Accidental Realism

Lying Low on E. 4th St.

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By Ed Staskus

   It never mattered what time I stepped into Otto Moser’s, which was in an old part of downtown. It didn’t matter if it was morning, noon, or night. Somebody was always soused at the bar. If they were quiet enough everybody ignored them. If they got unruly, they ended up being tossed out on the sidewalk. If it happened in the morning, they waited outside on the sidewalk for forgiveness.

   Otto Moser’s was a bar and eatery on East 4th St. When I started taking classes at Cleveland State University it had been there about eighty years. In the future it toasted the century mark shortly before its time ran out. It was a narrow deep-set place between a shoe store and a Woolworths. A civil defense shelter was set between the variety store and Otto Moser’s, in case the Russians went crazy and started dropping atomic bombs. Everybody at Otto Moser’s agreed, if that happened, they would stay right where they were, where there was plenty of food and drink.

   Europeans drink more alcohol than anybody else in the world and Lithuanians knock back the most of any European drinkers. The ethnic community I belonged to, being Lithuanian, was swimming in it. They put their faith in God and country with booze a close second. It was a belief in and of itself. Even though I was of the blood, I wasn’t much for strong drink. A couple of shots and a beer put me under the table, so I nursed whatever was in front of me. I went to Otto Moser’s to get out of the rain and  hang out. The price of a chair for the afternoon, between the lunch and dinner crowds, was a cup of coffee and a grilled cheese sandwich.

   The watering hole’s grand opening was in 1893 when East 4th St. was called Sheriff St. The Euclid Avenue Opera House was across the street and there were five theaters and two burlesque houses within the blink of an eye. Many actors, businessmen, and stuffed shirts stopped in for a bite and a snort of hootch. Otto collected their autographed portraits, framed them, and hung them on the walls of his saloon. It got so there were hundreds of them. There were six mounted animal heads, too, including a moose named Bullwinkle.

   When Otto died in 1942 two of his employees, Max A. Joseph and Max B. Joseph, took over. Their mother had wanted a third Max she could name “C” but it never happened, much to her regret. The two Max’s didn’t change much. Sometimes they closed their doors to the public, when the cast of a big show took the place over, or the Metropolitan Opera was in town. When the Met was in Cleveland they closed at the stroke of midnight for most of that week so the singers could kick back and relax at their leisure.

   Whenever I went there mid-day the waitress was Norma Bunner, who had been there since 1955. She never looked at a menu and never wrote my order down. The coffee was always hot  and the sandwiches fresh, with extra pickles on the side. I liked to read when I was by myself, which was most of the time. Norma made sure I got a quiet corner if there was one.

   I often stopped at Kay’s Books before going to Otto Moser’s to pick up used paperbacks that rarely had anything to do with my college studies. One of my majors was English literature, so I made sure my fun reading was sans the classics. I read the John Carter of Mars series, Jim Thompson’s hard-boiled pulp, and Jorge Luis Borges’s short stories about knife fights on the docks of Buenos Aires.    

   Kay’s Books was on Prospect Ave, or what some folks called Prostitution Ave., at the corner of East 6th St. There were adult movie houses, hookers and pimps, and other sketchy lifestyles on both sides of the street. There were several wig stores and rotgut bars. If I was going to Kay’s in the morning, I got off the bus at Public Square, walked through the May Company, left by the back door, and slipped past the Domino Lounge, its jukebox blasting disco funk, stepping into the bookstore.

   There was a raised platform inside the front door of the store on the right side. A homosexual big as a bear, who went by the name of Harry Condiles, worked behind the counter, looming over everybody and everything. He wore white button-down shirts with the sleeves ripped off. He was friendly up to a point. He knew how to be deliberately unfriendly.

   “Get out of here, you creeps,” Rachel Kay blew up whenever his boyfriends stopped by to chat. He knew where everything was, was quiet and patient, although he could lose his temper if questioned one time too many. One day when a customer couldn’t find a book for the third or fourth time he snapped, “Oh, it’s up there, over there by those damned books, over by that fucking thing there.” He had a keen eye for shoplifters. He knew when a purse or bag didn’t look right. The boss lady appreciated his profit and loss smarts. She was always somewhere in the three-story building, her shoes click clacking on the mosaic tiled floors, keeping order as best she could.

   The place was stuffed full of books and magazines. I had never been in the basement, which was rumored to be filled to the brim with them, but what I saw upstairs made me think they had a copy of every book ever printed. The aisles were narrow and the shelves floor to ceiling. There were rows of books behind every first row of books. It was sort of organized. New hardcovers were up front. Poetry was on the mezzanine. Mass market paperbacks were on the second floor. The upper level was for porn and health magazines full of female nudists. Everything else had to fend for itself.

   The paperbacks I bought were fifteen cents, maybe a quarter. Some of them had been sticker priced so long ago I knew I was coming out way ahead when adjusted for inflation. Cockroaches that ate the glue were rampant, so I learned to check the bindings. The boss lady didn’t always stick to the sticker price. She wasn’t above saying a book stickered $2.95 was worth more, crossing out the price, and writing $4.55 in black crayon in its place. Whenever anybody argued with her about being highhanded, first, they didn’t get the book, and second, they were told to take their business somewhere else.

   I was reading a dog-eared copy of “Exit for a Dame” one afternoon when one of the barflies got up, limped over to my table, and plopped himself down in the chair across from me. He looked at the book. I looked at him. His eyes were halfway down a wormhole.

   “Whatcha reading?” he asked.

   “Are we getting acquainted?” I asked.

   “You betcha,” he said.

   I thought before I spoke, wary of anymore cha-cha-cha’s. He seemed partly sober, as far as I could tell. He seemed affable enough. He seemed like he was able to form sentences from beginning to some kind of end.

   “It’s pulp fiction from right after World War Two.”

   “I was in that war, fella,” he said. 

   “Is that right?”

   “You don’t believe me?”

   “I’ll take your word for it.”

   “All right, all right,” he said, reaching for his billfold. 

   He pulled out a five-pointed gold star attached to a faded red, white, and blue ribbon.

   “What is it?” I asked.

   The Silver Star,” my newfound companion said. “It’s awarded for gallantry in action against an enemy of the United States.”

   “What did you do to get it?

   “I was on Tarawa.”

   “What’s that?”

   “It’s a sand island in the Pacific. We landed there in 1943. I got shot twice before it was all over, but I killed my share of slant-eyes. Those sons-of-bitches were tough.”

   The battle for Tarawa was fought in late November, part of Operation Galvanic, the invasion of the Gilbert Islands. Altogether more than 6,000 Japanese and American soldiers died during the three-day fighting, mostly on and around the 300-acre bird-shaped island of Betio, southwest of Tarawa Atoll. It was the first American offensive in the central Pacific. The nearly 5,000 Japanese defenders were well-prepared. They fought to nearly the last man. The few who didn’t die were too mangled to fight anymore. It was all over in three days.

   “The island was the most heavily defended atoll that would ever be invaded by Allied forces in the Pacific,” said Joseph Alexander, a Marine amphibious officer who later became a war historian. One combat correspondent who landed with the fighting forces called it “the toughest battle in Marine Corps history.”

   “It was flat as a pancake” the barfly said. “There was nowhere to hide. We dug holes in the sand fast as we could, like crabs, trying to stay alive.”

   “Every spot on the island was covered by direct rifle and machine gun fire,” Marine Colonel Merritt Edison said. He meant every spot on the island was the wrong spot. Every Marine on the island knew that first-hand. They prayed to God during the fighting that he was on their side.

   “We landed on amphibious tractors,” the man said. His hair was thin and unkempt. His teeth were bad, and his fingernails were yellow. He smoked Lucky Strikes one after the other. He wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, but his watch was a Rolex, and his shoes were soft fancy leather. He was down but not out. He waved towards the bar for his drink to be refreshed. 

   “It was one goddamned mix-up after another,” he said. Shelling from the American warships was disjointed. The landing time was delayed twice. Headwinds pushed the landing craft between the devil and the deep blue sea. Scaling the seawall was more dangerous than anybody anticipated. “Those who were not hit wading ashore would always remember how the machine gun bullets hissed into the water, inches to the right, inches to the left,” wrote Robert Sherrod, a correspondent for Time Magazine.

    The Japanese used their hand grenades to good effect once the Marines started landing. Corporal John Spillane, a major league baseball prospect before the war, caught two of them barehanded and threw them back before a third exploded in his hand. His baseball career was over in that instant.

   “You got shot two times? Is that how you got the medal?” I asked.

   “That’s when I got it, but I didn’t get it for getting shot,” he said. “It was when the Japs counterattacked the third night. They were screaming and yelling and running right at us out in the open. Our artillery opened up on them until they were so close to us that they had to shut down. It was hand to hand after that.”

   “So, what did you do to get the medal?”

   “A squad of gooks got low with their machine gunin , the kind that has an armored shield, and were spraying us. We had to take them out. Five of us went with grenades. Another one of us had a flame thrower. We took care of business, but I was the only one who made it back. I got plugged in the shoulder and my leg, right here near the hip. The medics jacked me up with morphine, poured a bottle of sake down my throat, and that was the end of the war for me.” 

   After the battle, which saw only 17 wounded Japanese soldiers surrendering, the island was awash in carnage. “Betio would be more habitable if the Marines could leave for a few days and send a million buzzards in,” Robert Sherrod wrote afterwards. Marine General Julian Smith declared the enemy “wiped out.” After that it was on to the next island.

   The disheveled man an arm’s length from me had been a hero once. Watching him I thought of Marcel Proust, one of my least favorite writers, who I had been forced to read for one of my English classes. Why we had to read a long-winded French dandy was beyond me.

   “Remembrance of Time Past” is one and a half million words long. During a Q & A session I asked our professor how many times he thought a person might need to go to the bathroom getting through the endless magnum opus. He gave me a sour look. Proust scribbles words, words, and more words about his day-to-day life society manners friends enemies boys girls courtesans and love and love lost and the love of love and, above all, jealousy, and recrimination. After a while it just makes you want to puke. I couldn’t finish it. There was no pay-off in it. Cliff’s Notes were created because of that book. When the class was over, I threw the book away.

   Just as I was about to ask what happened, how he went from hero to tosspot, my companion said, “I got to go to the john.”

   There was one thing about Proust that I remembered. He wrote we think we are living in the world when we are only really living in our minds. Everything is inside us, not just now, but all of the past. We are a house of mirrors. I had no doubt the World War Two story had been told to countless listeners, some willing, some procured at random like me. My booze hound was staring in the same mirror day after day. Otto Moser’s was a way station and a confessional.

   When he came out of the bathroom, he told me “the can is broken.” He went out the front door. It was for the best. I had a four o’clock class and needed to get going. I stuffed my stuff into my backpack, paid the bill, and walked out into what was left of the afternoon.

   The Veteran of Foreign Wars was outside, three sheets to the wind, supporting himself with an outstretched arm leaning on a fire hydrant at the curb. He must have done a shot-or-two for the road. He was standing on a pile of crushed cigarette butts in a patch of milky sunshine. He was a sinking ship in a bottle. 

   “Are you all right?” I asked.

   “Sure, I’m OK,” he said, coming up for air.

   “Where’s home?”

   “Old Brooklyn, down by the zoo.”

   “You might want to go home and dry out.”

   “I’d probably die if I tried drying out,” he said.

   “There’s always tomorrow morning. Otto’s opens early.”

   “I know the order of business here, son, theirs and mine.”

   “In the meantime,” I said, “maybe don’t lean on that johnny pump.” I pointed at the fire hydrant. “Guys are always peeing on it.”

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

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

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

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

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

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

Accidental Realism

Tower of Babel

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By Ed Staskus

   My sister Rita thought Gadi Galilli was going to help her learn Hebrew, but he didn’t, not even for a minute. He was from Jerusalem, he had a boat load of friends who spoke Hebrew, and they yakked it up among themselves all the time. But he never helped her, even though they lived together, and she was the designated driver who drove him to synagogues. 

   She met Gadi when he was with the Cleveland International Group. They were both looking up at the same dinosaur one day at the Natural History Museum and afterwards she gave him a ride home. Everybody in the immigrant group loved him. He asked her for her phone number. He was a cute guy, and she liked him, but found out later he had almost no patience, even though it is a Biblical virtue.

   He was from a Kurd family, had been born in Haifa, and was an orthodox Jew. Rita always thought there was something out of joint with him. He never talked about why he left Israel when everybody else said it was the homeland. He didn’t always go to the same synagogue, either. He was supposed to walk to the service but she always drove him. She dropped him off a block from whatever synagogue he was going to that day and he walked the rest of the way. He didn’t want anyone to see him in a car.

   Rita was working at Born to Travel in Beachwood when she started thinking about learning to speak Hebrew. Beachwood is an ethnic neighborhood on the far east side of Cleveland and many of the people who came to the agency spoke Hebrew. She thought, “Maybe I should learn it. It would help me get ahead in my job.” Gadi and she would have something in common, other than going out and making out. 

   Sandy Eisen and Sima Zucker encouraged her. They were the co-owners of the travel agency. They wanted Rita to guide tours to Israel. What could be better, they said to one another, hacking and spitting into their trash cans, making their plans. They were sisters and both were fat. They were always at the head of the buffet line. Sandy was usually ahead of her sister. Sima worked hard, but Sandy didn’t, since she had Sima. Sandy fell asleep at her desk every day, her head lolling on triple chins. They both smoked cigarettes non-stop all day, stinking up the office, like it was the most important thing to stick in the mouths, next to chow. They were from Israel, from when they were children. They had never gone back. They weren’t even planning on visiting anytime soon.

   Although Rita wasn’t Jewish and only knew a handful of Hebrew words, she spoke Lithuanian fluently and some German. “I’m pretty good with languages,” she thought. She used to be a schoolteacher and was sure she could learn. At least she thought so until she tried. “I couldn’t have been more wrong,” she admitted. It was like baby talk being your native tongue and trying to learn Chinese and Hungarian both at once. 

    Sima told her about a language school on Shaker Boulevard, just 10 minutes from where Rita and Gadi lived. Classes were at night, twice a week, Tuesdays and Thursdays, from 8 o’clock until 10 o’clock. She made sure to get there early her first night, although when she got there every last person was already in the classroom.

   When the teacher walked in, Rita could barely see her, she was so short, barely bumping five feet. She had dark hair and was from Yemen. The first thing she said was, “Yemenite Jews are the most Jewish of all Jews. Be glad I am your teacher. Sit up straight and pay attention.” Her name was Ayala. She handed notebooks out with the Hebrew alphabet in them to the class. She started speaking in Hebrew, too, right away, and never went back to English unless she absolutely had to. She was all business.

   “Let’s go,” she said clapping at the start of every class.  Everybody had to stand up and sing the Israeli national anthem. Then it was down to the business of Hebrew.

   Rita’s biggest fear was Ayala calling on her. “I would have to speak in front of everyone,” she complained to herself. She tried to keep her nose buried in her notebook, scribbling notes. She tried to keep her head down in the foxhole. Everybody in the class was Jewish, except for her. Everybody had to tell everybody else their names the first day of class, There were Esther, Joshua, Miriam, Daniel, and 1Alexander. One man’s name was Gilead, which Alaya explained means mound of testimony, although she never explained what mound of testimony meant. Most of the class called him Gil, although one wise guy called him Mound of Gil, because he was heavyset.

   “Oh, my name’s Rita,” she said when it was her turn. Right away somebody asked her, “What’s your Hebrew name?” She wanted to say, “What the hey, I’m not even Jewish,” but instead said, “My family calls me Rita.” 

   Ayala asked questions in Hebrew, and when everyone around her answered in Hebrew, she realized they all knew at least some of the language, while she knew nothing. It was a beginner’s class, but she was as far back from the starting line as could be. When Ayala found out Rita didn’t know anything, she devoted a little more time to her. 

   Rita couldn’t make out the strange alphabet, and on top of that the writing was backwards. When the teacher spoke, it sounded like she was clearing her throat. She decided she wouldn’t be able to make those sounds. “I’m not coming back,” she decided. But two days later she was back. She told herself, “I am taking the class for work’s sake. I want to travel overseas. I don’t want to admit to Gadi I am quitting after one night.” She ended up taking the course from beginning to end, nine months of Hebrew. 

   Every symbol of the alphabet had to be memorized back to front and back. She tried, but it was hoodoo to her for a long time. Everything the teacher wrote on the black board she copied in her notebook. She wrote sentences first in English and then in Hebrew. She wrote her name repeatedly until she got it right. She wrote, “We have three children in our family, two boys and one girl,” and then she wrote it in Hebrew, over and over.

  The Pilgrims, when they landed in America, for a few minutes thought of making Hebrew their national language. It didn’t matter that it was the New World, not the Old World. But there’s no word in Hebrew for history, so the Hebrew proposal became lost history.

   The classroom across the hall was a conversion class. Everybody in the class was somebody converting to being Jewish. Rita’s classmates craned their necks, a sour look on their faces, watching them go in their door. They didn’t like it, at all.

   “Oh, they’ll never be real Jews, those non-Jews trying to be Jewish.” they said.  

   “Take a look at that shiksa,” a skinny man sneered looking down his nose.

   Rita thought everybody believed her mother was Jewish, although she didn’t know why. She had shoulder-length blonde hair. “I don’t look Jewish,” she thought, but if you say that in front of Jews, they’ll say, “What? There are plenty of blondes in Israel.” 

   Gino, who was the travel agent at the desk opposite her, and she were talking about the Jewish look one afternoon when a man walked in and she said, “Tell me he doesn’t look Jewish.” She said it too loud. It just came out. Everybody heard her say it.. Sandy and Sima put their cigarettes down. The secretary looked up from her typewriter. Most people who came to the agency were Jewish, so it wasn’t any surprise, but the man looked like Barbara Streisand.  

   Gino and she were outsiders because everybody else in the office and almost everybody else in the building and neighborhood was Jewish. Sandy and Sima would sometimes say, “I don’t know why the Christians don’t like Jews.” They made it sound like Christians were a crazy backwoods clan. They made it sound like being Jewish was God’s blue-ribbon plan.

   The Jewish holidays start in September. Yom Kippur is the heavyweight holiday. Everybody in Rita’s class was talking about it. One of them asked her, “What synagogue do you go to?” Most of the class lived on the east side, including her. She lived in Cleveland Heights up the hill from Little Italy. Rita thought, “Oh, Christ, there are a lot of small ones, but they’re all ultra-orthodox.” She didn’t want to look overly conservative. When she drove to work, she always passed the big Sinai Synagogue, so she said, “SInai.” It turned out it was ultra-orthodox.   

   Everybody was good with that, even though Rita didn’t wear a wig or have a real Hebrew name. She decided she had to go to the Sinai Synagogue to see it. At the service the men were all downstairs and the women upstairs, on a balcony, segregated. She took the stairs. It looked like most of the women were wearing wigs. She didn’t own a wig and never went back.

   Her classmates knew she lived with Gadi. He dropped her off at school and picked her up afterwards. He was OK with her saying she was orthodox. Since everybody mistakenly thought she was Jewish she knew she had to be crafty about it. She ran into them all the time where she lived and worked, especially around Corky and Lenny’s in the plaza next to Born to Travel, where she went to lunch every day.

  One evening an elderly lady with a scratchy voice, the mother of a woman she sat next to in class, called her out of the blue. It was a week before Christmas. It was the day before the last day of Hanukkah.

   “What did you do today?” she asked, like they were old friends.

   “I just finished all my shopping,” Rita said. She almost said Christmas shopping, but caught herself. Her family celebrated Kucius, the Lithuanian Christmas Eve. Her kith and kin were dyed in the wool Christians.

   “But it’s the last day of Hanukkah tomorrow,” she said.  

   “In my family that’s how we do it, we do everything the last minute,” Rita explained. “I’m not breaking tradition. Oh, I bought some donuts, too.” Somebody had told her to say donuts if she ever felt she was being called out.

   “Oh, I see, that’s good,” the old lady said.

   Rita was never certain whether she was getting a good grasp on Hebrew, or not. After every class she thought, “I’m never going back.” One night she finally didn’t go back. She couldn’t bring herself to do it. That night Alaya called her at 11 o’clock, just as she was going to bed. 

   “Why weren’t you in class?” she asked. 

   Rita wanted to tell her, “You should be asking me why I go, not why I didn’t go this one time.” But she told her because of the holiday coming up, she had to clean her cupboards, getting rid of all the yeast in the kitchen. If you’re ultra-orthodox you have to remove any yeast you have in the house, sweep away crumbs, look under cushions for moldy donuts, remove every trace of the stuff.  Most of the people in class were reformed Jews and didn’t take it too seriously, but because she had mistakenly made everybody believe she was more conservative than them, she was expected to be serious about ritual.

   “It never was my intention to say I was Jewish, but a good time to admit it never came up,” she explained to Gadi. What was worse, she was Roman Catholic. That side of her didn’t like Jews. The Lithuanian side of her didn’t like Jews, either. She kept her peace of mind by doing breathing exercises.

   After Alaya hung up, Rita had to meet her on Sunday morning, just the two of them, to make up the class. It was impossible to keep her head down with her teacher breathing down her neck. Alaya told her she was making progress. It made Rita glad.

   Gadi’s younger brother Oz from Israel visited them for two weeks in the spring. He was a big help, taking the time to talk to Rita in Hebrew, helping her get the feel of the language. It sounded like something between Arabic and French when he spoke it. He helped her more in a few days than Gadi ever did.

   Since his brother was visiting, the two men went to services together on Fridays, dressed up in business casual. Gadi turned off all the lights in the apartment when they went, walking to the synagogue. He had never done that before. He even unscrewed the light bulb in the refrigerator. When they left, they left Rita sitting alone in the half-dark.

   At the end of the class Rita got a B, even though she more-or-less staggered through it like wandering in the desert. Her reading and writing were sketchy, but by graduation time she spoke the language tolerably well. Even so, she was glad when it was all over.

  She started chaperoning Born to Travel tours to Israel soon afterwards. Sandy and Sima saw her off at Cleveland Hopkins Airport. They waved goodbye with their long Virginia Slims, their fingertips stained yellow, their flat feet achy. They bought giant hot pretzels to tide them over on the way home.

   Rita stayed with Gadi’s mother the first time she was in Jerusalem. Oz still lived at home. He  took her to a wedding. He told her how to dress for it. “Wear a black dress.” Rita wore a black dress. The men sat on one side and the women on the other side. After the ceremony she sat at a table with the women who passed around platters of food. 

   They were separated from the men by a low wall. The women sat and talked, most of the chatter too fast for her. All the men wore black hats and were having a great time, drinking, singing, and dancing, sweating up a storm, their hats bobbing up and down on the other side of the wall. The groom wouldn’t say a word to her when she tried to talk to him. He and his bride didn’t dance together, not even once. Rita danced with some of the other women. She had a wonderful time.

   The more often she went to Israel the better her Hebrew got. One day she was walking around Jerusalem by herself, sight-seeing the way she liked it. A young man with red hair wearing a yarmulke asked her something as he was passing by.

   “What’s that?” she asked.

   “Do you know where Jaffa Road is?” he repeated.

   Her tour group was staying in a hotel on Ben Yehud Street. It was exactly where it met Jaffa Road. She pointed over her shoulder.

   “It’s over there,” she said in throat-clearing squeaky-clean Hebrew.

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

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

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

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

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

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

Bomb City

Throne of Blood

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By Ed Staskus

   Little Italy was a fifteen-minute drive from the Central Station. Frank Gwozdz drove slightly under the speed limit and didn’t try to time the lights. It took them twenty minutes. He parked at the intersection of Euclid Ave. and Ford Dr. on the border of city life and Case Western Reserve University. Downtown was its own world. The school was its own world. Little Italy was up Mayfield Rd. It was its own world, too.

   “We’ll leave the car here,” Frank said. “We can walk the rest of the way.”

   “No respect for the law where we’re going?” Tyrone Walker asked.

   “Let’s just say it’s better to leave the car here where the school kids are,” Frank said.

   They walked to Corbo’s Dolceria on Mayfield Rd. at the corner of Murray Hill Rd. After sitting down at one of a handful of small tables in the front, Frank ordered a caffe normale and Tyrone ordered a coffee with cream and sugar.

   “Do you want to try a cappuccino instead?” Frank asked.

   “Whatever that is, no,” Tyrone said.

   Frank ordered a cassata for himself and another one for Tyrone.

   “Do you want it the Sicilian way or the American way?”

   “What’s the difference?”

   “The Sicilian way is with cannoli filling and maraschino cherries. The American way is with fresh strawberries and custard.”

   “I’ll take mine the American way.”

   “Suit yourself,” Frank said, ordering the Sicilian way for himself. Antoinette Corbo, who owned the bakery with her husband Joe, brought them their coffees and cassata cakes. She gave Tyrone a sidelong glance. 

   “Did you know the macaroni machine was invented in this neighborhood 70 years ago?” Frank asked Tyrone.

   “No, I didn’t know. I don’t know anything about this neighborhood.” 

   “It’s kind of like an Italian hill town,” Frank said. “Cleveland is down there and Cleveland Hts. is up there at the top of Mayfield Rd. It’s been here nearly a hundred years. Most of the first immigrants, who were from around Naples, worked at nearby marble works. They were stone cutters. Their women went into the garment trades, mostly lacework and embroidery.”

   “Why are we here?” Tyrone asked.

   “We’re here for you to see the neighborhood,” Frank said.

   “Is this the hot bed of dynamite?”

   “This is one side of the bed. The other side of the bed is the Celtic Club.”

   “I’ve been boning up on the files.”

   “Not here, not now,” Frank said. “After we finish our drinks we can take in the sights and sounds and then walk up to the cemetery. We can talk there. The walls have ears here. The dead don’t care there.”

   “What cemetery?”

   “Lakeview Cemetery. You can’t see it from here, but we’re sitting right next to it. That why all the Italian stone masons came here in the first place.”

   After finishing their cups of coffee Frank and Tyrone walked two blocks down the hill to the Holy Rosary Roman Catholic Church. It was a Baroque-style building. The house of worship stood four-square on the incline of the street.

   “The dagos weren’t here but a few years before they started building this church,” Frank said.

   “Don’t call them dagos,” Tyrone said.

   “I agreed to not call you a Negro,” Frank said. “That’s all the agreeing I’m going to do for one day.”

   “All right then,” Tyrone said under his breath.

   “Where was I?”

   “Christian charity,” Tyrone said.

   “I didn’t agree to listen to wisecracks, either.” 

   “All right,” Tyrone said under his breath again. Frank was his partner but partner or not, he was still his superior officer. There was no point in making an enemy of him his first day on the job. That could wait for later. He followed Frank up one of the flights of concrete stairs to the double front doors. There were two large arched windows above the doors. There were statues of saints at the top of the façade. A domed bell and clock tower anchored the eastern corner of the church. There was a parochial school in the back run by nuns of Maestre Pie Filippini. Boys and girls were forbidden giving them any lip. The nuns were not above giving them a hard crack. Their parents did worse than that whenever they heard excuses from their children about their misbehavior in school.

   “Since all the Italians back in the day here were stone cutters, like you said, how come this church is built of brick?” Tyrone asked.

   “The foundation is stone,” Frank said.

   “I guess that’s good enough,” Tyrone said.

   “Are you a church-goer?” Frank asked as they stepped inside.

   “Yes, but Baptist, not Roman,” Tyrone said. “How about you?”

   “Not anymore.”

   They went inside. It was quiet as a moonbeam. The church was empty. The sanctuary was brightly colored, but the nave was musty. It felt like a tomb. The police detectives looked around. Frank spoke low and slow.

   “This where the dagos get baptized, get married, and get buried,” he said. “We are always here for the funerals, to make sure whoever is in the casket is the man we won’t miss seeing, making sure he’s really dead, and check out what other hoodlums are in the crowd.”   

   “Do you take pictures of them?”

   “No, we show some respect when we’re here. Beside, we know who’s who.”

   “It sounds like routine enough work.”

   “It’s not the kind of work you’re going to be doing anytime soon, not with your face.”

   “My badge is the same color as everybody else’s,” Tyrone said.

   “The men we’re talking about don’t have any respect for badges, no matter what color they are. They have even less respect for black men carrying badges.”   

   Back on Mayfield Rd. they went across the street again. Frank slipped back into Corbo’s and came out with a cold bottle of San Pellegrino. He looked  back at the church. “They have a weekend here called the ‘The Feast of the Assumption’ every summer. It’s some kind of fundraiser. They hoist the Virgin Mary up on a platform, march her around, and everybody pins dollar bills on her. There are so many people nobody can move.”

   They went up the hill. They stopped when they got to the New Mayfield Repertory Cinema. “Opening Soon – Classic and Foreign Films” an a-frame sidewalk sign announced. “It’s some Jew who lost his job teaching English out in the suburbs,” Frank said pointing at the sign. “He got a year’s pay in the downsize and is re-opening this place. He thinks between the arty college crowd down on Euclid Ave. and the grab bag hippies up on Coventry Rd. he can turn a hobby into a business.” 

   Tyrone wanted to say something about calling Jews Jews but wasn’t sure what to say. It was dawning on him that Frank was less mean mouthed than missing a sense of properness. He wasn’t a babe in the woods by any means but for a big city cop he was somehow more country than big city. He was like white men in Alabama who couldn’t help themselves. A glass encased poster for the opening movie said “La Strada.” It was an Italian movie with Anthony Quin and Richard Basehart in it. Anthony Quinn looked musclebound. Richard Basehart was wearing angel wings and walking a tightrope. The love interest was somebody by the name of Giulietta Masina. She wore a bowler hat and had a clown’s dot on the tip of her nose. She didn’t look like any leading lady Tyrone had ever seen. The director was somebody by the name of Federico Fellini. Tyrone had never heard of him.

   “The funny thing about it is, he had to talk to Blackie first about getting this place,” Frank said.

   “Who’s that?” Tyrone asked. 

   “That’s Jim Licavoli, one of the mob bosses here. They had lunch together and he finally gave the Jew his blessing to lease the Mayfield, even though he didn’t have any ownership in it. It used to be a vaudeville theater that closed six or seven years ago. The way Blackie looked at it, strippers were OK but foreign movies were immoral.”

   “Why do you call him Blackie? His name came up in a file, but it said he’s called Jack White.”

   “He’s almost as dark as you, which is why we call him Blackie. He calls himself Jack White, God knows why. We never call him by that name.”

   “How do you know they had lunch together?”

   “We were nearby and heard the whole thing, although it was more a waste of time than anything else. The Jew had curly hair and was sincere as Shirley Temple. He wouldn’t stop talking about how much he loved movies. We thought he was a faggot. I think Blackie gave him his blessing just to get rid of him.”

   “You go to the movies?” Tyrone asked.

   “Not since I was in the academy,” Frank said. “’The Music Man’ might have been the last movie I saw.”

   “What do you do to relax?”

   “Fight with my wife,” Frank said.

   “She can’t be all bad.”

   “She comes the closest.”

   “That’s too bad.” 

   “Yeah, it’s too bad.”

   They continued walking up Mayfield Rd. When they got to E. 126th St. they turned left. At a dead-end past half-a-dozen houses they walked through a line of trees into the cemetery. Frank led the way, zig zagging to the James Garfield Monument.

   “It’s a tragedy what happened to him,” Frank said.

   “It’s a tragedy any time somebody gets shot, president or no president” Tyrone said.

   “No, I mean it’s too bad about how he died. He had the best doctors in the country, but they didn’t believe in disinfecting their hands and instruments. So, he didn’t die of the gunshot wound. He died of infection. He had only been president four months. He was six feet tall and had been a two-star general. It took him almost three months to die.”

   They stopped to look at John D. Rockefeller’s grave, but Tyrone didn’t want to stay. “He was the richest man in the world, selling his black gold, but he wouldn’t give the black man a chance. His kids did better later, but not John D. He was a son-of-a-bitch.”

   They crossed the cemetery’s Hillside Rd. before coming to the Haserot Angel.

   “What is that?” Tyrone asked looking at it. It was a life-sized bronze angel sitting on a marble gravestone. She held an extinguished torch upside down. Her wings were outstretched. She seemed to be crying black tears.

   “They call it ‘The Angel of Death Victorious’ because of the torch that is out,” Frank said. “Some people call it the weeping angel because it looks like she’s crying. It was put up about fifty years ago by a local man who made his fortune in canned goods.” The name ‘Haserot’ was chiseled into the base of the gravestone. “The man who sculpted it is buried in this same boneyard. Lots of people say this place is haunted, especially this spot right here.”

   They heard a cough and rustling behind the angel. There was a bad smell in the air. Frank put a finger to his lips and signaled Tyrone to step back. Tyrone slipped his Colt into his hand with the barrel pointing to the ground. Frank stepped to the side of the monument. The angel stayed where it was, looking deadpan.

   “All right, come out of there, with your hands where we can see them.”

   What stumbled out from behind the marble angel was a small swarthy man who reeked of booze. There was a pint bottle of it peeking out from his back pocket. It was emptier than fuller. He slapped dirt off his hands and shrugged loose grass off his shoulders. One of his shoes was untied. His shirt was checked, and his eyes were fly belly blue. His zipper sagged at the crotch of his pants. All of him smelled worse the closer he got to them.

   “That’s close enough,” Frank said. “What are you doing here?”

   “Visiting old friends,” the man said.

   “Let me introduce you to Joey Bag of Donuts, one of the bomb makers for the dagos,” Frank said to Tyrone, pointing to the man. “Does Danny Greene know you’re here? He might show up with a shovel.”

“It takes an earlier bird than that dumb-ass paddy to get the better of a worm like me,” Joey said smiling slyly.

Excerpted from “Bomb City.”

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

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

A Mid-Century Crime Thriller

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

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

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

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

Accidental Realism

Angel Face

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By Ed Staskus

   “My first grade gym teacher was the man who started me out in music,” Chuck Eversole said. The  gym teacher was an ex-Jarhead with a standard issue buzz cut. “He had a meeting with my mom and dad one day.” The meeting was about him. “Charles has very poor hand eye coordination,” he told Chuck’s parents. “He has trouble catching balls. I have a suggestion. I think he should take piano classes, or learn some kind of keyboard instrument.”

   When Chuck’s grandfather heard about the suggestion, he suggested the accordion. It had a keyboard. He was from Switzerland where everybody in his part of the mountains danced to the squeezebox. It was what kept them up at night, young men swinging and squeezing young women around the floor.  It was his favorite musical instrument. When he sized up his grandson, however, he changed his mind. 

   “I was always the smallest kid at the end of the row in our school pictures,” Chuck said.  He tipped the scales at just over 40 pounds. Beginner accordions weigh about 15 pounds. “It was too heavy for me, so grandpa bought me a piano.” He started taking lessons when he started 2nd grade. “I took to it right away. By the time I was in 6th grade the choir director at our school asked me to play piano for his choir practices.”

   Chuck’s mother Katherine and his father Charles met at a math teacher’s summer conference. She was from Long Island. He was from Ohio. They were both math teachers. Before long one plus one became two peas in a pod. “Every summer our vacations were going to some college campus for a math workshop. One summer we went to Stow, Vermont. I had just seen ‘The Sound of Music’ so my parents took me to where the real Maria von Trapp was operating a ski lodge there.”

   He bought a book about the musical in the gift shop. There was a picture on the back cover of Maria von Trapp wearing a colorful dirndl. “We were in the parking lot getting ready to leave when a turquoise sports car raced up and stopped beside us. Maria von Trapp, wearing the same dirndl, popped out of the driver’s seat. I was so excited because music was my thing. I went right up to her and got her autograph.”

   That school year Chuck made friends with a new kid in his class. His name was Cory Harding. “We went to choir classes together.”  One day Cory told Chuck he was in another singing group and they were going to perform downtown at Music Hall on Mother’s Day. “I told my parents we had to go.” The only tickets left were in the nosebleed part of the balcony. “We were three rows from the top. The stage was a sea of kids. After their first song I turned to my mom and dad and told them I had to be in that group.”

   The group was the Singing Angels. The year was 1978. The Singing Angels had been the brainchild of Bill Boehm. When he was a young man he performed in musicals at John Adams High School and Western Reserve University. He became  a professional singer. Then World War Two broke out. “I had everything going for me. My God, I had a contract from Hollywood in my hand. I had a contract from Broadway. But I came from a family where you’re an American, so what do you do? Well, somebody has got to fight for this country.”

   He founded the Singing Angels in 1964. It was the same year the Beatles blasted off. A few years earlier while doing research in the Western Reserve University library for his master’s degree in theater, he had struck up a conversation with a woman about a project he had in mind. He wanted to organize a children’s singing group. “I had this idea for quite a while and just didn’t know what to do with it. Even so, I knew I had something practical that would work and be good for the kids.” 

   The woman suggested he contact the Cleveland Friends of Music. He  went to see them. He told them he wanted to put on a show at Severance Hall, the home of the Cleveland Orchestra.  They told him they would promote it if he would and could sell all the tickets. He put out a notice for singers. Eighty children responded. “From the word go I knew I had something.” 

   Bill Boehm recruited children from all around Cleveland to perform what he called “good” music. Rock and roll was the rage. He thought it was “very bad” music. “There is no melody,” he said. “It is just volume.” Their first show was a medley of holiday songs that Christmas season. They were a smash. The Lakeside Summer Art Festival became an annual venue the next year after their first show there. Their first television special was on a local TV station in 1967. Two years later they were invited to the White House for a Command Performance. That same month they appeared on the Kraft Music Hall Special on NBC-TV. 

   Chuck kept the Singing Angels at the front of his mind all summer. Auditions were scheduled for September. But when his turn came he was told the group only took children up to and in the 8th grade. He was  going into the 9th grade. Chuck was crestfallen. “You are breaking his heart,” his mother said.

   There was a training chorus and a performing chorus. As children matured and got better they were promoted into singing on stage. Chuck’s mother wrangled an audition for her son. When he was done auditioning, he was invited to join the performing chorus on the spot. Rehearsals were in a large enough extra space at the Fireman’s Training Academy on the periphery of downtown. “There were more than a hundred kids there from all over. I had never seen so many different kinds.  I came from Richmond Hts. where there was only one black kid in our school of a thousand.”

   He had led a sheltered life. “My mom was overprotective. Whenever I wanted to go out with my high school friends she had a fit. But after a year with the Angels, if I had told her I was going out with a gang of them to knock off a bank, she would have said, ‘Make sure to be home on time for dinner.’”

   Practices were on Saturdays. They lasted three hours. The Tuesday night practices lasted two hours. If they had a big show coming up they practiced on Sundays, too. “We had to memorize all our songs,”  Chuck said. “We didn’t use sheet music. We weren’t a choir. We were a performing chorus. It wasn’t a religious group, all sacred music. There was some spiritual music, but it was mostly show tunes, barber shop harmonies, and holiday songs. Every January after Christmas we had to learn and memorize a whole new repertoire.”

   The Singing Angels staged up to 30 shows during the holiday season and that many again the rest of the year. Mothers and fathers had to make as much of a commitment as their children. Neither of Chuck’s parents sang or played a musical instrument. Regardless, they supported him non-stop. His grandfather had some musical talent. “He was a very severe man, but he knew how to yodel,” Chuck said. Some people have van Gogh’s ear for music. Chuck had an elephant’s ear for it.

   He was in the marching band in high school. He played the trumpet while wearing a shakos hat and marching up and down the field. “We didn’t have plumes, though,” he said. One of his parents would drive him to the Saturday morning football games in their Chrysler New Yorker. “It was the model with the fins. It was like the Batmobile. As soon as halftime was over I would run to the car and change while I was being driven downtown for Angel practice. I would duck down on the back seat, strip off my marching band uniform, and change into civilian clothes.”

   The Singing Angels began touring foreign countries in 1974. Their first tour was to Romania. “My second year with the group, which was 1980, we toured Berlin, Vienna, and Rome. The pope came out to St. Peter’s Square to see us. My third year we went to the International Song Competition in Wales. We had to learn all new to us classical songs for it. There were 32 groups there. We came in 4th place. My last year we toured Mexico.” The year after Chuck left the group the Singing Angels went to China, just ten years after Richard Nixon ended the isolation between the United States and the communist country. “I always wanted to make music that would bring joy,” Bill Boehm said. “What would bring young people together, and help them understand patriotic things, human things. It’s the magic of music.”

   Everybody’s tour of duty with the Singing Angels came to end when they graduated from high school. By then Chuck’s younger brother William was in the group. “He stayed longer than I did since he joined earlier. When I was a kid I had an imaginary friend named Billy. After my parents named my brother Billy I had to say goodbye to my imaginary friend, although at first I wanted my mother to take my baby brother right back to where he had come from.”

   A year after Chuck retired from the group his mother Katherine  joined it as the administrator of the training chorus. “She replaced Roe Green, for whom the Kent State University Center for Performing Arts is named.” Katherine stayed with the Singing Angels for the next 30-some years. “One of her first responsibilities was ironing the red taffeta ties the kids wore.”

   The Caroling Crusaders came into being at that time. They performed in small groups at hospitals and nursing homes. “They sang a cappella. They learned how to adapt on a dime, from going to a small nursing home to the Cuyahoga County Fair to St. Peter’s Square. As much as they learned about music they learned about life.”

   There was a lot to learn. “There I was, a high school student, and I was one of the soloists at Music Hall with a microphone in my hand in front of a sold-out audience. I learned how to be confident around other people. I learned more about life than I learned about music. That’s the truth.” Confidence in your ability is the key. Once somebody has that, and is ready to follow through, they are nearly unstoppable.

   “If you’re not going to go all the way, why go at all?” said NFL quarterback Joe Namath. When he won the Super Bowl in 1968 he went all the way. At the same time, he knew how to have fun. “When you have confidence, you can have a lot of fun. And when you have fun, you can do amazing things.” 

   The Singing Angels weren’t always angels, no matter how amazing they were. “Some of my friends and I snuck out of our hotel one night when we were in Wales. We hung out and ran around all over. It was lots of fun. We had to sneak back into our rooms like secret agents in the middle of the night.” At the end of the day, if it was fun, it was a good day.

   “We were in England walking around after a show when some girls asked my friends and me for our autographs. They were like groupies. Two weeks later when I was back home in Richmond Hts. I got a postcard from one of the girls, It was addressed to Chuck Eversole, Singing Angels, Cleveland, USA. That was it. I don’t know how it ever got to me, but it did. Her address was on the postcard and we ended up being pen pals for the next five years.”

   Being a pen pal can be a testament to patience. Letters mailed to England in the 1980s took almost two weeks to get there and another two weeks for the response to get to where it was going to. When Chuck finally got a letter from his pen pal it was always the write time to  put his Bic pen to paper.

   After four years in the Singing Angels his magical mystery tour with the group was over. He had made many friends. He stayed friends with some of them through the years. “Absolutely,” Chuck said. “I’m still friends with Cory, the boy who introduced me to the group. He’s a television producer for Dateline. Whenever I’m in New York City we try to get together.” The Singing Angels was a garden where Chuck blossomed. It was where he found the freedom to lift up his voice and be himself. It was where he learned to be amazing.

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

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

A Mid-Century Crime Thriller

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

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

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

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

Lake Erie Blues

Call of the Wild

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By Ed Staskus

   Every time Maggie Campbell found an animal, a cat, dog, bird, or squirrel, anything, it didn’t matter, she would take care of it. If they were hurt, her dad, Fred, and she would help them get better They did it together. If it was an emergency, they took them to the Lake Erie Nature Center down Wolf Rd. way.

   It drove her mother Alma batty. She barely tolerated animals. “They belong outside where they belong.” Besides, she had asthma. Their dander, saliva, and skin flakes aggravated it. It was a headache for everybody. “Somebody’s going to have to take me to the people doctor,” she complained bitterly whenever Maggie brought another lost or hurt critter home.

  “If you’re born to love animals, then you love animals,” Maggie said. She didn’t think it was anything you could just make happen. Her dad had it. She had it. Her mom wasn’t good with strays. She didn’t have it. Whenever Maggie wanted a pet, she always asked her dad. She never asked her mom. They had cats, dogs, guinea pigs, and a poodle, thanks to Fred.

   Their poodle Coco hated Maggie’s brother Brad. She never knew why, exactly, except she thought he might have been too rough with her when he was a crawler. “Coco, get him,” was all she had to say if they were sitting on the sofa together. Coco would jump him, growling and snapping and ripping off his diaper. She had fun making the poodle attack her little brother, since she knew the dog wanted to, and because she could.

  Before Elaine her older sister moved out, Maggie and Brad slept in the same room. They both had single beds with posts and a bar across the back. They each had cherry wood dressers, a closet, and shelves for their toys. Maggie slept by the window and Brad slept closer to the door. Her brother passed wind, more like gusts of noxious gas, when he was a young. They kept their bedroom window cracked open even in winter. Sometimes Brad farted so loud he woke her up.

   “Are your butt cheeks still flapping from that one?” 

  She did love him, though. He was a good kid most of the time. When she was in junior high, she took him with her wherever she went. They had their moments, though. They were like Tom and Jerry. No harm no foul.

   Maggie played TRIP! with him all the time when he was small. Wherever he was in the house, which was a split level, six steps up from the basement, or the five steps up to the kitchen, or the twelve steps up to the bedrooms, it didn’t matter. He never knew when Maggie was going to suddenly pull a cord tight and make him trip.

   Her sisters made her play LET ME HAVE IT! with them. They would be in Elaine or Bonnie’s bedroom, and she would have to say, “LET ME HAVE IT!” They would pummel her with pillows. Just beat her, letting her have it. It was pillow talk time.

  A car hit Coco when Maggie was a sophomore in high school. Coco had gotten older and slower, but none of them saw it coming. She ran up and down the street and into and out of the woods at the end of their cul-de-sac all her days.  The man who hit her stopped, picked her up, and went looking for the owners. When he found Bonnie, she came to the Bay Village swimming pool where Maggie was lifeguarding and got her. They had to put Coco down. Even Alma thought it was awful.

   When they got their Rottweiler, Alma claimed she loved the dog, but they still had to get rid of him because she said the dog inflamed her asthma. Her sister Elaine adopted him, since she had moved away from home, so Maggie was still able to see the dog whenever she wanted.

   Growing up in the Fred and Alma Campbell house in Bay Village was not like growing up in your average house. You were either going to move out while you were still young, or you were going to be thrown out. Looking back, after she left, she realized they all left early. Everybody in their family got married when they were 19, except Maggie. Her mom and dad got married at 19, her brother got married when he was 19, and both of her sisters got married when they were 19. She didn’t get married until I was 34, soon after her dad died. Still and all, she left the family home the year she was 19.

   Long before she got married, after her dad threw her out, she watched Elaine’s dog whenever her sister went on vacation. He was a sweet dog, but a stupid dog, too.  Elaine named him Candyman. Everybody called him Candy. He wasn’t the kind of vicious Rottweiler everybody thinks they are. He had a blanket he carried around. They called his blanket Betty. They would tell him to go get Betty and when he came back, he would be dragging his blankie behind him.

   He loved people, just loved them. Elaine lived in West Park, near St. Patrick’s, which was a Catholic church and school, and when school let out, the Candyman would sit at the front door whimpering to be let out.

   “You can’t go out,” Elaine would say. “You’re going to scare the kids.”

   He was muddle-headed and cried no matter what she said. He learned how to lean on the door and swivel the knob with his snoot and get out. Maggie started thinking he wasn’t so simpleminded, after all. “No, you’re not going out there,” she told him all the time whenever she was at Elaine’s house, but if she was upstairs, he would finesse the door and the next thing she knew he was at the end of the driveway. As the school kids walked by there was a big slurp for each of them. They walked away wiping their faces and rubbing their hands dry on their pants.

   He got out one day when two guys were playing with a frisbee in the street. The Rottie had seen them through the screen. He couldn’t contain himself. “You’re not going out there,” Maggie told him firmly, wagging her finger. “I don’t know those guys.” 

   He banged up against the door and when it flew open, he took off. The guys were 16, maybe 17, and when they saw him running full speed at them, they froze. Maggie ran out waving her arms. “Throw the frisbee!” she yelled. They stayed stuck in place stiff as sticks. “The dog will love you if you throw the damn frisbee!” One of them threw their bright red plastic disk. The eager beaver Rottweiler hauled ass after it.

   “Sweet,” one of the boys said.

   They hit the jackpot that day, running the dog until the end of the afternoon. His feet were raw when he got home. He was an idiot, after all, Maggie decided. She poured him a big bowl of clean cold water and rubbed aloe vera gel on his paw pads.

   Even though she loved animals, and her mom didn’t, which was something between them that wasn’t getting resolved anytime soon, Maggie was the only one of her mom’s four kids who was determined to spark some love in her mother. The others had long ago given up trying. They had their reasons.

   She would come home from parties or from dances when she was in junior high and plop down on her bed, sprawling out and telling Alma about the whole fantastic night, everything that happened. Her mom would stay on the bed with her, stroking her hand, listening. She cooed until Maggie fell asleep.

   A dog will love you if you throw a frisbee. In their family they had to plan scheme compel their mom to love them. It was just the way Alma was. Her father had grown up well-off, but not her mother. Maggie used to wonder what it was like for her growing up in a worn-out washed-up town, her family poor broken ignored. Her mother needed some love. Maggie could tell. Maybe animals couldn’t give it to her, but she could try to get it done.

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

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

A Mid-Century Crime Thriller

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

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

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

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

Accidental Realism

City on Fire

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By Ed Staskus

   The Friday afternoon Cleveland’s St. Clair neighborhood blew up, Hal Schaser was walking home from his 7th grade class at Wilson Junior High on East 55th St. He was 13 years old. It was an Indian summer day on October 20, 1944. He was looking forward to a bowl of soup and salt crackers. He was nearing his house near three in the afternoon when he was almost knocked off his feet by a thunderous blast. When he steadied himself and looked around, he saw roofs on fire as far as he could see.

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

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

A Mid-Century Crime Thriller

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

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

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

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

Accidental Realism

Rocket From the Tombs

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By Ed Staskus

   When I saw Dick Dale at the Beachland Ballroom in 2003 I didn’t know he was dying. If somebody had told me that after the show was over, I would have said they were crazy. “The King of the Surf Guitar” had put on a set piece of steel string twang. He had a bass player and a drummer with him but he was a one man band. I had to stand in a shoulder-to-shoulder crowd from beginning to end. I was tired of standing by the end. Dick Dale was 15-some years older than me and spent the show the same as me, standing, except he did it moving back and forth, all the while putting on a three ring circus on his Stratocaster.

   “I’ve been performing since 1955 and I’m going to keep performing until I die because I’m not hoping to die in some rocking chair with a beer belly,” he said. “I’ll never die. I’ll just explode, right there before your eyes, onstage.” He spent 60-some years performing before he went pop.

   What I didn’t know was he had been diagnosed with cancer more than thirty years earlier. When that happened, he went to Hawaii for sunshine and treatments. It sidelined him for years. “You know what the doctors call me to this day? They call me ‘The Cancer Warrior.’” He stayed in trim through thick and thin, playing his guitar upside down and backwards. He was born into this world a lefty.

   Before Jimi Hendrix was the Jimi Hendrix Experience, he was the bass player for Little Richard. He was in Little Richard’s back-up band the Upsetters. “We were both left-handed, but we would use a right-handed guitar held upside down and backwards. He developed my slides and my riffs. He used to say, ‘I patterned my style after Dick Dale.’”

   Dick Dale cut his teeth and made a name for himself at the Rendezvous Ballroom in Orange County. The ballroom was built in 1928 and had long been a swing and big band place. He started playing there in 1961. Seventeen people showed up at his first show, all of them surfer friends of his. A half year later thousands of fans were attending his nightly gigs. The shows were called “The Surfer Stomp.” The Rendezvous Ballroom burned down in 1966, the day after the band the Cindermen played there.

   When the surf guitar craze died down in the mid-60s, Capital Records declined to renew their contract with him. His father and he went back to pressing their own singles. The British Invasion was in full swing. The Beatles were on the throne. The Monkees were on the horizon. Dick Dale took a back seat. “You’ll never hear surf music again,” Jimi Hendrix sang on his 1967 song “Third Stone from the Sun.”

   In the 1970s Dick Dale suffered an accident on his surfboard that almost cost him a leg. It took him a long time to recover. He stopped performing until he got his feet back under him. He scored his first comeback in the 1980s when he was nominated for a Grammy alongside Stevie Ray Vaughn for their cover of the Chantay’s “Pipeline.” It was back to the beach.

   Satan’s Satellites opened for the surfman when he came to Cleveland. When they were done stirring the pot it was time for the mainline. He was dressed like a cowboy, mostly in black. He had an aquiline nose and his hair had gone white. The Fender Stratocaster being driven to a reverb-heavy frenzy in his hands was yellow. The guitar was nicknamed “The Beast.” It was fitted up to be played loud, with thick gauge strings. “I called them cables,’’ he said. “That’s what gave me my fat sound.’’ He was compelled to use heavy picks to make an impact. His staccato picking led to him go through dozens of them every show. The Stratocaster didn’t have tone controls. It had a master volume and a toggle that activated the neck and middle pickups.

   “My philosophy is the thicker the wood, the thicker the sound,” he said. “The bigger the string, the bigger the sound. My smallest string is a 14 gauge.”

   Dick Dale wasn’t born “The King of the Surf Guitar.” He was born Richard Mansour, the son of a Lebanese father and a Polish mother. He learned to play the piano at an early age and moved on to the ukulele. His uncle played the oud and the tarabaki and taught them to his nephew. In his teens he bought a used guitar and it was off to the races after that. He blended tarabaki drumming into guitar playing, developing a picking technique he called “the pulsation.” When his family moved to southern California, he learned to surf on weekends. He took his board to the beach sunup to sundown. One thing led to another and the Middle Eastern music he had grown up with became the emerging genre of surf music.

   Surf music popped up seemingly out of nowhere in the late 1950s. It didn’t morph out of anybody else’s sound. The first wave was instrumental surf, played by the likes of Manuel and the Renegades, Eddie and the Showmen, and Dick Dale and His Del-Tones. Dick Dale pioneered the surf sound, folding his boyhood influences in with rock-n-roll, a spring reverb, and rapid alternate picking. His 1961 song “Let’s Go Trippin’” was a big hit and launched the popularity of the new music.

   The second wave was vocal surf, coming out of the mouths of bands like The Beach Boys, Jan & Dean, and Ronny and the Daytona’s. It was the kind of music meant to stir the hearts of teenage girls and get them to buy records. “Little surfer little one, made my heart come all undone, do you love me, do you surfer girl, surfer girl my little surfer girl,” is how the Beach Boys put it. They weren’t above repeating “surfer girl” four times in one verse.

   Dick Dale wasn’t an old geezer, but he wasn’t a young geezer, either, the night I saw him perform. He was in his mid-60s, an inch or two shorter than six foot, and looked fit as a fiddle, although a little thick around the middle. He wasn’t fiddling around, though. He looked like the kind of guy who knew his way around. He looked like he might have a switchblade somewhere on his person. He looked like the kind of guy you wouldn’t want to get into a knife fight in a phone booth with.

   “I can be a mean maniac,” he said. “Someone once threw a firecracker at a show and I jumped off the side of the stage and whacked them on the side of the head.” He knew how to whack hotheads, having raised wild animals for many years on his ranch. “When I was surfing, I would get a rumble sound,” he said. It was the sound he tried to capture on his guitar. “At the same time, I was raising 40 different exotic animals. So, when my mountain lion, he’d go, ‘Waaah!’ I’d imitate that on my guitar. When my African lion wanted to be fed, he’d go, ‘Ooowwwahhhhrrrgh!’ They were matching the sounds of what you go through when on a 15-foot wave.”

   He started the show at the Beachland Ballroom with “Misirlou,” an old Middle Eastern song originally known as “Egyptian Girl.” It was from where his father and uncle came from. He learned it as a boy from his uncle who played it on the oud. “I started playing it,” Dick Dale said, “but I said, ‘Oh no, that’s too slow.’ And I thought of Gene Krupa’s drumming, his staccato drumming. When we moved to California, I got my first guitar, but I was using this rocket-attack, Gene Krupa rhythm on the guitar.”

   The reason Dick Dale was in Cleveland was the movie “Pulp Fiction.” The director Quentin Tarantino used the song “Misirlou” in his mid-90s movie and just like that “The King of the Surf Guitar” was back in the spotlight. He released a new album and hit the road again. He announced from the stage he had another new album out called “Spatial Disorientation.”

   The Beachland Ballroom hadn’t always been home to the most wide-ranging rock ‘n roll on Lake Erie’s south coast. The building was built in Cleveland’s North Collinwood neighborhood in 1950 as the Croatian Liberty Home. It came with a ballroom and a bar. It was where local Croatians celebrated weddings and lamented deaths. After a shot and a beer, it was time to live it up on the dance floor grooving to the gajde. A kitchen and back bar were added in 1976. During the Age of White Flight most of the Croatians moved farther east to suburban Eastlake and built a new National Home. The old building was boarded up. It became the Beachland Ballroom in 2000. 

   Surf music is usually played on electric guitars in straight 4/4 time with a medium to fast tempo. It is known for its use of a spring reverb incorporated into Fender amps. The Fender Reverb Unit developed in 1961 was the first to feature a wet surf reverb tone. It is the effect heard on Dick Dale recordings from that time on. “People just loved the sound,” he said.

   They loved the sound in California, for sure. “Kids called it surf music, although I didn’t call it that,” he said. “I didn’t go to Julliard. I’m into just chopping, chopping at the strings. That’s the sound, the sound of the waves chopping. The surfing sound is not the reverb. When so-called music historians say reverb’s the surf sound, they don’t know what they’re talking about. It’s the heavy machine gun, the staccato sound. It’s the waves.”

   Hallway through the show, halfway through “The Wedge,” he grabbed a pair of drumsticks and played part of the song on his guitar’s fretboard with them. Music historians everywhere shook their heads. “Where’s the reverb?” they asked. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland stuck by their decision to not induct him into their museum. They inducted the Ventures instead. It was a wise decision. Dick Dale wasn’t museum fodder. Museums are for the antiquated. He was a live wire. He wrote a song called “Better Shred Than Dead.”

   His staccato sound was a loud sound. Leo Fender was the man who made it loud and louder. He created the first 85-watt transformer especially for the plank spanker. It peaked at 100 watts. Leo Lender called it the ‘Showman.’ “It was like going from a little VW Bug to a Testarossa,” Dick Dale said. The Ferrari Testarossa was a championship-winning racing car in its day. The name means “red head” in Italian, referring to the red-painted cam covers on the 12-cylinder engine. In time the ‘Showman’ became a 100-watt transformer peaking at 180 watts. Leo Fender called the new deal the ‘Dual Showman.’ Everybody hearing it called it a game changer.

   “Leo Fender is the guru of all amplifiers,” Dick Dale said. “It was him who gave me a Stratocaster. He became a second father to me.” He became Leo Fender’s quality control tester. If an amp could survive his show, it was ready to go big-time. Along the way Dick Dale destroyed 50-some standard 30-watt boxes. “Dale and Leo would continue to work together on upping the ante, building a speaker cabinet that could house two 15-inch speakers to sustain his vicious riffage,” is how the Fender folks put it. 

   After he ripped through “Misirlou” to open the show, Dick Dale ripped through “Shake ‘n’ Stomp” and “Rumble” and “Jungle Fever” and “Hava Nagila” and “Banzai Washout” and “Shredded Heat.” He slowed it down for a minute playing “Caterpillar Crawl.” The drummer got to get excited on “Surfing Drums.” After that came “Tidal Wave” and “Ghost Riders in the Sky.” There wasn’t much banter between songs. When one was over and done with it was on to the next one.

   “I’m going to play my goddamn guitar and that’s all there is to it,” he said. “I’m going to make people happy. I’m going to make them forget about all their pains.” He meant get happy and forget your troubles for two-and-a half hours.

   When the show wrapped up after one encore, we shuffled out into the springtime night. There was a full moon in the empty sky. My friends and I wandered along the half mile of storefronts towards East 185th St. The neighborhood had been the headquarters of the Irish Mob in the 1970s. Motorcycle gangs showed up after the Irish were gone. The neighborhood was slowly turning the corner, though. Ten years later it became the Waterloo Arts District, bustling with art and entertainment.

   Dick Dale died 16 years after I saw him at the Beachland Ballroom. He was a fast man off the starting line when I saw him, the one and only time I saw him, all the while suffering from diabetes, kidney disease, and heading towards more cancer. What sustained him getting to the finish line was beyond me. Maybe the music kept him going. He said as much when he said, “I make my guitar scream with pain or pleasure. It makes people move their feet and shake their bodies. That’s what my music does.”

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

A New Thriller by Ed Staskus

“Cross Walk“

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

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

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

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

Accidental Realism

Sledgehammer Hill

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By Ed Staskus

   The weekend my mother-in-law and her husband moved out of Reserve Square in downtown Cleveland, they moved out of twin Brutalist inspired apartment towers. They had lived there for more than twenty years, on the 17th floor facing Lake Erie. During the annual September air shows flying out of Burke Lakefront Airport they sat on their balcony and watched the Blue Angels streak past like roadrunners on the loose.

   There’s nothing like the sound of four F/A-18 Hornets roaring a few hundred feet overhead and veering away from skyscrapers dead ahead. They are jets able to perform slow high angle of attack tail sitting maneuvers, and can fly formation loops dirty, their landing gear down. The sound of silence once they’re gone is deafening.

   Terese and Richard Parello bought a hulk of a house with four bedrooms and three bathrooms on the corner of East 73rd St. and Chester Ave., in the Hough neighborhood, ten minutes from downtown. It was built in 1910 in the colonial style. When they got done with it, they had added an attached garage, put on a new roof, installed new vinyl windows and siding, a new interior staircase, and a new kitchen. It went from ghetto to gentrified as fast as the contractors could make it happen.

   Almost 100% of the people living in Hough in 1999 were black. 2% of them were white. Teresa was Lithuanian and Rich was Italian. They were part of the 2%. He was from Rochester. She was from Cleveland. They never said a word to me about the racial make-up of the neighborhood. Everybody and their uncle tried to talk them out of buying the house.

   Terese was a self-taught cook who owned four restaurants in her time and made herself into one of the city’s best pastry chefs. The opera star Luciano Pavarotti searched her out and pigged out on her cookies and cakes whenever he was in Cleveland. “That man can eat,” she declared. When he was done eating he was ready for an aria.

   Her signature creation was a 17-layer cake based on a recipe that Napoleon brought to Lithuania during his ill-fated Russian campaign. Teresa, Rich, my wife, brother-in-law, and I helped make them Novembers and Decembers, working out of her kitchen, freezing them, and selling them during the holidays through the Neiman Marcus catalog. I went home most nights needing to shower the flour off me. 

   Terese and Rich bought the house in Hough because she had grown up nearby, when the neighborhood was more white than not, and wanted to go home again. It wasn’t the same, but she saw what she wanted to see. She remembered the neighborhood from her childhood and made the reality fit her memory. She had a streak of magical realism in her.

   I had a red Schwinn mountain bike that I frequently rode in the Rocky River Metropark, on the paved trail, the horse trails, and the single tracks. I rode around Lakewood. I rode downtown, winding my way through Ohio City and across the Hope Memorial Bridge, especially on weekends when all the bankers, lawyers, and city workers were at home. I usually rode the Hope Bridge over the Flats because of the Guardians.

   The 6,000-foot-long art deco truss bridge crosses the Cuyahoga River. Four pairs of immense stone statues officially named the “Guardians of Traffic” are sculpted onto opposite-facing pylons at each end. Each of the Guardians holds a different vehicle in its hands, a hay wagon, a covered wagon, a stagecoach, a 1930s-era automobile, and four different kinds of trucks. I always gave them a thumbs up in hopes of keeping cars and trucks away from me.

   I got it into my head that I wanted to ride around on the other side of town, through Cleveland Heights and Shaker Heights. I thought about East Cleveland but thought better of it. I asked Terese if I could park my car in their driveway while I rode. She said yes but cautioned me to bring my rear-mounted rack into the garage. Law and order were sketchy in her neighborhood. When I did, she invited me into the kitchen to snack on fig and nut energy balls.

   She was in the middle of two projects. One was chocolate-covered plastic spoons that turned into a steaming drink when hot water was added. There were rows of the spoons on baking trays. The other thing she was working on was inventing a handy pan to make the long thin Italian cookies called biscotti in your own kitchen.

   Whenever I had ridden downtown with friends and wanted to push ahead into Cedar and Fairfax, what my friends called the black hole, they always turned back. “I don’t want my husband getting killed by some spade,” one of their wives told me. I didn’t bother trying to reassure her by saying rednecks in vans and pick-ups were far more dangerous. It wouldn’t have done any good.

   I rode up the hill to Little Italy and Lake View Cemetery. The riding was curvy up and down the graveyard. I couldn’t see the lake, no matter what. I stopped at the James Garfield Monument and the Haserot Angel. President Garfield was shot four months into his term of office and died two months later from infections caused by his medical staff. He was determined to live but stood no chance against his White House doctors. The shooter was hung the next summer. On the gallows he recited a poem he had written called “I Am Going to the Lordy.” He signaled he was ready for his fate by dropping the paper it was written on. The hangman kicked the paper aside and didn’t mess up with the noose.

   There are thousands of trees and 100,000 graves in the 280-acre cemetery, from nobodies to moguls. One of the most striking grave markers is the life-sized bronze statue called “The Angel of Death Victorious” but known as “Haserot’s Angel.” The statue is seated on the gravestone of Francis Haserot, holding an extinguished torch upside-down. He made his fortune canning foodstuffs and importing tea and coffee. 

   The angel’s wings are outstretched and looks like it is crying black tears. “They formed over time,” Terese told me. “It’s an effect of the aging bronze.” She had taken drawing and painting courses at the Cleveland Institute of Art. I took her word for it.

   The best thing about riding up Mayfield Rd. to the cemetery was riding down Mayfield Rd. It was a long enough stretch that I could go as fast as I wanted to but had to feather the brakes all the way down. I didn’t want to end up laid out next to James Garfield.

   I rode Fairmount Blvd. to Shaker Hts. and bicycled around the Nature Center at Shaker Lakes. The green space was created in 1966 to stop the Clark Freeway from going in. The folks behind the effort called themselves ‘Freeway Fighters.’ Cuyahoga County Engineer Albert Porter called the Shaker Lakes a “two-bit duck pond” and vowed that the highway would get built come hell or high water. The highway never got built. 

   The 20 acres of the Nature Center has eight mapped natural habitats, four gardens for native plants and insects, and two trails. I rode the trails and tried not to squash any insects. I wheeled out on the 7-mile long Shaker Blvd. to Beachwood and back. Shaker Hts. was built by Oris and Mantis Van Swerington, early 20thcentury developers. They modeled the suburb and the boulevard after examples of English Garden City planning. They laid rapid transit rail service down the middle of the boulevard. Big broad tree-shaded lawns front the mansions on either side of the road. One of my cousins lived in one of the mansions, but I was sweaty and didn’t stop to visit.

   Terese always let me wash up when I got back to her house, made me a cup of coffee, and put something tasty she had baked on a plate. She never went to cooking school, instead learning her craft by thumbing through cookbooks. Everything she made was as good as the cookbooks said it was supposed to be. She had been the pastry chef at Max’s Deli in Rocky River and Gallucci’s Italian Foods in Cleveland.

   One weekend I rode my Schwinn, which was equipped with front shock absorbers, and went looking for Sledgehammer Hill in Forest Hills Park. The city park is lodged between East Cleveland and Coventry Village. The sloping land up to a plateau was John D. Rockefeller’s private summer estate in the 19th century. He could afford it because his estimated net worth was equivalent to 1.5% of America’s GDP. He was and still is therichest man in American business and economic history.

   There were lakes and bridle trails. There was a racetrack and a golf course. Before JD died the property went to his son, JD, Jr., who transferred one third of the deed to Cleveland Hts. and two thirds to East Cleveland. His only stipulation was the land be used for recreation and nothing else. The new park opened in 1942. It is about half forest and half meadow. It has been improved over the years, with tennis courts, a swimming pool, picnic areas, as well as basketball courts, football fields, and baseball diamonds.

   When I was a kid, we never went there summers, but went there many times in the winter. We lived at East 128th St. and St. Clair Ave. and getting there was no trouble. We went ice skating on the man-made lagoon and sledding down Sledgehammer Hill. That wasn’t its official name if it even had one. It was what all of us called it because of the bump near the bottom.

   There was a boat house on the lagoon. It was where we changed into our skates. My father had taught us to skate growing up in Sudbury, Ontario. The city is east of Lake Superior and west of North Bay. He would spray our front yard with a hose in the winter and the water froze hard as concrete in an hour-or-so. When we moved to Cleveland in the late 1950s, we took our skates with us. Neither my brother, sister, nor I were big-leaguers on the ice, but we skated like dervishes, living it up as we tried to toe loop and pirouette.

   Sledgehammer Hill was a hill that started at the top of the plateau and ran down a wide treeless slope. When I went looking for it my remembrance was that it was long fast and deadly. I didn’t give my memory much credence, though, believing it must have really been short slow and safe. You never know when you’re making up a memory.

   When I found it, thinking that I would ride down it on my bike, I was startled. I backed away from the lip of the hill and got off my bike. I walked back to the edge and looked down. It looked even longer and more dangerous than I remembered. I saw the bump near the faraway bottom and remembered hitting it, going airborne, and landing like a sledgehammer had just body-slammed me. Many kids veered away from the bump. None of us ever blamed them. We had all done the same thing at one time or another. Only the innocent went over the bump the first time and lived.

   I don’t know how fast our sleds went, maybe 20 or 25 MPH, but they went fast as hell. We didn’t have helmets then and only wore caps on our heads. You were considered a sissy if you wore earmuffs. I started wearing earmuffs after the dead of winter weekend my ears froze and almost fell off. 

   Our parents always went skating with us or watched from a bench in case the ice started to  crack, but when we went sledding, they dropped us off and went on their way. My sister rarely sledded, my brother sometimes did, but I couldn’t get enough of it. We rode Speedaways, Yankee Clippers, and Flexible Flyers. Only the foolhardy among us rode Sno Wing Blazons. They were too fast for Sledgehammer Hill. Most of us wanted to go as fast as possible but not break our necks. We sledded until it started to get dark and our parents came back to pick us up. 

   I got back on my mountain bike, riding away from Sledgehammer Hill, roaming around the park plateau, taking in the ghost sights of the past. I rode to the north end of the hill where JD’s mansion had stood. It burned to the ground under mysterious circumstances in 1917.

   It was early in the evening when I pedaled back to Terese’s house. When I told her about the hill she stepped into the middle of her kitchen, pretending to be standing on a sled, balancing with her arms stretched out, and racing to the bottom. She had performed professionally as a ballet dancer and taught the fine points of footwork to Cleveland’s Lithuanian folk dancing groups. She was a chorus girl when the Metropolitan Opera came to town, dancing in the background. But if she had tried that stunt on Sledgehammer Hill, professional dancer or not, she would have gone flying headfirst when she hit the bump, and there wouldn’t have been enough cupcakes in the whole city to break her fall.

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

A New Thriller by Ed Staskus

“Cross Walk“

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

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

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

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

Accidental Realism

Up in Smoke

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By Ed Staskus

   Not everybody was too big at Born to Travel, but except for Sally, the office secretary, and my sister Rita, they were either full to the brim or getting close to it. Sharon, Karen, and Vivian were in love with the feedbag. Gino had a hankering for the beefy mixed with gravy. Sandy Eisen and Sima Zucker had fallen into the trough a long time ago and weren’t coming up for air.

   The travel agency was in Beachwood, a far east side suburb of Cleveland. The office wasn’t the biggest to begin with, making it a tight fit. It was a squeeze coming and going to the desks. The staff of six and the two boss women had to wiggle sideways to make their way around the cramped space.

   Everybody except Rita and Gino were Jewish. Gino was Italian, a gay man, and hated Sandy and Sima. Even so, he was there before Rita started working at the agency and he was still there when she gave notice after a gasoline tanker truck flipped over outside their doors. She had had enough by then and called it quits.

   Rita was the goy blonde girl who was good for business. Before she went to work at Born to Travel, she worked at another travel agency on Fairmount Circle, not far from John Carroll University. A jug-eared man who lived down the street owned the business. He put her desk in the window. He wasn’t hiding it. He thought she would attract whitish waspy people from the college.

   “Oh, look, they have a Christian girl there,” is what he hoped all the Christians would say.

   Sandy Eisen and Sima Zucker were sisters. They owned the agency. They were from Israel, like their cousin, who was Orthodox. Sandy and Sima were on the lighter side of Reformed. They didn’t take it seriously, although they could get serious in a second, if need be. They came to the United States when they were children. By the time they were teenagers it was as though they had always lived in McMansions in Beachwood. They only ever talked about the homeland when one of their tour groups was going there.

   In the 1970s Sandy was a dancer in downtown Cleveland. She worked at a disco bar serving drinks and dancing in a cage. The place was the Mad Hatter. It had a bubble machine, a strobed multi-colored dance floor, and sticky red-shag carpeting. She wore white go-go boots. Twenty-five years and 200 pounds later she showed Rita a picture of herself, in a shimmering sleeveless fringe dress, doing the funky chicken.

   Rita could hardly believe it and said so. Sandy didn’t like her tone. She lit a Virginia Slim cigarette and puffed on it, vexed, smoke coming out of her ears.

   Sandy and Sima’s world revolved around food. They loved all-you-can-eat buffets. Their favorite time of day was breakfast lunch dinner. They weren’t food snobs. Their motto was, eat up now. They were supposed to fast during the Jewish holidays, but because they were fat, they were diabetic and had to take medication. They had to take their pills with food, so they couldn’t fast. But they were sticklers about breaking the fast. Sandy would rush home right away and make a batch of potato latkes.

   Sima had two sons in high school. Her husband worked at a grocery store. He was the head butcher. He brought kosher beef and lamb home. Sandy had three daughters and her husband, a tall balding man with a nice smile, was a porno movie wholesaler. He sold them to video stores around the state. He made a good living selling glossy naked girls.

   All of Sandy’s daughters were pudgy-cheeked fat and fluffy. The youngest one was 22 years old and clocked in at close to three hundred pounds. The middle gal never went anywhere without her portable fridge. The oldest one’s neck was turning black because oxygen was being blocked by blubber. When they started hunting for husbands all three got gastric bypass surgery and lost weight by the boat load.

   No one ever knew what got into her, but Sima went to Weight Watchers for a month. She kept a journal and wrote down what she ate morning, noon, night, and snacks. But she lied to her journal. She made it all up.

   “I’m not going to say I ate all that,” she explained.

   “They’re not going to be checking up on you,” Rita said. “You’re just lying to yourself.”

   Gino didn’t believe she was going to lose any weight. “It’s a pipe dream,” he said. He chewed his cud about it. Rita encouraged her to keep it up, but Sima didn’t lose any weight, not that anybody thought she would.

   Sandy went on the Adkins Diet. She loved meat and started eating a slab of bacon every day. She brought it to the office in the morning. There was a microwave in the fax machine room. She tossed slices of bacon into it every morning, heated them up, and ate all of it. The office smelled like a fry shop for hours.

   “I don’t know about all that bacon,” Rita said. “It can’t be good for you.”

   “I’m on the Adkins Diet,” Sandy said. “I’m allowed to eat as much of it as I want.”

   “She’s double-crossing herself,” Gino said. Everybody looked the other way. Sandy didn’t lose any weight, the same as Sima.

   Whenever Sandy had to go to the bathroom, she would hoist herself up from the desk. It took a slow minute. She could have used a lift-o-matic. “Oy, vey” she complained. Her knees were giving out. When she came back from the bathroom and flopped down in her chair, it bounced, the hydraulic hissing and groaning.

   Every year, two or three times a year, Sandy and Sima went on cruises. They loved cruises for two reasons, which were food and gambling. They didn’t care what cruise line it was, so long as it was the cheapest. No matter how cut-rate it was, you could still eat all you wanted, and they all had casinos. They loved to gamble. The nightlife didn’t matter, either. The ports they stopped at didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was that it was a floating chuck wagon with one-armed bandits.

   Rita went on one of their dime-a-dozen cruises. The ship was creaky old but not yet rusty. It sailed out of Miami into the Caribbean for a week. Sandy and Sima spent every waking minute eating and betting. Rita got sun poisoning at the pool the first day and couldn’t sit on the sunny side of the street after that. The rest of the trip she had to stay on the shady side of the street with the 70-year-olds. She was bitter about it every minute of the cruise.

   When gambling started showing up on computers, Sandy started gambling at work. She played winning and losing games at her desk and made Sima do all the work. She bossed Sima around most of the time, anyway. Sandy was the older of the two, although Sima was the harder worker, so Sandy could throw everything at her without caring too much about it.

   They bought clothes by remote control because they couldn’t find their sizes at department stores. Catalogs arrived at the office every day. Their clothes were XXL, but nice looking. They didn’t wear sack dresses. Most of the clothes were sets, coordinated stretchy pants and a top, like turquoise pants and a turquoise blouse.

   Sandy and Sima were both top-heavy, even though both had skinny legs. Sandy talked about her legs all the time. “Look how thin I am,” she said, pulling up her pants. “My legs are so thin.” But from the waist up she was huge. She never pulled her top up or down. It would have been indecent.

   It was when Sima got false teeth that she finally lost weight. Her real teeth were a mess from smoking and eating sugary greasy processed food and not brushing and flossing nearly enough. She was in pain for months because of the new teeth and hardly ate anything. Her dentist told her to stop smoking, too. She wasn’t happy about it, but she lost weight for a while.

   She didn’t like having to buy new shoes before their time, but she had to. Her fat feet had gotten skinnier, and she needed them. She only ever had one pair of shoes, a kind of basic black loafer. When they were worn out, she would buy another pair the same as before. “I can’t live with sore feet,” she said.

   Sandy wasn’t happy about the change in her sister. She didn’t like Sima losing weight, especially whenever she sprang out of her chair like a spring chicken to go to the bathroom. Sima started saying, “Oh, I can’t stand that smell,” whenever Sandy lit up, since she had stopped smoking. They were sisters, but they bickered most of the time, arguing about whoever did whatever it was they were doing better than the other.

   Everybody in the office smoked, except for Rita. Sima went back to blazing. They were always blowing smoke out of their mouths and noses. They were in a non-smoking building, but nobody cared. They were all addicted to tobacco. Besides opening the windows to air out the office, they bought devices that supposedly sucked smoke out of the air. One was next to Rita’s desk, although she was never sure it did any good.

   One day after work she met one of her friends for dinner. When they got to the restaurant her friend said, “We can sit in the smoking section if you want to.”

   “Have you ever seen me smoke?” Rita asked.

   “No,” she said.

   “OK then.”

   Gadi Galilli, Rita’s boyfriend, made her change her clothes the minute she stepped into the house after work. He didn’t smoke and didn’t like the smell. “I know they are well off, but it smells like poverty,” he said.

   She always smelled like smoke, since she sat in the office all day, an office where somebody was always lighting up. Gino’s desk faced hers, which made it worse. She had a cloud of smoke in her face most of the day. It wasn’t just them, either. Most of their clients had the same bad habit, as though the agency specialized in people who smoked cigarettes.

   If Sandy wasn’t lighting up a Virginia Slims, Sima was lighting one up. One or the other was always huffing and puffing. They were a pair of choo-choo’s. Sandy’s wastebasket under her desk caught fire one afternoon. She absentmindedly flicked a butt into it instead of stubbing it out in the ashtray. They had to call the building’s security guard, who had to find a fire extinguisher, and by the time he got it under control the fire burned the underside of the desk and all the wires to her computer.

   She never said she hadn’t done it, at least not to anyone in the office. She never said anything about it. But she denied it to the insurance company. She didn’t want to pay for a new desk and a new computer. She didn’t start the fire purposely, which made it all right in her mind, and she got her settlement in the end.

   One day a few days before Halloween a gasoline tanker truck overturned on Chagrin Blvd., turning too fast on the ramp coming up I-271, just outside the office building. The street slopes downward for a quarter mile as it wends east. The gasoline from the ruptured tanker ran down the road like smeary water. None of them knew anything about it until a fireman with all his gear burst in.

   “Everybody out!” he said. “We’re evacuating the building.”

   Gino, Sally, and Rita grabbed their coats. Sandy leaned halfway up from her chair.

   “Nobody takes their car,” the fireman said. “The ignition could spark the gas. If anybody even tries to start a car, you’re going to get arrested.”

   Sandy and Sima wrestled themselves up to their feet. They all went into the hallway, everybody from the upstairs offices coming down the emergency stairs, shuffling towards the front door, stopping, and waiting their turn to go outside. Standing in line, rocking back and forth, Sandy pulled out her box pack of cigarettes, her BIC lighter, shook out a Virginia Slims Luxury Light 120, flicked the lighter, and lit up.

   The fireman came running over to them. “Stop!” he yelled. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

   He pulled the cigarette out from Sandy’s lips and crushed it between his gloved fingers. “Give me that lighter,” he said. Sandy gave it to him. She was furious but didn’t say anything. Rita thought she was going to burst, but she gave the fireman the stink eye, instead. 

   He didn’t give the look a thought. He threw the BIC lighter in the trash. He kept his eyes on her.

   When they got outside everybody was walking up the road, up to the bridge over the highway, away from the gasoline. Sandy and Sima turned the other way. The office followed them. As they walked past the gas pooling on Chagrin Boulevard where it levels off, splashing down into the storm drains, Rita realized why they were walking in the opposite direction from everybody else. Sandy and Sima couldn’t walk far and besides, they had trouble walking uphill. They could walk farther if they were going downhill. They were also going towards the stretch of fast-food restaurants where all the fire trucks and emergency vehicles, their lights flashing, were blocking the road.

   They stopped at Burger King and had burgers and fries. Firemen tramped in and evacuated everybody. They had to move on. They stopped at Taco Bell and had chicken tacos. The next thing they knew firemen were evacuating everybody again. They stopped at Wendy’s, and everybody had a frosty.

   The gas smelled like more gasoline than Rita had ever smelled in her life. She didn’t have an appetite, although she had a strawberry frosty to pass the time. Sally had one, too. The rest of the office had the empty feeling, a hunger that got bigger and bigger, and scarfed up.

   Sandy called her husband from the phone booth outside Wendy’s, and he came and picked them up in his family van. He deposited Sandy and Sima at home, drove the rest to their residences, and dropped Rita off in Cleveland Heights.

   While parked in front of Rita’s up and down double, the engine running, he turned in his seat and said, “You’re a very pretty girl, have you ever thought about being in dirty pictures?” He flashed her a warm smile.

   “No,” she said.

   “You could make a lot of money,” he said. “We’re always looking for sick minds in healthy bodies.”

   “No thanks,” she said.

   He looked down in the mouth for a minute but took it like a man.

   Walking up the sidewalk to her front door, as Sandy’s husband drove away, she thought, “I’m going to have to quit my job soon. Who needs a sex maniac, and all those stinky butts? That can’t be good for me.” That’s what she did, finally, the week after New Year’s. “Where there’s smoke, there’s smoke blowing in my face,” she said to Gadi. She was peeved. “They don’t even pay me hazard pay.” 

   They never asked her, “Do you mind if we have a cigarette?” She was just the blonde girl to get the goys to cough up. They were topping off the tank, Virginia Slimming, rolling in the dough, while she was saving every spare penny to get ahead.

   “I don’t care if they are spoiled rotten, or not,” she told Gadi after clearing her throat and breaking the news. “They don’t pay me enough to stay. I’m not bringing home the bacon I need. I’ve got to go.” 

   Gadi waved his hand, brushing away imaginary smoke. “Go change your clothes,” he said.

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

A New Thriller by Ed Staskus

“Cross Walk“

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

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

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

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

Bomb City

Cloak and Dagger

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By Ed Staskus

   The Cleveland Police plainclothes detective kept his eyes fixed on nothing. He wasn’t tall or short. He wasn’t thin or chunky, either, except when he wore a bulletproof vest, which made him look chunky. He was able-bodied enough, although he was near-sighted. The closer something was to him the better he saw it. When he had to, he wore brow line glasses to see far away. He kept his hair not-too-neat and didn’t shave too often. He read the Cleveland Plain Dealer newspaper every morning except Sunday when there was too much of it. There was hardly anything about him likely to draw anybody’s attention. When he was in some bar, at the bar with a beer in front of him, a Lucky Strike smoking itself at his elbow, nobody ever gave him a second look. 

   He worked out of the third floor of the Cleveland Police Department’s Central Station at East 21st St. and Payne Ave. The Central Station had been in business for fifty years. It replaced the Champlain Street Headquarters. When it did the Plain Dealer reported, “The minute the new station opens, the ancient Champlain Avenue mausoleum of crime and rats which has been functioning as a police headquarters for perhaps twenty-five years too long will start to crumble before the wrecking engines.” Fifty years later the Central Station was in the same boat, overflowing with crime and rats.

   Frank Gwozdz looked at his bottle of beer in front of him. He took a short pull. It was getting lukewarm. It didn’t matter to him. It was only there so he could hide behind it. He loosened his already loose tie and the top button of his shirt. Mitzi Jerman was working the bar. She asked if he wanted fresh peanuts. “Thanks, but no,” he said. He hadn’t touched the bowl. The bar didn’t serve food, just peanuts, pretzels, and pickled eggs. He hadn’t touched anything, yet, although he might if the two collectors stayed long enough. He was getting hungry. He knew the goon with jug ears doing all the talking had worked the numbers for Shondor Birns. He was sure enough the other one had been up to the same thing. He wondered why they were close by downtown and not the near east side where the Negroes lived. That’s where their bread and butter was this time of night. 

   Jerman’s Café was on East 39th St. and St. Clair Ave., although it wasn’t actually on any street. It wasn’t in a storefront like most corner bars, and it wasn’t on a corner, either. It was on the ground floor of a house. It was set back from St. Clair Ave. with a parking lot on the side. If a drinker didn’t know the bar was there he might end up high and dry. It opened in 1908 when a Slovenian immigrant and his wife opened it. It had lived through World War One, the New Deal, World War Two, and the 1956 Cleveland Indians World Series win, when the celebrating didn’t stop for days. It stayed open as a speakeasy during Prohibition, not missing a beat. Mitzi’s uncle smuggled booze from Canada those years, making the run across Lake Erie in a speedboat by himself. Mitzi’s mom and dad hid the rum and whiskey with neighbors whenever Elliot Ness was on the loose.

   Mitzi came back to where Frank was sitting and parked herself in front of him. “Working tonight, handsome?” she asked, drying freshly washed glasses with a bar towel. Frank wasn’t exactly handsome anymore, just like he wasn’t exactly young anymore.

   “I’m working right now,” the police detective said in a quiet voice.

   Mitzi had been born upstairs in the apartment above the bar. It was where her parents lived all their working lives. She slept in the same room she had been born in. There was a piano and a juke box in the bar. A pool table squatted at the rear, alone and lonely. Mitzi watched Tribe games in living color on a TV set placed high up on a wall. Her pooch Rosco slept at her feet. The bar Frank was sitting at was oak, and the ceiling above him was zinc. Mitzi served Pabst, Stroh’s, and Budweiser on tap.  Everything else came in a bottle. Frank fiddled with his bottle of Anchor Liberty Ale.

   One of the men at the back table snapped his fingers. Mitzi looked at them. They were looking at the neighborhood girl who worked nights with Mitzi. She was a looker. Some men wanted to hang their hats on her. Mitzi sent her to their table. They ordered two more glasses of Pabst and gave her a pat on the behind for her trouble.

   “Are you working those two bums?” Mitzi asked.

   “I only work bums, and it looks like they are the only two of their kind in this place right now.”

   “Is anything going to happen in my place tonight?”

   “Not if I can help it,” he reassured her.

   Shondor Birns had run the numbers racket for years, until he was blown up on Easter Saturday outside of his favorite strip club three and a half months ago. “SHONDOR BIRNS IS BOMB VICTIM” the Cleveland Plain Dealer headline in block letters blared on March 30, 1975. The big news out of Vietnam that day was below the local bomb story. “Communists capture Da Nang” it said. The strip club was Christie’s Lounge, where Shondor Birns spent the evening drinking and ogling the naked girls bumping and grinding. When he was good and drunk, he staggered to his Lincoln Continental parked in a lot across from St. Malachi’s Catholic Church. As soon as he turned the key in the ignition the dynamite wired to the ignition came to life. He was blown in half, his upper body catapulted through the roof of the car. Some of him landed in the parking lot. Some of him was sling shotted into the webbing of the surrounding chain link fence. The rest of him disappeared. Celebrants at the Easter Vigil rushed out of the church when the explosion made the stained-glass windows shake and rattle.

   The racketeer had been arrested more than fifty times since 1925 but was hardly ever convicted. He had killed several men, but no charges ever stuck. He ran a theft ring. He ran the vice resorts. He became Cleveland’s “Public Enemy No. 1.” When he got into the protection racket many small businessmen discovered they needed protection. “He was a muscleman whose specialty was controlling numbers gambling on the east side, keeping the peace among rival operators and getting a cut from each of them,” was how the Cleveland Press, the city’s afternoon newspaper, put it. “He was a feared man because of his violent reaction to any adversary.”

   What little was left of Shondor Birns was buried in Hillcrest Cemetery on April Fool’s Day. He was officially gone. They had taken his picture down from the top row of the big board at the Central Station. Somebody else had taken his place, although the mystery man’s picture wasn’t on the board, yet. The policy games weren’t going to stop with Shondor Birns gone. His fast fists hadn’t been fast enough to save him. The next boss was already taking care of business. Frank wanted to know who that was.

   When the two men at the back table got up and left, Frank got up and left, too. They got into a green Plymouth Duster. He wasn’t going to have any trouble following it. He got into his unmarked Ford Crown Victoria. The dark blue car wasn’t much to look at, since it looked like every other unmarked police car in the country, but no other car was going to outrun it if it came to a chase. The Duster drove to East 55th St,, turned on Euclid Ave, and at Mayfield Rd. turned again going up the hill to Little Italy. They parked behind Guarino’s Restaurant and went in the back door. Frank parked five spaces away, near the entrance to the lot.

   He turned the car off. He was hungry but didn’t go inside right away. He thought about going home. Nobody had assigned him this shadow job. He had taken it upon himself. He could go home anytime he wanted to but he didn’t want to go home. He wanted to see his kid but didn’t want to see his wife. She had been getting unhappier by the day since the day she stopped nursing their boy. That was three years ago. She was miserable at home and had taken to drinking. Frank threw away every bottle he found hidden away somewhere, but he never found the last bottle. He could smell it on her breath every day when he got home.

   She was eleven years younger than Frank. He knew it was a mistake but at the time he hadn’t been able to control himself. She had gotten to be sneaky and patronizing. She complained about him being a policeman. She complained about his unpredictable hours. She complained about his pay and how he dressed. When he tried to explain the dress code behind being an plainclothes man, she was condescending about it, calling him “you poor dear man.” They didn’t kiss anymore, much less talk much. She complained about the housework, even though she did less and less of it. She had started to neglect their child, leaving the boy with a teenaged babysitter those afternoons she went to the Hippodrome.

   “What’s at the Hippodrome?” he asked.

   “Movies,” she said.

   The Hippodrome had the second largest stage in the world when it was built in 1907. It was in an eleven-story office building with theater marquees and entrances on both Prospect Ave. and Euclid Ave. in the heart of downtown. It hosted plays, operas, and vaudeville, at least until the movies took over. After that it was all celluloid. It became the country’s biggest theater showing exclusively big screen fare. A new air conditioning system pumped in cold water from Lake Erie, keeping everybody cool on sweltering summer nights.

   Frank tailed her there one day. She went to the Hippodrome but didn’t go to the movies. She went downstairs to the lower-level pool hall. She walked to the back and through a door marked “Private.”

   “What’s behind that door?” he asked one of the pool players.

   “The boss is behind that door,” the pool player said.

   “Would that be Danny Vegh?”

   “Naw, this is Danny’s joint, but Vince runs the place. Why all the questions?”

   “No reason, just curious.”

   “If you want to see Vince, you don’t want to right now. He’s got a woman in there and it’s going to be some time before they finish up their business.”

   “Thanks pal,” Frank said. “How about a game of nine ball?”

   An hour later and twenty dollars the worse for wear, Frank gave up. His wife was still in Vince’s office. The door was still shut tight. He walked out and up the stairs to Euclid Ave. He crossed the street, leaned against a light pole, and lit a Lucky Strike. His wife walked into broad daylight a half hour later. A car pulled up to the curb and she got into the front seat. Frank followed the car to their home in North Collinwood. The car pulled into the driveway. His wife got out and went in the front door. The car drove away.

   “Son of a bitch,” Frank muttered to himself. It was looking to him like she was a wife and mother gone over to monkey business. She had promised him at the altar far more than he was getting. He wasn’t getting any of her love, for sure. He could kill her for what she was doing, except for the kid. He might kill her anyway. There was more than enough room in the backyard for an unmarked grave. He could plant poison ivy to mark the spot.

   Frank’s stomach grumbled. He was hungry as a flatfoot at the end of a long day. He hadn’t popped even a single peanut into his mouth at Jerman’s Café. He could eat at the trattoria and keep an eye on the two collectors at the same time. He got out of the Crown Victoria, locked it, and walking through the vineyard patio went into Guarino’s. The restaurant had been around since before the 1920s. A Sicilian family ran it then and the same Sicilian family ran it now. It had been redecorated in a Victorian style in 1963, but the décor didn’t affect the food. Mama Guarino led him to a two-top table. He ordered veal saltimbocca. The waitress brought him half a carafe of chianti. He took his time eating, making sure his wife would be asleep when he got home.

   He had always thought there was nothing more romantic than Italian food. He wasn’t feeling romantic tonight, but at least the food was delicious. He took a bite of veal and gulped down a forkful of angel hair. No man could love a cheater and not pay the price for it. Things fall apart when they’re held together by lies. His thoughts grew dark. He filled his wine glass with red relief and drank it slowly thoughtfully.

Excerpted from “Bomb City.”

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

A New Thriller by Ed Staskus

“Cross Walk“

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

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

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

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