Rules of the Game

April 1, 2023 Edward Staskus Leave a comment

By Ed Staskus

You never want to fall asleep in Mr. Hittbone’s second period math class, no matter what, because he will leave you asleep until you eventually wake up, whenever that is. It’s one of the rules written on his personal rules board at the front of the class. “No Waking Sleepers!” Classes will come and go, and no one is allowed to wake up anybody sleeping.

If you fall asleep he just lets you snooze and snore, no shaking you awake, and you miss the next class, and even the class after that. You wake up and it’s, my God! You get major detentions for missing classes at St. Ed’s. It doesn’t matter if it wasn’t your fault. Mr. Hittbone doesn’t care that maybe you had homework for six classes and maybe you had work to do around the house, too, and walking the dog on top of that. Nobody cares when you’re explaining. They care even less when you’re complaining.

A guy once went dead duck and slept for three straight periods. When he woke up Mr. Hittbone was at his podium lecturing, just like always, but after the guy blinked shook his head looked around, he saw there weren’t any familiar faces. There were all different guys in the class. He bolted out of the room. He hadn’t technically skipped any classes, but he got a butt load of detentions for disrespect.

It’s not a school rule. It’s the Boneman’s rule. There’s no breaking and getting away with it. I woke up halfway through his class one day after a restless night at home. “Did you sleep good?” he asked. He smirked down at me. “No, I made a few mistakes,” I said. He didn’t like that. I got a detention.

“You boys grow up without rules, without boundaries,” he told us the first class the first day of school. It was September 2014. The good old summertime was over. “You need discipline. You can be yourself, whatever you think that is, once you’ve learned the rules.”

Lots of rules and no mercy, that’s the Boneman, like he just stepped out of the Old Testament. Mr. Rote and the rest of the religion teachers teach the New Testament, but that update has never reached Mr. Hittbone. It’s not sinners in the hands of an angry God anymore, Mr. Bonehead! But he doesn’t care about that, either.

Everybody says he’s been at St. Ed’s since it opened, or maybe even before that. He was probably rubbing his hands for the big day to happen. He’s only ever taken two days off in all those years. He told us about them on the second day of school. “It wasn’t because I was sick,” he said. The Chalk of Fate says he’s never been sick. Someone else might have been sick on those two days. Maybe he only ever feels like crap in private.

Mr. Hittbone’s a short man, mostly bald and bearded. He has lips like wieners. He wears suspenders like it’s another century. He doesn’t wear a sports jacket. He only ever wears a dress shirt. He has grayish hair and eyes the color of a telephone pole. He’s a grumpy dude. Everybody hates him, the upper classmen, and us, just everybody, really. Everybody hates his chalk board full of numbers and equations we can barely understand.

Some of the upper classmen add an “S” to the front of his name, but never out loud to his face. That would be a disaster. The Boneman is old but lightning fast on the draw with detention slips. It’s not even funny. He’s married but told us he can’t stand his wife because she never turns off the lights and watches TV all the time. “She even shops in bed, thanks to television,” he said. We all thought, “So what?”

He has a son and daughter, but never talks about his son. When he told us about his daughter he said he was annoyed about how in the first year of whatever job she got she was making more money than him. He always says money is a “masterpiece in the eye of a masterpiece,” whatever that means.

“God wants us to prosper and have plenty of money,” he said. “Money is how you keep score. That’s why you don’t want to stop at simple math, because then you’ll only make simple money.” Nobody knows what he’s talking about.

He smokes between classes, in front of our gold dome Hall of Fame chapel. He rips the filters off his cigarettes. I’ve never seen another teacher smoke on campus, only him. He throws the butts on the ground, mashes them with his foot, and lights up another one. Whenever anybody tells him cigarettes are bad for you, he scowls. “When it looks like I’ll live longer than my next smoke I’ll scrape it off the bottom of my shoe,” he says.

Whenever anybody tells him cigarettes are practically illegal, he gets mad about that, too. “The government tells you smoking is bad for your health, but when you Ben Franklin it, the government has killed more people than cigarettes ever did, or ever will.”

One morning he told us he was in a gas station buying cigarettes down on Detroit Rd. just down from the school, when somebody tried to rip off the attendant with some kind of money trick. “I wanted to beat him with a baseball bat,” Mr. Hittbone said, making fists, his hands shaking. He wanted to bash the hell out of him. Every day the forecast for the Boneman is clouds, rain, and anger. We all laughed, though. He couldn’t punch himself out of a paper bag with Babe Ruth’s bat.

He teaches from a podium at the front of class. He’s the only teacher in the school who has one. How does he rate? It’s because he’s a dinosaur and gets his way. He puts his papers and things on the podium and hardly moves all period, unless he wants to tear up something that’s on your desk. That’s another one of his rules. “Math Only!”

Even if you’re not doing anything with whatever is on your desk, like a science assignment, if he sees it he’ll just swoop down on you and take it. “I don’t think you’ll be needing this,” he says, and rips it up. He’s always looking for things to rip up, even if it’s something from one of your other classes, not even his class, something you were just glancing at. He’s always showing up all of a sudden and tearing your stuff to shreds.

He has a ton of rules on his board, more than fifty of them, a boat load of them. “No Chewing Gum!” If you chew gum anywhere on campus, not just in his class, watch out for him seeing you doing it. He scribbles your name in his black spiral notebook and reports you. He gives you a full detention, which is forty-five minutes. He never gives out minor detentions. Mr. Hittbone told us chewing gum should be forbidden at the school.

“You want to be a bum? Go ahead, chew gum, but not here.”

No one is allowed to touch anything in his classroom, either. “No Touching!” If you walk by one of his special teacher books and you sort of graze it with your leg, you get a major detention. If you pick up a marker at the board without first asking his permission, you get a major detention. If you punch somebody’s arm, even though it’s none of his business, you get a major detention.

It’s nothing like my third period class, which is our science class. The teacher is Mr. Strappas, who’s one of the varsity football coaches. He’s young, has blond hair, and is super fit. He played football in college and he’s a cool dude. He encourages us to touch things, do things, get into the projects, and the only rule he has is no talking when he’s talking.

I don’t know why some guys can’t get it right. It’s always the same guys who get it wrong, who do all the talking in class, breaking the rules. We sit pairs to a table and the two chatty guys are somewhere in the middle of the room. They talk about video games, sports, and all their other dumb stuff. Mr. Strappas will say, no talking, and they will say, sorry, but they don’t stop. They don’t get good grades on their quizzes and tests. They don’t turn their homework in on time and get bad marks for effort. They’re just retards.

Mr. Strappas doesn’t stand at his lectern. He roams back-and-forth, to the sinks, the whiteboard, and all around the room. He’s always on the move. It’s my favorite class of the day. I actually like learning in it. It’s fun finding out about atoms and lasers and everything he’s interested in.

He expects us to be in our seats when his class starts but doesn’t sweat it if it doesn’t happen. But if you’re not in your seat when the bell rings the instant Mr. Hittbone’s class starts, you get a full detention. Everybody should be in their seats when class starts, we all know that, but if you’re standing there for a second, just fixing your belt, he gives you a detention. It’s totally stupid, but that’s another one of his rules.

Because it’s the Boneman, you absolutely want to make sure you’re all good. “Look Proper!” We wear ties, dress shirts, dress pants, a belt, undershirt, and black shoes. We have to make sure we’re all buttoned up. If any button is even half unbuttoned it means a full detention. He totally hates it if the second button on your shirt is undone.

Even though Mr. Hittbone is a hundred years older than Mr. Rote, our first period religion teacher, who is young and thinks he’s all there, but is a doofus, it’s one for the button in first period and the same button in second period. They both hate casual dress days. “It’s like a casual walk through the insane asylum,” the Boneman says, looking at us like we are crazy.

If there is any piece of paper on the floor around or near your desk at any time of the class he’ll give you a detention, even if it’s not yours, and even if you didn’t see it in the first place. “No Litter!” If the paper has your name on it, it’s even worse, because he rips it up before giving you the detention. Mr. Hittbone is his own chicken hawk laying down the law.

“Don’t Look Through the Windows!” We’re supposed to face front when we’re in class, but there are some guys who sit right by the windows and sometimes they can’t help shifting their faces to the glass. That means a full detention. If Mr. Hittbone and I looked out the same window, I don’t think we would see the same thing, no matter how you do the math. Sometimes I think that since I didn’t have a part in making his rules, the rules have nothing to do with me. If you say Cloud 9 is amazing, he’ll say, what’s wrong with Cloud 8? No matter what, you can’t fight the Boneman. He’s like Godzilla. He swats you down with his horny tail.

At the end of class, we can’t jump up and leave like in any of our other classes. His rule about the bell for ending class is that it isn’t the school bell, but his make-believe bell that matters. When the real bell goes off, we have to stay in our seats until he says we can go. At the end of class I’ll say, “See you tomorrow Mr. Hittbone.” And he’ll say, “Thanks for the warning, Mr. Who It.” My name is Wyatt, so he calls me Who It, as in Why It, and then he laughs.

Sometimes it seems like he wants you to lay down at his feet like a beat-down dog and say, “Yes, sir, I’ll go dig up those apples, sir, whatever you say.” He thinks he’s the GOAT, but he’s just an old goat. He’s got us for fifty minutes, and that’s that. I’m counting the days until my sophomore year and I’m none of the Boneman’s business anymore.

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.”

Accidental Realism

Katya in Asia Town

April 1, 2023 Edward Staskus 1 Comment

By Ed Staskus

The Chinese started settling in the United States in the 18^th century. Wherever whenever there were enough of them, they lived close to hand, building their own neighborhoods, appropriately called Chinatowns. There are more than 50 of them across the United States, including at least 16 in California alone.

There are several of the towns within cities in New York City, the most famous one being in Manhattan. It’s the largest Chinatown in the country, spread out over 40 blocks and home to more than 150,000 Chinese-speaking residents.

Cleveland, Ohio used to have a Chinatown, a colony at Rockwell Ave. near downtown. Immigrants settled in the area starting in the 1920s. After the Communist takeover of the mainland and into the 1960s more than 2,000 lived in the neighborhood. There was a row of Chinese restaurants, among them the Three Sisters, Golden Coin, and Shanghai, as well as two grocery stores between East 21^st and East 24^th. Storehouses in the district supplied native eateries one end of the city to the other. There was a temple and a meeting hall.

Chinatown went into sharp decline in the early 1970s and a few years later, when I moved into what was becoming Asia Town, there wasn’t much left. Most of the residents moved to the suburbs and by the 1980s there were only two half-empty restaurants holding on, catering mostly to business folk and occasional tourists looking for the city’s historic Chinese quarter.

Asia Town is roughly from East 18^th St. to East 40^th St. and from St. Clair Ave. to Perkins Ave. It has the highest percentage of Chinese, Koreans, and Vietnamese in Ohio. When I lived on East 34^th St. between Payne Avenue and Superior Ave. in the mid to late 70s, there weren’t as many yellow faces yet but they were everywhere. There were dirt poor whites, dirt poor blacks, and a recent influx of college students. It wasn’t as present-day as it would become after the 1990s when Asia Plaza was built at East 30^th St. and Payne Ave., when it became a business as well as a residential community.

My roommate Carl Poston was tall, walked with a lanky slouch, and wore a mop of twisty black hair. Everybody called him Erby. He never said why, and I never asked. He liked to read, tearing through the Plain Dealer newspaper every morning, and liked to play chess, like me, but was better than me. He had a bad-ass motorcycle and several bad-ass friends with motorcycles. He worked downtown for the city helping crunch numbers and delivering bad news as Cleveland went under.

In 1978 the city became the first one in the United States to go bust since the Great Depression. After the bankruptcy it became known as the Mistake on the Lake, a nickname nobody in the hometown liked. When Mayor George Voinovich showed up at a Cleveland Indians game against the New York Yankees in the 1980s wearing a t-shirt under his sports coat, the t-shirt said, “New York’s the Big Apple, but Cleveland’s a Plum.” Only the Asians liked the plum thing, since plums represent purity and perseverance to them. Nicknames come and go but when Cleveland later became ‘The Land,’ nobody shook their heads in despair. It was far better than the mistake and the plum.

Our house on East 34^th St. was behind another house. There was no backyard or garage. Almost all the houses on the west side of the street were that way. The houses across the street had backyards and most of the houses in the neighborhood had backyards. But there were some houses so tucked away one had to be looking right at them to see them. Our rent was more than reasonable, and my half was even better. The landlord lived in Strongsville. His grandmother lived in Asia Town, like me. In return for checking up on her at the beginning of the week and taking her to Dave’s Grocery at the end of the week, I lived almost rent-free.

Her name was Katya, and she was hundreds of years old. She was five foot four something short and hunchbacked on top of that. She was always in her kitchen when I knocked on the side door, she always croaked “Come in, honey,” and when I went in, she always asked me what I wanted.

She had three cats who I never saw. She kept a pan of water next to the door for them but no food bowls or litter. They were freeloaders, running down grub in the wild. She had a stack of old newspapers in a corner and the linoleum kitchen floor was usually covered with them. It was sketchy walking inside. The unfolded papers piled haphazardly on top of each other slid every which way. I had to walk like a duck to stay upright.

“I keep my kitchen floor clean that way.” she said, peeling back the corner of a newspaper and showing me.

She bought her clothes from third hand stores but bought her shoes new. She was crazy frugal, but she wasn’t crazy. She was built to last, and her feet had to lead the way.

Katya was from Slovenia, from sometime back in the 19^th century. Her parents were peasants from a village nobody ever heard of southeast of Ljublijana. They came to Cleveland to work in the steel mills in the 1890s. At first, they lived in Newburgh, but when a community started forming along East 30^th St., from Lake Erie south to Superior Ave., they moved, finally landing on East 38^th St. She still lived in the small house her parents bequeathed her.

By 1910 there were so many Slovenes in Cleveland that it would have been the third-largest Slovenian city in the world if it was in Slovenia. The immigrants opened enough taverns to drown their New World blues and enough churches to repent their drinking. St Vitus was established in 1893, St. Lawrence in 1901, and St. Mary in 1906. Each had its own school. They published their own newspapers in their mother tongue and formed debating drama and singing clubs.

The singing clubs were stamping grounds, as well. The Lira Singing Society, located in the St. Clair neighborhood, and adamantly Catholic, was opposed by the Zaria Singing Society, sponsored by atheists and socialists. Everybody knew what the arguments were about.

Katya was married long enough to have two sons before her husband was shot by mistake by a policeman outside a Collinwood bank during a botched robbery. He bled to death before an ambulance could reach him. She buried him in Woodlawn Cemetery, never married again, raising her sons by herself. She took in sewing days and worked nights during World War Two. Her oldest son moved to Seattle and she never saw him again. Her younger son moved to the west side and had a family, but they didn’t want to visit her.

“We aren’t going to your crazy grandmother’s house in that terrible neighborhood, and that’s final,” his wife said. What the woman didn’t know was that Katya kept a loaded Colt Pocket Hammerless in her kitchen table drawer. It was a single action blowback .32 caliber handgun.

“Nobody going to shoot me by accident,” she said.

Her eldest grandson loved her and made sure she had what she needed to stay afloat. She had a small pension and some social security, too. She told me she had silver dollars buried in the backyard, but quickly shot me a wily look.

“Forget I say that.”

When Katya’s husband Janez was buried in Woodlawn, it was the oldest cemetery in Cleveland, the first man being inhumed there in 1853. It was the worst cemetery in Cleveland, too. The Depression wrecked its finances. There were sunken graves, toppled headstones, grass never mowed, piles of rotting leaves, and broken tree branches all over the place. That was before the city found out Louise Dewald, who worked in the finance office, had stolen almost half a million in today’s dollars from the coffers as the Depression picked up steam.

After that it got worse.

The cemetery chapel roof and the rest of it collapsed in 1951 and was hauled away. The next year City Council thought about digging up and moving all the bodies somewhere else, but the public outcry was too great. Katya never stopped visiting Janez, no matter what, no matter what it took to get there.

One Friday walking her home from Dave’s Grocery she asked me if I could take her to the Slovenian National Home the next afternoon for a luncheon.

“I don’t have a car anymore, Katya, sorry.” My 1962 Rambler Custom Six, that I had gotten for free, was no more. When I got it, the car was already on its last legs. It was now rusting peacefully away in a junk lot somewhere up on Carnegie Ave.

“Oh,” she said. “Maybe you walk with me there?”

“It’s pretty far,” I said. I didn’t mention taking a bus. She distrusted the metropolitan buses getting to where they were going, ever since the city’s rail tracks had been torn up and the electric cars replaced with diesel transport. She believed half the drivers were addled from the fumes.

The Home was almost thirty blocks away on East 64^th St. and St. Clair Ave. At the rate she walked we would have to start as we spoke. After the luncheon we would have to walk the whole night to get back.

“Oh, that too bad. Janez and I dance there all the time before he die.”

“Let me see what I can do.”

I asked my roommate Carl, in return for my washing the dishes, cleaning the house, and mowing our grave-sized plot of grass, if he would take her there and back.

“It’s a deal,” he said.

The next day he schlepped her to the Slovenian Home on his Harley, waiting outside smoking cigarettes and shooting the bull with passersby. She was a big hit with her cronies when they spilled outside after the gabbing and feedbag and saw her climb on the back of the hog, wrap her stumpy arms around Carl’s waist, and glide away.

The Slovenian Home was where my Baltic kinsmen booked their big wedding receptions and celebrations. The Lithuanian Hall on Superior Ave. was too small in the 1960s and the new Community Center in North Collinwood wasn’t built yet. The Home opened in 1924, with two auditoriums, a stage, bar restaurant kitchen, meeting rooms, a gym, and a Slovenian National Library.

The main auditorium was plenty big enough for any get together and the stage was plenty big enough for any band. The bar was big enough for even Lithuanians. Europeans drink more alcohol than anybody else in the world and Lithuanians are number one in Europe. Whenever I accompanied my parents to the Slovenian Home for a reception or gala, it was always a long night. There was a big dinner at big round tables, speeches, chatting it up, dancing, drinking, and as the drinking went on, singing. My father and his friends would booze it up well into one and two in the morning, singing “In the Sea of Palanga” and “The Old Roofs of Vilnius” and “Oh, Don’t Cry, Beloved Mother.”

By then I was snoozing sprawled out in the balcony.

Unlike our no backyard house Katya had a backyard where she grew Brussels sprouts cauliflower broccoli onions potatoes and anything else she could squeeze in. She liked prosciutto and bread for lunch. Sundays she made loads of yota with turnips beans cabbage and potatoes and a slab of meat loaf with hardboiled eggs in the middle. She kept it in the fridge all week, dinner at her beck and call.

That fall I had to tell Katya that once the school quarter at Cleveland State University was over, I was going to have to take the next quarter off. I had found a job with an electrostatic painting outfit that was going to send me on the road, expenses like food and motels paid, for a couple of months. We were going to start in Chicago, swing out to the west coast, end up in Texas, and be back in time for the spring quarter at CSU. It was chance for me to earn good money and save almost all of it.

“I going to miss you,” she said.

We traveled in three-man crews and worked nights, from about 5:30 to about 1 in the morning. We worked in offices, painting office furniture like metal filing cabinets, desks, bookcases, and storage cabinets. The paint was loaded with a low voltage positive charge and the metal items magnetized negative. The finish was like new, no runs, no brush or roller marks, and there was almost no overspray.

When I got back from my two-and-a-half months on the road, I picked up my cat Mr. Moto from my parents, did my laundry, and registered for classes for the spring quarter at CSU. I went to visit Katya that evening, but she wasn’t there anymore. The house was vacant. A “For Sale” sign was posted. I asked one of the neighbors, but he said he didn’t know much, just that a moving truck pulled up one morning and by the end of the day she was gone.

I peeked through the windows. The ground floor rooms were all empty. The only thing left was a stack of old newspapers in a corner of the kitchen.

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.”