Tag Archives: Ed Staskus

Accidental Reality

City on Fire

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By Ed Staskus

   “It was like the sky blew up all at once with lightning bolts and thunder,” he said. Thick black smoke turned day to night. His dog Buddy bolted up the front steps and pawed at the door. It was every dog for himself. “Only the pen of a Dante could do justice to the sights and sounds that occurred in the St. Clair neighborhood that hellish afternoon,” local writer John Bellamy said.

   Hal’s mother ran out of the house. Buddy ran into the house. Hal ran to his mother on the front lawn. They looked up at the burning sky.

   “Captain Albert Zahler of the Cleveland Fire Department, Engine Company No. 19, was in his quarters at East 55th Street,” Cleveland Police Inspector Tim Costello’s said. “Suddenly the windows rattled, and the building began to shake. He ran outside and was met by a blast of extremely hot air. He observed hundreds of people running toward him and could see flames up over the tops of the buildings between himself and the fire. He hastened to the telephone in his quarters and caused a two-alarm to be sounded. Then with his men and apparatus he started out of the station and got as far as the apron in front but found the fire shooting up the street as though coming from a flame thrower such as is used by our armed forces.”

   The firemen fled back onto the station. Captain Zahler ran to his telephone again and revised the SOS to a five-alarm. When the flames moved away from the front of the station house, he and his men started out again. They didn’t get far.

   “They had gone but a short distance when they were met by more flame. They jumped from their apparatus and threw themselves on the ground until it had passed over. When they arose, they were tossed about as feathers in a wind, due to the brisance of the explosion creating a vacuum. One man sustained a broken leg and others received severe burns.”  

   The explosion and subsequent too many to count fires were caused when an East Ohio Gas liquefied gas tank started leaking. The gas flowed into the street and began to vaporize. It turned into a thick white fog. Nobody knows how it happened, but it ignited. It might have been a spark from a passing railcar or somebody lighting a cigarette. The thunderous bang wiped out the tank and everything else in its way, starting with two roofers.

   It happened at the foot of East 61st St near the New York Central Railroad tracks. When the gas blew up it blew up at about 25 million horsepower, the same as the combined output of all the hydroelectric plants west of the Mississippi River in 1944. Streets shook four miles away. Flames reached 3,000 feet high, and the heat reached 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. After the war, a nuclear scientist estimated that the explosion released energy the equivalent of two and a half kilotons of dynamite, or about one-sixth the yield of the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.

   Tim Kelley’s father was home on leave from the armed forces after finishing basic training. He and a cousin were messing around the neighborhood when the big bang happened. “They took shelter under a box car to watch until they realized the steel wheels had gotten too hot to touch,” Tim said. They agreed It was time to go. They beat a hasty retreat.

   Hal, his kid brother Willie, and mother Agnes lived on East 66th St. and Lexington Ave., just a mile-or-so from the East Ohio tank farm. Agnes sprayed garden hose water on their house until the water pressure dropped to nothing. Standing on the front porch they watched a tangled mass of cars, busses, and townsfolk on foot going the other way. Police, fire, and civil defense cars and trucks raced towards the fire, which was spewing gas, molten steel, and rock wool into the sky. Birds turned to charcoal and fell out of trees. Hal’s dog Buddy snuck into the basement and didn’t come out for three days.

   When the storage tank, holding 90 million cubic feet of liquid natural gas in reserve for local war production, exploded, fire engulfed more than a square mile of city life, from St. Clair Ave. to the Shoreway, from East 55thSt. to East 67th St. The sky went red and orange then squid ink black. Fire boats poured water on factories along the shoreline of Lake Erie to keep them from burning down. 

   Sandy “Candy Man” Drago was checking a shipment of pipes at the tank depot that day. His candy was on his desk. His car was parked in a nearby lot. When the tank ruptured and exploded, he was knocked flat and the paperwork in his hands turned to ashes. When he looked himself over for damage, his clothes were gone. He was left wearing underpants with melted elastic. He ran for his life. His office and the candy on his desk caught fire. His Chevy caught fire. Two roofers replacing slates on top of the tank were blown to kingdom come. Not even a fragment of them was ever found.

   Mary Kolar was in her kitchen when a fireball smashed through the window, landing on her linoleum floor.  Her first thought was, “My God, the Nazis are here.” She swept up her children and ran for her life. Her house caught on fire. They passed a charred man caught on top of a fence. He was dead. “All that was left were his shoes.” When teenager Josie Mivsek rushed to her house, it was just in time to see it collapse. She later retrieved her marbles, being a marble-shooting champion, but they had all melted together into a lump.

   The smell of burning whiskey hung over streets as taverns and backyard stills went up in smoke. The copper lines and barrels of yeast melted. Cash money tucked away into drawers and under mattresses was set alight and lost forever. Some lost their life’s savings.

   Eleanore Karlinger was working on the Sunday bulletin at St. Vitus Catholic Church. When she was knocked off her feet she stayed there. It can’t be an air raid, she thought. She cradled her head just in case. Then she thought it must have been the devil. When she came to her senses, she thought about getting the hell out of the church. She started to run but went back to man the phones in case the house of God was needed for shelter. Mothers dragged their children into the church, which was still standing safe and sound, for safety.

   Housewives were caught unaware as flames raced through sewers and up their drains and their homes were suddenly on fire. “I was going to plug in my sweeper,” said Mrs. Charles Flickinger. “Suddenly it seems like the walls turned all red. I looked at the windows and the shades were on fire. The house filled with smoke. I think the furnace had blown up, then I see the fire all around.”

   Hal’s house didn’t catch fire. His brother, mother, and he didn’t have to shelter at Wilson School. It was where the Red Cross ended up taking in nearly 700 suddenly homeless men, women, and children. It was more than a week before anybody went back to school.

   Less than a half hour after the first explosion, a second tank exploded. Gas ran into the streets, into the gutters, and down catch basins into sewers, igniting and blowing up wherever it pooled. Telephone poles bent in the heat, smoking and igniting. Pavement was blasted into chunks and manhole covers sent flying. Fire trucks fell into sinkholes.  

   “Manhole covers were being blown up into the air like flipping pennies heads or tails,” Hal said. One of them was found in Glenville, miles away. One fell from the sky onto the heads of two men. All that day and the next day sirens never stopped wailing. More explosions followed, seven in all, smaller in scope but each one unleashing a fireball. When things died down “it looked like the end of the world,” a dismayed man said.

   Hal’s world had already been turned upside down twice. He was 2 years old when his father, who ran a corner store, was robbed, shot, and killed by two young hoodlums. His mother found out while in the hospital giving birth to his brother Willie. After she re-married, within a few short years, Hal’s stepfather died after a short sudden illness. Agnes Schaser never married again, going it alone, raising her two boys with no help from anybody. The land of dreams had turned into bad dreams. She was from Romania and would have gone back except for the war.

   When Albert Kotnik’s house shook like it was going to fall apart, he grabbed his two children and ran outside, followed by his wife. They looked towards the east side where it looked like hell had suddenly become real. They turned around when they heard all the windows of their house cracking and busting. The house was on fire all at once. It burned down to the ground in ten minutes. 

   Marcella Reichard’s house on Lake Court burned down to the ground. So did every one of the other twenty-three houses on her cul-de-sac. “I grabbed my mother and my little sister, and we knelt and prayed. Mother went out the back way, but I told her she would be running right into the flames. I told them to hold their hands over their eyes and run toward the lake. Then we just ran as fast as we could.” More than 10,000 people were evacuated from the neighborhood.

   Jack McLaughlin’s father died at the tank farm trying to rescue a great-uncle who worked for East Ohio Gas. Jack was the same age as Hal. “This was in God’s plans,” he said. Many who died worked for East Ohio Gas. Some of them were never identified, burnt so badly as to make identification impossible. Others were never found, their flesh and bone vaporized. Anthony Greenway worked for East Ohio Gas. He was killed almost immediately. “Uncle Anthony’s damaged watch was located and returned to the family. It was all they ever found of him,” said Kathy Chamberlain.

   Fatality figures for the burned are hard to come by eighty years later, although it is certain many of the severely burned subsequently died. “They didn’t have the tools and treatments in the 1940s we have today,” says Cleveland dermatologist William Camp. “They would have died of electrolyte loss, body heat loss, and infection.”

   Most of Cleveland’s fire companies and policemen attacked the immense blaze, as well as military personnel, utility workers, and civilian volunteer groups. Auxiliary police, auxiliary firemen, and air-raid wardens showed up by the hundreds. The Coast Guard and National Guard showed up. It was all hands on deck. Firemen and policemen worked non-stop shifts, grabbing a few minutes of shut eye when they could. They surrounded the fire and tried to keep it from getting away from them. They fought it all day and night dealing with consuming heat, explosions, and pumpers sinking into melting ground. Fire Engine No. 7 disappeared into a big hole in the ground.

   Cindy Greenwald’s father was working at a nearby war plant. “They were all let out of work to fight the fires,” she said. “He and some other guys worked all night long hosing down buildings on St. Clair. They watched a fire truck fall into a hole in the ground. When daylight came, they found out what they’d had their backs to the whole time. It was a gas station that was behind them.”

   By the end of Saturday morning, the fire department and the volunteers had almost all the fires under control. In the afternoon. Hal and his kid brother Willie went exploring. All the stop signs and traffic lights were gone, but there was no traffic, anyway. Burnt up hulks of cars and trucks lined the curbs. Fire hoses littered every intersection. Small still smoking fires lurked on every other front yard.

   “What happened to this place?” Willie asked. “It’s a mess. Do you think it was the Martians? Was it the Nazis?”

   “Before yesterday happened this mess was our place,” Hal said. “I don’t think it was the Martians. Why would they come all this way to do that? Mom said it must have been sabotage.”

   “This wouldn’t have happened if Superman had been here,” Willie said.

   “Yeah, him and Captain America, too,” Hal said. “They got the moxie.”

   Many of their friends, schoolmates, and relatives in the neighborhood were gone. They had gone somewhere anywhere safe. St Clair was like a ghost town. The fire destroyed homes, small apartments and boarding houses, factories, tractor trucks and trailers, and hundreds of cars. The death toll reached 130 while the burned and injured reached into the thousands.

   Hal and Willie slouched home, there being little to see except destruction. Besides, they had already been told twice by policemen to go home. Their mother always said three times is the charm. They didn’t want to tempt fate. When they got home, they checked on Buddy, who told them in no uncertain terms he was going to stay in the basement for another day or two, just in case.

   A month later there was a mass funeral at Highland Park Cemetery for the unidentified dead. Florists donated flowers and funeral parlors donated caskets. Thousands watched silently, wondering which one of the coffins held their missing father, mother, brother, or sister. The dead were lowered one by one into a concrete vault. The mayor ordered that no other funerals take place that day.

   “We want the nation to know that Cleveland looks after its own,” said Edward Sexton of the committee supervising the mass burial. “Usually, such victims would go to a potter’s field. That is not for Cleveland.” After the dead were buried the city began to rebuild itself. Rebuilding ground zero for the living is the way to recover from disaster.

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

Accidental Reality

Circle the Wagons

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By Ed Staskus

   Rytas Kleiza was born in the same neighborhood the same day as his dog, on a Monday, at the start of the week. The Lithuanian Village, the new community center in their North Collinwood neighborhood, was built the same year. He could have seen it from his crib on Chickasaw Avenue if he had been ahead of his time enough to look. He was able to stand at an early age, although he couldn’t make out what was what.

   Ugne was his best friend, more good-hearted friendly closer to him than anybody except his parents. Unlike many of his friends she only tried to bite him once. Dogs never bit him, only people.

   “Stop messing with her,” his mother yelled from the kitchen where she was making cepelinai, spilling her sentences into the dining room. But he wouldn’t stop messing with her, and suddenly she growled, bared her teeth, and jabbed at his arm.

   They were under the dining room table. Ugne had a deadly scissors bite, but she looked up at him with her round eyes when he squawked, and didn’t squeeze her teeth into his skin, after all.

   “You deserved it,” his mom declared, rolling up another whopping-sized potato and meat dumpling, not realizing the dog hadn’t bitten him.

   Ugne, which means fire in Lithuanian, was a cross breed between a Cocker Spaniel and a Poodle, parti-colored, black with a white patch on her chest. One of his friends told him Poodles were a weird religious cult, but Ugne wasn’t like that. She was on the level. She was on the small side, big ears and big feet, and a wavy tail.

   Rytas got Ugne eleven months after he was born. His dad got Bandit, who was more-or-less a Beagle, two years later. Rytas grew up with both dogs. Ugne slept on his bed and Bandit slept underneath the bed, except when it was winter, when they slept together curled up around and on top of him.

   His mother Gaile and father Andrius were from Lithuania, where almost everybody had dogs. They ran away from their Russian overlords in the mid-1970s, burning down their little farmhouse before leaving, setting their dogs free, knowing they would find a new home fast enough, giving the thumb to the Reds. They stole a small sailboat in Ventspils and made for Gotland, more than a hundred miles away. They made it there in record time. They made it to the United States soon enough.

   Ugne and Bandit were his best pals. They laughed with their tails. They laughed it up every day and he gave both of them a brisk goodbye rub on the head every day before school.

   His dad got Bandit because he wanted a hunting dog. But at the end of the day Bandit was gun-shy. They never found out why, no matter how many vets they took him to. They all ended up scratching their heads, saying they couldn’t explain it, since he was the only hunting dog any of them had seen who was scared that way.

   Andrius had to put his guns away and learn to hunt with a bow and arrow. “Rupuze,” he swore under his breath. At least he didn’t bust out with “Goddamnit!” which meant real trouble. Rytas knew full well what “Goddamnit!” meant.

   Ugne got stopped in her tracks in their driveway on Thanksgiving Day when they were both 14-years-old. She was still full of life, still kicking around, other than being blind and deaf. One minute she was standing in the driveway and the next minute she had a heart attack and dropped dead. By the time his brothers and he rushed to her, she was lying on her side, quiet and still. They buried her in the backyard before the ground froze.

   They had to put Bandit down when spring broke the next year. After Ugne died he started to slip away. They were like an old couple that had always been together. He went from being a healthy dog to being a decrepit dog. He gained weight, but then lost his appetite, lost weight, and started dragging his hind legs behind him like a cripple. When they took him to the vet’s office, he told them there was nothing wrong with him.

   Bandit was just giving up on life. They all knew that. The house got quiet and sad.

   When his dad carried him into the vet’s office to be put down, Bandit lifted his head and looked at his mom standing next to the exam table. He looked Gaile right in the eye. Everyone could see that a thought was going back-and-forth between them.

   “That was hard,” his mom said, and after they buried Bandit next to Ugne, she said they couldn’t have any more dogs.

   But two years later his younger brother told all of them he wanted a dog. “Everybody else has dogs. I want a dog, too,” he said. Their neighbor’s Lab down the street played footsies with a Shepherd that summer. In the fall there was a bushelful of black puppies. Everyone they knew took one, including his brother, which meant their mom got a new dog.

   His dad named him Buddy, after the baseball player Buddy Bell. Andrius had been a big fan back in the day when the third baseman played for the Cleveland Indians. He grew up to be like a full-sized Lab with a delicate face, small ears, and a spotted tongue. When he was a puppy Buddy liked digging holes in the backyard, sitting in them, and staring out at everybody.

   Sometimes he was The Shining. Other times he was a one-man Tasmanian Devil.

   Whenever they left their shoes in the open by mistake Buddy would chew them to pieces. He gnawed on electric cords in the house and telephone wires on the outside of the house. Their phone once went dead for a week. He ripped the aluminum siding off the house, but couldn’t chew it, and so gave it up. But the garage was still sided in clapboard. He tore one side of it off, as far up as he could reach, and chewed the wood to shreds.

   “Seriously, I was only outside for five minutes,” was the look he gave Andrius when he confronted him about it. His father had to contract for aluminum siding and get the garage done up. Buddy calmed down after three years, but not before being the most destructive dog anyone in their neighborhood ever heard of.

   On his second Kucios they left him in a cage for the night while they went to Midnight Mass at St. George’s in the old neighborhood. The church was going on eighty years, the first church ever for Roman Catholic Lithuanians in Cleveland. Before that they went to Polish churches, even though there was never a lot of love lost between them and Poles.

   They stayed overnight with relatives and the next morning after Christmas Day breakfast drove home. Coming up the driveway they noticed all the windows were open. They weren’t actually open, they just looked open because most of the curtains in the house were gone.

   Buddy was in the kitchen and beyond happy to see them when they walked in. The cage he had been locked up in was still locked. His dad rattled the door and inspected the sides. He couldn’t understand how the dog had escaped. Buddy Bell never said because dogs never talk about themselves.

   The curtains were torn down and lay on the floor. In the second-floor bedrooms their beds were set beneath windows and Buddy had jumped up on them so he could reach those curtains, too, and pull them down.

   “He tore the curtains down so he could see us coming,” his dad figured out when he realized Buddy hadn’t put the snatch on all the curtains, only those in the windows facing the front yard and the driveway.

   His father bought padlocks to secure the crate door so Buddy couldn’t ever escape again whenever they had to lock him up, but he did, over and over, like he was the Houdini Wonder Dog, no matter how many padlocks Andrius put on the latches. There was never a scratch on him, either. He wasn’t squeezing out. But by then he was finding his way in the world and his Christmas Eve rampage turned out to be a turning point.

   When Buddy came of age Andrius started taking him hunting. Labs are bred to be bird dogs, but Buddy wasn’t the best retriever of all time. He loved running around outdoors, and chasing anything that moved, but was terrified of water. Labs are water dogs, but even giving Buddy a bath was a titanic struggle. He whined and cowered when they rinsed him off with the hose.

   His father felt like he was cursed, like it was Bandit all over again.

   When they found out what happened, how the curse came about, they didn’t like it. Their next-door neighbor Emma Jean, whenever they were away the first summer they had Buddy, not liking his barking in his own backyard, sprayed him with their own garden hose until he stopped. Every time he barked, she snuck into their yard and sprayed him full in the face again

   After they found out Rytas and his brothers, the day Emma Jean flew to Las Vegas with her husband to eat drink and lose money, broke every window of her station wagon with baseball bats. They left her husband’s car alone, since he was innocent. It was in the garage, anyway.

   At home Buddy was their around-the-clock guard dog. He could wake up from a dead sleep in the blink of an eye, ready to go. He mistrusted all other dogs. They always knew when one was on the loose, thanks to him. He mistrusted all strangers, too. If a stranger came by their house, he watched them closely, and if they came up the driveway, he barked to let them know there was a dog in the house.

   One summer a dog living two doors down started barking all the time and wouldn’t stop. Somebody called the police and complained, saying it was their dog. They were sure it was Emma Jean, but by then the families weren’t talking. When the animal warden came up the drive, Buddy sat in the living room window watching him. He didn’t bark once. When the warden came to the front door and rang the bell, Buddy went to the door and waited. Gaile answered the door. Buddy looked up at the animal warden and the animal warden looked down at him.

   He told Gaile about the complaint. “But that can’t be right,” he said. “He didn’t bark when I walked up, or when I rang the bell, and he’s not barking now.”

   “That’s right,” Buddy said to himself, giving the warden a soft eyed loopy grin.

   None of them understood how Buddy knew to be quiet the day the authorities came to their house. But Emma Jean was off the hook. The three brothers put their baseball bats away.

   Buddy was wild crazy for doggie treats. Whenever they gave him one, he wanted another one right away. He wanted more for the next minutes hours days. When they let him out of the house after treat time he would run right back in, barging through the door, his doggo tongue slobbering for more.

   “Show some dignity,” they scolded him. “Do you want to be a fatso?” They never were able to break him of it. It was all just grist for the mill to him. He never got fat, either.

   After graduating from college, Rytas moved away from home, to the other side of Cleveland, to the west end of Lakewood, living alone most of the time, except for an occasional girlfriend and weekends when one of his brothers dropped Buddy off. He missed having a dog in the house. Her had a busy life, between work, jogging in the valley, getting together with friends for a Cleveland Browns game, but at a certain point he wanted something anything in the house day-to-day.

   Buddy was growing old. He was getting thin shaggy grayer by the month and having a hard time walking. Rytas knew he was dying and wouldn’t be seeing him much longer. He hoped the dog didn’t know, like Bandit had known. He decided to go to the SPCA shelter in Parma and find a puppy, sooner or later.

   Rytas grew up with mutts. No matter what breed they dressed them up to be, Ugne was a mutt, Bandit was a mutt, and Buddy was a mutt. His family didn’t pay for dogs. They found them for free. He knew that, but his brothers had forgotten. His younger brother Matas bought a Victorian Bulldog for a thousand dollars. Since then, he had spent thousands more on special kennels, training, and designer food, not to mention weekly canine whisperer sessions.

   His older brother Lukas and his wife bought a long-legged Jack Russell terrier. His name was Hank and he looked like Wishbone in the TV series. The real Wishbone read books and dressed up like Shakespeare, but Hank couldn’t read and had epilepsy. Whenever he had seizures he twitched and lost all his motor skills.

   Hank was high-strung and drove Buddy crazy whenever Lukas brought him along for a visit. Hank would go at him like a puppy even though Buddy was already of a certain age, and it pissed him off. He would bare his teeth and remind Hank that he had once chewed up and spit out garages. Hank would just get crazier, crossing the line, barking like a madman.

   “You’re in time out,” Rytas would say, pointing at him, shoving him down on his haunches. “Sit down there and don’t move.” He never really liked the dog but tried to hide it.

   Hank couldn’t be left alone because he might have a seizure any minute. Rytas baby-sat him while he was in college, which was how he paid for his over-priced textbooks. No matter that Lukas complained, it was cash on the barrelhead. He had to have it. His brothers had done better with pork barrels than him.

   Hank’s medication came with an eyedropper and Rytas had to be careful because a drop of it could and would burn human skin. He never understood why it didn’t burn going down Hank’s throat. The infernal pooch was inhuman.

   Rytas knew when Hank was having a seizure because he always got stuck behind the sofa. There was a wall at one end. Something would happen in his fido brain, he would walk behind the sofa, and then couldn’t move backwards. He froze until Rytas noticed. With all his medication, vet bills, and emergency room visits, his sister-in-law told him, when Hank died at five years, he cost more than their first child.

   He wanted to get a puppy at the start of summer, since he was a high school teacher, and had summers to himself. Knowing he probably wanted a Lab mutt, and knowing how Labs can be, he knew it would be best getting one when he was going to have free time. He wanted to be at home with the dog for three months. It would make the training easier.

   Rytas called the animal shelter at nine o’clock in the morning the day his vacation started. They told him they had twenty-some new puppies just in from Tennessee. When he got there at in the afternoon there were only three left. Everybody wants puppies and snatches them up like snapping your fingers. He got that. Everybody wants to start with a new dog.

   He had been to several shelters on his side of town, but all they had was full-grown Labs other people had given up on. He lived on the second floor of a Polish double and Labs start to have trouble walking when they get older. They get hip dysplasia. He couldn’t take a 60 or 70 pound already older dog to his second-floor rooms without taking on grief right off the bat. He had to be realistic.

   Going up and down aisles of stacked cages in an animal shelter is a down in the dumps experience. It smells like underarms and hot dog water. There are signs on all the cages. “My name is Kimmy. I am a 7-year-old Labrador. I love playing with children.” Wanting to take them all home is a cheerless dead-end. It’s like walking through a prison where everybody is on death row and you can only pardon one of them.

   The three dogs that were left at the shelter at the end of the day were two Boxers and a Lab mix. He didn’t know much about Boxers, and some other people were looking at both of them, anyway, so he turned his attention to the Lab.

   Shelters say to lay the puppy you are interested in on its back. If it looks at you and shows submission, that’s a good dog. If they don’t, they might be headstrong. He put the 8-week-old mutt on his back. He held him down even though the dog wasn’t trying to go anywhere. He looked everywhere except up at him.

   Rytas loved the white on his chest, and his one white paw, and that he was missing his tail. He thought it was a unique personality trait, even though he could tell that the no tail was a deformity.

   “I’ll take the Lab,” he told the attendant at the counter.

   “Are you sure?” he said. “He’s shifty-eyed, and did you see his tail?” That bothered Rytas. Because of the tail he didn’t have, he might not make it. That’s why he took him, finally, because of his missing tail.

   He named him Bronislovas, which means glorious protector, but called him Bron, after LeBron James, who was bringing championship glory back to Cleveland. When he went to work in the fall, he enrolled Bron at Pawsitive Influence, a cage-free doggie day care. It took more than a week, but he warmed up to it. After the first month he got excited every time they drove there, passing landmarks like the Speedway gas station and Merl Park. A friend of his worked there. He paid special attention to Bron, clipping his toenails, training him to sit and heel, and keeping Rytas up to date on his progress.

   Rytas never knew what got into him, but he started to think Bron needed a companion. He went back to the animal shelter. It was October, rainy and cold. He thought to himself, you know what, the puppies are all going to get adopted, so I’ll look at some of the slightly older ones. But most of them were either too old or too big for him, until he came to a row of cages full of puppies, all jumping up and down. In a cage by himself was a bigger black pup about the same age and size as Bron.

   “No one’s going to look at me, and that’s OK, la, la, la,” the dog was thinking, laying there, his paws crossed in front of him.

   “Can I walk him,” Rytas asked, and was given a leash.

   He didn’t just walk when he walked. He pranced when we got going, which surprised Rytas because he was a stray, although not a common stray. He had been trucked up to Ohio from the south somewhere, where there are lots of strays and kill shelters, but he was different. Even though things had gone wrong for him, he hadn’t gone wrong.

   “We think he came from a dog-fighting ring, a big one that got broken up. Even though he’s young, he still has a few scars, his front and back dewclaws are missing, and his tail’s been clipped,” a vet technician cleaning a nearby pen told him.

   Tails are a weak point because they can be grabbed. When dewclaws are ripped off, they get infected, so psycho dog fighters surgically remove them. It’s painful if the dog is older than even a few weeks because dewclaws are more like an extra toe than a toenail.

   The inside of his mouth was scarred, and there were lesions on his snout. He was a little less than a year old and a wide smile was pasted on his face as Rytas walked him around the perimeter of the cages.

   “I’ll take him,” he said.

   “He’s got a lot of Pit Bull in him.”

   “That’s OK, I’m good with mixes.”

   “What about his tail?”

   “It will grow back.” It was the tail of two pups. It grew back better.

   The new dog was timid around Bron for weeks, even though they were almost twins. Rytas named him Sabonis, after Arvydas Sabonis, the best Lithuanian basketball player of all time, so he and Bron would get along, and they did, finally. Sometimes he called him Bonehead, but only when he had to. He stopped taking Bron to the doggie day care since he and Sabonis had each other all day.

   He bought leashes for them and took them for walks in the Rocky River Metropark. Off the leash they ran across the meadows and right to the river, and all that fall had a ball. Whenever another dog came near him, though, Sabonis would get skittish and aggressive, barking and feinting at them, although Rytas could see he was shaking. He was careful at the Lakewood Dog Park, making sure there weren’t too many other dogs for him to worry about.

   He was walking them down Rockway Avenue one day, a nearby side street, when he overheard talk on a front porch, talk about his dogs. “I think they’re mini-Doberman Pinschers,” a thick-set man with eel-like lips hissed, as though they were supersized rats. “Dude, you should shut up, you don’t know dogs, at all,” he said. He knew how to talk down to teenagers when he had to. He knew how to talk down to nitwits, too.

   Rytas had a vet look at Sabonis, but they weren’t sure what breed he was. He could have had him genetically tested, but that wasn’t going to happen. He needed a new hard-working vacuum cleaner before he paid for anything like that.

   Sabonis was black and, like Bron, looked like a Lab Pit Bull cross. When he pinned his ears back his face went sleek. Rytas got nervous about it sometimes because so many people are anti-Pit. Bron was Mister Independent, but Boner wanted attention. He wasn’t a biter, although if he did, there would be trouble. His jaws were ripcord dangerous. When he had a branch in his jaws, the branch didn’t stand a chance.

   Both of them loved ice cream. Rytas was not the guy who said, “No more ice cream.” He always had it in the house. If the dogs learned how to break into his fridge, they would.

   Whenever he took them to the neighborhood DQ, they were ready to lick it, life and ice cream. They drove to the cone shack in his drop-top Chrysler 200. There was an Iron Wolf, the Gelzinus Vilkas, decal sticker on the back bumper. Anybody can be in a sour mood even on a sunny day, but not in a convertible. The dog days of summer are the wind in your face days. When they were ready to go, Bron and Sabonis vaulted into their seats like the Dukes of Hazard.

   They both liked to have people around them and got excited when his friends come over. They enjoyed company. They barked and warned him about strangers, but the people they knew, they get beyond excited.

   His brother had a cage for Hank. It was bigger and sturdier than the one their father had for Buddy, the escape artist who couldn’t be stopped. “God, why did you buy that big-ass cage for that little dog?” he asked Lukas one day after Hank was gone. It looked like it cost the heavy end of a week’s pay, at least his pay.

   “I don’t know,” he said. “I think I felt it had to be escape-proof.”

   Rytas’s mutts were his best friends. They were the living breathing things he loved and spoiled. If it wasn’t for them, he would have spent too much time alone. They got him out of the house twice a day. There were fringe benefits, besides fresh air and exercise. Young women were always coming up to them, asking if the dogs were friendly, and he always said yes with a bright smile.

   He knew his roommates were freeloaders. They didn’t pay rent and he had to feed them and clean up after them, too. He knew some people said they were just dogs. Why go to the trouble? He didn’t care what they said. He made sure to come home after work every day, so they weren’t by themselves. He walked them in the morning before work, after work, and sometimes before bedtime on summer nights. He could have read the collected works of Dickens Tolstoy Pynchon and become a literate smart man given the amount of time he spent walking his dogs.

   At least they hardly shed. There was no problem with hair all over the house. He gave them a vigorous brushing twice a month, keeping them shiny and smooth.

   He made sure to always be home for Bron and Sabonis and take them with him whenever he had to leave for more than a day-or-two. He never put them in a shelter or a kennel, even for a weekend, even if it was clean modern beyond words, because in a kennel they would be shut up in a cage for twelve hours a day. It would be like being traded to the Cleveland Cavs with the Chosen One gone.

   His dogs were free of the grip of crates. They couldn’t handle it, locked up instead of down at the foot of his bed. They knew there was no safety at the wrong end of the leash. East or west, home is best. Whenever there was a thunderstorm, or a big snowstorm, it was circle the wagons at his house, rustle up the chuck wagon, and surf the flat screen for the most exciting NBA game they could find.

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

Accidental Reality

Up the Country

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By Ed Staskus

   The morning Arunas Petkus and I left for California 2500-some miles from Cleveland, Ohio, the Summer of Love was a few years over. It had been a phenomenon in 1967 when as many as 100,000 people, mostly young, mostly hippies, converged on the neighborhood of Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, hanging around, listening to music, dropping out, chasing infinity, and getting as much free love as they could.

   We were both in high school at the time and stumbled into the 1970s having missed the hoopla. The Mamas & the Papas released “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)” and it got to number four on the Billboard Hot 100. It stayed there for a month, a golden oldie in the making, while the parade across Golden Gate Bridge went on and on. The vinyl single sold more than 7 million copies worldwide. 

   Arunas found a bucket of bolts, a 1958 VW Karmann Ghia, somehow got it running, brush painted it parakeet green, and was determined to hit the open road to see what all the excitement had been about. He also wanted to visit the spot at Twin Peaks where Chocolate George’s ashes had been scattered.

   George Hendricks was a Hells Angel who was hit by a car while swerving around a stray cat on a quiet afternoon in as the Summer of Love was winding down, dying later that night from his injuries. He was known as Chocolate George because he was rarely seen without a quart of his favorite beverage, which was chocolate milk, usually spiked with whiskey. He was a favorite among the hippies because he was funny and friendly. His goatee was almost as long as his long hair, he wore a pot-shaped helmet when riding his Harley, and his denim vest was dotted with an assortment of  tinny pin badges.

   One of the badges said, “Go Easy on Kesey.” The writer Ken Kesey had been the de facto head of the Merry Pranksters. Much of the hippie aesthetic can be traced back to them and their Magic Bus. Arunas was an art student and liked the way the bus was decked out.

   The Karmann Ghia was a two-door four-speed manual with an air-cooled 36 horsepower engine in the back. The trunk was in the front. Unlike most cars it had curved glass all the way around and frameless one-piece door glass. My friend’s rust bucket barely ran, unlike most of the sporty Karmann Ghia’s on the road, but it ran. There was still some magic left in it.

   When Arunas asked me if I wanted to join him, I signed up on the spot. The two of us had gone to the same Catholic boy’s high school and were both at Cleveland State University. We threw our gear and backpacks in the front trunk of the car, sandwiches, apples, and pears in what passed for a rear seat, a bag of weed in the glove compartment, and waved goodbye to our friends at the Plaza Apartments.

   The Plaza was on Prospect Ave., on the near east side, near Cleveland State University. It was an old but built to last four-story apartment building. Secretaries, clerks, college students, bohemians, bikers, retirees, and musicians lived there. Arunas was still living with his parents in North Collinwood, while I was a part-time undergraduate and part-time manual laborer trying to keep my head above water in a one-bedroom on the second floor.

   We got almost as far as the Indiana border before an Ohio State Highway Patrolman stopped us. “Where do you think you’re going in that thing?” he asked after Arunas showed him his driver’s license. He wrinkled his nose looking at the car’s no-primer paint job.

   “California.”

   “Do you know you’re burning oil, lots of it?”

   We knew that full well. That was why we had a case-and-a half of Valvoline with us. We had worked out the loss of motor oil at about a quart every two hundred miles and thought our stockpile would get us out west before the engine seized up.

   “All right, either get this thing off the road or go back to Cleveland,” the patrolman said, waving us away with his ticket book.

   On the way back home, we decided to go to Kelly’s Island, since we had sleeping bags and could more-or-less camp out, staying under a picnic table in case of rain. We took the Challenger ferry out of Sandusky, leaving the Kharmann Ghia behind. We landed at East Harbor State Park and stayed here until the end of the week. There were a campground, beach, and trails at the park, which were all we needed. We bought homemade granola and a couple gallons of spring water at a small store and settled down on a patch of sunshine. We met some high-class girls from Case Western Reserve University and played volleyball with them.

   When we got back to Cleveland everybody marveled at our quick turnaround from the west coast and attractive tans. “We didn’t actually make it to California,” we had to explain to one-and-all.  “We didn’t even make it out of Ohio.” We had to endure many snarky comments. When Virginia Sustarsic, one of my neighbors at the Plaza, said she was going to San Francisco and invited me to try again, joining her, I jumped at the chance. My feet got tangled up coming down when she said she was hitchhiking there.

   “You’re going to thumb rides across the country?”

   “Yes,” she said, in her detached but friendly way. She was a writer, photographer, and cottage craftsman. Virginia was a raconteur when she wanted to be one. She made a living dabbling in what interested her. She lived alone. Her boyfriend was an unrepentant beatnik.

   “How about getting back?”

   She explained she had arranged a ride as far as Colorado Springs. She planned on going knockabout the rest of the way, stay a week-or-so with friends on the bay, and hitchhike back. When I looked it up on a map, she was planning on hitchhiking four thousand-some miles. I didn’t know anything about bumming my way on the highway. When I asked, she confessed to having never tried it.

   Our ride to Colorado Springs was a guy from Parma and his girlfriend in a nearly new T2 Microbus. Although it was unremarkable on the outside, the inside was vintage hippie music festival camper. It was comfortable and stocked. We stopped at a lake in Illinois and had lunch and went for a walk. I veered off the path and got lost, but spotted Virginia and our ride, and cut across a field to rejoin them. I tripped while running, fell flat on my face, but was unhurt.

   We got to Colorado Springs in two days. The next day I found out what I had fallen into in Illinois was poison ivy. An itchy rash was all over my calves, forearms, and face. I tried Calamine lotion, but all I accomplished was giving myself a pink badge that said, ‘Look at me, I’m suffering.’” Virginia’s friends where we were staying let me use their motorcycle to go to a clinic. The doctor prescribed prednisone, a steroid, and by the time we got to San Francisco I was cured.

   In the meantime, leaving the clinic, since it was a warm and sunny summer day, I went for a ride on the bike, which was a 1969 Triumph Tiger. I rode to the Pikes Peak Highway, 15 miles west, and about half the way up, until the bike started to dog it. What I didn’t know was at higher altitudes there wasn’t enough air for the carburetor. By that time, anyway, I had gotten cold in my shorts and t-shirt. It felt like the temperature had dropped thirty degrees. I turned around and rode down. There was a lot of grit and gravel on the road. I rode carefully. The last thing I wanted to happen was to dump the bike. I found out later that Colorado snowplows spread sand, not salt, in the winter. 

   All the way back to town, as dusk approached, I saw jumbo elk deer and walloping antelope. Even the racoons were enormous. I stayed slow and watchful, not wanting to bang into one of the beasts. We stayed a few days and hit the open road when my rash was better. There was no sense in scaring anybody off with my pink goo face. We had a cardboard sign saying “SF” and finally hit the jackpot when a tractor trailer going to Oakland picked us up.

   The Rocky Mountains, left behind when the glaciers went back to where they came from, were zero cool to see, although I wouldn’t want to be a snowplow driver assigned to them. The weather was fair but cold with a high easterly wind the day we crossed them. Every switchback opened onto a panorama.

   Virginia’s friends in San Francisco lived in Dogpatch, which was east of the Mission District and adjacent to the bay. It was a working class partly industrial partly residential neighborhood. They lived in a late nineteenth century house they were restoring. They went to work every day while we went exploring.

   We stayed away from downtown where there was an overflow of strip clubs, peep shows, and sex shops. Skyscrapers were going up, there were restaurants, offices, and department stores, but it still looked like the smut capital of the United States. Elsewhere, rock-n-roll, jazz fusion, and bongo drums were in the air, especially the Castro District and Haight-Ashbury. Dive bars seemed to be everywhere.

   Virginia went to Golden Gate Park and took pictures of winos, later entering one of them in a show at Cleveland State University. She had a high-tech 35mm Canon. When her photograph was rejected with the comment that it was blurry, she said, “That was the point.” I went to Twin Peaks and took a picture of the spot where Chocolate George’s ashes had been strewn. When Arunas saw it later on, he said there wasn’t much to see. I showed him some pictures from the summit facing northeast towards downtown and east towards the bay. “Those are nice,” he said, being polite. My camera was a Kodak Instamatic.

   Twin Peaks is two peaks known as “Eureka” and “Noe.” They are both about a thousand feet high. They are a barrier to the summer coastal fog pushed in from the ocean. The west-facing slopes get fog and strong winds while the east-facing slopes get more sun and warmth. The ground is thin and sandy. George was somewhere around there..

   We stayed for more than a week, riding Muni city  busses for 25 cents a ride. No matter where we went there seemed to be an anti-Vietnam War protest going on. We rode carousel horses at Playland-at-the-Beach and went to Monkey Island at the zoo. We ducked into Kerry’s Lounge and Restaurant to chow down on French fries. We stayed away from all the Doggie Diners. We listened to buskers singing for tips at Pier 45 on Fisherman’s Wharf. Jewelry makers were all over the place. Virginia was on Cloud 9, being an artisan herself.

   When we saw “The Human Jukebox” we went right over. Grimes Proznikoff kept himself out of sight in a cardboard refrigerator box until somebody gave him a donation and requested a song. Then he would pop out of the front flap and play the song on a trumpet. I asked him to play “Stone Free,” but he played “Ain’t Misbehavin’” instead.

   “I don’t know nothing about Jimi Hendrix,” he said.

   Everywhere we looked almost everybody was wearing groovy clothes made of bright polyester, which looked to be the material of choice. Tie-dye was on the way to the retirement home. Virginia dressed in classic hippie style while I dressed in classic Cleveland-style, jeans, t-shirt, and sneakers. I didn’t feel out of place in San Francisco, but I didn’t feel like I belonged, either. There were no steel mills and too many causes to worry about.

   When we left, we started at the Bay Bridge and got a ride right away. By the time we got to the other end of the bridge the man at the wheel had already come on to Virginia. We asked him to drop us off. When he stopped on the shoulder and I got out of the back seat, he pushed Virginia out the passenger door, grabbed her shoulder bag, and sped away. She didn’t keep her traveling money in it, but what did he know? We saw the bag go sailing out the car window before he disappeared from sight and retrieved it. We smelled a brewery on the breath of the next driver and turned him down. After that a pock-marked face stopped and  asked us if we were born again. When I said I had been raised a Catholic, he cursed and drove off.

   We liked talking to the people who gave us rides but avoided talking about race, religion, and politics. I carried a pocket jackknife but wasn’t sure what I would do with it if the occasion ever arose. We never hitchhiked once it got dark, because that was when lowlifes and imbeciles were most likely to come out.

   We went back the way we had come, to Nevada, through Utah, Nebraska, and Iowa to Chicago, and returning in the middle of the day to the south shore of Lake Erie. We thumbed rides at entrances to highways, at toll gates, and especially at off-the-ramp gas stations whenever we could. Gas stations were good for approaching people and asking them face-to-face if they were going our way. 

   One of the best things about hitchhiking is you can take any exit that you happen to feel is the right one. One of the worst things is running into somebody who says, “I can tell you’re not from around these parts.” We avoided big cities because getting out of them was time-consuming. We avoided small towns because we didn’t want to be the new counterculture archenemies in town. We got lucky when a shabby gentleman in a big orange Dodge with a cooler full of food and drink in the back seat picked us up outside of Omaha on his way to Kalamazoo. He listened to a border blaster on the radio all the way. We ate the sandwiches he offered us.

   Our last ride was in an unmarked Wood’s County sheriff’s car. He picked us up near Perrysburg on his way to Cleveland’s Central Police Station to pick up a criminal. It was the same station where Jane “Hanoi Jane” Fonda was put behind bars a couple of years earlier. She was famous and not a real criminal and so didn’t stay long.

   “They said they were getting orders from the White House, that would be the Nixon White House,” she said about the arrest. “I think they hoped the ‘scandal’ would cause my college speeches to be canceled and ruin my respectability. I was handcuffed and put in jail.” The day  she was arrested at Cleveland Hopkins Airport, she pushed Ed Matuszak, a special agent for the U. S. Customs Bureau, and kicked Cleveland Policeman Pieper in a sensitive place.

   The city policeman later sued Jane Fonda for $100,000 for the kick that made him “weak and sore.” The federal policeman shrugged off the shove. The charges and suit were eventually dropped.

   The Wood County sheriff was a friendly middle-aged man who warned us about the dangers of hitchhiking and drove us to near our home. When we got out of the car, he gave us ten dollars. “Get yourselves a square meal,” he said. We walked the half dozen blocks to the Plaza, dropped off our stuff, and walked the block and half to Hatton’s Deli on East 36th St. and Euclid Ave. where Virginia worked part-time. There was an eight-foot by eight-foot neon sign on the side of the three-story building. It said, “Corned Beef Best in Town.” We had waffles and scrambled eggs.

   The waitress lingered at our table pouring coffee, chatting it up while we dug into apple pie. We split the big slice. The butter knife was dull, so I used my jackknife. She asked how our cross-country trip had gone. I gave her the highlights while Virginia went into details. When the waitress asked why we hadn’t gone Greyhound, Virginia smiled like a cat, but I put my cards on the table.

   “I had an itch to go and the stone free way was the way to go.”

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

Atlantic Canada

Let ‘Er Rip

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louise-et-Jonathan

By Ed Staskus

“J’aurais quelque chose a dire.”  Barachois

The Sterling Women’s Institute is the Stanley Bridge Hall on the corner of Route 6 and Rattenbury Road on the north-central coast of Prince Edward Island. The small town of Stanley Bridge spreads out in all directions.

A new traffic circle at the old intersection keeps the traffic moving. On one corner is the Race Trac gas station and farther down is the farmer’s market. Where the road flattens out at the river is the actual bridge that kids spend the summer jumping off down into the channel flowing out to the New London Bay.

The Women’s Institute is a yellow two-story clapboard building with white trim and a fair-sized deck. From the vantage of the front deck is a solitary house across the street, a cropland spread out wide and long, and the Atlantic Ocean. It is a quiet building on rising ground, except when six nights a week ceilidhs fill the hall with Irish Scottish Acadian fiddles guitars pianos and step dancing.

The hall holds close to 150 if every seat and bench along the side is taken. The night the Arsenault Trio – Helene Arsenault Bergeron, Jonathan Arsenault, and his mother Louise Arsenault – joined by Gary Chipman, played their first show of the summer in Stanley Bridge on a Wednesday night, there were upwards of a hundred ready to go.

“It’s great to see you all, thanks for coming,” said Marsha Weeks, the host of the show.

“All set?” asked Gary Chipman.

“All set,” said Louise Arsenault.

Ceilidhs are concerts, but more like musical gatherings, often staged at small halls in the Canadian Maritimes. Not so long ago, and sometimes even today, they were more along the lines of a kitchen party, a kind of jam session at home with the neighbors. Whoever could play a fiddle or a guitar or belt out a song at the top of their lungs would inevitably find themselves in the kitchen with everyone else. In the middle of January a case of beer might be close at hand in the snow just outside one of the windows.

The word itself comes from the Old Irish for companion.

“On long, dark winter nights it is still the custom in small villages for friends to collect in a house,” Donald Mackenzie wrote explaining ceilidhs more than a hundred years ago. “Some sing old songs set to old music or new music composed in the manner of the old.”

The music at Prince Edward Island ceilidhs is alert animate full of life, mainly jigs and reels, with a mix of waltzes and country songs. There are occasional vignettes about life on the island, some island humor, and stories about islanders making the music. Most of the shows are set in community centers, churches, town halls, and Lion’s clubs.

The Arsenault Trio ripped into the ‘Acadian Reel,’ an Evangeline Region tune in the Cape Breton style played in 4/4 time, in other words, on the fast side. From kitchen parties to laser-lit techno dance floors, the same rhythm pattern is part and parcel of the carousing. The signature style of Acadian fiddling is down home rhythmic drive with sawstroke syncopation, sometimes called shuffles.

“When you do the shuffle,” said Louise Arsenault, “it’s like two up bows in a row. That was dad’s style.”

The Evangeline Region of PEI is the land west of Summerside, from Miscouche to Mont Carmel to Abrams Village. Flags in blue, white, and red with a single gold star fly from front porches and front yards. Mailboxes are painted in the Acadian colors. The annual Agricultural Exhibition and Acadian Festival features boot throwing, horse pulling, and a big music and dance party at the end.

The communities are about co-operatives, farming and fishing, vittles and fiddling.

“Where’s everybody from?” Marsha asked the crowd.

Ontario, Quebec, Alberta, Ohio, Florida, and Australia were some of the answers.

“Massachusetts,” a man called out.

“Whatever you said,” said Marsha. “I can’t pronounce that.”

“Wellington,” another man called out.

Several in the audience, probably all from Prince Edward Island, laughed. Wellington is a small town on PEI. It is home to the head office of College Acadie as well as the Bottle Houses, which are three fantasy-like buildings made of approximately 30,000 recycled glass bottles.

Most of the year islanders have the island to themselves. In the summer ten times as many people as live on PEI visit there for a week-or-two.

“They gave it 150% and we could feel it down to our tappin’ toes,” said a man from Amherst, Massachusetts.

The Aussies in the audience thought it was an “all there bonzer” show.

“The energy was amazing,” said a woman from New South Wales, Australia. “We all clapped and stamped our feet.”

Gary Chipman announced he was going to sing a song.

“I’ve been told I have a great voice, but that I’m going to ruin it by singing,” he said. Still and all, he has been singing for many years. He sang ‘Prince Edward Island Is Heaven To Me,’ a country song penned in 1951 by Hal Lone Pine and recorded with his Lone Pine Mountaineers.  

“The air is so pure, and the people so gay, Prince Edward Island, I’m coming to stay, there’s swimming and hunting and fishing galore, the sun shines so bright on its long golden shore, a touch of God’s great hand this island must be, Prince Edward Island is heaven to me.” 

“Yes, sir!” somebody rang out at the end of the song.

Somebody else called out a request for the ‘Arkansas Traveler.’

“It was some hot day today,” said Louise Arsenault. “You can go from your fur coat to your bikini just like that here on this island.” A few days earlier it had rained eighteen hours straight and never reached fifty degrees. The day of the show it was a breezy sunny 74 degrees.

“Arkansas Traveler!”

“Has anybody got a drink in his car?” asked Gary Chipman, to keep his singing voice well-oiled. He told a joke about a young woman in a tight skirt trying to board a bus.

“Arkansas Traveler!”

The ‘Arkansas Traveler’ is a plantation fiddle tune, a quick reel, from the early 19thcentury, one of the most famous of American fiddle tunes. Back in the day it was a barn raiser, meant to tear the audience up. The band tore into it, followed by ‘The Maid Behind the Bar’ and ‘Farmer’s Daughter.’

Jonathan Arsenault played ‘Cottonwood’ on his guitar. In the second half of the show he played ‘Jerry’s Breakdown.’ Written by Jerry Reed, a Nashville guitarist and country singer, the song is played finger-style on guitar in a similar way to the banjo.

“It’s a wicked hard tune to play, but Jonathan makes it look easy,” said Gary.

“When I was a boy, mom bought a little guitar at a flea market,” said Jonathan. “That was her only guitar back then. She sat me at a table, put the fiddle in her lap, and played a set. I learned to flat top pick from my mom, from the fiddle, since she didn’t have a second guitar to show me what a fret was.”

Step dancing is a part of most, if not all, ceilidhs on Prince Edward Island.

“Louise and I are from Acadian backgrounds,” said Helene Arsenault Bergeron. “We grew up with fathers playing the fiddle. In those days they didn’t have a lot of accompaniment, so they accompanied themselves with their feet. That way they always had their accompanists with them.”

She and Louise Arsenault stepped to the front of the stage.

“When you hear that every day, you learn how to play and dance and you don’t even remember learning it. We saw our fathers, aunts and uncles, and grandfathers, and it was just kind of always there, and so we’re going to do a dance for you now.”

The dancing was sparkling high-spirited swashbuckling.

“I was waiting all night for that,” said Jonathan.

Step dancing descends from traditional Irish dancing. Tap dancing is a modern form of it. It is a looser form. The arms move along with the feet. Step dancers keep their upper bodies still with their arms at their sides, except when they don’t, when they’re fiddling at the same time.

Creating your own melody by using your feet is challenging enough, but fiddling a reel at the same time as step dancing like the Arsenault’s do is gnarly, time to sit up and take notice. Louise and Helene do it like a walk in the park, no matter the large front tap on one of Helene’s shoes secured with black electrical tape.

Louise grew up down the road from Helene and Albert Arsenault, who she would later collaborate with in a roots music band. Her father, Alyre Gallant, played music, too. “I grew up in a musical family,” she said. “My father played the fiddle and my mother played the pump organ. I started playing when I was seven. I learned a lot of tunes from my dad.”

At a time in the 1960s when few Prince County girls picked up the fiddle, her father jigged tunes when she was a girl so she could find them on her instrument.

The first half of the show ended with a series of reels. “Whoop, whoop,” someone in the audience shouted. Someone else stamped their feet. It was getting dark on the other side of the windows. It was still fired up inside the hall.

The second half opened the same way as the first half, with the ‘Acadian Reel.’ The song is the work of Eddy Arsenault, a carpenter and fisherman and one of the hands-down best fiddlers on PEI for more than 70 years. Helene Bergeron’s father, he blended local Acadian fiddling with the Scottish approach.

“Is this a new tune,” asked Marie Gallant Arsenault the first time she heard the song a few minutes after its composition. “It is lively.”

“Yes, it is,” said Eddy Arsenault. “What are we going to call it?”

“That sounds right like Acadian music,” said Marie. “Why don’t you call it the Acadian Reel?”

The name stuck.

Even though Eddy Arsenault wrote it, it’s the kind of song that was never new and never gets old.

Gary Chipman strolled into ‘You Are My Sunshine,’ inviting everyone to join in, which many did, some of their voices uncommonly good.

“You are my sunshine, my only sunshine, you make me happy when skies are gray, you’ll never know dear, how much I love you, please don’t take my sunshine away.”

After Gary put his guitar down to the side, Helene stepped around her piano to the front of the stage, and brought some perspective to the sunshine song that had brought a warm glow to the hall.

“Louise and I used to be in a band called Barachois,” she said.

Helene Arsenault Bergeron got her start as a fledgling in a barn putting on step dancing shows set to old records scratching out fiddle tunes. She watched her elders. “The kitchen parties we had at my grandfather’s and at our house, everybody was always jumping up to dance because the fiddling, the music was so lively.” By her 30s she was one of the best step dancers on Prince Edward Island. She took up the piano, taking on the Cape Breton style, with lift, syncopated, marked by step dancing rhythms.

“Jonathan would come on tour with us when he was a small boy, and he just loved this song we’re going to do for you. Some of the older generation, they used to compose songs as a way of keeping track of local events. It’s a song about an old maid, an old girl, whose neighbor, a young girl, asks for advice about getting married, but the old girl is disillusioned, so it’s not a very encouraging song.”

Louise threw her head back and laughed zestfully full-mouthed.

“It’s called ‘The Family Song,’” said Helene.

Later in the summer Gary might tell a joke about a RCMP officer who calls his station from a crime scene.

“I have an interesting case here,” he says. “A woman shot her husband for stepping on the floor she just mopped.”

“Have you arrested her?” asks his sergeant.

“No, not yet, the floor’s still wet.”

After more hoedowning by the band, Helene and Louise brought two chairs to the center front of the stage.

“Helene and I are going to do a sit down dance,” said Louise. “It’s not because we’re lazy. We can dance standing, we can dance sitting, so here we go!”

Their arms at their sides, their hands gripping the sides of their seats, able-bodied, their feet a breakdown blur, seeming to never leave the floor no matter the tapping, they chair danced up a storm.

Marsha Weeks walked out from the wings with her fiddle.

“You know it’s a great show when the host comes back on stage,” said Jonathan.

Gary, who taught Marsha how to play, picked up his fiddle, as did Helene and Louise.

Gary Chipman has been playing the fiddle since he was five-years-old. He says it was “about a hundred years ago.” Later in life he picked up the guitar and vocals, when “Elvis Presley and the boys came along and the fiddle was out.” With the revival of PEI fiddling in the 1990s, he rosined up his bow again. He earned a degree in clinical psychology, but says it “only made me a smarter fiddle player.”

A hundred years later he concedes, “I’m going to keep playing until I can’t play anymore.”

They played an arrangement of the ‘Tennessee Waltz,’ a tune from the 1940s whose lyrics were first written down on the back of a matchbox and whose music by Pee Wee King remains sad and lively to this day, tracing a man and a woman turning around and around a dance floor.

“I was dancing with my darling to the Tennessee Waltz, when an old friend I happened to see, I introduced her to my loved one, and while they were dancing, my friend stole my sweetheart from me.”

They played a pretty arrangement on four fiddles of the pastoral melody ‘The Rosebud of Allenvale.’

Although they had been letting it rip all along, at the last Gary and the Arsenault’s let it rip. “We’re going to end with the fastest tune of the night, I’m pretty sure,” said Marsha. They dove headlong into an instrumental version of the ‘Orange Blossom Special.’

Laisse les aller!

The tune is for raising high the roof beam. It is sometimes just called ‘The Special’ and is known as the fiddle player’s national anthem. For a long time fiddle players needed to know how to play that one song before being able to join any bluegrass band.

“It is a vehicle to exhibit the fiddler’s pyrotechnic virtuosity,” wrote Norm Cohen in his book about railroads in folksongs. “It is guaranteed to bring the blood of all but the most jaded listeners to a quick, rolling boil.”

No one at the Stanley Bridge ceilidh was left jaded as the last notes of the ‘The Special’ steamed away into the night.

“She’s the fastest train on the line, it’s that Orange Blossom Special, rollin’ down the seaboard line.”

The show ended with hootin’ and hollerin’ and a big round of applause.

“If you had a great time, please tell everybody at your cottage and campgrounds,” said Marsha as the lights came up. “If you didn’t have a good time, you can just see Gary in the kitchen after the show.”

It wouldn’t be a kitchen party if something lively wasn’t going on in the kitchen.

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

Accidental Reality

Animal Crackers

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By Ed Staskus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   “That was the whole point,” she groused. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Barron Cannon

Fixing the Frankenstein

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By Ed Staskus

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

   “You look like hell,” Barron said. 

   “I feel like hell,” Frankenstein said.

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

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

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

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

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

   “How did you get here?” Barron asked.

   “I walked.”

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

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

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

   “Was his name Oliver?”

   “Yes.”

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

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

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

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

   “I can see that,” Barron said.

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

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

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

   “I’ll do my best.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Accidental Reality

Bat Out of Hell

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By Ed Staskus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   “Sure,” I said.

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

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

   “You bet,” I said.

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

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

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

   “That was fun,” I said. 

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

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

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

   “NGHTMRE,” is what it said.

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

Cross Walk

Mean Streets

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By Ed Staskus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   “Hello.”

   “Hey, Vee, it’s Stan.”

   “Stan, my man,” she laughed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   “I’ll take that for a yes.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   “How’s Ernst doing?” Stan asked. 

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

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

    “You going to be carrying the cornflower flag?”

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

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

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

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

   “Do you know who they are?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

   “Gotcha, bub,” the cabbie said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

   Stan asked again, looking straight at the older boy.

   “East Harlem, where you think?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   “They are just kids.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   “Ballistic?” she asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Excerpted from the crime novel “Cross Walk.”

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

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

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

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

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

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Accidental Reality

Law of the Land

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By Ed Staskus

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

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

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

   My reasoning fell on deaf ears.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   He pronounced Vietnam like scram.

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

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

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

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

   “What’s that all about?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

   “Yes, sir,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

West Park Blues

Jumping the Traces

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By Ed Staskus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   “That hurt!” he shouts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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