Category Archives: Dogs Never Bite Me

Dogs Never Bite Me

Shake and Bake

1 Comment

By Ed Staskus

  Maggie Campbell’s father was a stockbroker, an investment advisor, and a vice president at Prudential Bache. He worked in downtown Cleveland with the other moneymakers. He believed in capitalism but didn’t let it go to his head. He was shrewd, although not always prudent.

   Everybody called him the Margin King. His wife called him the King of Fools. When Fred and Alma got married, he was a gambling man, but Alma didn’t want him doing that after the wedding. She said it was time he became a family man.

   “The gambling stops now.”

   Fred Campbell became a stockbroker. That way he could still gamble, except now it would be with other people’s money. He made a boatload of money. He wasn’t just one-sided about raking in a ton of loot, though. He told jokes all the time. He was a shaggy dog man. Getting a laugh was like hitting the jackpot to him.

   He was a prankster as well as a jokester. He used to appear on the “Hoolihan and Big Chuck” TV show now and then, doing skits with them. Hoolihan was Bob Wells, but he was Hoolihan the Weatherman on the CBS affiliate. After Ghoulardi left Cleveland for Hollywood in 1966, Hoolihan still did the weather, but became the other half of the “Hoolihan and Big Chuck Show.” It was what replaced Ghoulardi’s Shock Theater. They showed cheesy z-grade science fiction and horror movies late at night and did comedy skits in between the commercials.

   That’s where Maggie’s dad came in.

   The show always started with the Ray Charles song “Here We Go Again” and ended with the Peggy Lee song “Is That All There Is.” Fred couldn’t carry a tune, so was never invited to raise his voice.

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

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

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

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

   “That hurt!” he shouts.

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

   Shake and Bake Nights were when there were double features featuring movies like “Earthquake” and “The Towering Inferno” back-to-back.

   Alma was in a skit with Big Chuck. They are sitting on a park bench on a first date under a full moon and he turns into a werewolf. He reaches for her. She starts screaming and runs away. She falls face first into a cream pie. He turns back into sheepish Chuck.

   Fred did most of his skits wearing an old gorilla suit. But not all of the acts were on the “Hoolihan and Big Chuck Show.” Some of the time it was unscripted. It was their own reality show. He would wiggle into a gorilla suit and he and Big Chuck drove around the west side of Cleveland in a dark blue four-door Buick looking for hitchhikers. Big Chuck drove while Fred hid in the back seat. They would pick somebody up and after a few minutes Fred would suddenly pop up with a roar out of the back seat in his gorilla suit.

   That would scare the hell out of the hitchhiker in the front seat. One of them jumped out of the car while it was still moving. Maggie remembered being a little girl and listening to their adventure stories and thinking, “You guys are really weird.”

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

   As they got older and wiser Big Chuck, Hoolihan, Stash and Lil’ John and Fred got a little more sophisticated restrained. They had mystery parties, which were parties on a bus on which they would have dinner and drinks with their friends, not knowing where they were going, and at the end of the night everyone would have to guess where they were. The winner got to be on the show. It was the Me Decade. Everybody wanted to be seen and heard.

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

   Another of their neighbors had dogs like them and Maggie babysat them when the Butlers were out for dinner or at a show. “Can you take care of our dogs?” Mrs. Butler would ask her.

   One day Fred took advantage of Maggie having the Butler family house keys. He snuck into their house and filled up every glass, cup, vase, sink, whatever it was, with water and a single goldfish. When they got home there were many hungry goldfish waiting for them, even in the toilets.

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

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

   Maggie and her sisters and little brother weren’t out of his stomping grounds. He would crawl under their bunks at night and wait quietly until they went to bed got cozy and dozed off. When he was good and ready, he reached up and around and abruptly grabbed their arms or legs, yanking.

   “Oh, yeah, while we were sleeping! I still can’t hang my foot out over the edge of my bed at night to this day,” she said. 

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follo

Dogs Never Bite Me

Just Like Honey

Leave a comment

By Ed Staskus

   Steve De Luca’s cousin Clint had been an addict, gone through rehab, and everything seemed to be all right, until the night he decided to stick a needle into his arm again. The problem with smack is junkies think, since they’ve been clean, they can go back to using the same amount of it they had been using before. It tastes just like honey, except when it doesn’t. When it doesn’t it is trouble.

   It becomes the hard stuff.

   He wasn’t thinking straight. He went into the bathroom, sat down on the American Standard toilet, and stuck a needle in his arm like before. He was thinking less a few minutes later. The junk smacked him upside the head. He went down and out. The next morning his roommate awoke and found Clint curled up like a baby on the bathroom floor. He had been lying there all night, it turns out, on goose bump tile in the dark. It had been a long icy Lake Erie winter night.

   “Clint, my man, get up, I have to go pee,” the roommate said.

   When Clint didn’t move, the roommate, being the sleepy head that he was, went back to bed for an hour. When he woke up again Clint was still in the bathroom, still stone cold. Did he call an ambulance? No. Did he call the police? No. He called his girlfriend. She was almost out the door on her way to work.

   “What is it?” she asked, annoyed.

   “Hey, Clint’s on the floor of the bathroom and I need to get in there to wash up and stuff. I need to get to the grocery store. I’m out of coffee.”

   “Who is this genius?” Maggie Campbell asked her husband.

   “Boy wonder, disaster,” Steve said.

   When Maggie and Steve got married at the turn of the century Maggie kept her name and Steve kept his name. Steve came from Italian blood. Maggie came from Scottish blood. He had the oily hair and dark skin to prove it. She had the pale freckled skin to prove it. “There is no sense in trying to make you a Dago,” Steve said.

   The girlfriend rushed over to the drug den. While she was on the way she called the cops and Clint’s mom. She was thinking and reckoning. She knew Clint’s bad habits. EMS rushed him to the emergency room at the Cleveland Clinic in Fairview Park, where the roommate and Clint’s mom were told the bad news.

   “Here’s what is going on. This kid is not in good shape. He’s overdosed on heroin, his kidneys have shut down, and he’s got compartment syndrome. His whole body is shutting down. Before we can work on the kidneys, before we can work on the syndrome, before we can work on anything, he’s got to pull through the heroin overdose. He’s got to come through that first.”

   After forty-eight hours he was still alive, even though he had chased the dragon and lost. Nobody could believe it. It was like a miracle.

   The deadness is what happens when oxygen gets cut off to the muscles in the body. That’s what happened to Clint. It’s the same thing that happens when you fall asleep on your arm in the middle of the night and wake up with it numb and tingling. 

   You shake it off. It’s no big deal. You get up and have breakfast.

   But Clint had been lying on his face, arms and legs crushed beneath him, when he crumpled to the bathroom floor the night before. It was a big deal. He’d been unconscious for ten hours, circulation, and oxygen, everything, cut off. Everything fell into the big sleep. Then his muscles started dying, dying all night.

   In the hospital they slit his hands open at the palms and slit his hands open at the back. The doctors slit his arms all the way up on both sides and slit his legs down the middle. They manipulated his muscles to get them to start coming back to life.

   He was wide open, machines circulating his blood. They did nineteen surgeries over three months. They saved his arms, but both of his legs were gone. They had to be amputated. His leg on the left side was gone above the knee and his leg on the right side was gone below the knee. The Cleveland Clinic couldn’t bring the muscles back for anything. He lost taking a lazy walk to the corner store for smokes for good.

   His spoonful of fun had gone glum woebegone.

   They didn’t tell him they cut his legs off until he was almost done with all the surgeries and out of the recovery room because they needed him to fight and keep going. They didn’t need him down in the dumps. He was almost ready to leave his hospital room for rehab when they talked to him.

   “We have to tell you something,” they said.

   “Is it bad news?” he asked.

   “Yes,” they said.

   “All right, man, give it to me straight.”

   After he got home, he got a small, motorized wheelchair that he rambled around in. He couldn’t use prosthetics because the muscles in his upper thighs were ruined. They had to take some of them out because they were dying. If they had left them in, that might have made the other muscles die, too.

   The doctors had to take all the muscles that had the syndrome in them out of his legs. He had no strength in his upper leg muscles to support prosthetics, so he was going to be in his wheelchair until he went blue in the face. He was thirty-two years old. His fingers were locked up. They were almost like claws. When he talked and tried to gesture, he couldn’t unclench them.

   Clint took antibiotics anti-inflammatories and narcotic pain killers religiously for months. When his therapist’s care was over and done, he went cold turkey. If you can’t swim, you’re not saddled up. You’re only learning how to drown. He asked Maggie and Steve for a pet to keep him company. All his friends and dopehead pals had dropped him like a hot potato. His roommate had long since disappeared. Nobody wanted reminders of bad times.

   “I need a friend,” he said. “I need one bad. I don’t got nobody.”

   The friend they found for him was a puppy mill dog, a Parti Yorkie. They got her from a rescuer who put her up on Facebook. They didn’t even know what kind of dog she was. They thought she was a Maltipoo, but she was really a Parti dog. She was a kind of new-style designer dog.

   Steve and Maggie jumped the rescue by telling Facebook they had a desirable home for the dog. It was only partly a lie. The rest of it was a white lie. Facebook doesn’t know the difference between bona fide and groundless, anyway, no matter how pious the social site pretends to be. They took the dog, not knowing for sure if Clint would go for it. She was under seven pounds, not a family-sized Yorkie. Steve carried her around with him in his bathrobe pocket. That was a mistake, carrying her around, because Steve then started wanting to keep the dog. They cleaned her up before giving her to the lonely ex-junkie. 

   When they delivered the Yorkie to Clint’s apartment Steve told him if it didn’t work out it would be OK, and he would take the dog back. But Clint had nothing to do except sit in his wheelchair and dote on the dog. And the dog was the kind that needed nothing but being doted on. They were two peas in a pod.

   “I love this dog, man, and she loves me,” Clint said. “I am going to call her Honey. I’m keeping her, for sure.”

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

Dogs Never Bite Me

Dead Man’s Curve

Leave a comment

By Ed Staskus

   Maggie Campbell was almost 22 years-old the morning she drove face first into a cement truck. She was driving a yellow 1973 coupe a girlfriend of hers at the Bay Deli, where they both worked, had sold her for one hundred and eighty-five dollars in cash. It was a rust bucket, but it was a Jap car so the two hundred thousand miles on it hadn’t made a dent in it running, at least not yet.

   She had gotten up late that frosty spring morning and shoveled down a Fudgsicle, a hot dog, and a cup of joe for breakfast. “I better go,” she said to herself, throwing the Fudgsicle stick in the trash with the other Fudgsicle sticks.

   Her roommate and she were sharing a small house on Schwartz Road behind St. John’s West Shore Hospital in Westlake. She was late for class at the Fairview Beauty Academy. She bolted out to the car. When she got into it, she couldn’t wait for the front window to defrost more than the small square absolutely needed to look through. She was squinting through one square inch of windshield taking the curve at Excalibur Ave. and bopping to Jan and Dean on the radio.

   “It’s no place to play, you’d best keep away, I can hear ’em say, won’t come back from Dead Man’s Curve.”

   “I never touched the brakes,” she said after hitting the cement truck headlong.

   The truck was parked on her side of the street. The front end was facing her. That was the first surprise. She knew she was on the right side of the street as she came around the curve since she could see full well out her driver’s side window. At first, Maggie didn’t know what happened. The second surprise was that when she tried to get out of her car she couldn’t move. When she looked down to see why she couldn’t move she saw the steering wheel jammed into her legs. She was sandwiched between the wheel and the seat. Some days you are the dog and other days you are the fire hydrant.

   She finally got out of the car by swinging one and then the other leg over the steering wheel. Standing next to her coupe, looking at the man suddenly standing in front of her, she realized why no one had come to help her. He was white as a ghost. The rest of the cement men behind him looked like they were looking at a ghost, too. They thought she had died in the car, which had turned into scrap metal in an instant.

   “I tried to wave you off,” one of them said.

   “Hey, here’s a clue, bub, I didn’t see you and I didn’t see the truck,” she said. “Thanks for the heads up, but I didn’t see anything.” The next thing she knew a woman walked up to her and shoved Kleenex up her nose.

   “You better sit down,” she said.

   “That’s OK,” Maggie said. “I’m good. Besides, I’ve got to get to school.”

   “No, you better sit down. I’ve called an ambulance. They should be here in just a minute.”

   “Seriously, thanks, but no. I just bumped my nose.”

   She sat Maggie down. When she did Maggie’s white beauty school skirt rode up and she saw her mangled knees. The skirt was bleeding.

   The convertor radio underneath the dash had slammed into them. Even though she couldn’t feel anything bad, she could see shinbones and a thighbone. That looks bad, she thought. It had only been a minute since she had gotten out of the car. The front end of it was jack-knifed. She left patches of raw skin behind her on the front seat. 

   It was when the excitement was over that she went for real. She lost her eyesight. It was her next-to-last surprise. She blinked. It didn’t help. She blinked again. It still didn’t help.

   “Everything’s gone fuzzy, like an old TV on the fritz.”

   “Just close your eyes. The paramedics are here.”

   “OK, open your eyes,” one of the paramedics said.

   “Are they open?” she asked.

   “Yeah,” he said.

   “Are you sure? I can’t see anything.”

   “Is it like in a closet, or more like the basement, with the lights all out?”

   “A closet or a basement? What kind of as question is that? Oh, my God, you are such a smart ass. Who sits in a dark closet except crazy people?”

   They laid her down and out in the ambulance and, suddenly, her sight came back.

   “It was just the shock,” she told them.

   “Stop self-diagnosing,” the medic said.

   “I was a lifeguard at the Bay Pool. I know my stuff!”

   St John’s West Shore Hospital must have thought she was younger than she was. Underage is what they thought, so they called her parents. Her mom was on the way, they said. It was Maggie’s last surprise.

   “You did what? You called who? I’m 21-years-old. You didn’t need to call my parents.”

   “It’s done.”

   “You rat bastards!” Maggie was beyond mad. She hadn’t talked to either of her parents for more than a year. “Fuck off and die” had been the last thing she had said to them.

   She planned on moving out as soon she turned 21, but her dad didn’t want her to grow up or move out. Maggie wanted both, to be 21 and gone. Her parents wanted her out, too, but they didn’t want her to go, either. When she told them she would be leaving the day of her birthday, first, they slapped the crap out of her, and then they threw her out of the house. She had no money, no clothes, and nowhere to go.

   She called her dad from a phone booth about picking up her clothes.

   “If you come grovel for them, you can get them out of the trash,” he said.

   “You keep them, dad, because I’m not going to grovel.”

   At the very least they raised a true-blue Scottish kid, Maggie thought. She never knew if her dad really threw her clothes in the trash because she never called or went back, at least not for the clothes.

   Her mom burst through the emergency room door at St. John’s at the same time as her dad got her on the phone. Before that she had been joking with the doctors, saying she cut her legs shaving.

   “Oh, my God, look at her legs!” her mom started shouting.

   “Who let that woman in here?” Maggie blew up.

   “Who’s the president?” her dad asked over and over on the phone until the line went dead. The next thing she knew her whole family, sisters, brother, her dad rushing in from work, were all in the room, and then the adrenaline started to wear off fast. She had been laying there, not too panicked, and suddenly her constitutional joy juice was all gone. She hurt like hell. She went banshee.

   AAARRRGHHHHHH!!

   Her younger sister started crying and everybody got so upset about her crying that they put her in her dad’s lap. Her mom stroked her hair. Maggie was left on her back on the table in pain and agony, ignored and all alone until a nurse finally wheeled her away to surgery. No one noticed she was gone.

   At the end of the day, what happened wasn’t off the charts. She broke her nose and had two black eyes along with a concussion. One of her teeth was loose. She hurt both of her knees. One of them had to be operated on. She was released three days later. A policemen told her afterwards if she had hit the back of the cement truck instead of the front she would have been decapitated.

   If that had happened and she had been driving a rag top instead of her hard shell, then “HEADLESS GIRL IN TOPLESS CAR” would have been the headline on the front page of the next day’s West Life News. As it happened, she ended up in the middle of the back page.

Ed Staskus posts on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

Dogs Never Bite Me

Love Shack Romeo

Leave a comment

By Ed Staskus

   Maggie Campbell met Steve De Luca, her husband-to-be who was more-or-less living in Little Italy, when he wasn’t in jailbird trouble, a week after he got thrown out of a Columbus court and came home for his father’s funeral. Meanwhile, she was being thrown out of the family house in Bay Village after her own father died and she threatened to kill her sister.

   They met at Mad Anthony’s, and later Steve followed her to the Tick Tock Tavern on Clifton Boulevard, on a night when she was out with her friends. The stars were sparkling in a west side Cleveland sky. “I needed to get loose that night. Elaine and I had gotten into a fight at mom and dad’s house and when she tried to choke me, I told her I was going to punch her in the face and kill her if she ever put her hands around my neck again.”

   “What did you say?” Elaine shrieked.

   “I know how to break your nose and shove it up into your brain,” Maggie screamed when she pushed her older sister off. “I will do that if you try choking me one more time. I will lay you out flat.” Elaine never touched Maggie after that, but the threat of death didn’t go down well.

   Steve had been a bartender at the Tick Tock Tavern once, slinging shots and shooting the bull. He worked there forever, although since it opened in 1939 it hadn’t been forever. Whenever anybody mentioned anybody’s name to Steve at the bar he always said, “Oh, I know him.” It didn’t matter who it was, famous, infamous, or unknown.

   “Food, spirits, and characters” is what they say at the Tick Tock.

   After the fight with Elaine, Maggie went to her church, Bay Presbyterian, to talk to the pastor. She was contrite but seething. “I was born a Christian and raised a Christian. I have always gone to Bay Presbyterian, and I still go there. But goddamn my family to hell.”

   She had been going to counseling for years, but still not accepted the fact that her sisters and brother and she had been roughed up as children. She was upset that her roughing-it-up father had died, and was upset, too, about her ex-boyfriend-to-be, Craig, who was the mayor of Lorain, which was along the lake near her Bay Village hometown. 

   They had been seeing each other for twelve years, but there was no re-election on the horizon. Even if there had been, Maggie’s chances of higher office were slim to none. Craig had his eye on future choices and chances.

   “What are you doing with Craig?” her minister asked.

   “Why would you ask me such a thing?”

   “Why do you stay with him?” he asked.

   “You really want to know? I’ll let you know! I made a promise a long time ago, when I was a Young Lifer, that I would never have pre-marital sex. When I met Craig, a couple of years into our relationship, I started having sex with him. I said to myself, well, I’ve made my bed and I’m going to lie in it.”

   “No, no, no,” he said. “That’s not the life the Lord wants for you.”

   They started praying for the kind of man she wanted to meet, from eye color to personality. What she didn’t know was that Steve was hoping and praying to meet someone at the same time. He wasn’t being as specific as Maggie, though.

   After Steve got loose after driving too fast too drunk and arguing with the police, and shortly after his dad died, Fat Freddie, his brother, begged him to stay with him in Little Italy, so he did. Steve was a full-blown addict by then. When she met him, he was drinking nearly a fifth of Yukon with beer chasers and snorting coke day in and day out so he could keep drinking.

   He had started thinking his life totally sucked. He hadn’t had a girl to talk to for more than two years, because he was an obnoxious drunk, and he was down, if not down and out. One day while he was walking the dogs, dogs that his brother and he rescued at their used car lot, he started praying, which was something he had never done before.

   “God, if you can, bring me a woman. Please make that happen. I’m lonely, I’m miserable, and I hate my life. Please show me someone who can show me how to love you as much as I can love her.” He was willing to hold hands with the Lord so long as he could hold hands with a woman.

   Shortly after that Maggie’s friends and she were out having fun at Mad Anthony’s. Steve walked in and as he went by, locked eyes with her. After he walked past, she was talking to her friends when she got a creepy feeling that someone was staring at her. After another drink she kept feeling that long steep stare. She went over to where Steve was sitting alone.

   “I’m pretty sure we went to high school together,” she said.

   “Yeah, Bay High,” he said. “I was two classes ahead of you. You worked at the pool.” Oh, Lord, you done good, he wanted to say. Maggie was a fine-looking gal with ruby red lips and jet-black hair.

   Steve asked her out on a date and one more, too.

   “Really, dude, two dates before we’ve even had one date?”

   He wanted Maggie to go with him to the wedding of a sportswriter friend of his, but he thought they should go out first, to test the waters.

   “Alright, alright,” she said, finally. “We’ll see what happens.” She gave him her phone number. She could always hang up if she had to.

   “We’re going to the next bar,” her friends said.

   “It was nice meeting you,” she said to Steve. “Call me.”

   He followed them out. By the time they got to the Tick Tock Tavern he was a different man than the man she had been talking to at Mad Anthony’s, getting obnoxious and louder by the minute. By then his brain was drowning in Yukon. His life preserver was coke. But he was out of the powder. It was all downhill from there.

   “I’m leaving, so piss off,” she finally told him.

   “Jenny, why don’t you come home with me?”

   “Whoa, dude, you’re a jackass.”

   “Jenny, Jenny, why are you going?”

   “Because my name’s Maggie and that’s why I’m not going home with you.”

   As she went through the door, she shot him a look. “Great, he’s got my phone number,” she thought. But she gave him a second look. “He could be really handsome if we got rid of that huge monobrow.”

   The next morning, he called her.

   “What do you want?” she asked, ready willing able to hang up.

   “Don’t hang up, don’t hang up,” he said.

   “I have drugs and alcohol in my family,” she said. “The last thing I want to do is put up with it in a boyfriend. It’s not going to happen, pal.”

   “No, no, no, I’m good,” he said.

   They talked some more. When Steve wasn’t drinking like a drunkard, he was charming. He charmed her into a date and then another one, and even another one. They always went out with a group because she wouldn’t go out with him by herself. She was leery skittish cautious. Every time she went out with him, she left him at the bar at the end of the night after their argument.

   “You’re an idiot.” 

   When she was done running him down, she would leave, stamping her feet. He usually walked the railroad tracks home. He had lost his car to a court order and was footloose. But he started to get better, slowly surely, and as he did, they got better together, and the clock in Maggie’s head kept time to the times that might be on the way.

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”