Monthly Archives: October 2024

Accidental Reality

Mexican Stand Off

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By Ed Staskus

   The day my nephew, who was going to be known by the name of Ike from that day on, told me he was changing his name to Wyatt, all I could think of saying was, “Why?” He looked up from his Xbox. He was sitting in a special gaming chair. There was carnage all over the big screen. The game was called Streets of Rage. It looked like everybody was losing.

   “What do you mean, why?” he asked.

   It turned out he had watched the horse opera “Tombstone” the night before and been enchanted by Wyatt Earp.

   “That might not work,” I said. 

   “Why not?”

   “Wyatt Earp was a lawman through and through. Your law-abiding ways are sketchy at best.”

   “Oh, right, I see what you mean. How about Doc, like Doc Holliday? He was smack.”

   “He was that, but he’s more along the lines of a Greek tragedy. I don’t see you as tragic.”

   “Hell no, I’m not tragic. The girls wouldn’t like that.”

   “How about Ike?” I suggested.

   “Who’s that?”

   “He was one of the cowboys in the movie, fast with a gun.”

   “OK, that sounds good. Ike it is from now on.”

   I didn’t tell him Ike was one of the bad cowboys who had tried to kill Wyatt Earp at the OK Corral.

   Ike was smart enough to make the grade and get admitted into St. Edward High School but scatterbrained enough to get suspended. St Ed’s is a Catholic school in Lakewood, Ohio in the Holy Cross tradition. Thousands of teenage boys apply to get in every year. A couple of hundred make it. Ike  had enough applesauce in him to not get expelled. He made it to graduation day by the skin of his teeth.

   He wasn’t so lucky at Cleveland State University. CSU is a state school. So long as your high school grades are somewhere near consciousness there is no problem getting admitted. After one thing and another he was told in no uncertain terms he had to find another school. When he left CSU, leaving his student housing apartment in need of disaster relief, he started looking for another place to live.

   His problem was no landlord with even a grade school education would rent to him. He camped out at his sister’s apartment until she said he had to go. His father suggested his uncles. He stayed with one after another until the last one told him he had to go. He stayed at my mother’s house, throwing parties for his friends whenever she broke a leg and was recovering at the Cleveland Clinic or had a stroke and was recovering at the Welsh Home in Rocky River. 

   When my brother asked me to throw some work his son’s way, I was of a mind to say no. It was almost the first thing I said. It was what I should have said. I had already hired Ike to waterproof our basement walls and repaint the concrete floor some months earlier. Every time I looked, he was easing himself down onto one of our lawn chairs and lighting up. He liked to smoke reefer rather than attend to the job at hand. When he wasn’t blazing, he was talking on his cell phone. In the end it was such a makeshift effort that I spent almost as much time in the basement as he had done, following up on his no effort work.

   I thought, that’s the last time. What I said, though, when my brother asked, was OK. I could have kicked myself.

   I worked more-or-less full-time for Light Bulb Supply in Brook Park. There were no brooks or parks anywhere in Brook Park. The biggest greenspace was Holy Cross Cemetery, 240 acres of it, across the street. I went there for walks instead of taking lunch whenever the day was dry and sunny. The office work more-or-less paid the bills. It was a family business, however, and I wasn’t a part of the family. I wasn’t going to get anywhere by relying on their good will, of which there was little. It was like my paycheck, on the stingy side.

   I got ahead by repairing tanning equipment part-time, on my own time, stand-ups and lay-downs, at tanning salons, beauty salons, gyms, and people’s homes. Indoor tanning was booming. I bought a tool box and electrical tools. I taught myself how to do it. My hourly rate was more, by far, than what Light Bulb Supply paid me. If it was an insurance job, I raised the price. If the insurance agent protested, I hung up.

   Allstate Insurance sent me to Dearborn, Michigan to inspect a tanning bed that had been under water for a few days in a family’s basement rec room. They found out their sump pump had failed when they got home from vacation. I drove there on a Saturday morning. It was going to be an all-day job getting there and back.

   Dearborn is just west of Detroit. and home to the most Muslims in the United States. It is also home to the largest mosque in the country. I thought I would stop and check it out. I got my signals crossed, missed the turn-off off I-75,  and missed the mosque. When I got to Detroit what I saw was an exit for Dearborn St. I took it. It was the wring exit. When all I saw were bars, funeral parlors, beauty shops, empty lots, and no white faces, I parked, found a phone booth, and called the folks with the soggy tanning bed. I told them where I thought I was.

   There was a pause. “Get back in your car and drive away from there right now,” the man of the house said. “It’s not safe.” There was no sense in tempting fate by sightseeing. I got back into my car and followed the Rouge River to Dearborn.

   I told Ike I had a job at a big tanning salon in North Royalton south of Cleveland. There were some repairs involved and re-lamping 9 or 10 tanning beds. It was going to take Ike and me a weekend and two or three nights. In the end it took me closer to a weekend and a week of nights. Ike was supposed to re-lamp during the day, since he was unemployed and had the free time, while I did the repairs at night, except he only showed up once and didn’t finish even one of the tanning beds.

   One day he wasn’t feeling well. His stomach hurt. Another day his garage door broke with his car inside it. Another day he didn’t bother to call to say he needed a mental health day. The last time before I told him not to bother anymore, he said the laundromat was closed and he didn’t have any clean clothes to wear to work. In the end I chalked it up to experience.

   “Nobody wants to hire me,” he complained, one of his many complaints. He seemed to think he could get the job done without going to work. He liked to say, “I don’t want to be tied down.” He didn’t want to be another cog in the wheel. There was little chance of that. Who wants a buzzkill of a cog?

   My brother asked my sister to let Ike move into her house. She lived nearby, had the space, but was reluctant. There was finally some peace and quiet in her house. She and her husband had split up. He had moved out and was on the road most of the time working as a long-haul trucker. Her daughter had graduated from Miami University and struck out on her own. There were two empty bedrooms. She could use the rent money. I suggested she get it up front.

   She told my brother she had reservations, especially since everybody knew Ike wasn’t just smoking reefer. He was selling reefer and branching out into fun pills. She didn’t want a drug dealer in her house.

   “He doesn’t have anywhere else to go,” my brother said.

   “What about your house?”

   “My wife doesn’t want him in our house.” His wife was Ike’s foster mother. She was a schoolteacher. Ike had been a student in her class during middle school. She probably knew what he was up to, although she was quiet as a mole snake about it.

   Ike was arrested one night in the middle of the night strolling down Detroit Rd. on the Cleveland side of its west side border. He was puffing on a stogie-sized spliff. It was the Dark Ages. Reefer was illegal. He was packing pills and cash in his pockets and having a high old time. A year later he appeared in court and was rewarded with intervention instead of jail time. My brother spent a small fortune sending him to assessment counseling treatment and prevention classes. I drove Ike to the classes now and then. He was like a honey badger talking trash.

   When he moved into my sister’s house, he brought clothes, shoes, and a safe with him. He kept the key to the safe on his person at all times. He moved into one of the vacant bedrooms. My brother paid his rent occasionally. Ike kept his clothes within easy reach and his shoes on display. “He thought nothing about buying $150.00 tennis shoes,” my sister said. “He had lots of them.”

   She didn’t ask what he kept in the safe. She didn’t want to know. One day she noticed one of the floorboards in his bedroom had been pried up and put back in place. When she looked under the board, she saw a green stash. She put the board back in its place. Boys and girls drove up to her house day and night, leaving their cars running at the curb. When they did, Ike ran outside, handed them something through their open car windows, and they gave him something in return.

   He texted his girlfriend a photograph of tens, twenties, and fifties fanned out across his bed cover. “Top of the world,” he seemed to be saying. When he was done with the display, he neatly packed the dough up and put it back in his safe. He was feeding the crocodile, hoping it would eat him last.

   My sister had told Ike, “No friends in the house.” A week later, pulling into her driveway after work, she saw more than a dozen boys and girls on her front porch and front steps. Two of them were sprawled over a railing. They were waiting for Ike. My sister called my brother.

   “Get over here right now and tell your son’s friends to leave.” 

   I happened to be driving by and stopped to see what was going on with the crowd on the front porch. When I asked if they were waiting for somebody, one of the youngsters on the railing said, “We are the ones we’re waiting for.” I assumed it was a smarmy Millennial trope. “Never talk to the monkey when the organ grinder is out of the room,” I said. “I understand,” the youngster said, which surprised me. I barely understood it myself. I left when I saw my brother’s car coming down the street and my sister storming down the driveway

   When Ike showed up, she asked him, “What do you not understand about no friends?”

   He was fluent when it came to complaining and explaining. Before he was done my sister cried uncle. “Just don’t let it happen again,” she said. He promised it wouldn’t happen again. It happened again and again. Ike could be sincerely insincere when he had to be.

   The driveway was delineated by the two houses on its sides. It wasn’t a wide driveway by any means. There was a grass strip on one side of the driveway but no buffer on her house’s side. Fortunately, Ike drove a compact car. Unfortunately, he had forgotten what he learned in driver’s education. He bounced off the house several times, denting his car, and ripping vinyl siding off the house.

   He liked to text my sister, asking if she needed anything done around his crash pad. When he wiggled down the driveway and hit the house he texted her, promising to fix it right away. He never did. He never did anything else, either, except breaking into the house through the back kitchen window whenever he locked himself out. Every time he did my sister had to replace the screen. A neighbor called the Lakewood Police Department when they noticed one of the break-ins, but Ike was able to explain it away. 

   After the intervention went bust, he was arrested again and charged with drug possession, possessing criminal tools, and a trafficking offense. He pled guilty since law enforcement had the goods on him. His charm, good looks, and a silver tongued lawyer carried the day. He was ordered to be drug tested on a week-to-week basis. 

   Something needed to save the day for my sister. She wanted Ike gone but didn’t know how to get it done. He was a blood relative and needed a place to live, even though he wasn’t willing to do what it takes to civilize an apartment and stock the shelves. It was a stand-off. My brother insisted there wasn’t anywhere else Ike could go. He had burned one bridge too many. She bit the bullet, but it tasted bitter.

   The magic bullet turned out to be the court-mandated drug-testing Ike was obliged to undergo. When spring turned to summer and summer turned to fall, he fell over his up-market tennis shoe laces and tested positive. Boys just want to have fun, even though I had told him not to squat with his spurs on. It meant the slammer. It meant he was packing up, shoes and safe and all. It meant my sister could slam and lock the door behind him the minute he left, which is what she did.

   The state of Ohio has the power to seize cash and property involved in drug trafficking. Asset seizures and forfeitures are a deterrent and a tool to take down criminal activity. “We generally seize assets that are believed to be the fruits of drug trafficking or used to facilitate the crime of drug trafficking,” Paul Saunders, a senior police official, said. “The courts have a litany of rules that are applied to each case to determine whether assets will be forfeited.”

   The last thing my sister needed was to have her home seized and taken away from her because of somebody else’s bad behavior. Fortunately, no searchlights were searching for her. She went back to mowing her lawn, walking her dogs, and watching “Law and Order” on TV.  When the crime drama wrapped everything up on a happy note, she went to bed snug as a bug with nothing bristling in her bonnet.

   I chewed on the idea of telling Ike who Ike really was, but never got around to it. It’s been said the truth will set you free. Sometimes it can feel good. Other times it can feel bad. I wasn’t in the advice business, however. I thought it best that Ike take whatever fork in the road he thought best.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East 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. President Eisenhower on his way to the opening game of the World Series. A hit man waits in the wings. A Hell’s Kitchen private eye scares up the shadows.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Chasing Infinity

Hard Landing

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By Ed Staskus

   “My grandmother Agnes lived with my father and mother after they were married, before I was born,” Vanessa said. Agnes’s son Harold Schaser had married Terese Stasas. They were Vanessa’s parents. Terese eventually put her foot down and Agnes had to move in with a daughter instead of a daughter-in-law. “After she moved, she visited us sometimes. One morning when I was three years old, she was making eggs for me. I was standing on a stool next to her telling her exactly how I wanted them done. I told her the whites should be cooked, and the yolks should be soft and pink, not orange. But I must have said too much because she suddenly turned, looked down at me, and said, ‘Halt die klappe!’”

   Vanessa didn’t know German but knew exactly what her grandmother meant. Agnes had raised four children and buried two husbands in her time. She didn’t need or want a three-year-old telling her how to fry eggs. She had done all the cooking in her own home all her years and wasn’t in the mood for a food critic.

   Two years later Agnes died. She was 60 years old. She had lived in Cleveland, Ohio for 38 years. When she came to the United States from Transylvania in 1931 she was 22 years old. She came on the arm of Mathias Schaser, her new husband. Both of them were Transylvanian Saxons. When she walked up the gangway to the deck of the ocean liner in Bremen, Germany that was going to take them to North America she had a bun in the oven. The voyage took seven days. She was seasick seven days in a row..

   Mathias had brown eyes, brown hair, and was five foot five. Agnes had blue eyes, brown hair, and was five foot three. He had emigrated to the United States some years before and was naturalized in 1929. He did well for himself and when the day came went back to his hometown Hamlesch to fetch the girl he had been waiting for to grow up. He was born in 1888. She was born in 1909. He was twice her age. It didn’t matter to either of them. They were second cousins. It didn’t matter to their Lutheran brethren. After a few months of romance, they exchanged vows in the big church in Hermannstadt near their hometown. He wore a dark suit. She wore a white dress. Agnes Kloos became Agnes Schaser on that day. She was ready for a new life no matter how hard it might be.

   Hermannstadt was one of the original seven Transylvanian Saxon towns. According to legend, the Pied Piper brought about the towns with his flute. Fate leads everyone who follows it. He lured 130 children from the German town of Hamelin with his tunes, led them into a mountain, guided them underground the length of Europe, until they finally emerged from a cave in Transylvania. The children separated into groups and founded the first seven Saxon towns in the land.

   All the towns in the Saxon lands of Transylvania were fortified. On top of that, all the churches were equally fortified. There were more than three hundred of them throughout Transylvania, both Romanesque and Gothic, built of brick and stone and most of them featuring a red tile roof. The village hall, school, and grain storage barns were always clustered around the church. The churches were usually built in the middle of town, often on a mound or a hill, with water tranches, multiple walls, and at least one tower The tower was for a bell, for observation, and for throwing rocks and pouring boiling oil on invaders. The fortified churches were the last resort and refuge. 

   The Saxons, even though they weren’t all Saxons, came from the Low Countries and Germany starting in the mid-12th century, before there was a Romania. It wouldn’t become a country until the late 19th century. When the Saxons arrived, it was a part of the Kingdom of Hungary. The colonization of Transylvania by Central Europeans, who later became known as Transylvanian Saxons, began during the reign of King Geza II in the 1140s. He recruited them as migrants to farm the valleys and exploit copper and iron ore mining in the northeast. They were also expected to help defend against marauding steppe tribes. They weren’t successful against the Mongols, but learned their lesson. When the Ottoman Turks showed up, they were ready for them. They made their stand in their fortified churches. It was every man for himself and God against all.

   Mathias and Agnes took a train from Bucharest to Berlin, made their way to Bremen, steamed up the Weser River, and crossed the Atlantic Ocean. Whenever Agnes wasn’t throwing up over the side, Mathias sat her down teaching her the English language. They landed in New York City in mid-May, where they spent the rest of the week seeing the sights, going to the top of the newly built Empire State Building, strolling the length of Central Park, and feasting on Nathan’s hot dogs at Coney Island. On the Monday of the next week, they took the Empire State Express to Cleveland’s Union Terminal.

   Until she arrived in Berlin, Agnes had never seen a train station bigger than a platform. Berlin was big, but she had been struck dumb by New York City’s Grand Central Terminal. When she got to Cleveland she was struck dumb again by the size of the train station there. More than 2,000 buildings had been demolished in the early 1920s to make room for the underground station and the 52 story Terminal Tower skyscraper built on top of it. It had been the second-largest excavation project in the world after the Panama Canal. The Terminal Tower, the tallest building in North America outside of New York City, opened to its first tenants in 1928. Everything was new as well as being new to Agnes. The United States she had come to was colossal, beyond anything she had ever imagined.

   Although she realized she might never see her family again, she was relieved to be gone from Transylvania, where trouble was brewing. The problem was, Transylvanian Saxons weren’t Romanians. The ethnic minority was one of the oldest German-speaking groups of the German diaspora. Before 1867 Transylvania had sometimes been autonomous and sometimes in union with Hungary. After the Compromise of 1867 it was incorporated into the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy. After the uneasy royal alliance came to an end at the end of World War One, the Romanian majority in Transylvania clamored for unification with the Kingdom of Romania. The Treaty of Trianon in 1920 ratified it. The nationalist aspirations of the Romanians, however, ate away at the independence of the Transylvanian Saxons. The writing was on the wall.

   Saxons had been leaving Transylvania in large numbers since the late 19th century. Many of them went to Cleveland, where they formed a fraternal organization called Erster Siebenburgen Sachsen Kranken Untersteutszung Verein, which meant First Transylvanian Saxon Sick Benefit Society. It was a mouthful no matter the language. The immigrants were determined to take care of their own. They purchased a sprawling old house on Denison Ave. in 1907 and converted it into what they called the Sachsenheim. They expanded and renovated it in 1925, adding two bowling alleys, a ballroom, a music room, a dining room, and a restaurant.

   The married couple settled down on the west side of Cleveland, which was the side of town where most of the city’s Transylvanian Saxons lived. Mathias operated a confectionary shop on Clark Ave., a fifteen minute walk from the Sachsenheim. He sold Big Hunks, Tootsie Rolls, and Chick-O-Sticks. There was chocolate galore. There was a soda counter. Agnes gave birth to their first son Harold at City Hospital. Everybody called the boy Hal. Mathias and Agnes scrimped and saved, setting money aside for a new family home. She gave birth to their second son William in November 1933. Everybody called the boy Willie. Two days later, after the baby was safely delivered, her husband Mathias was shot twice at point-blank range. He died in the middle of the night in City Hospital where Agnes was still recovering from Willie’s birth.

   “You mustn’t stay here any longer,” Agnes had told her husband when he visited her earlier that day at City Hospital. She was supposed to stay in the hospital a few days more. “You go back to the store. We will have to have more money now.” He went back to the store. He planned to return for his wife and child by the end of the week.

   Two teenagers, Pete Wanach and Pete Hansinger, walked in when Mathias was closing his shop, and demanded the day’s receipts. It was a hold up. When Mathias refused to give it to them, balling up his fists, one of them pulled a handgun and shot him dead. They scooped up all the one dollar bills and change in the till and fled. The Cleveland Police apprehended them soon enough. They were tried, found guilty of murder, and sentenced to life imprisonment in the Ohio State Penitentiary. Pete Hansinger had a teenage wife who was pregnant. She gave birth soon after he started serving his life sentence,

   Pete Wanach offered Agnes a one hundred dollar bond after his conviction. She refused to accept it. “I told him, maybe you have a mother or a sister who needs it more.” Pete Hansinger sent her a Christmas card from the penitentiary. She returned the favor. “Maybe it will make him feel better,” she said.

   Agnes soon married again, tying the knot with Joe Levak, a Slovak from the east side. They moved to that side of town and rented a small house. She decorated the house with cheap landscapes and Bavarian China. She gave birth to two daughters one right after the other. The house was filled to the gills with life. She and her husband had their hands full. After five years of marriage, Joe Levak suddenly died in 1940. Agnes never remarried. She raised her family on a Mother’s Pension, which was $90.00 a month.

   “I taught my sons to be forgiving, not to be bitter,” she said. “We got along all right. They started delivering newspapers when they were 10 years old. They finished high school even though they always worked part-time at a bakery.” On top of that, her sons had to play the violin. Agnes played it and her sons had to learn the instrument at her insistence, although Willie threw a temper tantrum and was soon excused.

   “You can’t carry a tune, anyway,” Hal told his younger brother.

   Hal was 13 years old in 1944. His middle name was Mathias, the same as his father’s given name. It was an Indian summer day in October. He was walking home from his 7th grade class at Wilson Junior High. He was looking forward to a bowl of potato tarragon soup. Agnes had brought the recipe from Transylvania. She made it with smoked ham. Hal was nearing his house when he was almost knocked off his feet by a thunderous blast. When he steadied himself and looked around, he saw roofs on fire.

   “It was like the sky blew up all at once, like blood and guts,” he said. Thick black smoke turned the day to night. Hal’s dog Buddy ran up the front steps and pawed at the door. Agnes bolted out of the house. Buddy ran into the house and down to the basement. Agnes’s daughters stood in the doorway bawling. Willie came running from the backyard. Hal ran to his mother on the front lawn. They all looked up at the red sky.

   The explosion and subsequent fires far and wide were caused when an East Ohio Gas liquefied natural gas storage tank started leaking. The gas flowed onto the concrete lot below the tank and began to vaporize. It turned into a thick white fog. It somehow ignited. It might have been a spark from a passing railcar or somebody lighting a cigarette. The deafening blast blew the tank and everything near it to smithereens, starting with the two men working on top of it. 

   It happened at the foot of East 61st St .near the New York Central Railroad tracks. When the gas exploded 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. One hundred year old oak trees were knocked down instantly. Cleveland streets convulsed four miles away. Flames reached 3,000 feet high and the heat reached 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Birds were turned to charcoal and fell out of the sky.

   Agnes and her brood lived on East 66th St. and Lexington Ave., less than a mile from the East Ohio Gas tank farm. White ash trees on their street were on fire. Agnes was dead set on not losing her house. She started spraying garden hose water on it. From the front lawn she watched a tangled mass of cars, busses, and Clevelanders on foot slogging away from the fire. Police, fire, and civil defense cars and trucks raced towards the fire, which was spewing gas, molten steel, and rock wool into the sky. 

   Housewives were caught unaware as flames spread through sewers and up their drains. When that happened, homes were suddenly on fire. “I was getting ready to do some housework” said Alice Janos, one of Agnes’s neighbors. “Suddenly it seems like the walls turn all red. I look at the windows and the shades are on fire. The house fills with smoke. I think the furnace has blown up, but then I see smoke all around the neighborhood.”

   Less than a half hour after the first explosion, a second tank exploded. It knocked Agnes down, but she got back on her feet right away. Whenever things were going to hell she kept going. She had lost two husbands. She was determined to not lose her house. She sprayed it with the garden hose until the water pressure turned to nothing. Gas ran into the streets, into the gutters, and down catch basins, igniting and blowing up wherever it pooled. Manhole covers were sent flying like bottle rockets. Utility poles bent in the heat. Fire trucks fell into sinkholes. The land of dreams had turned into bad dreams, but Agnes’s house was saved. The family didn’t have to shelter at Wilson Junior High. It was one of the schools where the Red Cross ended up taking in thousands of suddenly homeless men, women, and children. It was more than a week before children were able to go back to school.

   By Saturday morning the fire department had the conflagration under control. In the afternoon, even though Agnes had told them to stay near the house, Hal and Willie went exploring. All the stop signs and traffic lights were destroyed, but there was no traffic, anyway. Soggy hulks of cars and trucks were pell-mell everywhere. Dogs sniffed at flotsam. Fire hoses littered every intersection.

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

   “I don’t think it was the Martians,” Hal said. “Why would they come all this way to blow things up? Mom said it must have been Nazi 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.”

   Agnes spent the weekend airing out the house, washing the curtains, beating the rugs, and clearing the front and back yards of debris. She swept clumps of ash into the street. When she was done it looked like not much had happened. Her framed wedding picture, Mathias and her, taken in a photography studio in Hermannstadt in 1931, had fallen off the fireplace mantle. The glass was broken. She walked nine blocks to an open hardware store and replaced the glass. When she got home she gave her long-gone first husband a kiss and put the picture back on the mantle.

   Pete Wanach and Pete Hansinger, who had shot and killed Mathias Schaser, were paroled in 1955. They were middle-aged men by the time they were released. When Agnes was told the news she wished them well. “I have a happy life and my four children. I hope these men, too, can find good jobs and become good citizens.” She forgave them.

   In the meantime, she kept her eyes open for good husbands for her daughters and good wives for her sons. The future was coming up fast. She prayed that when they walked up the aisle and took the plunge they would land softly and not get hurt.

Photograph: Mathias Schaser and Agnes Kloos, 1931, Transylvania

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East 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. President Eisenhower on his way to the opening game of the World Series. A hit man waits in the wings. A Hell’s Kitchen private eye scares up the shadows.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication