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.
Home Movies

Squaring Off at Maxim’s

Leave a comment

By Ed Staskus

   The first time I went to Maxim’s Deli was in 1964, the year my parents bought a house in the North Collinwood neighborhood of Cleveland on a street southeast of E. 185th St. The deli had opened in 1949. It was on the corner of Cornwall Rd. and E. 185th St. It was opened by Emanuel “Manny” Berardinelli and his brother Giuseppe “Joey” Berardinelli. The next year, 1950, Joey Maxim, the name Giuseppe went by in the boxing ring, won the light heavyweight championship of the world by beating Freddie Mills for the title.  

   He knocked him out in the 10th round. After the fight three of his adversary’s teeth were discovered stuck in his left glove. Joey Maxim had a left jab to die for. Freddie Mills never fought again after that. Boxing goes back to ancient Egypt. The word pugilism comes from the Greek word “pyx” which means “with clenched fist.” Boxing has since been called the “Sweet Science.”

   Lennox Lewis, one of the best heavyweight boxers ever, said, “In boxing, you create a strategy to beat each new opponent. It’s just like chess.” Boxing may be tactical and calculating, but it always comes down to knocking somebody’s teeth out  when everything is on the line.

   Joey Maxim ran the streets of North Collinwood when training. He got the idea to open a baked goods and pizza shop during one of his runs. The start-up money came from his boxing wins, of which there were plenty. During his career he won 82 fights while losing only 29.  By the time he stopped boxing in 1958 the walls of the delicatessen were chock full of his memorabilia.

   At first I went to Maxim’s Deli with my mother. It was just down the end of our street. She bought bread there. I carried it home. It was better than anything from the supermarket and better than the Eastern European black bread we often ate. The aroma in the delicatessen was pleasing, even though I wasn’t overly interested in the bread. What I was interested in was the pizza. It was made in an old-fashioned stone oven. They made their own secret sauce. They sold their pizza by the pie and by the slice. The crust was slightly crispy and just right chewy. I started stopping into the deli by myself and getting it by the slice whenever I had the means.   

   Pizza to me was like the entire food pyramid in one bite. I only ever got one slice but it was plenty. The slices at Maxim’s Deli were large. When I saw the boxes whole pies came in I wondered why round pizzas were packaged in square boxes. On top of that, before they were put in the boxes they were sliced into triangles. I thought there must be some kind of higher math in play.

   Joey Maxim was a big boy growing up. He started boxing at the age of 12. He won the Cleveland Plain Dealer Golden Gloves Tournament, the Chicago Tribune Tournament of Champions, and the 1940 AAU National Tournament in Boston. He was 17 years old when he won the AAU National Tournament in his weight class. He turned pro in January 1941 when he was 18 years old. He took the name Joey Maxim after his manager said he threw punches faster than a Maxim gun. The Maxim gun is a recoil-operated machine gun. It was the first fully automatic machine gun in the world. Joey Maxim won his first professional fight in no time, pummeling his opponent. Then World War Two happened. He served as a military policeman in the U. S. Army, occasionally fighting in exhibition matches to entertain the troops.

   Live professional boxing was a major spectator sport in Cleveland in the 1950s and 1960s.  Matches at the Cleveland Arena drew upwards of 10, 000 fans. I was no slouch at roughhousing but not fighting with my fists, although I was good at shadow boxing. The shadows always lost. I never took lessons. Most of the gyms, like the Old Angle, were on the near west side, too far to go. Our father didn’t let us watch the fights on TV. He frowned on boxing. He said it was a cruel sport.

   “Two young men beating the sense out of each other for a dollar,” he said. He was an accountant. He needed his mind in good working order to understand dollars and cents. “When you’ve got your dollar but your brain doesn’t work anymore, that is not good.”

   Everybody in the neighborhood knew all about Joey Maxin although nobody ever saw him. He was always somewhere else. After his boxing career was over and done with he worked for a casino in the Bahamas and later appeared in a few small parts in the movies. In 1963 he appeared in “Goldilocks and the Three Bares.” The movie was billed as the “first nudist musical.” He played himself playing a nightclub owner. He was featured on the movie poster. “It’s me, Joey Maxim, the former world’s light heavyweight champion! I’m one of the stars! My first screen appearance!” He tried his hand at stand-up comedy  but didn’t kill on stage and gave it up. 

   He moved to Las Vegas and worked for several casinos like the Frontier and the Ambassador as a greeter. He did it for twenty years before retiring. He was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 1994. He had beaten fighters like Jersey Joe Walcott, Floyd Patterson, and Sugar Ray Robinson. He fought Sugar Ray Robinson at sold-out Yankee Stadium in New York City in 1952. The bout was the first to be shown on closed circuit television in movie theaters.

   Sugar Ray Robinson was the best fighter of all time the day before the fight. The next day he was the second best fighter of all time, at least for one day. He was the middleweight champion, but moved up a classification to light heavyweight to fight Joey Maxim. He gained some weight but still gave up almost 20 pounds to his opponent.

   A monsoon soaked New York City for two days before the fight. The day of the championship bout it was very humid and the temperature reached 105 degrees. Some spectators in the stands passed out from the heat. Bright tungsten lights lit up the ring for the TV cameras. Joey Maxim lost 10 pounds during the fight. Sugar Ray Robinson lost 16 pounds. The referee collapsed hallway through from heat exhaustion and had to be replaced. Doc Kearns, Jack Dempsey’s ex-manager, was in Joey Maxim’s corner, but Sugar Ray Robinson was ahead on the judges’ scorecards going into the 13th  round. By the end of the round he was worn out. His legs were like rubber. He unleashed a wild haymaker, came up with nothing but air, and off balance fell flat on his face. He staggered back to his corner. He couldn’t come out for the 14th  round. The contest in New York City was the only one he never finished.

   After the victory Joey Maxim capitalized on his momentum, fighting coast to coast, and in Italy, England, and Germany, as well. He won more than he lost. But when he lost his last six fights in a row he hung it up. He knew he was washed up.

   His brother Manny was the day-to-day man at Maxim’s Deli. He was always behind the counter. He seemed to know everybody’s names. He even knew mine. His son Gene started working there on weekends from when he was 13 years old. After he finished high school he decided to go full time and joined his father in the business. Manny’s daughter Loretta worked at the deli, too. After she got married and had children, she continued to work there part-time. 

   After I started my four years of higher education at St. Joseph’s High School, within walking distance of where we lived, I stopped at Maxim’s Deli for slices of pizza less and less often. It wasn’t out of the way but I had to get home after school, do whatever chores my parents told me to do, eat dinner, do my homework, and get ready for the next day. One day, standing in the hallway after my Monday through Friday religion class, I happened to mention to my teacher that I liked the pizza at Maxim’s Deli. Our teachers were Marianists, members of the Society of Mary. They were sober and serious men. They told us they were caretakers of our souls and we were to never forget it.

   My teacher, like all of the Marianist brothers, was dressed in black from tip to toe. He was a tall man with a square jaw and thick wavy hair. He looked down at me and said, “Pizza is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.” 

   One day when I was a sophomore I heard two seniors were going to fight after school in the alley behind Maxim’s Deli. There was a gravel and dirt parking lot there. The Marianists frowned on fights anywhere on school grounds. It was grounds for expulsion, something everybody knew they would never be able to explain to their parents.

   “You did what?” is what everybody knew would be the beginning of the beat-down.

   When I got to the alley behind Maxim’s Deli there were twenty-or-so of us from school and the two adversaries. I almost went home when I got a look at them. They were jocks. I thought they were going to be greasers. The student body at Joseph’s High School was made up of jocks, greasers, true believers, the clean-cut, and honor students. Everybody stuck to their own for the most part, especially the honor students, who knew they were going to rule the world sooner or later. Dennis Eckart got a law degree and served five terms in Congress. John Skardis was on the same career path until he joined the SDS, got arrested for revolutionary terrorism, skipped bail and disappeared, but was finally apprehended and sent to a dungeon somewhere. Nobody ever heard of him after that.

   Jocks knew all about organized violence on the football field, which meant everything at our school, but nothing about fist fights on a gravel and dirt field. Greasers, on the other hand, were best avoided unless you were one of them. They toned down their slicked back hair when they were in school, but outside of school they wore leather jackets and carried sharpened church keys, which were sharpened punch can openers. Their leather jackets weren’t just for show. The leather buffered punches.

   The fighting was hapless, which was one swing and a miss after another. They finally grabbed each other, grappling while going around in circles, and fell down in the dust, where they wrestled furiously for a few minutes. It didn’t amount to anything. Manny Berardinelli came out the back door of the deli with a green-colored bag of garbage and told us to beat it, or else. All of us left, including the two jocks making a mockery of the “Sweet Science.”

   Joey Maxim had a heart attack in 1999 while visiting his mother in Euclid, not far from where he grew up. He suffered a major stroke two years later and died in West Palm Beach. He is buried in the Memorial Gardens in Hollywood, Florida.

   We moved out of North Collinwood after I graduated from high school. Maxim’s Deli moved fifteen miles east to Mentor in 2004. Gene Berardinelli and his wife Kathy took over the business after the relocation. Manny continued to work at the deli, retiring in 2014 at the age of 93. Every so often I thought about taking a drive there and having s slice of pizza but never did. I knew without thinking about it that it wouldn’t be the same. The watermill wasn’t going to be grinding any more wheat for pizza dough with flow water that was long gone.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street at 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.”

“Bomb City” by Ed Staskus

“A police procedural when the Rust Belt was a mean street.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F1LM1WF9/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2MYAQAOZIC2U9&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.hTm7BGbiQbSe5ZapFwYPPfcwOpTe-Vdg6VLE4aGyTyk.Z0R-VNBWWEcvKcNaO9LdCOUnNIOOXgvYkRS_FXiXuHk&dib_tag=se&keywords=bomb+city+ed+status&qid=1742136726&sprefix=bomb+city+ed+staskus%2Caps%2C84&sr=8-1

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. Nothing goes according to plan.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Home Movies

Animal Crackers

Leave a comment

By Ed Staskus

   Dave Bloomquist ran the show at the Plaza Apartments, trying to make it work on the near east side, on the fringe of downtown. The apartment building we called the house was on Prospect Ave., a $.25 fare on a rundown Cleveland Transportation System bus about five minutes from Public Square. The ghetto was uptown and all around us. Liquor, deadbeats, hookers, old cars, and  boarded-up windows were the order of the day. The house, however, was its own enclave.

   Dave was from Sandusky. “The town, which is sluggish and uninteresting, is something like an English watering-place out of season,” Charles Dickens wrote after visiting it. A hundred years later it was known for Cedar Point, an amusement park on a peninsula jutting out into Lake Erie. After high school Dave moved to Cleveland to study visual and fine arts at Cleveland State University.

   “Art held a natural attraction for me, and it was something I wanted to pursue,” he said. “My dad was an electrician. II helped him run wires and other simple tasks. I also worked during college, renovations, painting, things like that. After graduation, my business partner and I scraped together a down payment on the 48-unit Victorian-style Plaza. We decided to restore it ourselves.”

   Dave was always in in and around the building. Whenever anything went wrong, it didn’t take long to find him. He was the owner, superintendent, and maintenance man. If he wasn’t nearby, his ex-wife-to- be, Annie, tall and slim, her hair done up in braids, was right there cooking, cleaning, and taking care of their baby boy. Built in 1901 for middle-class residents, something was always making trouble at the Plaza.

   “We learned to sweat pipe, patch the roof, and fix windows,” Dave said. “We had to operate with just rent money. We couldn’t afford to call on anyone for help.”

   Back in the day Upper Prospect was the second most prestigious place to live in Cleveland, next to Millionaire’s Row on Euclid Ave. Prospect Ave. and Euclid Ave. were where to be, the smoking rooms of the city’s economic and social elite. Most of the homes on Prospect Ave. were brick two-story single-family houses in the Italianate style. The street was lined with elm trees.

   By the time I moved onto Prospect Ave., as the 1960s leaked into the 1970s, all the rich folks were long gone, and Dutch elm disease had killed most of the trees. It was killing most of the elms in all but two states east of the Missouri River. Those that hadn’t died were being sprayed with DDT or removed. The entry point for the bug was Northeast Ohio in 1929, on a train bringing in a shipment of elm veneer logs from France. The train stopped south of Cleveland to load up on coal and water. Not long afterwards elm trees along the railroad tracks started to die. The elm bark beetle doesn’t kill the tree, but the fungus it carries is deadly.

   There were rowhouses scattered among the single-family homes, which included the Prospect Ave. Rowhouses that Dave was throwing his eye on. He had more than enough work on his hands, but he was a no slouch go-getter. Preservation and restoration efforts on Upper Prospect were beginning to pick up steam.

   Before moving in I walked to Mecca Keys on Rockwell Ave. off East 9th St. and had a key for my apartment made. The Plaza was home to students, secretaries, both beatniks and hippies, machinists, artists, bikers, clerks, musicians, court reporters, dogsbody men, anarchists, and writers, some shaking and baking, others simply doing their best to keep the wolf away from the door. 

   “We were urban pioneers before the term was coined,” said Scott Krauss, a drummer for the art-rock band Pere Ubu. “Like the Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead had their band houses, we had the Plaza.”

   “There were scores of wonderful community dinners, insipid and treacherous burglars,” Dave said years later when it was all over. “Innocence was lost. There were raucous outrageous parties. Families were formed and raised and there were tragic early deaths of close friends. But music, art, and life were in joyful abundance all the time.”

   There was plenty of old-fashioned seediness, too. “I remember coming home at four in the morning and there would still be people in the courtyard drinking beer and playing music,” said Larry Collins. “We would watch the hookers and their customers play hide-and-seek with the undercover vice cops.”

   One of the first friends I made there was Virginia Sustarsic. I had seen her around Dixon Hall up the street when I lived there before I moved to the Plaza. She was close to John McGraw, a trim bohemian who lived alone on the third floor, read obscure European poets, drank Jack Daniels from the bottle, and drove a 1950s windowless Chevy panel truck. It was a black panel truck.

   Virginia had interned at the Cleveland Press, worked on Cleveland State University’s’s student newspaper, and wrote for the school’s poetry magazine. Since she was settled in at the Plaza, was friendly, and worked for herself, she made friends easily, and I subsequently made friends at the Plaza by hanging around with her.

   She knew all about art. I didn’t know much about anything. When she showed me a reproduction of a Jackson Pollack painting, I thought, what a mess. When she showed me a picture of an American flag by Jasper Johns, I found a ragged old flag and thumbtacked it to the wall at the head of my bed. I thought I was being au courant.

   Virginia made candles, incense, and roach clips for a head shop on the near west side. The owner of the shop, Jamie, was a little older than us. He wore fake glasses to disguise a pear-shaped nose. He wore a red checked bandana and liked to go barefoot. He pulled up in a mid-60s VW T2 bus, Virginia delivered the goods, he would say he had a great idea for going someplace fun, as many people as could fit would pile into the Splittie, and he would drive to a park, a beach, or a grassy knoll somewhere.  

   Jamie always played The Who’s “Magic Bus” at least once every trip, there and back. “Thank you, driver, for getting me here, too much, Magic Bus, now I’ve got my Magic Bus.” The speakers were tinny, but the volume made up for it.

   We went to see “Woodstock” the movie at a drive-in, since none of us had gone to the music festival. Virginia’s roach clips came in handy. The Splittie’s back and middle seats could be pulled out. It was useful at drive-ins, backing the bus in to face the screen, some of us in the seats on the ground, others in the open rear of the bus, and Jamie with his gal on top of the VW, an umbrella at the ready. 

   Nobody wanted to be sitting behind Mike Cassidy, who was skinny enough, but had a massive head of long electrified red hair. Virginia got him a shower cap to keep his mop top under control, but he refused to wear it.

   Virginia was hooked on photography and showed me the ropes, letting me use her camera. When a photography contest was announced at Cleveland State University, she entered a picture she had taken in San Francisco. I entered a picture of Mr. Flood.

   Bob Flood lived on the second floor, like me. None of us knew what he did, exactly, although he wore a hat suggesting he was a locomotive engineer. Virginia thought he was a professor of some kind. Everybody called him Mr. Flood. Nobody knew why. He was a lanky careful man, sported a shaggy looking beard, was divorced, but had visitation rights to his two children, who came and played in his apartment on weekends.

   My picture was a portrait and Virginia’s a full-scale shot of two homeless men in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, passing a bottle of booze between them. The trees in the background disappeared into a triangle. After I won the blue ribbon, Virginia went to the Art Department and talked to one of the judges. She told him she had been trying to conjure the Pointillism of Georges Seurat.

   “Well,” he said. “The portrait and your picture were our top picks. But yours was kind of grainy.”

   “That was the whole point,” she groused. 

   Virginia’s best friend at the Plaza was Diane Straub. Diane had a straight job. She was a secretary downtown. She got up every morning, got on the bus, went to work, and came back at night. Monday through Friday she took care of her apartment and her cats. On weekends she got loose. She got dressed up as Bogie’s old lady.

   Bogie was Diane’s live-in boyfriend. He was fit and strong and always wore black, tip to toe. He had a Harley Davidson he kept in the back lot. Nobody ever tried to steal it, because everybody knew that would be a big mistake.

   He was one of the Animals, although he and the other Animals had been forced to go freelance. They used to have a clubhouse, its walls pockmarked with bullet holes, on Euclid Ave. in Willoughby, until the day the Willoughby police raided it. “The police couldn’t get anything on us, so they hot-wired the landlord to force us out,” one of the Animals, Gaby, told the Cleveland Press, which was the afternoon newspaper. “We never did anything worse than use the clubhouse walls for target practice.”

   Gaby knew full well there was more to the story. His biker clubmate Don Griswold had been arrested the day before for being involved in a shooting with members of Cleveland’s Hells Angels that left two dead. “The Angels were going to take care of me if the cops didn’t do it first,” he said. “Misery loves company.”

   The spring before my first full summer at the Plaza, Cleveland’s Breed and the Violators got into it at a motorcycle show at the Polish Women’s Hall southeast of the Flats. The 10‐minute riot with fists, clubs, knives, and chains left 5 men dead, 20 Injured, and 84 arrested. The dead were buried, the injured rushed to hospitals, and the arrested hauled away to the Central Police Station on Payne Ave. The Black Panthers were always demonstrating outside the front doors, but they had to make way that day. Armed guards were posted in the hallways of the station as a precaution. When the injured bikers recovered, they were arrested at the hospital’s exit door.

   Art Zaccone, headman of the Chosen Few, said the fight broke out because of trouble between the two groups going back to a rumble in Philadelphia two years earlier. The biker gangs didn’t ride on magic busses. They rode hogs. They made their own black magic. They had long memories and nursed never forgotten or forgiven grievances.

   After Bogie moved out, Diane took up with Igor, a math wizard. He was tall, had long wiry hair, and played air guitar. Even though he was egg-headed about numbers, he often looked like he was only half there. He was vivid but baffling.

   “We all thought he was tripping a lot,” Virginia said.

   I lived in a back apartment on the second floor, although I avoided the back stairs and porches. They were falling apart in their old age. Virginia lived in a courtyard-facing apartment on the same floor and an older Italian couple, Angeline and Charlie Beale, lived in the front. They always had their apartment door open. Charlie was short and stout, a retired mailman. He read newspapers and magazines all day long. Angie was short and stout, too. She stayed in the kitchen in a black slip cooking and drinking coffee from a Stone Age espresso machine. 

   They had an orange and green parrot. Whenever Angie spied Virginia walking by, she called out, “Oh, honey, come in, let me see if I can get him to talk to you.” She would coo and try to convince the bird to talk. He never did, even when she poked him with a stick. When she did, he whistled and squawked, sounding offended.

   “How long have you had that parrot?” Virginia asked, thinking they were still training him.

   “Oh, we’ve had him for sixteen years, honey.”

   Angie and Charlie went shopping for foodstuffs twice a week. They walked down Prospect Ave. to the Central Market. “They always started out together, but ended up a block or more apart,” Dave said. They both carried handmade cotton shopping bags, one in each hand.

   The Central Market was on E. 4th St., nearly two miles away by foot. The only people who went there were people who couldn’t get to the West Side Market. It was grimy and the roof leaked. “Some panels are out, and when it rains, we got to put plastic tarp down, which looks like hell,” said produce stall owner Tony LoSchiavo.

   “She always ended up walking twenty feet behind him,” Virginia said. “A couple of hours later, same thing, both of them their two bags full, he would be walking twenty feet ahead of her as they came back to the Plaza.”

   He waited at the front door, holding it open for her. She trudged up, he followed her, and the parrot every time said, “Welcome back!” when they stepped into their apartment. Angie returned with vegetables like asparagus and nuts like filberts for the thick billed brightly colored bird.

    Most of the tenants at the Plaza were on good terms with one another. Many of us were single and sought out company up and down the floors and down the hallways, especially in January and February when snow piled up unshovelled. We swung by unannounced and chewed the fat.

   “Friends would just drop in,” Virginia said. ”All the time.”

   One Siberian Sunday afternoon Mr. Flood’s children were visiting and went exploring in the basement. They found a Flexible Flyer. Their father bundled them up and carried the sled outside. When they got tired of pushing each other back and forth in the parking lot, they found a shovel and scooped snow onto the back stairs as far up as the first landing. They shoveled enough snow on the stairs to make a ramp and spent the rest of the day running across the landing, throwing themselves on the sled, racing down the ramp, and zooming across the icy lot.

   Mr. Flood and I watched them from the second-floor landing. “They’re up to snow good,” he said when they hit bottom, bumped upwards, and got some air under their sled. Mr. Flood was the kind of man who talked low, talked slow, and didn’t say too much. He wasn’t, for all that, above cracking a joke.

    “They’re on their own magic carpet ride,” I said.

   “Animal crackers!” the children whooped back at their father, living it up without a care in the world.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street at 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.”

“Bomb City” by Ed Staskus

“A police procedural when the Rust Belt was a mean street.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F1LM1WF9/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2MYAQAOZIC2U9&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.hTm7BGbiQbSe5ZapFwYPPfcwOpTe-Vdg6VLE4aGyTyk.Z0R-VNBWWEcvKcNaO9LdCOUnNIOOXgvYkRS_FXiXuHk&dib_tag=se&keywords=bomb+city+ed+status&qid=1742136726&sprefix=bomb+city+ed+staskus%2Caps%2C84&sr=8-1

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. Nothing goes according to plan.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Bomb City

Elevator to the Lake

Leave a comment

   By Ed Staskus

   Stanley Gwozdz had never been higher off the ground than three stories up. His dentist’s office was on the third story of a four story building. He had been grinding his teeth while sleeping. His jaw had started to hurt from the grinding. His father took him to the dentist’s office where they made a moth guard he had to wear at night. He didn’t like it, but his father was a policeman. He did what his father told him to do.

   “The mouth guard will get the job done,” the dentist said. “It will take a while, but he’ll stop grinding his teeth slowly but surely.”

   “Good,” Frank, his father, said.

   “One last thing.”

   “What’s that?” 

   “Is there anything going on in his life that the boy might be worried about, that might be stressing him?”

   “No,” Frank said. He didn’t say anything about ex-wife-to-be Sandra. He couldn’t do anything about her being gone. He could have found her, if it came to it, but he didn’t want to, even though he wanted to. Some women are good at lying and cheating. Sandra was one of those women. Whatever you can get away with. She had been a bad idea gone wrong. He needed to dump the memory of her.

   “That’s good,” the dentist said.

   Frank had taken the day off from police work and housework and taken Stanley on an outing. They were high off the ground inside the Terminal Tower. They were forty two stories high on the Observation Deck. They had taken elevators to get there. Stanley had never been on an elevator. He and his father always walked up the stairs to their dentist’s office.

   “Why do we have to go inside that box?” Stanley asked, looking inside the elevator after the door slid open. He was very suspicious. He stood on the lip of the threshold and peered into the corners of the box.

   “Because it will take us to the top.”

   “Why can’t we walk?”

   “It would be like walking upstairs twenty times as far as the dentist’s.”

   “I could do it.”

   “Maybe next time.”

   They took the elevator to the thirty second floor, exited to the left, and followed signs to the next bank of elevators. They rode up to the forty second floor.

   The Terminal Tower was on Public Square, catty-corner to the Soldier’s and Sailor’s Monument. Work on it started in the early 1920s. Concrete and steel supports for the building reached two hundred feet underground. It was finished in 1927 and opened in 1928. It was dedicated in 1930, lit up with spotlights and a strobe light at the top. Tens of thousands of people on Public Square cheered and tossed their hats in the air. When it opened its fifty two stories made it the second-tallest building in the world. 

   The Observation Deck was enclosed. There were windows on all four sides. They had a birds-eye view of Lake Erie, Municipal Stadium, the Flats and the Cuyahoga River, and the city spread out as far as they could see. It was a clear sunny day. They could see for miles.

   “I didn’t know the lake was so big,” Stanley said.

   “Lake Erie is one of the biggest lakes in the world. It’s part of the Great Lakes. There are five of them.”

   “Can we go see all of them?”

   “Not today, but someday. A friend of mine and I drove around them one summer, long ago. Maybe you and I can do that circle tour someday.”

   “Can we do it tomorrow?”

   “Not tomorrow, but soon, when you’re a little bit older.”

   “I’m older now.”

   “I know, but kindergarten is coming up.” Stanley wasn’t quite five  years old, but he knew how to sit and listen, follow simple rules, and play cooperatively. He could use a crayon and scissors. He knew what circles and squares were and could copy them.

   “I don’t want to go to school.”

   “It’s a long trip around the lakes. Anyway, how do you like living with Aunt Joannie?”

   “I love Aunt Joannie. We have fun. Mommy isn’t always fun.”

   “What do you mean?”

   “She’s mad at me a lot. I don’t know why, she just is. Am I bad boy?”

   “No, Stanley, you’re a good boy. Mommy is wrong to be mad at you.”

   “Why is she so mad all the time?”

   “Maybe she thinks she’s not happy,” Frank said.

   “Is she coming home soon?”

   “I’m sure she is, but hey, enough about that. How about we go to the races.”

   Frank had parked in a lot across Superior Ave. in the Warehouse District. Many of the old buildings there had been torn down one by one since the 1960s. It was a change called urban renewal. There were parking lots everywhere but not many places to go to anymore. Frank crossed the Cuyahoga River on the Shoreway and drove south on W. 25 St. He turned right when he got to Denison Ave. and found the Soap Box Derby track just past the Riverside Cemetery. The track was off John Nagy Blvd. beside the Metroparks Brookside Reservation.

   The first unofficial races were in Dayton, Ohio in 1933. Tens of thousands of spectators turned out to watch hundreds of cars built of orange crates, sheet tin, and baby buggy wheels. None of them were built of soap boxes. The first official winner in 1934 drove a car built of laminated wood taken from a saloon bar. The cars were unpowered and relied only on gravity to race downhill. The rules amounted to nine sentences. Anything went, so long as the car was built by the boy who was going to race it. 

    The All-American Soap Box Derby World Championships were held in Akron. In 1946 Gilbert Klecan from California was nicknamed “The Graphite Kid” because he smeared his face and car with graphite to cut down on wind resistance. He took the World Championship hands down. In 1952 Joey Lunn from Georgia crashed his car crossing the finish line while winning his first heat. Volunteers repaired the car with tape, strips of tin, and the remains of a lunch box. He went on to win the World Championship, his car shedding parts of itself in every heat leading to his final victory.

   Frank and Stanley found a spot to sit on a grassy knoll. They could see the starting line and had a good view of all of the nine hundred foot track. They watched one heat after another in the bracket-style elimination.

   “How fast are they going?” Stanley asked.

   Frank looked across the track at the traffic on John Nagy Blvd. He knew the traffic was doing thirty to forty miles an hour. He looked at two racers speeding soundlessly down the track.

   “I’m guessing twenty five miles an hour at least, probably more.”

   “Is that fast?”

   “That’s plenty fast on an empty gas tank.”

   “When can I start racing?” 

   “I think you have to be at least seven or eight years old, so in a few years. In the meantime we could start building a car.”

   “I want one just like that,” Stanley said, pointing to a glossy green car shaped like a torpedo.

   “Yeah, but how about that one?” Frank said, pointing to a yellow car that looked like a No. 2 pencil.

   “It’s OK, but the green one is way better.”

   “Then we’ll build one just like that,” Frank said, wondering how many weekends it was going to take. He didn’t know some parents spent more than a thousand hours helping their children build a no-engine car.

   “Look, there’s a girl racing one of the cars.”

   When Frank had read the newspaper about the upcoming 1975 heats in Cleveland he had read that the rules had changed and girls were being allowed to race.

   “She’s got a lot to learn,” Frank said to himself watching the girl behind the steering wheel. What he didn’t know was that eleven year old Karen Snead from Pennsylvania was going to win the World Championship that year in a photo finish, driving with a broken left arm set in a cast.

   They watched eight or nine heats before Stanley said, “I’m hungry. Can we get a hot dog?”

   “Sure son, let’s go find a hot dog.”

   They walked past the staging area where two boys were getting ready for their race. One of them looked like he was about ten years old and the other one about thirteen years old. 

   “It looks easy,” the older boy said to the younger boy, “but one small thing can lose a race, like hitting a bump and wandering off-line. You want your helmet and eyes to be just peeping over the cockpit to reduce drag. The wheel is hard to hold just right. If you jerk it you’re in trouble. It can mean the race.”

   The younger boy looked like he knew he didn’t stand a chance.

   Frank drove north on W. 25 St., circled onto the Shoreway, and went past downtown to Edgewater Park. He parked outside the wastewater treatment plant. Father and son walked past the yacht club, past the pier, and to a grassy field beside the beach where there were funnel cake and hot dog carts.

   A weathered plywood sign nailed to 4 X 4 posts said “IN THE SPIRIT OF….CLEVELAND NOW, EDGEWATER BEACH, SAFE SWIMMING” and was signed Carl B. Stokes, Mayor, It was four years out of date. Carl B. Stokes had been replaced by Ralph Perk as Cleveland’s mayor in 1971. There were many people on the beach. Hardly a soul was in the water. Everybody knew the city’s moguls were still cutting costs and dumping industrial waste into Lake Erie.

   They got two foot-longs slathered in relish and mustard and two bottles of Coca-Cola. They sat at a picnic table and had their late lunch. Seagulls drifted down from the sky.  Stanley tore small pieces off his bun and tossed them into the air. The seagulls snatched them up in mid-air. Frank thought about the skunks at Euclid Beach Park.

   “Why do I have to eat vegetables at home?” Stanley asked. “Why can’t I eat hot dogs all the time?”

   “Vegetables are good for you.”

   “Aren’t hot dogs good for me?”

   “Not all the time, no.”

   “Why can’t I have candy for breakfast?”

   “Because milk and cereal are for breakfast.”

   “Why can’t I eat Play-Doh?”

   “It’s got salt, water, and flour in it, so I guess you could, but don’t let me ever catch you eating it.”

   “Captain Kangaroo loves Play-Doh.”

   “Captain Kangaroo needs a new hairpiece,” Frank said.

   Bob Keeshan, the actor who played the children’s entertainer on TV, wore a blonde bowl cut hairpiece with mutton chops on the show.

   “Why is the lake blue?” Stanley asked, looking out onto Lake Erie. The waves had gotten choppy.

   “You ask some hard questions. Maybe it’s because fish like the color blue best.”

   “Why do we eat fish?”

   “Because they are food.”

   “Do they know we are going to eat them?”

   “I don’t think so.”

   “Should we tell them?”

   “No, I don’t think that would be a good idea.”

   “Why not?”

   “Come on, let’s go for a walk,” Frank said.

   They walked down to the beach, walked the length of it and back, and returned  to where Frank had parked their car.  Frank carried his son on his shoulders the last leg of the walk.

   “When we drive around the lakes, dad, I’ll do the driving.”

   Frank put him in the driver’s seat of the car.

   “As soon as your feet can reach the pedals and you can see over the steering wheel.”

   “Oh, all right,” the boy said. “I can’t wait to get bigger and get going.”

   “Don’t be too anxious,” Frank said. Everybody said kids grow up fast. He didn’t want Stanley to grow up too fast. He couldn’t do anything about it, he knew, although he could try to smooth out the bumps along the way. 

   It was early evening by the time they got back to North Collinwood.

   “Why do I have to take a bath?” Stanley complained once they were in the house and he was being led to the tub. “I’m clean enough.”

   “That’s easy,” Frank said. “Father knows best.”

Excerpted from the crime novel “Bomb City.”

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street at 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.”

“Bomb City” by Ed Staskus

“A Rust Belt police procedural when Cleveland was a mean street.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F1LM1WF9/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2MYAQAOZIC2U9&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.hTm7BGbiQbSe5ZapFwYPPfcwOpTe-Vdg6VLE4aGyTyk.Z0R-VNBWWEcvKcNaO9LdCOUnNIOOXgvYkRS_FXiXuHk&dib_tag=se&keywords=bomb+city+ed+status&qid=1742136726&sprefix=bomb+city+ed+staskus%2Caps%2C84&sr=8-1

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..

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Home Movies

Ring of Fire

Leave a comment

By Ed Staskus

   Many bands came to Cleveland, Ohio in the 1980s, bands like Queen, Guns N’ Roses, and Journey. I didn’t see or hear any of them. Besides, they just played the same song over and over again. I couldn’t afford arena rock, even if I wanted to squeeze myself into their sold-our shows. What did they do with all their money? Freddie Mercury didn’t spend much of it on his five-and-dime white tank tops.

   I did see and hear Wall of Voodoo when they played the Agora Ballroom, shortly before the band broke up. They were the second-to-last group I saw at the downtown music hall before it burnt down. After the fire the Agora moved thirty blocks uptown into what had been the Metropolitan Theatre, built in 1919. It had been home to the Cleveland Opera until 1929. Twenty two years later, when the prima donnas were long gone and the building was housing the WHK radio station, disc jockey Allen Freed coined the phrase “rock-and-roll” on the air there.

   The Agora was on E. 24th St. across the street from Cleveland State University. It had been there since 1968. It was the brainchild of local entrepreneur Henry LoConti Sr. “Monday Night Out at the Agora” showcased new bands like ZZ Top, Meat Loaf, and Talking Heads. “Live From the Agora” was broadcast on the radio. There were many affiliated stations. Bruce Springsteen’s show at the Agora in 1978 was heard by more than three million listeners. On Sunday nights it was reserved for home-grown bands like the Raspberries and the James Gang. 

   Iggy and the Stooges hit the music hall one night during a thunderstorm. “Iggy came out in a jock strap,” Henry LoConti Sr. said. “He had a razor and cut himself on stage, all kinds of crazy things. A girl and her boyfriend were in the front row. Iggy jumped off the stage on her face. Her boyfriend and his friends started beating on him. Our guys finally got him out of it, dragged him back, and he finished the show like nothing had happened.” The Stooges, however, spent the rest of the night slipping and sliding on Iggy’s blood on the boards.

   Wall of Voodoo was a Los Angeles band fronted by Stan Ridgway, who had been running a film score business before getting into the emerging punk scene in the 1970s. He picked up a bass player and a keyboardist from the Skulls and a drummer from Black Randy and the Metrosquad. They started playing at the Masque, a club underneath the Pussycat Theatre in Hollywood. They mixed electronica with country and western with Ennio Morricone movie music. There were junkyard riffs and percussion effects galore. 

   It didn’t always go over well. “This electronic music quintet makes self-proclaimed nightmare music,” John Swenson wrote in The New Rolling Stone Record Guide. “I pass on this stuff,” he declared in black and white, not writing another word.

   When asked by Dick Clark on American Bandstand to describe their music, Stan Ridgway said, “I’m just as confused as anyone else as to what to call it.” The band released an EP in 1979 featuring a synthesizer driven cover of “Ring of Fire.” It wasn’t what the songwriter June Carter had ever intended. It had a spaghetti western twang to it. It was strange and surreal. Their album “Call of the West” was released in 1982. The catchy single “Mexican Radio” from the album became a big hit. It was about hot desert winds and border blaster radio stations.

   By the end of the 1970s Henry LoConti Sr. had built twelve more Agora music clubs around the country, turning himself into a corporation. He went buttoned down in a no button business. He was awarded Billboard’s Steve Wolfe Award in 1979, presented to the person who had contributed the most to music entertainment the previous year. Billboard’s “Best Club in the Country” award was awarded to him in 1980. 

   For all that, the original Agora in Cleveland was always a rough and tumble place, awards or no awards. The audience was young. The music was loud. The drinks flowed all night long. There were bouncers. They kept their eyes and ears off the stage and more on the disturbances on the floor that erupted time and again.

   The word “bouncer” comes from an 1875 book by Horatio Alger. A young man has a hearty breakfast, claims he has no money to pay for it, whereupon his waiter is ordered to “bounce” him. “A well-directed kick landed him across the sidewalk into the street.” But before there was the word, there were the Romans. In Rome a bouncer was known as an ostiarius. His job was to remove unwanted people from places they were trying to get into. In the Old Testament bouncers protected temples from “illegal entry into sacred places.” In the United States, starting in the mid-19th century, saloons and whorehouses hired them to remove drunk as a skunk, noisome, and violent patrons from the premises.

   The Agora didn’t necessarily call their security staff bouncers, but that is what they were. They checked entrants for underage drinking. They refused entry to those already the worse for wear. Their duty was to maintain some semblance of order. Their No. 1 task was to deal with hot-headed behavior.

   Wall of Voodoo opened their show with “Me and My Dad” followed by “Red Light” followed by “Call of the West.” Everybody’s ears perked up. “Got a green look about ya, and that’s a gringo for starts, sometimes the only thing a western savage understands are whiskey, rifles, and an unarmed man.” It was easy enough to follow the bouncing ball because Stan Ridgway had a clear as a bell voice. He sounded like a revved-up Hank Williams. The band was in fine fettle but didn’t drown him out.

   They finished their first set with “Lost Weekend.” The song was Lou Reed-inflected, about a couple driving home after a losing streak in Las Vegas. “She was in the backseat while he was at the wheel, all the money from the store they’d gambled away. He said the best laid plans often go astray. She lit a cigarette, she didn’t make a sound. I know if we’d had just one more chance, he said. I know, we’d finally hit the big one at last, she said.” It was Wall of Voodoo’s bad dream of the American Dream.

   The club was a haze of never ending cigarette smoke. The ceiling was barely visible. Music lovers elbowed their way to the front of the bar the minute intermission began. I was chronically short of cash and rarely drank at bars. I drifted outside for whatever fresh air there was. Cleveland was a smokestack city and the Agora was just two miles from the smokestacks. Beggars can’t be choosers.

   The front doors were behind a makeshift garage door of corrugated metal. When the sidewalks finally rolled themselves up after a show the corrugated metal door came down. Even though the club was next door to Cleveland State University, it wasn’t in the best neighborhood. When the sun went down it was more along the lines of a bad neighborhood. I stood to the side minding my own business until saying hello to the bouncer by the door, with the idea that it is never a bad idea to get on the good side of bouncers.

   He was younger and taller than me, about twenty pounds heavier, and appeared to be between a WWE wrestler and a bull fighter. He was wearing dark pants and a short-sleeved shirt. He looked like he did bicep curls for a living. He didn’t talk much until I asked him how he had gotten into the bouncer business.

   “My great grandfather was a bouncer before he got into the New York City ganglands,” he said. “His name was Monk Eastman. I’m named after him.”

   “Your great grandfather?” I was dubious. The young usually can’t remember that far back. Their memories go in one direction, which is forward, not backward.

   “Yeah, he was a bouncer from 1894 to 1899, after which he got into the rackets. Back then there were saloons from one end of New York City to the other. He was seventeen years old when he got his first job. The saloon he went to, the manager told him he was too young, and besides, he already had two good men. My great grandfather asked if he could meet them. When they met, he quickly took care of both of  them and got the job on the spot. He worked alone, although he always carried a truncheon.”

   “You mean like a club?”

   “Just like a club. It had notches carved into it for every man he made mincemeat of. Family legend has it, one slow night before he retired from bouncing, he threw his eyes on the bald spot of a man drinking at the bar. He couldn’t take his eyes off the bald spot. He walked up behind the man and clubbed him. ‘I had forty nine nicks in me stick and I wanted to make it an even fifty’ is how he explained it.”

   “You said he got into the rackets after that?”

   “Feet first, free-lancing in the beginning. He charged $15.00 for ‘ear chawed off’ and $19.00 for ‘leg broke.’ It was $100.00 for doing what he called ‘the big job.’ He put together his own gang soon enough. They got into it with another gang. One night he crossed a boundary line by mistake and got jumped. He carried a blackjack and was holding his own until he was shot twice in the stomach. He plugged the holes in his belly with his fingers and found a doctor. Two years later the other gang and my great grandfather’s gang went at it for real in Manhattan under the tracks of the 3rd Avenue Elevated line. It went on all night, fifty or sixty men firing at each other with Colts from behind cast iron arches. The police tried to stop the fighting but they had to retreat. Five men died and dozens were wounded.”

   “It sounds like Iggy Pop,” I said.

   “Iggy Pop has got a screw loose,” he said. “He would have shot himself in the foot.”

   “What happened when the shoot-out was over?”

   “A boxing match happened.”

   “They put their guns down and put up their fists?”

   “My great grandfather and the other man decided to settle matters with a boxing match. The other man was good with his hands but mine had arms long as an ape. In the end they fought for two and half hours to a draw. A month later they were shooting it out again. It was too much for the city fathers. Both of them were finally arrested, convicted of something, and both of them got eleven years in Sing Sing. When my great grandfather got out of prison his gang was gone, up in smoke. He volunteered for the army and was sent to Europe towards the end of World War One. My father told me he never took a prisoner if he could help it. He came home with a medal and told everybody there were plenty of saloons in New York City tougher than what everybody called the Great War.”

   “What did he do after he got home?”

   “Not too much, to be honest. He was found dead behind a dance hall in Brooklyn on New Year’s Eve in 1920. Somebody emptied a revolver into him. There were six bullet holes in him.”

   “That’s too bad,” I said.

   “Yeah, although he probably deserved it,” the bouncer said.

   When I heard the band start their second set I took leave of the bouncer and went back into the Agora. On the cover of the album  “Call of the West” there is a crooked door, slightly ajar, inviting everybody into Wall of Voodoo’s world. A standing room only crowd had squeezed into the Agora. It looked like all of them were still there.

   Wall of Voodoo were pioneers of a kind. Their sound was plenty original. For all that, they were never going to be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

   When Huey Lewis and the News played the Agora in 1981 they played to a sold-out crowd. “We always heard that the heart of rock and roll was Cleveland, and we’d say ‘Wow, we’re from San Francisco. We had the Grateful Dead! We had Jefferson Airplane! What’s Cleveland got?’’’ The enthusiastic audience inspired Huey Lewis to write “The Heart of Rock & Roll.” He meant Cleveland was the heart of it. Fourteen years later the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame opened in Cleveland, not New York City or someplace in California, or anywhere else. 

   Wall of Voodoo finished their second set with “Mexican Radio” and came back to do an extended version of “Ring of Fire” for their encore. “I fell into a burning ring of fire, I went down, down, down, and the flames went higher, and it burns, burn, burns, the ring of fire.” When they were done the band looked wiped out. They got a big hand and most of the audience shuffled out. Some stayed to reminisce over a last drink.

   I went home to crack open Nathaniel West’s “The Day of the Locust.” I had read it in an English class at Cleveland State University and there was something about the music I heard that night that reminded me of the book. Wall of Voodoo’s songs seemed to be about those with little in the way of hope and getting by on illusions, just like the book. Their songs were not all about hard luck and dark times, but enough of them were for me to get a handle on what thread was being woven. The thread was about one small-time lost in time tragedy after another.

   For all that, I wasn’t about to cue up the arena rockers, or the likes of Madonna or Boy George, now or ever. Better the real deal than deals from the bottom of the deck. Better rough and tumble than a bag of old baloney.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street at 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.”

“Bomb City” by Ed Staskus

“A police procedural when the Rust Belt was a mean street.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F1LM1WF9/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2MYAQAOZIC2U9&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.hTm7BGbiQbSe5ZapFwYPPfcwOpTe-Vdg6VLE4aGyTyk.Z0R-VNBWWEcvKcNaO9LdCOUnNIOOXgvYkRS_FXiXuHk&dib_tag=se&keywords=bomb+city+ed+status&qid=1742136726&sprefix=bomb+city+ed+staskus%2Caps%2C84&sr=8-1

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. Revenge is always personal. It gets personal.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Home Movies

Boss Man

Leave a comment

By Ed Staskus

   It was ten minutes before five o’clock on a Friday when Dave Myers asked me to come into his office. I knew his plan was to get rid of me. Efficient Lighting was going downhill fast. There wasn’t much that was efficient about it anymore. I also knew I wanted to stick it out before it all went to hell and the doors closed for good. There was still some blood in the turnip. All I had to do was somehow convince the boss man to let bygones be bygones.

   That was going to be easier said than done. Dave’s bite could be worse than his bark. When I walked into his office and saw him with his wiener dog in his lap, sitting behind his St. Bernard-sized desk, I thought if I played my cards right, I might have a chance. He was high-handed but he could be flighty, too. The dog was the key.

   “You wanted to see me, Dave?”

   He was wearing a green checked shirt and a blue blazer. He gave me a sour look. He didn’t like me calling him Dave. I didn’t like calling him David. Some of the sales guys called him Corner Office. The two Vietnamese women who did the bookkeeping called him Big Daddy. The guys in the warehouse called him Big Cheese. 

   Efficient Lighting was the parent company of several offspring. We sold commercial lighting of all kinds for all kinds of uses, from illumination to disinfection. We sold heating bulbs and metal halide bulbs. We sold high-pressure sodium bulbs for parking lots. We sold plant grow bulbs and bulbs that made salt water coral grow. Our big seller was Light Sources tanning bulbs. We sold them by the boat load, although the boats had been slowly getting smaller since the start of the aughts, after tanning beds got mixed up with cigarettes. It was a slow death, but it was the kiss of death. Fewer and fewer people wanted to risk skin cancer for a drop-dead tan.

   The first time I met Dave Myers was at the Light Sources factory in Connecticut. Our sales guys were there for a tour of the plant, to see how fluorescent UV bulbs were made. I was one of the sales guys. When we were introduced to him, I couldn’t help noticing his office was spacious, something on the order of ten times the size of my cubicle. He was some kind of executive in charge of something. It seemed he was close to Christian Sauska, the head man of the operation. I found out later Dave Myers was married to a woman from the Sauska family.

   Light Sources went back to 1983, back to Hungary, when Christian Sauska and some long-gone buddies got the company off the ground. All the top guys in Connecticut, the site of their American factory, were Hungarians. Dave was enough Hungarian to count as one of the guys. When Light Sources engineered a takeover of Ultraviolet Resources International, the golden goose of Efficient Lighting, they sent Dave to us where we were in Brook Park, Ohio to run the show. He became our Dutch uncle.

   Doug Clarke was the owner of Efficient Lighting. He had built a state of the art 45,000 square foot warehouse and offices in Brook Park at the turn of the millennium, across the street from the Holy Cross Cemetery, after more than fifteen years in the light bulb business, most of them in a repurposed building in Lakewood. When Light Sources took control of Ultraviolet Resources everything stayed the same for a while. Everybody stayed right where they were. I stayed in my cubicle where everything was within arm’s reach. The only change was that Doug was kicked upstairs and Dave took over Doug’s ground floor corner office and day-to-day operations.

   I was a jack of all trades, working general lighting, salt water fish lighting, and tanning bulbs. Everybody was the boss of me at the same time nobody knew what to do with me. I kept my head down and kept moving, trying to stay out of the weeds. I went to all the sales and motivational meetings and tried not to doze off. I had trouble concentrating on the gasbags who did all the talking. 

   The second time I met Dave was at a trade show in Las Vegas. By the end of the day I thought, “This guy must get the same briefing the President of the United States gets every morning.” He seemed to know everything about everything. I never ventured an opinion about anything to him. I didn’t need him turning me over every chance he got.

   I was more-or-less civil to Dave from the day he showed up to the day he took Ultraviolet Resources to greener pastures. The family firm was splitting up and the day they would split up for good was fast approaching. Kathy Hayes, Doug’s wife, had brought her brothers and sisters into the business one after the other. They were all on the verge of jumping ship and signing on to the HMS Bounty. In the end that is what happened.

   Patty Hayes was our sales manager for the moment, but she was too mild-mannered to last and didn’t last. John Hayes, Kevin Hayes, and Maggie Hayes ran the show. They were mean-spirited and fit the bill. They rotated who was Beavis and who were the Buttheads on a daily basis. Maggie did her best to be Beavis as often as possible and took the trophy home more often than not. Kevin took personality lessons from Dave. John handled big accounts and tried to look too busy to care about trophies. What he cared about was his super-sized paycheck. Kevin’s wife was our long-time bean counter. She controlled the books with a left-handed smile.

   Dave and the Beavis and Butthead crew were on the verge of leaving Brook Park for a bigger building in Westlake. He was dreaming up a new business venture with Wisconsin-based Tan-U, a regional distributor in the upper Midwest. He had plans for becoming the top dog of the tanning bulb world.

   “As the indoor tanning industry evolves into a more mature market, consolidation makes a great deal of business sense,” he said. “I can’t think of another company which could result in a better fit and look forward to cementing the new company’s position as a major player in the market.” Dave could be on the level on occasion, but he was a big fan of corporate snake oil.

   He started by asking me if I liked my job.

   “Sure,” I said, stretching the truth.

   “Are you satisfied with how things are going?”

   “Sure,” I lied. 

   “What are your goals?”

   He was getting to be bothersome with his business school questions, but I played along. I made up some goals. Dave liked the sound of his own voice far more than he liked the sound of anybody else’s voice. I kept it short. The less said the better, unless I wanted to be treated like a country cousin.

   Dave nodded, stroking his wiener dog, considering my goals. He rubbed his chin and looked down his nose. I knew it was in one ear and out the other. His middle-aged dog was recovering from hip surgery. One of my middle-aged hips hurt. I was taking yoga classes, looking for relief. I was taking them two and three times a week. Along the way I was learning meditation and patience.

   Dave started explaining how the business world works. He was snarky and patronizing while talking at me. He told me that to understand how business works, you must have a firm understanding of how people think and behave, how people make decisions, act on those decisions, and communicate with others. At its core, he intoned, every enterprise is a collection of people whose work and processes can be reliably repeated to produce a particular result.

   “Do you understand what I’m getting at?” he asked after tossing me his guidance counselor crumbs.

   “Sure,” I said. “How is your dog doing?”

   “Much better,” he said. “Thanks for asking.” He described the limp the dog had had to live with, the operation, his recovery, and the first day the purebred Daschund had stepped out on grass and run a few steps, wagging its tail. He brought the dog to work every day. The dog slept in a custom-made bed in the corner. He ate a special diet catered to him in special doggie bowls. Dave encouraged the dog to follow at his heels whenever he went anywhere in the building in order to build its strength back up.

   “If there’s one thing that man loves without a shred of contempt, it’s that dog,” I thought.

   We talked about pets, animal cruelty and animal rescue, the companionship of dogs, the loyalty of dogs, and whether dogs were better people than people. By the time he was done, since he did most of the talking, it was past six o’clock and he said he had to pack up for a weekend trip. He gave me a bottle of wine from the walnut custom-made wine rack in his office. 

   “Thanks, Dave,” I said, hefting the bottle like a trophy. II was surprised. It was undoubtedly worth more than I made in a day. Dave had seventy or eighty bottles in his office. Maybe I could sell it on eBay. Maybe I would leave it out in the sun and let it turn to vinegar.

   He had forgotten to fire me, thanks to the dog. I slipped away to my cubicle, got my stuff, and left. In the parking lot I saw his four door luxury sedan and his natty ragtop sports car. They were parked on either side of my Saturn. I made sure to not dent, scratch, or otherwise molest one or the other of his rides. The last thing I wanted was a lecture from a clubhouse lawyer.

   When Westlake was ready for Ultraviolet Resources International, Dave, John, Kevin, Maggie, Kevin’s cagey accountant wife, somebody’s dodgy sister-in-law, and some others of the sales force went to the outer-ring suburb. Our building felt half-empty after that because it was half-empty. We were going to struggle for the next three years until all the downsizing that could be done was done and the building had to be sold. I was one of the last to be laid off, but I didn’t mind. There was hardly any work left for me to do by then, anyway. I had gotten tired of taking long lunches with nobody to talk to.

   The next thing I heard through the grapevine was that Dave wasn’t with Ultraviolet Resources reinventing corporate tricks anymore. He was up to his own tricks. He had set up an ISO Italia office near the Chagrin Highlands, selling glossy Italian tanning beds and shoddy Canadian-made Sylvania tanning bulbs. I was sure he could explain away the performance problems of his bulbs.

    The following year I read news that he had gone into the business of backdoor crookery. He had been charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission with insider trading. He had always been bullish on the stock market. I wasn’t sure he would be able to explain his actions away. Federal agents didn’t usually like it when their suspects talked down to them.

   “Baltimore-based consultant Brett Cohen received coded e-mails from a fraternity brother about two biotechnology companies and passed the information to an uncle, David Myers, of Cleveland, Ohio who traded on the tip,” the Securities and Exchange Commission said.

   The fraternity brother got the information from his real brother, who was a patent agent for California-based Sequenom, which made genetic analysis products. The patent agent passed along non-public information about the company’s plans to acquire Exact Sciences. Dave bought 35,000 shares of Exact Sciences on the sly before the acquisition was announced. The news sent Exact Sciences’ stock up 50 percent, setting Dave up to pocket first class profits by selling the stock over the next few weeks. “David Myers garnered more than $600,000 in profits trading on the inside information,” the Securities and Exchange Commission complained.

   The patent agent also passed on tips about an up-coming announcement that investors should no longer rely on Sequenom’s data about its Down syndrome testing. Dave bought Sequenom options just before the announcement, which caused a 75 percent drop in the company’s stock, according to the Securities and Exchange Commission complaint.

   “David Myers later sold that entire position for illegal profits of more than $570,000,” the complaint alleged. He knew how to put his nose to the grindstone when he had to. He knew how to generate cold hard cash out of nothing and spend it on himself, no problem. 

   On top of everything else, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of California filed criminal charges against Brett Cohen and Dave. My Dutch uncle was going to have to spend some of his profits on a mouthpiece. The mouthpiece was no great help. They both eventually pled guilty to conspiracy to commit securities fraud. 

   “Holy smokes,” I thought, shutting off my Apple iPad. I didn’t wish Dave any real harm, but it was nice to know he didn’t know everything after all. I didn’t care how much he knew because I knew he didn’t care what I thought. He had sometimes forgotten my name in mid-sentence. I had forgotten the wiener dog’s name but wished him the best, on and off the leash, although I thought he would be better off if he made a break for it, so long as his new hip was good to go. No good dog should end up being bad to the bone.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street at 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.”

“Bomb City” by Ed Staskus

“A Rust Belt police procedural when Cleveland was a mean street.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F1LM1WF9/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2MYAQAOZIC2U9&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.hTm7BGbiQbSe5ZapFwYPPfcwOpTe-Vdg6VLE4aGyTyk.Z0R-VNBWWEcvKcNaO9LdCOUnNIOOXgvYkRS_FXiXuHk&dib_tag=se&keywords=bomb+city+ed+status&qid=1742136726&sprefix=bomb+city+ed+staskus%2Caps%2C84&sr=8-1

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. Nothing goes according to plan.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Home Movies

Bust Up at White City

Leave a comment

By Ed Staskus

   When Virginia Sustarsic asked me if I would be willing to feed and walk a dog once a day for a week, I said no problem because it was no problem. I was living on Upper Prospect at the Plaza Apartments. I didn’t have a 9 to 5 and had the time. I didn’t have to worry about the kind of time that makes sure everything doesn’t happen at once.

   I could take the CTS 39B bus, which was an express. The bus route was east on I-90 to Liberty Blvd, through the village of Bratenahl, and then the length of North Collinwood. Virginia’s friend lived on Lakeshore Blvd. on the border of Bratenahl and North Collinwood. The minute I passed through the rich man’s enclave, bordered on the north side by Lake Erie and on the south side by the ghetto, I would be at her friend’s doorstep.

   “She lives across the street from White City Park,” Virginia said. “That’s where she goes to walk the dog.”

   “What kind of a dog is it?” I asked. 

   “It’s a pit bull,” she said. 

   “Why a pit bull?”

   “It can be an unsafe neighborhood, especially for a single girl,” Virginia said. Her friend was an art student at Cleveland State University, the same as Virginia. “Bratenahl is safe as a prison. Where she lives is what goes on before prison.”

   “Is the dog a biter?”

   “Yes.”

   “Is it going to bite me?”

   “No.”

   “Why not?”

   “He’s really a sweet dog,”  Virginia said. “On top of that, my friend will tell you the magic words to keep that from happening.”

   The only magic I believed in was magic realism, but I went along with her assurance that the dog wouldn’t bite me. In the end, she was right. The dog didn’t bite me even once, although he tried to bite Danny Greene twice on the afternoon the Irishman shot and killed Mike Frato at White City Park. I had to be loud and clear with the magic words to keep him off the gangster.

   The shooting happened the day after Thanksgiving, 1971. It had to do with the gang war going on between the Italians and the Irish. The Italians were the John Scalish Crime Family in Little Italy and the Irish were the Celtic Club in North Collinwood.

   Agnes was Virginia’s friend. She lived downstairs in a Polish double on the south side of Lakeshore Blvd. She was going to some kind of meditation retreat in Michigan. I asked her what meditation was.

   “It’s a yoga thing,” she said.

   “What’s yoga?” I asked.

   “It’s exercise for your body and brain.”

   “Oh, I see,” I said, without seeing, although I could see she was healthy enough. The dog’s name was Harvey. He was healthy, too. He was an American Pit Bull Terrier, muscular with a short coat. He was caramel colored with patches of white. He might have weighed fifty pounds. He looked like he could hold his own.

   “Virginia said you would tell me the magic words to keep him from biting.”

   “No biting,” Agnes said. 

   “That’s it?” 

   “No biting,” she repeated. “That’s it.”

   “When will you be back?” I asked.

   “On the Saturday night after Thanksgiving.”

   I took the CTS 39B bus to her house every day that holiday week, taking Harvey to White City Park for a walk, and then feeding him. I made sure he had plenty of water. I cleaned up around his bowls and fluffed up his dog bed, which was a big fuzzy pillow. I tried to keep him from licking my face. His tongue was unusually gritty.

   White City Park, at E. 140th St. and Lakeshore Blvd., had been around a long time, although it started life as Manhattan Beach. The White City Amusement Park was built there around the turn of the century. It had a baseball field and a dance hall. There was a swimming pool, a boardwalk, and an observation tower. The rides included Shoot the Chutes and Bump-the-Bumps. Fraternal organizations and secret societies held meetings there. There was an incubator clinic where premature babies were displayed and cared for. The clinic was touted as the best hope in town for infant survival. Mr. Bonavita the lion trainer and Madame Morelli the leopard trainer kept their creatures away from the clinic.

   A gale blowing in from Lake Erie wrecked the amusement park with wind and rain ten years later and it was closed. National Guard troops trained there during World War One. The White City Yacht Club set up shop on the spot for many years. The U. S. Navy took it over during World War Two. After the war the city converted the land to a public swimming beach. By the 1970s, after years of neglect, nobody swam there anymore. The water was too polluted to set foot in.

   I liked White City Park because hardly anybody ever went there. The Bratenahl folks avoided it like the plague. The North Collinwood folks avoided it like the plague, too. As soon as we crossed the street and got to the park, I took Harvey’s leash off and let him run free. The park was mostly a big empty field with a few trees. I carried a bag of dog biscuits. Whenever I wanted Harvey to come back to me I raised the bag over my head and shook it. He always sprinted right back to me.

   On the day after Thanksgiving I was the only person in the park until another man with three dogs showed up. It was late morning. He was wearing flared polyester pants and a dark jacket. It was breezy and sunny, sunnier than it should have been in late November. I couldn’t make out exactly what kind of dogs they were. I thought one of them might be a Jack Russell.

   He didn’t have any of his dogs on a leash. I called Harvey over to me and put him back on his leash. The man had parked on the other side of the field and was walking on the shoreline. It looked like he was going to the entrance that led to the beach. I stayed on my side of the field.

   Then it happened. When it did it happened fast. I heard a car engine, looked, and saw a car bump over the curb. It was a big two-door sedan. It slowly went past me towards the other end of the field. There were two men in the car. They went past me like I was invisible. The passenger side window was open. The man with the dogs was walking towards the west and the car was going towards the east. The car was going slow. When it got to the far side it slowly circled around to the west.  When the car came abreast of the man with the dogs an arm suddenly stuck itself out the passenger side window. There was a handgun in the hand at the end of the arm. I heard three loud pops, saw the dogs run away in three different directions, and saw the man on the shoreline drop to one knee. When he did his arm was extended. There was a handgun in his hand. I heard two more loud pops.

   The car wobbled and then accelerated, ripping up grass. It sped past me, jumped the curb, and raced away on Lakeshore Blvd. I later found out the driver sped to Mt. Sinai Hospital, where he abandoned it, abandoning the dead man on the passenger side at the same time. An empty holster was under the dead man where he was slumped in the seat. The dead Mike Frato left fourteen children behind him.

   The man on the shoreline stood up. I ran over to him. Harvey was barking up a storm. He tried to bite the man, who stepped back. I pulled Harvey away. “No biting,” I said. I recognized the man from the newspapers. He was Danny Greene, the Irish gangster who was at war with the city’s Italian gangsters.

   Mike Frato was the operator of AAA Rubbish Service and Rubbish Systems. The mobs were big into garbage. He and Danny Greene had been fast friends, They each named one of their own children after the other man. He also owned Swan’s Auto Service. The car repair garage had been bombed and destroyed a month earlier after Mike Frato dropped out of a solid waste arrangement with Danny Greene. He formed his own association. That was when all the trouble started.

   “Are you all right?” I asked.

   “Yeah, yeah, I’m fine. I think I got him. I saw blood for sure.”

   “Were they shooting at you?”

   “You saw what happened, right?”

   “I didn’t really see much.”

   “They shot first. It was self-defense.”

   “That’s what it looked like to me, them shooting first.”

   “All right, the cops will be here soon, but I’m going to split. You tell them what happened. Make sure you tell them the guys in the car shot at me.”

   “Sure,” I said, even though I had no intention of waiting for the police and telling them what I had seen. The last thing I wanted to do was get mixed up in gangland doings. I knew for sure it wouldn’t be in my best interest.

   Danny Greene turned to gather his dogs and leave. Hervey tried to bite the Irishman again. “No biting,” I shouted and pulled him to the side with the leash.

   “Sorry,” I said to the Irishman’s back as he walked away.

   Even though I had said I would inform the police about what I had seen, I wasn’t exactly on their side, no matter that I had been a witness. I wasn’t on the side of the gangsters either. I wasn’t on anybody’s side, other than my friends at the Plaza Apartments.

   I walked Harvey back to Agnes’s house, fed him and got him settled, and took the CTS 39B bus downtown. I got a transfer and took a local up Euclid Ave. to E.30th St. I walked the rest of the way, which wasn’t far.

   Two days later Danny Greene called the Cleveland Police Department, said he was ready to turn himself in, and told them he was in a motel near Painesville. He said he had panicked and gone into hiding after he learned of Mike Frato’s death. He was arrested but never charged. He was released after the police put the pieces together and determined what had happened was self-defense.

   One day the following spring Danny Greene was again walking his dogs at White City Park. A sniper hiding behind a tree started shooting at him with a rifle. Instead of taking cover the Irishman pulled his handgun out and started sprinting at the sniper, shooting as he ran. The sniper ran away. Murder contracts had become a way of life in the Irishman’s life.

   It was the first of December before I saw Virginia again. She had been spending the holiday with her Slovenian mother in the St. Clair – Superior neighborhood. Her mother and aunt lived above a tavern. Her father was dead. Her mother served drinks in the tavern and her aunt served food. A Romanian woman did the cooking. The menu was a grab bag of hamburgers,  strukliji, and goulash. The goulash, a meat stew served with potatoes and parsley all together in the same bowl, was the best thing on the menu.

   “Agnes called and asked me to thank you for watching her dog,” Virginia said. She had a one bedroom apartment like mine, one floor above me. It was like mine but nicer. Mine looked like a monk lived there. Hers looked like a hippie postcard. She was a writer for an alternative weekly and a kind of artisan, making paraphernalia with which to smoke pot. She seemed to always have ready cash, unlike me.

   She lit up. When she passed the pipe to me I took a toke. I couldn’t smoke much of it because it put me to sleep much sooner than later. I passed the pipe back to her. I told her about Danny Greene and White City Park.

   “Holy cow!” she exclaimed. She was older than me and world-wise, but sometimes blurted out things like ‘Holy cow!’ especially when she was smoking. When she was she got less measured and more playful. Her hands joined the conversation.

   “I’ve heard about the mobsters but I’ve never seen one, much less met one,” she said.

   “I only saw him up close for a minute, Danny Greene, but he looked good, like he lifted weights,” I said. “He was almost handsome, too.”

   “I wonder why they’re always shooting each other,” she wondered.

   “You don’t want to be holding the ace of spades,” I said. 

   “It seems like they’re gun crazy but why do they do it?”

   “It’s probably about who’s king of the jungle and who gets the loot.”

  “You mean money?”

   “I think it’s most likely all about cash,” I said. “Sometimes money can cost too much.”

   “I’d rather be a poor girl with just enough money.”

   “Some green is better than poverty, if only because it pays the bills.”

   “What I don’t like is that ‘Time is Money’ thing,” Virginia said. “The more time you spend making it is the less time you have to do what you really want to do. Money is a thief of time.”

   We agreed about it being a thief of time and agreed Danny Greene’s days were numbered, which a few years later turned out to be the case when the wheel of fortune turned and he ran out of time.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street at 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.”

Help support these stories. $25 a year (7 cents a day). Contact edwardstaskus@gmail.com with “Contribution” in the subject line. Payments processed by Stripe.

“Bomb City” by Ed Staskus

“A Rust Belt police procedural when Cleveland was a mean street.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F1LM1WF9/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2MYAQAOZIC2U9&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.hTm7BGbiQbSe5ZapFwYPPfcwOpTe-Vdg6VLE4aGyTyk.Z0R-VNBWWEcvKcNaO9LdCOUnNIOOXgvYkRS_FXiXuHk&dib_tag=se&keywords=bomb+city+ed+status&qid=1742136726&sprefix=bomb+city+ed+staskus%2Caps%2C84&sr=8-1

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. Nothing goes according to plan.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Home Movies

Feed Your Head

Leave a comment

By Ed Staskus

   I was in my early 20s in 1973 the first time I visited Lake View Cemetery. I was in the back seat of a 1964 Oldsmobile Jetstar 88 convertible. Bill Neubert was driving and his wife Bonnie was beside him. Everybody called Bonnie Buck, although I called her Bonnie. It was a mid-summer day, warm, bright, and breezy. The top of the car was down. Bill stopped in front of an old headstone. We got out of the car and walked over to it. The name on the grave was Louis Germain DeForest. The dates were 1838 – 1870. There was moss on the base of the stone.

   “He was the first guy buried here,” Bill said.

   Captain Louis Deforest was from Cleveland, Ohio, one of ten children, served in the Union Army during the Civil War, and went home after Johnny Reb gave up the fruitless struggle. He married Theresa Luidham before the war, got her pregnant during the war, and again after the war. Once back in Cleveland he went into the jewelry business. The sparkle didn’t last long. He died unexpectedly at the age of 31.

   Two sites in the graveyard were on the National Register of Historic Places, the second one added that year. I didn’t know much about places with a past. I had enough trouble making sense of the present. Bill filled me in, even though he wasn’t interested in historic places. He was more interested in the flow of history.

   Bill and Bonnie were mimes clowns comedians, putting on shows around town, working out of town when they got offers. They were a few years older than me, friends of my roommate Carl Poston. That Saturday morning Carl begged off messing around town, leaving me the odd man out. Bill and Bonnie made me feel at home. Bill didn’t act or look anything like Humphrey Bogart, but he talked just like him. We drove to Little Italy and had pastries and coffee. Back in the car they both dropped acid and asked me if I wanted to try it.

   “All right,” I said.

   They didn’t call it LSD. They called it Uncle Sid. It was the first time I took LSD. A half hour later I was finding it and everything else incredibly interesting. Everything seemed fresh and bright. Uncle Sid wasn’t the disheveled uncle with yesterday’s stogie trying to take your picture with his dime store camera. He was my best friend that day.

   The Jefferson Airplane released “White Rabbit” in 1967. “One pill makes you large and one pill makes you small, feed your head,” Grace Slick sang with her eyes full of stars.. My head was full to the brim the rest of the day. Everything was freaky but close and personal.. No matter what it was, it all felt, looked, smelled, and sounded new. My eyes stayed wide open like a baby’s all day long.

  “What’s it like to be a child?” asked Robin Carhart-Harris of Imperial College in London. “That sense of wonder, that sense of awe is what you certainly see with psychedelics. Sometimes it’s framed in a sort of mystical or spiritual way. But it’s interesting if you look at some literature, someone like William Wordsworth, who talks about the infant state as being a kind of heavenly state where we’re closer to what you would call God.”

   LSD was first synthesized in 1938 in Switzerland. It was introduced as a psychiatric drug in 1947 and marketed as a psychotropic panacea, in other words “a cure for everything from schizophrenia to criminal behavior, sexual perversions, and alcoholism.” The abbreviation LSD is from the mouthful of the German word lysergsäurediethylamid. The drug was brought to the United States by the CIA. The spy agency bought the world’s entire supply for a quarter million dollars and promoted its use in clinics, research centers, and prisons. They administered it to their own employees, soldiers, doctors, prostitutes, the fruity, the mentally ill, the down and out, and plain folks to study their reactions, usually without those given the drug knowing what they were taking. The idea was that LSD is like psychoanalytical Drano.

   Lake View Cemetery is a graveyard straddling Cleveland, East Cleveland, and Cleveland Heights. It was founded in 1869. It was where the city’s wealthy buried themselves during the Gilded Age. There are many lavish funerary monuments and mausoleums. Little Italy up and down Mayfield Rd. was settled by stone masons from Italy who came to the United States to make monuments for God’s 280 acres. Many of the monuments they made were symbols. It’s better to be a symbol than a monument. Pigeons do bad things to monuments.

   In the 1960s Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, and Timothy Leary got their hands on LSD and started advocating its use to the counterculture. It was supposed to be the drug of choice for consciousness expansion. Owsley Stanley got the blotter rolling in San Francisco. Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters popularized it during their road trips, giving it away to anybody who wanted it. Nick Sands created Orange Sunshine, the most pure, highest-quality LSD made at the time, better than the CIA’s. In 1966 the Psychedelic Shop opened, selling acid over the counter. It was legal as cookies and milk. If you were a gal, wearing a pants suit was problematical, but not downing the hallucinogenic.

   Bill drove his Olds 88 to Section 9 on Lot 14, to the marble gravestone of Francis Haserot and his family. The bigger than life tomb marker was “The Angel of Death Victorious.” The angel’s wings were outstretched, and she held an extinguished torch upside-down. I stepped up to her and saw what looked like black tears dripping from her eyes and down her neck. I wasn’t unnerved, but rather impressed with the sculptor’s skill, until I realized the tears were a result of rain and aging bronze.

   W. H. Auden wasn’t impressed with LSD. “Highly articulate people under it talk absolute drivel,” he said. After he tried it, he reported, “Nothing much happened but I did get the distinct impression that some birds were trying to communicate with me.” The Beatles jumped on the bandwagon with “Day Tripper” in 1966 and “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” in 1967. “The first time I took LSD, it just blew everything away,” said George Harrison. “I had such an incredible feeling of well-being.”

   Not everybody was all in. “We don’t take trips on LSD in Muskogee, we are living right and free,” Merle Haggard sang on “Okie from Muskogee.” Living free in the home of the brave is one thing. Living right is in the eye of the beholder. The city is on the Arkansas River in Oklahoma. It is home to a museum of Native American history and the USS Batfish, a WWII submarine with an onboard museum. Between 1858 and 1872 the Texas Rangers and U. S. Cavalry battled Creeks, Kiowa, and Comanche Native Americans in more than a dozen major engagements, eventually wearing them down, rounding them up, and telling them to stay the hell on the reservation. In the 1970s the USS Batfish was becalmed bewildered on the river, many miles from its native ocean hunting grounds.

   After we left the angel we drove to the Garfield Memorial. It’s the final resting place of assassinated President James Garfield, who was from nearby Mentor. The memorial is built of Ohio sandstone in a combination of Gothic, Byzantine, and Romanesque styles. It took five years to build and was dedicated on Memorial Day, 1890. James Garfield, and his wife, Lucretia, are entombed in the crypt.

   The circular tower is 180 feet high. We stood on the broad front steps and looked up. Before we went in, we gave the once-over to the bas-reliefs depicting President Garfield’s life and death, which included more than one hundred life-size figures. Inside was a gold dome and a statue of the main man. Below the Memorial Hall were two bronze caskets and two urns, the urns holding the ashes of the presidential couple’s daughter and her husband. I followed Bill and Bonnie up a stairway to a balcony with a view of Lake Erie. We stayed for twenty minutes, taking a long look at the downtown skyline before we left. It was like IMAX a year before IMAX happened, but without the motion sickness.

   “My feelings about LSD are mixed,” said Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead. “It’s something that I both fear and love at the same time. I never take any psychedelic, have a psychedelic experience, without having that feeling of, I don’t know what’s going to happen. In that sense, it’s fundamentally an enigma and a mystery to me.” 

   “The function of the brain is to reduce available information and lock us into a limited experience of the world” said the Czechoslovakian psychiatrist Stanislav Grof. “LSD frees us from this restriction and opens us to a much larger experience.”

   When he was dying of cancer Aldous Huxley asked his wife to inject him with LSD. The drug has analgesic properties for the terminally ill. When the acid trip was over so was his trip on earth. He died that night. The doors of perception closed on the man who wrote “The Doors of Perception.” Two years later Jim Morrison and Ray Manzarek named their new band The Doors.

   In the United States LSD was scaring the bejesus out of Washington D. C. They thought it was undermining American values and undermining the war effort in Vietnam. The Air Force might have dropped puff powder bombs of it on Charlie instead of napalm to keep the dominoes in place, but they didn’t. It was made illegal in the late 1960s. It was classified as a substance with no legitimate medical use and a lack of accepted safety. The DEA said it had a high potential for abuse. Although the drug had never caused any documented deaths, that was that. If you wanted to be in the sky with diamonds, once you landed back on earth your next stop might be prison.

   After we left Garfield’s Memorial we left the Olds 88 where it was and set off on foot. The memorial is on a hill which is the boneyard’s high point. We rambled downhill in the sunshine, making our way on twisty paths, stopping at the graves of Charles Brush, Elroy Kulas, John D. Rockefeller, and Garrett Morgan.

   Charles Brush was an inventor with fifty patents to his name. His arc lights were the first to illuminate Cleveland’s Public Square. When he later sold his company, it merged with the Edison Electric Co. to form General Electric. Elroy Kulas was the president of Midland Steel from the day it was organized in 1923 until his death in 1952. He was one of the driving forces behind the city’s steelmaking. During World War Two he built hulls for tens of thousands of M4 Sherman Tanks. The Nazis had a low opinion of them, but in the end the Sherman’s played chin music with the Panzer’s, blasting them to kingdom come. The Kulas Auditorium at the Institute of Music is named after him.

   We found John D. Rockefeller’s grave without any problem. It was at the base of an almighty obelisk. We didn’t stay long, only long enough to pay our respects to the Age of Oil. John D. Rockefeller was a son-of-a-gun, bleeding anybody and everybody who crossed him bone dry. It was how he made it to the top of the world, making himself the richest man in the world. He gave it away at the end so people would stop spitting in the gutter when they heard his name. 

   Garrett Morgan founded the Cleveland Call newspaper for the Negro community. He patented a breathing device that was used in 1916 during a mining disaster in gas-filled tunnels under Lake Erie to rescue workers and bring back those who died. Twenty-one men died. He and his brother rescued two of them and recovered four dead. He developed the modern traffic light and was the first black man in town to own a car.

   We went flaneur hoofing it around the graveyard, spending all day there. By early evening we were dog tired and coming down from the LSD. We needed bread and water. We hopped into the Olds 88 and drove back own to Little Italy. Instead of bread and water we had espresso, ham sandwiches, and biscotti.

   When Bill and Bonnie dropped me off back home it was nighttime. I ignored the mail, fed Ollie my Siamese cat, who was meowing up a storm, brushed my teeth, and got into bed. Ollie jumped up and got comfortable beside me.

   I had spent the day with the dead but felt incredibly alive. More than one hundred thousand men women and children are buried in Lake View Cemetery, their eyes closed forever. My eyes had never been more open. I didn’t drop much LSD after that, and when I did stuck to small doses. I didn’t think it was especially dangerous, but it is unpredictable stuff that can go wrong, like children one minute are laughing their heads off and the next minute bawling their eyes out. 

   I thought maybe I would take it again when I was dying, like Aldous Huxley, and go out on a high note.

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

Help support these stories. $25 a year (7 cents a day). Contact edwardstaskus@gmail.com for details.

“Bomb City” by Ed Staskus

“A Rust Belt police procedural when Cleveland was a mean street.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F1LM1WF9/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2MYAQAOZIC2U9&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.hTm7BGbiQbSe5ZapFwYPPfcwOpTe-Vdg6VLE4aGyTyk.Z0R-VNBWWEcvKcNaO9LdCOUnNIOOXgvYkRS_FXiXuHk&dib_tag=se&keywords=bomb+city+ed+status&qid=1742136726&sprefix=bomb+city+ed+staskus%2Caps%2C84&sr=8-1

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. Nothing goes according to plan.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Barron Cannon

Stumbling On Barron Cannon

Leave a comment

By Ed Staskus

   It was an early May morning when Frank and Betty Glass went visiting Barron Cannon, who they hadn’t seen much since they first ran into him picketing a vegan restaurant near where they lived in Lakewood, Ohio. They had dropped by his yurt, which was on a bluff overlooking the Rocky River Metropark Reservation, several times in October and November, but once winter got cold and snowy had not paid him a social call, not that Betty minded, or even gave it a thought.

   The first time they ever saw Barron had been the past September, when they were attracted by the flashing lights of two Ford Police Interceptors at the vegan eatery, and were greeted by the sight of a slender pony-tailed man in his early 30s bearing a picket sign on a stick. Faces peered through the plate glass windows. Passersby stopped to see what was going on. There was a single word scrawled on the placard.

   HYPOCRITES! It was in capital letters. It was written in blood red crayon. Barron was waving it around in circles.

   The policemen who had been called to the scene by one of the outraged waitresses were telling him he had to call it a day. They told him protesting without a permit wasn’t permitted. Although he maintained he had more than enough reason, and cited his first amendment rights, and made a speech about animal rights, he finally agreed to go home and strode off, his picket sign bouncing up and down on his shoulder.

   The bemused policemen walked away shaking their heads. “He’s like the cranky old guy who’s always on his front porch and yells at the neighborhood kids,” one of them said before they got into their separate Ford Police Interceptors.

   Barron was going the same way as Frank and Betty, up West Clifton Blvd., and after falling into step with him, they were astonished to learn he was himself a vegan. “Eating is an act of nourishing my body and soul,” he said. “I choose to do no harm to myself.”

   He did not eat animals, drink their milk, or wear their hides. He eschewed all animal products. He didn’t eat anything deep-fried and never snacked on refined sugar. He eschewed Worcestershire sauce because it contained anchovies. He considered eating honey exploitive and avoided it.

   “I don’t abide people who eat animals,” he said, “and since that’s just about everybody, and since that is not changing anytime soon, that’s that, and there I am, a lonely voice in the wilderness. At least I don’t have to live with them.” 

   At least as long as they weren’t his parents. Although he lived alone, he lived with his parents. He lived in their backyard.

   “My parents are among the worst,” he said. “They are always bringing chicken, pork, and ground beef home from the grocery. I see them in their kitchen every day, sticking forks into decomposing flesh and animal secretions. They chew on Slim Jim’s while they watch the news, which is full of lies and misery, on TV.”

   Barron lived in a yurt outside the kitchen window of his parent’s house overlooking the Rocky River Metropark Reservation, about a mile-and-a-half south of Lake Erie. He had built the orange Mongolian-style dwelling himself. He didn’t have a job, a car, a refrigerator, a TV, a wife, or any pets.

   “Don’t even get me started on pet slavery,” he said.

  Betty gave him a sharp glance. She and Frank had two house cats, who were Mr. Moto and Sky King, who slept with them on their bed most nights. The cats were rescues. She didn’t think of them as slaves and was sure they didn’t think of themselves as slaves, either.

   “Have we met before?” Frank asked as they stopped at the corner of their side street off Riverside Dr. while Barron was going to continue his ramble back to his lodgings.

   “I don’t think so,” said Barron. “I would know. I have an excellent memory.”

   A college graduate with a master’s degree in philosophy and a hundred thousand dollars in unpaid federal student debt, Barron was unqualified for nearly any job, even if he had been remotely interested in seeking employment. He didn’t vote, although he enjoyed political antics whenever he heard about them. “Whenever I hear about a grift, or I hear about a politician, but I repeat myself,” he said. He disdained pro sports, calling the athletes “millionaires throwing, catching, and kicking some kind of damn fool ball.”  He didn’t read best sellers or know anything about current trends. He dressed like the 21st century had never happened.

   He didn’t take any drugs, over or under the counter. “By FDA requirement,” he explained, “each and every pharmaceutical is tested on animals.” He was a vegan purist, pursuing his ideals to their logical conclusion. Betty thought of his pursuit as a dead end, but didn’t say so.

   Barron didn’t have a bank account or any credit cards. He had few friends, other than several bicycle-riding neo-hippies and a handful of retirees in the neighborhood for whom he did odd jobs on a cash basis. He only worked for them if they could prove they didn’t have cars and agreed never to talk about their problems, especially their health problems.

   “Insurance, HMO’s, meds, doctors, it’s all a racket,” he said.

   The few times Frank and Betty had visited Barron they always walked, because if he knew they had driven to see him, he would refuse to see them. Burning fossil fuels was anathema to him. “That is some queer duck who lives at the top of Hogsback Lane,” Betty said. Hogsback Ln. was an entry road down to the river valley.

   “Can’t we just drive and park a block away?” she asked, reminding Frank of the three-mile round-trip hike from their house.

   Barron lived on an allowance his parents begrudged him. He shopped at a once-a-week farmer’s market. He had recently gotten his yurt connected to his parent’s power supply. Unbeknownst to them, he had gone on-line at the Lakewood Library, read about the work he had in mind, and dug a trench from the back of their house to his yurt, into which he buried a transmission wire.

   “They got a solar roof last year and got off the butane and coal, which I will tell you is a blessing,” he said. “It gets dark and cold in this yurt in the middle of winter. I used to heat it with firewood from the park. I had to collect it at night, otherwise the park rangers gave me grief. I don’t think they like me.”

   He now heated his yurt with a 5,000 BTU infrared quartz heater and LED’s were strung in a kind of loopy chandelier. He put his vegan candles, made of plant-based wax, away. He cooked on a Cuisinart 2-burner cast iron hot plate. He had previously refused to employ either electricity or natural gas, on the premise that both are petroleum products, in which are mixed innumerable marine organisms.

   “That’s one of the things I can’t stand about those leaf-eaters at the restaurant, cooking their so-called vegan cuisine with gas made from the bodies of dead fish,” he said. “They’re too busy ringing up the cash register to know or care.”

   Vegetarians drew his ire, too, although he tolerated them. “I can put up with vegetarians if I have to,” he said, which Frank reluctantly admitted to being when Barron quizzed them. Barron gave Frank a mirthless grin. “At least they’re only half lying to themselves.”

   Betty, who described herself as an omnivore, on the side of free range and organic, directed a bright smile at Barron, keeping her eating habits to herself while gnashing her teeth at the same time. Frank knew his wife was a wise woman who knew when to bite her tongue.

   As they approached Hogsback Ln. they saw a sea of green treetops in the valley below, always a welcome sight after a long winter. Barron’s yurt was on the backside of a sprawling backyard on the edge of the valley, where the long downhill of the road intersects with Stinchcomb Hill, named after the founder of the park system. It is a bucolic spot in the middle of the big city.

   Frank was reluctant to mention that William Stinchcomb had been a pork roast and beef tenderloin man in his day, as well as president of the Cleveland Automobile Club, so he didn’t mention it.

   “Vegans are as bad as my parents, the whole lot of them,” Barron said.

   “Show me a vegan who isn’t an elitist, or someone who spouts veganism who is not a do-gooder, or making boatloads of money from it, explaining how it’s all one big happy equation, yoga and veganism and new-age capitalism, and flying to their immersions in the Bahamas, and everywhere else around the planet on their holiday retreats, never mind the carbon footprint, and I’ll show you the sanctimonious side of who’s burning up the planet.”

   Since Barron didn’t have a doorbell, they were glad to find him out of doors, although Betty was less happy about it than Frank. Barron was laying out rows of seeds and tubers outside his yurt. They joined him, sitting down on canvas field chairs. He had opened the flap over the roof hole of the yurt. Betty poked her head inside the yurt, remarking how pleasant and breezy it was inside his house.

   “Inside your tent, I mean,” she said.

   “It’s a yurt,” he said.

   It was round, orange, and fronted by a half-circle of large white stones, like what children do at summer camps in front of their tents.

   “Whatever,” Betty said under her breath.

   Frank was nonplussed to see a new Apple laptop on a small reading table.

   “I keep up, especially now that I have power,” Barron said. “It’s not like I’m a caveman.”

   Frank noticed a yoga mat rolled up.

   “Where do you practice yoga?” he asked.

   “Here in the backyard, every day, and sometimes at the studio on Lake Rd. in Rocky River. The owner and I trade cleaning the studio for classes.”

   “That’s probably where I’ve seen you before,” Frank said.

   “Maybe,” Barron said, not bothering trying to remember.

   “I thought you were down on yoga.”

   “I’m down on the phony’s who practice it, not the practice itself,” Barron said.

   He led them to his new garden. He had dug up most of his mother’s backyard, dislodging her wild roses and rhododendrons and was planting rows of root crops, including beets, onions, and potatoes. He was especially proud of his celery.

   “I cover my celery with paper, boards, and loose soil. They will have a nutty flavor when I dig them up at the end of the year. I don’t eat anything from factory farms. In fact, I am getting away from eating anything from any farms anymore, at all. Farms, whether big or small, are not good ideas. They make you a chattel to the supermarket. Freedom is the way to go, although it’s challenging trying to free fools from the chains they worship.”

   Neither Frank nor Betty knew what to say. As they got ready to leave, Barron scooped handfuls of birdseed from a large barrel into a brown paper bag and handed the bag to Frank. He was still unsure about Betty. She seemed to always be giving him the stink eye.

   “You should take every chance to feed the birds and other animals you see outside your house,” he said. “Give them good food, organic food, not processed. It will make such a difference in their lives.”

   On the driveway of his parent’s ranch-style house at the top of Hogsback Ln., looking across the valley towards the Hilliard Bridge, Barron tapped the brim of his Chief Wahoo baseball cap in farewell.

   “Be a real vegan,” he said. “That’s the best thing any of us can do.”

   Frank and Betty walked the long way around before circling back to home, first crossing the Hilliard Bridge to Rocky River, from where they would make for Lakewood. The nine hundred foot long concrete bridge wasn’t the first one at that spot. The earliest one was known as the “Swinging Bridge.” It was a rope bridge with wooden planks that was used by school children and pedestrians back then to cross the river. It hung thirty feet above the water and swayed in strong winds. Sometimes a child fell into the river and had to be saved.

   Betty was unusually quiet. She was usually a talkative woman. Frank gave her an inquisitive glance. As they passed the Erie Island Coffee Co. on Detroit Rd., where there was outdoor seating, she suggested they stop for refreshments, since Barron hadn’t offered them any.

   “Man, oh man, I know chocolate brownies have eggs in them,” Betty said, “and cappuccino has milk in it, and I know Barron would have a cow, but right now I think I need to sit down and enjoy myself for a few minutes, not thinking about that guy.”

   They agreed that the vegans they knew were ethical and compassionate, their lives complementing their health, humanitarian, and environmental concerns. They could not agree on whether Barron Cannon was a determined idealist, a mad ideologue, or simply lived in an alternate universe. Or maybe he was just his own incarnation of the cranky old guy on the porch.

   They sat at a table outside the entrance door. They had espresso and cappuccino, scones with gobs of butter, and chocolate brownies. They watched the sun slip in and out of the springtime clouds and walked the rest of the way home in the late afternoon in a sated buzzy state-of-mind.

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

“Bomb City” by Ed Staskus

“A Rust Belt police procedural when Cleveland was a mean street.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F1LM1WF9/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2MYAQAOZIC2U9&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.hTm7BGbiQbSe5ZapFwYPPfcwOpTe-Vdg6VLE4aGyTyk.Z0R-VNBWWEcvKcNaO9LdCOUnNIOOXgvYkRS_FXiXuHk&dib_tag=se&keywords=bomb+city+ed+status&qid=1742136726&sprefix=bomb+city+ed+staskus%2Caps%2C84&sr=8-1

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. Nothing goes according to plan.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

West Park Blues

Here and Now

Leave a comment

By Ed Staskus

   It was in the middle of winter that Maggie Campbell started noticing her mother wasn’t herself. The middle of winter meant it was dark as could be before six o’clock. A blizzard had blown in over Lake Erie. It was icy cold and the forecast was for more cold.

   “Something’s wrong with mom,” Magie told her brother Brad.

   “What do you mean?” he asked. 

   “Something’s up, maybe she’s in another drug psychosis, because she’s got issues.”

   Steve de Luca, Maggie’s husband, and she had gone to Fort Lauderdale with her mother and Pete, her stepdad, to their house there. Alma got into a health problem and got put on steroids. They wreaked havoc with her. One thing led to another and she started overdoing and overdosing everything. It wasn’t exactly anything new, but she went into a psychosis. They got her out of the hospital in Florida and went back to Ohio. When they did they had to detox her.

   “Mom, you have to go back into care,” Maggie told her getting off the plane in Cleveland. “You have got to get clean.”

   “I’m not going back to the hospital, Jay,” she said. Her mother called Maggie the Jay Bird.

   “Yes, you are. You’re not done. There’s something seriously wrong. You have to go back and finish.”

   “If you think I’m going back to the hospital, you’re wrong, I’m not. I’m healthy as a horse.”

   When Maggie insisted, she got mad as a hornet and called her daughter everything but a cannibal. “I hope you’re having fun!”

   “If you think this is fun for me, you are seriously mistaken,” Maggie said. 

   “Go to hell, Jay,” she said.

   “Maybe later, mom, but right now, I’ve got to get you to a hospital.” 

   Even though Alma was angry up down and every which way, they got her there. Afterwards things got better, even though she wasn’t sleeping well at night. She tossed and turned and woke up exhausted. Then she fell and broke her back. Maggie told her she needed surgery. 

   “I don’t want to,” Alma said. “I’m going to go on pain management instead.”

   “Oh, great,” Maggie said to her brother. “She’s going to take more drugs.” Alma’s house was already a pharmacy. The whole family knew about it but nobody was willing to do anything about it.

   After a week of intense pain management Alma couldn’t walk. She had to have surgery because of the way her vertebra broke. It was poking into a nerve. After surgery she seemed better, but she was high all the time, even more than she had been. She would take an OxyContin and then a couple of Percocet’s and be gone like a kite in the sky. Maggie’s mother was 78 years-old and was tripping. It wasn’t anything new. She had taken drugs most of her life. It started when she became a nurse. After that it was going to the doctor, getting drugs, then seeing more doctors, and getting more drugs.

   Maggie began noticing that after her mother started getting better she started getting worse. At first, they thought she had a urinary tract infection, as though it was one thing after another. They thought she was looking, sounding, and acting crazy because of the infection. But the doctor ruled out a urinary tract infection.

   “I just have the flu,” Alma said.

   “Maybe it’s about missing her drugs,” Pete said. “She hasn’t taken any medication in three weeks.”

   “What? Why isn’t she taking her drugs?” Maggie asked. “She’s a major hypochondriac. I mean, she lives to take drugs.” All of a sudden, a woman who lived to take drugs wouldn’t take a single pill. She wouldn’t take her high blood pressure medicine, her thyroid medicine, or her asthma medicine. She had gone cold turkey.

   “You have to take these,” Maggie said.

   “I was a nurse,” Alma said. “You’re not a nurse, What do you know?”

   “Take your medicine.”

   “No.”

   On top of everything else Alma was diabetic and wouldn’t take her insulin. “Don’t you think it’s time to measure her sugar?” Pete asked Maggie.

   “She doesn’t seem to have any idea about what to do to take care of herself,” Maggie said. “It’s like she doesn’t know anymore that she needs insulin.”

   They took her back to the doctor’s office. She was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. He said she might have had some mini strokes, which he was going to have to test for. When they finally got her to take her medications, she would only take them from Maggie. She had to put them in applesauce and feed them to Alma in the mush. She wouldn’t take any from her son Brad. He was like their father and that made Alma mad. She never liked her first husband Fred.

   “Do you want supper, mom?” Maggie asked.

   “’No, I already ate some.”

   “That’s what she says, even though she hasn’t,” Maggie told Pete. “You have to live in her world. There’s no reasoning with her. You have to take all reasoning out of the conversation. Suppose she wants to have her hair brushed? You learn to use little white lies and trade-offs. ‘You take your medicine, mom, and I’ll brush your hair.’ It’s hard to watch. It’s like seeing your mom revert back to childhood.” 

   Maggie started doing art projects with Alma, just to keep her mind occupied.

   “My brother helps a little, but my stepdad and I are who take care of her,” Maggie told Steve. “My sister Bonnie, who hasn’t talked to me in more than seven years, lives in a podunk somewhere. No one even knows the name of the town. My other sister, Elaine, has a hard time with it. It makes her depressed, even though she and my mom never got along. She can’t deal with it and just stays away.”

   Maggie went to her mother’s house on Mondays and Fridays. She gave her a bath every Monday. Fridays were usually a bad day all around, as though everything might come to an end at the end of the week. Home health care came in five days a week and made sure she took her medications. They wrote everything they did down in an iPad.

   “She’ll take pills from me, and sometimes from a stranger, although not always. One Thursday she slept for more than fourteen hours and when Friday morning got there still didn’t want to get up.”

   “I don’t want to,” Alma said.

   “But why, mom?”

   “I don’t know.”

   “I don’t want to make you upset, but Tiffany’s going to be here soon to give you your medicine. Do you remember Tiffany?”

   “I don’t forget, Jay. The doctor says I never forget. I was just there, so I know.”

   “OK, so that’s what he said?”

   “He says I don’t have a memory problem at all.”

   “Mom, that’s great,” Maggie said. “I’m glad you don’t have a memory problem,”

   “That nurse, whoever she is, she can come here, but I won’t get out of bed.”

   “I can guarantee you she will be here, so you be nice.”

   “Oh, I’m nice. I’m just not going to get up.”

   “That’s not being nice.”

   “I know what’s chirpy and what’s not.”

   There were many things Alma no longer knew. There were some things she knew full well but there were fewer and fewer of them. What she still knew was slowly becoming a pile of broken mirrors.

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. 

Help support these stories. $25 a year (7 cents a day). Contact edwardstaskus@gmail.com for details.

“Bomb City” by Ed Staskus

“A Rust Belt police procedural when Cleveland was a mean street.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F1LM1WF9/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2MYAQAOZIC2U9&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.hTm7BGbiQbSe5ZapFwYPPfcwOpTe-Vdg6VLE4aGyTyk.Z0R-VNBWWEcvKcNaO9LdCOUnNIOOXgvYkRS_FXiXuHk&dib_tag=se&keywords=bomb+city+ed+status&qid=1742136726&sprefix=bomb+city+ed+staskus%2Caps%2C84&sr=8-1

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. Nothing goes according to plan.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Home Movies

Inside the Box

Leave a comment

By Ed Staskus

   I started playing racquetball in my mid-20s, at Cleveland State University, while taking my mandatory physical education class. I got good enough to play on an intramural team and some small tournaments around town. By the time I had played enough and worked my way through the B and A divisions to the Open division, I was in my 30s and getting too old to play in the Open division. It took a year-or-so of beating my head against the wall, but when the discontent went away I started playing in the 30-plus division.

   Racquetball is played with a small rubber ball on an indoor 20-foot-wide by 40-foot-long court. It is basically a box made of concrete or laminate with a hardwood floor. A door is set flush in the back wall, the wall sometimes made of tempered glass. The floor, walls, and ceiling are legal playing surfaces, with the exception that the ball off the racquet must not hit the floor first. Hinders are interference. It happens when somebody gets in the way. Unlike tennis, there is no net to hit the ball over, and, unlike squash, there is no out of bounds tin at the bottom of the front wall requiring the ball be hit above it.

   The game’s roots are in handball and Squash 57, a British game sometimes called racketball. Joe Sobek invented what would become racquetball in 1950, adding a stringed racquet to the game of paddleball in order to increase velocity and control. At the start he called his new sport Paddle Rackets. He was the first person to be inducted into the Racquetball Hall of Fame.

   When I started playing, the school supplied racquets, which were warped antiques that generated little velocity. Controlling the ball with them was along the lines of magic realism. Playing a game took forever because nobody could score points, unless it was by accident. Fortunately, Ektelon was on the way.

   Founded by Frank “Bud” Held, it was one of the first manufacturers to go big in a still small sport. Working from his garage in San Diego, he got his start designing and patenting a new kind of stringing machine. Ektelon introduced their first racquetball racquet in 1970. The next year they made the first ever racquet of high-strength aluminum. Six years later they pioneered hand-laid composite racquets and six years after that the first oversized models. They became foremost in the hearts of racquetball players.

   Ektelon racquets made a fast game even faster. The leading amateurs and top pros regularly hit drive serves in the 130-and-up MPH range. Even club players hit serves and set-up shots at 90 MPH and better. There is no outrunning the ball. Fortunately, given the parameters of the court, there isn’t far for the ball to run.

   Not only is it a flat out fast game, it works every muscle group known to man. The arms and upper body are involved in hitting the ball, legs are involved in getting to remote spots where the opponent has sent the ball, and the core is involved in keeping legs and arms on the same page. The more I played the better my balance became as my hip and leg strength improved. I became more flexible, too, stretching before and after matches so I could contort and lunge for difficult shots. My hand-eye coordination got better. I developed some playmaking skills.

   They weren’t classic life skills like reading, writing, and arithmetic, but they were classic skills for staying relevant on the racquetball court. The game is good for staying trim, too, since it is aerobic involving constant motion, burning up to 800 calories an hour. On the other hand, burning a boatload of calories isn’t so great at tournaments, which require not only playmaking to get to Sunday’s semi-finals and finals, but stamina to endure the Friday and Saturday matches and so make it to Sunday.

   I asked Danny Clifford, a heavy hitting high seeded Open player from Cincinnati, how he did it, usually  making his way to Sundays. He was about the same age as me. He never looked the worse for wear at tournaments. Whenever I made it to a Sunday, I looked bedraggled for days afterward.

   “You don’t want to see me Monday mornings,” he said. “I usually have to roll out of bed and crawl on all fours to the bathroom, where I run a hot bath and soak for as long as I can before I need to go to work. If I didn’t have a cushy enough job, I wouldn’t be playing in tournaments.” 

   Playing in an age division was the best thing I could have done. It wasn’t that anyone’s shot making was any the worse, but they were slowly and surely becoming slower like me and got sore and achy just as fast as me. They recovered slower, too. They didn’t party hardy Saturday nights anymore, opting for a good night’s sleep, instead. Dave Scott, my doubles partner when I played doubles, was an exception. His motor was along the lines of his Oldsmobile’s V8.

   Dave was the student at Cleveland State University with whom I started playing racquetball. I was an English and film major and he was in the accounting program, not that anybody could tell by looking at him. He wore his clothes loose and his hair long and smoked marijuana. When we started playing doubles together racquetball was the fastest-growing sport in America. Entrepreneurs around the country were busy building courts. Back Wall clubs popped up like mushrooms around northeast Ohio. The sport expanded internationally thanks to its fast pace and high intensity. The first world championship was held in 1981.

   “It’s the hottest recreational sport in America, spearheading the whole fitness craze,” said Marty Hogan, the world’s top-ranked player at the time.

   We didn’t know it was happening, but something happened to the hottest recreational sport over the course of the 1980s. Even though there were more than 12 million participants in 1982, the boom was over.  Aerobics and body building “had a definite impact” on racquetball, said Chuck Leve, editor of National Racquetball Magazine. “You have to understand that a lot of people do things that are ‘in.’ There was a time when racquetball was the thing to do. The people who played racquetball because it was a fad are long gone.”

   The morning Dave and I were scheduled to play a semi-finals doubles match at the Hall of Fame in Canton was a sunny mid-spring Sunday morning. it was a men’s Open match at one of Ohio’s biggest racquetball clubs. I got up early, drove to his house, parked on the street, and knocked on his back door. With one thing and another, by the time we got into his Rocket 88 it was 10 minutes after 9. Dave drove big cars with plenty of legroom and beefy engines. The match was scheduled for 10 o’clock. The club in Canton was an hour away.

   “Don’t worry, we’ll be there with time to spare,” Dave said. When we pulled onto the highway I found out why he was so confident. He flattened the accelerator pedal and sped to Akron at 90 MPH. He slowed down going through Akron, but once we were just south of it, he picked it up a notch, hitting 100 MPH an hour. Even though there were few cars on the road that early in the morning I gnashed my teeth and hung on to the ‘Oh God!’ handle above the passenger door. My takeaway coffee got cold. We walked into the club with 5 minutes to spare.

   The Hall of Fame was a large club with 25 racquetball courts, among other things like tennis courts, basketball courts, and a swimming pool. We were at one of the glass back walled courts ringing the lobby, putting on our sweatbands and sticky gloves, when Kelvin Vantrease strolled in. He had two blondes with him, one on each arm. Heads swiveled as he strolled towards the locker room. Only Kevin Deighan, an Open player from Mentor who hit line drives and nothing but line drives, kept himself to himself. He was a staunch Republican and didn’t suffer rascals, unless they were good for his wallet.

    Kelvin Vantrease looked like he had been up all night. He was scheduled to play on one of the two center courts in an Open semi-final singles match at the same time as us. He looked like he needed a nap, a shower and shave, and a fisherman’s breakfast. He didn’t look like he was going to unleash his vaunted forehand anytime soon. I couldn’t have been more wrong. There was thunder in his shot-making that morning and it was all over before his opponent knew what hit him.

   I played Kelvin in an Open quarter-final match once. He crushed me in the first game. I eked out the second game, mostly because he was horsing around and I wasn’t. I scored the first point of the tie breaker. Feeling my oats, I served again, tempting him with a lob serve. He didn’t take the bait, we rallied, with Kelvin hitting the ball harder and harder and me trying to match him. I don’t know what got into me, but I started diving for the ball whenever I couldn’t get to it on my feet. I finally left a  floater that hung around the front of the court. He attacked it, taking it out of the air hip-high, hitting a splat shot, and barking, “Return that!” I didn’t return it and didn’t score another point.

   A couple of years later the four-time Ohio junior racquetball state champion and 1984 United States doubles champion needed surgery. “When I had back surgery for a ruptured disc, the doctor told me I would never play sports again,” Kelvin said. ”I had never planned to go pro or even play much on the amateur level, but when someone tells you that you can’t do something, it makes you want to do it more.”

   He bought a motor home and supported himself giving lessons, churning out up to 40 of them a week. ”I’m like a rat,” he said. ”I can adapt. If I can live in a motor home for three years, I can live anywhere.” Half-Dutch, half-Cherokee Indian, he trimmed his Samson locks and cut down on the cornpone, like playing with a frying pan instead of a racquet and wearing swimming flippers instead of sneakers. He started playing tournaments again and by 1986 stood second in the men’s Open national rankings.

   Our doubles match turned out to be the match of the day. The men’s and women’s single’s finals were scheduled for the early afternoon. Other matches were going on, but ours went on and on and drew a crowd, in part because of the commotion.

   Our opponents were a lefty righty team, making it tough on us. Right from the start Dave did not like the lefty, who was a walking rule book. Hinders are inevitable when playing doubles and the rule book and his partner were no exception to the rule. They were worse. They were both hefty men and phlegmatic. They had no problem with never giving way. There were hinders galore. Dave took it in stride in the beginning. Then he started to seethe and smolder. Then he went off. He argued with them and started harping on the referee about blown calls. The referee put up with it for a while but finally ripped up the score sheet and tossed the crumbs down on the court, walking away. Another referee was rustled up.

   Refereeing was voluntary although the losers of the previous match on the same court were expected to referee the next match. The second referee did the best he could but wasn’t able to control or put up with the repeated flare ups, by now involving all four of us on the court. The crowd grew when a third referee had to be recruited. It was standing room only. There was cheering and catcalls, clapping and jeering, hoorays and laughter.

   We went to a tiebreaker game before finally losing by one point. It was an exciting match. The walking rule book was smug about their victory. Dave was gracious except on the ride home when he vented spleen for ten minutes before lighting up a blunt and calming down. I drank a bottle of Gatorade to keep from cramping up and took a toke to be companiable.

   I continued to practice and play and got a job at the Back Wall in Solon as an Activities Director so I could practice and play for free. I met others around town who were willing to play practice matches with me. Kevin Deighan and Gaylon Finch played in Mentor. Bobby Sanders and Jerry Davis played in Cleveland Heights. Steve Schade and Dominic Palmieri played in Middleburg Heights. At my home club I gave lessons, although there was no need to give lessons to local boy Doug Ganim, who was half my age and twice the playmaker. His t-shirts were emblazoned with “Eye of the Tiger” on the back. His backhand was already a rally killer. 

    Over the years he reached the finals of the National Doubles Championships eight times with four different partners, winning the national title four times. He is considered one of the best right-handed left-side players to have ever played the game, all the while promoting the sport as an executive for Head/Penn Racquetball for 28 years and as the President of the Ohio Racquetball Association for almost as long.

   I played racquetball through most of the 1980s, although not as much and not nearly as many tournaments as I had earlier in the decade. I started riding a mountain bike and was thinking of trying yoga. I began playing squash and one day put my racquetball gear away for good. Dave continued to play the game and play well with his old-school all-steel Dayton racquet. After a time it became the only one of its kind left in existence.

   My wife and I bought a house in Lakewood and I put my nose to the grindstone. I played squash whenever I could at the 13th Street Racquet Club in downtown Cleveland and found more than enough competition because many of the better players in the city played there. It was only a 10-minute drive from home instead of driving all over town looking for a skirmish inside the box. They had a Nautilus circuit and a running track. They had a sauna. They had food and drink at the bar for afterwards. It was a one-stop shop.

   The only thing squash didn’t have was a kill shot or a rollout. A kill shot in racquetball is hit low and bounces twice in the blink of an eye coming off the front wall. It is nearly impossible for an opponent to return. A rollout is hit so low that it rolls back flat after hitting the front wall, never bouncing at all. It is like a fingertip touchdown catch in the back corner of the end zone, irremediable and final.

   Although squash is a gentleman’s game, gentlemen with squash racquets can be hardhearted at the drop of a top hat. Some of them are patient wolves, the most dangerous in the animal world. The game has its own pleasures, like long rallies vying for position, but nothing like the pleasure of ending a rally with a perfect kill shot, rolling it out, and going Foghorn Leghorn.

   “Try and return that, son!”

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

“Bomb City” by Ed Staskus

“A Rust Belt police procedural when Cleveland was a mean street.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F1LM1WF9/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2MYAQAOZIC2U9&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.hTm7BGbiQbSe5ZapFwYPPfcwOpTe-Vdg6VLE4aGyTyk.Z0R-VNBWWEcvKcNaO9LdCOUnNIOOXgvYkRS_FXiXuHk&dib_tag=se&keywords=bomb+city+ed+status&qid=1742136726&sprefix=bomb+city+ed+staskus%2Caps%2C84&sr=8-1

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. Nothing goes according to plan.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication