All posts by Edward Staskus

Edward Staskus is a freelance writer from Sudbury, Ontario. He lives in Lakewood, Ohio. His crime thrillers "Cross Walk" and "Bomb City" can be found on Amazon.
Modern Romance

Jack in the Box

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By Ed Staskus

Emily Byrne knew Jack Hoffman from when she was in Broadview Hts. High School, although she didn’t know him. She was a freshman and he was a senior. Emily was hardly aware of Jack, seeing him only occasionally in the hallways as they went their separate ways. Jack threw an eye over her. What she needs is to fill out, he thought. She forgot about him the minute after whenever he passed her locker.

 They ran into each other when she was a senior and he had long since graduated. She had started taking Barre classes at Prescription Fitness. “I remember you from high school,” he said, which surprised her. She thought back. He was a dim memory. He seemed to always be there, lifting weights. He would make small talk and encourage her to start weightlifting, saying that it would help her with body control, no matter what she was doing.

He was a fit young man, a gym rat. He worked out all the time. That was his main hobby. He was a beefcake and participated in physique competitions. “I work hard on my body,” he said. “You’ve got to dedicate yourself 100% to your training. Dedication is 150% of the formula.”

He somehow got her phone number and the next thing she knew started calling her. “We talked a few times. It seemed all right. We lived in the same town and had gone to the same school. Even though I didn’t consciously know what he was doing, I intuitively knew he was flirting with me. He was nice enough, but it was more irrelevant to me than not. I was indisposed to that sort of thing. He didn’t get it, but for some reason I let it go on.”

What she didn’t know was that it was a reason spinning down a road riddled with potholes.

During her freshman year at Baldwin Wallace University they started texting and messaging back and forth. Modern dating starts with a talking phase. You’re courting but it’s not exclusive. Nobody asks anybody to be serious. “In one way or another it got to the point where we were Snapchatting all the time. I got very much into him, even though it was all talk. I practically never saw him. It seemed like a mutual thing but I had a crush back, for sure. In the early days it was so much fun.”

Neither of them asked the other to make it a big time thing. “We were doing a weird limbo-like dance. We were together but not together. We were at that stage where it was something, although it was still not much of anything.”

He finally made a move and they made a date for the week of Emily’s spring break. The talking phase was going somewhere. “It was a big step for me since I was closed off to any kind of close relationship.” He was living with his mother in Broadview Hts. His father had abandoned the family for another woman years before when Jack was starting grade school.  She was rooming in a dormitory on campus. They lived about twenty minutes apart and agreed on a restaurant.

She didn’t hear from him for a week beforehand. “I thought it was weird leading up to our exciting day, our first date.” She made sure to get a good night’s sleep the night before. She shampooed her hair, laid out a familiar outfit, and went over her conversation prep twice.

The plan was to go low-pressure, eat out, and go to a movie. “We had a plan but he stood me up. By the afternoon we were supposed to go out I still hadn’t heard from him. When he didn’t call I saved myself the embarrassment of being at the restaurant and waiting there for naught, so I didn’t go. I knew better.”

She had hoped the date would be a soft launch. It turned out to be a hard landing. “One thing about me is, cross me once, you’ll never have the chance to cross me again. He was finished. For what he was after, he was disqualified. I meant that with my whole heart. It was over for that man. It wasn’t a big blowout thing. It was just beyond doubt.”

He called her the following Monday.

“Hey, I haven’t talked to you in a couple of days,” he said, trying to gloss it over. “What’s up?”

“I called him out on it. He gave me some sad excuse that wasn’t any use.” She listened to most of it. “Whatever” is what she finally said. “I knew he wasn’t for me. It was not a good fit. He seemed to lack what was important to me, which was ambition.”

“Give me another chance,” he said, getting suddenly ambitious.

“I was young and I gave him a little bit of a leash. Attention is quite the drug. I let him continue to give me attention. We went back to limbo land my next few years of college. I should have stopped it, but I didn’t. Dumb and pretty, I screwed up.”

When they went back to what they had been doing, the talking phase, one cell phone base tower to another, it was a lot of flirting and daydreaming, no strings attached. He was getting some of what he wanted. To begin with, he wanted a girl to talk to. It wasn’t entirely clear to her what else he wanted. Emily had no expectations, like going on dates. “It worked for me. I wasn’t at Baldwin Wallace for its dating scene. I didn’t date anybody. I was hyper focused on my career, getting out of college and figuring it the hell out.”

Love can be a dangerous game.  It can change our lives. It can ruin you or save you. “I had no desire to be close to men in that way. Unless you’re absolutely sure about it you have to fend for yourself. That might sound stoic and uncompromising, but that’s how I looked at it.”

She was at the campus gym one night and saw somebody she knew from one of her classes. “The guy stopped, said hello, I smiled, and he said it was the first time he had ever seen me smile.” It made her pause, but not for long. “College was a business to me. I wasn’t there to make friends. I didn’t have the luxury of failing a class or missing out on an internship for the summer. I needed to do whatever I had to for my survival. I needed to figure out how to get through my school days clean, dirty, and fast. Get it done, get out of there, and make sure you’ve got something lined up, because it’s off to the races before you even know you’re in the race.”

Emily was in the School of Business at Baldwin Wallace University. She had been offered scholarships to several universities but chose the school in Berea because the courses were taught both by academics and former business executives. There was plenty of hands-on learning. The student-to-faculty ratio was ten to one, which sealed the deal for her.

She kept Jack where she wanted him. “I wasn’t going to play the love game. It wasn’t  going to get any deeper than the surface level.” What she meant was Jack could pay attention to her and she would accept his attention. She would take the male gaze for what it was worth.

The male gaze is structured by society for the benefit of men. It goes back a long way to Renaissance painting, classical Greek sculpture, and even farther back to Assyria. Middle Assyrian law codes dictated that respectable women had to wear veils in public. Prostitutes and enslaved women were not allowed to wear the veil. It was a barrier against the male gaze in public. It was a signifier, signaling which women were under the protection of a man.

“I didn’t have the space, the bandwidth, in my mind. I couldn’t allow him in. I wasn’t carried away by him, for one thing. There were some things I didn’t like about him, although I didn’t dislike him. But what I needed was somebody I could lean into. He wasn’t that somebody. He was in his mid-20s and still lived with his mother. There was something juvenile about that. I didn’t like it.”

Jack had gotten a track and field scholarship to Kent State University, but only lasted two semesters before dropping out. He later enrolled at Cuyahoga Community College but didn’t finish the first semester. He was a bartender. He always had plenty of cash and drove a white Toyota RAV4. “Everybody says I look good in it,” he said. “I like its adventure appeal.”

Emily wasn’t rocked by those kinds of adventure. “I felt that he wasn’t far enough along for where he was in life. I didn’t like him throwing away his scholarship. You have to make it happen. There is no option to fail. You have to figure out how to get out of the house and stay out of the house.” She tried to make sense of why Jack continued to call and text her, regardless of the scarcity of feeling she had for him.

“Most people at school, when they met me, thought I was older than I was. They thought I had a good handle on myself, because that is what I had to do outwardly. What I think he found so interesting about me was my energy, that I seemed to have figured it out. I’m not asking for validation from anybody. I don’t need that. That was the vibe I gave off. I’m going to keep moving by myself. I didn’t think he had much of that in him.”

Jack found Emily bewitching because she was buttoned up, not in spite of the buttons. She wasn’t a thousand and one emotions. He had his own emotions to deal with. “I couldn’t let myself have many feelings. I was tunnel visioned with school. My scholastic life was fight or flight. Feelings were obstacles. Emotions were road blocks.”

Jack was barking up the wrong beanstalk. Even if he had conjured up a family cow there was no treasure. There was no magical golden harp to trade for. “I kept  telling him, I don’t think you understand. It is over my dead body that I will end up with a man like you. I mean, for real.” She was honest to a fault. “I don’t have what it is you think I have. And even if I have a soft side, it is not available for me to tap into. This is not going to work. Save yourself, find somebody else.”

After Jack didn’t show up for their date, although they continued Snapchatting, Emily didn’t allow herself to get close to him. She didn’t entirely trust him anymore. “You are so nice,” he texted. She ignored it. “You are so cool,” he texted. She ignored it. “You are so pretty,” he texted. She ignored it. They communicated mostly on social media. Jack was a presence, but not a physical presence. She only saw him a few times the next few years, more in passing than not.

“I was in school and he was not. I had to stay focused. He wasn’t focused on much of anything, except his body building.  I told him, ‘I’m not going to date you.’  He had no problem picking up women. I was the woman who refused to give in, to validate him. I began to think he was a masochist, but then I realized he wanted me so I would give substance to his infatuation. He seemed to think, as long as he was in pursuit, no matter how many times I said no, the answer wasn’t no. He kept trying. He just wouldn’t quit.”

During her senior year Emily rarely replied to Jack’s messages. During her last semester she didn’t communicate with him, at all. “I knew one message from me and he would be up and running again.” After she graduated she rented a two-bedroom house in Hingetown, an emerging neighborhood for urban living on Cleveland’s near west side, sharing it with another graduate. She found a good-paying job with American Greetings.

She and her roommate explored nearby Tremont and Ohio City, which were walkable neighborhoods like Hingetown, home to contemporary bars and eateries, trendy boutiques, and pop culture. “It was great having a girlfriend to do things with. We met some men. It was fun. None of them needed emotional support from me. I made sure of that. I didn’t want to have to cradle anymore broken pieces because somebody’s father had abandoned him.”

Emily didn’t block Jack on her cell phone or on social media, but she didn’t let him know about her new address. She presumed it was over. She had little doubt she would ever see or hear from him again. She was wrong. He was a Jack in the Box. He was winding himself up. In the middle of an Indian summer that lasted into mid-November, a dozen Chrysler Imperial red roses were delivered to her house.

The card that came with the roses said, “Love, Jack.”

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. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.” More short stories can be found at Ed Staskus WordPress. His books are available on Amazon and Apple Books.

“Bomb City”

Cleveland, Ohio 1975. The John Scalish Crime Family and Danny Greene’s Irish Mob are at war. Car bombs are the weapon of choice. Two police detectives are assigned to find the bomb makers. It gets personal. Revenge is always personal.

Barron Cannon

Fixing the Frankenstein

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By Ed Staskus

The day the monster Frankenstein walked into Barron Cannon’s yoga studio in Lakewood, Ohio, Barron could tell he wasn’t a happy monster. He walked as though he had never gotten over the rigor mortis of what should have been his one and only death, before being hammered together by Victor Frankenstein. He was wet and dirty. His boots were caked with muck and mire. He needed a haircut and a shave. He looked like he could use ten or twelve square meals all at once.

“You look like hell,” Barron said.

“I feel like hell,” Frankenstein said.

“The way I heard it you were dead and gone and only still alive in the movies,” Barron said. “The story is you died on the North Pole after Victor died. That would have been a couple of hundred years ago.”

After being chased and pelted with rocks, flaming torches shoved into his face, shot at and thrown into chains, Frankenstein had sworn revenge against all mankind. They hated him so he would hate them. He had even hated himself, as well, for a long time.

“I was going to end it all when I floated off on an ice floe, but I froze solid, and it wasn’t until twenty or thirty summers ago that I defrosted.”

An unexpected consequence of global warming, Barron thought to himself. There’s always a silver lining, no matter how thin the lining might be.

“After defrosting I lost track of time,” Frankenstein said. “It’s either all day or all night all the time up there. I built an igloo and learned to hunt seals for dinner. I caught and beat their brains out with my bare hands. I steered clear of the polar bears. I meant to go back to Ingolstadt where I was created, but after living on the ice safe and sound, I changed my mind. There wasn’t anybody trying to kill me, which was a blessing. But then I got lonely stuck there all by myself.”

“How did you get here?” Barron asked.

“I walked.”

“It’s got to be more than three thousand miles from the pole to here. How long did it take you?”

“I meant to go back to Germany, but I took a wrong turn. Canada looked like Russia until I got to Toronto. By then I didn’t want to turn around. I had been at it for five months. I kept walking until I reached Perry, just east of here. I met a boy and girl there. They were riding pedal go-karts on the bluffs near the nuclear power plant. The girl said her brother was the Monster Hunter of Lake County. It was hard to believe. He is a small skinny boy. When I asked him whether he thought I was a monster, he said I looked monstrous, but was sure I wasn’t a monster.”

Frankenstein had seen his reflection in water. He was aware of what he looked like. He didn’t like it any more than passersby did, all the while throwing him wary glances and scuttling away on all directions.

“Was his name Oliver?”

“Yes.”

“You didn’t throw him and his sister down a well, or anything like that, did you?”

“No, and I’m glad I didn’t. They helped me. They gave me some of their homemade granola bars.”

“Don’t underestimate the boy. He’s taken on banshees and trolls, the 19 virus, Bigfoot, and the King of Monsters himself. I don’t know how he does it, but he’s no ordinary child to mess with.”

“He told me to come here and talk to you, that you were a yoga teacher and could liven me up. I’m stiff as a board all the time.”

“I can see that,” Barron said.

“I want to be able to touch my toes. I want to be a better person.”

“I can help you with that,” Barron said. “Except the better person part. That’s up to you.”

“I was benevolent and good once,” Frankenstein said. “Misery made me a fiend. Make me happy and I shall again be virtuous.”

“I’ll do my best.”

For once, Frankenstein had the feeling he had found a true friend.

After Barron got back from the Goodwill store with Big and Tall shorts and muscle t’s, pants and shirts, and threw away Frankenstein’s clothes, which hadn’t been washed in centuries, they got started on the yoga mat. Barron told him to get barefoot. When he did the smell was very bad. Barron turned on the studio’s fans and opened both the front and back doors. He took the creature’s boots outside and threw them in the dumpster. The dumpster gagged and spit the boots back out. They landed in the parking lot with a clomp. Barron doused them with gasoline and burned them.

“We’ll start with the twelve must-know poses for beginners,” Barron said.

Frankenstein had no problem doing the mountain and plank poses, but that was the beginning and end of what he could do. He couldn’t do down dog or a lunge to save his life. Triangle and half pigeon pose might as well have been rocket science. When he tried seated forward fold, he folded forward an inch or two and farted.

“More roughage in those granola bars than you’re used to?” Barron asked.

“I lived on seal blubber for a long time,” Frankenstein said.

He could do some of the hardest poses, like headstand, easily. He balanced on his flat head like nobody’s business. He also chanted like a champ, his deep baritone rich and heart felt. He did dead man’s pose like he was born to it.

When the lesson was over, however, he wasn’t able to get up out of the corpse pose. His muscles were in knots. Barron pulled out his Theragun and went to work. It took all the percussion device’s battery power to get Frankenstein on his feet and into the storeroom, where Barron prepared a place for him to sleep..

“It doesn’t look like you’re in any condition to go anywhere, but please make sure you stay right here. I have three classes back-to-back. I don’t want you barging in through the door and causing any heart attacks.”

Frankenstein groaned and rolled over. He slept the rest of the day, that night, and part of the next day. Barron took him to the barber shop next door. Frankenstein had never gotten a haircut. His hair was halfway down his back and his beard down to his belly button. The barber gave him a taper fade and a shave. He trimmed his eyebrows and the tufts of hair growing out of his ears. He unscrewed the electrodes in his neck.

The incisions around his neck, wrists, and ankles had long ago healed. Barron found a pair of size 34 sneakers and second-hand bifocals for him. Frankenstein was out of practice, but he enjoyed reading. Barron bought two dozen books, mostly crime thrillers at the Friends of the Library sale.

Monday morning dawned big and bright. Barron and Frankenstein walked to Lakewood Park, where they could unroll their mats outdoors on the south shore of Lake Erie. Barron had sewn two mats together for the big man. Barron’s goal was to make him more flexible. His unhappiness with the human race would have to wait. He wasn’t killing anybody anymore, at least. Frankenstein’s problem wasn’t a desk job and never exercising. He wasn’t rigid with chronic tension. He had been on an all-blubber diet for a long time. He was all in with the plant-based diet Barron was converting him to. They started having breakfast at Cleveland Vegan.

Frankenstein had never stretched in his life, which contributed to his stiffness and pain. His muscles were as unyielding as could be. On top of everything else he was close to three hundred years old, counting his own lifetime and the lifetimes of the men he was made of. His synovial fluid was thick as mud. He was like a modern day Methuselah.

Barron and Frankenstein worked on standing forward bend hour after hour, day after day. At first the creature could only bend slightly, placing his hands on his thighs. He did it a thousand times. He huffed and puffed. When he was able to touch his knees, he did it two thousand times. He broke out into a sweat. One day Barron brought blocks, setting them up on the high level. Frankenstein folded and got his fingertips to the blocks. The day came when Barron flipped them to their lower level.

“Don’t be a Raggedy Ann doll, just flopping over,” Barron told him. “Do it so it means something. Do it right.”

The gold star moment finally arrived when Frankenstein folded forward without blocks. His upper back wasn’t rounded, his chest was open, his legs were straight, and his spine was long. He was engaged but relaxed. He took several steady breaths as the space between his ribs and pelvis grew.

“Great job, Frank,” Barron said, encouraging him. Frankenstein did the pose three thousand times. He was looking lean and not so mean. His skin was losing its yellow color. He was getting a tan in the sunshine at the park. He was looking good.

According to B.K.S. Iyengar, standing forward bend slows down the heartbeat, tones the liver, spleen, and kidneys, and rejuvenates the spinal nerves. The yoga master explained that after practicing it “one feels calm and cool, the eyes start to glow, and the mind feels at peace.” Frankenstein’s mind fell into gear.

They walked to Mitchell’s Homemade Ice Cream in Rocky River. Barron had a scoop. Frankenstein had eight scoops. Children gathered around him asking a million questions, asking for his autograph, and taking selfies with him in the picture. He was a natural ham and never said no.

From standing forward bend it was on to more beginner poses and then intermediate poses. By the end of the month Frankenstein wasn’t a yogi, yet, but he was more human than he had ever been. He joined Barron’s regularly scheduled classes. He was much bigger than everybody else. Barron put him in a back corner by himself where he wouldn’t accidentally thwack anybody while doing sun salutations.

When the time came for Frankenstein to move out of Barron’s storeroom into his own apartment, Barron made him a gift of B.K.S. Iyengar’s book “Light on Yoga.”

“This is the book that will make you a better person, Frank. I’ve read it twice.”

“I’ll read it fifty times,” Frankenstein said.

“What do you plan on doing?” Barron asked.

Frankenstein thought about becoming a barber but bending over the tops of heads all day long would lead to more lower back pain. He knew full well he had sciatica.. He threw that idea out the window. He thought about becoming a house painter. He could reach more spots compared to a shorter man. He could cut in walls and ceilings without using a step ladder. That would save time over the course of a job. The downside was having to paint down low, like skirting boards. Stooping would do a number on his back. He threw that idea out the window, too.

When he finally decided on what to do, he was surprised he hadn’t thought of it before. It was a natural. It was how he had been granted a second life. He would become an electrician.

Electricians are skilled tradesman who run wire, install outlets and breaker panels, and repairs fixtures and equipment. He would specialize in installing fans and lights into ceilings. Being tall would free him from the need of a step stool. His long arms meant he could reach anything. It turned the work from a two-man job into a one-very-tall-man job. Homeowners in Lakewood were always restoring and upgrading their houses. He would advertise himself as “Call Frank – He Knows the Power of Electricity and Will Save You Money.”

If he ever made a mistake, he knew he could absorb any bust-up of voltage. He had already been hit with more of the hot stuff than any mortal man and lived to tell the tale. Once he had steady work he would look for another bride, this time a nice girl without a bolt of lightning in her hair. When the time came, they would make a family for themselves.

He had been alone all his life. He had endured plenty of trouble and bad press. He started looking for the odds and ends that would make a new Bride of Frankenstein. When trouble comes, he thought, it will be Mrs. Frankenstein and their Baby Frankenstein’s who will circle the wagons without picking him to pieces about the details.

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. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.” More short stories can be found at Ed Staskus WordPress. His books are available on Amazon and Apple Books.

“Bomb City”

Cleveland, Ohio 1975. The John Scalish Crime Family and Danny Greene’s Irish Mob are at war. Car bombs are the weapon of choice. Two police detectives are assigned to find the bomb makers. It gets personal. Revenge is always personal.

Baltic Circle

Cooking Up Trouble

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   By Ed Staskus

“Mom, you know it’s not dinner without a napkin,” Matt said. He was in his room on the third floor on his cell phone talking to his mother Terese who was in the first- floor kitchen. She answered on the land line. She had made a three-course dinner for him and taken it upstairs a minute earlier.

She made dinner and took it upstairs to him every night, at least on those nights he was at home. When he wasn’t, she caught a break. She would then quick fry some chicken and kick back in front of the TV. She liked B & W movies, mostly comedies and melodramas. Her husband worked split shifts. She had the house to herself those nights to laugh it up at the funny parts and cry at the sad parts.

Terese was my mother-in-law. She was a self-taught chef. She got the bug from her mother Stefanija, who had emigrated from Lithuania to the United States after World War Two. Stefanija worked in the kitchen of Stouffer’s flagship restaurant in downtown Cleveland for the rest of her working life. After she retired she compiled her favorite Lithuanian recipes and published them in a book called “Kvieciu Prie Stalo.” It means “We Welcome You to the Table.”

Terese taught herself well enough so that she could make anything, from sloppy joes at feed-the-poor kitchens to wedding cakes for millionaires. She only ever thumbed through cookbooks when she had to. No matter that she was intrepid and skilled, having opened and operated several restaurants, as well as working as a pastry chef and a caterer, she had to play dumb waiter once a day.

“I’ll bring one right up to you,” she said to her son. What else could she do? After all, she had taught him his table manners.

Matt lived on carry out dinners except they were carry up dinners. His mother did the cooking and carrying. Matt did the eating. When he was done he dutifully brought his dishes downstairs. My father-in-law Dick washed them by hand every day. They had a dishwasher, but he preferred to stand at the sink and get his hands dirty while getting the dishes clean. He had been a war-time MP in Vietnam before becoming a bartender. He was a hands-on kind of man.

Their house was on E. 73rd St. at the corner of Chester Ave. in the Fairfax neighborhood. It was built in 1910, three stories of it, four bedrooms, two baths, two fireplaces, and a full basement. The third floor was originally servant’s quarters. The foundation was sandstone quarried in nearby Amherst by the Cleveland Stone Company. Amherst had been the “Sandstone Capital of the World” back in the day.

There were stores, churches, and schools everywhere back then. There were light industries and warehouses. Street cars ran east and west all day and night on Euclid Ave., which was one block north of Chester Ave.. The Karamu House Theater opened in 1915. Langston Hughes developed and premiered some of his plays on their stage. Sears, Roebuck & Co. built a flagship store there in 1928. 40,000 people lived in Fairfax in the 1940s. Sixty years later, when my mother-in-law showed up, only 5,000-some people still lived there.

By the 1950s the servants on the third floor were long gone and so were the well-off families who had raised their children in the house. They moved away to the suburbs. Urban renewal was in full swing. As 1960 rolled around the neighborhood became nearly all-black and low-income. The house was divided up and converted into boarding rooms. By the 1980s it had gone to hell, in more ways than one.

Terese and her husband were living in Reserve Square in a 17th floor three-bedroom corner apartment overlooking ,Erie on E. 13th St. and Chester Ave. when they bought the house with the intention of bringing it back to life. They were living well enough. They owned and operated a bar restaurant on the ground floor of the apartment complex. They didn’t realize how much trouble they were cooking up for themselves making the move. It was the kind of trouble confidence men outside their ken had dreamed up.

The neighborhood they moved to was three miles from their former home in downtown Cleveland. Fairfax was on the edge of University Circle, where most of the city’s major educational institutions and museums were. The eastern side of the neighborhood was dominated by the Cleveland Clinic, which was growing by leaps and bounds. Hough neighborhood was just to the north and St. Clair-Superior was north of that.  On the far side of the city limits was Lake Erie, where yellow perch and walleye lived rent-free.

The housing market was going underwater. Hands were being wrung coast-to-coast. The fish didn’t care. They liked living underwater.

The house was being flipped when Terese and Dick first saw it. The flipper put the house back together as a single-family home, putting in a new central staircase, a new kitchen, and a new two-car garage. He stopped there. He bought the house for pennies on the dollar. He sold it to my in-laws for dollars on the dollar. They paid $135,000.00 for the house, more than double what almost all the other houses in Fairfax were priced at. The real estate agent described it as a ”steal.” A vacant lot next door was thrown in as a bonus. There was another vacant lot across the street. There were several others within sight. The empty lots were like tumbleweeds. The neighborhood was more ghost town than not.

Hough was where race riots happened in 1966, when Terese was in her mid-20s, married to her first husband, with a child and another one in the making. They then lived on the border of the Euclid Creek Reservation, bounded by North Collinwood and Richmond Hts. It was a family friendly neighborhood with good schools. All the men drove to work in the morning. Most of the women kept house. Children walked to school. Their backyard was a forest. On clear days in the winter they could see Mt. Baldy in the distance.

The Hough Riots started when the white owner of the Seventy-Niners Café on Hough Ave. and E. 79th St. said “Hell, no” after being asked by a passing black man for a glass of water on an oppressively hot day. One thing led to another, an angry crowd gathered, there was some rock throwing which led to looting and vandalism, arson and sniper fire followed, and two days later the Ohio National Guard rolled in with .50 caliber machine guns mounted on their Jeeps. They carried live ammunition.

Terese and Dick opted for the Fairfax because Terese was pining for a house on the near east side near where she had grown up. She grew up in a Lithuanian family, her father and mother and four sisters in a two-bedroom bungalow where she slept on the sofa. It didn’t matter to her that the house she wanted was on the wrong side of the racial divide. Dick wanted what his wife wanted. They lived for each other. He cashed in his 401K to make the down payment on the house. The next summer they took out a second mortgage for $85,000.00 to replace the roof, replace all the old windows with vinyl windows, blow liquid polyurethane insulation into the walls, and side the exterior. They painted the interior, which meant Matt and I pulled on our painter’s pants and got to work.

The floors were hardwood from back when there were man-sized forests. They had them refinished. When the floors were done, they sparkled like the clock had been turned back a century. No matter how old anything is, everything was once new.

They blew through their second mortgage fast. When ownership of Terese’s downtown lunch counter in the National City Bank building on E. 9th St. and Euclid Ave. slipped out from under her feet, her partner getting the better of her, they began living partly on Dick’s paycheck, partly on her freelancing, and partly on their credit cards. It wasn’t long before they were making only the minimum payment on their credit cards. It was a downward spiral.

Matt moved in with his parents after sampling the bachelor life on Lakewood’s Gold Coast. He was working full-time for General Electric and going part-time to graduate school to get a second high-tech degree. He played lead guitar in a local rock ‘n roll band, keeping his eyes open for a girl who might become his girlfriend. He paid some rent for his third-floor space and helped out around the house.

My wife landscaped the front yard and Dick put in a sizable garden in the back yard. Terese liked herbs and fresh vegetables where she could get her hands on them in a jiffy. They adopted a handful of stray cats. They invited Terese’s sisters and their husbands over for holiday dinners. Dick’s family lived in New York, which was a long drive and short excuse away. The house was spacious and cozy at the same time. It was pretty as a postcard when it was lit up and full of people on Christmas.

They had barbeques in the summer, opening the garage door and wheeling out a grill. Dick was a driveway cook. He wasn’t a chef, but he was a master at charcoal-broiling when it came to hot dogs, hamburgers, and steaks. We played horseshoes in the vacant lot where there was plenty of room for the forty-foot spacing. Dick was a big man with a soft touch and almost impossible to beat when it came to pitching. He was King of the Ringers. Even when he didn’t hit a ringer he was always close. The game is deceptively simple, but hard to master. When I complained about losing to him over and over again, he said, “You can’t blame your teammates for losing in horseshoes.”

We bought skyrockets, paper tubes packed with rocket fuel, for Independence Day and shot them off from the vacant lot when it got dark. One of them went haywire and flew into the garage through the open door. Dick was standing at the grill in the driveway but ducked in the nick of time. The cats went running every which way. They stayed on the run for two days, until they got hungry and came back.

Their garage got broken into. It got broken into again. It wasn’t the safest neighborhood. They installed a security system. They lost their front porch patio furniture to thieves. Terese saw the thieves dragging the furniture down the street in broad daylight, but she was alone and there wasn’t anything she could do about it. She called the Cleveland Police Department but there wasn’t anything they were inclined to do about it. The crime rate in Fairfax was high and the police had better things to do. Dick replaced the furniture, chaining it down to the deck of the porch. They went on litter patrol most mornings, picking up empty wine and beer bottles and sweeping up cigarette butts and plastic bag trash.

What few neighbors they had watched out for each other. A mailman lived in a newer house catty corner to them where Spangler Ct. met E. 73rd St.  He clued them in on the workings of Fairfax, what to watch out for and what didn’t matter, and after they took the measure of the neighborhood they got as comfortable with it as they were ever going to get. Terese started ministering to some of the kids who lived in the run-down walk-up four-story apartment building behind them. She made lunch for some of them, took some of them on day trips to nearby museums, and drove some of them to school when their parents were incapacitated.

There were cluster homes and McMansions being built in both Hough and Fairfax, but they were far and few between. Police cars and ambulances sped up and down Chester Ave. every hour on the hour sirens blaring. There was an occasional gunshot in the night. Everybody locked their doors at sunset.

One day, sitting on the steps of their front porch, I watched three men tie a rope around a dead tree in the vacant lot across the street. They were going to try to yank it out of the ground with a pick-up truck. The first time they tried the rope snapped. The second time they tried they used two ropes. They put their truck in low gear and tugged. The rear bumper got yanked off and the truck shot forward, the driver slamming on the brakes, tearing up the turf. They came back with a bigger truck. When the tree started to lean it fell over fast, cracking, the roots ripping loose, barely missing them. I thought they were going to saw the branches off and section the trunk after it crashed to the ground, but they didn’t. The dead tree lay moldering in the grass all summer.

Neither Terese nor Dick lived to see their house vanishing in front of their eyes. If they had they would have seen their one asset in life reduced in value by 90%. All the money they had was tied up in the house. They were going to be left with nothing. They could see it coming and it made them miserable. Their health started to fail. The confidence men who puffed up the housing market until the bubble blew up walked away free and clear. Alan Greenspan, who ran the Federal Reserve Bank for nearly twenty years, said the meltdown was due to a “flaw in the system.”

He didn’t say much more about it that mattered. When he said “system” it was clear the fix was in, that it had been a stitched up deal.

Terese died on New Year’s Eve 2005 and Dick died on Easter Saturday 2006. She collapsed  on the landing of their central staircase. She was dead by the time 911 got her to the nearby Cleveland Clinic. Dick collapsed in the wine room of their house in the middle of the night four months later while working on a crossword puzzle. He never used a pencil. He always filled the squares in with a pen. When Matt discovered him in the morning, he had almost finished the puzzle. His pen was on the floor. It still had plenty of ink in it.

The value of houses continued to crumble and the collapse that was going to push the United States into a recession picked up speed. Matt stayed in the house for a few years, trying to make the bank payments, taking in Case Western Reserve University student boarders, but it was to no avail. He was throwing good money after bad. When he walked away it was for good. My wife and I helped empty the house, giving most of everything that wasn’t a personal effect to whoever could use it.

When it was all over Matt moved away and never went back. Whenever I found myself driving through the Fairfax neighborhood, the night filled with stars I couldn’t see in the obscure city sky, the sidewalks empty as they usually were, I avoided the corner of E. 73rd St. and Chester Ave. I preferred to not look back. I had no taste for what I might see, or not see there, the house dark and abandoned.

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. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.” More short stories can be found at Ed Staskus WordPress. His books are available on Amazon and Apple Books.

“Bomb City”

Cleveland, Ohio 1975. The John Scalish Crime Family and Danny Greene’s Irish Mob are at war. Car bombs are the weapon of choice. Two police detectives are assigned to find the bomb makers. It gets personal. Revenge is always personal.

Dogs Never Bite Me

Blitzkrieg Bop

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By Ed Staskus

   Maggie Campbell loved the Ramones, who were Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee, Tommy, and the Marky. There was no doubt about her love. She had all their records and CD’s, although she never got their autographs. She did, however, have the ticket stub from the Variety Theater where she saw the movie. “It started with ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll High School,’ which was the best most fun movie you ever saw. It’s a cult classic. If you haven’t seen it, or if you say you can take it or leave it, all I can say is, what is wrong with you?”

   The Variety Theater was in a bad neighborhood on Cleveland’s near west side. Maggie had to sneak out of Bay Village, which was a good neighborhood on the far west side, to see the movie. She didn’t tell her parents. It was worth the risk. They were kicking back with martinis in hand with their neighbors, anyway. Her father was a big fan of the cocktail. He always said “Two are too many and three aren’t enough” as he worked on his third one.

   Maggie saw the movie in the winter of 1980, as soon it hit the silver screen, at least when it finally came to Cleveland. The city called itself the “Home of Rock ‘n’ Roll.” A few years later, when it was in stores on VHS, she bought it and watched it more than twenty times. She couldn’t get enough of the movie.

   “Rock, rock, rock ‘n’ roll high school, well I don’t care about history, rock, rock, rock ‘n’ roll high school, cause that’s not where I want to be.”

   She loved the movie so much, which was about high jinks and punk music. “Play before you get good,” Joey Ramone said, “because by the time you get good, you’re too old to play.” The Ramones never waited until they knew what they were doing. “They were like a UFO landing in the middle of rock music,” Bono of U2 said. “Joey had an intensity and heart in his voice that made him stand out.”

   “Sis, that’s the worst movie I’ve ever seen,” her sister Elaine told her.

   “How can you say that?” Maggie asked. “It might be a stupid movie but it’s awesome. Maybe you need to watch it with me, so I can show you once and for all how great all the parts are. It’s awesome because the Ramones are actually in it, with all their punk and all their attitude, blowing everybody away. You have to hear them upfront and loud to understand.” 

   The first time the Ramones came to Ohio, to Youngstown, three years before the movie, only ten people showed up to the show. Two of them, drunk as skunks, wandered in by mistake. All of them were blown away. “They were the real deal,” Iggy Pop of the Stooges said. “Watching the Ramones was like seeing the essence of rock boiled down to its raw, primal form. They were a breath of fresh air in a lot of fake, bloated rock at the time.”

   Johnny Ramone, the lead guitar player, was maybe the ugliest lead guitar player anyone will ever see in their life. He was even more unattractive than Howard Stern, if that could possibly be. He had long black hair and wore red glasses. He always looked dirty and greasy. He didn’t think much of “Rock ‘n’ Roll High School.” He liked scary movies. “I like 60s and 70s Italian and Spanish horror movies. ‘The Bride of Frankenstein’ might be my favorite horror movie.”

   The movie is about a high school girl, Riff Randell, who’s in love with Joey Ramone. Joey was the beanpole lead singer of the Ramones. Riff is his Number One fan. She’s written a song for the band. She has to meet them so they will play her song. “Rock, rock, rock ‘n’ roll high school, I just want to have some kicks, I just want to get some chicks, rock, rock, rock, rock, rock ‘n’ roll high school.”

   Riff spends three days in line to be the first person to buy Ramones concert tickets. The first day that she cuts school she writes a note, “Please excuse Riff because her mother has died.” The second day she writes, “Please excuse Riff because her father has died.” The third day she writes, “Please excuse Riff because her goldfish has died.” She buys one thousand tickets and starts distributing them at school.

   The school principal, Principal Togar, is a no fun, buttoned-down she-goat. She has hired goons who are her hall monitors. They’re always writing love letters to her, while rolling a joints and getting high, although she doesn’t know that. She treasures their love letters, even though their handwriting is chicken scratchy.

   Riff is non-stop on Principal Togar’s shit list, and when the hall monitors body search her, they confiscate her Ramones tickets. Now neither she nor anybody else from her school can go to the show. She and her friends are sad. “Everyone’s going to be there, but not us.” But then she wins a local radio station’s “Name This Song” contest. It’s a Ramones song, of course. She knows it right away.

   Before the concert Principal Togar does a science experiment with white mice. They have to listen to rock ‘n’ roll music with headphones on, to the Who, the Clash, and Led Zeppelin, and finally the Ramones “Watch what happens when they have to listen to the Ramones,” Principal Togar says. The mice heads explode. 

   “If you’re not into stupid humor you won’t like it.” Maggie was without a doubt into stupid humor. “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” was another of her all-time movie favorites.

   The band comes to Riff’s school. A mouse wearing headphones is there, like at all their shows. The music in the movie is full blast Ramones, except for a few songs by Devo and Alice Cooper. Maggie sang “Teenage Lobotomy” for weeks while walking to school. Her friends started to think she had gone lame in the brain.

   She went to a Ramones concert in 1989, at the Phantasy Night Club on the east side of Lakewood. She thought she could handle being in the mosh pit, but she ended up flopping around on the floor. “Well, the girls out there knock me out you know, rock, rock, rock ‘n’ roll high school, cruisin’ around in my GTO.”

   A bouncer dragged her to safety. “Don’t come into the pit anymore,” he said. “It’s not for suburban girls.” There were bodies everywhere. After the concert everybody went upstairs to drink at the bar. The Ramones went upstairs, too. She was star-struck, even though Johnny Ramone was more unhandsome in person than he was in the movie. She couldn’t get up the courage go to their table to get autographs. She was frozen in place and just watched them from a distance.

   There was a tribute to the band twenty years later at the Happy Dog Saloon in Gordon Square. It had been an Eastern European restaurant called Mom Socotch’s for sixty years until mom sold it to hipsters. Maggie was beyond excited. When they announced during the show at the Happy Dog that “Rock ‘n’ Roll High School” was going to be shown on the big screen at the Capital Theater the following week she jumped for joy.

   “Oh, my God,” she turned to her husband Steve de Luca. “Can we go? We’ve got to go! I’ve got to see it for real again.”  She had watched “Rock ‘n’ Roll High School” on the small screen from the word go through high school and beyond. She would push the cassette into the VCR whenever she wanted to and crack up all night long.

   “Rock, rock, rock ‘n’ roll high school, I hate the teachers and the principal, don’t want to be taught to be no fool, rock, rock, rock, rock, rock ‘n’ roll high school.” The Ramones are all dead now, except for Marky. “I’m really lucky I’m still around,” said Dee Dee Ramone, just before he died. “Everybody expected me to die next. But it was always someone else instead of me.” He was the troublemaker in the band.

   In 1999, the year Maggie’s father got cancer, he started listening and singing along to the music of the Ramones. He had been a stockbroker all his life. Frank Sinatra was more his kind of  songman. She didn’t know what had gotten into him. “Hey ho, let’s go, hey ho, let’s go, they’re forming in a straight line, they’re going through a tight wind.”

   “Who sings this song?” 

   “That would be the Ramones, dad.”

   “A tight wind? They’ve got that right.” Her father kept up the beat until the end. 

   “The Ramones didn’t mess around,” Lemmy Kilmister of Motorhead said. “They got up there, played their hearts out, and left.” The Ramones cranking it up were the soundtrack of the life they led, like seeing your life with your ears. They sang it loud and clear until they couldn’t sing it anymore.

   “We’ve got to stop this crazy carrying on, It’s going to be the death of me, I don’t feel so good inside, but I had a good time, you know it was good,” is what they sang.

Excerpted from “Dogs Never Bite Me.”

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. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.” His books are available on Amazon and Apple Books.

“Bomb City”

Cleveland, Ohio 1975. The John Scalish Crime Family and Danny Greene’s Irish Mob are at war. Car bombs are the weapon of choice. Two police detectives are assigned to find the bomb makers. It gets personal. Revenge is always personal.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Home Movies

Brand New Plan

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By Ed Staskus  

The year my senior class graduated from St Joseph’s High School was a high point of the Vietnam War. It was a low point of the American War, which was what the North Vietnamese called it. It was 1968, the year nearly 600,000 American troops were battling Hanoi up and down the country and the year 80,000 of the enemy struck back during the Tet Offensive. They hoped to ignite a popular uprising. It didn’t happen. Their hopes were dashed. During the month-long battle for the city of Hue the city was destroyed in order save it. The residents fled in all directions.

In 1964 the undeclared war got up to full speed with the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. Just ten-some years after the end of the Korean War, the United States military began pouring back into Asia. By the time the war ended in 1975 nearly 60,000 American servicemen had lost their lives, along with 250,000 South Vietnamese troops, as well as a million Viet Cong and North Vietnamese combatants. More than two million civilians were killed. There was no use trying to count the maimed, shredded, and burned by napalm. Eight million tons of bombs, two-and-a-half times as much as were dropped on Europe from 1940 to 1945, were dropped by the United States Air Force down onto Vietnam.

I didn’t know the Gulf of Tonkin from the man in the moon the summer before my freshman year. I barely knew anything about Vietnam. I had a vague idea about where it might be, which was somewhere near China. I had never heard of the domino theory or the idea of dying for dominoes. Four years later I knew more. I knew enough to stay away from the principal’s office and the kind of trouble officialdom could bring to bear, which was at least something.

Many of my friends at St. Joseph’s High School, on the east side of Cleveland, were Lithuanian Americans. The neighborhood was crawling with us. We were all Roman Catholic and the school was Roman Catholic, within walking distance for most of us. We were taught history, math and science, civics, religion, and English. There were vocational classes and there was an honors program. The football team was big and bad, playing for titles. We were taught to be good Catholics and good citizens for God and country.

None of us worried about the Vietnam War as freshmen and sophomores. We had other things to worry about, like getting to the next class on time, homework, pep rallies, school assemblies, dances in the gym, our status and looks, part-time jobs, outside activities, and summer vacation. The greasers had cars and leather jackets and we could only look on in envy. The jocks had good looks and never mind getting a good look at their girlfriends. The honor students had brains and were looking towards the future.

It changed fast our junior and senior years. President Lyndon Johnson’s State of the Union address in 1967 was bleak. It was bad no matter if you were the parent of a draft-age young man or if you were the young man. “I recommend to the Congress a surcharge of six percent on both corporate and individual income taxes, to last for two years or for so long as the unusual expenditures associated with our efforts in Vietnam continue,” LBJ said. “I wish I could report to you that the conflict is almost over. This I cannot do. We face more cost, more loss, and more agony.”

My father didn’t like the cost part. The White House proposed a record-breaking $135 billion-dollar federal government budget. My father, an accountant, was shocked. I didn’t know how to count that high and kept quiet. I didn’t like the agony part and said so.

Our last two years in high school nobody wanted to not be going to college. A student deferment wasn’t a sure thing, but it was better than nothing. In 1965 President Lyndon Johnson urged the country’s young men to get up, stand up, and fight. It didn’t matter that twenty-five years earlier LBJ had largely avoided World War Two except for a couple of months of make believe. What mattered was what he said now.

Lewis Hershey, the head of the Selective Service, ordered draft boards to stop granting deferments so that more men would have to join up. College students found themselves being reclassified. When the Selective Service Qualifying Test came into play for anyone who wanted to keep their deferments, students took to the streets. The next year “Hershey’s Directives” ordered draft boards to punish anyone who protested against the Vietnam War. After that the proverbial crap hit the fan and kept hitting the fan until the Paris Peace Agreement was signed in 1973.

The year after we graduated was the year the Selective Service started drawing lottery numbers determining who would or would not be drafted. The drawing was televised live. Everybody our age stayed glued to the tube. If you were born on September 14th then your number was number one and you were going to be drafted the next day, or sooner. If you were born on March 14th, like me, your number was 354 and you weren’t going to be drafted and weren’t going anywhere more dangerous than your own backyard. No Viet Cong with an AK-47 was going to be firing hot lead at you napping in your outdoor chaise.

I was dismayed when I found out the lottery in 1969 didn’t apply to me. I had entered high school early and wasn’t quite 19 years old. I was going to have to wait another year for the sword of Damocles. I was worried lightning might not strike twice. Was it possible to replicate the good luck of landing a number like 354 out of 365?

Two of my friends, John Degutis and Algis Karsokas, were drafted and shipped out to Vietnam as infantrymen for tours of duty in God-forsaken jungles. They didn’t know what they were getting into until they got there. When they came back, they weren’t the same, not by far.

Joe Gibson, another friend of mine, came back in 1971. He came home with a Zippo lighter engraved with an epigram. The epigram said, “We the unwilling, led by the unqualified, to kill the unfortunate, die for the ungrateful.” His family had come up the hillbilly highway in the late 1940s to work in Cleveland’s steel mills. He stopped at home but was moving back to southern Ohio with a buddy he had served with. “We’re going to get into the business of Meigs County Gold. We learned one or two things in Viet Nam. The DEA best not send their helicopters to spray our crop.”

From 1965 to 1972, 150,000-and-more men of draft age lived in Cleveland and within surrounding Cuyahoga County. About 60,000 of them served in the military, many of whom enlisted, while the others were drafted. More than 90,000 never served in the armed forces. Nearly 4,000 of them were draft dodgers and the rest deferred, exempted, or disqualified from service. Of those who served 47,000 never went to Vietnam, 3,000 were stationed in Vietnam but saw no fighting, while some 10,000 experienced combat. More than 400 of them were killed and more than 2,000 were wounded.

The odds weren’t bad, but who wants to roll snake eyes in the crap game of a meaningless war? By 1970 slightly more than half of all Americans believed troops should be pulled out of Southeast Asia. Kent State happened in May 1970. The spring quarter was coming to an end. Warm weather was busting out all over and everybody wanted to be out in the sun. Some three hundred students were protesting the war when Jim Rhodes, the four-term “Get It Done” governor, had enough and ordered the Ohio National Guard to put down the disturbance. When the Guardsmen heard enough insults shouted in their direction they started shooting. Four students were killed and nine wounded.

Before the shooting the Tower of Rhodes said the protestors were “the worst type of people that we harbor in America.” After the shooting he said, “We deeply regret those events and are profoundly saddened by the deaths of four students and the wounding of nine others.” The bloodshed turned the mess into a place on the map busting out across the country. Crosby Stills Nash & Young wrote a song about it. “Tin soldiers and Nixon’s coming, we’re finally on our own, this summer I hear the drumming, four dead in Ohio.”

Gerald Casale, who later became the lead singer and bassist for the alternative rock band Devo, was there. “All I can tell you is that it completely changed my life. Two of the four people who were killed, Jeff Miller and Allison Krause, were my friends. I was a hippie boy and then I saw exit wounds from M1 rifles on two people I knew. We were all running our asses off. It was total, utter bullshit. Live ammunition, none of us knew, none of us could have imagined. They shot into a crowd that was running away from them. I stopped being a hippie and started to develop the idea of devolution. I got real pissed off.”

The shootings ignited outrage on campuses around the country. More than four million students participated in walk outs at hundreds of high schools, colleges, and universities. It was the largest student strike in the history of the United States. Everything at Cleveland State University, where I was a student, stopped dead in its tracks. We all thought it was a horrible thing. Everybody knew Kent State University, about thirty miles away, was a chill campus, and even though somebody had burned down the ROTC building the night before, the demonstration was civil as far as riots go. Some Billy clubs would have done the trick.

I was dumbfounded the next week when a Gallup Poll revealed that 58% of respondents blamed the students. Many people confuse feeling with thinking. Only 11% blamed the National Guard and 31% expressed no opinion. I was surprised that one out of three people didn’t know what to think about what happened. What were they thinking?

The tabloids sided with the military, but the national press didn’t agree. “It took thirteen terrifying seconds last week to convert the traditionally conformist campus into a bloodstained symbol of the rising student rebellion against the Nixon Administration and the war in Southeast Asia,” wrote Time Magazine. “When National Guardsmen fired indiscriminately into a crowd of unarmed civilians, killing four students, the bullets wounded the nation.”

Newsweek Magazine was more analytical. “The National Guard insisted that their men fired as they were about to be overrun by the students. But if the troops were so closely surrounded, how was it that nobody closer than seventy five feet away was hit? And if the rocks and bricks presented such overwhelming danger, how did the troops avoid even one injury serious enough to require hospital treatment?”

The average distance from the soldiers to those killed and wounded was the length of a football field. It was a turkey shoot, especially since the students didn’t have two toy guns to rub together. In the end, none of the National Guardsmen took a dead undergraduate home for their roasting pans, turkey shoot or not.

Less than a week after the shootings 100,000 people demonstrated in Washington, D.C., protesting the war and the killing of unruly students. “The city was an armed camp,” said Ray Price, Richard Nixon’s chief speechwriter from 1969 to 1974. “Mobs were smashing windows, slashing tires, dragging parked cars into intersections, even throwing bedsprings off overpasses into the traffic down below. That was the student protest. That’s not student protest, that’s civil war.” President Nixon was whisked away to Camp David for two days for his own safety.

When Mark Rudd, a national leader of the Weathermen, snuck into Cleveland for a February 1970 meeting with the local boys and girls, he said they were going underground for “strategic sabotage against all symbols of authority” according to an informer. He called for urban guerrilla warfare.

A fellow Viking at St. Joseph’s High School, John Skardis, who was a National Honor Society student, enrolled in Columbia University and soon joined Students for a Democratic Society. He later joined the Weathermen and then the even more radical Weather Underground. He thought he knew the right approach for fighting the man, but he was wrong.

He had to beat it out of town after he and a band of Weather Undergrounders rampaged through a gleaming new indoor mall in Cleveland Heights, smashing plate glass windows and terrorizing mid-day shoppers. He was arrested, but after his parents made bail he fled the state. The FBI got involved, naming him a fugitive charged with “Unlawful Flight to Avoid Prosecution.”

“Attended Columbia University in 1968 and 1969 and was involved in student disorders,” the wanted poster said. “Joined the revolutionary Weatherman group and took part in several violent demonstrations in Chicago and Ohio. Entered the Weather Underground in early 1970. He has used the alias Jonas Rytis Skardis,”

In 1975 he was named by United States Senate investigators as one of thirty seven members of the Weather Underground who the FBI were still looking for after nineteen politically motivated bombings since 1970. The year before the group had managed to plant a bomb in the State Department building in Washington. Although they avoided blowing anybody up, they scared the hell out of a lot of power suits. When John Skardis and a companion surrendered the following year, they had been globetrotting for months in several European countries with passports issued in false names based on false ID’s. After he was extradited he disappeared down the by-the-book rabbit hole.

Although I went to a couple of anti-war demonstrations on Public Square, I avoided the clouds of tear gas and confrontations with the Cleveland Police Department, especially the police on horseback. I bided my time until next December and the next Selective Service drawing. When the time came, I found my hopes for another draft-defying lottery number were fool’s gold. My number came up 12. I was going to Vietnam to fight in a failing war that most people, whether they said so or not, didn’t believe in anymore. In 1965 about 80% of the American public supported the war. Six years later it was down to 40%. By the end of the war, it was 30%.

I had to appear at my draft board for a physical, which went well, thanks to my having been a Boy Scout for many years. But I was determined to not go to Vietnam. “Hell No! We Won’t Go!” was the handwriting on the wall. I was willing to volunteer if the Viet Cong invaded the United States, but I wasn’t willing to put myself in harm’s way in anybody else’s civil war, especially not nine thousand miles away in Southeast Asia where they had been fighting for self-determination since 1943. It didn’t seem like they were about to give up anytime soon.

Young men coast to coast were burning their draft cards. I was hoping it wouldn’t come to that. I didn’t even have a lighter. I had to pull out all the stops. First, I declared myself a conscientious objector. The draft board laughed it off. Then I told them I had been an altar boy and objected on religious grounds. They laughed that off, too. They were church-going men on Sundays but not any other time. Finally, I told them I would frag an officer the first chance I got if I was forced into poplin fatigues and sent to Vietnam. I wasn’t trying to be mutinous, but I wasn’t prepared to be crippled or killed keeping dominoes in place, no matter what dominoes they were.

That was no laughing matter to them. They sent me to a Master Sergeant who chewed me out for being unpatriotic, who then sent me to a commissioned officer who chewed me out for being unpatriotic, and finally to an indifferent psychiatrist who wrote me up as hopeless. He gave me a 4F deferment, meaning I was “physically, mentally, or morally unfit to serve.” I was OK with the snub.

In the meantime, my father, who was  a God-fearing Republican, and I got into several heated arguments and I moved out. I dropped out of Cleveland State University for half-a-year and discovered the Upper Prospect bohemian enclave on the city’s near east side. I had grown up going from one end of high school to the other, but I hadn’t grown up as much as I thought. Cooking and cleaning, making the rent, and meeting new kinds of people in a new place outside of my old world was a kind of coming of age.

The war in Southeast Asia went on without me. I stopped reading the news about it. It was a dead letter. I hoped that when Johnny came marching home he came home in one piece, but got to thinking that marching in lockstep might not be the best and brightest way for me to make my way on the road ahead.

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. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.” His books are available on Amazon and Apple Books.

“Bomb City”

Cleveland, Ohio 1975. The John Scalish Crime Family and Danny Greene’s Irish Mob are at war. Car bombs are the weapon of choice. Two police detectives are assigned to find the bomb makers. It gets personal. Revenge is always personal.

A crying of Lot 49 Publication

Home Movies

Riding the Red Line

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By Ed Staskus

   The last summer I lived in the Forest Hills neighborhood around Eddy Rd., where there were no forests or hills, although there were plenty of Eastern European immigrants, including me, was the last summer my friends and I took the Rapid Transit to mess around downtown and go to the movies. We went on Saturdays, rain or shine. It had been twenty-some years, before any of us were born, since the city-owned train system got rolling. Their motto was “This breakthrough is brought to you by the Cleveland Transit System.” We didn’t pay attention to mottos. We paid attention to the ten cents for the fare tucked in the coin pocket of our pants.

   The newspapers that summer were all about civil rights and Vietnam, two issues we hardly knew anything about and cared about even less. What we cared about was whatever was right in front of our eyes. The year was 1963. Beatlemania was on the way, although we didn’t know what it was, yet. Stevie Wonder released his first live album, “The 12 Year Old Genius,” and it shot to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. We were all twelve and thirteen years old. None of us were geniuses, not by a long shot, although some of us went on to be able to think more or less clearly.

   A vaccine for measles was approved that year. It didn’t do me any good since I had gotten the measles a few years earlier. Push-button telephones were new and a yellow smiley face popped up out of nowhere. All of us had voted for John F. Kennedy three years earlier in a mock election at St. George’s Catholic School. He was young, energetic, and handsome, while Richard Nixon was old, slow, and looked shifty with a five o’clock shadow. After JFK visited West Berlin in 1963, delivering his famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech, we went around calling each other Berliners and saluting Nazi-style. Our nuns didn’t like it. They told us to stop horsing around and pay attention.

   The Rapid Transit was a light rail system, what we called the wagon train. Tens of millions of riders rode it every year, especially on Saturdays, when it seemed like all of them were riding the Red Line at once to go shopping. We had to stand most of the time. Even when we got a seat, we had to soon give it up to pregnant women and old folks. Standing and swaying and holding on to a pole was carefree. We were excited about roaming around downtown and seeing a big-time movie.

   All we had known in our youth was the neighborhood Shaw-Hayden Theater, which we could walk to. They showed monster movies, cowboy movies, and rocket ship movies on weekend afternoons. We ignored the Fox Movietone News. Cartoons and a double bill cost fifty cents. Popcorn cost fifteen cents, but since we were chronically short on cash, we usually brought our own in brown paper bags hidden under our jackets. We stopped at Mary’s Sweet Shoppe once in a while and bought some penny candy.

   There was a school playground around the corner behind the local fire station with Saturday Sandbox contests, but we never went, being too old for sandboxes. There were dances at the Shaw Pool every Saturday night, but we never went to those either, being too young to care much about girls and their goings-on.

   Before the movie matinee at the Shaw-Hayden there was sometimes a drawing for prizes. One of my friends won two thousand sheets of paper one winter afternoon. He was beside himself hauling the reams home in the snow. He complained about frostbite, but he was a griper at heart, so we ignored him. The movie house was big, more than a thousand seats. We always went early so we could sit in the front row, stretching our legs out, kicking each other, and whooping it up when the screen lit up.

   Going downtown meant hoofing it from where we lived off St. Clair Ave. down E. 128th St. to Shaw Ave. to Hayden Ave. and following a no-name foot path to the Windermere station. We scrambled up the embankment, crossed the tracks at the rear of the station, and waited on the platform for the downtown bound train. Windermere was the end of the line for the Red Line.

   The Red Line ran at ground level, alongside railroad rights-of-way. There were no grade crossings with streets or highways. All of the stations along the way had high platforms. Unlike most transit lines, it was powered by an overhead electric catenary instead of a third rail. We knew things were going well when we heard the corona discharges of the high voltage.

   When we finally rolled into the underground station downtown we dusted ourselves off and ran upstairs, running through the Terminal Tower lobby and overflowing outside. We made tracks around Public Square until there was nothing left to see. We liked walking to the movies on one of the three main avenues, which were Prospect, Euclid, and Superior. Our parents warned us to stay away from Prospect Ave. where there were prostitutes and burlesque houses. It was because of their words of wisdom that we took Prospect Ave. most of the time, although we never talked to the prostitutes and never went into the bars and strip clubs. We weren’t interested in smut, and besides, we wouldn’t have been able to pay for the cheap thrills. 

   There was a cluster of theaters between E. 14th and E. 17th. Four of them faced Euclid Ave. while one faced E. 14th St. The three blocks were known as Playhouse Square, although none of us were aware of that. We didn’t pay any mind to corporate branding unless it  had something to do with the movies. All of us had our own money, cobbled together from allowances, paper routes, altar boy service at weddings, and some thievery from our siblings if push came to shove and our Saturday was threatened.

   The Ohio and State theaters were built by New York City plutocrat Marcus Loew in the early 1920s, followed by Charles Platt’s Hanna Theater. The Hanna was named for Mark Hanna, Cleveland’s wheeler-dealer senator in Washington. He once said there were two things important in politics. “The first is money and I can’t remember what the second one is.” The Pompeiian-style Allen Theater opened at about the same time. 

   The Palace Theater got up and running at the end of the next year, in the Keith Building, the tallest skyscraper in the city at the time. The biggest electric sign in the world was fabricated and turned on the night of the Palace Theater’s grand opening. It was billed as the “Showplace of the World.” The opening night entertainment was headlined by a famous mimic and featured dancing monkeys. Everybody said it was “the swankiest theater in the country.” 

   It wasn’t the swankiest anymore when we started going to Saturday matinees there, but we didn’t notice the wasting away. It had wide seats and a gigantic screen and that was all that mattered. The movies cost seventy five cents and we were happy to pay it. It was where we saw “Son of Flubber” and afterwards pretended to defy gravity like Fred MacMurray. We saw “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” and laughed until we cried. We loved stories about lost treasure. The movie was perpetual motion and shouting. Ethel Merman was the most likable loudmouth we ever heard. We saw it twice and it was just as good the second time around.

   We saw “Cleopatra” and agreed afterwards that we had all gotten sick and tired of Elizabeth Taylor. “Why is she even in the movie?” we wondered. Rex Harrison and Richard Burton were more like it. Thousands of Romans with swords, spears, and shields fighting each other were even more like it.

   We wanted to see “Psycho” but weren’t allowed. We were warned it was too intense and inappropriate for boys our age. We were offended, but when we heard what it was about, we asked each other what all the fuss was. It sounded like a sicko stabbing people, which was right up our alley. We had all seen plenty of horror movies, like “Carousel of Souls” and “Village of the Damned.”

   When “The Raven” was playing we saw it right away, even though none of us knew Edgar Allen Poe from the man in the moon. There’s a black bird. There’s a tapping at the door. The night is dark and the wind is howling. When the door is opened there’s nobody there. “Watch your back!” we shouted at the screen.

   The stars in that movie were Vincent Price, Boris Karloff, and Peter Lorre, even though Peter Lorre was a half-pint. He had a sinister voice, hooded eyes, and a dodgy way about him, which made up for his lack of height. Vincent Price was disappointing, despite being the tallest. He spoke and acted like a sissy, even though he was supposed to be a big bad magician. In the end the whole business was disappointing. It was more laughable than scary, and once we realized how it was going, we enjoyed it for the laughs. We took a chance and asked for our money back, claiming intense disappointment, but a grouch in a red jacket ushered us out and told us where to go.

   The movies were spellbinding to us. They were like a dreamland in waking life. It didn’t matter if the story was real or unreal. We were dazzled by the moving images and the music. It was disorienting stepping out of a dark auditorium after the motion picture magic into bright sunlight, like after a midday nap when daydreams had come fast and furious.

   We heard about “Seven Wonders of the World” on WERE-AM radio before we ever saw it on the marquee of the Palace Theater. We didn’t go see the movie, even though we saw the title on the marquee week after week and even though it was in Cinerama. We didn’t like being told what a wonder was, or wasn’t. We did our own wondering. We saw everything in a kind of Cinerama, anyway, since we always sat in the front row. A gigantic screen always made a bad movie twice as good.

   Our real life hometown was where we went to see the wonders of the world. We stared at the skyscrapers, counting the windows. We sprinted the front steps of City Hall and the County Courthouse. We wandered around in the industrial valley, what everybody called the Flats, light-headed and amazed, gazing up at the steel plants, looking down on the Cuyahoga River, watching the up and down bridges go up and down as freighters hauling ore made their way. Six years later the river caught on fire, flames and greasy black smoke turning day to night. We walked along the shoreline of Lake Erie where fishermen pulled walleye and crappie out of the polluted water that nobody was supposed to swim in, much less eat out of. 

   We snuck into Municipal Stadium, called the Mistake on the Lake, whenever we knew the fire-balling Sam McDowell was pitching. He was twenty years old and tall as a tree. Hardly anybody went to see the back of the pack team and we often had most of the eighty thousand seat stadium to ourselves, cheering on the Tribe. We sat wherever we wanted. When ushers asked to see our ticket stubs, we hemmed and hawed and changed sections. Whenever we ended up in the bleachers there were never any ushers to roust us. If it was hot, we pulled our shirts off. We lobbed popcorn to the pigeons and threw pebbles at them when they were finished with their freebies.

   The weekend before our summer vacation was going to be over and we had to go back to school we saw our last movie at the Ohio Theater. It was “Lord of the Flies.” It was about boys our age who were marooned on a desert island. We knew what a boy’s life was all about. We didn’t know anybody our age who ever did the crazy things they did. We didn’t like grown-ups making up stories about us. We appreciated great trash but not great art. All of us wrote it off as high-brow hokum. 

   Going home on the Red Line after the movie we saw a fight break out. Two men had been talking, then shouting, then shoving each other in the aisle, until one of them pulled a knife and stabbed the other one in the arm. Real blood gushed and stained his clothes. A woman screamed. Two men grabbed the knifer and held him down, while another man took his own tie off and tied a tourniquet on the upper arm of the stabbed man. When we got to the Windermere station there were police cars and an ambulance there. We watched, fascinated, until a policeman told us “there’s nothing to see here, break it up and go home.” We went home more breathless than any movie had ever made us.

   President Kennedy was shot and killed that fall, which put a pall over everything. A fire broke out in the Ohio Theater the next year and the other theaters were hit by vandalism. All of them closed between the summers of 1968 and 1969 except for the Hanna. We were juniors and seniors at St. Joseph’s High School by then and the only movies we went to those years were at the LaSalle Theater in our North Collinwood neighborhood. 

   By then, when we went to the movies, we were more interested in girls than whatever was playing, although we soon found out horror movies were the way to go. There was never any doubt about what to do with your hands when you were with your main squeeze and the scary parts burst onto the screen.

   “Don’t worry, I’m right here,” we all said. “Don’t give another thought to the monster mash.”

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. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.” His books are available on Amazon and Apple Books.

“Bomb City”

Cleveland, Ohio 1975. The John Scalish Crime Family and Danny Greene’s Irish Mob are at war. Car bombs are the weapon of choice. Two police detectives are assigned to find the bomb makers. It gets personal. Revenge is always personal.

Dogs Never Bite Me

Cracking the Crib

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By Ed Staskus

   When Steve de Luca worked at his brother’s east side used car lot, he came across stray dogs all the time. He would pick them up, bring them home, take them to the vet, get them repaired, feed them to bursting, and find them homes. Although he didn’t live or work on the east side anymore, whenever Steve or his wife Maggie Campbell saw a stray, they stopped the car and did something about it.

   After they moved to West Park they got a reputation for stealing dogs from people who mistreated them. It started after a lady mailman, who had been delivering mail to a nearby house for several years, and who always saw a dog in the back yard, noticed as the year was morphing into fall that the dog was getting skinny and skinnier. She found out the homeowner had gotten another dog and was starving the skinny dog in the back yard to death.

   When she complained to Animal Control they told her the dog wasn’t being visibly mistreated. She was distraught. One day she was telling a friend, somebody who knew Steve and Maggie, about the poor creature.

   “I know these crazy awesome people that will go steal that dog,” the friend said. “Just give me the address.”

   “Really?”

   “Yeah.”

   The mail lady gave the friend the address of the skinny starving dog. The friend passed it on to Steve and Maggie.

   It was Thanksgiving night. The plan was set, but they sat down at the table first. They had dinner, cracked a couple of beers, tuned in to a football game, set the alarm for 2:30 AM, and went to bed. When they woke up it was storming, lightning and thunder.

   “That’s a good sign,” Steve said. “In case the dog barks the thunder will hide the barking.”

   “What about the lightning flashes? Won’t they light us up?”

   Steve didn’t say anything. He pulled on a balaclava. Maggie whipped up a handkerchief as a mask.

   They filled their pockets with turkey leftovers. When they got to the dog’s house, it was pitch as a tar pit. They walked up to the fence and the dog came running. Steve unlatched the gate. The dog came to the gate and sniffed him up and down. They gave the dog some turkey. He was hungry and ate all they had. When he was done they went right to the car together. The dog was more than glad to go.

   The next morning they called the mail lady.

   “We have the dog,” Steve said.

   “What? You have her?”

   “Yeah, you want to pick her up?”

   The next day, when the mail lady walked up to their front door, she looked around in all directions like it was a drug deal. Many people think dogs are their property, but when dogs are mistreated, Maggie didn’t care about anybody’s philosophy of property. If you’re starving a dog, you should have it taken away from you. When you chain a dog up, and get a kick out of it, you need some mental health. You’re one step away from being slime. You’re one step closer to crime and punishment.

   A friend of theirs in Lakewood had one of their rescues. They kept in touch. She called them one day and said her neighbor two houses down was kicking and whipping his dog. “He leaves the dog in his stinking garage all day, too.” She was in tears. “I can’t take it anymore.”

   “Can’t you do anything?”

   “I’m afraid of him, but I can’t let the dog live like that.”

   “The minute he goes somewhere call us, we’ll get the dog,” Maggie said. “The guy won’t give us any lip, if he knows what’s good for him.”

  When she called them, Steve and Maggie walked right into the man’s garage. The service door wasn’t locked. They took the dog, who was in bad shape, because the man had been taking his belt and whipping the bejesus out of it. The man came out on his front porch with a fried chicken leg in his hand.

   “If you treat a dog like that, I can’t imagine how you treat your wife and kids,” Maggie said. 

   “Go back inside,” Steve said. He patted the pocket of his jacket. The man went back inside his house.

   Steve rescued a young pit bull bait dog who was being forced to fight after Maggie’s niece-in-law’s sister told them about it.

   “You stay home, just in case there’s trouble,” Steve told Maggie.

   It was seven o’clock in the morning. He walked up to the backyard, where there was no food, no water, and no shelter, and pulled the dog up by his collar over the fence. The next minute he was gone. That was that. 

   It’s not always that easy, although sometimes it can be. They were told about a Great Dane in the Hough neighborhood on the east side that was left alone chained to an outdoor post all day and night in all kinds of weather. When they got there, they found out the homeowner was on vacation. His neighbor approached them.

   “I’m here to take the dog,” Steve said.

   “What are you going to do with him?”

   “We’re going to find him a better home than this hole.”

   “OK by me.”

   Steve cut the dog’s chain with a bolt cutter and they took him away.

   Most of the dogs they rescued they found by word-of-mouth or on Facebook. Maggie had lots of dog rescuer friends on social media. Whenever they rescued a dog, they took it to a vet, and then took it to their house where it could play with their own dogs. Steve and Maggie worked hard to find them homes. 

   “Those dogs are put in our path for a reason. That reason is to help them. We find the money for it all by praying.”

   They had a vet who had been helping them for a long time. They took a dog to him that Steve found running in the street. The owners of the dog were chasing him. A chain was clanking on the concrete behind him and there was a padlock on his neck, a padlock that was so tight it was embedded in the skin. Steve scooped him up on the fly through the door of his moving car and sped away down the street. He gave the owners the finger.

   “This is the cruelest thing ever,” the vet said.

   Steve rescued dogs all the time. He found one when he saw some guys stopped at the side of the road and saw they were yelling and throwing rocks at a dog.

   “What the hell are you doing?”

   “Nuthin!” one of them yapped. “What’s it to you?”

   “I’m making it my business,” he said, walking straight at them, keeping his right hand in his pocket like he had something in it that meant business. They got in their car and took off. Steve pulled out the pack of Wrigley’s Doublemint he had in his pocket and unwrapped a stick.

   Another day he found a spitting mad mastiff in the bushes, won its trust, and the next thing anybody knew there was Steve with the dog eating out of his hand. He found a white and tan mutt the same way, on a street somewhere, escaping from who knows what. Maggie was making meatball soup when he brought the dog home. She gave some soup to the dog.

   “What are we going to do with her?” Steve asked.

   “We’re going to keep Gretel,” Maggie said.

   “Gretel?”

   “That’s her name,” she said.

   Gretel was the sweetest dog ever. It made their day the day she came to live in their home. They never found a Hansel for her, but kept her safe and sound until the day she went to the Rainbow Bridge.

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. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.” His books are available on Amazon and Apple Books.

“Bomb City”

Cleveland, Ohio 1975. The John Scalish Crime Family and Danny Greene’s Irish Mob are at war. Car bombs are the weapon of choice. Two police detectives are assigned to find the bomb makers. It gets personal. Revenge is always personal.

Monster Hunters

Legos on the Loose

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By Ed Staskus

   The day Maryann Shelly got her Lego Creative Brick Box was the day she got to work. Her Lego Man started off small, less than an inch tall, when she started building him. He didn’t stay small for long. Every day Maryann made him bigger. By the end of the month he was as big as her, which was just shy of five foot tall. Less than a month later he was eight feet tall and wouldn’t fit in the house anymore. She moved him outside behind the garage, under an eave so he wouldn’t get wet.

   One day she noticed her supply of Lego plates, tiles, and bricks, the basic building blocks, was running low. She scratched her head in bewilderment. She hadn’t been working on anything lately. Where were all the pieces going?

   She found out where they were going on a Saturday morning. It was a fine sunny day. She and Amelia, a friend of hers, had gone for a walk along the railroad tracks as far as Lane Rd., went back on S. Ridge Rd., and cut through Canterbury Crossing to return to their housing development.

   “Do you want to see my Lego Man?” Maryann asked Amelia.

   “That would be fun.”

    When they got to where Lego Man was supposed to be behind the garage, he wasn’t there.

   “What happened to him?”

   “He couldn’t have just walked away,” Amelia said.

   They heard a car horn on Park Rd., tires screeching, and then another car horn. They ran down Trotter Ln. to Park Rd. and saw Lego Man tramping past the Cedar Glen Condominiums. He was nineteen feet tall.

   How did he get so big, Maryann wondered, and in a flash realized he was who had raided all her Lego building blocks. He was building himself. What she didn’t realize was that Lego Man had tapped into AI and was teaching himself how to make his own way in the world. Might Makes Right is what he had learned so far. After he found that out he decided it was all he needed to know. He shut off the modem that connected him to the internet.

   When Lego Man crossed Welch Rd. and got to the railroad tracks the gates were closing. He ignored them, lumbering through like they were matchsticks. When the train got to the crossing it stopped, the engineer took one look at Lego Man, and immediately turned the train around.

   Lego Man saw 1922 Coffee and Brew on the corner and stopped there for a take-out coffee. He ordered three gallons with lots of sugar. He had a sweet tooth. When it came time to pay for his drink he realized he didn’t have any money. He stomped the building flat.

   A Dollar General store was across the street. He needed more Lego building blocks if he was going to get bigger. When he found out Dollar General didn’t have any he flattened that building, too. He was learning to love Might Makes Right.

   He tramped down Madison Ave., watching cars swerve in all directions. Sirens sounded in the distance. The klaxonsdidn’t bother him overmuch, it was just hurley burley, but he needed to get bigger, regardless. He thought five hundred feet tall would be about right. When he got that big all bets would be off.

   Nothing was going to stop him. He thought he might get a red tie so everyone would know who he was. They would see the red tie and know he was the Great Lego Man. He went back to Dollar General and pawed through the rubble. He found a clip-on red tie. He also found an orangey wig in the style of a comb-over. He didn’t know what a comb-over was, but he knew what he liked. He slapped it on top of his head. He took a selfie and checked himself out. He thought he looked great. He felt great. He was great, no doubt about it.

   He plodded down S. Ridge Rd. He had grown so fast his balance was sketchy. He definitely didn’t want to fall down. If he did he would break apart into a million Lego pieces and his greatness would be all gone. He tightened the knot of his tie. He had to get bigger. He had to get so big that he would never fall.

   Lego Man slowed down when he saw the blockade ahead of him. It was the National Guard. They had taken a break from chasing immigrants. They were chasing him. He looked to his right. There was a forest. He wasn’t big enough yet to walk over the trees. He looked to his left. He saw a small church. It was the Church of Jesus Christ. Maybe if he knelt  down in front of the church and pretended to be saying his prayers they would leave him alone. 

   He put his hands together and signaled to the National Guard that he was going to church, but they sprayed him with a water cannon, taking him by surprise and almost knocking him over. Lego Man didn’t like that. He lumbered over to the water cannon truck and flattened it. 

   The National Guard sent for reinforcements, including flame throwers. Lego Man didn’t like flame throwers. Although he was made of ABS, a durable plastic that had clutch power and up-to-date SEBS, plastic was still plastic. It and flame throwers didn’t mix. He would melt in a flash.

   He retreated to the rear of the Church of Jesus Christ, but since he didn’t believe in the Ten Commandments, or anything like that. he flattened the house of worship instead of stopping in and repenting for the warpath he was on. Repentance was for suckers, anyway.

   He thought he might lose himself in the thick twelve foot high cattails behind the Canterbury Crossing Condominiums if he crouched down. He was doing just that when he saw the one hundred and twenty foot cell tower at the far end of the cattail field. Why was the cell tower so much bigger than him? He stomped over to it, pushed it with all his might, and pushed it over. When he did the internet went out all over the neighborhood, including Oliver and Emma’s house, whose back patio faced the flattened Church of Jesus Christ.

   Oliver and his sister Emma were the Monster Hunters of Lake County. The Lego Man didn’t know anything about them. He was going to have to face the consequences of his know nothingness.

   “What happened?” their father asked coming down from his home office on the second floor. “Did you kids do something to the internet?”

   Oliver and Emma had been having lunch, hashing out their plans for the rest of the day.

   “It wasn’t us. Maybe something happened to the tower.”

   The cell tower had been erected three years earlier, and although it was an eyesore, it made the internet reliable. Oliver looked out the sliding glass back door.

   “There’s some kind of gigantic Lego thing out there mashing the tower,” he said.

   “Oh, that’s just great. I’m in the middle of a project. Ollie, can you go out there and make it stop. In the meantime I’ll have to hotspot off my phone.”

   “OK, dad.”

   Oliver and Emma went outside. Lego Man was still on the warpath, throwing galvanized steel pieces of the ex-tower all over the place.

   “Who does he think is going to clean that up?” Emma asked.

   “And what’s with the weird hair?” Oliver asked. “We can’t let him do whatever he wants, like wrecking things.”

   “What can we do?”

   “Oh, that’s going to be easy” Oliver said. “The bigger they are the harder they fall.”

   Emma followed her brother as they approached Lego Man, who was breathing heavy from his labors. He didn’t notice them. Oliver snuck behind him and pulled a single Lego brick from the back of his right heel. When he did Lego Man begam to wobble. He swayed back and forth. His right foot disintegrated, Lego bricks littering the ground. When his foot was completely gone he completely lost his balance. He fell over and fell apart, Lego bricks scattering everywhere. Lego Man was no more. It took the National Guard the rest of the day to pick up all the pieces.

   “Why do you think he was wearing a red tie?” Oliver asked as they walked back to their house.

   Emma was two years older than him. She was his right hand man. He knew she knew almost everything.

   “Red is supposed to stand for power and authority,” she said. “Maybe he thought he didn’t have enough of it, so he wore a red tie to make himself believe he was powerful. It’s the kind of thing grown-ups do.”

   “Oh, right,” Oliver said. “What about the hair?”

   “I’m in the dark about that. Anyway, I don’t know that I want to know, although I do know that was the color of Lex Luthor’s hair before he went bald.”

Illustration by Everett Schaser.

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. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.” His books are available on Amazon and Apple Books.

“Bomb City”

Cleveland, Ohio 1975. The John Scalish Crime Family and Danny Greene’s Irish Mob are at war. Car bombs are the weapon of choice. Two police detectives are assigned to find the bomb makers. It gets personal. Revenge is always personal.

Dogs Never Bite Me

Jumping the Traces

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By Ed Staskus

   Maggie Campbell’s father was a stockbroker, an investment advisor, and a vice president at Prudential Bache in the 1980s. He worked downtown with the other moneymakers. He believed in capitalism but didn’t let it go to his head. He was shrewd, keeping his greed engaged, although not always prudent. Sometimes he tripped over his sense of humor.

   Everybody called him the Margin King. His wife called him the King of Fools. When Fred and Alma got married, he was a gambling man, but Alma didn’t want him doing that after the wedding. She said it was time he became a family man. “The gambling stops now,” she declared, stamping her little feet.

   Fred Campbell decided to become a stockbroker. That way he could still gamble, except now it would be with other people’s money. He raked in a boatload of loot. He bought a house in Bay Village due west of Cleveland near Lake Erie. He wasn’t just one-sided about the almighty dollar, though. He told jokes all the time. He was a shaggy dog man. Getting a good laugh was like hitting the jackpot to him.

   He was a prankster as well as a jokester. He appeared on the “Hoolihan and Big Chuck” TV show now and then, doing skits with them. Hoolihan was Bob Wells. He was Hoolihan the Weatherman on the CBS affiliate. After Ghoulardi left Cleveland for Hollywood, Hoolihan still did the weather, but became the other half of the “Hoolihan and Big Chuck Show.” It was what replaced Ghoulardi’s “Shock Theater.” They showed low-budget science fiction and cheesy horror movies late at night and did comedy skits in between the commercials.

   The show always started with the Ray Charles song “Here We Go Again” and ended with the Peggy Lee song “Is That All There Is.” Hoolihan played a trumpet with a toilet plunger mute and Big Chuck played a small uke. That’s where Maggie’s dad came in. Fred couldn’t carry a tune, so was never invited to raise his voice in song. He brought his gorilla suit instead.

   The Soul Man, Lil’ John, and Mushmouth were on the show, too, more than Fred was. That’s how he met them. Once they met, they became fast friends in no time. Fred and Alma went to Hoolihan and Big Chuck’s house parties. They used to have Lil ‘John over to their house for spaghetti dinners. Lil’ John was a small man who could eat many plates of spaghetti. He was a hungry Hank.

   They did skits on the show like Ben Crazy, from the “Ben Casey” TV series, Parma Place, which was like “Peyton Place,” and the Kielbasa Kid, which was like a Polish cowboy misadventure. The skit Fred was most famous for was the “When You’re Hot You’re Hot” skit, which was based on a Jerry Reed song.

   “Well now me and Homer Jones and Big John Taley, had a big crap game goin’ back in the alley, and I kept rollin’ them sevens, winnin’ them pots,” was how the song went. “My luck was so good, I could do no wrong, I just kept on rollin’ and controllin’ them bones, and finally they just threw up their hands and said, when you hot, you hot.”

   They acted out the words to the song. Big Chuck rolled the dice. He had a Kirk Douglas face, if Kirk Douglas had been Polish. Fred was the sheriff. He had an honest face. The Hoolihan no-goods would be shooting craps on the street and Fred busts them. Later when they are in court the judge tells them he is going to throw the book at them, except when he throws the book, he hits Fred, who is the sheriff, in the head by mistake.

   “That hurt!” he shouts.

   “You’re out of order.” the judge declares, pounding his gavel like a madman. “Arrest that man immediately!”

   Shake and Bake Nights were when there were double features featuring first-class movies like “Earthquake” and “The Towering Inferno” back-to-back. That was when Alma got into the act. She was in a skit with Big Chuck. They are sitting on a park bench on a first date under a full moon and he turns into a werewolf. He reaches for her. She starts screaming and runs away, but falls face first into a cream pie. He shrugs and turns back into sheepish Chuck.

   Fred did most of his skits wearing a gorilla suit. But not all the skits were on the “Hoolihan and Big Chuck Show.” Some of the time it was unscripted. It was their own unreality show. He would wiggle into his suit and he and Big Chuck drove around Cleveland in a Buick Regal Sedan looking for hitchhikers. Big Chuck handled the wheel while Fred hid in the back seat. They would pick somebody up and after a few minutes Fred would suddenly pop up out of nowhere with a roar, reaching for their passenger’s neck.

   That always scared the hell out of the hitchhiker in the front seat. One of them passed out. Another one jumped out of the car while it was still moving. Maggie remembered being a youngster listening to their scarefest stories and thinking, “You guys are really strange.” It felt funny to say it about her own father.

   Sometimes they would go out at night and roof jump in Lakewood. The houses and apartments are close together, often separated only by a driveway. They would run across the roofs, swinging from the chimneys, jumping from one roof to the other. They whooped it up as householders in for the night wondered what the thumping above them was all about.

   As they got older and wiser the gang got more socially correct. They had mystery parties, which were parties on a bus on which they would have dinner and drinks with their friends, not knowing where they were going, and at the end of the night everyone would have to guess where they were. The winner got to be on the show. It was the Me Decade. Everybody wanted to be seen and heard.

   Maggie’s dad was a prankster even at home, which was quiet Bay Village. He played jokes on the neighbors on their street. He hired the Bay Village High School Marching Band to wake up one of their neighbors at five in the morning. They did it by marching up and down their driveway and playing a fight song. All the other neighbors for blocks around woke up, too. Some of them thought it was funny. Most of them didn’t. They called City Hall, even though City Hall wasn’t open for business that early in the morning.

   One of their neighbors had dogs like them and Maggie dog sat them when they were out for dinner or at a show. “Can you take care of our babies?” Mrs. Butler would ask. One day Fred took advantage of Maggie having the Butler family house keys. He snuck into their house and filled every glass, cup, vase, sink, whatever it was, with water and a single goldfish. When they got home there was a glut of goldfish waiting for them, even in the toilets.

    From then on it was buttheads on the loose at the Butler house every few months. Once when they were taking a walk on Huntington Beach after dinner, Fred and his friends got into their garage, picked up their car, and turned it sideways. The man of the house couldn’t go to work the next morning.  There wasn’t anything he could do. Everybody on the street thought he might have to tear the garage down.

   “I am going to sue that son-of-bitch,” he roared. He was a corporate lawyer. His funny bone was more along the lines of a crazy bone. He couldn’t prove who had done it and had to resort to fuming.

   Fred crept into their house late on a summer night wearing his gorilla suit and scared their kids so much they screamed their heads off and peed on the floor. He thought it was great laughs, giving them nightmares. That was fun to him. It didn’t matter what anybody thought or threatened. Whatever he thought of doing he did it. He was always pranking the poor Butlers. When they complained to the Bay Village Police Department, the cops just shrugged it off.

   Maggie and her sisters and little brother were never out of prankster range. Their father would crawl under their beds at night and wait silent as a snake until they got warm and cozy and dozed off. When he was good and ready, he reached up and around and suddenly grabbed their arms or legs, yanking.

   “Oh, yeah, while we were sleeping!” Maggie said. ”I found out your worst fears can come true at any minute. I’m a grown woman and I still can’t hang my feet out over the edge of my bed at night to this day.”

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. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.” His books are available on Amazon and Apple Books.

“Bomb City”

Cleveland, Ohio 1975. The John Scalish Crime Family and Danny Greene’s Irish Mob are at war. Car bombs are the weapon of choice. Two police detectives are assigned to find the bomb makers. It gets personal. Revenge is always personal.

Dogs Never Bite Me

Skinny On Down

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By Ed Staskus

   Maggie Campbell went on birth control when she was in her late 20s. She had to be on some kind of birth control because of her polycystic ovary syndrome. It was what helped. But as soon as she went on Norplant she broke out in stupendous acne. It was horrible.

   “Get that stuff out of your system,” her mother Alma told her. Her mother had been a nurse and knew her stuff. She said so all the time.

   When she did she put on eighty five pounds and it would not go away. She went on every diet known to man and beast. She would lose some weight, get down to a certain number, stop the starving, and then get it all back. It frustrated her and pissed her off, too.

   “I’m going to do gastric bypass,” she told Steve de Luca, her husband.

   “No, don’t do that, I love you the way you are,” he said. He was under no circumstances going to say she was fat.

   “I’m going to do it,” she told him, putting her foot down.

   Maggie went to St. Vincent’s Hospital near Cleveland State University the day she was forty-two years old, signing on the dotted line.

   “I highly recommend the full gastric,” her doctor said.

   “I’ll do whatever you recommend,” she said, although she asked him about the band.

   “If you do the band I go in and put the band in your stomach, but you don’t start losing weight right away. First you have to wait six months for it to heal, and then I’ve got to tighten it.”

   “Screw that,” she said. “Let’s do the one where I start losing pounds right away. I don’t want to wait.”

   She dropped eighty five pounds, which was exactly what she had put on. One day she went to Kamms Corners to see her chiropractor for an adjustment. Her back was being troublesome. His jaw dropped. “Where did the rest of you go?”

   “I know, I know, it’s great,” she said. “It’s just gone, where I don’t know.” She had no intention of ever finding it again.

   She had been a small person in a big body before the implant. Most of the women in her Bible study group had eating disorders and weight issues. She knew what it was like.

   “I was anorexic in high school. My brother Brad’s wife is thirty eight years old. She’s a double zero and she’s lost all her teeth because she’d made herself throw up so many times. All her teeth corroded, just eroded out, and she’s lost her esophagus. Then she had to get a double mastectomy because she found out she has the x marker. She’s teeny-weeny, but her mother is heavy, and her sister is almost five hundred pounds. Her sister’s husband used to be normal, but he has put on a lot of weight since they’ve been together. She’s one of the sweetest people I’ve ever met, but she stinks, like in stinky. She stinks to high heaven. How do you bathe when you’re five hundred pounds? She’s the sweetest person, but she knows.”

   Maggie wanted to have a hysterectomy because her ovaries were bad. “My female parts are diseased and horrible, but they won’t do it.”

   “You should keep all your parts, like you keep your teeth,” her doctor said.

   “Why would you want me to keep them?” she asked. “You pull out rotten teeth, don’t you?”

   But her doctor said she wouldn’t do it. She gave Maggie three options.

   “You can go back on the pill.”

   “I’m forty nine years old,” she said. “No.”

   “We could try an ablation.”

   “I’m not doing that. I probably have cystic ovarian disease. And I have anemic cyanosis. It’s only the inside of the uterus. I’m not doing that.”

   “All right, we can do an implant again.”

   “The hell with that. I’m never doing that again, gaining all that weight, so forget it.”

   The diet she followed was the blood type diet. It’s the eat right for your blood type diet. Anybody can get any disease, any ailment, any affliction. But there are some blood types that get some more than others. More of the O’s, like her, are going to get more blood clotting, rheumatoid arthritis, and have more sinus issues. A’s have heart issues, high cholesterol, heart disease, and all the things that go with that.

   Her chiropractor told her about the blood type diet. “If you’re willing to do the gastric, are you willing to go a step farther?” he asked.

   “I can try anything for a month,” she said.

   A few weeks in Maggie started to feel good. After two months she noticed she hadn’t had a sinus infection for two months, so she kept going. Steve went on the diet, too. He followed his specific blood type diet, which was awful because he was required to be a vegetarian. He hated it, but on weekends he splurged and ate whatever he wanted.

   After Maggie started following her diet she hardly ever got sinus headaches anymore. She used to get them all the time. In the last seven years, since she had been on the blood type diet, she got a sinus infection exactly three times. There’s something to it, although her husband’s aunt, who is their doctor, didn’t believe in it.

   “It’s funny,” Maggie told her, “how I used to see you all the time, but now I hardly ever see you.” Maggie shrugged. The doctor shrugged. “I suppose I won’t be working on Maggie’s farm much anymore.” Maggie understood. Her doctor was a Bob Dylan fan.

   “Steve has to be a vegetarian, but I love my meat. I’m a Christian and I believe animals are here for me to eat. I’m not about vegetarianism. At the same time, I think there’s so much in our food we don’t know about, like preservatives and chemicals. Why do they have to torture animals before killing them? They inject them with drugs and rip their feathers out while they’re still alive.” Treat them humanely before they go in my stomach is what she believed.

   Last Christmas they were out for a party with friends, driving around in a limo, all lit up like Christmas trees. Steve and she were hammered. When they got to their restaurant her hair salon boss’s husband went right to the bathroom and threw up.

   Steve ordered veal, since it was the weekend, and since she had never had veal, she wanted to try it, so she did. She stuck a piece in her mouth, but she had a thing with texture. It was just not steak texture. She liked steaks better than anything. She would kill the cow herself if she had to. She didn’t like the veal. Steve must have seen the look on her face, because when she spit it out, he picked it up and popped it into his mouth.

   Everybody at the table laughed. Share and share alike. All you need is love, but a little veal now and then doesn’t hurt.

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. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.” His books are available on Amazon and Apple Books.

“Bomb City”

Cleveland, Ohio 1975. The John Scalish Crime Family and Danny Greene’s Irish Mob are at war. Car bombs are the weapon of choice. Two police detectives are assigned to find the bomb makers. It gets personal. Revenge is always personal.