Bt Ed Staskus

   Unless somebody knows Steve de Luca, it won’t make sense. Unless they know him, inside and out, where he came from, it won’t make sense to them. What made sense to Maggie Campbell was that he was a good guy, and always had been, except for a few detours.

   It all started when Steve was living in Florida with his sisters and mother. He had just gotten out of jail, where he was locked up for contempt of court. He wouldn’t give away what he knew about somebody to the judge. He was covering for somebody and wouldn’t tell anybody anything. Then his father died in 1999. He came back to Cleveland for the funeral. After the funeral his brother Fat Freddie begged him to stay.

   “Stay here stay with me,” Freddie pleaded. “You can stay at the house and we can work together. It will be great.”

   “Blah, blah, blah.” That’s the way Freddie had always been.

   So, Steve moved back to Ohio, to Cleveland, to Little Italy. There used to be a Big Italy, near downtown, near the Central Market, but in the 1960s new freeways and urban renewal wiped it all out. Little Italy is on the east side, up from Euclid Ave. up Mayfield Rd. and all the way up to Cleveland Heights.

   Little Italy was a hundred years old by then. It was Italian stonemasons from the Abruzzi who settled it. They built the Holy Rosary Roman Catholic Church and sculpted the giant headstones and monuments at Lake View Cemetery at the top of Mayfield Rd.

   Maggie and Steve met in 2001 when he was living with Freddie. He had become a full-blown addict in the meantime. When she met him, he was drinking up to a fifth of Yukon a day with beer chasers and snorting coke so he could keep drinking. Maggie was living in Lorain. She was a gal from Bay Village, on the west side, as far away from Little Italy as could be in more ways than one. They met at a party at a bar. It didn’t seem like they had much in common except that his father had just died, and her father had just died, too.

  Maggie’s childhood was staid while Steve’s was more exciting than most. There was alcohol and drugs, there was money, there was the Mafia. They were all in on it. The Little Italy house they lived in they got from Danny Greene as a gift. Steve’s father was a mob lawyer. He wasn’t a crook, although he sprang crooks free.

   Danny Greene was a mobster during Cleveland’s gang wars in the 1970s. The Irish and Italians were always trying to blow each other up. One time a rival gangster tried to blow up Danny Greene’s car, but Danny found the bomb and disarmed it. He showed it to the Cleveland Police Department’s Bomb Squad. “Do you want to press charges?” they asked. “Do you want police protection?”

   The Irishman just laughed. “I’ll take care of it myself,” he said. He later blew up the rival gangster. Everybody thought he used the same bomb. Everybody was right.

   Danny wore a medal of St. Jude around his neck and took care of other people, including eight hit men who tried to get him. But, one day when he was leaving his dentist’s office, getting into his car, the Trojan Horse car next to him exploded and he was blown to bits. Even though Danny Greene and Steve’s father were tight, he defended the hit man who killed the Irishman.

   Steve’s uncles used to hide drugs and stuff in the kid’s rooms, in his room, so if the police searched, they believed the cops wouldn’t search those rooms. They hid everything under the carpets. After Steve and Maggie got married, they finally stopped having a traditional Easter breakfast with the uncles because she thought it was sacrilegious.

   Steve’s uncle Angelo was one of the heads of the Youngstown Mafia. They would go to their house for Easter. They would be sitting at the table, the godfathers, cooing over their babies, pinching the butts of babes, shoveling food into their mouths, and talking on their phones.

   “I started wondering, what are they going to be doing later in the afternoon? I finally decided I couldn’t have Easter breakfast, on the day Jesus died, with hit men. I just couldn’t do it.”

   Steve and Maggie saw each other for ten months before they decided to get married. At first, they lived in Maggie’s brother’s mother-in-law’s old Polish double house on Berea Rd. They were planning their marriage and honeymoon. Then Brad’s mother-in-law accused Maggie of running up the water bill.

   “You’re doing hair at home,” she said.

  Maggie double-checked the water bill. She blew up. “Do you think my doing hair at home is costing this much water? I do half a dozen heads at home a month. I don’t fill up the bathtub for each head, for God’s sake!”

   The mother-in-law had a Section 8 family with special needs kids living upstairs in the double house. Steve and Maggie lived downstairs. One night at two in the morning she felt water dripping from their bedroom ceiling. She went upstairs.

   Bang, bang, bang, she knocked.

   When the kids came to the door they were in their underpants, swinging pots and pans full of water, and firing water guns. What is happening here, she wondered. 

   “Stop that!” she commanded.

   Not only did the family upstairs do all their laundry every night, but the folks who were supposed to watch the kids during the day did their own laundry in the basement, too. The washing machine was always going, night and day.

   “You’re accusing Steve and me of using all this water, really?” They got into a fight on the spot. “Steve and I have been nothing but fair and kind to you. We’ve taken care of the yard and we’ve taken care of the house. Fuck this, we’re leaving.”

  They packed up and left, even though they didn’t have anywhere to go. They got married and moved back to Fat Freddie’s house in Little Italy. They weren’t there long before Maggie started looking for her own home. She couldn’t stand living with Freddie and his hi-jinks.

   “He loved it because I did all the grocery shopping, all the cooking, and all the cleaning, too,” she said. “But Freddie and I didn’t get along. He had a not-so-funny sense of humor. A good man is hard to find, and he was a good man when helping Steve rescue stray dogs, but I needed to wash that man out of my hair.”

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

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

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

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

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

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

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication