latest state-of-the-art technology based on your body’s alignment. Listen to the audio instructor on your phone and feel the guidance on your skin.”

   “The vibrations will guide your focus,” says Billie Whitehouse.

   It is downstream to go modern, take sense and mindfulness out of the equation and go straight to machine learning, go straight to the Big Brother of asana practice, the brother who has your best interests in mind and won’t mine any of the data it collects about your body.

   “There’s a sucker born every minute,” the showman PT Barnum said long ago. He would have been happy to see the birthrate rise in our own age and get in on more of the action.

   “Wearable X is the future of wellness that brings together design and technology to create a better quality of life through experience and fashion,” says Wearable X, the Australian cyber company behind the yoga pants device.

   “Putting electronics into garments is still so new and so difficult,” says Ben Moir, co-founder with Billie Whitehouse and chief technology officer. “Yoga pants get stretched, get sweated in. The sensors had to be invisible and the pants had to not be a tech-looking product. That’s kind of an engineer’s nightmare.”

   “We’re very proud that it is at its peak.” Billie Whitehouse said about their new  cow nose ring attire device, proudly pointing the way to the unforeseeable future.

   “I’ve got to bounce on that,” Barron said to himself. “I smell a rat.”

   “They make my butt look good,” said Isabelle Chaput, half of a French performance-art duo, a few months earlier during a demonstration of the pants in New York City

   The high-waisted four-way stretch level one compression pants aren’t just for gals, either. “These leggings are extremely well made. The high waisted band is flattering, and these are honestly my go-to leggings for everyday wear,” said Justin Gong, reviewing the pants on Amazon. “Whether it’s a full 40-minute flow or a 5-minute session, my Nadi X allows me to flow whenever I want.”

   It’s great to get what you want, whenever you want it, whether you’re a gal or a guy, or whoever.

   They were named Nadi X for a reason. “In Sanskrit, the nadi are the highways of communication that exist around the body when all your chakras are aligned,” Billie Whitehouse spelled out, updating the past, eliding then and now. “As You Think You Vibrate” is one of the company’s mantras.

   Over the next twenty minutes the Hot Yoga class filled up, a quiet buzz and energy filling the room until there were thirty-some mats lined up in a loose order alongside and behind Zadie when the proceedings got started. Barron taught a one-hour flow class in a room heated to the mid-90s. His method was to start slow, pick up the pace, end slow, and encourage a five-minute corpse pose at the end.

   He didn’t like it when folks rolled their mats up after the last pose and bolted the room. “Hold your horses!” he hollered.

   The Nadi X pants are manufactured in Sri Lanka, an island country off the southern coast of India. The nation is prosperous economically, has a strong military, and is the third most religious country in the world, with 99% of all Sri Lankans saying religion is an important part of their daily life. They are by all accounts proud to produce the vibrating pants for the spiritual practice of yoga. 

   Wearable X has even designed several yoga sequences for travelers, making the pants and the app work with phones on airplane mode, assuming the flight attendants don’t mind a downward dog in the middle of an aisle at 38,000 feet.

   “Sitting is the new smoking,” Billie Whitehouse said. “It is a genuine epidemic. It’s not just because we’re at desks all day but because we’re constantly on airplanes.”

   Baron Cannon had never been on a big airliner, only a seaplane that flew 30-minute tours over Long Lake in the Adirondacks. He had been on it several times, whenever he went north to the High Peaks for a week of hiking, always flown by the same pilot, a short stocky old man by the name of Bob, who if you saw him in the street you might mistake for a bum. He flew his battered Cessna with one hand, pointing out landmarks. Sometimes he flew the little plane with no hands, talking with both hands. He always landed it, fair or foul weather, like the lake was a baby’s bottom.

   Nadi X is a godsend for all the yogis who burn up the carbon, flying here there and everywhere, globe-trotting for profit and diversion. The pants are machine washable and powered by a rechargeable battery that lasts up to an hour-and-a half, which is as long as most yoga classes ever are. The battery connects by Bluetooth to a smartphone, letting one and all choose the level of effort they’re going to be putting into the practice.

   “Once you have set your vibration strength, you can place the phone next to your yoga mat during your session. Your pulse is monogamist to your phone. You can have different Nadi X pants, but your phone will always want to connect to your pulse.”

   Everyone knows that their smartphone never screws up and is always up to snuff. Silicon Valley would have a heart attack if it was otherwise. That would be the day a robot car runs into a robot directing traffic, sending it to the garbage dump.

   “The audio instructions are paired with gentle vibrations to give you clues where to focus. The accelerometer values are processed in your smartphone and the audio instructions will let you know if you have made it into the pose at the end of each pose.”

   After a couple of instructional noises from the phone, Barron shut the sound off, muttering to himself.

   Within ten minutes it all fell into place for Zadie. She wasn’t an expert, but she wasn’t a novice either. In her late 20s she was fit and smart, smart enough to catch the cues and act on them. By the middle of the class there were hardly any cues anymore. The class was flowing. She was deep into it and getting it just right.

   That’s when the trouble started.

   Even though she was going strong and was intuitively aware of how good it was all going, Barron not even glancing at her, she was getting zapped more and more frequently. The vibrations were rolling up and down her legs almost continuously. There was something wrong with the device, she thought. 

   Was there a ghost in the machine learning?  There must be! Maybe it’s all this sweat, she thought, mopping her brow. She looked up from the floor pose she was doing to ask Barron to turn her iPhone off, but he was gone.

   He was patrolling the room making hands-on adjustments, alignment-based assists for backbends and forward folds. Barron didn’t push anybody deeper into their poses, but he tried to get them into the integrity of the pose, within the constraints of what their flesh, tendons, ligaments, joints, and bones would bear.

   A young woman had complained about it in one of his classes, saying that touching her was inappropriate and reminding him about the #MeToo movement, saying its concerns were a real issue to her.

   “You’re doing it wrong,” he said. “You’re compromising your safety.”

   “I don’t care, hands-off,” she said. “My husband’s a lawyer, just in case you’re a pervert.”

   “Oh, the hell with it, get out of here and don’t come back.”

   “What?” She glared at him. The class stopped and everyone watched the goings-on. Those who knew Barron better than others rolled their eyes heavenward. They knew banishment was coming. Barron didn’t believe in the customer is always right.

   “You heard me,” he said. “Out.” He fixed his hand firmly on her arm and led her to the door.

   When they were outside, he leaned into her and said, “Tell your husband the local Hells Angel chapter practices at my class Saturday mornings, so I don’t ever want to see your face again or hear a word from your legal beagle about anything litigious, understand?”

   “You’re an ass,” she said.

   “Let’s leave it at that, sweet lips,” Barron said. “Now drift.” He went back to his class.

   Love, peace, and understanding, he thought, were all well and good, except when it came to the empowered privileged well-bred wallets from the better neighborhoods, especially on the lakeshore, which was called the Gold Coast, where he was sure she sprang from.

   Barron was an anarchist at heart. He believed anarchism walked the walk best with the practice of yoga. Any other affiliation with anything else, capitalism, socialism, democracy, dictatorship, consumerism, minimalism, left-wing, right-wing, high and mighty, and the lunatic fringe, was inimical to the practice. Barron was an idealist, but practical enough to pay his taxes and not run red lights. He kept his anarchism to himself.

   Zadie was close to the breaking point. The longer the class went on and the sweatier she got, the more her pants shocked her. It was only 12 volts, she knew, but it was getting to be 12 volts every second. Maybe it was more voltage than she thought. Was it getting stronger? Yow, that stung!

   “The hell with it,” she finally cried out. She ripped her cherry pop yoga pants off and angrily tossed them into a corner. She was left wearing a pair of royal purple Under Armour pure stretch underwear.

   Everyone behind Zadie gave them a close look.

   “Eyes on me, everyone, front and center,” Barron said. “Let’s get back to business.”

   “Those pants can kiss my butt,” Zadie said, getting back into the flow of the class.

   “And, no,” she said, looking straight at Barron, “I won’t need any adjustments for the rest of the class today, thank you very much.”

Paperback Yoga

Hitting the Bricks

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By Ed Staskus

   There once was a union maid, she never was afraid, of goons and ginks and company finks, she went to the union hall when a meeting it was called, and when the Legion boys come ’round, she always stood her ground.”  Woody Guthrie

   Early in 2019, five weeks into a union-led strike against the country’s biggest car maker, General Motors was losing about $90 million a day and thousands of auto workers were watching their savings shrink. Yet there was no end in sight for the longest labor upheaval in many years. Nearly 50,000 workers were idled, picketing outside GM factories from coast to coast, squabbling about wages, retirement benefits, and the fate of the shuttered Chevrolet plant in Lordstown, Ohio.

   At about the same time, teachers at New York City’s YogaWorks studios, a nationwide chain that advertises itself as “America’s #1 Yoga Studio,” asked the wellness corporation to recognize a union. “It would appear to be the first union in the United States to include yoga instructors,” according to The New York Times.

   “Yoga teachers are poor,” said Abi Miller, feeling like the low man on the totem pole. He posted his feelings on a Facebook group page. “This is a vibration that I lived for the first years of teaching yoga,” he said. “I did lots of free community events. While there is absolutely nothing wrong with doing those things, it prevented me from jumping towards my dream. It held me back because I was afraid to ask for the money that I was worth. It delayed my process of stepping into the teacher that I am meant to be. This industry is in full boom and makes a ton of money every year. If you are a teacher, why wouldn’t you be deserving of having a little piece of that pie?”

   Although yoga is for everybody, everybody can’t always get to the front of the table for their piece of the pastry. Joe Hill, the songwriter, and union organizer, back in the day,  once pointed out why that was. “Work and pray, live on hay, you’ll get pie in the sky when you die.”

   “We believe yoga is for every body,” is the mantra of YogaWorks, fiddling with spelling and meaning. “No matter your age or fitness level, we offer yoga that will work for you. Our programs remain authentic to ancient yoga tradition while seamlessly integrating today’s popular styles. Join us on the mat, we’re here to honor and empower your journey toward personal growth and well-being.”

   Even though the request by their employees, who honor and empower the journeys of all those who come to the studio, was polite, if firm, the response by the company was equally firm, if not exactly polite. It was stern, if not rabid, in the tradition of labor-management relations, which are almost always adversarial.

   Unions and bosses have never exactly been a baby blue meeting of the minds. They have spent most of their time since the Industrial Revolution poking one another in the eye. When it’s gotten out of hand, which it often has, it’s ended up as an eye-for-an-eye. Sometimes it gets ramped up to two eyes for one. It never gets damped down to turning the other cheek. No one is that Christian Buddhist Muslim Jewish or God-fearing.

   In the 1890s the Carnegie Steel Company went toe-to-toe against the nation’s strongest trade union, which was the Iron and Steel Workers. An 1889 strike had won them a three-year contract, but three years later Andrew Carnegie was determined to break them. The company locked the workers out of the plant and all of them were fired.

   They workers stormed the factory and took over the company town. Three hundred Pinkerton guards, locked and loaded, were called in, but when they got there they were met by thousands of strikers, many of them locked and loaded, too. After a full-out gun battle, the Pinkertons gave up and ran for it. In all, nine strikers and seven Pinkertons were killed. More than a hundred were injured. Eight thousand Pennsylvania National Guardsmen were called in and the strike was quickly broken.

   The Battle of Blair Mountain, near Welch, West Virginia, in 1921, was a spontaneous uprising of ten thousand coal miners who fought the company’s hired guns and their allies, the state police, for three days before federal troops intervened. In 1987, while union members staged a fight as a distraction, others set fire to the Dupont Plaza Hotel in Puerto Rico. The union was in a dispute with management about pay and health care. Ninety-seven people were killed, many of them burned beyond recognition.

   In New York City, the battle between YogaWorks and their working people was more in the way of a war of words. It was about hitting the bricks, not throwing bricks. Non-violence stayed the course. A YogaWorks official sent an e-mail addressed to their NYC teachers and trainers, painting the union as an untrustworthy group simply looking to collect dues from them, and on the look-out only for their own welfare.

   The e-mail, from Heather Eary, a regional vice president, ended in blunt capital letters. “DON’T SIGN A CARD.” The capital letters referred to cards being circulated by teachers and by the union, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, stating the signatory wanted the group to represent them.

   “YogaWorks does not believe that employees joining, and paying dues to, a union is in the best interest of YogaWorks, our employees or our students,” the message said. “We are surprised that the machinist union would ask us to help them possibly take away your right to decide whether you want to go running to join them.”

   There was something queer about the message, as though it needed to get into down dog on both feet and both hands, to get itself grounded in the gap between the company’s principles and appetite. “Our offer to work in collaboration with the company still stands,” said David DiMaria, an organizer with the union. “Hopefully they will see past their original reaction.”

   Carla Gatza, the head of human resources for YogaWorks, said, “We believe that our company, our employees, and our students are best served when YogaWorks and its employees work together without the interference of a third-party union.”

   “They often say the yoga teachers are the center of this business,” Tamar Samir, embroiled in the unionization bid, said of the company’s leaders. “But then somehow the way that teachers are supported in terms of pay and benefits and job security doesn’t match that.” That being said, YogaWorks promptly closed its SoHo center, throwing its employees out of work and its students out on the sidewalk.

   A union is an association of workers, often in a trade or profession, formed to protect and further their interests and rights. They began forming in the mid-19th century in response to the social and economic impact of the Industrial Revolution. National unions bubbled up in the post-Civil War era as the coasts and regions were brought together by commerce and railroads.

   Labor unions benefited greatly from the New Deal in the 1930s, especially after the Wagner Act was passed to legally protect their right to organize. The number of workers belonging to unions peaked in the mid-50s at about 35% of the workforce and the total number of members peaked in the 70s at about 21 million. Membership has declined ever since. In 2013 there were 14 million members compared with 18 million in 1983. In 2013, the percentage of workers belonging to a union was 11%, compared to 20% in 1983.

   There are more than 50 thousand yoga teachers in the United States, and according to the Yoga Alliance there are two people interested in becoming a teacher for every current teacher on the classroom floor. At that rate, should they succeed in signing up the proletariat of yogis, the Machinists and Aerospace Workers will soon be the biggest union in the country.

   “Do I think that yoga teachers deserve more job security and better pay? Yes,” says J. Brown of J. Brown Yoga. “Are there a lot of yoga center owners who are participating in a business model that exploits teachers? Yes. Does the Yoga Alliance 200-hour teacher training standard bear a lot of responsibility for creating this model and fueling more people to follow it? Yes.”

   He didn’t stop there. “Do I think that 100 teachers in NYC becoming part of the union, so they can attempt to negotiate the terms of their employment with YogaWorks, will do anything to change the model across the industry and give teachers more job security and better pay? The answer is no.”

   There are about six thousand yoga centers nationwide. Twenty years ago, all of them were mom and pop places, independents, riding the wellness gravy train. In the past ten years venture capital has gotten its tentacles into the practice, for good reason.

   There are 36 million pairs of active feet on mats nowadays, according to Yoga Journal. The number of people doing yoga grew by 50% in the past five years. Sun salutations are now as popular as swinging a golf club, without even having to go outside and get a sunburn. Popularity polls show that 15% of everybody has done yoga in the past year.

   J. Brown sees “bottom line economics infecting the entire landscape of yoga centers. That is why yoga teachers have come to be paid so little and treated so poorly by both the corporate and independent operators.”

   The median income in the United States is about $32,000. Median pay at GM is about $40,000. Roughly speaking, the average hourly pay for a member of the United Auto Workers ranges from $28 to $38 for those hired before September 2007, and between $16 and $20 for workers hired afterward. In 2015 yoga teaching was rated as one of the top one hundred jobs in the country, according to CNN, with a median annual paycheck clocking in at more than $60,000.

   The compensation at YogaWorks ranges from about $35 to $100-or-more to teach classes of an hour’s length, occasionally an hour-and-a-half. The average teacher, teaching an average of 25 classes a week, working about 30 hours a week, at an average rate of pay of $50.00 a class, will make their $60 thousand-or-more a year without breaking a sweat, unless it’s a hot flow class.

   One of the complaints made by yoga teachers about their jobs is the extra time they have to spend cleaning the yoga rooms after class, even though the rooms are simply empty spaces with wood floors that usually just require mopping up some sweat and sweeping up some dust balls.

   The pay for hotel maids ranges between $9.00 to $13.00 an hour across the country. The pay range hardly varies, suggesting there aren’t many opportunities for increased pay or advancement, even with several years of experience. The average cleaner, working 40 hours a week, vacuuming making beds disinfecting hotel rooms, makes approximately $21,000 a year, a third of what the average yoga teacher makes.

   But it’s not just cleaning up after class. There’s more to it than that in the teaching racket. Hotel maids may have to mess with some messy stuff in the rooms they clean, but they don’t have to fiddle with their iPods. Yoga teachers do. “We’re constantly having to change our playlist, constantly having to sequence, testing it out,” Melissa Brennan of CorePower Yoga said. “The expectation is go out and do all of this work and then come back and bring it back to the studio.”

   The work on their digital music players is not compensated and has led to resentment, notwithstanding that teachers make about twice what the average Joe and Jane do. On the other hand, resentment is not morally superior to making money, so you might as well make as much of it as you can when you can.

   Melissa and Effie Morgenstern are suing CorePower. They claim the company has failed “to pay its instructors for certain hours worked, causing their average weekly compensation to drop below the minimum wages they are entitled.”
   “They hide behind the fact that you have all this gratitude and love and appreciation for yoga and your peers,” said Effie. “In a lot of ways, they weaponize relationships,” Melissa said. “I know there is a part of me that feels really foolish for buying into that and thinking that these people did care about me.”

   The suit is the fourth action with similar complaints filed against CorePower. Almost two thousand other yoga instructors joined a separate class action lawsuit, claiming they are “overstretched and not being paid the minimum wages they are entitled to.” In a statement, CorePower Yoga said the lawsuit brought by Brennan and Morgenstern is without merit and maintains there was no wrongdoing. “CorePower is proud of its practices, believes they are fair, and will continue to stand by and defend them.”

   When yoga went commercial it went capitalist. Yoga is cool beans, but cool capitalism is still capitalism, no matter how many times headquarters quotes BKS Iyengar Seane Corn Leslie Kaminoff or anybody else. They might as well cut to the chase and get right to Sadie Nardini, the bright shining light of yoga commercialism.

   The debate about traditional vs. modern in the world of yoga is over. It’s been bushwhacked. The answer is free market capitalism. It’s about selling and winning and making money. It’s not for the faint of heart. After all, you can go broke in the yoga game, like anywhere else. “Capitalism without bankruptcy is like Christianity without hell,” says Frank Borman, businessman and ex-NASA astronaut.

   Yoga is progressive open-minded socially conscious, except when it isn’t, when it comes to collective bargaining. Then it’s status quo push back time. “The dynamic of unions doesn’t reflect who we are, how we interact, how we make decisions or where we need to go,” is what automaker corporations and venture capital yogis all say when push comes to shove. It’s my way or the highway.

   Yoga literally means union. Yoga yoke union. It can be understood on different levels, philosophically, religiously, and psychologically, as in no longer living at cross-purposes with yourself. It can simply mean going to yoga class, getting in step with like-minded folks. It might soon mean a first sighting thunderbolt, yoga teachers walking the picket line, fending off glib-talking union-busting ginks and finks.

   Meanwhile, Andrew Carnegie, the Bluto of plutocrats, is rolling over in his grave laughing hysterically, while new-age union bosses are getting with the new dynamic, and Krishnamacharya and his antecedents are springing up out of corpse pose with surprised looks, all shook up at the ruckus.

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.”

Cape Cod

Lights Out at the Lighthouse

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By Ed Staskus

   “Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got, ‘till it’s gone.” Joni Mitchell

   Starting early in April, lights start blinking back on in stores inns restaurants and businesses of all kinds on Cape Cod. Hiring ramps up for cooks, waiters, waitresses, cashiers, retail associates, merchandisers, front desk agents, landscaping, cleaning services, and even at local airports who park and fuel aircraft. The Sagamore Bridge puts on its best welcome back smile.

   Even though snowfall is slight on Cape Cod, whatever there is of it melts as the weather gets warmer. Purple-blue hyacinths and bright yellow daffodils start to open. In Wellfleet, which is between Orleans and Provincetown, where almost everything shuts down for the winter, almost everything opens up again in the spring. Except when it doesn’t.

   It was early in April when Joe Wanco and his family, wife Laura and daughters Michelle and Jodie, made it known that their Lighthouse Restaurant would not be opening for the upcoming season. The iconic mid-19th century building in the middle of town on Main St. groaned.

   “After many years, many employees, many building renovations, many blueberry muffins, pints of beer, and Boston sports championships, it has been decided it is in the best interest of the family that we no longer operate as a business. This is not a decision made overnight or without extensive consideration. Forty years is a long time and even longer in restaurant years.”

   “Oh, man, this is sad,” said Molly MacGregor. It being springtime on the Outer Cape, dark gray clouds rolled in and filled the sky. “This is worse than closing down Town Hall,” said Steve Curley. “I want to scream, NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!” screamed Heidi Gertsen-Scheck.

   Forty years in the dining room trade is like four hundred in dog years. It’s a challenge as well as a slog. If you like falling jumping being pushed off the deep end, operating a watering hole is for you.

   Even if your menu is coherent and priced appropriately, and the tables are set nice and neat, and the ambience is what your customers like, but the customer service is sour, customers will remember and go elsewhere. Even if management is ahead of food and drink costs and keeps labor costs manageable, if they don’t notice nobody is asking for slimehead, and don’t take it off the menu, they’re stuck with a freezer full of slimehead. On top of that, even if the grub is outstanding, the staff trained and civil and ready to go, if the front man is slow-mo marketing his restaurant, he ends up with a half-empty restaurant.

   “You have had a great run,” said Jim Clarke, who owned the Lighthouse from 1968 to 1978. “I still have memories and nightmares from those years. I wish I had a nickel for all the muffins I baked.”

   The Lighthouse was a local seafood eatery, with arguably the best oyster stew between Cape Cod Bay and the Atlantic Ocean, a local sports bar and grill where the Patriots Red Sox Celtics ruled the roost on the flat screens. It was a local dive bar with two-dollar cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon and Cape Cod bands livening up the joint year after year.

   “You guys have been a bedrock of this community,” said Sam Greene. “Main Street won’t be the same,” said Donna McCaffery. “We started almost every vacation in Wellfleet at the Lighthouse, starting in 1989 when my now husband met my family there for our vacation-starting breakfast,” said Laura Wardwell.

   Six White House men came and went, while another one got stuck in traffic with a flat tire and only Twitter to keep him company, from the time the Wanco’s landed on Main St. Townspeople and tourists grew up with the Lighthouse. Others were born and had to find out for themselves, peeking in through a window. “I grew up with stories about the Lighthouse before I even knew what it was,” said Amy St. John Ramsdell.

   “Our five children grew up having breakfast at the Lighthouse every Sunday after mass,” said Jodi Lyn Deitsch-Malcynsky. “Your family was always inviting and gracious and fun! Our summers in Wellfleet will be forever changed.”

   “I remember parking my bicycle out front and coming in for a Cherry Coke,” said Matt Frazier, years before he became their trash hauler and recycler. “An extra special thank-you for always treating our crew with snacks and beverages during and after Oyster Festival.”

   The menu wasn’t encyclopedic, the prices weren’t an arm and a leg, even though the plates were chock-full, and the always hot food was more than good, often very good. “The best scallops in the world, as good as Digby, Nova Scotia,” said a man from Boston. “What’s more to say?”

   “I can’t say enough about the Cod Ruben,” said a man from Westfield. “They had a great selection of beer. The service was awesome.” He was crestfallen when he heard the news.    “Where am I going to get a good Cod Reuben now?”

   “They happened to have lobster dinners on a special, super fresh and tender,” said a woman from Worthington. “They were the best lobster dinners we had all summer.”

   The Lighthouse was the only restaurant on the Outer Cape without a front door. There were two side doors, and plenty of windows to sit at and watch the world go by. “Here’s to missing the big picture,” one man said to another, sitting at the bar one September morning, over hearty breakfasts and Bloody Mary’s, their backs to the front window. The bar sat about a dozen and the front room and side room tables sat forty or fifty. The floors were hardwood. There is a big skylight in the beamed tilted ceiling of the side dining room. It isn’t a small place, but it isn’t a big place, either. It was always lively and got even more lively at night.

   “When I was younger it was our breakfast place,” said John Denninger. “As I grew older it was my place to get a drink. When I decided to move here the Wanco’s made it feel like home. I could not have found a better place to hang out.”

   A red and white replica of the red and white Nauset lighthouse is on the flat roof of the front room. “The lighthouse does great service, yet it is the slave of those who trim the lamps,” observed the writer Alice Rollins. It doesn’t go looking for passing ships in the night. It just stands there with its big bright light on. Lighthouses are always lighthouses in somebody’s storm, especially if the fish is pan-fried just right and the beer is cold.

   The Wanco’s came from New Jersey in the late 1970s. They partnered with a friend of theirs in the restaurant so they could “try our hand at a small business in a seaside town in an expression of our own American dream.” Their partner retired after ten years, but the Wanco’s kept the fireplace stoked, carrying on. “It was our family providing a watering hole, meeting place, warm meal, cold beer, loud music, local gossip, friendly banter, and a smiling face.”

   Besides everything else, who wants to lose a smiling face? There aren’t a great abundance of them to begin with. “Ah, Jaysus,” said Jenifer Good. “It’s too much!”

   Owning and operating a restaurant isn’t the same as going to work. It’s more like hard work. Many people start work by checking their e-mails. So do many restaurateurs. Many people check their e-mails all day. Most restaurateurs don’t. They don’t have time. There are too many other things to do.

   After they’ve turned on the lights and checked their mail in the morning they do a walk-through of the restaurant, note what needs to be cleaned repaired replaced, start receiving orders, start food production, say hello to arriving cooks and staff, last minute scrambles because someone is sick hungover missing, breakfast service, take a break, lunch pre-shift, lunch service, move on to more food production, staff meal, dinner pre-shift, dinner service, clean up, wipe down, go over the day’s receipts, stay on top of staffing for tomorrow, and fit in balancing the checkbook, making payroll, checking inventory against reality, making a list of purveyors to talk to, and finally, locking up for the night

   All of this without swearing too much at staff customers passersby and loved ones. Not that working at the Lighthouse wasn’t a happening, spiced by curses out of left field. “Working there was always an adventure,” said John Dwyer.

   “My first waitressing job was 40 years ago here,” said Gina Menza. “I was terrible, but they kept me on. Some crazy memories of living upstairs, sitting on the roof to watch the parade, and sneaking into the drive-in rolled up in a carpet in the back of the company van.”

   The Wellfleet Drive-In has been around since 1957. It’s one of only a few hundred drive-ins left in the USA. Vans and pick-ups back in so the crowd packed inside them can see the screen.

   “What I remember is living in the upstairs apartment while working at the Lighthouse at my first job, smashing my head into the tables while running from the kitchen to the dining room, creamy dill salad and the best pickles on the planet, working down in the bakery, and years later to many post-shift beers,” said Jacqueline Stagg.

   “My most fun job ever,” said Kelly Moore. “Endless pre-games and endgames, situations, life lessons with Pill Bill, meltdowns, bike stealings and returnings, hurricane parties, skinny dipping team meetings, Wall of Shame, family breakfasts, jam sessions, chats with Thomas, high society, beer pong tournaments, roof top nights, off-season regulars, and Mexican meltdowns with Slammo. I will never forget mista sista kissa.”

   Communities are built around their city halls, schools, and businesses. Even though the Outer Cape is known for its guidebook attractions, sun and sand whale watching art galleries seafood summer theater, Provincetown, the Cape Cod Rail Trail, and the National Seashore, its essence is in its smaller neighborhoods and places.

   “They were the center beacon of our town,” said Chris Eize of the Sacred Mounds. “When we became the house band, we became part of the place.”

   Most bands that played at the Lighthouse played where the music sounded consistently better than it should have sounded, resonating better than the written notes and the acoustics, and from Funktapuss to the Sacred Mounds they always lit up the venue. “The Super Scenics always had a blast playing there with our gracious hosts the Mounds and the Lighthouse” said Jeff Jahnke, “Thanks and cheers!”

   “We got to know Michelle and Jodie on an intimate level of trust, honest communication, and friendship,” said Chris, the front man of the Mounds. “I loved how Jodie didn’t really have a filter, and you knew exactly what she was thinking, because she would tell you, whether you liked it or not. We enjoyed the after-show drinks and reflections with Michelle, and that openness will live on with appreciation and fondness.”

   There is always a lot of camaraderie in restaurants, everybody working closely together, all in around the chuck wagon. “The restaurant business, even in the most stable of markets is, frankly, exhausting,” said Joe Wanco. “It’s an ever-consuming extra member of the family. There are no restful nights, even with the help of your favorite tequila.”

   It is a consuming undertaking because of the long days, most of it on your feet, and the competition inherent in the undertaking. The restaurant business is massive, with more than one million restaurants coast to coast. The chances of making it even two years are slim. Most eateries close in their first year. Three out of four close in the next three to five years. Making it four decades is Bunyanesque.

   The Wanco family put their heart and soul into their work. Staying the course means staying steadfast. “Wow, 40 years, that’s awesome,” said Katie Edmond.

   “You and your oyster stew are going to be greatly missed,” said Rob Cushing. “Joe and Laura, enjoy your well-deserved retirement,” said Virginia Davis. “You have served the town well.”

   It works both ways, coming and going, since Main St. is not a one-way street. “We are eternally grateful for the many years of support from our loyal clientele, especially our year-round community,” said the Wanco family, signing off. “Good luck, cuz,” said Joyce Fabiano to the leave-taking. “We sure are going to miss you all,” said Mike Deltano.

   “What I want to know is how will I ever now find my children when I get to Wellfleet since the Lighthouse is closed?” asked Judy Sherlock. “Look for them at the town library?” She thought better of spitting out “Hah!”

   The Wanco’s were the food and drink keepers for a long time. The lights of our favorite places go on and off over time. Every now and then they need a new minder. What Main St. in Wellfleet needs now is a new barkeep to fire up the lanterns at the local public house again, like the New Jersey transplants did forty-some enterprising years ago.

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

Born to Be Bad

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By Ed Staskus   

   Maggie Campbell was a Bay Brat, which means she grew up in Bay Village, Ohio, where the well-off live west of Cleveland, while the not so-well-off live back east in Cleveland. She lived there her whole life growing up. When she was a girl, she picked up every lost bird and squirrel, every lost cat and dog, and every injured anything still alive and brought it home to protect it.

   She was an animal lover from the get-go. She got it partly when she was born, in the blood, partly from her dad, Fred, but not from her mom. Alma never liked any of the animals they ever had in the house basement garage backyard.

   Her parents met at Lycoming College in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, a few hours from Philadelphia. Her grandparents on her dad’s side had moved from Ohio to Philadelphia a few years earlier and enrolled in college there after high school. Alma was working in the town library, which is how they met. He fell head over heels for her, swept her off her feet, or at least he thought so, and they got married.    

   “We’re out of here,” is what he said the minute they got married. They moved right back to Cleveland. Even though they were married for more than forty years it might have been the worst thing either of them ever did. But Fred was stubborn, and Alma could be mean as a junkyard dog.

   Maggie had a mom who didn’t love her dad, and a dad who was frustrated about it, and the way he tried to make his wife happy was to rough up their kids. So, it was a tough childhood. Either you were being totally ignored or you were being roughed up.

   There were four of them. First, there was Elaine, then two years later Maggie, and then Bonnie hard on her heels, and last, three years later, Brad. Alma always said Fred tricked her four times. He zipped it up and from then on kept his thoughts to himself.

   He was from Cleveland, from the west side, where he grew up almost rich for his time. Alma was from Jersey Shore, just a few miles from Williamsport, where she grew up poor. Jersey Shore isn’t anywhere near New Jersey, the Jersey shoreline, and the shoreline it had didn’t live up to the name. There used to be silk mills and cigar factories in Jersey Shore. Later, factories made steel rails for train tracks there.

   During the Depression Maggie’s paternal grandfather was the only teenager in his high school who had a car. He used to follow her grandmother down the street trying to get her to come in his car with him, saying he wanted to help carry her books, so along the way what happened was they got cozy and got married.

   Her grandfather in Jersey Shore had three jobs the minute he stopped being a teenager. He was a coal miner, a school bus driver, and a milkman, but his family still stayed in the dumps. They were too poor to paint but too proud to whitewash. Even though they were always short they built their own house on the Susquehanna River. Maggie didn’t know how they got it built since they were strapped for hard cash most of the time.

   The river was their front yard. Susquehanna means Oyster River and it was on the Susquehanna where the Mormons say they got their holy orders delivered to them by divine beings. It was a big comfortable house. It’s still standing, although it’s not been taken care of, so it’s falling apart fast.

   Her grandmother lived in the house into her 80s, but then sold it and moved into a trailer, in a trailer park in the mountains above Jersey Shore. She started believing people in the other trailers were trying to shoot her with laser guns. She slept wrapped up in foam rubber holding an umbrella over her head for protection. Alma never wanted to talk about her mom because she thought she was crazy, and a Jesus freak to boot.

   Maggie didn’t know her Jersey Shore grandfather. He died young. He had arthritis from tip to toe, and it finished him off. It didn’t help working underground coal mining. She knew her grandmother well enough. Whenever her sisters and she visited her, she taught them how to pull taffy and fudge. They played with her paper dolls. She didn’t have any real dolls. They sat on the front porch in the afternoon and waited for the bean truck.

   “Before dinnertime she sent my older sisters to the side of the road. When the bean truck, or sometimes the vegetable truck, went by on the unpaved road beans bounced off the back of it and they would run and gather them up. My grandmother cooked them for dinner. If no beans fell off the truck, there was no dinner, although she usually had a little something else in the house.” Most of the time it was something cold she had canned months earlier.

   Fred went to Upper Darby High School, starting when he was a sophomore. His parents moved him to Philadelphia from Cleveland, and he never stopped saying he hated it. He was a Cleveland Browns fan and wore their colors, so he got into fights every day with the other kids who were Philadelphia Eagles fans.

   “My dad liked telling us stories when we were growing up, like the one about how one day he and his friends went to the second story of their high school and jumped up and down all at once all together until the second floor fell in on the first floor.” The school’s mascot is a lion, but when Fred was there it was a court jester.

   Fred’s parents were from Akron and lived in Lakewood for a long time. They had to move when the new I-90 highway was being built. It was called the “Main Street of Northern Ohio.” When they were growing up Fred would drive them to a bridge over the highway and show them the exact spot below the bridge where their house used to be.

   It was when they had to sell the house to the state that they moved to Philadelphia. After Fred and Alma came back, they lived in Lakewood in a rented house for a few years. Maggie’s sister Elaine was born there. The rest of them made the scene in Bay Village. The family had moved to a short cul-de-sac, five blocks south of Lake Erie. Her dad designed the house, and it was built just the way he wanted it. He died when she was thirty-three years old. The next thing she did was get married to Steve de Luca.

   The crow’s nest was where Maggie grew close to Brad, who when he was small fry looked just like Bamm Bamm in the Flintstones cartoons. They even called him Bamm Bamm, although after he got his drum set, they called him Boom Boom. Brad brought home a drum set somebody had thrown out on their tree lawn and set it up in the basement. He taught himself how to play. He called himself Ginger Boom after Ginger Baker, his favorite drummer. He had thrown down the gauntlet. After he did no animal nor human would go down to the basement. It was too noisy, to begin with, and damp as his underarms, besides.

   They all had our own rooms, although Brad and Maggie shared a room because the house was a room short. Her sisters had separate bedrooms down the half-story stairway from them, and her parents were at the other end of the hallway. They lived in the crow’s nest until Elaine moved out and got married and Maggie finally got her own room.

   Maggie was Brad’s number one protector when he was growing up, like she was with all the neighborhood’s lost cats and dogs. She and Brad sold bananas, bread and butter sandwiches, and hard-boiled eggs on their front lawn whenever their mom wasn’t looking. They ran to Bracken Way with money in their hands when they heard Uncle Marty’s Ice Cream truck coming.

   But Maggie could never protect Brad from Coco, their poodle, who bit and tore his diapers off when he was little. He could never crawl away fast enough, no matter how fast he scurried on his hands and knees. The dog was quick as the devil and cut him off.

   Sometimes Maggie didn’t try to stop Coco, even if she could have. She had some of her mom’s tough love in her. Other times Brad had done something she didn’t like, and it was just his tough luck that Coco was on the rampage. She could be a brat when she had to be.

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.”

Baltic Place

One Man Army

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By Ed Staskus

    There has never been an excess of men who fight for a guerrilla band and three armies, one of the armies twice, quitting it the first time around, during any single war. An armed force a day keeps most men busy enough. Leonas Lucauskas stayed busier than many other combatants during the struggle that was World War Two. He fought with partisans in the forests. He served in the Lithuanian, German, and American militaries. He may not have had as many lives as a cat, but it was close.

   “My father Leonas was born in 1916, in the Ukraine,” his son Leo Lucas said. “My grandfather Juozas and grandmother Stanislava were living in Poltava, insanely far from Lithuania, which was their home.” He meant the seven hundred miles was insanely far given the state of Russian roads and their rundown railroads. The Eastern Front, where millions of men were slaughtering each other at the time, was closer.

   “My grandfather was a professor, teaching there during the war.”

   The school was the Poltava National Technical University. It was founded in 1818 by the wife of the governor-general of the province, the granddaughter of the last Ukrainian strongman before the Russian Empire absorbed the country in the 18th century. For hundreds of years Lithuanian and Polish freebooters had controlled vast tracts of the Ukraine and were a law unto themselves. They were no match for the Cossacks, however, who were later no match for the Russians.

   After the war the family, including Leonas’s older brother and sister, who were twins, went back to Lithuania. They settled near Iglauka, not far from Lake Yglos, His father taught school in Marijampole, twelve miles to the west, and they lived on a farm. His mother’s family were prosperous owners of farmland and personal property.

   In 1924 the state-sponsored revolt in Klaipeda was signed, sealed, and delivered, the country competed in the Summer Olympics for the first time, and Leonas’s older brother unexpectedly died of a contagion. The next year his mother went to a wedding. In the middle of the reception she was shot dead.

   It had been Russian Imperial policy to leave Lithuania in a non-industrial state. The inheritance system after the land reform of 1863 forbade the partition of plots. There were many landowners at the reception. They stuck together socially, friends, neighbors, and families bound by the old-time way.

   The Communist party of Lithuania was formed in 1918, declared illegal, and remained illegal until 1940. The Reds didn’t care about legality. They were out for blood and land. There is only so much land to go around in small Baltic-like countries. It was a zero-sum disagreement. “A group of Communist agitators, people who wanted other people’s land, came to the wedding, started a ruckus, started shooting guns, and my grandmother was coincidentally shot and killed.”

   Years later, Leonas told his son the challenge of his life after his mother’s death was, should he take revenge when he grew up? They lived in small towns, everybody knew everybody else, and everybody knew who the Communists were. Should he kill them when he grew up? He decided he wouldn’t, although he never got over the ill will he felt.

   When he grew up, he got married, had a daughter, and was planning on going to school to study medicine, but then World War Two happened. His father was shot and killed by fifth column collaborators in his own living room. Leonas joined the Lithuanian Army and the Soviet Union invaded. 

   It was never a fair fight. In mid-June 1940 a half-million Red Army troops poured across the borders. Within a week the Baltics were overrun, one week before France fell to Nazi Germany.Josef Stalin blew his nose into his walrus mustache. Adolf Hitler did an awkward jig, grinning behind his toothbrush mustache.

   Leonas took to the forest, joining a group of partisans, staying in the fight for the next year. It wasn’t any more dangerous than anything else in dangerous times. He had been working in their fields when his father was killed. “They were killing landowners. My father’s luck was just the luck of being in the fields,” Leo said. “They would have shot him if they had been able to track him down.”

   A year later Lithuania was invaded by the German army. Most Russian aircraft was destroyed on the ground. The Wehrmacht advanced rapidly, assisted by Lithuanians, who saw them as liberators. They helped by bringing their weapons to bear, controlling railroads, bridges, and warehouses. The Lithuanian Activist Front and Lithuanian Territorial Corps formed the native backbone of the anti-Soviet fighting.

   Leonas was one of many who joined the German Army, being assigned to a Baltic Unit. Three years later he was having second thoughts. The Russian Baltic Offensive of 1944 was in full swing. The Red Army was on the march to “liberate the Soviet Baltic peoples.” An NCO by then, Leonas and his men were ordered to man the front line and hold it at all costs. It was costing them dearly every day. 

   “The rich Lithuanians were officers,” Leo said. “They weren’t in the tranches getting their heads shot off. The enlisted men were getting killed. They all wanted to get away.”

   There was a small airstrip nearby for reconnaissance and resupply. Junker 52s were flying in and out with ammunition, first aid, food, and hope in the grim hopelessness. Leonas and three other men from his unit were unloading one of the planes at a side door by means of a ramp, the front and wing-mounted engines roaring, when with hardly a word spoken between them they made up their minds on the spot to steal it and fly somewhere safe and sound.

   Two of the men rushed up the ramp and threw the German pilots out the door, while the other Lithuanian and Leonas kept watch, guns at the ready. He was the last one to scramble into the plane and was shot in the back of the foot just before slamming the door shut.

   “I was playing on the floor one day,” Leo said. It was the late 1960s. “My dad was relaxing, shoes and socks off, sitting on the sofa in the living room reading a newspaper. I saw a scar on his heel and asked him what it was. He said it was a bullet wound. He rolled up his pants and showed me three more on both legs.”

   One of the Lithuanians returned the shooting with a MG15 machine gun set in the dustbin turret, while the other two men dragged Leonas to the cockpit. None of them had ever flown an airplane. He was the only one of them who had ever even driven a car.

   How hard can it be? he thought. With bullets slamming into the corrugated aluminum fuselage, he found out it wasn’t hard at all. He pushed on the throttle, got the Junker going as fast as he thought it would go, raised the nose, and “Iron Annie” lifted itself up into the air.

   They quickly came up with a plan, planning to fly to Switzerland. They got as far as the Poland to Germany border when they ran out of gas. The plane wasn’t the fastest, 165 MPH being its top speed, and it could go about six hundred miles on a tankful. When they went down, they were headed in the right direction. All they needed was another full tank.

   It solved their landing problem, since Leonas had already told his confederates he had no idea how to land the plane. The Junker hit the ground hard and every part of it broke into pieces. When Leonas came back to life he was in a German field hospital. He never found out what happened to his countrymen.

   The doctors and military men asked him who he was and what happened. He answered them in German, in High Deutsch, not Low. “My father spoke Lithuanian, Polish, Russian, and German.” He was wearing the right uniform when found, was speaking like a householder, and they assumed he was one of them. Leonas bit his tongue about who he really was, thanking God for his good fortune.

   After he got out of the hospital he was deemed not fit enough for combat and assigned to the motor pool. Soon after that he drew a lucky number and was assigned to be the driver for a Wehrmacht general. It was lucky enough until several months later, when early one morning, in the middle of winter, he got a wake-up call from one of his motor pool sidekicks.

   “Don’t come to work today,” the man said.

   “What do you mean?”

   “Your general died late last night. One of the first people the Gestapo will want to talk to is you.”

   He knew it was true. He knew what had happened to anybody and everybody involved in the attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler in mid-July. Nearly five thousand people were executed. He would never be able to stand up to scrutiny. They would stand him up in front of a firing squad in no time.

   His general was probably out carousing in their Tatra 87, slid on some ice, smashing into a tree, but it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter whether the general died in the arms of his mother or was assassinated. His goose was cooked if the SS got him. They were known to literally cook people to death.

   The Tatra 87 had been the Nazi Car of the Year five years running. Sleek, futuristic, BMW-engine fast and high-tech as could be, it was the vehicle of choice for German officers. Unfortunately for them, it handled like pudding, killing its passengers right and left. Leonas always kept it under 40 MPH. It was the vehicle of choice of the Allies, too, at least for their mortal enemy. They thought of it as a secret weapon, killing more high German officers than died fighting the Red Army.

   He jumped to his feet, got himself into his uniform, threw on a winter coat, and fled his room. Making his way to the motor pool, he found a truck with keys in the ignition and a full tank of gas. There were plenty to go around. Opel manufactured ninety five thousand of the 4 x 4 Blitz trucks during the war. He quickly signed it out, turned it over, and drove away. He drove straight for the front. His plan was to break through the line and surrender to the Americans. When you’re at the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on.

   He didn’t run out of gas and didn’t get shot by either side. In the event, he surrendered. He was relieved and confident that the war was over for him. But by the time the war raised the white flag he was in his third army. At least he was finally on the winning side.

   “My grandfather Juozas was a gigantic guy,” Leo said. “I’m six foot four myself. But my father Leonas was five nine and maybe one hundred forty pounds.” In the end, what counts is what you do. Dwight Eisenhower was the Supreme Commander of what he called “the whole shebang” in Europe. He knew there was more to winning the war than armor. “What counts is not necessarily the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog,” he said.

   At the beginning of 1945 the Allied Expeditionary Force on the Western Front had seventy three divisions ready to go. The Germans had twenty six divisions. The Battle of the Bulge ended in an Allied victory. Adolf Hitler held a meeting with his top men, instructing them to hold the Americans and British off at all costs. By that time, however, his top men were flat tires. The Fuhrer boarded a train and never went back to the Western Front. At the end of January, he gave the last speech he was ever to give. It was all hot air.

   After surrendering, Leonas spent time in a DP camp, until being recruited by the Americans. They were looking for men who spoke multiple languages and he fit the bill. He had been picking up bits and pieces of English in the meantime. Russian and Polish are among the Top 10 hardest languages to learn. English is no slouch, either. He persevered with his new grammar book and was made a Sergeant. In 1946 and 1947 he was in Nuremberg, where war crime trials were being conducted, translating the misdeeds. He watched the men who propagated the National Socialist German Party commit suicide, get executed, or get locked up forever.

   As the hard-fought decade of the 1940s wound itself down, Leonas made his way to North America, finding work as a lumberjack near Sudbury, Ontario. “It was an indentured servant kind of job,” said Leo. More than two-thirds of the Canadian province is forest, in land mass the equivalent of Fascist Germany and Fascist Italy combined. “He was never quite sure where he was when he was in the forest.” He preferred it, though, to being a mile down in the Sudbury Basin nickel mines. Up a tree he could, at least, see for miles.

   Making it in a company town is hard to do. Since there is no competition, housing costs and grocery bills can become exorbitant, and workers build up large debts they are required to pay off before leaving. It can be bondage by another name. Leonas determined to find another way, his own way.

   He and several other immigrants pooled their resources, found a broken-down car, scavenged parts from other wrecks, filled the tires with enough rags to get them to roll, and hit the road. He ended up in St. Catherine’s, near Niagara Falls, and later, sensing an opportunity to get into the United States, he took it. He settled down outside Buffalo, New York in 1950, where he stayed the rest of his life. He never saw his wife and child, trapped behind the Iron Curtain, again.

   He got married to an American woman. His new wife Louise taught school. They raised a family. He went to work as a butcher in the meat department of a grocery store for more than thirty years, rarely missing a day. He built a house on three acres of land. One acre of it was devoted to a garden. “I must have moved five thousand wheelbarrows of manure as a child,” Leo said. “Whenever our factory friends went on strike, I delivered food from our garden to them in the morning before school.” His sister Katherine still lives in the family home.

   Leonas often hung from his heels in the garage to prove he could still do it. “My father was a strong man.” Sometimes men are strong because it’s the only choice they have. Spinning your wheels doesn’t get it done. Leonas smoked and drank with his friends at the local Italian and Polish social clubs. They played cards. They rarely talked about the past. They stuck to the present. The past was a dead letter.

   He was a sociable man in post-war society. He was friendly and approachable. He rarely missed a dance at the social clubs. He believed that if you can dance, you always have a chance. He had more lives than a cat, although he stopped testing the limits. He never fought in another man’s army ever again.

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.”

Paperback Yoga

Making the Scene

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By Ed Staskus

“Now it’s time for change, nothing stays the same.”  Motley Crue

Yoga has never been what it has been or what it is. It’s not one thing, even though it doesn’t say one thing and mean another. Not everyone brings the same curiosity interest hunger to it, nor does everyone get the same thing out of it. There are a lot of drops in the ocean of it, which is apropos, given hatha yoga’s beginnings.

Matsyendranath, the founder of hatha yoga, was tossed into the ocean about a thousand years ago by his parents when they determined he had been born under a bad sign. He was swallowed by a big fish, stayed swallowed but survived, and grew up. One day when the fish dove to the bottom of the ocean, he overheard Siva and Parvati, who happened to be nearby, talking about yoga. He made notes, practiced what they preached for twelve years while inside the belly of the whale, and when he finally made it back to dry land became a yoga teacher.

Everyone called him ‘Jonah, Jr.’ behind his back, but his students called him ‘Lord of the Fishes’ face forward.

The Yoga Alliance has nothing on Matsyendranath’s credentials, since he put in more than one hundred thousand hours of groundwork compared to YA’s 200 and 500-hour teacher training certificates.

For about five thousand years yoga was largely a mind game, focusing on energy and awareness. The right stuff was life force, the vital principle, discernment and consciousness. Yoga exercise wasn’t a big part of the package. It was hardly part of the package, at all. When almost everybody was working dawn to dusk to just get by, there wasn’t a big demand for vinyasa classes.

In the Industrial Age, when machines make our machines, and we sit in cars, sit in the glow of our flat screens, and sit around telling Alexa what to do, a little get up and go has become a priority. Yoga has become primarily a physical practice, for good reason. “Birds born in a cage think flying is a sickness,” said Alejandro Jodorowsky. But, many people still crave strength and movement skills. Coupled with the mental fortitude the practice brings to bear, yoga has become a go-to for tens of millions.

In the last one hundred-or-so years yoga has become whatever anybody says it is, from Yogananda to BKS Iyengar, from Pierre Bernard to Bikram Choudhury, from Lilian Folan to Tara Stiles. In the 1970s it was Ashtanga Yoga, in the 1990s it was Power Yoga, and in the 2000s it was Anusara Yoga.

Back in the day it was build your own internal fire. Today it’s the warm and hot and very hot room. Tomorrow is up for grabs, given the implications of climate change.

In the last twenty-or-so years it has become a cornucopia, yoked to acrobatics and paddleboards, booze and barnyards, therapy and retreats. There are conferences and festivals. It’s the ever-changing life-changing magic of the practice. If yoga is about transformation, it is living up to its mission in the new millennium.

In the same way that when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change, the age-old practice is going through some changes.

AntiGravity Yoga and Fitness, developed by Christopher Harrison, a former gymnast and dancer, in 2007, is about getting hitched to a fabric swing hung from a ceiling and stretching and working out on it. The device is called the AntiGravity Hammock.

“Suspend your disbelief, and I can bring you to better health, less pain, and allow you to feel the joy of flying,” he says.

The yoga has its roots in his AntiGravity, an entertainment brand established in 1991, which has conceived and collaborated in over 400 productions since that time, from Broadway shows to the Olympics to the Academy Awards. Chris Harrison designed bungee dance technology and developed hanging silk as a performance apparatus. His AntiGravity Theater and National Aerial Performance Training Center is based in Florida.

AntiGravity Yoga has spread to gyms and studios in more than 30 countries, including Madonna’s Hard Candy Fitness. “It’s not as hard as it looks, and it’s actually not as terrifying as it seems,” observed Jessica Booth after taking a class at Studio Anya in NYC. “Once you’re in the hammock correctly, you’re so much more secure than you’d think. If you do exactly what you’re told, you’ll find yourself doing front and back flips, handstands galore, and even hanging upside down.”

Some people hang on for dear life, while others get a great workout in. You can even fly back and forth like it’s a playground swing set. Since a good part of the exercise is done upside down, everyone feels taller when they’re finished.

“It makes you feel like a total badass,” Jessica added.

AcroYoga is yoga melded with acrobatics and healing arts. It got off the ground in the early part of the 21st century, although Krishnamacharya used to do it in the 1930s, playing the role of the base, while a child played the flyer, doing asanas above him. It’s a vigorous workout usually involving three people, base, flyer, and spotter.

The base is on the ground, on his or her back, while the flyer is the person elevated off the ground, moving through a series of dynamic postures. The spotter is there to make sure things don’t go haywire, and save the day, if need be. The circle ceremony, promoting openness and communication within the group, is what everyone does before class.

Jason Nemer and Jenny Sauer-Klein founded AcroYoga International in 2003. It blended gymnastics with playfulness with yoga. They systematized the terms and training and execution of the practice. They made common poses a matter of teamwork.

It’s the yoga of trust, because you’ve got to trust the person whose hands and feet you are balanced on. You are moving up there, but are being moved from below, as well. It is move play connect. It is leaning on each other, believing your partner will always be there to lend a hand.

It isn’t easy, requiring muscles, core strength, and kinesthetic awareness. It takes long-established practice to new heights. It’s more fun than sweating your ass off at a Bikram Yoga studio, too.

SUP Yoga is doing yoga on a paddleboard, and it’s also more fun than sweating your ass off at a Bikram studio. For one thing, you’re outside, on the open water, in the fresh air, not in a steam bath of a mirrored torture chamber. For another thing, if you fall, you fall into clean water, not face first onto a Bikram-mandated moldy carpet.

Standing up on canoes and rafts and propelling yourself with the help of a pole or paddle is thousands of years old. The Waikiki Beach Boys of Oahu pioneered the modern style of stand up paddle boarding in the 1960s. Although nobody knows who actually premiered SUP Yoga, Rachel Brathen is one of the pioneers.

“My fiancée was always surfing on a longboard with big dogs, and I thought, if he can surf with a dog on a board, I should be able to do a down dog on a board,” she said.

On shore, people asked her, “Do you teach classes in this?”

“Sure!” she said, channeling her inner and outer teacher, which she is, as well as the author of the New York Times bestseller “Yoga Girl”.

A week later she started giving her first classes.

SUP Yoga is a little more complex than posture yoga, which barely requires a mat, if that. It calls for essential gear, including a paddleboard, paddle, leash, personal flotation device, and an emergency whistle. It takes some getting used to. Just about anything that is done on a mat can be done on a board, but the board is wobbly all the time, which engages on-land muscles in a different way. It demands you be intentional with all your movements, and stay in the present, every split second.

Otherwise, it’s over the side.

On the far side, from kooky to cute, is doing yoga while under the influence, and practicing with pets.

Boozy yoga got its start when studios started pairing their classes with cheese and wine tasting afterwards, cocktails at the local saloon after Friday night classes, and mimosas after Sunday morning flow classes. There’s nothing like a pick-me-up after the pick-me-up of a good yoga class, although it can get to be too much of a good thing.

One in eight American adults meet diagnostic criteria for alcohol use disorder.

Beer Yoga is happy hour on the mat. Pop-up classes get sponsored by a local bar or brewery. There are 24 hours in a day. There are 24 beers in a case. It can’t be a coincidence. It’s got to be destiny, karma. It’s also got to be a new revenue stream for beer makers. Who knew yogis would be getting into suds?

There is even Drunk Yoga, created by Eli Walker, a yoga teacher in Brooklyn, NYC, for those unconcerned about hitting the bottle hard. A plastic tumbler of wine is near to hand at every mat, although everyone is limited to one glass just before class and one glass during class. All bets are off after class.

“With Drunk Yoga, I wanted to create a safe and silly space for yogis and non-yogis alike to just have fun and move their bodies,” says Eli Walker.

“I’ll drink to that,” say her students.

“We make new friends over a glass of wine and just lighten the fuck up about yoga,” observed Jamey Powell. “And you know what? It worked for me. It is as fun as it sounds.”

Getting in the groove with pets and barnyard animals are surefire ways to lighten the mood of any yoga class. Yoga with your dog, or Doga, for short, is changing it up from a daily walk and into the yoga studio. They don’t actually do anything once they are there, except maybe keep you company and relax in corpse pose for an hour, but it keeps them from chasing squirrels.

“Dogs really benefit from Doga whether they participate, or not,” says Mahny Djahanguiri, who has been bonding with canines for about five years. “In my class the dogs are dogis and humans are yogis.” The idea is that animals lower anxiety levels and generate feel good hormones.

She has written “Doga: Yoga for You and Your Dog”. The how-to book includes pictures of how to deploy large dogs as bolsters and small dogs as hand weights.

Yoga with animals has spread to horses, cats, and baby goats. Goat Yoga got started at Lainey Morse’s farm in Oregon in 2016 when a friend suggested she host yoga classes. “I said OK,” said Lainey, “but the goats have to join in.” She had eight goats. The goats joined in. Within a year there was a waiting list to get in on the classes.

“The most fun part for me is watching people’s faces when a little goat comes up to them while they’re doing a yoga pose,” she said. “It’s a distraction, but it’s a happy distraction. It’s hard to be sad and depressed when there’s baby goats jumping on you.”

In the past two years Caprine Vinyasa, better known as Baby Goat Yoga, has grown by leaps and bounds. The goat kids might distract you with their melt-your-insides cuteness, might climb on your back when you’re in plank pose, and might leave little pools of goat pee here and there, but they are ideal therapy partners.

Jut watch out when you’re in headstand, as goats tend to butt heads.

Rooftop Yoga, Silent Disco Yoga, Naked Yoga, TRX Yoga, Broga, MMA Yoga, and Soul Flow Yoga are among a myriad of other niche practices that have suddenly sprouted on the scene in recent years. It’s always great to take risks and try new things, but new roads sometime mean superhighways and other times just mean new ruts.

On the other side of redesigned ways of doing things at your local studio, festivals and conferences drawing national and international audiences have proliferated in the past twenty years. Some of the best festivals are Sat Nam Fest, OM Yoga Show, and Wanderlust. They are launching pads for the old school that endures and the cutting edge that works.

The OM Yoga Show is a yoga gathering in London. Studio owners from around the world come to participate and network at one of the biggest such expos in the world. “If you’re in the yoga industry bring business cards with you,” said Sarah Highfield, founder of Yogarise. “Come in your yoga clothes – there are lots of classes on offer. Finally, turn up hungry, because there are plenty of tasty food stands to try.”

Sat Nam Fest is five days of asana, mantras, and meditation, revolving around Kundalini Yoga. Wanderlust is yoga by day and concerts by night, celebrations of mindfull living, living it up, summer surfing with “great nature, great food, great people, and more!” It has grown to 8 festivals annually in the USA and Canada.

Even though there are many ways to sharpen skills nowadays, from blogs to podcasts to instructional videos, one of the best ways is still the live event, workshops and conferences.  They are about meeting influencers and experts face-to-face, learning new know-hows and relearning classic ways of doing things, and sharpening the saw. Almost everybody comes home from conferences, from investing in themselves, from being in rooms with the energy of like-minded individuals, with a greater focus.

The Omega Institute hosts an annual Yoga Service Conference. “The conference is a wonderful opportunity to connect with folks whose yoga, meditation, and mindfulness practices are primarily focused on service to the world,” said Sue Julian of the Yoga Prison Project. The Toronto Yoga Conference has grown to 300 exhibitors and 700 hours of seminars and training sessions. The Yoga Journal Conferences have long been venues to experience the diversity of the practice, get inspired, work on your skills, and experiment with new ones.

The modern world is about change. Yoga is a practice of moxie and awareness. The first step in riding the wave of change is awareness.

In its own domain, yoga in the modern world has been experimenting, experiencing growing pains, shooting off in all directions. It gets hare-brained at times, shooting itself in the foot, electrifying at other times, shooting for the stars. It can do whatever it wants, even though it can’t do whatever it wants. It can only do what works, which is why it is still in business, still breathtaking.

Although new isn’t always progress, all yoga was once new.

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.”

Cross Walk

Hell Bent

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By Ed Staskus

   “What the hell am I doing?” Jackson Pollack asked himself,, giving a once over to the rising road, driving up too fast toward the top of it for what was on the other side. He couldn’t dope it out. He wasn’t planning on going over the rainbow, or was he? He was driving like a crazy man, like what all the couch men he had ever gone to always told him he wasn’t.

   Not crazy, at least not exactly. One of them said, “You’re just in search of a nervous breakdown.” He didn’t tell that one about 1938. It didn’t matter. He knew he was raw on the inside. That’s why the work on the floor had worked. It was raw, just like him. He wasn’t a nutcase because he saw psychiatrists. But in the last five minutes he had twice caught himself steering the car straight at the soft shoulder.

   He might be a nutcase, but he was usually on the ball behind the wheel, even though he could be dangerous. He was the next-best driver in Springs, next to Harry Cullum, who told him he was second best on a late afternoon one day in mid-winter when the two of them were having cherry yellow pickled eggs and cheap beer at Jungle Pete’s. The eggs were spicy like Harry, who gulped them down twice as fast as Jack.

   “You’ll have the last laugh, just wait and see, Jack,” Harry said, laughing and clapping him on the back. “Maybe not on the road, but you’ll get ‘er done, son.”

   Jackson Pollock’s convertible didn’t have seat belts. Harry, the best driver in town, had recently outfitted his family car with belts. He told everyone it was for his wife’s sake. “In stock car racing we never used seat belts if there wasn’t a roll bar, suicide if you do,” he said. “Family life is different, different kind of suicide. You need a belt, for sure, for that.”

   The young woman in the middle of the front seat, squeezed between Ruth and him, was screaming. “Stop the car, let me out, let me out!” He wasn’t going to stop the car, he knew that, but he had a bad feeling. It was a clear night, splashed with stars and no moon dark, hot and muggy. The road felt spongy. He felt strange, not himself, not yours truly.

   It was the second weekend of August 1956. The car was an Oldsmobile Rocket 88. It was an open-air car, robust and fast. Jackson had taken his shoes off and was driving in his bare feet. It made him feel alive. He got his first convertible, a Cadillac, when his action paintings started to get some action, after Life Magazine put him on the cover almost exactly seven years ago. He was wearing denim pants and a denim jacket in the photograph showcasing him. The jacket was dirty and spattered. It was his high-octane light-of-day “look at me now ma” year of success. They said he was the new phenomenon of American art. 

   “I don’t know about that,” Willem de Kooning said. “He looks more like some guy who works at a service station pumping gas.” 

   When the year 1950 got done, the next month Art News published a list of the best exhibitions of the past year. The top three shows belonged to him. It wasn’t bad for somebody who never graduated from high school. He never talked to anybody about high school. It was a lifetime ago. It didn’t mean anything then and it didn’t mean anything now.

   Even though he purposely used to throw his car keys in the bushes whenever he was getting drunk at parties, he had smashed the Caddy after a party. He got off easy, only a citation and no broken bones. The car didn’t get off so lucky. It went to the graveyard.

   Action painting, he thought, and snorted, spraying saliva on the steering wheel. What the hell did that mean? There wasn’t any action, at least not the kind they meant. It was all just headlines. What critics didn’t know wasn’t worth a pot to piss in.  “If people would just look at my paintings, I don’t think they would have any trouble enjoying them,” he said. “It’s like looking at a bed of flowers. You don’t tear your hair out over what it means.” He had meant it when he said it. He’d say it again.

   Most of the art critics these days, if they saw him walking on water, crossing the Hudson River at Canal Street, would scribble something about him not being able to swim. All they wanted was to see the other guy go down. The only time he met Man Ray, at the Cedar Tavern when the Dadaist was on his way back to Paris, Man Ray told Jackson, over a boatload of drinks, that he hated critics.

   Franz Kline laughed across the table. “Manny, tell us what you really think.”

   “All critics should be assassinated,” Man Ray said. Jackson liked the Frenchman because he liked fast cars and beautiful women, like him. Jackson hated critics, too. He thought Man Ray wasn’t wrong.

   Lee Krasner wasn’t beautiful, but he had long since gotten over it. His wife called his work all over painting because he got it all over the flat canvases nailed down on the floor, the hard plank floor itself, and his boots and jeans and hands. Bugs and bits of litter and blackened shag from his cigarettes fell into the paint.

   “Is Jackson Pollock the greatest living painter in the United States?” is what Life Magazine asked, blowing the balloon up, with a picture of him slouching against a wall with a gasper dangling from his mouth, and a couple of pictures of his paintings. He looked good, like he didn’t have a care in the world, didn’t give a damn, like he had the world by the balls. Now it was different. He hadn’t made a painting in more than a year. He knew the ballgame was over. He was washed up. He didn’t have anything to say anymore. He was sure of it. There wasn’t a place for him at the art world table anymore.

   “She started to scream,” said Clement Greenberg, one of the city’s kings of culture. “He took it out on this pathetic girl by going even faster. Then he lost control on the curve. The screaming is what did the killing, finally.” The Clem had a strong opinion about everything, no matter whether he knew anything about it, or not. When he was done holding court about the killing he went on to the next thing.

   What was her name? Jackson chewed it over, tossing a glance at the woman next to him. He couldn’t remember. He had a headache. His headaches had been getting worse and worse for months. They were on the Fireplace Road in East Hampton, not far from his home. It couldn’t be more than a mile. Not much of a home anymore, though. Lee was in Paris with her friends. She said she was coming back, but he had his doubts. He thought she might have her own frogman across the ocean. He wanted her back, but it had all gone wrong.

   Hell-bent in his Rocket 88 with two broads in the car while his wife was gone free and easy to Europe wasn’t going to get it done, wasn’t going to get it all back. He had to get back on track. Maybe he could start painting again. Maybe the last analyst he’d seen was right, maybe there was something gumming up the works. “We are going to try a fresh approach,” that shrink said. He called it hypnotherapy.

   He was one of the top downtown brain doctors. “It’s not hypnosis, at least not how most people think of it,” Dr. Robert Baird said. “We’re not going to try to alter or correct your behavior. We’ll try to seed some new ideas, sure, but we’ll talk those out before we go ahead.” Jackson told Lee he was going to get his head clear this time. “He isn’t full of the old-time shit,” he said about his new man.

   Whenever his neighbors saw his car fast and sloppy coming down the road they laughed and said it was like his paintings. Most of them still thought he was nuts, even though they didn’t say so anymore to his face, not now that he was in galleries and museums. When he was a nobody, they looked down on him like he was a nobody.

   “I could see right away he wasn’t from here,” Frank Dayton said after he first bumped into Jackson Pollack. “I asked a fellow later who he was. ‘Oh,’ the fellow said, ‘that’s just a loony artist.’”

   “To some people he was a bum, just someone to laugh at,” Sid Miller said. “They didn’t think much of his work. They didn’t think he was doing anything.” Ed Cook said the same thing. “Folks said he painted with a broom. Near everybody made jokes about his paintings and never thought they’d amount to anything.”

   “To hell with them all,” Jackson said to Ruth, his elbow twitching on the shelf of the door. Ruth was a looker, that’s for sure, the kind of juice he needed to get him going again. He had gone dead inside. He knew he had. She was the kind of gal who could crank him up. What’s-her-name at his other elbow kept bawling.

   “What?” Ruth asked, leaning towards him, twisting around the screamer.

   “To hell with them,” he muttered to himself again. “What do they know?”

   “Slow down just a bit, Jack, the car’s a little out of control, take it easy,” Ruth said.

   The joke was on them. When he was painting, straddling a canvas, it was when he was most in control. It was when he didn’t have any doubts about himself or what he was doing. He knew exactly what he was doing. “I can control the idea, the flow of paint. There is no accident in the end, not by my hand,” he told anybody interested in listening to him.

   “He picked up a can and paint brush and started to move around the canvas,” Hans Namuth said. “It was as if he suddenly realized the painting was not finished, His movements, slow at first, gradually became faster and more dance-like as he flung black, white, and rust-colored paint onto the canvas. He completely forgot that Lee and I were there. Finally, he said, ‘This is it.’”

   “I work from the inside out,” he told Hans. “That’s when I’m in the painting, in the middle of life, but outside of it at the same time. I can see the whole picture.” A gallery owner told him his pictures didn’t have any beginning or any end. He didn’t mean it as a compliment, more like a sneer, but it was fine by him. It was a fine enough compliment. All the twisted lips who said it didn’t know what they were talking about.

   He knew what he was doing driving his Rocket 88, too, even when he was drunk as could be, which was what he was now. “He came in for his eye-opener, a double, just after breakfast before train time, the day it happened,” said the morning bartender at Jungle Pete’s. “Start your day the way he did sometimes, you’d be in the same fix he was. If you said he was half bagged, you’d be about right.”

   Doc Klein, his on-again off-again family doctor, said it was OK for him to drink and drive. Jackson liked that. He knew trees never hit cars except in self-defense. “But stay on the road,” said Doc Klein, a big man laughing his big laugh. “Goddamn right, I always stay on the road,” Jackson said. “Except when I’m pulling into Al’s or Pete’s, then I get off the road. I have to. There’s no trees in those parking lots, anyway, thank God.” If there had been they wouldn’t have lasted long.

   Everybody who was an artist in their neck of the woods was drunk at night, especially the writers and painters. They liked to drive around in their cars when the streets were more empty than alive. If Jackson was out in the dark, he was at the head of the parade.

   He wasn’t driving right tonight. He was driving wrong. The screamer grabbing at his arm was right. He usually lived it up driving. But tonight, instead of being sure handed with the steering wheel, like he was with paint out of a can, he was being clumsy, as though he was at cross-purposes, heavy and herky-jerky. The on-target gestures he put to use to stream paint from a stick when he was working were usually the same when he drove his car. Tonight, they were too big around, whiplash gestures, like they had a life of their own.

   “He had to be moving fast, 85 to 90, anyway,” Harry Cullum said. “There is a crown where the town tar road begins at the beginning of the left curve. Jeez, I almost lost my car a couple of times there when I was a kid, but finally you smarten up and ride that crown, the one they fixed after Pollock got killed.” It was after the fact, though, like an empty bottle of beer thrown out a car window at a stop sign that isn’t there anymore. “Jackson died of drink and the Town of East Hampton Highway Department,” Wayne Barker said.

   It was close to three years ago, the last week of November, when he had stormed over the crown of the road like a firecracker. He had come back from the city on a Friday, on the train. It snowed all morning and afternoon and it was still snowing at the end of the day when he found his wheels in the lot, brushing a mound of snow off the front window with his hands, rubbing the cold out of them at the car’s heating vent. When he finally got on the road to Springs, he was one of only a handful of cars. A nor’easter was blowing in off the ocean. The car shuddered whenever the road flattened out and he was sideways to the coast.

   “I crawled up there, I could barely see, and stopped when I saw the pile of snow,” he told Lee later at home, their windows in their sash frames rattling in the wind gusts. “There was a snowdrift, five feet, six feet high, down the other side blocking the way. I backed up a little, to where my rear tires could get a grip on a stretch of clear road and stomped on the gas. I went as fast as I could, hit the snow head on, everything went white, everything disappeared, no color, just white. By the time I came out the other side the car was barely moving, just crawling.” They laughed about it all night, over dinner, and later in bed, curling up close together under a pile of blankets.

   Pale lips beside him was still screaming. How long could she keep it up? She was driving him crazy. He was driving wrong, all wrong. There was a reason. He knew it, but he also thought, how can there be a reason? His head hurt. What was it? He could feel it. Where was it? He knew it was right there, right at the front of his brain. It was like the images behind the abstractions in his paintings, right there but hard to see. When he tried to think of why he was driving wrong his head hurt bad like a next day hangover, before he could get his hands on some hair of the dog.

   He had a hangover all the time now, more than five years-worth of hangovers, but it wasn’t just from booze. It was from having catapulted to fame, putting everything he had into it, until he didn’t have anymore, and he quit pouring paint. He quit cold turkey. It was all over. When it was over he couldn’t make a painting anymore that anybody wanted. The magic was gone. When he finished his black paintings, he couldn’t give them away. Even his fame wasn’t enough to prime the pump. Nobody thought they were any good. He knew they weren’t any good. He had gone round the bend for good.

   “An artist is a person who has invented an artist,” Harold Rosenberg burst out apropos of nothing one night near the tail end of a long night of poker and drinking.

   Rosie always thinks he is right, Jackson thought. “He got it wrong on the train the day we were riding into the city together,” he told Lee. “When I said the canvas was an arena, I meant it like it was a living thing, not a dead thing. I didn’t mean slugging it out in the ring. He thought I meant it literally, even though both of us were sober at the time, and the next thing I knew I was an action painter. At least he got the inventing part right at the card game.” 

   Not like Hoffman, who was like all the others. When Lee brought her teacher, Hans Hoffman, to Springs to meet Jackson, he saw the sour look on the great man’s face right away. Hans was a neat freak, everything in its place, clean as starch and orderly. His own studio was a mess. Nothing was in its rightful place, even though he knew where everything was. There wasn’t a sign of a still life or a life model anywhere.

   “You do not work from nature,” Hans complained. “You work by heart, not from nature. This is no good, you will repeat yourself.”

   “I am nature,” Jackson said, and left it at that.

   There wasn’t a drop of hope left in the sky or anywhere on the other side of his windshield. He finally got to the curve at the dip, where the concrete stopped and the town’s blacktop started. He veered off the road, suddenly aiming for the trees. What the hell was he thinking, he thought. He stopped thinking. The car skidded in the sand. He let it slide, its front-end dead set on the big oak tree to their left.

   Going into a skid in the dirt off the road didn’t surprise him. He was going too fast, that’s all. It didn’t mean anything. The screaming woman stopped screaming. She got small next to him and her eyes got big. She was squeezing her handbag in her hands with all her might. His hands felt dry and relaxed on the steering wheel. He didn’t tense up at the wheel even when he smashed into the tree head-on. 

   The Rocket 88 broke every bone in its body when it hit the one-hundred-year-old tree. The one-time painter was catapulted over the windshield and into the woods. The front end flipped over, tossing Ruth into the weeds. When the car landed upside down, splintering the windshield, the young woman with the handbag in her hands suddenly stopped gripping it. She let out a gasp. The car horn blared, stuck in place. Gasoline poured out of the punctured gas tank. The taillights blinked on and off and on and off.

   He hit the oak tree hard as a meteor. “I’m going to become one of my paintings,” Jackson Pollack realized in mid-air, no longer in the crosshairs, on the way to forever. “I’m going to splatter all over. I’m going to be in nature, be nature, once and for all.” 

   When he caromed, he landed with a wallop, even though it was soft ground. There was a jutting out of the ground lump of rock mottled with luminous moss that had waited a lifetime for him. His neck hit the rock like a falling star. Gravity had been the heaven-sent hand that gave life to the paint and flotsam that dripped splashed flowed down onto his canvasses. It was now the hand that dealt him a death blow. He had stuck his neck out and now it was broken. He lay there like a lopped-off tree branch, cracked in the head, shoeless, arms and legs every which way.

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

Available at Amazon

Apple Books 
http://books.apple.com/us/book/id6502837788

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.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

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