Tag Archives: 147 Stanley Street

Made in Cleveland

Calling the Corner Pocket

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By Ed Staskus

   Joe Tuma’s Billiard Club wasn’t a big place, although it was big enough. There were two snooker tables, two billiards tables, six straight pool tables, a scrappy ping pong table, and half a dozen mismatched beat-up stools at a beat-up front counter. There was an eight ball table in a corner for tourists. Nobody else ever went near it. All the tables were clean as a whistle except for the eight ball table. The floor was swept nightly but never mopped. The front windows were filthy. The bathroom was filthy. There was no bathroom for women. Nobody had ever seen a woman inside Joe Tuma’s anyway, so it didn’t matter.

   The pool hall was on the south side of Euclid Ave. at E. 19th St. on the second floor of a two-story building. Pool halls were usually in basements or on second floors to save on rent. The Morse Graphic Art Supply Co. was on the ground floor. Fine art students came and went. Cleveland State University was two blocks up the street. As many times as I went to Joe Tuma’s was as many times I didn’t go to the art supply store. I wasn’t interested in art.

   Cleveland State University was where I was a freshman, at least until I dropped out instead of getting flunked out. I spent more time at the pool hall than I did attending lectures in the humanities and sciences. My teachers were always asking me who I was and if I was in the right class.

   I wasn’t the only one in the thrall of pool. Ron Mabey graduated from the Cleveland Institute of Art, lost his student deferment, but was still waiting to be drafted. He and a cousin with the same 1-A ticket to Vietnam rented cheap office space in the nearby Corlett Building. They did odd jobs. “We started going to Joe Tuma’s and spent less and less time at the office,” Ron said. “We were killing time waiting for our letters from Uncle Sam. The billiard club was more enjoyable than the 3rd Platoon, D Company, 14th Battalion, 4th Brigade, where I eventually ended up, although by the time I ended up in the army  the war against the pajama’s was over.” The United States military had been killing the NVA and Viet Cong by the score, winning battles up and down Vietnam for more than a decade, until the day it suddenly lost the war.

   Joe Tuma’s called itself a “Billiard Club” and advertised “Bowling and Billiard Supplies” on its front window. I never saw anybody wearing a monogrammed club sweater and never saw supplies of anything except balls, chalk, and cue sticks. There were no bowling supplies of any kind. I never saw Joe Tuma,, either. After a few months I stopped looking for him.  Eventually I came to doubt his existence.

   Warmed over hot dogs and lukewarm beer were both twenty five cents at Joe Tuma’s. The wieners were cooked on a Carnival King rotisserie. The beer was P. O. C. out of a keg packed in not enough ice under the front counter. P. O. C. was Pride of Cleveland brewed by the Pilsener Brewing Company. It had been Cleveland-made ever since Wenzel Medlin from Bohemia founded the brewery in 1892, although it spent several aimless years in Pittsburgh in the 1960s before coming back. When it did it celebrated by giving away limited edition giant P. O. C. bottles. One of the giant beer bottles was behind the counter. It was where the quarters for the next keg went.

   The pool hall didn’t have slot machines, darts, or foosball, staying true to pool, billiards, and  snooker. When my father found out I was playing pool he said it would only lead to gambling, laziness, and philandering. He said it was a “social ill.” I told him I didn’t have any ready money to gamble with, learning to play was elbow grease not laziness, and I didn’t know what philandering meant, even though I did. My mother had just seen the movie “The Music Man” and referred me to the song “Trouble.”

   “You got trouble, folks, right here in River City, trouble with a capital ‘T’ and that rhymes with ‘P’ and that stands for pool.”

   The Cuyahoga River was right around the bend from the pool hall and it was always in trouble. It was always catching fire. My father was an accountant and said it was the price of progress. My mom didn’t say much about it. She was a cashier at a Pick-N-Pay supermarket, racing home to make dinner for my father, brother, and sister after work. By then I had already moved to the beatnik neighborhood on Upper Prospect and heated up my own pork and beans.

   The front door of Joe Tuma’s was at the side of the building and the front stairs were lit by a 40-watt light bulb on its last legs. Inside, most of what lights there were, were situated over the tables. There were no radios and no TV’s. It was always quiet, like a church, except for the clacking sound of balls hitting each other.

   Pool balls used to be made of stone, back in the 14th century when high society played a game that was a cross of croquet and billiards. When the game moved up to a table, balls were made of wood and clay. When the makers of balls discovered ivory, they started making them out of ivory. It was a slow go, though. One elephant tusk yielded only five or six of them. They were prone to discoloring and cracking if struck with too much force. A family of Waloons in Belgium hit the jackpot after World War Two when they developed a resin and plastic combination called phenolic resin. They became the biggest manufacturers of billiard balls in the world. Every ball racked and stacked at Joe Tuma’s was an Aramith branded ball that had been made and inspected at the Sulac family factory four thousand miles away.

   Nobody ever argued about anything at Joe Tuma’s. They didn’t give a damn about politics or society’s troubles. “Less talk and more chalk,” is what they said. Somebody might tap his cue stick on the wood frame of a table to show appreciation for a shot, but that was about as demonstrative as anybody ever got.

   One of the most soft-spoken men who came and went to Joe Tuma’s was Baby Face. “I was given that tag when I was 15 years old,” he said. “I had just played Buddy Wallace right here. Buddy played straight pool in championships where he ran large numbers to beat some world class players. I played him for money to 50 points and won decisively.” Life is a game of chance and money is to keep score. It’s draw for show and follow for the dough.

   “As I was going out the door with my winnings after I beat Buddy the man who covered the pool tables for Joe, who was named Butch, asked, ‘Who’s the baby face?’ When I got into my 30s, I was on the road busting everyone I ran up on. I busted Reid Pierce at the Office Lounge in Mississippi. I busted Tommy Sanders and Gabby in Texas. I busted Rich Geiler in Washington.”

   “Who is he talking about?” I wondered, even though I knew full well he was talking about Minnesota Fats kinds of guys.

   “I was pretty much undefeated except when I ran into Mike Siegal. He showed me what a world champion could do. I played him on the big table. It was painless. He only gave me a couple of opportunities. I started stalling with him the first rack out and he hit me with a 4 pack. I never came out of it. It was painless in the end.” 

   “The easiest way to win is to not let the other guy shoot,” is what road players say.

   I didn’t know much about pool when I started playing between classes. I had played eight ball on coin-operated bar tables with my friends, but it meant nothing except some fun. When I first saw the tables at Joe Tuma’s I knew for sure I knew nothing. There were always old timers hanging around, playing an occasional game on their social security money. One of them, Brooklyn Bob, who lived in Old Brooklyn near the Cleveland Zoo and took the bus downtown, helped me. He taught me how to play straight pool. I learned how to play billiards and snooker, too. I didn’t take to billiards, although I liked the caroms on the pocketless table.

   The first thing Brooklyn Bob told me was to “stroke it, don’t poke it. The ball will go where you look, but you don’t have to aim straight if you stroke straight. Let your cue stick do the work. Take what the table offers. Don’t try to get perfect shape when good shape will do.”

   The rules were simple enough and keeping score was even simpler. Every table had sliding scoring beads on a wire perpendicular to the table, using the light centered over the pool table as the middle string mount. The beads were made of wood. Fifty of them were dark and the other set of fifty were light colored. First color to fifty carried the day.

   At first my shooting was loose and clumsy, like I was shooting with a rope. I lost more games fifty to zero than I could count. I was on the hit and hope bandwagon. After I got a little better my nickname at the pool hall became One in a Row. It got so nobody wanted to play me, so I practiced by myself.

   “It’s not the cue, it’s you,” Brooklyn Bob said. “Hold the stick like you’re shaking a lady’s hand. Don’t crush it, but don’t be limp, either. Squat the rock. If you already have position, don’t play for it. Be steady.  Don’t cry in your beer about it, though.” Bob always had bottles of Blatz he brought with him in a Pan Am stewardess’s flight bag and always had a cigarette burning down in a tin ashtray on the table beside his stool. 

   The big open room on the second floor stank from years of incessant smoking. Everybody drank beer and smoked. I didn’t drink much but started tucking a cigarette behind my ear to stay in the swim of things. The sharks smoked Camels and Lucky Strikes. The tobacco was strong stuff. I tried to not breathe too much. After a while I had a pool hall tan like everybody else.

   The fewer school classes I went to and the more I practiced at Joe Tuma’s the worse I got at erudition and the better I got at pool. I started picking up games. I never played for money because the only loose change I ever had went to pay for table time. “Never gamble with a man named after a state or a city,” Brooklyn Bob told me. When he tried to get me to play him for money, I followed his advice.

   Some of the town players and lots of the road players had nicknames, all of them more flattering than mine. There were Frisco Jack, Rocket, Handsome Danny, Cadillac Ed, and Cue Ball Kelly. Before the movie “The Hustler” came out Minnesota Fats was simply Fats, even though his real name was Rudolf Wanderone.

   “Perhaps the most striking aspect of the pool hustler’s argot is the use of nicknames. The percentage of them who have nicknames is not only higher than among either professionals or hustlers in other sports but is higher than in any other adult group in America,” Ned Polsky wrote in “Hustlers, Beats and Others.” 

   Oklahoma Flash sounded good, and he was a good shooter, but his handle had nothing to do with pool. “I had a friend who started calling me that when we played softball together in Oklahoma,” he said. “Every time I ran to first base, he said a dust cloud could beat me there.”

    I learned how to handle the cue stick and how to stand in the right stance, keeping my head down on the ball with the cue below my chin. I got in the groove of gradually approaching the cue ball keeping my follow through straight and relaxed. I stayed down after the shot. I hit thousands of practice shots, then tens of thousands, until I realized getting to the level of guys like Baby Face was going to mean hitting practice shots until the end of time. “HAMB is the only fool-proof aiming system,” Brooklyn Bob said. HAMB meant ‘Hit a Million Balls.’ I didn’t think I had it in me.

   One afternoon after attending an occasional school class I stopped at Joe Tuma’s. A crowd was gathered around the ping pong table where a man was playing all comers with a small rusty garbage can lid. His off hand was tied behind his back. Nobody was having any luck scoring any points, even when he played two opponents with two balls in play at the same time. It was Danny Vegh, who was from Hungary, where he had been the country’s boy champion, junior champion, and adult champion. 

   He came to the United States after the Hungarian Uprising. “The border opened up and I ran like hell!” he said, landing at Camp Kilner Air Force Base in New Jersey. “I knew no one in this country.” Somebody on the base told him many Hungarians were going to Cleveland. He and his wife packed up and went to Cleveland. Four years later he was the USA Singles and Doubles Table Tennis Champion. It didn’t pay the bills, though, so he opened a ping pong center.

   “The business was a complete failure,” he said.

   Since he was a good pool player, too, he moved to the Hippodrome Building just west of E. 9th St. and opened Gaylord’s Pool Hall. It was a big success. He added four ping pong tables “just because I loved it.” He started staging pool tournaments with hundreds of players competing. The entry fees went to the Cleveland Plain Dealer Charities “so we had a lot of publicity.” Kids played in age divisions. “I was in the 9 to 10-year-old group and my cousin John was in the 8 and under,” Tim Goggin said. “He could barely see over the top of the table, but still made it to the quarterfinals.”

   Now and then, somebody would blow into town, do a demonstration at Gaylord’s, give some lessons, play whoever was up to it, and blow out of town better off than the day before. They didn’t usually come to Joe Tuma’s, but one morning when I walked in a road player was showing off trick shots. He was Jew Paul. He was from the Rack & Cue in Detroit. There were dark circles under his eyes. He looked like he had been up all night. 

   “He was here all night and he’s still here,” Butch said. “He ordered breakfast for everybody, should be here soon. Make sure you stay.”

   Paul Bruseloff was Jew Paul’s real name. He was in Cleveland with a friend of his by the name of Cornbread, whose real name was Billy Joe Burge. Jew Paul was from East New York City. The first time he played pool was in 1939 when he was 12 years old. The first time he played was also the first time he gambled on the game. It was for one cent. He needed three cents to pay for an 8-ball rack and twenty cents for an hour of straight pool. He won enough to play all he wanted.

   Jew Paul made a white-collar living selling kitchenware and a no-collar small fortune betting on his cue stick. He preferred one-pocket on a snooker table but played anything and everything. What he liked most was “come out a few games behind but win all the money.” One day he was doing just that, betting $300 a game in the center and $500 a game on the side. “But the hapless guy I was playing was running out of dough, so I accidentally dropped a couple of hundred on the floor so he could keep playing and I could find out just how hapless he was.”

   After breakfast somebody tried to take Jew Paul’s picture with an Instamatic. He pushed the man away. “Pictures are for movie stars,” he said.

   “That man don’t let nobody take his picture,” Butch said.

   He wasn’t the only one. I had started taking artsy black-and-white pictures, guided by Virginia Sustarsic, a friend of mine who was a hippie photographer and some-time writer. She had access to a dark room where we developed film and pictures ourselves. I borrowed her 35mm Nikon camera and brought it to the pool hall to take some character shots, but was firmly and not-so-politely told, “No pictures.”

   When I finally went back to school full-time, after dropping out came to seem like a bad idea, I dropped playing pool. I couldn’t do both. I was majoring in English literature and film studies and going to all my classes, reading and writing at night, and working part-time to keep the wolf away from the door. It took up all my time. Playing pool would have snookered me. 

   “All gents know how to play pool,” Brooklyn Bob told me one day when I was messing around with a friend during spring break, showing him how to put English on the cue ball. The old timer took a pull on a bottle of warm Blatz. “But any gent who plays too good, he ain’t no gentleman.”

Photograph by Helaine Garren.

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

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

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

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

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

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Made in Cleveland

Staying Alive

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By Ed Staskus

   One of the concerns of Cleveland’s early settlers was that Canada might invade at any time. They were just on the other side of Lake Erie and they had plenty of boats. They might land their Canuck army somewhere in the middle of the night and lay siege to the city. Nobody knew what they would do if they captured Cleveland, they being foreigners who lived on bacon and poutine and littered their mother tongue with ”eh?” Everybody was convinced it was going to happen soon. What could they do?

   When the city fathers finally acted they formed the Cleveland Grays, a volunteer military company, to protect themselves from Canucks on the loose. They weren’t called the Grays at first. At first they were called the Cleveland City Guards but since their uniforms were gray from tip to toe they changed the name the next year. They wore Queen’s Guard bearskin hats that made them look a foot taller than they really were. They adopted “Semper Paratus” as their motto. Nobody knew what it meant because it was in Latin until the man upstairs finally explained it meant “Always Prepared.” Everybody liked that. There were 65 of them. They stayed prepared after that.

   The Cleveland Grays stayed busy even though the Canadians eventually decided to stay on their side of the border. In 1852 they put down a two-day riot at Cleveland’s Medical College. A mob bearing clubs and cleavers attacked the school, protesting the work of Resurrection Men. They were men who robbed graves of the recently deceased for dissection lectures. The rioters broke into the college. The doctors, teachers, and students fled while the bully boys destroyed all the furnishings and equipment. They ransacked the lower level looking for the body of a local woman who they believed had been body snatched. The Grays restored order, but the next day the roughnecks were on their way to burn down the house of one of the anatomy teachers when the Grays had to save the day again. The rioters saw their bearskin hats a mile away and snuck away.

   In 1861 they were the first militia in the country to form a company and respond to the call for Union soldiers. They fought at the First Battle of Manassas. They hauled the first ever captured Johnny Reb cannon of the war from the Cheat River battlefield back to Camp Cleveland in Tremont. The troops called it ‘Cannon Sesech’ after the secessionists. They fired it after every Union victory. They whooped it up loud and clear every hour for 24 hours on the day the war ended. Nobody complained about the noise. Over the years, after a Gray had been a member for twenty-five or more years, he was entitled to be called a “Pioneer” and to wear a leather apron with his uniform. He was also entitled to carry an axe when on parade. Nobody messed with them when they were on parade. They fought in the Spanish-American War and World War One. 

   After that the Militia Act proscribed them and their like from fighting in wars anymore on their own initiative. Uncle Sam still wanted them but only if they wore his regulation uniform. The Cleveland Grays lasted as a “Businessmen’s Camp” into the 1990s.

   They first set up shop on the fourth floor of a building called the Mechanics Block. Thirty years later they needed more space. They moved into a former fire station. Ten years later they moved into the newly built City Armory, sharing it with the Ohio National Guard. Soon after that a fire destroyed the building. They decided to build their own place that would stand the test of time. 

   A three-ton block of sandstone was set in place in 1893 where Bolivar Rd. meets Prospect Ave. for the foundation of the Grays Armory. It grew to be three stories high with a five-story tower on the northeast corner. It was built as an urban fortress. There is a black iron drop-gate and iron barriers in front of the solid oak front doors. Iron rods were bolted to the brick walls as window protectors. 

   The armory was built to store weapons and ammo. The drill room, which doubled as a ballroom, was where the Grays marched up and down in tight formations. But it wasn’t long before it became a kind of Blossom Music Center. The Cleveland Orchestra’s first concert in 1918 was staged there. The first time the Metropolitan Opera came to town they sang songs of doomed love and hellfire there. When John Philip Souza first marched into town his band played there. 

   Even though in the early 1970s I was living on Prospect Ave. near Cleveland State University, and later in nearby Asia Town, I didn’t know the first thing about Grays Armory. The few times I saw it I dismissed it as an old ramshackle castle with a cool-looking tower. I did, at least, until Joe Dwyer invited me to his new digs there.

   Joe and I went to St. Joseph’s High School the same four years in the 1960s and for a few years in the 1970s lived a street apart in Asia Town. Many of the suburban kids who went beatnik and hippie in those days moved downtown like us. Many of us lived in reduced circumstances, trying to keep our heads above water, living catch as catch can in our counterculture world. Joe was living rent-free in the caretaker’s quarters on the top floor of the tower. He was keeping a part-time caretaking eye on the armory.

   He showed me around the building. He told me it had just been added to the National Register of Historic Places. It looked like a forest had been chopped down for the floors, doors, stairs, and wainscoting. It was a sunny day and sunlight poured in through the windows. Everything was old but gleaming like new. We played a game of pool in the Billiard Room. We peeked into the basement where there was a 140-foot-long shooting range. We played some haphazard notes on the Wurlitzer pipe organ that had been installed a couple of years earlier. It came from a silent movie theater in Erie, Pennsylvania. It sounded creepy in the empty ballroom. Three or four concerts a year were being sponsored by the Western Reserve Theater Organ Society.

   Twenty years later my wife and I were living in Lakewood when we received a friend’s wedding invitation in the mail. The reception was being held in the main ballroom of Grays Armory. We checked the box saying we would be attending the festivities. My wife bought a new dress and I polished my dress shoes,

   We parked on Erie Ct. alongside the Erie Street Cemetery on the day of the big day. It was where Lorenzo Carter, the first permanent settler of Cleveland, was buried. It was where Chief Joc-O-Sot, who fought the first settlers, was buried. It was where almost a hundred Civil War veterans were buried, including General James Barnett, who was a commander of the Cleveland Grays. After the war he served on the commission that got the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument built on Public Square. We walked to the end of the block to the armory. The lobby was carpeted in red. There was some kind of ancient ticket booth off to the side. There was a grand staircase. The posts and railings were carved from a single slab of wood. The posts were engraved with ‘CG’ for Cleveland Grays.

   After toasts, dinner, a slice of wedding cake, and some dancing, we were standing around when somebody in our group said the armory was haunted. “Lots of people have seen ghosts here,” the man in the know said.

   “Like who?” I asked. 

   “Plenty of people,” he replied.

   “I saw a handsome young man with light brown hair, parted on one side, with a crown imperial goatee,” said Chris Woodyard, who has written a series of books about haunted places. “The spirit was wearing a Cleveland Grays woolen jacket, decorated with a glockenspiel pattern down the front, formed by braids and buttons.” Staff members said a woman wearing white often appeared at the armory’s piano. She didn’t play it but no matter where it was moved to, she was always there. She wanted to dance but didn’t have a partner. Day and night doors locked and unlocked themselves and disembodied sinister voices whispered in the shadows. Ghostly footsteps were forever setting off security alarms.

   One day the spirit of a soldier walked through a wall to get into the ballroom. A cleaning man was mopping up after a party. He watched the spirit watching him. A woman spirit wearing a party dress appeared and walked up to the man spirit. When the cleaning man coughed the spirits melted away. Another day a maintenance man was working at the back of the ballroom when a glowing green hand closed the door. He ran to the door, and opened it, but there was nobody there. The door knob oozed wormwood.

   After another drink my wife and I went looking for spooks. “Don’t bother looking for Lou,” we heard a voice behind us say. “He’ll find you.” My wife didn’t like the sound of that, but she was game and went with me. “Who is Lou?” she asked.

   Lou was a caretaker who once lived at the top of the tower in the same quarters Joe had lived in. He died of a heart attack making his rounds. He still made his rounds. Most ghosts are about unfinished business. He often walked behind people in the ballroom. When they heard his footsteps they turned to see who it was, but there was never anybody there, although they could smell the aroma from his cherry-vanilla pipe. Whenever there was a meeting in the first-floor tower room, where there was an oversized potted plant, he liked to shake it violently until it fell over.

   “Do you believe in ghosts?” I asked my wife.

   “Not during the day,” she said.  

   “How about at night?”

   “I’m a little more open-minded at night.”

   It had gotten to be night when we went on our self-guided tour of Grays Armory. We went upstairs. We stepped into the Club Room where the Grays used to sit around and puff on stogies. There were comfy leather sofas. The mahogany was dark and the atmosphere cozy. We stepped into the Billiard Room where Joe and I had shot pool years earlier. There were antlers of long dead deer on the walls. We peeked into the rooms on the upper floors. One of them was a smaller ballroom for meetings. Back in the day folks wanted to be high up so they wouldn’t have to smell the horse shit in the street. There were unlit fireplaces everywhere. We found cupboards in the Mess Room where members used to hide their booze during Prohibition. There wasn’t a drop of spirits left.

   With every step we took we had the feeling somebody or something was behind us, but every time we looked around we were alone. After a while being alone got scary. It’s better to be alone than to be in bad company, I reassured myself.

   “Maybe we should go back,” my wife suggested.

   “We’re not after fish but let’s do a little more fishing,” I said.

   We went up and down the tower. We stepped into the ground floor room. The lights went on by themselves. We heard footsteps and bumps in the night. A big dusty potted plant that looked like it was a hundred years old started to shake. It fell over.

   “That’s enough fishing for the day,” my wife said, backing up.

   In the end we didn’t see any ghosts, except for maybe Lou, which wasn’t to say we were ready to say there weren’t any. The Ghost Hunters, a paranormal team on the TV show SyFy, rooted around Grays Armory one day and found evidence of hauntings. Every time they left a room something closed the door behind them. When they investigated the basement they heard an unseen somebody say “Hello.” When they left the voice said “Goodbye.” They concluded there were spirits, but they seemed to want to have a good time more than cause a ruckus. Ghosts just want to have fun sometimes.

   “Have you ever noticed that ghosts are always wearing clothes?” my wife asked.

   “I’ve noticed without really noticing it,” I said.

   “How do their clothes get into the other dimension with them?” she asked.

   “That’s a good question,” I said. “If you ever get the chance, ask one of them.”

   “There’s a fat chance of that ever happening,” she said.

   We hadn’t seen anything substantial but we had seen enough. We had felt the presence of spirits in the shadows. We went back to the wedding reception in the ballroom. The bride and groom were the life of the party on the dance floor. True love can be like a ghost. Everybody talks about it but not many have ever seen it. They were doing the hustle to a Bee Gee’s tune being spun by the DJ. Disco is a surefire remedy for ghost sightings. The Lady in White, the lonely dancing spirit who had long haunted the armory, was nowhere in sight. She was dancing to her own tune.

   “Feel the city breakin’ and everybody shakin’, and we’re stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive,”  the Bee Gees sang in their eerie falsetto voices.

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

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

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

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

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

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Bomb City

Hard Bargain

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By Ed Staskus

   Uncle Ernie was no fool.  He knew this moment had been waiting to happen for a long time, even though it came out of the blue. He wasn’t fooled by the nondescript car that slid up to the curb across the street. He wasn’t surprised, either, that the two men in the car didn’t get out right away. He knew they were getting their bearings and that he had enough time to do what he had practiced doing when the time came. He got all the cash he kept in a Premium Plus cracker tin in the kitchen and stuffed it into his pants pockets. There was more than $78,000 of it, most of it in one hundred dollar bills. His pants bulged on both sides of his crotch with the wads of cash.

   He grabbed a pack of Pall Malls and put his bucket hat on. He slipped a belly gun into his back pocket. It was a Smith & Wesson Model 10. It was illegal to carry a concealed weapon in Ohio, but that was the least of his concerns. He quickly went into the basement, set an alarm clock wired to a bundle of dynamite, and went out the kitchen door. He stood still on the back porch for a second. He walked down the alley. A cat on top of a fence post watched him. His car was parked in a rented garage at the end of the alley. The widow who lived there didn’t have a car and appreciated the monthly rental money. He walked to the garage, unlocked it, unlocked his car, pulled it out, locked the garage up again, and drove away. He would miss his house, but he didn’t want to end up in the big house, where he knew his life would be worth nothing. It would only be worth something to the men who would want to kill him once they found out who he was. He had no doubt they would find out.

   Frank Gwozdz and Tyrone Walker watched the house for five minutes from their Crown Victoria. The front porch was in shadows. No lights were on in the windows. There was no blue flicker of a TV. Tyrone thought nobody was at home and suggested they come back in the morning.

   “Take the back door,” Frank told him, ignoring his suggestion. “Don’t do anything unless somebody comes out. I’ll go in the front door.”

   “What if the door is locked?” Tyrone asked. “We don’t have a warrant and this Earnest Coote doesn’t have a record.”

   “Like I said, I’ll take the front,” Frank said.

   The alarm clock ticked down toward the minute it had been set for. Uncle Ernie had set it for ten of them. Zero hour was coming up fast. As the timer got to where it was going Tyrone was standing behind a line of shrubs at the rear of the backyard. Frank was walking up the front walk. When the clock struck its appointed hour and the contacts made contact, the house blew up.

   The blast catapulted both Frank and Tyrone backwards. Frank landed hard on his butt, partly breaking his fall with his hands. It happened fast. The breath was knocked out of him. Tyrone was thrown backwards into the chain link fence that the shrubs were a border for. The fence absorbed then repulsed him. He bounced off the chain links and landed on his face, splitting his lower lip. The house blew up, but not outwards, saving Frank and Tyrone and the houses on both sides of Uncle Ernie’s house from too much damage. Frank scurried on his hands and knees away from the house to behind a maple tree on the tree lawn, gasping for air. Tyrone stayed on the ground. He sheltered his head with a garbage can lid. When shards of glass and splintered wood stopped raining down on them, they both stayed where they were, hoping the next shoe wouldn’t fall. The house fell in on itself. A gas line exploded and the clapboard caught fire.

   Five minutes later an engine truck from Fire Station No. 31 pulled up. The firemen began to spray water on the house with their deluge gun. They left their ladders on the truck. The second floor of the house didn’t exist anymore. When their water tank ran dry they switched to the uncurled hoses which they had attached to a hydrant. A patrol car pulled up, followed soon enough by two more of them. The policemen stood to the side. There wasn’t anything for them to do. All the neighbors who had rushed out of their houses stayed at a careful distance gaping at the fire.

   After an East Ohio Gas truck arrived, and the gas line had been shut off, the firemen finished their work. Before long all that was left of the house was a smoldering heap of charred wood and rubble. The mess had once been a place, but it wasn’t anymore. Frank and Tyrone stood in the street leaning on their Crown Victoria. Other than some cuts and bruises, neither man was hurt overmuch, although Frank had a gash on the back of his hand. He knew it needed stitches. He wrapped a handkerchief around it to staunch the bleeding.

   “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get over to Mt. Sinai.”

   “Mt. Sinai?” 

   “The hospital, not the mountain. Right now, I need a doctor, never mind Moses. They can look at your lip, too.”

   An hour later, his hand sewn up and a tetanus shot working its magic, Frank drove the few minutes to Uptown at E. 105 St. and Euclid Ave. He needed to catch his breath. He needed food. He needed a drink even more. He looked around for a place that might have both. 

   “Uptown used to be Cleveland’s second downtown,” he said as Tyrone licked his sewn up swollen lip and took in what amounted to the sights.

   “What happened to it?”

   “The race riots and Winston Willis happened to it.”

   Uptown started life as Doan’s Corners when Nathaniel Doan opened a tavern and a hotel in the early 1800s. They were built because the spot was a stagecoach stop between Cleveland and Buffalo. In the early 1900s the Alhambra Theater opened. It was a vaudeville house until it became a movie house. It sat more than a thousand in the mezzanine and nearly five hundred in the balcony. There was a pool hall next door. The young Bob Hope hustled nickels there playing the new game of nine-ball and cracking wise through misunderstandings. He was good at pocketing the number nine ball on the break, winning the game outright. The Alhambra was followed by restaurants, clubs, and more theaters. By mid-century the Circle Theater was hosting Roy Acuff and his Grand Ole Opry and Keith’s 105th Street Theater was showing first-run motion pictures on a new wide screen. 

   Ten years later Uptown started going downhill. When it did it went down fast, picking up speed on the wrong side of the hill. The neighborhood went from mostly white skin to mostly black skin. The Towne Casino had already been bombed in the 1950s. The reason was the popular music club attracted an interracial audience. The city’s grand dragons in their civil defense shelters didn’t like anything interracial. The Hough riots and Glenville shootings sealed Uptown’s fate. Nobody liked bullets flying. White flight sped up until there were almost no whites left. Those who stayed, stayed inside their homes behind closed curtains, watching the value of their properties fall to nothing. Winston Willis stepped into the breach, snapping up as many holdings as he could, opening penny arcades and adult bookstores. The Performing Arts Theater became the Scrumpy Dump Cinema. The Scrumpy Dump showed low-budget B movies about the sewer looking like up to their sad sack stars.

   Frank rolled his side window down and propped his elbow on the rim of the door. Nothing looked inviting. Everything looked like a greasy dump. He swung the wheel, took Liberty Blvd. to Larchmere Blvd., and when he got to the Academy Tavern parked on E. 128 St. He and Tyrone walked to the bar. It was a two story brick building. The electric sign read, “Food & Liquor Since 1939.” The front door was catty-corner to the corner. A dark green awning was over the door. The police detectives went inside and found seats at the far end of the bar. Frank ordered a cheeseburger with a fried egg on top and a side of pickles. Tyrone had the same except for the pickles. He didn’t like anything brined. He ordered mashed potatoes. They each had a glass of Falstaff on tap.

   “What do you think happened back there?” Tyrone asked while they waited for their food.

   “I think Earnest Coote saw us coming,” Frank said. “I don’t think it was an accident. He either rigged something up fast, or had it set up beforehand. I’m guessing he had it set up, like a fail-safe. I think he went out the back. If we had gone in a minute-or-two sooner we wouldn’t be here talking, but we didn’t, thank God. I don’t want to be laid to rest in the Badge Case before my time. I’m sure you don’t either.”

   “You think he blew his own house up?”

   “That’s what I think happened, yes.”

   “Who does something like that?”

   “Somebody who has a good reason for doing something like that. The Bomb Squad will fill us in on what happened. I wouldn’t be surprised if our man-made bombs in the basement.”

   “How’s the hand?” Tyrone asked.

   “It doesn’t hurt, yet. It’s the pills the doc gave me working their magic. He had to stitch it up because the cut was two inches long and jagged.”

   “How many stitches?”

   “Seven.”

   “Ouch,” Tyrone said as their cheeseburgers were delivered. “At least it’s your left hand.”

   “I suppose, although I’m left-handed,” Frank said.

   They ate in silence. The bar was half-empty. The Cleveland Indians were losing another game in living color on a TV behind the bar. Herb Score and Joe Tait were broadcasting the bad news. When the police detectives were done eating they finished their glasses of Falstaff. Frank paid the bill of fare for both of them. They left the Academy Tavern and walked up East 128 St. Approaching their Crown Victoria they saw two Negroes huddled beside the car. It was parked under a leafy tree. One of the men was fiddling with the driver’s side door. He had a cleft chin. The other man was the watchdog, except he was busy watching his partner getting nowhere. Both of them had one-track minds. Neither of them saw the jim-jams coming.

   “It looks like those soul brothers are trying to borrow our car,” Frank whispered.

   “Does that mean you want me to take care of it?” Tyrone whispered in his turn.

   “You’re soul brother number one in my book.”

   “All right, give me a minute,” Tyrone said, reaching for his badge to display as he started walking towards the two men. He believed in law and order by the book.

   Frank reached for the roll of dimes in his pocket, making a fist around the Roosevelts. He tucked his left hand away in his pants pocket for safe keeping. He squeezed his right hand, getting a good grip on the dimes. He believed in getting the job done right. He kept his eyes on the big man who was doing the fiddling with the lock. Frank hoped to God he didn’t break anything in his hand when he sent the man nosediving.

   He went dead set towards the thief at the car door. There was going to be trouble when he got there. He would have preferred believing the best of what he was seeing happen, since it would save toil and trouble. Oh, hell, I might as well get it over with, he thought.

Excerpted from the crime novel “Bomb City.”

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. 

“Bomb City” by Ed Staskus

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

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

Cleveland, Ohio 1975. The John Scalish Crime Family and Danny Greene’s Irish Mob are at war. Car bombs are the weapon of choice. Two police detectives are assigned to find the bomb makers. It gets personal.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Baltic Place

Mystery Street

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By Ed Staskus

   I was ten years old the first time I saw a dead man. It was the morning of Holy Saturday. The sky was low and thick with clouds. It looked like it might rain any minute. My best friend Feliksas, a Lithuanian kid like me who everybody called Felix, and I had walked to the VFW hall behind the Gulf gas station at the corner of Coronado Ave. and St. Clair Ave.  It was a log cabin-like building with dusty windows. We didn’t have anything in mind except seeing the sights and messing around. We liked to slip behind the steering wheels of unlocked cars waiting to be repaired in the lot next to the gas station and pretend adventures on dangerous roads.

   When Felix noticed flashing lights on St. Clair Ave. we went around the corner to the front of the gas station. There were two black and white Cleveland Police Department prowl cars and an ambulance there. We called their rotating lights gumball machines. We called the sirens growlers. The black and white ambulance was a Ford station wagon that was both a police car and an ambulance. A policeman was standing around doing nothing while another one kept the crawling traffic on the other side of the street on the move. The traffic on our side was filtering down side streets. The ambulance men were standing beside their black and white station wagon smoking cigarettes.

   We stood to the side of a cluster of grown-ups who were tossing glances at the dead man on the ground. Nobody was saying much. We stepped closer to the man until we were standing over him. We looked down at him. He was lying on his back, partly on the sidewalk and partly in the street. He was wearing a white shirt and a plaid jacket. One of his shoes was missing. The other one was a tasseled loafer. One of his front teeth was cracked from when his face hit the concrete going down.

   The front of his white shirt, open at the neck, was a blob of red. Some of the red was damp while the edges of the blob were going lifeless. Flies were buzzing around him. We  jumped when the dead man moaned.

   “Do you need some help?” Felix asked

   “Getting bumped off is the only help for being alive,” the dead man said in a low tone of voice.

    Felix stepped up to the stone-faced policeman doing nothing. “That man is trying to say something,” he said.

   “That man is dead,” the policeman said. “Leave him alone.”

   “Who is he?” I asked. I had never seen him in our neighborhood before.

   “He was a hoodlum.”

   “Did you shoot him?”

   “No, not us. He spun the big wheel and lost.”

   “What’s the big wheel?”

   “Never mind kid.”

   There was a dark green car parked between the gas pumps and the station. It had white wall tires. We went over to look at it. The windshield was smashed, like somebody had thrown a rock through it. We looked inside. There was dried blood on the front seat. When I looked up I saw ‘Happy Motoring!’ stenciled on the plate glass windows of the station. We turned back to the street.

   “Tell them not to bury me in the Glenville Cemetery,” the dead man said.

   Glenville Cemetery was a graveyard next to the New York Central railroad tracks not far away. It lay in a triangle of land between St. Clair Ave. and Shaw Ave.  We could walk there down E. 129th St. in ten minutes. We always passed it on our way to the Shaw Hayden Theater where we went to see  monster movie matinees.

   “Too many Jews,” the dead man said. “And now they’re burying niggers there.”

   What does it matter, I thought, even though I didn’t know very much about Jews or niggers. I didn’t know much about graveyards, either.  I always wondered what my father meant  when he said he had to work the graveyard shift. How much work do the dead need done for them? I had never been to a funeral, except for two funerals at St. George Catholic Church, where I was training to be an altar boy. I had sat in a back pew those two times and observed the goings-on as part of my training. I dozed off during the second service.

   I noticed the knot of grown-ups was gone. The stone-faced policeman and the ambulance men were still standing around waiting for something. The other policeman was standing on the corner waiting for the traffic light to change, except there weren’t any more cars. There wasn’t anybody in sight. There wasn’t a single person going into a single store even though it was shopping day. St. Clair Ave. was usually busy with women shopping at the A & P and all the other stores. Nobody seemed to be going home with a ham for Easter. Where was everybody? 

   A young woman came running down the street, pushed past the policemen, and threw herself on top of the dead man. Her hair rolled down her shoulders. The curls of her hair smelled like wet ashes. She started to cry, quietly rubbing the tears off her face with the sleeve of her dress.

   The dead man wiggled a forefinger and motioned for me to come closer.

   “Do a pal a favor, kid,” he said. “I don’t want her to cry over me and I don’t want her asking me for anything. Get her off me and help her home. It’s just around the corner. I was on my way there when I got mine.”

   The two ambulance men lifted her off him, got her steady on her feet, and Felix and I helped her back to her apartment. She lived on the second floor of a two story brick building on Dedman Ct. a block away on the other side of Lancelot Ave. It looked like nobody lived there. Most of the windows and the front door were broken. The roof was partly caved in. The lawn was choked with weeds.

   “Nobody lives here except me,” she said.

   “Was that man your boyfriend?” Felix asked.

   “No, my boyfriend disappeared two years ago, on the second day of 1959. I heard he joined the merchant marine, hauling ore on the Edmund Fitzgerald.” The Edmund Fitzgerald was the biggest boat on the Great Lakes. “Whoever that is lying on the cement over there looks like he’s got a free pass to the graveyard down the street.”

   “He asked us to make sure he wasn’t buried there.”

   “I don’t know why. He always said he was Italian, but he was half Jewish and half Negro, too.” 

   She turned to Felix. “Isn’t your name Feliksas?” she asked.

   “Yes, how did you know?”

   “Do you know your name means lucky?”

   “No, I didn’t know, nobody ever told me. How do you know my name?”

   “I know everybody’s names, everybody in this neighborhood, everybody on their way to the boneyard, where everybody is going, sooner or later, trying to not hear their own hollow footsteps. Forgiveness of sins and resurrection of the flesh.” Felix’s eyes got wide. I was getting spooked. A crow on top of the roof cawed three times.

  “What was your boyfriend’s name?” Felix asked.

   “I don’t know,” she said. “I think it was Frankie Paramo, but I’m not sure anymore. I’m starting to forget what he looked like.” She leaned against a shadow. Her face was going limpid. “May he rest in peace,” she said. Her voice was a thin lament. We went down the front walk to the sidewalk. When we turned to wave goodbye she wasn’t there anymore, like she had never existed.

   The gas station was in front of us before we knew it. I felt torpid and restless at the same time. The dead man was where we had left him. We took a step over to where he was. He looked up at the sky and said, “Life, what did you ever do for me? It’s my turn now. I’m not going to do anything for you anymore.”

   His words were muffled. His eyes were like dull marbles. Felix yawned like he was nervous. When we glanced at the dead man again he was blurry like there was an eclipse of wet moths around him flapping their wings. A dog barked monotonously in a backyard on Coronado Ave.

   A four-door Oldsmobile raced down St. Clair Ave. “What the hell does he think he’s doing,” one of the policemen groused. Not everybody saw the big car go past. It was like trying to see a falling star during the day. Felix said it was his Uncle Gediminas. Most of the Lithuanians in Cleveland lived in Glenville, although all of them were moving to North Collinwood. I had heard my father tell my mother one night they would have to start looking for a new house soon, or urban renewal would make our family home worthless. I didn’t know what urban renewal meant, although it sounded bad. I knew worthless meant bad. 

   Uncle Gediminas was an middle-aged undersized man with an old man’s turkey neck. He was an accountant and could afford a new car whenever he wanted one, even though he unfailingly bought used cars that burned oil. “He’s always staring down his kids,” Felix said. “All his kids are afraid of him. He bosses them around day and night.” 

   The street was full of echoes, even though the few people on the street weren’t saying anything. It felt like somebody was following us. We looked everywhere but couldn’t spot anybody.

   “Do you want to wait for him to die?” Felix asked.

   “I don’t think he has much time left even though the policeman said he’s already dead.”:

   “Not dead enough,” said a man walking past. His hair was shiny with Brylcreem and he was wearing a bowling alley shirt. He spit in the gutter before crossing St. Clair Ave.

   “Let’s wait,” I said to Felix.” I don’t want to just sneak away.”

   “You found out I’m not long for this world?” the dead man said. “I’ve known that for a while now, since the beginning. I don’t like it when people talk about me like I’m not here. You kids should go home where you belong.”

   “Is your name Frankie?” Felix asked.

   “Yeah.”

   “Do you believe in Heaven?”

   “I believe in Hell.”

   The sky got dark. It started to rain. It was a steady rain. The ground got full of worms. The dead man started to melt. When he started melting there was no stopping him. Five minutes later he had come undone and was a pile of mud. One of the policemen stepped up to him. “There’s no sense in getting worked up about it. Call off the pathologist. Call the fire department instead. They can hose him down the drain. It will save the taxpayers the trouble of an autopsy and a burial.”

   We were soaking wet after a minute of rain. We got chilled and goosebumps popped up on our arms and legs. Felix ran home down Coronado Ave. and I ran home down Bartfield Ave. Even though it was storming and had gotten darker, none of the houses were lit up. They were all shade and shape. We lived in a side-by-side Polish double that my parents bought on the cheap with my father’s sister and her family when they had emigrated to the United States.

   Our front door was locked. I ran to the back door. It was locked. I knocked but nobody came to the door. I kicked at it but still nobody came to let me in. I went into the backyard to the tornado doors. They were never locked. One of the doors had a handle. I pulled on the handle. The doors were locked.

   A German widow lived next door to us. Her husband was dead and her children had moved away. She was alone in the world. In a week she would be one hundred years old and her solitude would be full-fledged. I ran to her house. She was sitting on a lawn chair in the middle of her basement. A small storage room was where she kept her canned goods. She kept carrots, radishes, and potatoes in bins. She was writing in a spiral-bound memo pad. 

   Her memory was on the fritz. She wrote notes and Scotch taped pictures in her pad. There were pictures of my father, mother, brother, sister, and me, and our names in the pad. There were pictures of her fridge and stove and what they were called, which was fridge and stove. There were diagrams of all her rooms and everything in the rooms, what they were for and what they were called. There was a scrap of paper pinned to the front of her house dress. Her name, Agatha, was written on the paper in block letters.

   “My stomach is shriveled up from hunger,” she said, even though she had enough food stored in the basement to last a year. She often forgot to eat. My parents checked up on her every few days.

   “Where is everybody?” I asked.

   “Your family is all in the house. They are watching the TV. They will be sorry if a tornado comes. I told them so, but they wouldn’t listen.”

   “Can I borrow the key to get into our basement?”

   She had it in a pocket of her apron. She handed it to me. I unlocked the doors and swung them open. The concrete steps led to the cellar. They were slippery with slime. It was where our father told us we had to go whenever there was a tornado. He told us about the last one in Cleveland in 1953 that killed nine people, injured three hundred, and left two hundred homeless when their homes were blown away. “The cellar will protect us from high-speed winds and flying debris,” he said.

   I ran up the stairs to our kitchen. All the lights in the house were on. My  brother and sister were arguing on the living room floor while my parents watched the weatherman on the TV. We had an old Zenith. The only time it worked right was when there was a clear sky. There was a clap of faraway thunder. The TV went fuzzy. I couldn’t understand a word the weatherman was saying.

   “Where have you been?” my mother demanded. “You’re all wet. Go change your clothes before you catch your death of cold. And don’t touch the Easter ham. That’s for tomorrow.”

   “I didn’t know you were home,” I said. “The house was dark and locked up.”

   “What do you mean dark and locked up? Your father and I went grocery shopping but got back an hour ago. It was so busy out there. What with this gloom in the middle of the day, the house has been lit up since we got home.”

   My brother, sister, and I slept upstairs in the front bedroom. Our sister slept in a corner. Our parents slept in the back bedroom. They needed privacy by night. There was a bathroom and a linen closet. I dried off with a bath towel. I changed my clothes and sat on my bed looking out on Bartfield Ave. All the houses on the street were suddenly bright in new sunshine. The police cars and ambulance in front of the Gulf gas station were gone. The pile of mud that had been the dead man was gone. A firemen had a hose on the ground, where he had flattened it, and was rolling it up to put back on the pumper. 

   I ran up the street and found Felix on his way to meet me. We got our bikes and rode down Eddy Rd. and through the village of Bratenahl to Gordon Park on the Lake Erie shoreline. The sun made the mist in the air sparkle and bent the light. We sat on the edge of an overhang on a steep bank of the lake and watched a rainbow hover in the sky until it vanished off the face of the earth.

Photograph by Fred Lyon.

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

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

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

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

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

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Home Movies

Ready to Rumble

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By Ed Staskus

   When I went to work for Gene Weiss in the 1980s all I knew about him was that he owned a racquetball club in Euclid, Ohio and that he was a famous wrestler. The club was Racquettime, which also went by the name of Gene Weiss’s Place for Fitness. It was a boxy two-story building on Lakeland Blvd. with a big sign clearly visible from I-90. The front doors were on the second floor, the front desk was just inside, and the locker rooms were downstairs. There were lots of racquetball courts and a weight room. Gene sold workout equipment on the side. His other enterprises were top secret.

   I got the job because I had worked for the Back Wall, a Beachwood-based chain of clubs that had transformed its customer base into a cash cow by selling what they touted as lifetime memberships at a ridiculously low price. There was an initiation fee and monthly payments for a while but after that it was the gravy train for the members. At least, that was the pitch. After everybody’s money was safe and sound in the corporate vault, they went out of business and closed all their clubs.

   My job was to reproduce the cash cow. I got an office just inside the front door and was expected to sign up as many members to Gene’s new plan as possible. What he didn’t know was that I was barely an operational salesman. My job at the Back Wall had sort of involved sales, but my aim wasn’t true. I was a hapless peddler.

   Gene went to Shaker Heights High School and won the state wrestling title. After he graduated, he won gold and silver medals for the USA at the Maccabiah Games. In 1961 he was named coach of the United States wrestling team. Four years later he was flag bearer for the USA at the opening ceremonies of the 7th World Maccabiah Games in Israel. He was named Ohio Amateur Athletic Union coach of the year and continued to coach with the United States wrestling teams. In the meantime, he became National Wrestling Chairman of the Maccabiah Games and a member of the United States Olympic Committee. 

   He was inducted into the Ohio Wrestling Hall of Fame in 1977 and in 1980 was inducted into both the Cleveland Sports Hall of Fame and the Shaker Heights High School Hall of Fame. In the 1970s he refereed pro rassling at the Cleveland Arena. He was running the Ohio School of Wrestling when I went to work for him. 

   He introduced himself and his accomplishments to me at some length. I listened dutifully, an attentive expression on my face. When he came up for air, I thought, I hope there isn’t a quiz on this tomorrow. I hadn’t taken notes and most of it went in one ear and out the other. I had gotten the gist of it, though. He was great guy. It was a great club. We were going to have a great time.

   Everybody loved Gene Weiss. “Gene is tough as nails on the outside, but a softie on the inside with a big heart of gold,” said Don Roskoph. “He’s a tough guy with a big heart,” said Bill Turk. “A friend like Gene comes along once in a lifetime. He’s always for the underdog and will give you the shirt off his back in a second,” said Angelo Amato.

   Gene loved unqualified praise. I found out later praise undeserved is satire in disguise. Acclaim for the bridge that got you over to the other side is deserved. Otherwise, it’s hot air.

   “Gene is a big bad dude. He could grab you and he could hurt you.” said Ryan Peters, the athletic director at Beachwood High School. At the same time, he’s a teddy bear, he hastily added. “You can’t help walking away from a meeting with Gene and not give him a big hug. He’s one of these guys that when you meet with him, he’d tell you a story that would change your life.”

   He never hugged me but was always punching my upper arms and slapping me on the back. Thank God he pulled his punches. I loved Gene for a few months until the day after day glad-handing got to be too much while his promises got smaller and smaller, finally fading away to nothing.


   Gene was the owner operator of Racquettime, although he wasn’t in the club overly much nor did it seem like he did over much. When he was there, he mostly mixed with the members and checked with the staff about how things were going. Several young women worked at the front desk and his right-hand man Katherine the Great was in some kind of supervisory position, although whether she was the manager or assistant manager or simply the all-seeing eye for Gene was never clear to me. What was clear was that everybody did what she told them to do, except me. 

   I knew Kathy Roach from racquetball tournaments. She was a good player, athletic fast strong. She didn’t like me, and I didn’t like her. I don’t know why, but there it was. As much as Gene led with smiles she led with scowls. I was forced to play racquetball with Gene every so often, which was literally a pain. He was a human hinder. He hated letting me hit open winners and would do his best to obstruct me. He was a man-sized slab of iron. I wasn’t. Running into him meant bouncing off him, while the ball went bouncing away and he won the point. 

   If I complained about it, he explained and explained, going on and on about why how where I was wrong. On top of that, he signed my paycheck, so I didn’t complain. Besides, his takedowns were accompanied by a full mouth smile full of sparkling Chiclet teeth. I wondered what candy store he got his choppers from.

   Sometimes in the locker room after games he talked about wrestlers, bringing up the names of stars like Mr. Fuji, Tarzan Tyler, Andre the Giant, Killer Kowakski, and the Iron Sheik. I didn’t know anything about wrestling and didn’t know any of them from the man in the moon. He seemed to be on a first name basis with torso twisters far and wide.

   Kathy was a better racquetball player than Gene. However, even though Gene necessarily won every game we played, she never won a single game. I disliked her so much my goal was to always shut her out, which I did. I slowed my serves and shots down against Gene but sped them up against Kathy. After goose-egging her several times she stopped asking me to play. I never asked her, so we stopped altogether, although she never stopped shooting me dark looks.

   She fawned over Gene as though he was the Great Sugar Daddy. After a while I looked the other way. Too much sugar. It wasn’t any of my business anyway. I had my eyes on Emily, a pretty dark-haired girl who worked at the front desk. Despite my best efforts, including charming her parents, I never got anywhere.

   I saw Gene every day because he was there more-or-less every day. I started work at 11 o’clock and worked until 7 o’clock. Gene was gone most afternoons and came back as the after-work surge got started. I made sure I was gone at seven, no matter what. By then I had long ago learned that going the extra mile for employers was giving up my time in a losing cause. When push came to shove it would mean nothing.

   Gene was paying me more than the Back Wall had, said he would spring for health insurance, and promised me a bonus when all was said and done. At first, selling the dream team memberships was easy. I sold them to the tried-and-true members, everybody who loved the club and loved Gene. After that the going got harder, especially with members who only came to the club occasionally sporadically. They wanted to pay for court time or workout time and leave it at that. They didn’t want to sign any contracts. They didn’t want to give me their bank account numbers for monthly withdrawals. It was even harder when it came to first timers. They always asked for a free one-time pass and usually never came back a second time. I was expected to get their phone numbers and follow up with them. I learned quickly enough what it felt like to have one person after another hang up on me.

   But the work wasn’t hard and I kept plugging away. I needed the paycheck since I was living paycheck to paycheck.

   One day at my desk I started experiencing discomfort in my right side. By the end of the day the discomfort had turned to pain. Gene noticed I was squirming during our daily meeting the next day and asked me what was wrong. When I told him he took me to the locker room and said a session in the whirlpool would take care of business. I said maybe I should go see a doctor. He said no, I didn’t need a doctor. He was big on saunas, steams, and whirlpools, and insisted I stay in the hot water tub until I couldn’t stand it anymore. After I got out, I felt better all over except for the pain in my side. It felt worse. That night I couldn’t sleep.

   The next morning, I went to Lakewood Hospital and found out I had kidney stones. The ER doctor gave me a small allowance of morphine-like pills and told me to drink as much water as my bladder could stand. “The pain of kidney stones is right up there with giving birth,” he said. I didn’t go to work that day and that night slept like a baby. In the morning I felt like a new man.

   When the bill for the hospital visit came a few weeks later I left it in Gene’s in-tray, which is when I found out I didn’t have health insurance after all. It was all hot air. He had never signed me up and never paid any premiums. I wasn’t sure what to do. If I confronted him about it, he might put me in a headlock. I heard through the grapevine that nobody, except for maybe Kathy Roach, had health insurance. 

   The last couple of months I worked at Racquettime I stayed busy discovering things weren’t going my way. I had been promising new members we were going to be putting an Olympic-size swimming pool in soon. When I pressed Gene about it, since members were pressing me about it, he hemmed and hawed. I realized there wasn’t any pool on the way.

   Gene wanted me to start giving racquetball lessons, but I didn’t want to. I had done lessons at the Back Wall. No matter how many times I told men, women, and teenagers to hit a thousand forehands backhands ceiling shots and to practice their serves, they never did. What they wanted to do was hit the ball around with me while I tried to correct their swings. Everybody thought there was one sure way to become a winner. When I tried to explain that everybody good went at it in their own way, and what they should do is practice and discover what worked for them, all the while grooving their swings, they weren’t interested. They wanted to know what the easy magic was.

   When I asked Gene about my bonus, the bonus he had promised me for selling his new memberships, he said I hadn’t sold enough of them to make paying me a bonus worth it. On top of that he was so disappointed in my performance that he was going to have to let me go, starting right now. It didn’t take me entirely by surprise, but it took me by surprise. I hadn’t planned on it and hadn’t gone looking for anything new. I didn’t bother arguing with him. I knew when I was down for the count.

   “Gene was on my paper route when I was a kid,” said Randy Harris. “He loved to show me a one-hundred-dollar bill when I’d ring his doorbell with my well-known motto, ‘Cleveland Plain Dealer .75 cents please’, thinking I’d wait until next week. I always told him I’d be right back while I rode my bike home and returned with $99.25.”

   On my way home I reminded myself, never trust the heavyweights. They didn’t get to be big cheeses by giving anybody anything unless they absolutely had to. They got rich by pinning suckers to the mat until they squealed. The only people they respect are others like them, and even that respect is provisional.

   The kingfish always say they got where they are through hard work. They get annoyed when asked whose hard work. They don’t care if they are rich, so long as they have a boat load of money, no matter where it came from. Top dogs make the rules. It’s the law of the land. My rule of thumb was to keep my distance, since when the mondo men make trouble it’s always the small fry who get beat on the anvil. 

   I had been thinking about going to work for myself. Hardly anybody gets much satisfaction other than bread and butter by being a wage slave. I wasn’t going to make it to Fort Knox with the modest plan I had in mind, but I moved the thought from the back of my mind to the front. I might still have to work part-time for somebody else to stay afloat, but I was going to make sure to be wary of whoever it was.

   Nobody quits when they’re wrestling the Iron Sheik and gets sick and tired of it. You quit when the Iron Sheik gets sick and tired of you. I was old enough to know the rules, but I was old enough to know the exception to the rules, as well.

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. An assassin in the dugout.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Home Movies

Walking the Line

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By Ed Staskus

   When I got out of high school finding a job was easy as pie, as long as it was the most thankless job known to man, work like grit blasting, jackhammering, and tearing off roofs. None of it was a bowl of cherries, not that anybody ever said it was going to be. It was more like a crown of thorns with the only salvation at the end of the day being the end of the day.

   The good thing about grit blasting was that the work was indoors, in an all-metal room, out of the sun and rain. The bad thing about it was being in an all-metal room, in a haze of abrasive dust, hoping the blast hose wouldn’t bust a gut. The work room measured twenty feet wide by fifty feet long by fifteen feet tall. It was all business, no windows, no distractions, and no escape.

   The metal finishing shop was in Brook Park near Cleveland Hopkins Airport. Starting time was 7:30 AM, no ifs ands or buts. God forbid I miss my bus. They did shot-peening, deburring, and metal polishing. Other than the occasional odd job, I only did one thing. I blasted an assortment of metal dinguses, most of them incomprehensible to me, with steel grit or crushed glass. Sometimes, if the object was small, I worked at a sandblasting cabinet. It had a foot operated control valve.

   I wore a heavy canvas long-sleeved blast suit, gloves with gauntlets, and steel-toed safety boots. When I was ready, the last thing I put on was an air-fed metal helmet with a shawl protector. My boss was adamant that I go slow, never stopping at one spot with my blaster, keeping the same pace, which was a crawl. I had no problem with that since I could barely move in my protective suit.

   The shop was noisy, dusty, and dingy from front to back, although when we got finished with whatever thing we had been working on it looked brand new. After three months, though, I felt beat up. I was down for the count and quit in the middle of my shift. I took a bus to Edgewater Park, stripped off my shirt, and lay on the sand in the sun the rest of the day. My fish belly got some good color.

   I didn’t think my next job, jackhammering, could be worse than grit blasting. I was wrong. It was worse. It was like hanging on to a prehistoric woodpecker. The pneumatic t-shaped tool weighed a hundred pounds and was very loud. When it got revved up it sounded louder than a jet engine. I was given Willson earmuffs to save my hearing. I didn’t wear them my first five minutes on the job. After the first five minutes I never took them off.

   Charles King, a pioneering engineer in the Gilded Age, produced the first air-powered jackhammer for the mining industry. Miners had labored for ages breaking rocks with sledgehammers. The jackhammer was a groundbreaking invention for them. They are percussive tools. They pound rock and concrete with thousands of hits a minute. Once we had  broken a slab of concrete into small pieces it was time to move on to the next slab. For basic breaking I used a basic point bit. The old hands, who were built like fire hydrants,  used a flat bit for better control.

   We sprayed the concrete with water to keep the dust down. We wore face masks. Since shrapnel wasn’t an unusual hazard, I wore heavy-duty pants and a long-sleeved shirt. I still had my steel-toed boots from my grit blasting days. There was no steep learning curve. Even though I was young and fit, I took breaks all the time. The shock waves were too much to stand. Whole-body vibration is fun and games for only so long. At times I wished for an earthquake to do the work for me.

   The old hands knew the score but still complained about fatigue, headaches, and lower back pain. They sometimes took five to lay down flat on their backs on whatever ground was nearby. It was hard work controlling the heavy tool. We rotated on and off. Everybody said jackhammers were better than sledgehammers in the hot sun, but it struck me as making a fine distinction to no purpose. I didn’t last long. I was neither strong nor sizable enough for the work. After my last day I went home to my apartment and slept for a day-and-a half. My lumpy mattress felt like a bed of roses. 

   It was still summer, so I signed on with a roofing company. There was even less of a learning curve. I was dragooned to be one of the guys who tore roofs off. It sounded easy enough but it was hard to do. I didn’t know it was the most physically demanding specialty trade work of all time. I didn’t know it was the fourth most dangerous job in the country, either.

   “It’s hard work and it can be a risk,” the boss said. “You need to be proud of what you do. It’s good stuff.”

   The other guys ignored the boss. They said don’t climb ladders with your hands in your pockets. I showed them my open palms. “Don’t slide down ladders,” one of the men said showing me his hands. “It might have splinters.” They said don’t slip when topside. I said I would watch out for that. They said don’t touch wires and get electrocuted. I agreed to watch out for that, too. They claimed the company was a storm chaser, even though we never worked during storms. I found out what it meant soon enough. Our warranty was in effect so long as the homeowner could see our truck’s license plate as we were driving away. 

   If it was ninety degrees on the street, it was nine hundred degrees on the roof. If it was a dark-colored or metal roof, it was even hotter. I got a sunburned face my first day. I wore sunscreen and a baseball cap as a matter of course after that. I got heat rash and learned to never wear jeans or dark-colored clothing. I got heat cramps and learned to drink gallons of water. 

   There were two of us at the bottom of the totem pole. We were responsible for cleaning up. The rolling magnetic sweeper was my favorite tool. Sweeping for loose nails and screws was incredibly easy and meant the end of the job was at hand. The pay was good, but I didn’t like going up and down ladders. Once I got on the roof, I settled down, but ladders made me jumpy. I finally had enough of them and called in sick. I stayed sick until the office manager stopped calling me.

   Summer started to drift away after Labor Day. I applied for work at the nearby Collinwood Rail Yards and was hired as a temporary workhand for as long as they needed me. The railroad yard and diesel terminal had been there for about one hundred years, after a machine shop and roundhouse were originally built to repair locomotives. Miles of stock yard rail was laid for freight trains coming and going. By 1930 there one hundred and twenty miles of track handling two thousand cars daily. During World War Two the Collinwood Yards became one of the major switching and repair facilities for the New York Central, and after that for Penn Central.

   My job title was Extra Clerk. I thought it meant a cushy office job. What it actually meant was I had to work wherever they wanted me to, filling in when somebody was sick or on vacation. I found out soon enough that nobody in any office ever got sick or went on vacation.

   A warehouse had been built near the roundhouse. There was a smaller storehouse with two offices next to it. The front office was for whoever wanted to sit around in it. The back office was for my boss. I worked for him even when I was working for somebody else. He was Isaiah Wood, an older man who always wore an Irish scally cap indoors and outdoors, rain or shine. He wasn’t Irish. He was a rabble rouser for the Nation of Islam. He always had stacks of their newspaper “Muhammed Speaks” on the floor behind his desk. When it became “Bilalian News” he piled up stacks of those.

   He sold them to African Americans who worked in the yard. They trooped in, plunked down their dough, and walked out with the newspaper in a coat pocket. Nobody who was white ever trooped in and plunked down anything. Isaiah Wood was disliked by every white man in the Collinwood Yards, especially when I let out who I worked for. They all told me what a dismal dead-end I was stuck in.

   He had a poster on the wall of the Nation of Islam kingpin Elijah Muhammed wearing sunglasses and a funny hat with stars and crescent moons emblazoned on it. The poster quoted the kingpin. “If you think the white man isn’t the devil like I have taught you, then bring me your devil and I will show you that the white man has no equal.” Whenever I had to go into his office the poster was right behind him so it was right in my face.

   He liked to say things like, “Whenever you look at a black man you are looking at God.” Then he would tell Wally and me that there were two or three gondolas with rail wheels on them that needed unloading. He tried to make it sound like orders from the mouth of God, speaking low and slow. We trudged out to the gondolas low and slow.

   Wally was Ozor Benko. Nobody ever called him Ozor or even Ozzie. Everybody called him Wally. He was shorter and older than Isaiah. He had been married for almost fifty years. His wife put together his lunch pail of sandwiches, apples, and grapes. The sandwiches were always Hungarian since he and his wife were Hungarian. He especially liked black bread smeared with cream cheese and topped with plum jam.

   Wally and I worked together. Every morning at 7 AM we collected wood from broken pallets and built a bonfire. Some winter days the fire was as big as Isaiah’s hatred of the white man. We stood around it once it got roaring and warmed ourselves up. Anybody passing by was welcome to take a spot. Whenever we had to unload a gondola in bad weather, we made sure to have a 55-gallon steel drum nearby with a fire going in it. We thawed our hands and dried our gloves over the fire.

   When we were unloading rail wheels the two of us stood in the gondola with a crane on a flat car at hand. The crane operator swung his block to us, one of us wrote a number on the wheel with a thick yellow crayon, while the other one attached a sling to the wheel. The crane lifted it, setting it down in a row of them, and swung back to us. It wasn’t hard work, except when it was cold, snowy, and slippery. There wasn’t as much snow that winter as there would be a few years later during the Great Blizzard, but it was cold enough.

   Wally started taking days off when his wife got sick. I didn’t mind because another Extra Clerk like me, who was about my age, filled in. One week Wally didn’t come to work at all. At the end of the next week Isaiah told me Wally’s wife had died and he would be taking a few weeks off. When he came back, he looked terrible. He started going to one of the bars just outside the yard for lunch, eating pickled eggs, fried baloney sandwiches, and swigging bottles of P.O.C. 

   Even still, he lost weight, getting thinner. His clothes hung loose on him. His skin got gray and cadaverous. He died two months later. He missed his wife so much he didn’t want to go on living. He had a heart attack and died on his sofa watching “Sanford and Son” on a portable TV. We thought he died of a broken heart. Isaiah didn’t say much, although he went to Wally’s funeral. I went with him. We each had a P. O. C. afterwards.

   When spring came, I was assigned to be a tracker in the switching yard. I was given a clipboard and a pocketful of pencils. My job was walking the line. Boxcars, flat cars, and gondolas were busted up a cut and sorted by railway company, loaded or unloaded, destination, car type, and whether they needed repairs. The black snakes hauling coal, unloading across the street, weren’t on my beat. I walked miles a day every day, noting and writing it all down and delivering the paperwork to an office in the shadow of the terminal.

   I discovered small beat-up shacks tucked into shadows where workmen hung out, making hay, killing time, reading the daily papers, listening to the radio, playing cards, and drinking. A lot of drinking went on in the yard and at the bars on East 152nd St. just outside the main entry gate. Even more drinking happened on payday, when many men cashed their checks at the bars and drank part of it before their wives could get their hands on what was left.

   By the end of summer, I was out of a job. Conrail was taking over, cutting costs, and laying workers off. First hired first fired. When the 1970s came to an end Conrail closed the diesel locomotive repair facilities and sold off most of the rail yard. By that time, I didn’t care. I had squirreled away the hard cash I had made and gone back to college so I could make my way. My father was a fan of higher education.

   He had been a miner in Sudbury, Ontario in the 1950s until he finally saw the light. When he did we emigrated to the United States where he worked days and studied nights at Western Reserve University, graduating with a degree in accounting. He was determined to work with his head and not his hands.

   Everybody said I had my father’s looks, but we didn’t always look at things the same way. He had a bad habit of threatening me with the ways of the world, with all the terrible things that were out there. He was from the Old World and had survived World War Two, on the wrong end of the stick for most of it. Even though he and I didn’t routinely see eye to eye, after a year of punching the working stiff’s time clock, I began thinking he might be on to something about working with your head. I wasn’t big on accepted wisdom, but I thought maybe it was time to put my thinking cap on.

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. An assassin in the dugout.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Home Movies

Champing at the Bit

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By Ed Staskus

   By 1984 many bands had strutted their stuff at the Richfield Coliseum. It was built for basketball and anything else that could be booked between games. Everybody called the venue the Palace on the Prairie. It was in Richfield, Ohio. The bands included Led Zeppelin in 1975, Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band in 1978, the Rolling Stones in 1981, and Queen in 1982. The Bee Gees drove girls to screaming, crying, and pleading in 1979.

   Frank Sinatra opened the place with a show in October 1974. “The crisscross of lights, mirroring the animation of 21,000 stylish people packed from floor to roof, transformed the gray amphitheater in the hills of Richfield Township into a huge first-night bouquet of green and blue,” is how The Cleveland Plain Dealer splashed Old Blue Eye’s show across its front page. We called him Slacksey because, no matter what, his slacks were always neatly pressed. Roger Daltrey gone solo closed the doors and shut off the lights for good in 1994. His show drew fewer than 5,000 fans. Nobody wrote a word about it or how he was dressed. Over the years there were might have been a thousand musical events at the Richfield Coliseum. 

   Vann Halen opened for Black Sabbath in 1978 and came back as headliners in 1984. When they did, they had to sit on their hands waiting for ice to melt. Walt Disney’s Magic Kingdom on Ice had just skated out of the building. When Van Halen came to town it was the one and only time I saw the band and the one and only time I went to a show at the Richfield Coliseum. 

   It wasn’t that I didn’t go to rock ‘n roll shows. It was that the few I went to were closer to home, like at the Allen Theater, the Agora, and Engineer’s Hall, where it was standing room only. There were no seats. Downtown was nearby but Richfield was a long way for my long-suffering car. Besides, I was by necessity a Scrooge. Big shows charged big bucks. First things came first, like food and shelter. 

   I saw the Doors at the Allen Theater in 1970, the Clash at the Agora in 1979, and the Dead Kennedys at Engineer’s Hall in 1983. The Dead Kennedys blew into town during a heat wave. The air conditioning at the Engineer’s Hall was non-existent and there were no windows. Everybody sweated up a storm and everybody stayed through the encore. Six years later the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers sold their building. It was demolished and replaced by a posh hotel.

   The Doors opened their sold-out Friday night show in 1970 with ‘Roadhouse Blues’ followed by ‘Break on Through’ and ‘Backdoor Man’. They covered Bo Diddley’s ‘Who Do You Love?’ That was a surprise. “I walk 47 miles of barbed wire, I use a cobra snake for a necktie, I got a brand new house on the roadside, made from rattlesnake hide.” They sounded much better live than on carefully managed vinyl. They were more than worth the six dollars for my orchestra seat ticket. My girlfriend paid her own way. We had an even-steven relationship. Eli Radish, a local band, opened, and were funky and fun, but all through their set everybody was antsy waiting for Jim Morrison.

   “He worked the crowd with his staring sneers and sexy leather posing, witch doctor mumbling and slouching about,” said Jim Brite, who was in the crowd. “The lighting and sound were dramatic. The band was great, with extended solos and workmanlike professionalism, delivering the music behind the shaman. No one could take their eyes off Jim. It was one of the best concerts I ever saw and I’ll never forget it.”

   The Doors were banned in Miami for Jim Morrison’s obscene language and lewd behavior. He told the city fathers to call him the Lizard King. They had been banned from performing in Cincinnati and Dayton the year before. None of it mattered to the 3,000 of us filling every seat at the Allen Theater.

   “Jim Morrison swigged beer and smiled a lot between numbers,” Dick Wooten wrote in The Cleveland Press the nest day. “When he performs, he closes his eyes, cups his hand over his right ear, and clutches the mike. His voice is pleasant, but his style also involves shouts and screams that hammer your nervous system.”

   When it was over we whistled, roared, and clapped until the house lights came on. We were disappointed there was no encore. Everybody was getting to their feet when Jim Morrison suddenly came back on stage. “Somebody stole my leather jacket, he bellowed. “Thanks a lot Cleveland!” He flipped us the finger. Then he said, “Nobody leaves until I get it back!” Nobody knew what to do. A half-dozen rough-looking bikers jogged to the back of the hall and blocked the doors. When my girlfriend and I looked to the side for another way out, Jim Morrison had left the stage, but then a minute later came back.

   “Sorry, that was a mistake. I found my jacket.” 

   He said the band wanted to play some more songs to make up for the mistake, but that John Densmore’s hands were messed up. He was the group’s drummer. The beat couldn’t go on without a beat, except it could and did.

   “John their drummer was walking around backstage and holding up his hands which seemed bloody in the creases of his fingers,” said Skip Heil, the drummer for Eli Radish. “I felt all warmed up since we played before them, so I said I’ll do it. I wasn’t sure of the songs, but I thought they were simple shuffles.” 

   After two encores, and telling everybody how much he loved Cleveland, Jim Morrison accidentally locked himself in an old bathroom backstage. One of the band’s roadies said, “Stand back Jim.” He knocked the door down and set him free.

   The band toured non-stop after they left Cleveland. They had been touring non-stop for several years. Jim Morrison died in Paris of a heroin overdose the next year and the door shut forever on the band. It was a shame.

   The Richfield Coliseum was an arena in the middle of nowhere, halfway between Akron and Cleveland. It was built to be the home of the Cleveland Cavaliers, the local NBA team, although indoor soccer, indoor football, and hockey were played there, too. Larry Bird of the Boston Celtics said it was his favorite place to shoot hoops. He played his last pro game there. Muhammed Ali fought Chuck Wepner there in 1975. Dave Jones, Ali’s nutritionist, could never get the boxer to try soy burgers. He had to have his red meat. Chuck Wepner was his red meat that night. There were rodeos and monster trucks. There were high wire acts and hallelujah choruses. The WWF Survivor Series came and went and came back.

   I had a friend who had gotten free tickets to see Van Halen. Two other friends of ours went with us but had to fork over $10.75 apiece for the privilege. I didn’t know much about the band, except that they were no doubt about it loud as two or three jet engines, but free is free and since I had the free time I went. 

   The headbangers were from Pasadena California. They were Eddie Van Halen on guitar, Eddie’s brother Alex Van Halen on drums, Mike Anthony on bass, and David Lee Roth belting it out up front. Mike Anthony sang back-up while keeping the low pitch going.  

   “It wasn’t until the fourth or fifth Van Halen record that people would go, ‘Wow! You’re singing backgrounds on those records. We thought it was David Lee Roth doing that, too,’” the bass player said. “And I go, Hell, no! That’s not David Lee Roth.”

   The word among aficionado’s was that the band was “restoring hard rock to the forefront of the music scene,” whatever that meant. I was listening to lots of John Lee Hooker and the Balfa Brothers. The rock ‘n roll parade was largely passing me by. I didn’t have a clue who was at the front of the parade.

    Everybody I asked said Van Halen’s live shows were crazy energetic and Eddie Van Halen was a crazy virtuoso on the electric guitar. During the show he switched guitars right and left, but more-or-less stuck to a Stratocaster, except it wasn’t exactly a Stratocaster. Eddie Van Halen called it a Frankenstrat.

   “I wanted a Fender vibrato and a Stratocaster body style with a humbucker in it, and it did not exist,” he said. “People looked at me like I was crazy when I said that’s what I want. Where could I go to have someone make me one? Well, no one would, so I built one myself.” He wasn’t trying to find himself. He was creating himself.

   His homemade six-string was almost ten years old in 1984, made of odds and ends, a two-piece maple neck stuck onto a Stratocaster-style body. He used a chisel to gouge a hole in the body where he stuck a humbucking pickup taken out of a 1958 Gibson. He used black electrical tape to wrap up the loose ends and a can of red spray paint to get the look he wanted. When he met Kramer Guitar boss Dennis Berardi in 1982 Eddie showed him his Frankenstrat. It was his prize possession. 

   “We went up to his house and he got it out,” Dennis said. “It looked like something you’d throw in the garbage. That was his famous guitar.” 

   Van Halen released their first LP in 1978. By 1982 they had released four more LP’s. When they came to northeast Ohio they were one of the most successful rock acts of the day, if not the most successful. Their album “1984” sold 10 million copies and generated four hit singles. “Jump” jumped the charts to become a number one single.

   When the lights went down and the stage lights went up, the band took their spots. Eddie Van Halen wore tiger striped camo pants and a matching open jacket over no shirt. He wore a white bandana and his hair long. Mike Anthony wore a dark short-sleeved shirt and red pants. He wore his hair long, too. David Lee Roth wore a sleeveless vest, leather pants ripped and stitched every which way, and hula hoop bracelets on his wrists. He wore his hair even longer. Alex Van Halen wore a headband. The headband was all I could see of him behind his Wall of Drums. There were speakers galore stacked on top of each other on both sides of the drum set.

   When they launched into “Running with the Devil” Mike Anthony ran across the stage and slid on his knees playing the opening notes. David Lee Roth was a wild man, swinging a sword around like Zorro and doing acrobatics like the Olympian Kurt Thomas. He did Radio City Rockette kicks and jumped over the drum set while singing “Jump.” 

   Taylor Swift would have flipped out if she had been alive, but she wasn’t going to be alive for another five years. When she came into her own years later she got very good at strutting on stage, but she never jumped a drum set. The audience at the Palace on the Prairie was alive as they were ever going to be that night. David Lee Roth’s high flying got a standing ovation.

   In the middle of one song, David Lee Roth stopped singing. The band played on but slowly dropped out, one instrument at a time. “I say fuck the show, let’s all go across the street and get drunk,” he shouted into his handheld microphone. The crowd hooted, hollered, and cheered, forgetting for a moment they were in the middle of nowhere and the closest bar was miles away. 

   One of the best parts of the show was when Alex Van Halen and Mike Anthony did a long bass and drum duet. Eddie Van Halen did some good work on keyboards, doing the opener for “I’ll Wait.” He did his best work, however, on his guitars. He had a way of playing with two hands on the fretboard. He learned it from Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin. 

   “I think I got the idea of tapping by watching him do his “Heartbreaker” solo back in 1971. He was doing a pull-off to an open string, and I thought wait a minute, open string and pull off? I can do that, but what if I use my finger as the nut and move it around? I just kind of took it and ran with it.” He filed for and got a patent for a device that attaches to the back of an electric guitar. It allows the musician to employ the tapping technique by playing the guitar like a piano with the face upward instead of forward.

   Most of us stayed in our seats during most of the show, only coming to our feet to applaud, but there was an undulating crowd squished like sardines at the front of the stage, where they stayed from beginning to end. They never left their feet. It was more than loud enough where we were up near the rafters. It had to be deafening if not mind-blowing being at the lip of the speakers.

   By the time the show ended Eddie Van Halen and David Lee Roth had long since stripped off their shirts. They came back for several encores and then the music was over. It took a half hour to shuffle out of the arena, a half hour to find our car, and another half hour to inch along the traffic jam the half mile to the highway. My sense hearing came back somewhere along I-271 on the way home.

   After the concert I went back to listening to the blues and zydeco. I didn’t rush out to buy any records by Van Halen. My cat and the neighbors, not to mention my peace and quiet roommate, would have complained about the noise. I tried explaining to my cat that one man’s noise was another man’s symphony, but he wasn’t having any of it. 

   Six years later, after the excitement of being pushed and pulled into existence had died down, when Taylor Swift was in her crib in the living room, she took a peek at a film clip on MTV of the 1984 Van Halen concert at the Richfield Coliseum. She went bananas over the sold-out crowd. She made a vow then and there that she would do the sure thing. She wasn’t going to invite 20,000 fans to hit the bottle. She was going to schmooze them into buying the bottle for her.

    The first thing she would do when she was ready to sing her way to stardom was head to Nashville. It would be a baby step, but she had her sights set. It was going to be the hillbilly highway first and then the superhighway. Her father was a stockbroker at Merrill Lynch and her mother was a marketing manager at an advertising agency. She already knew the way to the teller’s window at the bank. She was determined to be a rich girl when she was grown up. 

   She was sure as shooting not going to strum a Frankenstrat or bust out any freaky Mighty Mouse moves, with or without a sword, with or without a shirt, although her legs were fair game. They were shapely legs made for boots that were made for walking. She was going to belt out her break-up ballads and march her way to the front of the hit parade. She was going to blend Frank Sinatra’s pressed pants with some tried-and-true country, add a dash of spicy pop, mix in lots of love and heartache, and deliver it with catchy melodies. 

   Van Halen’s aim during their time at the top of the charts seemed to be to die of exhaustion rather than boredom. Their aim was true. Taylor Swift’s aim was different. She was going to the top of the charts but she wasn’t going to die of exhaustion getting there. She wasn’t going to take any chances, no matter how boring it might be.

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

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

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

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

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

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Paperback Yoga

Gods and Monsters

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By Ed Staskus

   The Bhagavad Gita, a classic poem of 700 verses divided into eighteen books, composed in about 200 BC, is considered a monument to the human heart and spirit, testifying to man’s quest for truth and wisdom. It is often called “The Song of God.” It covers a wide range of topics, dilemmas, and themes, some vintage and hallowed, while some are not so much among the angels.

   In its own way, and in the same way, it rivals the Iliad. It sings of arms and the man. It is about volition, judgment, heroism, and redemption. It is about making yourself the man you mean to be, and the man you must become to meet the world headfirst.

   For more than two thousand years the canonic text, long ago subsumed into India’s national epic Mahabharta, has been considered one of the ultimate instruction manuals for living a spiritual life, no matter that it is set in martial times. Somebody by the name of Vyasa is supposed to have written it, but that’s like saying Homer wrote the Iliad or God wrote the Bible.

   In modern times, like the Bible and the Quran, many of the insights of the Bhagavad Gita continue to address the problems of the 21st century, speaking to issues such as choice, duty, and purpose. It was written for a reason, but the reason can be faceted, dimensional, and conflicting. Many great men have extolled its virtues.

   “When doubts haunt me, when disappointments stare me in the face, and I see not one ray of hope on the horizon, I turn to the Bhagavad Gita and find a verse to comfort me,”  Mahatma Gandhi said.

   “When I read the Bhagavad Gita and reflect about how God created this universe, everything else seems so superfluous,” Albert Einstein said.

   “It’s about the game of awakening, about the coming into Spirit,” said Ram Dass, the author of “Path to God: Living the Bhagavad Gita.”

   In the world of yoga, the Bhagavad Gita is both bedrock and revelatory, because it is through Arjuna’s questions and Krishna’s answers – the mainstays of the text – that the underpinnings and practice of yoga are revealed. Although yoga has much to do with physical and mental well-being, in the Bhagavad Gita the original spiritual purpose of the practice, connecting one’s consciousness to the supreme consciousness, is the nexus of the poem. Everything else is coincident to controlling one’s body, mind, and senses for the purpose of uniting with the divine.

   The Bhagavad Gita is not without its problems, however, among them its recruiting poster warrior sub-text, its wild inconsistencies regarding non-attachment, and its top-down rationale for ordering human affairs.

   One of the most vexing problems concerning the poem is how to take Krishna. Is he the avatar of yoga’s most abiding and sublime motifs, such as vairagya and ahimsa, or not? Vairagya, or non-attachment, and ahimsa, or non-violence, are two of the basic precepts alive and well in nearly all forms of yogic thought.

   Or is he a monster who advocates war for his own unspeakable reasons, justifying fratricidal conflict with specious arguments about the meaninglessness of physical existence? Is he the avatar of liberty, or is he Uncle Caesar, Uncle Napoleon, and Uncle Sam all rolled up in one?

   The problem comes to a boil in Book 11.

   As Book 10 ends Krishna declares that he is so vast and great that just a single fragment of him is what “supports the entire universe.“ Despite this grand declaration, Arjuna responds that although he doesn’t doubt Krishna’s greatness and godliness, he would still like to see first-hand what it all amounts to. “I want to see for myself the splendor of your ultimate form,” he says.

   Krishna grants Arjuna divine sight for a few minutes so that he can transcend his mortal vision and see Krishna for what he really is. What follows in Book 11 are six omniscient narrative stanzas and seventeen stanzas spoken first-hand by Arjuna describing what he is seeing. His eyewitness account makes up the salient stanzas, beginning with “I see all gods in your body.”

   Krishna is described as being everything and everywhere, without beginning or end. At the same time, he is described as sitting on a lotus throne, wearing a crown, and bearing a mace and a discus. Which is it? Is he everywhere or in one place?

   His discus is a symbol of the knowledge of truth and his mace is a symbol of the power of knowledge. Krishna is everything, but at the same time is the King, or Lord. He knows what the truth is, being everywhere and everything, and as the King or Lord, wields the power of that knowledge. He knows when to bring it to bear. He knows when to crack the bell.

   Arjuna goes on to describe the amazed angels and deranged demons that gaze on Krishna, the chants the sages sing to him, and how the “innards” of mortals tremble at the sight of him. The image of guts going gutless is bleak. Since Krishna is said to have “billion-fanged mouths blazing like the fires of doomsday” no one should be surprised at the bellyful of distress mortal men might feel at the sight of him.

   The next lines are the crux of the problem.

   They describe the opposing armies on the battlefield of Kuru, who are those of the Pandavas, led by the virtuous Arjuna, and those of the Kauravas, led by the one hundred sons of a blind king. They are both being swallowed up indiscriminately by the voracious Krishna, who Arjuna is seeing stripped down to his appetite.

   “Rushing headlong into your hideous, gaping, knife-fanged jaws. I see them with skulls crushed, their raw flesh stuck to your teeth,” Arjuna says. “As the rivers in many torrents rush toward the ocean, all these warriors are pouring down into your blazing mouths. As moths rush into a flame and are burned in an instant, all beings plunge down your gullet and instantly are consumed.”

   It is a godless Gita as Krishna goes about his grisly business. He is on the other side of fear. He is safe in his own immortality.

   The Hebrew god of the Old Testament is often described as angry and cruel. He has nothing on the Hindu god Krishna. Not once in the almost seven thousand sightings of the Christian divinity in the Old Testament is Yahweh ever described as having “gaping, knife-fanged jaws.”

   If the Bhagavad Gita is a recruiting poster for Krishna’s promotion of war, which is his often enough stated and explicit intention throughout the poem, the slogan “I Want You” takes on a sinister double meaning. Regardless of what side they stand on, all the warriors on the battlefield of Kuru are grist for the mill. All of Krishna’s reasoning, arguments, and commands are to one purpose, which is to get the detritus of war to pour down the craw of his rapacious mouth. 

   In the movie “King Kong” the big monkey tried to use Fay Wray as a toothpick. In Greek mythology Kronos, the Titan god of time, devoured his children for fear that they would one day overthrow him. In the Bhagavad Gita everything is grist for the mill. Neither self-survival nor the niceties of gastronomy seem to motivate Krishna. He is the great maw that must be fed and sated, although from all accounts in the Bhagavad Gita it is doubtful that Krishna can ever be sated, given his enormous hunger and preoccupation with the eternal.

   Krishna does not explain himself other than to say he is death, annihilating all things, and ultimately the “shatterer of worlds.” He bluntly declares that both armies will perish with or without Arjuna, and echoing Homer again, specifically the Illiad, urges Arjuna to fight and win everlasting glory.

   It is a harrowing picture. Never look a gift horse in the mouth.

   Krishna blandly advises Arjuna to not be frightened anymore and to see him as he was before. When he does, Arjuna is put at ease. It is an extraordinary turnaround after seeing the “shatterer of worlds” gobble up thousands of men like so many French fries.

   Krishna explains the merits of living in the now for most of the Bhagavad Gita. At the end of Book 11 he has apparently succeeded.  Arjuna says his “mind has regained its composure” and it is on to the next thing. There will be blood, and that’s that. He has moved forward from one now to the next now without any thought of consequences or repercussions. Every now is now the same as every other now.

   In Book 1 Arjuna catalogued his many and valid reasons for not going to war, not including ahimsa, which is never mentioned. Be that as it may, Krishna has won the day. Arjuna says at the end of the poem, “I have no more doubts. I will act according to your command.” Like a lamb going to slaughter he consents to Krishna driving his chariot back into the god-ordained fray. It is unclear how this decision to go to war on the battlefield of Kuru dovetails with uniting to the divine, the supposed purpose of Krishna’s yoga lessons.

   The godless Gita gets it wrong when it goes recruiting poster, when Krishna goes the Phantom of Liberty, like a headless horseman on a soapbox. George Orwell got it right in “1984” when he savaged the self-righteous ruling class with the bitter epithet “Freedom is slavery, war is peace.”

   The Bhagavad Gita ends with the poet Sanjaya, who is reciting the poem, saying that he has seen “splendor and virtue and spiritual wealth.”  This may be an apt assessment, especially in Books 2 through 8, but it cannot be right when seen in the light of Book 11, in which Krishna reveals his true nature, which is self-serving and spiritually bankrupt, if not downright deadly.

   Practicing non-attachment in order to apprehend the divine, as Krishna advises at the beginning of Book 7, may be the way to go when living the yogic life, but when Krishna adds the refrain that it requires “surrendering yourself to me,” it might be time to speed-dial the nearest martial arts center to hold back the “knife-fanged jaws” of the angry and ferocious god. When it comes to getting swallowed up by monsters, it’s time to fight back.

A version of this story appeared in Elephant Journal.

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

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

A Mid-Century Crime Thriller

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

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

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

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

Home Movies

Rolling With the Punches

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By Ed Staskus

   I was taken aback the day my mother told me that, other than the two-week sun and sand Lithuanian youth camp in Wasaga Beach, and our one-week Boy Scout camp at Pymatuning State Park, I would be working most of the summer at the newspaper Dirva. I shouldn’t have been surprised, since my parents believed in the work ethic and worked like a dogs, but I was. She gave me an annoyed look when I blurted out it would screw up my off-from-school plans.

   She and I weren’t on the same page, so I kept my dismay to myself. It wouldn’t have helped, anyway. I knew once she told me I would be working at Dirva from the day after Independence Day to Labor Day, I would be working there. My mother’s best friend was Regina Ciuberkiene and Regina’s husband, Jonas, was the editor of Dirva. They had arranged it. Thank God it was only part-time. I would be home before four and didn’t have to work on Fridays. I was going to be enjoying three-day weekends before I even knew what three-day weekends were.

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

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

   The first day I slouched my way to work was a sun-drenched summer morning. I was down on Dirva but resigned to the handwriting on the wall. I rode two CTS buses, transferring once, from where we lived off St. Clair Ave. to E. 105th St. and over Liberty Blvd. down to Superior Ave. It was the same two buses and same route I took going to school, to St. George’s, on E. 67th St. and Superior Ave.

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

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

   If we had somehow survived the atomic blast, even though we all brought our own sandwiches in Jetson and Dudley Do-Right lunch boxes, we would have all slowly starved to death trying to live on crumbs and apple cores. Our movers and shakers in D. C. wouldn’t have been any help, snug in their bunker under the Pentagon. 

   Jonas Ciuberkis was our neighbor two houses down from where we lived off St. Clair Ave, on the corner of Bartfield and Coronado, in a Polish double my parents had bought with my father’s sister and her family. He was the editor of Dirva, working out of a small office next to the front door. A quiet man, going bald, careful in manner, he was married to a woman fifteen-some years his junior, a woman who had given him three children, and who was fleshy and gregarious. Nobody knew how they made it work.

   Regina Ciuberkiene had an opinion about everything and could talk your ear off. It didn’t matter that we were just kids. A little less talking and a little more action is what we believed in. We avoided her. My mother never called her Regina. She called her Ciuberkiene, even to her face. Many of Jonas’s friends called him Janis, which is Latvian for Jonas. He had studied law in Lithuania and worked in Latvia before the war. Their two daughters were either too old or too young for us, but their son, Arunas, was just right and we horsed around with him.

   Dirva was in a drab one-story building on Superior Ave., next to the haunted house that was next to St. George’s. The Lithuanian Hall Society was next door to Dirva. It was where civic and cultural business was done. It was also where there were parties, dances, and heavy drinking. Jonas Ciuberkis wasn’t sure what to do with me, so the first few days I didn’t do anything. After that he obliged me to start cleaning up the mess, starting with the bathroom. My job was to do this, do that, or whatever I was told to do.

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

   By the time World War One was over there were almost ten thousand Lithuanians in Cleveland. They had long been sick of the Tsar. It didn’t take them long to get sick of the communists. St. George’s was their church. Dirva was their newspaper. It was put out by the Ohio Lithuanian Publishing Company, which was then run by Apdonas Bartusevicius. 

   After World War Two boatloads of Lithuanians fleeing Europe made it to Cleveland. Dirva published local, national, and international news, as well as keeping everybody informed about what was going on back in the homeland. We mailed the paper to Detroit and Pittsburgh and other places where there was a community.

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

   He usually wore a white shirt and brown pleated pants. His thin hair was brownish gray. He drove a brown car. The interior was tan Naugahyde, clean and anonymous. No one would ever have suspected he had a vivacious wife. He turned right on Norwood Rd., six blocks later turned right on St. Clair Ave., past the Slovenian National Home, to the Maple Lanes Bowling Alley and Tavern. It took five minutes. He parked on the street and we went in. Nothing was going on in the bowling alley, but he wasn’t going to the bowling alley, anyway. He walked into the bar, checking to see that I was following him, and took a stool.

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

   I sat down next to him. The bartender stepped up and a heavy shadow fell over me. He was wearing a bow tie and looked like as big as a mattress wearing a bow tie. I couldn’t see around him even if I had wanted to.

   Jonas Ciuberkis ordered a shot and a water chaser and asked me what I wanted. I wanted a Coca-Cola. I wanted it to be ice cold. It was in the 90s and humid. There was a big glass jar of pickled eggs at his elbow. He took one for himself and nodded at the jar, looking at me. I said thanks, but no thanks. Pickled eggs are eggs hard boiled, the shell removed, and submerged in a solution of vinegar, salt, spices, and seasonings. The eggs are left in the brine anywhere from one day to several months. They get more and more rubbery the longer they are in the pickling solution.

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

   Pennsylvania Dutch style means whole beets, onions, vinegar, sugar and salt, as well as cloves and a cinnamon stick are used as the brine. The eggs looked pinkish purple. I took a bite, gingerly. It wasn’t bad. It was far better than the koseliena, which was chopped cow’s tongues and pig’s feet in cold aspic, my mother was always trying to get us to eat. Some food from the old country should have been left in the old country, dead and buried.

   When the bartender moved to the side, I saw a large painting right in front of me. It was on the wall above the top shelf of liquor bottles. It was of a half-naked woman reclining on her side on a chaise, looking down on the drinkers, her long blonde hair hanging loose. Her eyes were wide set and her lips pouty red. It was Lili St. Cyr, a burlesque dancer forty-some years ago. She was a stripper known for her cutting-edge performances. One of her most famous tricks was “The Flying G.” While she was doing her striptease, the lights slowly going down, just at the instant when everything went completely dark, a man in the wings with a fishing rod would snag her G-string with a hook and pull it off. Even if you didn’t blink it looked like it had disappeared just like that.

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

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

   He talked about the “Great Books,” one of his favorite subjects, so I didn’t tell him about my reading habits, which revolved around Fantomas, Doc Savage, and John Carter of Mars. He talked about Lithuania, his other favorite subject, its history, the commies, and how to restore its freedom. I didn’t tell him it was going in one ear and out the other. He talked in a passionate way, but I couldn’t pay attention, so I gave up, and set my sights back on Lili St. Cyr. When I did she started looking familiar. I finally realized, if she were wearing clothes, she looked just like Regina Ciuberkiene, wide set eyes and full mouth, buxom, calves of salami.  She wasn’t a spitting image but as close as spit got.

   I noticed the black and white portable TV high on the wall in a corner was broadcasting a re-run of a boxing match. The two men were taking small steps, staying on the balls of their feet, and never crossing their legs so they never lost their balance. When one threw a punch the other one rolled with it. They were doing a lot of chopping, throwing punches right and left, but not many chips were flying.

   Jonas Ciuberkis had to drag me away and never invited me to Maple Lanes again. Mondays through Thursdays the long summer crawled by, while Fridays through Sundays flew by. I fooled around with my friends during my three-day weekends, rode my bike, and played a boatload of pick-up baseball. By the time my employment was coming to an end, Labor Day fast approaching, I had come to an accommodation with my job. The printing press and I were on speaking terms. I was no longer down on Dirva. I almost enjoyed it. I asked about my paychecks. I hadn’t seen a single one of them.

   “I gave them to your father every two weeks,” my boss said.

   “Oh,” I said.

   I didn’t ask my father about the paychecks. He was a fanatical saver, being an accountant, putting every spare penny in the bank. I thought I knew what he was going to be doing with the money, which was clothes and tuition for school. I didn’t have much money, anyway, so less of it wasn’t going to be a burden.

   By the next year we had moved past Five Points to the new Lithuanian neighborhood in North Collinwood. Everybody was moving there because, with urban renewal in full swing, black people were steadily shifting east, moving into our old neighborhood. “We like them less than the hillbillies,” my father said “They’re lazy.” If you weren’t a workaholic my parents thought you were lazy.

   The first Lithuanians in Cleveland lived near downtown, but fifty years later were mostly living in the St. Clair – Superior neighborhood around St. George’s. After that they moved near the church of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, off of E. 185th St. Most Lithuanians are Roman Catholic, although some are Lutherans, and a few are Jewish. None are pagans anymore. A small group of Cleveland’s Lithuanians broke off to live among working-class Poles on the south side, even though there is no love lost between Poles and Lithuanians.

   I enrolled in St. Joseph’s High School when the time came. It was where E. 185th St. intersected with Lakeshore Blvd. It was an all-boy’s school. I took a peek at Dirva now and then, but when classes were on all I read were my schoolbooks. I read Doc Savage adventure books on weekends. There were twenty-four of them in all. I read them all. My favorite was “The Secret of Satan’s Spine.”

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

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

   When I heard the St. Joseph’s High School bowling team was going there for a tournament, I told them I knew the ins and outs of the bowling alley and they let me tag along. Everybody asked me about the painting, which the new owners hadn’t messed with. I told them I knew everything about it. I didn’t really know the painting from playing polo, although I knew the seniors at school liked blondes the best. 

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

   That was unlikely to happen, because everybody in our neck of the woods went to church on Sundays. Even Lili St. Cyr probably went back in the day, to atone for her strip teasing sins. There weren’t as many churches as bars, but it was close enough. There would have been gossip like wildfire if it happened, front page news that you had rolled a three hundred game, and there would have been hell to pay, everybody saying tell Old Scratch that Mr. Perfect is rolling himself there as fast as he can.

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

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

A Mid-Century Crime Thriller

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

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

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

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

Home Movies

Eye on the Prize

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By Ed Staskus

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

   “What’s the idea?” I asked.

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

   “Who is One-Eyed Charley?” 

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

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

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

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

   “She drives all that way every day?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

A Mid-Century Crime Thriller

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

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

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

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