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.
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Tracks of My Tears

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   By Ed Staskus

   I didn’t watch much TV growing up because we didn’t have a TV. It wasn’t until a couple of years after we moved from Sudbury, Ontario to Cleveland, Ohio that my parents bought a used 1955 Philco Custom 400. It was a 21-inch model in a cabinet of white oak with a finger-tip tuning system. It had a Double Gated Automatic Picture Control tuner that never worked during sketchy weather of any kind, whether it was drizzling or thunder storming.

   At first, I wasn’t impressed with what I saw. The shows were the likes of “McHale’s Navy,” “Car 54, Where Are You,” and “My Three Sons.” I had no use for “Hazel” and “I Love Lucy” drove me nuts. Lucy was a fruit loop and everybody hollered and played pratfalls like there was no tomorrow. I liked watching baseball and football games, although baseball games went on forever and football games were only broadcast on Sundays. The Cleveland Browns were a powerhouse. Everybody citywide stayed patriotically stuck to the tube when they were playing.

   Cartoons were fun and westerns were my favorite, especially “Maverick,” “Bart Masterson,” and “Have Gun – Will Travel.” My parents enjoyed “Bonanza” and watched it every Sunday night which meant my sister, brother, and I watched it every Sunday night. I didn’t care for it, the Cartwright’s being irredeemable do-gooders, but I couldn’t and didn’t say anything to my parents about my point of view. They were always telling me to be a good boy.

   My favorite was “Route 66.” It was about two young men driving around the country in a Chevy Corvette convertible. Besides the adventures, what I liked about the show was that every episode was shot on location in a new state. It was my kind of geography.  I would have given my tooth fairy money to be them. I didn’t mind being good, but I didn’t want to be too good.

   I had been to the neighborhood Shaw-Hayden Theater many times and seen plenty of space adventure and monster movies. My friends and I always sat in the front row. Movies were the real deal and TV was lame compared to the big screen. Movies were stupendous while TV was furniture. At about the same time we were watching Godzilla movies on the big screen the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission gave a speech to the National Association of Broadcasters. After praising the professionals in the room, he said that television should uphold the public interest. Then he said TV was a “vast wasteland.” He didn’t stop there. “When television is bad, nothing is worse.” He was a starry eyed idealist who didn’t pay attention to the commercials.

   One summer when I started watching “Queen for a Day” I watched it every day. It didn’t matter that my friends were riding bikes, playing ball, and messing around outside. I watched it laying on my stomach on the floor a few feet from the TV. I only watched it for three or four weeks, although it was more than enough to make me sweat bullets. When I stopped watching it, I went cold turkey and never watched it again. I hadn’t grown much older watching the sob show, but I seemed to be growing up way too fast on the tracks of melodrama and avarice.

   The show was originally a local affair on radio in Los Angeles but became popular enough that NBC picked it up and started broadcasting it nationally on television. The broadcast was live from the Moulin Rouge theater restaurant in Hollywood. Its ratings got so high that the network increased its running time from 30 to 45 minutes so they could sell more commercials. They were raking in $4,000 a minute, a premium price nobody else was getting. Sponsorships poured in. Every single prize came from sponsors. Models in faux medieval outfits plugged the products. They looked more slutty than maidenly. They had to put up with the sad sack-looking host saying things like, “Let’s give Mary Ann a big hand for finally doing something right.” Pre-recorded commercials ran between segments. Naming all the sponsors at the end of the show took more than five minutes.

   The show went to ABC from 1960 to 1964 until it finally folded. The television writer Mark Evanier has called it “one of the ghastliest programs ever produced, tasteless, demeaning to women, demeaning to anyone who watched it, cheap, insulting, and utterly degrading to the human spirit.” After that nobody bothered asking him what he really thought.

   The idea behind the show was simple as dog eat dog. “Queen for a Day” was about four women sharing their stories of unhappiness and tribulation in front of an all-female audience. There was always a box of Kleenex on the table behind which the women sat. jack Bailey was the host. He was a pencil mustached man who always looked like he needed another drink. The stories were about dead husbands and sons crippled with polio. One woman wanted to win so she could repair the bullet holes in her bedroom walls where her husband had committed suicide. He missed several times before getting it right. Determined widows with healthcare problems were a staple. If they had a small dying child, to boot, they were sure to win. 

   “I had two handicapped sons,” one woman said. “I lost them, and then I took care of an elderly lady in a wheelchair. She passed away, along with my mother and my father, and then my husband passed away. I feel that I would like to have a vacation.” She got her vacation. Another woman related the tale of her legally blind uncle and cousins. They were a poor farm family in Kansas. Everybody in the family had serious vision troubles. She came in second place and so none of her relations got new eyeballs.

   “On the show when Jack Bailey introduced my mother, he made a big deal about her being a long-lost cousin because her last name was Bailey,” one woman’s daughter recalled. “Since she was a farm girl, he asked her if she milked cows, and she demonstrated on his fingers. She became the queen that day. My uncle was given everything my mother asked for and more. He got a complete piano tuning tool set and a scholarship to a piano tuning school in Seattle. My mom got a full set of living room furniture and an Amana freezer that lasted for twenty-five years.”

   “My husband died,” one contestant explained. “Then my children and I were evicted and were out in the cold with nowhere to turn.” The show was the forerunner of all the reality TV shows that came after it. “Well, ha, ha, ha!” Jack Bailey laughed like he was at a circus. “Today is your lucky day, getting to tell your story here and having the chance at being chosen QUEEN FOR A DAY!” Sometimes, unable to help himself, he guffawed at the sad stories and threw out sarcastic comments, immediately explaining that he was just kidding.

   After the ladies finished, the audience applauded for the woman they wanted to see become “Queen for a Day.” The winner was determined by a decibel-reading Applause Meter, what I called the Thing-O-Meter. I didn’t always agree with the contraption, but what did I know. The winner was fitted with a jeweled crown and robed in a sable-trimmed robe. She got money, appliances, clothes, and vacations, among other things.

   “I always thought losing was the worst,” said Bill Costello, who like me found himself glued to the boob tube. “Then you find out your life sucks, but not enough.”

   Not just anyone was picked to be on the show. They had to somehow appeal to the  producers before they ever got to a live audience and the tens of millions watching at home. One woman explained she wanted to be on the show because “it would help me to regain my identity, which I seem to have lost somewhere between the maternity ward and the washing machine.” The best approach was delivering enough pathos and bawling to turn the trick. One woman said she would give her right arm to be on the show.

   My mother spotted me on the living room floor one day staring up at the TV, engrossed in the black and white pathos. She put her dish towel away and sat down in a sofa chair behind me. When the day’s episode was over, she shut the TV off. “Don’t watch that show anymore,” she said. She had never forbidden me to watch anything before. I knew there was something wrong with the show but couldn’t put my finger on it. It held me in its sordid grip. The women told fantastic stories, whoever got the most applause for her miserable tale won, got crowned, and walked away with prizes up the wazoo. What could be better?

   One winner said her husband was killed in a car crash, the family ended up poor as church mice, their savings exhausted, and needed help bad. “My mother was 28, pregnant, my sister was 8, and I was 5,” her daughter remembered years later. “My father promised my sister that if she got good grades, he would buy her a pony. She did but he died before he could fill his promise. My mother won two bedroom sets, a living room set, a dining room set complete with dishes for a service for eight, a set of silver ware, a cook-set, a built in mixer, a hot water heater, a 7-piece patio set, a complete set of Tupperware, twelve complete outfits that included dress, matching shoes and handbags, twelve pairs of stockings, a complete set of Sarah Coventry jewelry, a complete set of rhinestone jewelry, a diamond encrusted watch, a four piece matching mother-daughter outfit, a swimsuit, a check for $1,000, and a Shetland pony.” 

   When she came up for air she checked the time on the jewel-encrusted watch.

   Jack Bailey had a trademark signoff, which was, “Make every woman a queen, for every single day.” He never said what the losers got, although I always assumed they got nothing. Once my mother came to grips with the show, she disliked it instantly. My parents were World War Two refugees from Lithuania and didn’t believe a word about getting something for nothing.

   “I was babysitting my aunt’s four children in 1944 when the Russians came,” my mother said. “We ran away on a cart pulled by a horse with a cow tied to the back. On our way through East Prussia, we had to sell the cow for food. There was no milk for the baby. We slept under the cart every night and every night either the Germans or Russians bombed us. After the war I lived in Nuremberg in one room with three other women and worked at the Army Hospital. When I went to Canada where I had gotten a visa and a job, the job was as a nanny for a family of thirteen. When your father joined me the next year, he had no money and went to work in a cement factory the next day. When we got married, we still had no money, but we had the three of you and bought a small house. It’s shameful to go on a TV show, telling all the world your troubles for prizes.”

   She hadn’t seen her parents, uncles, aunts, brothers, sisters, and cousins for almost twenty years. The Iron Curtain was locked up tight. My parents never complained about it. They both went to work weekdays and on weekends worked around the house when they weren’t doing something at the church or with the Boy Scouts. They didn’t help us with our homework or drive us to the library. We did our own homework and walked to the library.

   She wasn’t telling me anything about “Queen for a Day” I didn’t already know, although I couldn’t if my life depended on it have put it into words. I knew I didn’t like the clapping like crazy for the most miserable story of the day. “Sure, the show was vulgar and sleazy and filled with bathos and bad taste,” the show’s producer Howard Blake said after the program’s nine-year run ended. “That was why it was so successful. It was exactly what the public wanted.”

   He didn’t stop there. He knew it was a trashy show that played on people’s misery, while those same people played out their tearjerkers to cash in on the American Dream. “Everybody was on the make, NBC and later ABC, the producers, the sponsors, and the suppliers of gifts. And how about all the down-on-their-luck women who we used to further our money-grubbing ends? Weren’t they all on the make? Weren’t they willing to wash their dirty linen on coast-to-coast TV for a chance at big money, for a chance to ride in our chauffeured Cadillac, for the free tour of Disneyland and the Hollywood nightclubs? What about one of the most common wishes they turned in? ‘I’d like to pay back my mother for all the wonderful things she’s done for me.’ The women who made that wish didn’t want to pay back their mothers at all. They wanted us to do that.”

   We never clapped and cheered when anybody in our grade school class at St. George’s Catholic School had a bad day. None of us clapped and cheered when a nun slapped one of us and made him or her stand in the hall. Nobody clapped and cheered when somebody was a step slow getting to the CTS streetcar taking us home. We yelled and slapped on the windows for the driver to stop and pick the kid up. None of us wanted to be finks for a day, or any other day.

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

A New Thriller by Ed Staskus

“Cross Walk“

“A once upon a crime whodunit.” Barron Cannon, Adventure Books

“Captures the vibe of mid-century NYC.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CRPSFPKP

Late summer and early autumn. New York City. A Hell’s Kitchen private eye. The 1956 World Series. President Eisenhower at the opening game. A killer in the dugout.

Chasing Infinity

X Marks the Spot

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By Ed Staskus

   As many times as I met Matt X. Sysack was as many times I didn’t meet his father Russell X. Sysack. Matt was my brother-in-law’s best friend. They met during their freshman year at St Ignatius High School on Cleveland’s near west side. My wife and I and my brother-in-law and Matt often went out together to weekend breakfasts, to shows, and to haunted houses. We went to honky-tonks to listen to the rock and roll band my brother-in-law played lead guitar for. After the two young men finished college and started on career tracks, they decided to not be too serious about life, at least not just yet. They decided to be fun guys while there was still some fun to be had.

   Neither of them lived on their own at the time. When they bought motorcycles they kept them in our garage. When they bought a Jet Ski together they kept it and its trailer in our garage. They launched the Jet Ski from Eddy’s Boat Harbor in the Rocky River Metropark a couple of minutes from our garage. We called the Metropark by its local name, which was the Valley. There was a bait shop at Eddy’s that sold ice cream. I had a cone one day while I watched the Sunday sailors launch their craft.

   It was only a couple thousand feet down the river to Lake Erie and fun riding the waves, except when they ran out of gas a half-mile out on the lake. When they did they discovered there wasn’t a paddle on board. A Good Samaritan in a power boat threw them a towline and got them safely to shore. It wasn’t long after that before they stopped cranking the throttle on the craft’s impeller. 

   Both Matt and my brother-in-law eventually sold their motorcycles and their Jet Ski and mothballed fun and games for the foreseeable future. “Hustle it up” is what they said. They put their noses to the grindstone. Matt’s father, Russell, always had his nose to the grindstone. He was a hard-working man with a family to support. At the same time, he never put his irreverent sense of fun away. He wasn’t going over the hill anytime soon. He knew over the hill meant picking up speed on the other side.

   Russell X. Sysack was born in Cleveland and went to John Carroll University, a Jesuit school in University Hts. After graduation he became co-owner and manager of the family business, Sysack Sign Co., in Old Brooklyn on Cleveland’s near west side. He sported a Waylon Jennings beard and overalls at work. The work he did was hand-painted signs, from small displays to big-size displays. When Russell’s father Harry X., who opened the business in 1940, punched the time clock for the last time, Russell took over. Over the years the Sysack Sign Co. gave the high life to innumerable storefronts.

   Russell mixed business with pleasure. He was a libertarian and provocateur, more in your face than subtle. He was outspoken. He was subtle as a sledgehammer. His signs were everywhere around northeastern Ohio. In the meantime, he had his own op-ed billboard at the front of his sign shop. It was across the street from a public library. His work for others expressed what their goods and services were about. His personal billboard was where he expressed himself. It was where he expressed himself In 2002 when he compared Martin Luther King, Jr. to Osama bin Laden. The comparison let the terrorist play his own tune; it insulted Martin Luther King, Jr. The billboard was set on fire one night. The Cleveland Police wrote up an incident report and filed it. Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones led a protest march. 

   “Mr. Sysack has said that over the years he’s been sued and received bomb threats because of his signs,” the Sun Press reported. Russell explained his resilience by saying “I take the right of free speech very seriously.” Stephanie Tubbs Jones wasn’t having any of it. “The right to free speech is limited,” she said. Nobody is allowed to falsely shout “fire” in a crowded theater, she added. The First Amendment doesn’t protect words “that incite people to violence.”

   The community was divided. “Those signs were the highlight of my day when I was stuck in traffic on W. 25thSt.,” Anna Namoose said. For some, his words were signposts. “I love his truthfulness,” Dale Bush said. “Sorry if the truth hurts.” Some were perplexed. “Every time I see his signs I’m struck with the same thought,” ‘Silent Dot’ said. “Sir, what do you think happens next? Do you think that someone driving by will stop and read your sign and go ‘Holy cow!’ this guy with the sign is a genius. I’m going to drive to the State House to speak my mind right now!” Others were outraged. “I hope your racist business closes,” Monica Green said. Some took an art school approach. “This is a special kind of batshit insane outsider art,” Adam Ohio said.

   One man, at least, took a philosophical approach. “Russell Sysack has been in our consciousness since the ’80s,” Tim Ferris said. “He really got going on issues in the ’90s when Mayor Mike White began compromising the public interest. He might be extreme, but he’s necessary. He forces us to think back towards a middle position. By temperament, perhaps by training, he’s a cartoonist, and it’s his purpose to distort and amplify so as to reveal or enlighten. We shouldn’t take cartoons too literally. Those who do, do so with the intent of silencing him. We also need to realize that we can’t look for good taste when it comes to addressing outrageous or extreme abuses. He speaks to big problems, and he uses strong talk.”

   He posted his strong talk on his personal billboard year after year and appeared regularly on local mouth-foam talk radio. His targets were Martin Luther King, Jr., the city’s African American mayors, and Black History Month. Politicians weren’t his favorite creatures. If they were Democrats, so much the worse for them. He celebrated Edward Kennedy’s death on his personal billboard, despite the Massachusetts senator being still very much alive. Public education and the Catholic church were targets of his ire. Anything new-fashioned was fair game. He compared environmentalists to Nazis. “The only way to make the earth green and stop global warming is for all humans to die” was what one sign said.

   The near west side sign man worked in the “Simon Sez” tradition even though he worked outside of the tradition.  Buddy Simon was the sign man on the near east side of town. He hung a “Simon Sez” sign outside his Carnegie Ave. shop every week for more than 30 years. They were usually wry and funny observations about the way we live today. He kept his nose out of race, religion, and politics. He stayed on the Mr. Rogers side of the street. Nobody ever set any of his signs on fire. 

   Russell X. Sysack was more of a soapbox man than Buddy Simon, although his soapboxing was more diatribe than not. He was a worried man singing a worried song. He was worried about how the present was going to affect the future. He stood by Abraham Lincoln, who said, “You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.”

   Splashing his op-ed sign on the street where everybody could see it, he wasn’t holding back.  He said he standing up for the taxpayer and the small businessman. He told anybody who would listen he was a defender of the American way of life, by which he meant capitalism. He said he was a patriot. He was met with threats, vandalism, and litigation. There were widespread complaints of racism. “I’m just expressing my opinion,” he told the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the city’s morning newspaper. 

   In this corner, still undefeated, it was Russell X. Sysack’s long-held opinions and beliefs. He didn’t need a referee. He gave as good as he got, even though his facts weren’t always reliable. Free speech advocates argued he was entitled to his own opinion. His detractors said he wasn’t entitled to his own facts. “Opinion has caused more trouble on this earth than plagues and earthquakes,” said the French Enlightenment writer Voltaire. The trouble with opinion is, more often than not, the fewer the facts the stronger the opinion. The White House under the thumb of a latter-day rabblerouser testifies to the trouble that can ensue.

   In retirement, Russell X. Sysack became a crossing guard for the Parma schools, working the streets in his neighborhood. He helped children cross the street safely. His presence made parents feel easy in their minds about their children walking to school. He reminded drivers in no uncertain terms of the presence of underage pedestrians. Nobody was ever run down on his watch. Pity the fool who tried to barrel down the road at 21 MPH.

   After he stepped aside from the sign company his sister Nancy took over the business, She lived in a house attached to the back of the sign shop. She was a chip off the old block. She kept up the family practice of posting the Sysack point of view on the op-ed billboard in front of their building. One of them had to do with migrants.

   “The head of DHS is a Communist & a Treasonist. On May 11th he will open the southern border. No illegal will be refused entry. US troops will transport them to every city in the US. They went to Panama to organize this invasion using NGO’s & the cartels with taxpayer money. 8 million will enter this country by year’s end from 150 countries. China has warships in the Bahamas. The plan is to overwhelm our system, crash our economy, and create a national emergency. There will be a fundamental change of our country into Communism. What are u going to do about this invasion?” 

   As it happened, nobody did anything because there were no Chinese warships in the Bahamas and no US troops were escorting anybody anywhere. The secret messages and conspiracies went up in smoke. The invasion was a nonstarter. Nancy went back to the drawing board.

   Her “Ugly Ugly Ugly” sign ruffled more than one feather in 2017.  It featured a woman’s wide open Rolling Stones-like mouth outlined in bright red lipstick. It said “All Women Are Beautiful Until They Open Their Mouth” and listed some women the sign maker considered loudmouths. It was in the tradition of bad taste making more millionaires than good taste.

   “The sign suggests women only have, or their mouths in particular, only have one purpose, and I find that greatly offensive,” said Christopher Demchak, one of the organizers of a demonstration. “Particularly in this political climate and particularly when young children and families are driving by.” The protestors were hoping a demonstration would influence the sign company to stop posting offensive content. They didn’t know who they were going up against.

   “We don’t want to cover up this message and stop somebody’s voice, since this was a woman who put this message out, interestingly enough,” said Christen DuVernay, the other organizer. “But, we do want to provide alternative messages for young girls in the community to say ‘your voice does matter.'” 

   President Barack Obama became the dartboard for Nancy’s darts when he was elected. “Now that red-necked and facist America elected Obama on a campaign of change, will blacks show their gratitude & change? Hell no. Will Jesse Jackson & Rev. Al stop being racists? Hell no. Will blacks stop using slavery as an excuse? Hell no.”

   When Russell invoked the First Amendment one of the things he meant was, if you can guarantee never offending anybody, you don’t need the amendment. It doesn’t guarantee you the right to be heard, though. Nobody has to read or listen to anything you have to say. All media has an on-off switch, even billboards, Look the other way if it rubs you the wrong way. You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the message blows.

   Russell X. Sysack died in 2009. He was in his mid-60s. He had run whatever race he was running. Wherever he has ended up, with the stand-up saints or the fallen angels, he is undoubtedly making his idiosyncratic voice heard, loud and clear.

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

A New Thriller by Ed Staskus

“Cross Walk“

“A once upon a crime whodunit.” Barron Cannon, Adventure Books

“Captures the vibe of mid-century NYC.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CRPSFPKP

Late summer and early autumn. New York City. A Hell’s Kitchen private eye. The 1956 World Series. President Eisenhower at the opening game. A killer in the dugout.

Dogs Never Bite Me

Dogs Never Bite Me

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By Ed Staskus

   Maggie Campbell was working at her friend’s hair salon in Old Brooklyn and was halfway through an overlay when her husband called. She couldn’t pick up since her hands were full. When she listened to the voice mail later, she heard Steve say he was sorry.

   “Honey, I’m sorry,” he said. She could hear talking in the background, and somebody laughing. The laughing man sounded like Fat Freddie, Steve’s brother.

   “What did you do?” she thought, sitting in the lunchroom, making a sandwich, waiting for it to heat up in the toaster oven. He rattled on for more than a minute. She took a bite of her ham and cheese sandwich. It was raining cats and dogs outside.

   “Oh, man, what did you do?” she thought to herself louder than before.

   “She was walking in the street,” he said. “She looked like she was trying to get hit by a car.”

   “Oh, he rescued another dog,” Maggie realized.

   He said the dog looked so bad that he pulled over, turned around, went back, and picked her up. Fat Freddie sat in the back with man’s best friend, who was shivering. “She was just looking for somebody to hit her,” Steve told Maggie over dinner that night. “She just wanted to die.” But there she was safe and sound at their feet.

   Steve found her on the east side, on Superior Ave. on the other side of downtown. No collar and no tags. She was a purebred German Shepherd, between two and three years old. Fat Freddie wanted her right away. He lived in Little Italy where he had some sketchy neighbors. But, because Steve’s brother had a hateful girlfriend, she said no, and that was that.

   When Steve brought her back to their house in West Park, Maggie fell in love with the pooch. “She’s so sweet I can’t stand it. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to give her to anybody.”

   She curled up on the sofa between them when they watched TV. If they got up at the same time, she didn’t know which one of them to follow. Wherever they went she was right behind them. She lay next to the claw tooth tub when Maggie took a bath. She had to step over the dog, which was hard to do with her short legs.

   She was wondering what the dog’s tale was.

   Maggie was going up the stairs to take a bath, stripping as she went, when she found out. She was taking her belt off when the dog almost pooped herself. She could not get away from the sight of the belt fast enough. The Shepherd stumbled down a few steps before recovering her balance, and disappeared fast

   Maggie muttered “son-of-a bitch” under her breath. “All because I took my belt off. How about that?”

   When they first got her, the dog was depressed and miserable. She wouldn’t eat for a week. At first, Maggie and the pooch shared rice chips. She wouldn’t eat anything else, and she wouldn’t touch dog food, but then she got back in the swing of eating chow.

   She had a bad ear infection, but, luckily, Maggie had ear medication left over from other dogs they had rescued. Their vet came over to check her out because she had some small lumps on her chest. Tracy the Vet said they were probably fatty lumps and nothing to worry about. She ran the dog’s blood, just in case.

   Steve put a call in to the pound and left a description of the dog and his phone number, but no one ever called back. Maggie didn’t know if she was going to be able to give her to anybody, but thought she had to find her a home, even if it was only with another rescuer.

   They put up fliers with other rescuers, passing them to each other, by word of mouth and on Facebook. They found a home for her in no time. A few days after Steve found the German Shepherd, Maggie tagged her sister about a Yorkie.  Her sister had needed to put her own Yorkie down a couple of months earlier.

   “I want the dog,” she said.

   Maggie called about picking up the Yorkie.

   “When can I grab the dog?”

   She drove to Elyria and picked up the eleven-month-old dog. He was going to be Maggie’s sister and nephew’s Christmas present, but they had to fix him up first, in more ways than one.

   An older woman had bought the dog from a breeder, but she broke her leg and ended up in a nursing home. Her kids locked the puppy in the garage for three weeks. They were sick idiots. They fed him, sure, throwing some food into the garage now and then, but they neglected the animal. He went from being spoiled rotten to having no one, no matter how rotten they were.

   Finally, a neighbor took the Yorkie, but soon decided the dog was vicious.

   “Oh, it’s vicious, vicious, it snarls at me, and lunges at me,” the lady said.

   “All seven pounds of it” Maggie said.

   “Yes, he won’t let me pass out of the kitchen.”

   “Just give me the dog,” Maggie said.

   People are so stupid, she thought. Sometimes I hate them. “Dogs never bite me, only people,” she told the Yorkie. “Honestly, I’d rather hang out with dogs,” she told anybody who would listen.

   Most of the Yorkie’s problem was that he had never been neutered. That was going to take a lot of his attitude out of him. The rest of it was they let him act like that. You don’t let a dog act like he wants to. You are the alpha dog, not the dog. He learned quick enough who the alpha dog was in Maggie’s house.

   “When they’re aggressive you have to show them that you’re more dominant than they are.”

   Maggie said no, and the Yorkie growled, showing his teeth, and she picked him up and put him on his back. If it’s a little dog, you put them on their backs. If it’s a big dog, you press on their backs until you hear the sigh of release.

   “We don’t do that in this house,” she explained.

   She put him in a cage.

   “Ugh,” he said, and said it again.

   But cage training is better than force training. After that he was a good boy, running around on the couch, playing with his rope and toy. When she gave him to her sister, she explained how to restrain him when he acted out, and to make sure she had a cage for him, just in case.

   The next day Steve came home with another Yorkie.

   “It’s for my cousin,” he said.

   Steve’s cousin Clint had been a heroin addict who had to have his legs amputated.

   “He isn’t still using, is he?” Maggie asked.

   “He needs a dog,” Steve said, and that was all he said.

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

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

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

A Cold War Thriller

“Captures the vibe of mid-century NYC.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CRPSFPKP

Late summer and early autumn, New York City, 1956. Stickball in the streets and the Mob on the make. President Eisenhower on his way to Ebbets Field for the opening game of the World Series. A killer waits in the wings. A Hell’s Kitchen private eye scares up the shadows.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

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Front Row Seat

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By Ed Staskus

   The documentary “Night and Fog” is 32 minutes long, unless it’s watched thirty times in a row, which makes it 16 hours long. I was studying literature and film at Cleveland State University in the late 1970s when I saw it for the first time and the thirtieth time. It had been made twenty years earlier by the French filmmakers Jean Cayrol and Alain Resnais. It is about the Nazi concentration camps of the 1940s, specifically Majdanek and Auschwitz. It is a monster movie without the pretend.

   The reason I watched “Night and Fog” thirty times successively by myself in a small dim room wasn’t because I was especially interested in World War Two or the Holocaust. In fact, the documentary spooked the hell out of me. Dennis Giles, the one and only professor of film in the Communications Department at Cleveland State University, had suggested I write a paper about it. He made me a teacher’s assistant so I could have a closet-sized office on the 16th floor of Rhodes Tower down the hall from his office. In return, I screened motion pictures for his film classes, which was hardly a chore. The rest of the time, which was most of the time, was my own. 

   Nazi Germany and its Axis allies built thousands of concentration camps and other incarceration and extermination sites between 1933 and 1945. They stayed busy as killer bees. Majdanek was outside Lublin, Poland and run by the SS. The SS were the black-uniformed and self-described “political soldiers” of the Nazi Party. There were many gallows and seven gas chambers. Auschwitz was also in Poland, a complex of forty camps. It was run by the SS, too. It had more gallows and more gas chambers. The camps were what the Nazis called the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.” They asked themselves the question and dreamed up the answer among themselves. The camps were also the solution about what to do with gypsies, homosexuals, Russian prisoners, and anybody else who got in the way of the Third Reich.

   My teacher’s assistant office was no-frills cinderblock, like the grind houses of the 1960s and 70s, which were old movie houses in bad neighborhoods showing low-budget horror movies. I was given access to a 16mm projector and a spotless copy of the documentary. It was the only thing clean about it. If the Nazis thought they were cleaning up the world, they had a dirty way of doing it. There was a method to their madness, but it was madness, nevertheless.

   Dennis Giles graduated from the University of Texas with a master’s degree. His thesis was “The End of Cinema.” He got a Ph.D. from Northwestern University and then showed up in Cleveland. He was tall, thin, lanky, dressed like a beatnik, and smoked like a chimney. He lived in Ohio City near the West Side Market. The neighborhood was a mess, but in the past ten years the Ohio City Redevelopment Association had gotten more than a hundred structures restored or redeveloped. Houses were being refurbished by the young upper middle-class, proto Yuppies, leading to complaints of gentrification. 

   If Dennis Giles was part of the gentrification, he didn’t look the part. He looked scruffy as a beatnik. He looked like he had spent too much time watching movies by himself. He was a member of the National Film Society. He liked to say film was art and television was furniture. He didn’t mean the furniture was any good, either.

   It took me a few days to figure out how to tackle the project. I finally decided to do a shot-by-shot analysis, zeroing in on how the shots were the brick and mortar of the scenes and sequences. I reasoned that if I tried writing about the gruesome nature of the subject, I would never get out of the weeds.

   The film goes back and forth between past and present, between black-and-white and color, with some of it shot by the filmmakers and some of it stock footage. The first shot is of a deadpan sky. The camera tracks downwards to a dreary landscape. It then tracks to the right and stops on strands of barbed wire. The second shot is of a field with a line of trees on the horizon. “An ordinary field with crows flying over it,” the narrator says. But it’s not an ordinary field. The camera again tracks to the right revealing posts with more barbed wire strung from post to post. The wire is electrified. The third shot tracks from an open road once more to the right to another tangle of more wire.

   After a while the tracking shots to the right and the wire everywhere start to look like a normal landscape. “An ordinary village, a church steeple, and a fairground. This is the way to a concentration camp,” the narrator says. When he says “steeple” the shot on screen is of an observation tower, machine guns at the ready.   

   The city of Siaulai is in the north of Lithuania, which is north of Poland. It is home to the Hill of Crosses. It is place of pilgrimage, established in the 19th century as a symbol of resistance to Russian rule. There are more than 100,000 big and small crosses on the hill. During World War Two almost every single Jew who lived in Siaulai bore his own cross. Most of the natives didn’t worry about them. They had more than enough of their own problems to worry about, squeezed between the Nazis and the Communists.

   My father was born in the mid-1920s and grew up in Siailiai. His father was the police chief who was swept up by the Russians in 1941 and deported to a Siberian labor camp for ideological reasons. He never stood a chance. He died of starvation the next year. My father was in his mid-teens. He had to take over the family farm. When the Germans invaded, capturing and imprisoning vast numbers of Red Army troops, he applied for and was granted labor rights to a dozen of them. There were severe manpower shortages. The Russians worked 12-hour days and slept in the barn. When they groused about the work, he passed out Bulgarian cigarettes and bottles of vodka. When they escaped, the Germans gave him more men and told him to lock the barn doors.

   The first part of “Night and Fog” is about the rise of fascist ideology in Germany. The second part contrasts the good life of loyal Germans to the travails of the concentration camp prisoners.  The third part details the sadism of the captors. The fourth part, all in black-and-white, is about gas chambers and piles of bodies. It is nothing if not dreadful. Even the living are bags of bones in their dingy barracks. The Nazis shaved everybody’s heads before they gassed them. They said it was for lice prevention and that the gas chambers were showers. They collected and saved the hair. It was used to make textiles at factories in occupied Poland. The last part is about the liberation of the camps and the bearing of responsibility.

   Everybody, even the next-door neighbors, said they didn’t know anything about the camps, or if they did, were just following orders. “We SS men were not supposed to think about these things,” said Rudolf Hoss, the commandant at Auschwitz. “We were all trained to obey orders without even thinking, so that the thought of disobeying an order would simply never have occurred to anybody, and somebody else would have done it just as well if I hadn’t. I never gave much thought to whether it was wrong. It just seemed a necessity.”

   The next shots of the film are of the rail lines to the camps and their gates. “All those caught, wrongly arrested, or simply unlucky make their way towards the camps,” the narrator says. “They are gates which no one will enter more than once.” The train tickets were all one-way. There was a 16-foot wide sign above the entrance gate to Auschwitz that said, “Work Makes One Free.” It didn’t say what kind of work.

   After World War Two started and the Nazis incorporated the Baltics into the Reich Ostland, there were about 240,000 Jews in Lithuania, about 10% of the population. The first thing the Einsatzgruppen did was start gunning them down in the countryside, aided by Lithuanian auxiliaries. By August 1941 most of them were dead or gone to ground. Then the SS killers started in the cities. There wasn’t a lot of search-and-destroy involved, so the grim business didn’t take long. 

   “Gangs of Lithuanians roamed the streets of Vilnius looking for Jews with beards to arrest,” said Efraim Zuroff, who didn’t wear a beard but whose wife and two sons were taken to Likiskis Prison and shot. Karl Jaeger, the commander of an Einsatzgruppen unit that did its work in Vilnius, kept an account book of their work. On September 1, 1941, he recorded those recently killed as “1,404 Jewish children, 1,763 Jews, 1,812 Jewesses, 109 mentally sick people, and one German woman who was married to a Jew.” When the war finally ended there were only 10,000-some Jews left in Lithuania, slightly more than 0% of the population. It was the largest-ever loss of life of any group in that short a period in the history of the country.

   The middle shots and scenes of the film are without narration. They show crowds of disheveled people being strong-armed into boxcars. The last shot is of a father leading his three children along a railroad platform. The father looks resigned and the children look bewildered. They are shoved into a boxcar. “Anonymous trains, their doors well-locked, a hundred deportees to every wagon,” the narrator says. “Neither night nor day, only hunger, thirst, and madness.”

   The Nazis occupied Siauliai in 1941. All the Jews were made to wear a yellow Star of David on their chests. Their children were forbidden to go to school. Their businesses were taken away from them. At the end of summer, the Einsatzgruppen and Lithuanian auxiliaries rounded up more than a thousand Jews, took them to a forest, ordered them to strip, and shot them down like dogs. They shoved their naked bodies into open pits. When the shooters left, they took all the watches, jewelry, wallets, and purses with them. “Today the sun shines,” the narrator says in the 70th shot of the film, tracking through the sunlit trees. “Go slowly along, looking for what? Traces of the bodies that fell to the ground?”

   The rest of the town’s Jews were made to move into a ghetto. Two years later two thousand adults and a thousand children were transported to Auschwitz and gassed. The next year the few of them left were sent to the Stutthof concentration camp. That finished off the Jews in Siauliai, once and for all.

   Nearing the end of the film the narrator asks, “How discover what remains of the reality of those camps, shrill with cries, alive with fleas, nights of chattering teeth, when they were despised by those who made them and eluded those who suffered there?” One of the last shots is of a macerated man lying on his side on the ground and drinking something from a bowl. “The deportee returns to the obsession of his life and dreams, food.” The next shot is of a dead man, legs akimbo in the mud, ignored by those around him. “Many are too weak to defend their ration against thieves and blows. They wait for the mud or snow. To lie down somewhere, anywhere, and die one’s own death.”

   My father fled Siauliai for East Prussia when the Red Army swarmed the country in 1944. His two sisters and mother were already on the run. One of his sisters made it to Germany, the other sister didn’t, going into hiding, while his mother was arrested and sent to Siberia, where she remained for the next ten years. Even though he fled with almost nothing except a handful of cash, a few family photographs, and a change of clothes, he had nothing to lose. The Russians would have shot him on the spot if they had captured him.

   Like most Lithuanians my father had no use for Jews. He never had a good word to say about them. He never let on to me, and never talked about went on in Siauliai, except as it related to his family, but I caught enough snatches of talk at parties, community events, and get-togethers to know what the score was. My father wasn’t a bad man, just like most Lithuanians weren’t bad men and women. He wasn’t any different than most people. He worked hard to support his family, community, and country. He was a Boy Scout leader and helped get the local church and parochial school built.

   The film ends with aerial shots of Auschwitz. It is 1945. The war is almost over. “There is no coal for the incinerators The camp streets are strewn with corpses.” One of the last sequences shows captured Nazi soldiers lined up by Allied forces outside a concentration camp. All of them look sullen and demoralized. Many of the soldiers are women. They carry rail thin corpses slung over their shoulders, throwing them into a pit, and going back for more. You never realize how thick the murk is until it lifts. Prisoners barely alive but suddenly free stand next to useless strands of rusting barbed wire. 

   In a Nuremberg courtroom one after another Nazi official says he was not responsible. “Who is responsible then?” the narrator asks. The Master Race all look like somebody’s bland Uncle Ernie. Nobody responsible says anything, although many at least were convicted of war crimes and hung. They should have been broken on the wheel and quartered for their evil deeds.

   Short of cannibalism, what the Nazis did to those they herded into their concentration camps was the worst thing they could have done. After I finished my thirtieth viewing of every shot, scene, and sequence in the film, I wrote my paper and turned it in. I got an A- for misspelling some words. I got to keep my cubbyhole. I knew I wouldn’t watch the documentary ever again. 

   One groundhog day after another had gotten me down in the dumps. Enough was enough. I returned my print of “Night and Fog” to the university library. I caught my breath and went for a walk in the brimming light of day.

A version of this story appeared in Literary Heist Magazine.

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. 

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

“Captures the vibe of mid-century NYC, from stickball in the streets to the Mob on the make.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CRPSFPKP

Late summer and early autumn. New York City, 1956. President Eisenhower on his way to the opening game of the World Series. A hit man waits in the wings. A Hell’s Kitchen private eye scares up the shadows.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Home Movies

Juke Joint

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By Ed Staskus

   When Matt Lavikka and I slowly but surely stopped playing chess and started playing Go we didn’t know we were sitting down to the oldest board game played continuously to the present day. The game was invented in China 3,000-some years ago. It is a contest for two players in which the goal is to capture more stones and surround more territory than your opponent. The way of the game is inexorable. The way anybody plays is one’s own choice.

   The playing pieces are called stones. One player uses the white stones and the other one the black stones, taking turns placing them on the vacant intersections of the board. The stones can’t be moved once placed, but are removed from the board if it, or a group of stones, is surrounded on all adjacent points, in which case it is captured. At the end the winner is determined by counting each player’s surrounded territory along with captured stones. 

   Games can and do end when one player is very tired or has gone brain dead. Our games usually went for two to three hours. The longest game ever played was played in Japan in 1938 between two Go masters. It lasted 54 hours. Shusai Meijin, the older of the two masters, died immediately after the marathon due to the aftereffects of the ordeal. He played the game with life and death determination. 

   The chess board starts with everything on it. The last man standing wins. The Go board starts with nothing on it. Whoever is the more ruthless and determined ends up on top. It’s the way of the world. Even though the rules of Go are simple, the play is complex, especially the longer the action goes on. It has a larger board than chess with more scope for play and more alternatives to consider. The number of board positions in Go has been calculated to be greater than the number of atoms in the observable universe. The Japanese believe no two matches have ever been or ever will be the same. They deem the game to be a microcosm of everything everywhere all at once.

   If we had known that we probably would never have started playing. By the time we found out it was too late. We had been sucked into the black hole of Go. Getting out of the hole meant going down to the Harbor Inn for a pick-me-up. It was another hole, on the west bank of the Cuyahoga River in the Flats. It either was or wasn’t the oldest bar in town. Either way, the place wore its reputation on its sleeve.

   “The place was always shoulder to shoulder with bikers and their molls,” said Dan Coughlin, a sportswriter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer. “Wally had a virtual armory behind the bar. He had pistols and shotguns. One night in the middle of the summer we stacked up cases of beer bottles and fired at them from the hip, with shotguns blasting away. I put a hole in the stop sign in front of his bar.”

   Wally was Vlado Pisorn, an immigrant from Slovenia who had taken over the Harbor Inn sometime in the indeterminate past. We called him Vlad the Impaler. He had the kind of beer we liked, the kind from Germany and Czechoslovakia. The wine came from a hose and died on the tongue. After a couple of near deaths, we never drank it again.

   Matt had served a tour of duty in the armed forces, was on a prolonged stretch of R & R, and in the meantime was boning up for the entrance exams for mailman, fireman, and policeman. He was hedging his bets. He finally found employment with the Bay Village Fire Department, which was like working at a posh nursery school. There were hardly ever any fires anywhere near the lakefront suburb. There were, however, lots of old folks having heart attacks and strokes and the EMS trucks kept up an endless shuttle to St. John West Shore Hospital.

   One night Matt and his duty partner Chuck were called to a house where the man of the house was having chest pains. He was on his back in bed, his eyes closed. When they stepped up to him in the bedroom his wife whispered that she thought he was dead. “The poor dear man,” she said. Chuck was in the lead. As he walked up to the bed, he slipped on a throw rug and went head over heels on top of the man, body slamming him, the bedsprings recoiling.

   “If he’s not dead yet, he’s dead now,” Matt thought. 

   “Is he OK?” the woman asked, alarmed. 

   “Your husband will be OK,” Matt said. 

   “No, not him,” the woman said. “I meant the other fireman.” 

   “What the hell is going on!” the dead man suddenly spat out, jolting awake. “Get your fat ass off me.” He rolled Chuck off the bed, who fell to the floor. From then on, Chuck was known as Lazarus back at headquarters. It took years for the sobriquet to fade away.

   Virginia Sustarsic introduced me to Matt. How they knew each other was beyond me. She was Slovenian and a hippie through and through. He wasn’t, not by a long shot. He was a cool customer and Finnish on top of everything else. He played chess, like me, and we got to know one another playing now and then. I had moved out of the Plaza Apartments, where Virginia still lived, and was living on a forgotten street in North Collinwood, a couple of blocks south of Lake Erie. I lived upstairs in a two-bedroom Polish double. Ray Sabaliauskas, a fellow Lithuanian, owned the house and lived downstairs with his Southeast Asian wife and a prize German Shepherd. He had come home safe and sound from the bright shining lie that was the Vietnam War.

   I found my Go game at a garage sale in the neighborhood. It was practically brand new, the instruction sheet still in the box. I paid a dollar for it in pocket change. Reading the rules took less than five minutes. Explaining the rules to Matt took less than one minute. Our first game took five hours. We played on the front porch. The contest was suspended due to darkness when the sun set.

   “The best strategy is to spread the pieces far apart and stretch them out, to encircle and attack the opponent, and thus win by having the most points vacant,” Go master Huan Tan said nearly two thousand years ago. We were both bug-eyed after our first game. We didn’t know the game’s strategy from a seesaw. It was like wrestling a gorilla. You don’t quit when you’re tired, you quit when the gorilla is tired. Go is considered the most difficult board game in the world. Sleeping became my new go-to after a long match.

   I started jogging on Lakeshore Blvd. west out of North Collinwood, where everybody was a working man in one way or another, through the village of Bratenahl, where everybody was tall, trim, and filthy rich. They oozed pride in their state of being. When I was running in their neighborhood I hesitated to even spit on the tree lawns. I had put exercise on the back burner in my early 20s. I never thought I would be working out again to be able to sit quietly hour after hour staring at a square board of intersecting lines.

   When I was a teenager I ran track and field as part and parcel of Zaibas. It was a Cleveland Lithuanian sports club formed in 1950. In 1951, at the 1st North American Lithuanian Games, members participated in basketball, volleyball, and table tennis. The next year the club hosted the games in our hometown and fielded a full team in track and field. 

   In the 1960s I ran around in circles encouraged by Algirdas Bielskus. He was a small man with a round face and a championship head of hair. He was the director of a men’s vocal ensemble, co-founder of a choir, and concertmaster of the Ciurlonis Ensemble. He was also the Zaibas track and field coach for sixty years. He had the voice to make himself heard loud and clear from the far end of any quarter-mile track. Every weekend fair or foul all I heard was “Go! Go! Go!”

   He always carried a briefcase, briefcases he was always losing, stuffed with notes about how we were progressing. Rita Kliorys, one of his top-notch runners, made him a Christmas gift of a new one in 1966. “It was the accordion kind,” she said. “I remember it cost $100.00, and I collected one dollar from many people. He actually did not lose it, either.”

   He coached thousands of youngsters who ran hundreds of thousands of miles. “I thought of him afterwards whenever I saw a turquoise and orange Howard Johnsons and would remember how he took us there for ice cream sometimes,” Regina Thomas said. “Although I was a klutz at sports, he never made me feel like one. I never thought much about it as a kid, but what a commitment to youth and sports.” The small man with the big voice was seemingly tireless, championing fitness among Cleveland’s Baltic off-spring.

   “He worked for my dad’s company, Transmission Research, in the basement of our house,” Dalia Nasvytis said. “Sometimes we would hear strange noises downstairs late at night and realize he was still down there running off schedules for the next athletic meet he was organizing.” He was unrelenting about the fettle of immigrant kids.

   Once we started playing Go, Matt and I made a commitment to it. We played all that spring, summer, and through the winter, two and three games a week. It wasn’t an obsession, although it was. We played on the front porch until it got too cold to play outside. After that we played in the living room at a coffee table, sitting opposite one another, all four of our eyes glued to the board.   

   The game demands concentration, which is born out of silence. Some of our best moves and long-term maneuvers were made quiet stealthiness. I found out the more time I spent noiseless, the more illumination lit me up. We hardly talked, going for a half-hour without saying a word. Every so often Matt smoked a Marlboro. Before long he would tap another one out of the red and white flip-top box. Whenever I joined him, the living room filled with smoke, a gray-white cloud stewing over the entanglements of Go.

   When we first started playing our plan of attack was capturing stones. We both saw that surrounding other stones and taking them prisoner yielded points. It was like taking a piece in chess. After a while we discovered the object of Go is not to surround and capture the opponent’s stones. The object is to surround empty territory on the board. The way to do it is by building walls around empty intersections. If your territory includes some opposing stones, all the better. Then it’s grab and go. From then on it became a contest to capture territory rather than simply capture stones.

   In the Eastern world Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War” reads as an introduction and exposition to the game. Real life warlords back in the day of every stripe were always big on blockading their enemies and capturing territory. The times they were not a-changing, not anytime soon. The Vietnam War was over, but there was always another war on the horizon.

   There’s an old saying, “Chess is a battle. Go is a war.” The more we played the more we discovered it was a war of attrition. It was like breaking stones in the hot sun. Both of us knew how to make the other guy sweat. There was no fighting the commandments of Go.

   Oskar Korschelt, a German chemist, brought the game from Japan to Europe in the 1880s. Even though it was slow to catch on, by the 1950s championship-level tournaments were being organized. By the early-70s it was filtering into the United States. I never met another Lithuanian who played the game. My kinsmen are instinctively suspicious, somewhat superstitious, sometimes curious, usually sensible, always pragmatic, hard-working, conformist, and punctual. They are often reserved except when they get together. Once they establish their bona fides it’s time to pick up a drink and run off at the mouth, getting communal. They play volleyball and basketball like nobody’s business. They probably couldn’t stand the prolonged silence of Go.

   One night after a long back-and-forth on the board we drove to the Harbor Inn. We were looking for some downtime. The two-story building was a home-away-from-home for dockworkers and salt-miners. A lonely man who didn’t mind a lumpy mattress could even grab some shut-eye upstairs. It might have been a dive way back when, but it was no ifs ands or buts about it still a dive, slinging suds to third shifters in the morning and anybody else who had a buck the rest of the day and night. There was a coin operated bowling arcade game downstairs and battered dart boards upstairs. We ordered bottles of Pride of Cleveland instead of imported European brew, being short on ready cash, and picked up a handful of house darts.

  Nobody knew how long the Harbor Inn had been there, but we thought it had to be from the day after Moses Cleaveland settled the land centuries before. It reeked of smoke from long-gone cigars and cigarettes. The shadows smelled even worse, like ammonia had been set on fire. Looking around there was no doubt some of the men at the bar only bathed once a month.

   The beer was cold and refreshing and playing darts was fun. We played 501 Up. Both players start with a score of 501 and take turns throwing three darts. Bullseye scores 50, the outer ring scores 25, and a dart in the double or treble ring counts double or triple. The tally is calculated and deducted from the player’s total. The goal is to be the first player to reduce the score to exactly zero, the only hitch being that the last missile thrown must land in a double or the bullseye. 

   Darts are front weighted for flight and are several inches long with a sharp point. A big part of playing darts is the throwing part. The rest of it is mental toughness, staying on the button, stinging the cork like a bee. It was like Go except we could let ourselves go. We wrote our names in chalk on the brick wall, adding them to the hundreds of other names reaching to the ceiling. After a couple more Pride of Cleveland’s we got sloppy, but it was no matter in the juke joint that was the Harbor Inn.

   When I took a good look at the dart board, there weren’t a hundred-or-more darts crowding it, like all the stones on a Go board. Every throw was always at an empty target, every throw a new chance to get it right, unencumbered by the past. Go was all about the past, the past of all the carefully placed stones on the board. Playing darts was right now. It was a relief to see the target and hit the target, except when we completely missed and the dart bounced off the brick wall. When that happened we yukked it up, not like the game of Go, which was never a laughing matter.

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

A New Thriller by Ed Staskus

“Cross Walk“

“A once upon a crime whodunit.” Barron Cannon, Adventure Books

“Captures the vibe of mid-century NYC.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CRPSFPKP

Late summer and early autumn. New York City. A Hell’s Kitchen private eye. The 1956 World Series. President Eisenhower at the opening game. A killer in the dugout.

Home Movies

Elbow Grease

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By Ed Staskus

   When Mike White was elected the 55th mayor of Cleveland in the fall of 1989 he became the city’s second youngest mayor. Everybody thanked their lucky stars he wasn’t Dennis Kucinich, who had been the youngest, and who had bankrupted the city in 1978. He also became the city’s second African American mayor. Blacks weren’t exactly Blacks then, although they were getting there. They were African Americans. When Frank Jackson finally retired in 2022, after serving four terms as the 57th mayor of Cleveland, Mike White became the second-longest-serving mayor. He had served three terms.

   The day he was sworn in he inherited a boatload of crime, poverty, and unemployment. The tax-paying population of the city was shrinking fast. Downtown was more a hotbed of boll weevils than hotties. There was no Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and no Gund Arena, which is now Rocket Mortgage Field House. The Indians and Browns were both still playing their ballgames in the decrepit Municipal Stadium on the south shore of Lake Erie, although the Browns were thinking of packing up and moving to Baltimore.

   My wife and I were living in Lakewood, which wasn’t Cleveland, although it was close enough. It was the big city’s next door neighbor, what in the day was called a streetcar suburb. Nearly half of Cleveland’s residents were African American. Less than 1% of Lakewood’s residents were African American. We lived on the west end of town where there were zero African Americans. There wasn’t a Berlin Wall keeping them out of town but there was a Berlin Wall.

   We lived off Riverside Ave. on the east side of the Rocky River valley, which had been transformed into the Rocky River Metropark. The river and the valley were just steps from our front porch. Cleveland’s racial divisions seemed like a distant problem. In the event, one day a man was apprehended throwing more than a dozen black bowling balls into the Rocky River at Eddys Boat Dock. He explained to the police officers, “I thought they were nigger eggs.”

   Being the mayor of a village is hard enough. Being the mayor of a city can be thankless. It can be worse than thankless when the top dog shows up. “I would not vote for the mayor of that town,” Fidel Castro once said while touring his island nation. “It’s not just because he didn’t invite me to dinner, but because on my way into town from the airport there were such enormous potholes.”

   There was only one reason Mike White wanted the job. He was a born and bred Cleveland man. He was a true believer and a do-gooder. He was bound and determined to make the city a better place to live. “I remember looking out at the crowd of Cleveland residents, black and white, and reflecting on how many children were there,” he said about his inauguration day in 1990. “I remember how they looked at me as a symbol of what could be. It speaks to the powerful responsibility of being the kind of leader people want to follow.” 

   Getting the job done was going to be a problem, if not Mike White’s man-sized burden. He presented himself on the stump as pro-business, pro-police, and an effective manager. He argued that “jobs are the cure for the addiction to the mailbox,” by which he meant once-a-month welfare checks. He didn’t win over any live and die by the mailbox voters. In the end he won 80% of the vote in the white wards, 30% of the vote in the African American wards, and 100% of the brass ring.

   “Caesar is dead! Caesar is dead!” the crowd in Cleveland Centre cheered when the result was announced. It was near midnight. “Long live the king! Long live Mike!” When the mayor-elect appeared, people stood on chairs and cheered some more. “I extend my hand to all of Cleveland whether they were with me or not” he said. It had been a bitter uphill campaign. “The healing begins in the morning!” There were more cheers. “We … shall … be… ONE … CITY!” He spent twelve years trying to make it happen.

   “Winning an election is a good-news, bad-news kind of thing,” Clint Eastwood, the movie star who was once the mayor of Carmel-by-the-Sea, has said. “Okay, the good news is, now you’re the mayor. The bad news is, now you’re the mayor.” He ran on a promise to roll back Carmel’s back-handed ban on ice cream cones. The law stated that take-out ice cream cones had to be in secure and foolproof packaging with a cover. “Eating on the street is strongly discouraged,” the suck all the fun out of it city fathers said. The actor beat the incumbent in a tight race. One of his first official acts was getting au naturel ice cream cones back on the streets. After his two-year term was over he never stood for elected office again. Politics was too dirty for even Dirty Harry.

   By the time Mike White took office I couldn’t have cared less about Cleveland. For one thing, I no longer lived there anymore. For another thing, I wasn’t working in Cleveland anymore. I was working for the Light Bulb Supply Company. They were in the Lake Erie Screw Building in Lakewood. I wasn’t attending Cleveland State University anymore, either. As much as I used to go to the asphalt jungle was as much as I didn’t go there anymore.

   The city in 1990 was a mess, literally. Nobody thought anything about throwing litter and trash into the street. The police had never been busier. The fire department had never been busier. The schools had deteriorated so much that everything educational looked like up to the teachers. The graduation rate was less than 40%. “It couldn’t have gotten much worse,” recalled James Lumsden, a school board member. Mike White likened the schools to the Vietnam War, where well-meaning people went to help, but ended up stuck in a nightmare.

   Manufacturing jobs were disappearing, the workforce hemorrhaging paychecks, labor costs being outsourced like nobody’s business. Only street cleaners felt secure in their employment. The No. 1 bank in the city, Cleveland Trust, which had become AmeriTrust, was being dragged down by bad loans and a collapsing real estate market. The iconic May Company was drawing up plans to close its downtown store, which had been on Public Square for nearly 90 years. 

   In 1950 the city was the 6th largest in the country. Forty years later it was the 23rd largest in the country. Everybody who could move away was moving to the suburbs. When the inner ring suburbs filled up, new outer ring suburbs popped up. When they filled up, exurbia became the next place to go. Nobody from nowhere was moving to Cleveland. It was hard to believe anybody wanted to be mayor.

   Mike White grew up in Glenville on Cleveland’s east side. It was a rough and tumble neighborhood, notorious for a 1968 shootout. Gunfire was exchanged one night for nearly four hours between the Cleveland Police Department and the Black Nationalists of New Libya. They were a Black Power group. Three policemen, three Black Power men, and a bystander were killed. Fifteen others were wounded. Lots of others were shoved into paddy wagons and locked up.

   The new mayor’s father was a machinist at Chase Brass and Copper. He was a union man and ran a union shop at home, too. “If not for the discipline at home, we would have been lost,” Mike’s sister Marsha said. The first summer Mike White came home from college in 1970 his father took one look at him and told him to cut his hair. He had grown it long and was fluffing it into an afro. While he was a student at Ohio State University in Columbus he protested against racial discrimination practiced by the capital city’s public bus system. He was arrested. He got involved with Afro-Am and led a civil rights protest march. He was arrested again. The charges were disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. He didn’t deny the charges. “I hated the sheets back then,” he said.

   He was sick and tired of being arrested. He put his thinking cap on and ran for Student Union President. When he won he became Ohio State University’s first African American student body leader.  He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1973 and a Master of Public Administration degree in 1974. He began his professional political career as an administrative assistant for Cleveland’s city council in 1976 and was elected councilman from the Glenville neighborhood in 1978. From 1984 until he ran for mayor he represented Ohio’s 21st District in the State Senate, serving as assistant minority whip for the Democrats. 

   Mike White’s opponent in the race for mayor was the long-time politician George Forbes, who was also African American. The color of his skin turned out not to matter. Mike White had gone color blind. He described George Forbes as a “foul-mouthed, uncouth, unregenerated politician of the most despicable sort.” The Forbes campaign countered by accusing their opponent of abusing his wife and abusing the tenants of his inner-city properties by ignoring housing codes. The difference between a hero and a villain can be as slight as a good press agent.

   I didn’t pay too much attention to the character assassinations. My wife and I were working on our new house. It had been built in 1922, and although the previous owners had done what they could, it was our turn to do what we could. What we were doing first was ripping out all the shag carpeting and taking all the wallpaper down. When we were done with those two projects we painted all the walls and restored the hardwood floors. Our game plan was by necessity long-term. We started on the basement next, started saving for a new roof, and started making plans for everything else.

   Mike White didn’t give a damn about ice cream cones, but he gave a damn about the kids who ate ice cream cones. “We can spend our money on bridges and sewer systems as we must,” he said, “but we can never afford to forget that children remain the true infrastructure of our city’s future. We need to create a work program and show every able-bodied person that we have the time and patience to train them. And we should start people young. We want to guarantee every kid graduating from high school a job or a chance to go to college.”

   He put the city’s power brokers on notice. “We do not accept that ours must be a two-tier community with a sparkling downtown surrounded by vacant stores and whitewashed windows.  You can’t have a great town with only a great downtown. I’ve said to corporate Cleveland that I’m going to work on the agenda of downtown, but I also expect them to work on the agenda of neighborhood rebuilding.” He wasn’t above making deals, although he wasn’t selling any alibis. Safety became a mantra for him. “Safety is the right of every American,” he said. “A 13-year-old drug pusher on the corner where I live is a far greater danger to me and this city than Saddam Hussein will ever be.”

   He would prove to be true to his commitments. In the meantime, he put his nose to the grindstone. He worked Herculean hours. His staff worked Herculean hours. Anybody who complained they weren’t Hercules was advised to find work elsewhere. When he found out the Gulf War was costing the United States $500 million a day, he was outraged. “I’m the mayor of one of the largest cities in the country while we have an administration in Washington that is oblivious to the problems of human beings in this country,” he said. “I sit here like everyone else, watching CNN, watching a half-billion dollar a day investment in Iraq and Kuwait, and I can’t get a half-million dollar increase in investment in Cleveland.”

   Mike White was never going to be president of the United States. He probably didn’t want to be president. He had his hands full as it was, making it happen in his hometown. He wanted a Cleveland with dirtier fingernails and cleaner streets. The city was in a hole. His goal was to get it to stop digging. It wasn’t going to be easy. He didn’t always speak softly, but words being what they are, he made sure that as mayor he carried a big stick, the biggest stick in sight.

   He was going to need it, if only because President Lyndon Baines Johnson had said so. “When the burdens of the presidency seem unusually big, I always remind myself it could be worse,” LBJ said during his troubled administration. When asked how that could be, he said, “I could be a mayor.”

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

A New Thriller by Ed Staskus

“Cross Walk“

“A once upon a crime whodunit.” Barron Cannon, Adventure Books

“Captures the vibe of mid-century NYC.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CRPSFPKP

Late summer and early autumn. New York City. A Hell’s Kitchen private eye. The 1956 World Series. President Eisenhower at the opening game. A killer in the dugout.

Home Movies

Heart to Heart

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By Ed Staskus

   When Francie Chmielewski’s husband Steve doubled over while putting his shoes on, she didn’t bother asking him if he was all right. “I have to sit down,” he said in the backyard. It was a Sunday evening in late May. He was feeling a great deal of pressure on the left side of his chest. “I don’t think it’s my heart, but maybe we should go to Fairview Hospital.” One look at him fumbling and dropping his shoes on the steps of their kitchen told her everything she needed to know. He was not all right. He was having a heart attack.

   “Steve is a very fit man,” Francie said. He wasn’t a man so out of shape he might have a heart attack watching that day’s bad news on TV. “He doesn’t smoke, eats right, and rides his bike to work every day, even in the winter.” His bike ride to work takes an hour one way, from Rocky River to the near east side of Cleveland, and then another hour back home. Two days earlier, on a Friday, he complained to a co-worker about being out of breath during his ride. His co-worker urged him to call his doctor. Steve’s doctor said, “OK, come in on Tuesday.” 

   “What happened on Sunday was the widow maker,” Francie said. ”His main artery shut down.”

   Heart problems were one of the most uncommon causes of death in the United States until 1900. Heart disease had always been uncommon. Fifty years later it was the most common cause of death in the country. It became the go-to way to die. Everybody was smoking their heads off. Doctors routinely appeared in print and on TV promoting their favorite fag. Everybody was eating as much pork and beef as they could get their hands on. The protein was good. The saturated fat was sketchy. The off-the-chart serum cholesterol was terrible.

   It is still the most common cause of death in the United States, despite almost everybody having given up smoking and many former junk foodies eating a more balanced diet. “After I had a heart attack, it was a very simple choice,” said one-time football player and coach Mike Ditka. “What the doctor told me, I did and I did it religiously. I ate nothing but lean turkey breast or chicken breast or a piece of fish that was very lean. I mean, I stayed away from everything.” The misguided popularity of maintaining an unhealthy weight has kept it in the top spot, as has the notion that exercising at least thirty minutes a day five days a week is for somebody else.

   There is never a good time to have a heart attack. The worst time to have one might be during a game of charades. Steve wasn’t playing games. What was happening to him was sudden and massive. He was down and the clock was ticking. Around half of all heart attack deaths occur within one hour, especially if the victim isn’t able to get immediate help and get to a hospital fast. It is called the Golden Hour. The longer a person goes without treatment, the faster the clock ticks.

   “One day my father went hunting,” the French movie director Alain Resnais recalled. “He had a good day. He killed a lot of game. He was with his best friends. He said, ‘Ah, I’m still a good hunter.’ Then he said, ‘I don’t feel well.’ In thirty seconds, it was all over.”

   Steve started to shake and his eyes rolled up and back. One of the issues with heart problems is that the first symptoms can be fatal. “This isn’t looking good,” Francie thought. She got serious as a heart attack and sprang into action. She had been ready for the moment for a long time. She stretched Steve out and began performing CPR on him, at the same time hurriedly calling 911 on her cell phone. She wasn’t the kind of wife who mailed in her request for help, checking the spelling before sealing the envelope. 

   “He had cardiac arrest,” she said. “His heart stopped. When I saw he wasn’t breathing my adrenaline kicked in. I just reacted.” When the Rocky River EMS team got there they checked his heart’s rhythm, gave him oxygen, and administered a blood thinner. They sped him to the Cleveland Clinic in Fairview Park where he spent the next two weeks in the Intensive Care Unit flat on his back hooked up to a ventilator. “I never saw anybody like him,” an ICU nurse told Francie. “Most people in his circumstances die.” 

   “Steve isn’t most people,” Francie told the nurse.

  “The quicker we can get a person having a heart attack into the cardiac catheterization lab the better,” explained Erica Spatz, a cardiologist at Yale Medicine. “Time matters in treating heart attacks.” The heart pumps oxygen-rich blood to the rest of the body through a network of arteries. However, the arteries around the heart can get clogged up, usually by a blood clot. When that happens, blood flow is slowed or blocked. The obstruction is seriously dangerous.

   Nearly a million people in the United States suffer a heart attack every year. It happens about every forty seconds. The cost of care for coronary heart disease is more than $100 billion dollars annually. One of the least expensive and front of the line interventions is CPR. Francie was ready to bust it. “I teach CPR at the Rocky River Recreation Center,” she said. “But I never had to actually do it on a real person. I never thought the first time would be on my own husband.”

   CPR, officially known as Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation, is an emergency lifesaving procedure performed when the heart stops beating. It can double or triple the odds of survival after cardiac arrest. It is a critical step in what is called the Chain of Survival. Keeping blood flow active multiplies the chances of a successful resuscitation once medical staff arrives. Professional CPR is about chest compressions and mouth-to-mouth breathing at a ratio of 30 compressions to 2 breaths. The basic recommendation to bystanders who happen upon a heart attack victim is hands-only CPR until help arrives.

   After two weeks in ICU Steve was transferred  to a Step Down Unit at the Cleveland Clinic in Avon, where he stayed for a week-and-a-half. His last five days in the hospital were spent in rehab. One of his daughters was visiting him when a doctor walked in reviewing a chart. “This guy us really sick,” the doctor said to himself. Steve and his daughter dropped what they were doing and stared at him.

   “Oh, sorry, not you, somebody else,” the doctor said, stopping dead in his tracks, quickly flipping to Steve’s chart. “You are actually doing very well.”

   “The doctor told me he was doing well because he had never smoked, was more than fit enough for his age, and had gotten to the hospital soon enough to make a difference,” Francie said. “Only about one out of ten people with his kind of heart attack survive. If he had been a smoker he would have had a zero chance.”

   When Steve got home he wasn’t allowed some of the small pleasures of life, like ice cream and beer. He had to take a handful of prescription drugs every day. He was wired to a heart monitor. He wasn’t allowed to go back to work. He had to take several months off. “His doctor said he could go back in September.” He was allowed to work from home. “They told him not to overdo it.”

   He was hazy about what happened during his near-fatal weekend. “He can’t remember anything about it, from Friday through Sunday,” Francie said. Many of the memories surrounding heart attacks are lost to cardiac arrest survivors. They don’t always come back because the brain didn’t have enough time to store them. It doesn’t always want to remember near death experiences, no matter that the ordeal tends to put things into perspective.

   In some ways life itself is a near death experience. Like the song says, the end is always near. Francie wasn’t patting herself on the back for saving her husband’s life. “I wasn’t sure if he had life insurance or not, so I had to do it,” she explained. Buddha long ago said in plain English that the act of saving a life was a greater good than spending the whole of one’s life making religious offerings to the gods.

   Steve spent the rest of the summer resting, walking up and down stairs, and making further strides with short walks outdoors. He progressed to varied aerobic activities designed to improve circulation, lower blood pressure, and strengthen his heart. Francie watched him like a mother hen. “He is the kind of man who pushes it,” she said. “I told him not to push it.”

   World Heart Day is celebrated every year on September 29th. This year Francie and Steve hope to enjoy the holiday together. “Keep a Healthy Heart So We Won’t Be Apart” has become their new married couple motto.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.” His books are available on Amazon and Apple Books.

“Bomb City”

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

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Home Movies

Bat Out of Hell

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By Ed Staskus

   What I didn’t expect the hot summer night my wife, brother-in-law, and I went to the Lorain County Speedway was how loud the cars were going to be when the drivers stepped on the fast pedal, how bad the oil, gasoline, and rubber smelled in the humidity, how many crashes there were, and the fight that broke out on the track immediately after one of the crashes.

   The minute my brother-in law Matt sat down he pulled a pair of earplugs out of his pocket and pushed them firmly into his ears. We tried asking him where ours were, but he couldn’t hear a word we were saying. My wife and I finally decided to soak in the full experience, not like some people who couldn’t bear to enjoy the primal roar of engines going all out.

   The Lorain County Speedway is more-or-less in South Amherst, 30-some miles west of Cleveland, Ohio. It opened in 1949 as a third of a mile dirt oval. It was paved over in 1960. The night we were there the track had long since been upgraded to a 3/8-mile oval with 12-degree banking in the turns and a slight bank on the straightaways. It wasn’t NASCAR by any means, although NASCAR was the reason we were there.

   The racing at the Speedway that night was billed as street stock. I had never been closer to race cars than a TV screen, and the only reason I had ever gotten that close was because Matt came over our house every Saturday afternoon during the racing season, plopped himself down on our sofa, and for the next three, four, five hours watched brightly decaled handmade cars built from sheet metal with engines assembled from a bare block and frames constructed from steel tubing take tight left turns over and over and over at 200 MPH. The NASCAR four-wheelers resembled street stock about as much as cheetahs resemble wart hogs, even though both kinds of cars were essentially doing the same thing.

   The big story that summer was Jeff Gordon going up against Dale Earnhardt until it became the only story. Dale Earnhardt had won his seventh Winston Cup Championship in 1994 tying Richard Petty’s record for Cup Championships. Everybody was looking for him to win his eighth in 1995 and make history. It wasn’t to be, not with Jeff Gordon burning up the tracks.

   Jeff Gordon was young, only 24, but he had won the Coca-Cola 600 and the Brickyard 400 the year before. He wasn’t exactly wet behind the ears. He was off to the races. He landed in victory lane in three of the first six races of 1995. As the season wore on, he racked up 14 straight top ten finishes. Earnhardt was game, but the game was up. Gordon finished at the top of the board, the youngest champion since 1971. He toasted “The Intimidator” with a glass of milk instead of champagne, a nod to being barely legal.

   When he wasn’t watching NASCAR on TV, Matt and a school friend of his spent weekends driving to and camping out at nearby NASCAR events. They went to the Miller Genuine Draft 400 at the Michigan International Speedway, the Bud at the Glen at Watkins Glen, and the Mountain Dew Southern 500 at the Darlington Raceway. One weekend Matt asked if we wanted to go see some slam bang racing. We said alright, we’re not doing anything tonight, so long as it’s not out of state. He said it was close-by.

   The grandstand at the Lorain County Speedway was right on top of the racing. The bleacher seats were half full, like a high school football game where the fans are family and friends. There was a protective screen between the front row and the track. When I looked it up and down, I thought it might keep a flock of seagulls from assaulting us, but not a crate engine or the whole 3000-pound car. 

   “If one of those cars rolls and flips and comes up into the stands, that screen is going to stand the same chance as toilet paper,” I told my wife.

   “What?” she asked trying in vain to hear me over the noise.

   Five years earlier a man was killed and five people hurt when a race car went out of control and crashed into the pit area of the Lorain County Speedway. The man who was killed was another driver from another race. The driver of the wayward car said the accelerator on his car stuck, causing him to lose control on a turn. Eight years earlier at Talladega, Bobby Allison’s car going at the speed of light ran over debris and a tire burst. His car went airborne and smashed into the safety catch wall. Shrapnel sprayed the fans. From then on restrictor plates, which cap engine speeds from climbing too high and keep all race cars at around the same speeds, were made mandatory.

   The thought of shrapnel gave me the heebie-jeebies. My brother-in-law must have thought it through because he had led us to the second-to-last row. Even though the stands were only some twenty rows deep, it was better than nothing. The group of guys in front of us had their own cooler of hop juice. They offered us some. My brother-in-law didn’t drink, and my wife didn’t drink beer.

   “What the hey,” I said, accepting a Budweiser, my least favorite beer. Beggars can’t be choosers. In the heat of the night, to my surprise, the cold tasteless suds were delicious.

   My brother-in-law was a chemical engineer working in a General Electric lab in Willowick, but was transitioning to mechanical engineering, which meant going back to school part-time. He didn’t have a girlfriend, which meant he had time outside of work and school to take up a hobby. He bought a hulk of scrap metal that was once a 1970 Monte Carlo. His plan was to tear it apart piece by piece and rebuild it. Unfortunately, he didn’t have the space to get it done. Unfortunately, we did. The next thing I knew our two-car garage was a no-car garage. The hulk of scrap metal took up all the space. What space was left was devoted to a worktable, a tool locker, and an air compressor.

   He took the engine out. He took the seats out. He took the dash out. He took everything out and off the car. He built a rotisserie on wheels and fitted the frame to it, so he could wheel it in and out of the garage, working on it in our driveway. He sanded all the rust away and primed it. When the time came, he had the car hauled away and professionally painted. The color was Tuxedo Black.                                               

   When the weather turned foul, he turned a room in our basement into a work room, working on the engine and God knows what all else. He fabricated a new dash from scratch. He slowly but surely bought original parts and started to put the Monte Carlo back together. It took years and tens of thousands of dollars. Some nights, drifting off to sleep, we could hear him through our back window still working in the driveway in the glow of a bank of lights he had fixed up for the purpose.

   NASCAR race cars have almost nothing in common with street cars. By the 1990s they were being built to optimize aerodynamics. The focus was on speed. They stopped looking like stock cars. Stock car racing uses production models somewhat customized for racing purposes. It got started in the 1930s when moonshiners transporting white lightning souped up their Fords to evade revenue agents. One thing led to another, and they started racing each other on weekends on tracks carved out of corn fields.

   Street stock is racing a car that can be bought off a dealer’s lot. It is sometimes called hobby stock or showroom stock. Most of the tracks are short ovals, less than a mile. The speeds at the Lorain County Speedway that night hit 80 to 90 MPH on the straightaways, but slower in the turns. There were crashes galore in the turns. One of them happened in the turn coming around to the grandstand, when two cars bumped, tangled, and tore into each other. The driver on the outside track ran out of talent halfway through the turn. They both slid skidded to a stop in front of us. The drivers got out of their cars unhurt. When they did one of the drivers got hurt. 

   What happened was, when the two drivers got out of their banged-up cars, they started arguing. “What the hell, bumping me like that,” one of them yelled, his face red and splotchy.

   “I didn’t bump you,” the older of the two drivers said, calm as a fighting fish swimming back and forth in a tank. “I rubbed you. Rubbin’, son, is racin’.”

   They started pushing each other The younger driver got pushed too far out on the track and a car going slowly by under the caution flag ran over his foot. He fell to the ground and banged his head. Blood flowed down his chin. When he fell a woman bolted out of the stands, down the stairs, over the catch wall, and onto the track. She made a beeline for the older driver still standing.

   “This here is going to be trouble,” one of the men in front of us said cracking open another King of Beers.

   My brother-in-law’s 1970 two-door Chevrolet Monte Carlo was on a 116-inch wheelbase A-body platform with the longest hood Chevy had ever made. It stretched from the windshield to tomorrow. The styling was influenced by the Cadillac Eldorado, which came out in 1967. The Monte Carlo borrowed its firewall, dashboard, windshield, decklid, and rear window from the Chevelle. Matt’s model was an upgrade with a console-shift four-speed manual and a four-barrel-topped Turbo-Fire V-8 350 rated at 300 horsepower. It weighed in at 4,000 pounds curbside. It wasn’t built for baby showers. Shotgun weddings were more its speed. When I first heard the engine fire up so did all my neighbors within two or three blocks. Some of them came outside, standing on their lawns and in the street, looking up our driveway.

   “Mommy, what is that?” a boy driving a Little Tikes Cozy Coupe asked his mother.

   When the angry woman running onto the track got to the spot of the crash, she leapt onto the back of the driver who had pushed the other driver, screamed like a banshee, wrapped her legs around his midsection, and started to pummel the top and back of his head with her fists. It took half a dozen drivers and security staff to pull her off and keep her off. A policeman finally handcuffed her to a fence post.

   An ambulance showed up, the driver with the pancaked foot was put on a stretcher and put in the ambulance, wreckers drove onto the track, removed the damaged cars, and before we knew it the race was back on like nothing had ever happened. A policeman came back mid-way through the rest of race to retrieve the fists of fury, still handcuffed, who everybody had forgotten about. They put her in a squad car, legs kicking and lips flapping, and drove away, lights flashing. Everybody gave her a King of Beers salute.

   Thirteen years after Matt started work on the Monte Carlo it was ready to go. It was 2003. The day he put license plates on it was the day he asked me if I wanted to go for a ride. 

   “Sure,” I said.

   It looked like a new car inside and out. It smelled like a new car. He turned the key in the ignition and flipped a rocker switch. It was like cracking a bullwhip. The car rumbled to life. It sounded like something going after prey. He backed it out of the driveway and set off for Lake Rd. We went west through Rocky River, Bay Village, nearly to Avon Lake, and then to the Huntington Reservation, where we turned around. When we got to the Clifton Blvd. bridge that crosses the Rocky River, he pulled over to the shoulder.

   “Do you want to drive it?” he asked.

   “You bet,” I said.

   As I got out of the car to walk around to the driver’s side, I noticed a red fire extinguisher bolted down in the back. It was a Kidde dry chemical vehicle extinguisher. “Are you expecting something?” I asked.  “Great balls of fire?”

   “You never know,” he said. “If it happens, pull, aim, squeeze, and sweep.”

   I buckled up, buckling the five-point harness belt. The car was a bat out of hell of muscle and acceleration, but no matter how fast it went I wasn’t going anywhere. The five-point belt was the kind used to restrain madmen. I waited until there was no traffic. I put the car in first, got started, burned rubber, put it in second, third, then fourth, and flew across the bridge. The engine was just as loud driving the car as it was standing next to the car. I got it up to sixty in about ten seconds before starting to down shift. The bridge was far behind us by then.

   “That was fun,” I said. 

   It was like being Buckaroo Banzai for a couple of minutes. I checked for flashing red lights in the rearview mirror. We drove halfway through Lakewood before turning around. Heads turned when we approached, and heads followed our progress. At a red light a graybeard next to us said through his open window, “That is some meat and potatoes.” 

   “So long as you don’t mind getting nine miles to the gallon,” I said. He was driving a brand-new Toyota Prius. The Monte Carlo was AC/DC to its folk singing purr. 

   We got the car back in our garage without a scratch. That would have been a nightmare. My brother-in-law was fussy as a newborn with his old car made new. Even though he kept it bedded down indoors, he secured a waterproof car cover over it, just in case.  As the garage door was closing itself, I noticed the vanity license plate mounted on the chrome rear bumper.

   “NGHTMRE,” is what it said.

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

A New Thriller by Ed Staskus

“Cross Walk“

“A once upon a crime whodunit.” Barron Cannon, Adventure Books

“Captures the vibe of mid-century NYC.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CRPSFPKP

Late summer and early autumn. New York City. A Hell’s Kitchen private eye. The 1956 World Series. President Eisenhower at the opening game. A killer in the dugout.

Home Movies

Thunder Road

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By Ed Staskus

   The best thing about living in North Collinwood the summer before I shuffled off to my freshman year at St. Joseph’s High School was the Race Place that had opened at the beginning of the year on E. 185th St. It was a five-minute walk away. It was in what had once been a corner candy store. On one plate glass window was plastered “Speed Action Fun Excitement!” The other window said, “Come in! This is where it’s all happening!” Inside the front door was a counter, some stools along the near side wall, pinball machines on the other wall, and an eight-lane racecourse. The track was laid out on top of sheets of plywood that were set on saw horses.

   None of my friends nor I were ever given permission to knock together a boy cave at home. The home of slot car racing was the next best thing. We made Race Place our home away from home.

   The track was bare bones, There were no pretend bushes or trees. There were no miniature buildings. There were no trains tooting their friendly way to the next station. Racing slot cars was girding your loins and going fast as hell, leaving the other guy eating your dust. It was thrills and spills sans real blood. No bones got broken, although feelings got bruised black and blue every day.

   A man wearing a pork pie hat, and smoking a cigar more often than not, sat on a stool behind the counter. His name was Ralph. Sometimes he wore a t-shirt that said, “I Like Beer and Maybe Three People.” He never said hello or goodbye. Nobody knew where he lived or how old he was. Nobody knew what he looked like, exactly, behind the cloud of stogie smoke obscuring his face. He took our spare change in return for time on the track, which was by the quarter hour, rented shabby slot cars to the poverty-stricken, and sold 10-ounce bottles of Coke from a cooler behind him.

   There was a poster on the wall next to the cooler. It said, “Drink Coca-Cola.” The picture was of a cutie pie smiling from ear to ear and dressed like a princess in a low-cut white dress, wearing forearm gloves, and a jewel-encrusted crown. There was a bottle of Coca-Cola in her hand. “Refresh…Add Zest” was written at the bottom of the poster.

   Slot cars are miniature electric powered race cars guided by a slot in the track on which they run. The cars are 1:32 scale. A blade extends from the bottom of the car into the slot. We used hand-held squeeze controllers to speed up and slow down the low-voltage motors inside the cars. The front wheels ran with the post in its guide-slot, but the rear wheels were free to drift and slide. When they started to slide was when you wanted to put metal to the petal. When you got it right was when the car ended up pointing straight down the straightaway coming out of a curve. The challenge was taking curves as fast as possible without losing your grip of the slot and spinning out. When that happened you de-slotted, flying off the track, everybody ducking out of the way and laughing their heads off. 

   I went to the slot car track with my friends, who were Ignas, Gediminas, Justinas, and the two Tommy’s. Everybody called Ignas Iggy. We called Gediminas Eddie while Justinas was just himself. He tried on several nicknames, but we told him nicknaming yourself was not cool. Tommy One Shoe and Tommy Two Shoes were twins. For some reason nobody ever found out, their mother named both of them Tommy. She was a no-explaining woman. They were Irish, not Lithuanian like the rest of us. The twins were hard to tell apart at the best of times, until the morning one of them forgot one of his shoes. By the time he boarded the CTS bus to school it was too late. He shuffled around all that day wearing one shoe and wearing a hole in his shoeless sock. The nuns didn’t bother hitting him with their rulers. They shook their heads, instead. “Poor little retard kid,” one of them whispered to another. He was so embarrassed a red dot like a freckle popped up on the tip of his nose. The next day it was still there. It never went away. After that there was no trouble telling the twins apart.

   Our slot cars were fast as lightning, close to 15 MPH flat out. The scale miles were more like 500 MPH. The cars were always shooting off the track. Everybody had nitro on the brain and wanted to go faster and faster. “If you’re in control you’re not going fast enough,” is what Tommy Two Shoes said. “Straight roads are for fast cars,” Tommy One Shoe said in return. “Turns are for fast drivers, like me.” Whenever Two Shoes took on One Shoe head-to-head, One Shoe always won. 

   “What’s behind you doesn’t matter,” he told his brother every time he won. He was the fastest thing on four tiny wheels. He started wearing a phony racing car helmet. He took a lot of teasing about it, but didn’t seem to care.

   “Run your car, not your mouth,” Tommy Two Shoes retorted. He rubbed castor oil on the warmed-up engine of his Lotus-Ford  to make it smell more authentic. He added racing emblems from a decal sheet. There was an itsy-bitsy driver in the open cockpit. Itsy-bitsy was modeled after Graham Hill. Tommy painted a devil-may-care whisker-thin moustache on it. He was turning himself into the Smokey Yunick of the slots, improvising and modifying. No matter what he did, though, he couldn’t beat his brother’s yellow Mustang with ‘The Boss’ emblazoned on the sides of it. The pony car was nearly unbeatable with Tommy One Shoe in the driver’s seat.

   He was training for the National Ford-Aurora Model Motoring competition. First prize was a full-size Thunderbird Sports Roadster. “If I win I might let my dad drive it sometimes,” he said. “I know I can do it. I’m going to be numb to the competition.” He was 12 years old. If he won he was going to be the only grade schooler in the world with his own real-life muscle car.

   The first toy racing cars made by the Lionel Train Company rolled off the assembly line in 1912. They were powered by raised electric rails. Then World War One happened. The assembly line stopped dead. In 1938 Bachman Brothers made the “Motorcycle Cop & Car Speedway.” it was a single track with vehicles made from tin. Two keys were included, and the cars were powered by winding them up with the keys.

   After World War Two British hobbyists began to toy with them again, except this time they fitted them with handmade stop-gap motors. The motors were the size of a dime. A fragment of iron was the magnet. In 1954 Great Britain’s Southport Model Engineering Society built an electric slotted course nearly 60 feet long. “Slot car” was coined to set the new racers apart from the earlier “rail cars.”  

   The summer that I burned up the neighborhood race track and destroyed two slot cars by virtue of aggressive cornering and excessive speed, there were close to 4,000 tracks in the country. Revell, Scalextrix, and Aurora were selling hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of cars and equipment annually. Boys’ Life magazine had slot cars written about and advertised in every edition.

   Ed Shorer, the only Jewish kid in our neighborhood, with a head of thick curls and quick hands on the controller, couldn’t get enough of his new hobby. “I was ditching Hebrew school one day when I was 12 years old and I wandered into a hobby shop,” he said. By the time he left he was hooked. “As a result, I never got my bar mitzvah.”

   Scalextric came out with models fashioned after the Maserati 250F and the Ferrari 375. Their Grand Prix-themed cars were unbeatable, at least until they went up against Aurora’s Model Motoring line-up. By 1963 the Aurora Thunderjet-500 was the slot car to beat. When push came to shove, however, success on the track came down to who had the hot hand on the controller.

   Whenever the competition got over-heated among us we heard Ralph at the counter somewhere behind his cloud of stogie smoke break in, “All right, boys, the No. 1 rule is have fun.” He was oblivious to who had the hot hand.

   “I have more fun when I win,” Tommy One Shoe declared, not paying attention to the ruckus, and never taking his eyes off the track.

   I had a Cleveland Press paper route that paid the piper. I was blowing through my savings, but I couldn’t help myself. I delivered my papers in the afternoon as fast as I could, never breaking stride, hurling rubber-banded newspapers out of my shoulder-slung bag onto porches. I never looked back to see if any of them rolled into the bushes. As soon as I was done I hustled to the slot car track, where I raced until dinnertime, when I hurried back home. My parents were by-the-rules Eastern Europeans and my sister, brother, and I were expected to be in our seats for cold beetroot soup and cepelinai, otherwise known as potato dumplings with a meat center, exactly on time. We ate our zeppelins larded with sour cream and pork cracklings.

   By the middle of summer I was delivering my newspapers faster than ever. Lines had been forming at the slot car raceway. Everybody and their brother wanted in on the action. Polk’s Model Craft Hobbies, the biggest hobby store in New York City, estimated it was becoming as popular as model railroading. There was a new 475-foot track in nearby Long Island. Elvis Presley raced there, not that it mattered. We didn’t listen to his songs anymore since he had become a movie star. We were listening to Jan and Dean.

   “We both popped the clutch when the light turned green, you should have heard the whine from my screamin’ machine, Dead Man’s Curve, I could hear ‘em say, won’t come back from Dead Man’s Curve,” Jan and Dean warned.

   Labor Day weekend that summer was the weekend of our slot car blow-out. Most of us were going to start high school the following Tuesday. We didn’t know if or when we would be racing again. The Cleveland National Air Show came back to town that weekend, after a fifteen-year hiatus, but no matter how many Blue Angels did however many aerobatic tricks we were going to be doing our own kind of high-flying. We got started on Saturday morning and wrapped it up on Sunday afternoon. Inside the Race Place we didn’t hear a even one sonic boom all weekend.

   We made up our own order of the day, which was a round-robin tournament. There were eight of us. Ralph smoothed the way by letting us have two slot lanes for the weekend. By the end of Saturday Tommy One Shoe and I were on top of the leader board. By Sunday afternoon everybody else was out and there was one last do-or-die race left. Tommy One Shoe lowered his pony car into the inside slot. I lowered my Scalextric Shelby Cobra into the slot next to the Ford Mustang. The race was set for ten laps.

   “One, two, three, go!” Iggy called out from a stool behind us. He was acting as referee, even though he didn’t know refereeing from a hole in the wall. He had brought a small, checkered flag with him that he waved around like a matador.

   I was a year older than Tommy One Shoe and no greenhorn on the track, but I never stood a chance. I didn’t know he practiced day and night on his own homemade track. I didn’t know he rehearsed going into turns and coming out of them. I didn’t know he used fine grit sandpaper to rough up his wheels to improve their handling. By his standards I was a babe in the woods, which is where I ended up.

   I also didn’t know he had upgraded the magnets on his car. He wasn’t going to be flying off the merry-go-round anytime soon. No sooner did I fall behind a half-lap after three laps than I was forced to speed up. It didn’t do me any good. After seven laps I was behind by almost a full lap. I sped up some more. My Shelby was screaming down the track, but every time I checked on Tommy’s Mustang, he was inching farther ahead.

   I knew my goose was cooked. I inevitably de-slotted, flipping high up into outer space. My car went crashing into the far wall, where the body of it broke away from the chassis, and the engine fell behind a pinball machine. Tommy One Shoe slowed down on the last lap, took a victory lap, jumped up on his stool, and raised his arms above his head making V’s with his fingers. The stool wobbled and toppled over. Tommy went head over heels, but Ralph was walking past and snagged him out of the air by the back of his collar before his phony helmet hit the floor.

   “Watch your step, champ,” he said, setting him straight.

   When high school started I still raced weekends and over the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays, but after the New Year I put my slot gear away. I had gotten straight A’s all through grade school without even trying. Halfway through my freshman year I was getting straight C’s without even trying. My parents made sure to let me know they were unhappy. Slot car racing was in my blood but I could see the handwriting on the wall. 

   Tommy One Shoe entered and won slot car races all over northeastern Ohio for a few years but never won the Ford Thunderbird he wanted. I thought he might be disappointed after all the work he had put into his hobby, but I was wrong. “Winning isn’t the point, even though somebody has got to get to the finish line first,” he said. He had become a philosopher as well as a slot car champion. 

   “Wanting to win is the point,” he said.

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

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

“Captures the vibe of mid-century NYC, from stickball in the streets to the Mob on the make.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CRPSFPKP

Late summer and early autumn. New York City, 1956. President Eisenhower on his way to the opening game of the World Series. A hit man waits in the wings. A Hell’s Kitchen private eye scares up the shadows.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Home Movies

Chilling at Irv’s

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By Ed Staskus

   Every Friday and Saturday in the 1970s deli’s like Solomon’s in South Euclid, Budin’s in Shaker Hts., and Irv’s in Cleveland Hts. were packed to the gills. The minute the front doors opened the smells of pastrami and corned beef wafted out like minstrels. We followed our noses. The minute anybody sat down was the minute a cup of coffee and a menu appeared. After that it was about waiting for a waitress to bring the sandwiches, French fries, and pickles.

   Even though we hardly ever went to Solomon’s, and only stopped in at Budin’s when we were going to the nearby Shaker Movie Theatre, I was at Budin’s one day having a bagel and coffee when Sandy Herskovitz’s friend won a bet. “I was sitting with a friend,” Sandy said. “A few tables down there were some women. One of them had on a straw hat. A countermen walked by with a jug of coleslaw and my friend says to me, ‘How much do you want to bet that guy is going to dump the coleslaw on the straw hat?’ OK, I’ll take that bet. Sure enough, he tripped and dumped his coleslaw all over the straw hat.”

   We went to Irv’s Deli in Coventry Village like going to grandma’s house. It was closest to where we lived and it was where the fun beatniks and hippies, cops and lawyers, college students, cutie pies, no-good bookies and gangster wannabees, and Hebrew folks went for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. There was the occasional misfit everybody ignored. We went there for the cheap breakfasts. We went there late at night, after everything else closed. Irv’s never closed. There were Outlaws and Hells Angels who lurked here and there, at least when the weather was warm and dry, but we avoided them. They spent most of their time drinking heavy down the street at the C-Saw Café, anyway.

   How Irv made any money with us spending the night ordering free refills of coffee is beyond me. Matzo ball soup was a buck a bowl and corned beef sandwiches were a buck-and-a-half. Somebody said Irv printed money in a room behind the kitchen. “You know how those Jews are,” a Case Western Reserve University student said. “They’ve always got secrets.” He was wearing bell bottoms and a turtleneck sweater and sported a Prince Valiant. One time when a waitress was complaining about the bikers and hippies who hung around without ever leaving a tip, Irv, who was always there, said, “You know how those losers are.” He knew how to give as good as he got.

   Although we went there all the time we didn’t usually eat there because we were chronically short on cash. We always had 15 cents for a cup of coffee, but not much more for food, unless it was a free deli roll and butter. Besides, the kitchen was sketchy. None of us ever got sick eating at Irv’s, but all of us closely inspected our food as soon as it was delivered. Nothing that appeared on a plate in front of us ever bore any resemblance to the way it was described on the menu. Beggars can’t be choosers. One night a hippie girl at our table said the sinks and stoves in the kitchen were filthy. We all rolled our eyes and laughed. 

   “No, I mean it,” the girl said. We laughed because the kitchen couldn’t have been any dirtier than her. She needed a bath right away and an appointment at a hair salon right after that. When my friend Jimmy the Jet said he was willing to send an SOS to Mr. Clean, she got into a huff. “Hey, babe, it’s all right, your beauty shines through,” he said. He was a smooth-talking devil.

   Jimmy was called the Jet not because he was fast on his feet but because he talked a mile a minute. Everything he said was a springboard for the next thing he was going to say. He always had an ace up his sleeve, and then another one, and another one. We knew he kept little white pills on his person at all times. He was the only one of us still bright-eyed as the night wore on, rapping with his dope fiend friends. He was always the last to leave, talking to himself as he walked back to his apartment on Mayfield Rd.

   Irv’s was a Jewish deli that served Chinese food, among everything else food-wise, and a bar that specialized in strong shots and weak beer. It was on the corner of Hampshire Rd. and Coventry Rd. in what was called Coventry Village in Cleveland Hts. Irving Gulko opened the delicatessen in 1959. His father and grandfather had both once operated eateries in Cleveland. It was in his blood, even though his food was generally bloodless. There were rumors that he wasn’t really in the deli business, but was in the drugs, prostitution, and bookmaking businesses. We never saw any drug-addled hookers lounging around and laying down bets, but that was neither here nor there.

   The prostitution supposedly went on in the basement, spilling over into the apartment building next door. Jimmy told us there was a secret door leading from Irv’s basement to the apartment building’s basement. “Everybody knows that,” he said. None of us knew it, but we didn’t have the means to rent a hooker, anyway, even if we wanted to. Besides, at the time, we believed in free love.

   At the turn of the century Coventry Village was a retail and restaurant venue for Cleveland’s Jewish community. The Mayfield and Euclid Heights streetcar lines met at the Coventry Rd. and Mayfield Rd. intersection. The streetcars made coming and going more convenient. By the 1920s a profusion of walk-up apartments had been built. There were bakeries and tailor shops. There was a kosher poultry slaughterhouse. By the time we showed up, however, many Jews were packing up and moving to Beachwood and the neighborhood was filling up with head shops and record stores.

   We hung around Coventry Books and flipped through books we weren’t going to buy. Reading was what libraries were for. “Bookstores are a place for youth to come and see people that you wouldn’t see at home,” the owner Ellie Strong said. We followed her advice and did more people watching than reading.

   We didn’t buy books unless we bought them from Kay’s Used Books downtown, where “War and Peace” could be had for 50 cents, but we did buy new records. We bought them at Record Revolution, which had opened a few years earlier. It was up the street from Irv’s. They sold tie-dyed t-shirts and pot paraphernalia, as well, calling the stuff “smoking accessories.” The walls were covered with autographs by Lou Reed, Led Zeppelin, and The Who, among others. Rock critics called it the “coolest place to buy records in Ohio.” It was a dingy place but it had the best LP’s. The rock station WWMS-FM routinely inquired about what was selling and added the albums to its playlist. 

   Many of us didn’t have cars, but some of us had bikes. We kibitzed at Pee Wee’s Bike Shop where they knew everything. If it wasn’t too involved of a repair, Marvin Rosenberg, who was Pee Wee during working hours, fixed things for free. When he was done he always said, “And don’t come back unless you have cash next time.”

   We idled through the High Tide Rock Bottom gift shop. Marcia Polevoi, the owner, never had any advice for us, although she kept an eagle eye on our doings. Shoplifting was endemic. The only customers who always paid were the Outlaws and the Hells Angels. They were criminals but didn’t do any petty thieving.

   The Coventry Street Fair happened for the first time in 1974, drawing close to 50,000 people in a neighborhood where 5,000 was too many. It was dreamt up to draw a new crowd to the scene. There were magicians and fire eaters. We checked out the scene but ran out of breathing room. The crowd was mostly suburbanites curious about the counter culture. “It got so big that the neighbors said they liked it, but whenever it was on, they left town,” said Bruce Hennes, president of the Coventry Neighbors Association. We didn’t leave town although we did what amounted to the same thing. We stayed away. We wouldn’t have been able to elbow our way into Irv’s, anyway.

   We went to the Dobama Theatre. It was a small playhouse in a renovated bowling alley that mostly featured serious style shows. I never saw a musical there. I saw Gore Vidal’s 1972 play “An Evening with Richard Nixon.” The playbill said, “ It is the playwright’s contention that American citizens don’t really remember anything. And a politician is thus able to re-invent himself on a day-to-day basis. Unless it is otherwise noted in the dialogue, what the Nixon character says and does this evening is what Mr. Nixon has really said and done.” I put my toy G.O.P. elephant away in a quiet corner so it could repent its sins. 

   The Saloon was where we went to hear bands. It was more-or-less a rowdy local bar, which worked well when the music was bad, but not so well when the music was good. Stairway and Rocket from the Tombs played there. Our favorite was the Electric Eels. The lead singer liked to dress up in tin foil and rat traps. “Wake up you miracle dumbbells!” he sang. “It’s time to fall out the window!” Their songs were more anti-social noise attack than music. They liked to bring a lawnmower on stage with them. Whenever fans got out of hand the Eels threw glasses of water on them. When that happened, we left, not saying goodbye.

   When we wanted a milkshake we stopped at Tommy Fello’s new dinette, which he called Tommy’s. It was small place with a small menu. He had bought the seven-seat Fine Arts Confectionary two years earlier. He knew how to make three dishes, which were all three of them Lebanese. We stuck to the milkshakes. They were fit for a king and only cost 35 cents each.

   We went to the Heights Art Theatre all the time. It was a 1,2000-seat movie house that opened in 1919. They showed movies nobody else was showing in northeastern Ohio. I saw “The Discrete Charm of the Bourgeoisie” there. The surrealist Spanish movie bowled me over. I was at the midnight showing of it and didn’t make it to Irv’s that night.

   “The Lovers” was screened at the Heights Art Theatre in 1959. It had won a Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival the year before. The local cops weren’t handing out any awards. They cleared the theater and confiscated the film. The Cleveland Plain Dealer called the movie “shockingly nasty.” The manager got arrested and convicted of “public depiction of obscene material.” He cried foul and appealed the verdict. The case worked its way up the chain of command. Five years later the Supreme Court overturned the ruling. They said the criminal conviction was improper and the film was not obscene. “I know it when I see it,” is what Justice Potter Stewart said about obscenity. When I saw the movie years later I thought, “What was all the fuss about?” It was a French movie. Everybody talked a lot and smoked a lot cigarettes more than they did anything else.

   Irv’s Deli was where we hung out and where we went when we were down to spare change. It was also where we ran seeking sanctuary whenever things went wrong out on the street. Even though we went to the C-Saw Café sometimes, we generally avoided it. The baseball fans who rioted at Municipal Stadium during Ten Cent Beer Night the summer of 1974 in the middle of a game between the Texas Rangers and Cleveland Indians, and who ended up at the C-Saw Cafe later that night, didn’t know what they were getting into when they started arguing with the bikers at the bar. It is one thing to drunkenly storm a playing field and attack baseball players. It is another thing to drunkenly attack Hells Angels. The bikers drink more than anybody but never get drunk. When they fight they are all business. They don’t hit singles. When they hit you it is a home run.

   Jimmy the Jet and I were walking past the bar when a man came stumbling all arms and legs out the door and landed on his back. All the breath went out of him. He started gasping. He was followed out the door by a Hells Angel who began kicking him. Before long there was blood coming out of the man’s mouth. His friends poured out onto the sidewalk, but stood back like innocent bystanders. The Hells Angel continued to kick the man. Before I knew it Jimmy was stepping in. “Hey, stop that!” he yelled and pushed the biker. That was a big mistake.

   “What the hell?” the biker bellowed and swung his arm at Jimmy. He was unsteady on his feet, however, and the momentum toppled him over. When he did other Hells Angels came out of the bar. When they did they saw Jimmy and me standing over their fallen motorbike brother. When they glared at us and growled, showing their teeth, we knew the jig was up.

   Jimmy and I ran into Irv’s, the Hells Angels on our heels. We barreled past Irv who was sitting where he always sat. I followed Jimmy when he ran to the back of the deli and through a door. It was the door to the basement. He fastened the dead bolt on the other side as soon as we were through the door. As soon as he did hobnail boots started kicking the other side of it. The boots sounded angry. We ran down the stairs and into the basement of the apartment building next door. I looked around for the helping hand of a hooker, but there weren’t any, not even one. We ran up the apartment building’s stairs to the first floor and back out onto Coventry Rd. There was a crowd of bikers milling around Irv’s front door.

   “What’s going on?” I asked, still breathless.

   “Some punk jumped one of our guys,” a biker said. “When we find him we’re going to feed him to the rats. Then it will be down the sewer for whatever is left of him.”

   We wished him and his friends the best of luck and hurried away. We walked to Jimmy’s apartment. When we got there he set the deadbolt and secured the chain lock behind us. We sat in the gloom. Jimmy kept the lights off like it was a scary movie. He hadn’t said a word since we left Irv’s, setting a new world’s record. He lit a Lucky Strike and started to chill out. He put an LP on the turntable and lowered the needle. It was Jim Croce singing “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown.”

   “It’s too bad more men aren’t angels,” he said, leaning back and idly blowing smoke rings. “If they were we wouldn’t need to be sitting here like this.” There was a full moon that night. A police car siren went past wailing. I left in the middle of the night, but didn’t go home. I went back to Irv’s and splurged on a pastrami sandwich.

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

A New Thriller by Ed Staskus

“Cross Walk“

“A once upon a crime whodunit.” Barron Cannon, Adventure Books

“Captures the vibe of mid-century NYC.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CRPSFPKP

Late summer and early autumn. New York City. A Hell’s Kitchen private eye. The 1956 World Series. President Eisenhower at the opening game. A killer in the dugout.