Smoke Signals

February 1, 2024 Edward Staskus 1 Comment

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.

Home Movies

King of the Surf Guitar

February 1, 2024 Edward Staskus 1 Comment

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, I would have said they were crazy. By the time he was done with the encore he had put on a set piece of steel string twang. He had a bass player and a drummer with him but he was essentially 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 of the night. He was more than fifteen years older than me and spent the show the same as me, standing, except he did it 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, not that way. I’ll just explode, right before your eyes, onstage.” He spent 60-some years performing before he went kingdom come.

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 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, Jimi and me, 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 music hall. He started playing there in 1961. Seventeen people showed up at his first show, all of them surfer friends of his. Less than a year later thousands of fans were attending his nightly gigs. The shows were called “The Surfer Stomp.”

The Rendezvous Ballroom burned down in 1966. It happened the day after the Fresno band the Cindermen performed there. Although it was a suspicious coincidence, nobody blamed them. When the surf guitar craze died down in the mid-60s, Capital Records declined to renew their contract with Dick Dale. His father Jim 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, trying to get 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 and his Stratocaster.

Satan’s Satellites opened for him when he came to Cleveland. When they were done stirring the pot it was time for the mainline. Dick Dale was dressed like a cowboy, mostly in black. He had an aquiline nose and his hair had gone white. The 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 call them cables,’’ he said. “That’s what gives me my fat sound.’’ He was compelled to use heavy picks to make an impact on the strings. His staccato picking led to him breaking dozens of picks every show. He kept many of them in his back pocket. The Stratocaster didn’t have tone controls. What it had was 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. He blended tarabaki drumming with 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 from 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 beat.

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 with in a phone booth.

“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 forty different exotic animals. So, when my mountain lion, he’d go, ‘Waaah!’ I’d imitate that on my guitar. When my African lion wanted his dinner, 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 surf music 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.” It sounded just about right.

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.”

Halfway 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.. Museums are for the antiquated. Dick Dale wasn’t museum fodder. He was a live wire.

His staccato sound was a loud sound. Leo Fender was the man who made it loud and louder. He created the first eighty five watt transformer especially for the plank spanker. It peaked at a hundred watts. Leo Fender 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 hundred watt transformer peaking at one hundred and eighty watts. Leo Fender called the new deal the ‘Dual Showman.’ Everybody hearing it called it a game changer.

“Leo 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 fifty-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 be 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 185^th 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. It was becoming the Waterloo Arts District, bustling with art and entertainment.

Dick Dale died sixteen years after I saw him at the Beachland Ballroom. He was fast off the starting line when 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.”

Like the reggae man Bob Marley once said, “One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain.”