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Bomb City USA

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By Ed Staskus

   When I went to work as the night clerk at the Versailles Motor Inn on E. 29th St. and Euclid Ave. in the mid-70s, Cleveland, Ohio was the bomb capital of the country. There were 21 bombings in the city in 1976 and 16 more in the surrounding county, carnage every ten days, making it tops in the United States, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. The federal lawmen christened Cleveland “Bomb City USA.”

   “A bombing sends a real message and it commands a lot of attention,” said Rick Porello, a northeast Ohio career police officer. “Danny Greene was said to have paid Art Sneperger, his main explosives guy, extra if the bombing generated news coverage. Art got paid a bonus if the thing got on television or in the newspapers.” If it bleeds it leads was and still is the leitmotif of newsmen everywhere.

   Art Sneperger made his own headlines in 1971 when, working at the behest of Danny Greene, he suddenly found himself engulfed by hellfire while planting explosives under the car of the Irishman’s old friend and new enemy Mike Frato. Fumble fingers don’t pay, although the fact of the matter was that Danny Greene set the bomb off from across the street. He had come to believe Art had ratted him out to the FBI.

   Six years later Danny Greene was himself blown up walking out of a dentist’s office in Lyndhurst. The gangster had paid cash, so the dentist ignored the sonic boom. Money was no good where the Irishman was going. Nobody outside his Celtic Club shed a tear.

   The bomb was in a Chevy Nova parked next to Danny Greene’s Lincoln Continental. It was a Trojan Horse. When it went off, set off by remote control, the Nova, the Continental, and the Irishman were reduced to scrap metal. The gangster usually wore all green clothes, wrote in green ink, and drove a green car. He wasn’t going incognito. It was easy to see it was him getting into the Lincoln. The bomb blew one of his arms one hundred feet across the parking lot. The lucky Celtic Cross he wore around his neck pierced and stuck into the asphalt. The coroner didn’t bother trying to put him back together.

   The used Chevy Nova came from Fairchild Chevrolet in Lakewood. “We heard the owner of the car lot might have been involved,” said Bob Gheen, a teenager at the time. The car had once been his father’s car. “They never transferred the title out of my dad’s name. Rick Porello from the Lyndhurst Police Department showed up at our door on Saturday morning and drove us to identify what was left of the car. We had to answer several questions and that’s pretty much the last we heard of it.”

   I was taking classes at Cleveland State University at the time but because I didn’t have a scholarship or any grants, and nobody would give me a loan to read old literature, I had to pay tuition fees and book costs myself. I was living in Asia Town, in a Polish double on East 34th St, upstairs in a two-bedroom with a roommate, but even though I knew how to live on next to nothing, I needed something to pay the bills and some more to pay for school. I was sick of Manpower and their stingy paychecks. I went looking for a steady job.

   The Versailles Motor Inn was built in the mid-60s, meant to piggyback on the Sahara Motor Inn a few blocks away at E. 32nd St., which was built a few years earlier. The Sahara wasn’t hiring, but the Versailles was, and I thought if it is anything like the Sahara, I was the young man for the job. I later found out I was the only young man to apply for the job.

   All the rooms at the four-story Sahara Motor Inn featured a television, air conditioning, piped-in music, and a dial phone, the first ones in rooms in northeast Ohio. There were three presidential suites and three bridal suites. There was a heated swimming pool, a dance floor, and a patio on the second floor. There was a continental dining room with velvet armchairs and a starlight ceiling. There were four cocktail lounges. The waitresses wore Egyptian outfits and the waiters wore fezzes. There were eight-foot paintings of Cleopatra, King Tut, and Queen Nefertiti in the lobby.

   Other than that the Versailles Motor Inn had 150 rooms, exactly the same as the Sahara Motor Inn, that is where the resemblance ended. My place of employment had a bar, a coffee shop, and a lobby. It featured sunken pit seating in the lobby where nobody ever went. The lighting was bad. The front doors facing Euclid Ave. were kept locked under penalty of death. Unlike the Sahara Motor Inn where the plants in the lobby were real geraniums, rhododendrons, and palm trees, everything at the Versailles Motor Inn was fake. The front desk was cheap veneer and the carpet was cheap, too, going threadbare. There was a drive-up side entrance at one end of the front desk and the door to the bar was at the other end of the desk. There were two elevators that made a racket going up and down.

   The Sahara Motor Inn attracted weddings, conventions, and business meetings. TV crews filming episodes for “Route 66” stayed there sometimes. The Versailles Motor Inn attracted business like peddlers on a tight budget, the sketchy who said hold all their calls, and the John and Jane trade. One weekend a flock of Baptist ministers booked all the rooms on three floors.

   I was glad to get the job since I could walk there from where I lived in Asia Town, it paid reasonably well, and I would have about half of my hours from 11 PM to 7 AM to do homework. I reconciled the day’s receipts before and after my shift. We had a floor safe bolted down in the back office. My responsibilities were mainly checking in guests and taking reservations. I gave directions to late-night callers, answered inquiries about our hotel services, which was easy enough since there were hardly any, and made recommendations to guests about nighttime dining and entertainment options, which was also easy.

   “In the 1970s downtown was dead,” said John Gorman, disc jockey and program director at radio station WMMS. “The Warehouse District and Playhouse Square weren’t happening yet. There was no reason to come.” The nickname of the progressive radio station was ‘The Buzzard.’ Downtown Cleveland’s nickname was ‘The Wasteland.’

   One night, while nothing much was happening on my side of downtown, and I was in the back office boning up for an exam the next week, Shondor Birns, Public Enemy No. 1 in Cleveland for a long time, strolled out of Christy’s Lounge, a strip club on Detroit Ave. on the near west side. It was across the street from St. Malachi Catholic Church. It was Holy Saturday, easing into Easter Sunday. As it happened, there wasn’t going to be any resurrection for the gangster after what was going to happen happened.

   During Prohibition the Birns family had turned to bootlegging, working a still in their basement for Cleveland Mafia boss Joe Lonardo. Mother Birns went up in smoke when the still exploded. After Shondor dropped out of high school, he was subsequently arrested 18 times in 12 years. After his 6th or 7th arrest a Cleveland prosecutor declared, “It is time the court put away this man whose reputation is one of rampant criminality.”

   He hooked up with the Maxie Diamond gang and got into the protection rackets. He muscled into the numbers and policy games. He opened restaurants like the Ten-Eleven and Alhambra. His big mistake was hiring Danny Greene as an enforcer. The relationship soured and Shondor Birns put a contract out on Greene. When the Irishman discovered a bomb attached to his car, he disarmed it himself and showed it to Cleveland Police Lieutenant Ed Kovacic, who offered him police protection. “No, for whatever it’s worth,” Danny Greene said, leaving the Central Station and taking the bomb with him. “I’m going to send this back to the old bastard that sent it to me.”

   When the old bastard left the girlie show, got comfortable behind the wheel of his Lincoln Mark IV, and turned the key in the ignition, a package of C-4 exploded underneath him. His head was blown through the roof of the car. The cigarette he had been meaning to light was still between his lips. His torso landed somewhere outside the passenger door. His legs landed somewhere farther away. 

   Mary Nags owned a print shop on Detroit Rd. It shared a common parking lot with the strip club. She got a call from the police telling her not to come to work on Monday. “They said a man had been blown up and parts of him were scattered around in our back lot.” The forensics men spent a day finding all the bits and pieces of the once infamous Shondor Birns.

   Police detectives focused on the numbers men in the ghetto with whom the gangster had been feuding. That turned out to be a dead end. “It’s dumb to talk about blacks doing Shondor,”one of the numbers men said.  “He wasn’t no bad fella. He was white but it didn’t make no difference. Shon had a black soul. He was black through and through.”

   Everybody knew Danny Greene had ordered it done, but charges were never brought after the actual bomber died. The Irishman had contracted Hells Angel Enis “Eagle” Crnic to do the job. The biker was later blown to bits while placing explosives to the underside of a car belonging to Johnny “Dell” Delzoppo. If the district attorney wanted to pursue the case, he would have to deliver his subpoena to the bottomless pit, where the Eagle was living next door to Art Sneperger.

   The first time I was robbed at the Versailles Motor Inn I wasn’t robbed, because I was surprised and reacted without thinking. A young black man filled out a registration card, handed me a twenty, and when I turned around to get him his key, started rifling the cash drawer. “Hey!” I shouted, lunging forward and smashing the drawer shut on his hand. He ran out yelping and cursing.

   The second time I was robbed I was robbed. The young black man didn’t bother registering. The bandit was wearing a jacket and suggested he had a gun in his jacket pocket by pointing the pocket at me. “Know what I mean?” he said. I had seen plenty of cops and robbers movies. I knew what he meant.

   “It’s not my money,” I said opening the drawer, stepping back, and raising my hands to the ceiling. What’s a simple man to do staring at the wrong end of a gun? He said I could put my hands down. “This ain’t no western movie matinee, but don’t mess around.” He took all of the night’s earnings except the loose change. I called the police, a patrol car pulled up, I made out a report, and they left. The men in blue seemed more indifferent than not.

   “Don’t let it happen again,” my boss said in the morning. He wasn’t indifferent about the missing money.

   “What do you suggest?”

   “Do you want to keep your job?”

   “I guess so,” I said, hedging my bets.

   “All right then,” he said, and that was the end of his words to the wise.

   My last night at the Versailles Motor Inn was the same as most nights, until it wasn’t. I was busy until 2:30, then it was slow as a shuttered orphanage. I sat in the back office reading until I got drowsy. I took a walk through the gloomy lobby to wake myself up and was standing behind the front desk doing nothing when in the next second there was a bright flash and a roaring bang. The doors of the bar flew off their hinges and every single bit of glass the length of the hallway was blown to smithereens.

   Other than the echo from the blast I couldn’t hear anything, slowly backing away from the desk and backing out the side door, sidling along the outside wall until I came to the front of the building. I stood outside until I was breathing again and my hearing started to come back. I decided I wasn’t hurt since nothing hurt. Back inside the dust was settling and it didn’t look like too much was on fire. The phone was still working. I called the police and they arrived in the matter of a minute, the fire department hard on their heels.

  The firemen hauled hoses inside and sprayed water on everything from one end of the bar to the other. The hardwood bar was split in half and the stools mangled. All the tables and chairs were helter-skelter. Many of them were splintered. All of the bottles and glasses and mirrors were shattered. It was a soggy mess when the firemen got done with it.

   There were forty or fifty guests tucked into their beds when the bomb went off. Some of them on the lower floors were woken up by the blast. A policeman stood by the elevator and whenever somebody came down asking what the noise had been told them to go back to bed.

   I went over what happened with a police detective. He asked me a hundred questions but finally told me to go home. It was five in the morning. I walked up E. 30th St. to Payne Ave, past Dave’s Grocery and Stan’s Deli, to my rented rooms on E. 34th St. I didn’t see another soul, although I saw thin ice in the shadows on every street. My roommate was dead asleep. Mr. Moto my Siamese cat followed me to my bed and jumped on top of me when I fell into it. He curled up while I lay awake.

   I quit my job by phone the next day. The only time I went back was to collect my last paycheck. My ex-boss looked at me sideways like I had something to do with the bombing. When I asked, he said the police had found a door forced at the back of the bar and believed that was how the intruder got in, taping two sticks of dynamite to the underside of the bar. He said I was lucky the wood was oak.

   “One stick can blow a 12-inch-thick tree right out of the ground, do you know?” he said.

   “I don’t know and I don’t care,” I said. There were sheets of plywood hammered up everywhere. A month later I heard talk that the bar’s proprietor, who leased the space from the Versailles Motor Inn, had fallen behind paying his protection money and the bombing was a way of settling accounts.

   The Mob was big in Cleveland in the 1970s. When John Scalish died after 30-odd years as the underworld’s power broker, Jack “King of the Hill” Licavoli took over. He lived in an unassuming house in Little Italy, up the hill towards Cleveland Heights. “Jack was the last of the old-school Cleveland mobsters,” said James Willis, his downtown lawyer. “Cleveland had the best burglars, thieves, and safe crackers in the country. I know, I represented a lot of them.”

   Jack White, another of his names, a play on his dark Sicilian complexion, got his start bootlegging in St. Louis. He came to Cleveland in 1938 and worked his way up. “A lot of the guys coming up were just out for themselves, but not Jack. He looked out for the operation and he was so good at his job that I thought it would never end,” James Willis said. “He was very secretive and not at all flamboyant. We would only ever talk in person.”

   “No one thought it would be Licavoli taking over,” Rick Porello said. “He was an old miser. One time he was caught by a store’s security for switching the price tag on a pair of trousers. When they found out who he was they dropped the charges.”

   I soon found work in the Communications Department at Cleveland State University, on the 16th floor of Rhodes Tower, working for their new film studies professor. I was an English major, but movies were close enough. They were becoming the new literature, anyway. My job was picking up whatever art house film my boss was screening from the mail room, roll the 16 mm projector out of storage, screen the movie to his class, and send it on to the next school that wanted it. In return I got free tuition and a closet that passed for an office.

   I watched many French New Wave movies, Japanese samurai movies, and 1940s Warner Brothers crime movies during my work-study year, films that the Cleveland State University library had tucked away in secret places. I projected them on my office wall at the end of the day. I didn’t have a TV at home, but the movies I watched were better than anything on TV, anyway.

   Two years after I left the Versailles Motor Inn, John Nardi, who was secretary-treasurer of Vending Machine Service Employees Local 410 and high up in the Mob’s chain of command, sauntered out of his office a couple of blocks away from where I had worked as a night clerk, stepped into his Oldsmobile 98, and turned the key. The small car parked next to him exploded. It was another Trojan Horse attack. The bomb, to make sure, was packed with nuts and bolts. John Nardi was blown to kingdom come. Bomb City USA was alive and well.

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

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

“A Cold War thriller that captures the vibe of mid-century NYC.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

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

The end of summer, New York City, 1956. Times Square, Coney Island, and the Mob on the make. President Eisenhower on his way to Brooklyn 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

Home Movies

Thirty One Words

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By Ed Staskus

   After my parents emigrated from Sudbury, Ontario to Cleveland, Ohio in the late 1950s I first attended a public school for a year and after that a parochial school through 8th grade. Iowa Maple Elementary School’s first grade was full of strangers. St. George’s Catholic School was full of the progeny of Eastern Europeans, children like me. After I graduated I went to St. Joseph’s, a Catholic all boys high school. One thing we did, no matter the school, was recite the Pledge of Allegiance first thing in the morning, facing an American flag with our right hands on our hearts.

   “I pledge Allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all.” When we were done we sat down and cracked open our books.

   At first, I wasn’t sure I was duty bound to recite the pledge, There wasn’t any such thing in Canada, although we did sing “God Save the Queen.” Who doesn’t like breaking into song first thing in the morning? I mentioned my doubts to my second grade teacher. Our nuns belonged to the Sisters of St. Francis of the Providence of God. She sent me to the principal. The principal set me straight. “You’re not in Canada anymore, young man,” she said. “As long as you’re here in the United States you’ll recite the pledge like everybody else.”

   The pledge was officially recognized by the United States in 1942. Congress wanted all schoolchildren to recite it every day. The next year, 1943, the Supreme Court ruled that requiring a person to say the pledge is a violation of the First Amendment to the Constitution. The court said students cannot be compelled to recite the pledge or salute the flag. The principal was in violation of the Constitution, although I didn’t bring it up to her. One reason was  that I didn’t know there was such a ruling. The other reason was that the principal was a power unto herself. There was no sense in poking the bear with a stick.

    The nuns of the Sisters of St. Francis of the Providence of God were stern. They knew how to put the fear of God in us. They often reminded their charges we were sinners in the hands of an angry God. It was a parochial school, which meant it was a private school. They made the rules. It was their way or the highway. 

   Supreme Court or no Supreme Court, during the 1950s and 1960s states continued to require recitation of the pledge. To this day forty seven states still mandate the pledge be recited in public schools, with varying exemptions. The fine print allows students to opt out. In my day hardly anybody except atheists read the fine print. Everybody recited the pledge. Nobody wanted to be known as an atheist or a communist.

   In 1954 President Dwight Eisenhower added the words “under God” to the pledge. They hadn’t been in the original. The change was made at the urging of the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic men’s fraternal organization, and approved by a Joint Resolution of Congress. “From this day forward,” the president said, “the millions of our school children will daily proclaim in every city and town, every village and rural school house, the dedication of our nation and our people to the Almighty. To anyone who truly loves America, nothing could be more inspiring than to contemplate this rededication of our youth, on each school morning, to our country’s true meaning.”

   Two years later President Dwight Eisenhower made the phrase “in God We Trust” the official motto of the United States. The phrase began appearing on currency in the early 1960s. The New York Times wasn’t impressed, saying “Let us carry our religion, such as it is, in our hearts and not in our pockets.” Others said the phrase should have been “In Gold We Trust.”

   The Pledge of Allegiance was easy enough to memorize. Even with the addition of “under God” there are only thirty one words. By the time I graduated high school I had recited it more than two thousand times. After the first hundred-or-so recitations the speaking of it became routine. It was just something we had to do first thing in the morning. When I went to Cleveland State University I found out reciting the Pledge of Allegiance was not practiced there, not that it mattered. By then I had stopped believing in “My country right or wrong.”

   I hadn’t thought about the pledge for decades when it unexpectedly cropped up one Christmas Eve over a Scrabble board. My wife and I were at my mother’s house for dinner. My parents grew up in Lithuania and celebrated Christmas on Christmas Eve. The ethnic holiday is called Kucios. The meal is traditionally meatless. It consists of twelve dishes representing both the twelve months of the year and the Twelve Apostles. An empty place at the table is often set for deceased family members to signify their presence and remembrance. My father had died some years earlier. We kept the chair he had always sat in empty during dinner.

   After dinner, and after opening our presents, my sister, Rita, my niece’s boyfriend, Dean, and I sat down in the living room to play Scrabble. My wife was not allowed to play because she was always breaking the rules by laying down foreign words – she spoke some French and German – and making up words. She felt it was her right, no matter what the rules said. She left the living room and by way of unintended consequences got buttonholed by my niece, Silvija, who was spinning her latest conspiracy theories in the kitchen. Once she got started she wasn’t going to be coming up for air any time soon.

    Silvija and Dean had hooked up at Miami University. After graduating they moved to Colorado together and set up housekeeping. We hadn’t seen them for several years. There was an ill at ease vibe in the air between them, but nobody asked what it was about. Silvija could be a time bomb.

   I was good at Scrabble. My sister was better. Dean had only played it a few times, but he was good with words. Halfway into the game I laid out the word ‘pledge.’ One of my tiles bridged a triple word score square on the game board. The move shot me into first place. 

   “Darn,” Dean said. “I had a word for that spot.”

   “Sorry about that,” I said, even though I wasn’t sorry at all. Even though it is true that we learn more from losing than winning, everything is bright and shiny on the Scrabble board when you are winning. Winning is all you need to know in our day and age.

   “Do you know the Pledge of Allegiance was written by a socialist,” Dean said out of the blue.

   “That’s hard to believe,” I said. “Americans hate socialists.” 

   Many Americans don’t see the social doctrine as the way to achieve social equality. They conflate it with communism. They think it means the government would take control of the means of production, throw tycoons in jail, and everybody would end up poor.

   “Look it up,” Dean said. “All those kids who have been reciting the pledge all these years have been mouthing a socialist’s words.”

   When I looked it up I discovered the Pledge of Allegiance was written 1892 by Francis Bellamy, a Baptist minister and Christian Socialist. The ideological movement flourished from the mid-19th century into the early 20th century. It endorsed socialist economics based on the Bible and the teachings of Jesus Christ. Acts 4:32 comments on early believers sharing their assets and possessing everything in common. Matthew 6:24 and Luke 3:11 both advise against serving wealth and encourage sharing resources. Christian Socialists believed capitalism was idolatrous and rooted in greed. Unlike what prevails today among many conservative Christians, who believe avarice is good, they believed it was a sin. They saw social inequality as being caused by greed and capitalism.

   An earlier pledge had been written in 1885 by Captain George Balch, a Union officer in the Civil War, who later wrote a book about teaching love for your country to children in public schools. Francis Bellamy adapted it, rewriting it, tightening it up, and making it more rhetorical. The reason he updated the pledge was because he had gotten a job in the premium department of the magazine Youth’s Companion. He had been forced from his Boston pulpit for his Bible-thumping sermons about the evils of capitalism and needed gainful employment.

   The Youth’s Companion was trying to sell more American flags to schools than they had already sold. The magazine had half a million subscribers. They wanted more subscribers. They had already sold 26,000 flags since 1888 as a premium to solicit subscriptions but sales were flagging. They needed a new marketing approach. They began offering a free picture of George Washington with every flag. They became enthusiastic supporters of the schoolhouse flag movement, which aimed to see a flag flying above every schoolhouse in the country. 

   “The flag over the schoolyard makes the nation a real thing to the very ones who are most in want of that lesson,” Francis Bellamy said. “The daily ceremony of raising it and saluting it is a perpetual education.” Honor and venerate the flag was the order of the day.

   In addition to the sales angle, there was an Americanization angle. The late 19th century was a boom time for immigration into the United States, fueled by famine, political unrest, and religious persecution. Many came for economic opportunity. Francis Bellamy was a true believer in the socialist movement and the nationalization movement. He believed that immigrants fed the country’s economic engine but that they could be harmful to the American way of life. He believed they needed to assimilate as quickly as possible. The pledge would act as  daily reminder. It would foster solidarity and patriotism.

   The pledge was published in Youth’s Companion in September 1892, dovetailing with flag salute ceremonies scheduled for Columbus Day the next month. The salute became known as the Bellamy Salute, stretching the arm out forward, palm downward, in line with the forehead, towards the American flag. It was practiced that way until World War Two, when the Nazi-like salute was replaced with a hand over the heart. 

   In spite of his belief that “Jesus was a socialist” and his jeremiads against capitalism, Francis Bellamy spent most of his working life in advertising, which is a cornerstone of capitalism. He spent nineteen years working in the profession in New York City and ten more years doing the same in Tampa, Florida, where he died in 1931.

   My brother and his family, who were a fidgety, impatient family, had gathered up their presents and left early. My wife was still stuck in the kitchen with Silvija. It had started to snow on the other side of the windows. Rita, Dean, and I were on the last lap of our Scrabble game. Dean was out of the running. Rita and I were neck and neck. I had six tiles left. They included the letters ‘c’ and ‘h’ and ‘y,’ all three of them higher point tiles. If I could run my rack I would win the game.

   It took a few minutes, my sister needling me to hurry up, hoping I wouldn’t run the rack, but I found the spot on the board I was looking for and put down the word ‘anarchy.’ I scored forty-some points, and since I had laid out all my tiles. I got to add on all the points on the tiles Dean and Rita were left holding. I won the game going away.

   “You pulled away with the pledge word and now you finished us off with the anarchy word,” Dean said. “It’s like some kind of yin and yang.”

   “You know what they say about those two peas in a pod,” I said.

   “No, what do they say?” Dean asked.

   “The way I’ve heard it, next to swearing an oath to anarchy, the next worst mistake in this world is pledging allegiance to a state, especially the state we’re in nowadays.”

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. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

“Bomb City” by Ed Staskus

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

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

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

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Vera Nyberg

Not Dead Enough

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By Ed Staskus

   Vera Nyberg was in the middle of a zigzagging dream when her cell phone rang. She kept it on the nightstand when sleeping. She let it ring, gathering her senses. Laying on her back she finally pawed for it and held it up over her head so she wouldn’t have to move her head. She saw it was 5:45 in the morning. It was the department. She took the call.

   “It’s my day off,” she said. “This better be good.”

   “Look out your front window,” the man on the other end of the line said. It was Dave Campbell. He was the boss of the Criminal Investigations Unit. He was her boss.

   Her back bedroom window faced onto Crest Ln., which was more-or-less an alley. Her front bedroom, which was empty since she hadn’t done anything to it since moving in except paint it, faced onto Riverside Dr. The street overlooked the Rocky River valley.

   Vera got up and trudged to the front bedroom. One of her cats had been sleeping with her. The other one was sleeping in the front bedroom on one of the windowsills. She went to the open window and looked down. The cat yawned, stretched, and jumped away. What she saw was the street blocked in both directions by Ford Explorer Police Interceptors. Red and blue lights were flashing. There were an ambulance, a rescue truck, and a utility truck, as well. The utility truck had probably come from Station No. 1 on Madison Ave, but the other two vehicles, she thought, must have come from Station No. 2, which was around the corner on Detroit Rd. She had slept through whatever was going on.

   There are more than 12,000 houses and buildings in Lakewood’s five-square mile footprint on the south shore of Lake Erie. The Fire Department has three stations. The lay of the land means their response times are very good. Vera hadn’t heard any sirens. She had gone out with a friend to the Alley Cat Oyster Bar in the Flats and been the worse for wear when she finally fell into bed. She swam downstream all the night.

   She couldn’t tell what the excitement was about. There were no civilian cars in the street. It couldn’t have been an accident. If it had been an accident she wasn’t likely to be involved, anyway. There wasn’t anybody sprawled out and oozing blood on the asphalt. Two police officers were leaning  over the safety railing on top of the Jersey barrier that bordered the valley side of the street from where Riverway Ave. dead ended to the corner of West Clifton Blvd. Maybe somebody had fallen into the valley. It was a long way down the cliffside, more than a hundred and fifty feet down.

   “Did somebody fall into the valley?”

   “Go take a look at what we’ve got and get back to me.”

   “All right,” she said, perplexed, She pulled on sweatpants and a light sweater. It was unseasonably cool for the first week of July. She slipped her identification card into her pocket, just in case. She stepped out her front door.

   When she walked into the street sunrise was in full swing. A police officer taking field notes looked her up and down.

   “Rough night Vera?” he asked.

   “It was a very good night,” she said. “It’s a rough morning.”

   “What there is to see is right over there,” the police officer said, leading her to the safety railing.

   She saw a rope tied to the safety railing. When she looked over the railing she saw a man hanging by the neck at the other end of the rope. He was wearing tan cargo shorts and a Cowboy Carter t-shirt. He wasn’t wearing shoes. There wasn’t much else to see. There wasn’t a sign of life to him.

   “The medical examiner should be here in about half an hour,” the police officer said.

   “Who called this in?”

   “Your neighbor one house over.”

   Tim Doyle lived in a cottage-style house with his wife. They shared their house with two shaggy dogs. He was a professional photographer. He wore his graying hair long and tied back in a ponytail. His wife Colleen was a fine gardener and his business manager. Tim was an early riser.

   “I went across the street to get some shots of the fog on the river,” he said. “I like the half-light early in the morning. I didn’t notice the hanging man at first. I was standing there at the barrier when a turkey buzzard flew over me.” The birds nested in the cliffside. “They’re ugly birds but beautiful in flight. I got a good shot of him. He dove and was coming back up when I saw the man hanging there. I couldn’t see his face too well, but I think I recognize the t-shirt.”

   “We’re going to get him up and wait for the medical examiner,” Vera said. “Are you willing to take a look at him then?”

   “I’ll be on my front porch. I need a cup of coffee.”

   The hanged man was less than three feet down from the edge, although the rope looked longer. Vera saw it wasn’t taut and wondered why. Two firemen began pulling him up by his armpits but stopped. “He’s stuck on something,” one of them said. Vera saw the back of the man’s belt was caught on a small stump jutting out from the cliffside. One of the firemen carefully stretched down and freed the belt from the stump  They pulled him up and laid him down in the street. Vera borrowed a pair of nitrile gloves and began looking the man over. The heels of his bare feet were scuffed and bloody. He was fit but thick around the middle. There was still some color in his face. She thought whatever happened must have happened just before sunrise. There wasn’t anything in his pockets. 

   The Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner arrived in twenty minutes. He  was in his late 30s, like her, but lanky and tall. He was six and a half feet tall. Vera was five and a half feet tall. She was always looking up at the underside of his bony chin. His name was Isaac but every time she saw him she thought of Ichabod Crane. She called him Ichabod, but only out of the man’s earshot.

   He began by crouching over the hanged man and examining his neck. After a minute he frowned. He looked up at Vera.

   “He didn’t die by hanging,” he said. “Ligature marks from hanging typically appear as a groove or furrow encircling the neck, obliquely positioned above the thyroid cartilage and discontinuous at the point of suspension. There are almost no ligature marks and there is no groove.”

   Vera got the gist, ignoring the jargon.

   “So what did he die of?”

   “I’ll show you what I think killed him.”

   He reached into his evidence bag and pulled out a pair of tweezers. He pushed the tweezers up one of the man’s nostrils and extracted a crumb of green fabric.

   “I think he was smothered, probably by a green shaggy pillow,” he said, probing the other nostril. He was still probing it when the man sneezed. Vera jumped back like she had stepped on a snake and the medical examiner almost fell over.

   “What’s going on?” the man groaned.

   “He’s not dead,” Vera said.

   “Apparently not,” the medical examiner said, recovering his poise and checking the man’s vital signs. He checked his pulse. He checked his respiratory rate. He checked his doll’s eye reflex, moving his head gently back and forth and observing his eye movements.

   “He’s definitely alive and seems to be all right, but let’s get him to Fairview as soon as possible,” he said. The Cleveland Clinic Hospital in Fairview Park was five minutes away.

   “Wait,” Vera said.

   She waved across the street at Tim Doyle, who put his coffee cup down and joined them. He looked at the man.   

   “That’s Bill,” he said. “He lives in that house there.” He pointed to a large house next to another large house on the opposite corner. Both houses faced the valley. “He lives with a partner. His name is Walter, although I call him Wally. He doesn’t like it, but that’s what I call him. He and Bill haven’t been getting along lately.”

   “How do you know that?”

   “I’ve heard the fights in their backyard the past two months. All the neighbors have. Wally’s been in a foul mood lately.”

   “Keep him right here,” Vera said to the medical examiner, pointing at Bill. “When you see me coming back put something over his face.”

   “He needs to go to Fairview the sooner the better.”

   “I’ll be back in five minutes.”

   Vera crossed Franklin Ave., walked to the second house down, and went up the front steps. The house had an old-fashioned slate roof. It had recently been spruced up with shiplap siding. An oak tree kept the house shaded. There were two large, glazed pots of scarlet geraniums flanking the front door. One of them was knocked over. Loose flower petals on the ground looked like spots of dried blood. The blinds in every window were drawn. She rang the doorbell. A man dressed like Jimmy Buffett answered the door. There were two suitcases and a carry-on next to him. What she could see of the indoors looked dim and gloomy. 

   “Let’s go,” he said. “I’ll be glad to get out of here.”

   “Where to?” Vera asked.

   “The airport.”

   “I’m not your Uber,” Vera said, showing him her identification card.  “Are you Wally?”

   “I’m Walter,” the man said.

   “Before you leave for the airport, I wonder if you would come with me for a minute.”  It wasn’t a request. A police officer had come with her. He was standing behind her.

   “I’m already running late for my flight.”

   “This will only take a minute.”

   They went down the steps when Vera suddenly said, “I forgot something, be right back.” She made a sign the police officer understood and beelined up the steps and into the living room. In the living room she saw two green shaggy pillows on a sofa. Back outside they walked to where Bill was. The medical examiner had covered him with an evidence sheet. He quickly peeked under the sheet and put a forefinger to his lips, signaling Bill to be quiet.

   When they got to the evidence sheet Vera said to Walter, “We discovered a man hanging from the safety rail this morning and we’ve been made aware he lived in the house you also occupy. Would you mind taking a look at the man and see if you can identify him.”

   “Is he dead?” Walter asked.

   Vera didn’t answer. The medical examiner uncovered the face of the man. Walter looked at him and said, “My God, it’s Bill, what happened to him?”

   Bill opened his eyes and said, “You’re what happened to me.”

   Walter was dumbstruck. His face went white. His eyes got big as a tree frog’s. “You can’t be alive. I killed you twice.”

   “I’m not dead enough for you?” Bill asked. “Why did you do it?”

   Walter’s face changed. It got dark. “I loved you for twenty years but you were dumping me for a younger man,” he said. “Where was I going to live? How was I going to live? I took all your money I could get my hands on and I was going somewhere warm and sunny where nobody would ever find me. I hate you. I wish I could kill you again.”

   Vera stepped in front of Walter, told him he was being arrested for attempted murder, and began reading him his rights. Halfway through her recital Walter bolted, dodged two police officers, and ran down Riverside Dr. towards West Clifton Blvd.

   “Oh, for God’s sake, he’s got the brains of a paper cup,” Vera said. “Go get him before he hurts himself.”

   While she waited for Walter to be caught and brought back, the ambulance took Bill to the Cleveland Clinic, the rescue and utility trucks drove off, and all but one of the Police Interceptors left. The medical examiner came over and stood next to Vera, looked down at the top of her head, and said, “Next time make sure they’re dead for real before calling me first thing in the morning.”

   “That’s on me,” Vera said.

   “And stop calling me Ichabod,” he said. “I use bone saws on headless horsemen, not the other way around.”

Image by Joan Miro.

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

“Bomb City” by Ed Staskus

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

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

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

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Home Movies

Gimme Shelter

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By Ed Staskus

   Not only did I not see the Rolling Stones when they rolled into Cleveland, I didn’t even get a t-shirt. In the event, however, I heard every song they played inside Municipal Stadium and I made more money that day than I was accustomed to making. I kept the money in my pocket, not rushing out to buy the band’s latest album. I didn’t have any of their albums, anyway, so I didn’t need another one to add to my collection.

   The band was in town on July 1, 1978, as part of the World Series of Rock. Just before they hit the stage in front of 83,000 fans a question flashed on and off in five-foot letters on the scoreboard. The question was, “Who’s the Greatest Rock and Roll Band in the World?” There was a roar from the crowd. I didn’t see the flashing letters but I heard the roar and saw the hundreds of red balloons that were released. I watched the balloons from where I was float over the rim of the stadium and out over Lake Erie .

   A small parking lot outside the entrance gates was where I was.  What I was doing in the parking lot was selling t-shirts. A neighbor of mine by the name of Hugo had gotten them silk screened at Daffy Dan’s. He and I spent the day peddling them from an eight-foot folding table at the southeast corner of the stadium. He didn’t have a license that I saw, but I did see a policeman wave to Hugo in a friendly way. I took that to mean we could stay.

   It was an overcast day, hot and sticky. It was the kind of day that looked like rain or maybe a thunderstorm rumbling in from Lake Erie. The stadium was on the south shore of the lake. It was the first place rain would show up.

   The show started just before one o’clock with Peter Tosh, who was from Jamaica, followed by Kansas, who were from Kansas. They sang their big hit from the year before, which was “Dust in the Wind.” As it was, they should have changed the lyrics to “Rain in the Wind” because in the middle of the song it started to drizzle. By the time the Rolling Stones hit the boards at five o’clock it was raining more and had gotten windy. It rained on-and-off throughout their 18-song set. 

   “Fans huddled under blankets or plastic wraps,” wrote Jane Scott, rock critic for the Cleveland Plain Dealer. “But the show was the most exuberant and exciting that the group has brought here. Mick Jagger was jauntier and more active than he has ever been. He skipped onstage in a red jacket, brownish vinyl pants and a red cap. He jogged in place and discoed to the first song. He waved his hands at the audience and doffed his cap. He seemed as carefree as a drunken sailor.”

   Hugo wasn’t jaunty or carefree. He had come prepared for bad weather with yellow slickers for both of us and a tarp to cover our table. We did a brisk business after the show selling dry t-shirts. It was the reason I never got one of them. We sold them out.

   The World Series of Rock was a recurring summer concert series staged at Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium from 1974 to 1980. The shows were organized by Belkin Productions, a local promotion company, and WMMS, a local radio station known as the ‘Home of the Buzzard.’ Some of the bands that came and went were Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Foreigner, Pink Floyd, Journey, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and Fleetwood Mac. None of them drew fewer than 60,000 fans. The all-day shows were notorious for drug use, drunkenness, and rowdiness. Every so often somebody fell or jumped off the upper deck. Most of them survived. All of them were more-or-less seriously hurt. 

   The Cleveland Free Clinic ministered to the hurt. They were funded by Belkin Productions. They conditioned their funding on the Free Clinic’s nondisclosure of the number of staff on duty, the nature of the injuries treated, and the number of concertgoers treated. Don’t upset the apple cart was the word of the day.

   The last World Series of Rock was staged in 1980 featuring Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band. Municipal Stadium officials had gotten sick and tired of the baseball playing field being torn up after every show and city officials had gotten sick and tired of the robberies and violence that had become part and parcel of the events.

   Hugo was a large man, four or five years older than me. He drove a well-kept 1962 Rambler Classic station wagon. His hair was long and tied back in a ponytail. His eyes were the green of sea glass. He wore a white t-shirt, dungarees, and Red Wing boots the day of the show, He was genial with buyers and gruff with everybody else. Not a single person messed with us, not even the outlaw bikers and shifty boys from the ghetto. 

   He handled the money, stuffing the bills into his pockets. He didn’t let anybody pay with loose change. Whenever he had a minute he rolled the bills up, rubber banded them, and pushed them down into a canvas messenger bag. He wore the bag cross-body, with the strap over one shoulder and the bag resting on his opposite hip. If somebody misjudged Hugo and tried to grab the bag, it wasn’t going to be easy getting it off him. It was going to be a mistake.

   The Rolling Stones started their set with “Let It Rock” followed by “Honky Tonk Women” and “When the Whip Comes Down.” I wasn’t a big fan of the band and so didn’t pay much attention. I enjoyed their last two songs, Chuck Berry’s  “Sweet Little Sixteen” and their own “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.”

   “I was born in a crossfire hurricane, and I howled at my ma in the drivin’ rain, but it’s all right now, in fact, it’s a gas, but it’s all right, I’m Jumpin’ Jack Flash.”

    Jack Flash was a 1950s adventure story character featured in the British comic magazine ‘The Beano’. It was hard to make out what the song was about, although it seemed to be something about enduring hardships and overcoming challenges. It didn’t help that hearing the lyrics was a challenge.

   “It was my first and last concert at Municipal Stadium,” said Chris Austin, a suburban Rocky River native. “It was hard to hear the music with all the screaming and yelling in my ears. It was a good line up but it was a shame you couldn’t hear it unless you were anywhere near the front row. All you heard was screaming.”

   Hugo didn’t know the Rolling Stones from the Beach Boys and didn’t care. He didn’t get a kick out of rock ‘n’ roll. He called the music the Beatles made “bug music.” He didn’t know much about rockabilly, the British Invasion, surf rock or Southern rock, hard rock or psychedelic rock, folk rock, blues rock, or funk rock. As far as I knew the only music he listened to was old Zydeco and rhythm and blues from mid-century, give or take a decade-or-two.  His favorite Zydeco musician was Boozoo Chavis, who played the accordion and was usually accompanied  by a fiddle and a washboard. He sang all his songs in French. Hugo didn’t speak a word of French so he paid attention to the rhythm and the feeling instead.

   I knew the Rolling Stones were one of the most popular rock ‘n’ roll bands in the world, but to me they were a money-making machine living the high life in the Top 10. I knew they portrayed themselves as outlaws but I also knew they were multi-millionaires. I had my doubts about millionaires being able to be outlaws. It seemed to be against the laws of nature. The rich steal with a fountain pen. That doesn’t make them desperadoes, at least not until they run out of money. 

   Tours by the Rolling Stones were a license to print money. Their United States tour in 1978 took them to twenty four venues coast to coast in fifty days. Their gross in Cleveland was more than a million dollars, or about five million dollars in today’s money. Mick Jagger was reported to be “jolly and high-spirited” after the show. It is easy enough to imagine how happy the band was with the loot they hauled back to Great Britain, where they could spend it doing whatever wealthy outlaws do.  

   I liked some rock ‘n’ roll bands like the Doors and the Jimi Hendrix Experience, but Jim Morrison was dead and so was Jimi Hendrix. I liked what I heard from Peter Tosh at the World Series of Rock and went  to see him and his seven-man band at the Front Row Theater in Highland Hts. three years later. It was a hike for my car but worth it. I even bought one of their albums.

   Peter Tosh’s songs were about equality and social justice. He sang about oppression and injustice, blending rocksteady with reggae, always keeping a skank beat going, although his rhythm section, Sky Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare, called it the “rockers rhythm.”

   “Everyone is crying out for peace, yes, none is crying out for justice, I don’t want no peace, I need equal rights and justice.”

   Many of the songs the Rolling Stones sang were about sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. They portrayed themselves as the rebellious spirit of the age. They claimed to challenge the status quo, even though they were the status quo. At least, that was what the Bank of England thought of them. They addressed some social and political issues, but didn’t make a bad habit of it. Swagger buttered their bread, not warmheartedness.

   It was incidental what I thought about the Rolling Stones. Most of the fans I heard talking about them while walking past our table of rapidly disappearing t-shirts seemed more than happy with what they had gotten for their $12.50. “He is the God of Cool” one of them said to his friend. I assumed he was talking about Mick Jagger. Somebody else said the show was “electrifying” while another said it was “unforgettable.” Two young women, one of them carrying a tote bag with the band’s iconic red lips and tongue logo on it, were talking excitedly. I couldn’t make out what they were saying, although it didn’t matter. Whatever they were saying was plain as day on their faces.

   The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is a five minute walk from where Municipal Stadium once stood until it was torn down in 1997. The museum marked the 50th anniversary of the World Series of Rock with an exhibit at their Library and Archives in 2024. There were guitars used by some of the musicians. There were old posters and mangy ticket stubs. There were many photographs.

   “They put together some good stuff,” said Jules Belkin of Belkin Productions. “It was a group of years that are etched in people’s memories.” He was there when it happened in the 1970s, although he didn’t seem to remember much about the shows. He was too busy backstage staging them to see anything. 

   “It was pioneering in terms of massive concerts like that,”  said Andy Leach, Senior Director of Museum and Archival Collections at the Rock Hall. “I don’t think there will ever be anything quite like that again. From what I’ve heard from friends of mine, you could wander right up to the stage.”

   I didn’t see the exhibit. I have never seen an exhibit at the Roll and Roll Hall of Fame because I have never been there, even though I live fifteen minutes away. I don’t see what museums have to do with rock ‘n’ roll since the music genre is a right now right here thing. The proof is in the pudding, not well-bred and displayed on a wall.

   Jerry Garcia, when the Grateful Dead were inducted, sat out the ceremony. He said he found the concept of a rock ‘n’ roll museum “stupid.” The rest of the band attended the induction ceremony. They brought a full-size cardboard cutout of Jerry Garcia with them. The Sex Pistols were even more uncompromising about refusing the honor. “Next to the Sex Pistols, rock and roll and that Hall of Fame is a piss stain,” they said. “Your museum. Urine in wine. We’re not coming. We’re not your monkeys. If you voted for us, hope you noted your reasons. You’re anonymous as judges but you’re still music industry people. We’re not coming. You’re not paying attention. Outside the shit-stream is a real Sex Pistol.”

   Hugo and I were packing up, which amounted to folding up our table and carrying it more than a mile to where we had parked, when a very drunk young man staggered past us bellowing “Monkey Man, play Monkey Man.” He kept bellowing until he was far away and we couldn’t hear him anymore. I hadn’t heard the song during the show.

   “Monkey Man” was a Rolling Stones song from the late 1960s. The lyrics went, “I’m a flea-bit peanut monkey, all my friends are junkies, that’s not really true, I’m a cold Italian pizza, but I’ve been bit, and I’ve been tossed around, by every she-rat in this town.” Whether the lyrics had ever been immortalized by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is an open question. The man’s enthusiasm for the song was undeniable.

   We left Municipal Stadium and the World Series of Rock behind. The departing crowd had thinned out. We walked as fast as we could to get to our car before more weather happened, although Hugo stopped at a hot dog cart and sprang for two foot-longs.

   “Ooh, a storm is threatening, my very life today, if I don’t get some shelter, ooh yeah, I’m gonna fade away, gimme shelter.”

   We got to the car, got the table stowed away, and secured the canvas messenger bag fat with cash under the front seat. A clap of thunder and a lightning bolt lit up the darkening sky. We slid into the car and got it running just as it started to rain for real. The car was shelter from the storm. It kept the outdoors where it belonged, which was outdoors.

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

“Bomb City” by Ed Staskus

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

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

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

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Home Movies

Full Steam Ahead

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By Ed Staskus

   I hadn’t seen Hildy for three or four years. She had become nomadic after graduating from college. When she unexpectedly showed up the first week of Lent I thought we might get together. She had always been a hard girl to get close to, being opinionated and stubborn with a zany streak to boot. But I thought I would try to catch up to what she had been doing. When two weeks went by, and it still hadn’t happened, I stopped in to see her stepmother, where Hildy was staying in her old bedroom. But it still didn’t happen. She sent a text that she had come down with a touch of Covid-19 but would see me in a day-or-two.

   “She says she’s had a deadly strain of Covid-19 a couple of times,” her stepmother said. “Both times it lasted for months. She says she’s hugely sensitive to it, that she keeps getting it for a few days or a week,  and that she can tell when anybody else has it.”

   “That’s unusual,” I said. “How can she tell?”

   “She smells and senses it. At least, that’s what she said.”

   She was named Hildegard after her grandmother. She hated the name and usually refused to answer to it. I called her Hildy as a workaround. She tolerated the diminutive like a teenager tolerates advice.

   Hildy’s senses were on high alert. She had her own house key so she could come and go as she pleased, although she hardly went anywhere. She was careful as could be. She spent most of her time in her room by herself with a twosome of laptops. She didn’t like anybody knocking on the bedroom door. She said she was boning up for her next computer programming job interview. She subscribed to Netflix to fill in the rest of the time. She watched sci-fi movies.

   After a day-or-two went by and I hadn’t seen her I thought it might happen in a week or-two. Maybe she was still under the weather. After a week-or two I thought it might be sometime in the unforeseeable6 future.

  “How long is Hildy staying in town?” I asked her stepmother.

   “I don’t know but I hope she leaves soon. She is creeping me out,” she said.

   “That is creepy, your light was on in your room even though I had turned it off, and I kept hearing strange noises,” Hildy said. “Someone else somehow had to have been in the house. It looked like some objects were moved as well. I feel super spooked out if it wasn’t you. I’ve been keeping the front and back door looked with the deadbolt when I’m home.  I always lock the doors. Even taking Emil out to go potty in the backyard, I lock the door behind me.”

   Emil was Hildy’s dog. It was a Tamaskan. She got him from a breeder eight years earlier when the dog was ten weeks old. His name is associated with ambition and a drive to surpass others. The dog was plenty big enough to live up to his name but was scared of his own shadow. He was like a jittery fawn. He had no daring of any kind.

   “I had an issue with stalking and people breaking and entering my apartment ever since I did that military project after college,” Hildy said. “I assumed it was staff coming in unannounced and made complaints to management and even filed a police report. They did nothing. I caught maintenance coming in once. It is a form of harassment and against the law. Maybe we should get some hidden cameras.”

   “She seems halfway in the weeds,” I said. “How is it she decided to visit you?” I knew there was some bad blood between them. There had even been real blood once.

   “I don’t know, she just showed up. Believe me, I didn’t invite her. She doesn’t have an apartment, or a job right now, so I don’t know what to do with her.”

   “What about Joe?”

   Joe was her ex-husband. He had been a policeman in the Baltics, a roofer in New Jersey when they got married, and was now a long-haul trucker. He worked and lived in his 18-wheeler. He had tried to convince his daughter to share an apartment with him in Texas, so he would have somewhere to stay for a few days every month where he could wash his clothes, sleep in his own bed, and plug into some R & R, but Hildy said no.

   “They can’t be in the same room together for long before they start screaming at each other.”

   Hildy was born in Lithuania in the early 1990s to Joe and his then wife Birute. When they divorced Joe met his new wife-to-be on a flight from Europe to the United States. She was a travel agent and was going home. Joe was on his way to New York City where his estranged wife had landed. He couldn’t get back together with her but got together with his new friend. After they were married they lived in Lakewood, just west of Cleveland, on a quiet tree-lined street in an old-school neighborhood. When she was a teenager, Hildy attended Lakewood High School.

   “I don’t feel safe anymore,” she said. “On top of the non-stop cyber-attacks, I have been living in hell for years from abuse, stalking, harassment, and sabotage. It has been a constant nightmare. It has destroyed my work, my finances, and so many other aspects of my life. I have spent $15,000 on new electronics in three years because of people installing malware and viruses on my devices and remotely controlling my computers and phones. I have been given wrong directions from my GPS directing me straight into oncoming traffic on one-way streets.”

   When she was in high school she played rugby, playing the scrum half and fly half positions. She was fast and quick on the pitch. Her last year on the team they won all their regular season games. They scrimmaged against both Kent State University and Ashland University. They beat them both. They placed second at the Midwest Rugby Tournament and qualified for the Nationals. They were ranked second in the country. 

   Hildy hurt her knee during the Midwest Rugby Tournament. She dragged herself off the pitch. She was still limping after a trainer wrapped her knee but insisted on going back into the game. She could hardly walk much less run, but she was worked up about winning. She had grit, if nothing else.

   “She had willpower, but she was a difficult friend, hard to get along with,” Tabitha her next-door neighbor and rugby teammate said. “She was nosy and jealous.”

   Hildy went to a summer camp on the Georgian Bay in Canada with her cousin Sadie, who lived around the corner and who went to the same high school, every summer for five years. “She couldn’t get along with her,” her stepmother said. “She wouldn’t be friends with Sadie’s friends and finally didn’t even want to be in the same cabin as her.”

   She went to Miami University, majoring in psychology. While there she collaborated on the study “Biodirectional Effects of Positive Affect, Warmth, and Interactions between Mothers With and Without Symptoms of Depression and Their Toddlers” published in the Journal of Child and Family Studies. She found a boyfriend, Sean, with whom she connected and with whom she traveled far and wide to raves and techno festivals. The lights were bright and the exclamation marks emphatic. The music was very loud. She danced up a storm. In the meantime, she went back to school, earning a degree in computer science.

   “People corrupted my computer and prevented me from being able to interview by changing settings or preventing me from downloading a compatible browser,” she said. “They have installed malformed certificates so my browser would not connect to the internet. All sorts of stuff like that for years. Non-stop abuse and attacks. Every single day I’m dealing with these things. I already had to return my new laptop. My phone currently has erratic behavior.”

   After she got done with her studies she worked as a software engineer for a year in New Jersey, five months in Connecticut, and six months in Delaware, before landing in Colorado, where she worked for about a year. By the time she came back to Lakewood she hadn’t been working for six months. She was living on her credit cards and living out of her car. Sean, her one-time boyfriend, had long since disconnected. She still had her dog, but she was a fish running out of fresh water.

   “It has all caused so much depression,” she said. “I have wanted to kill myself several times in the last three years because of all the abuse. Every time I made a police report or filed a report to the FBI Cybercrimes Division nothing came of it. I have lost over $150,000.00 from all of this in wage losses, property damage, job loss, and having to use credit cards to get by.” She was more than $30,000.00 in the hole with her credit cards and more than $60,000.00 in the hole with her student loans. The holes were getting deeper by the month.

   “My browser constantly gives the wrong info. When I am studying or working my code compilation returns incorrect results regularly. The people responsible deserve to rot in jail or die. Not die, but something. Just finished meditating and I feel way less stressed. I guess the silver lining is that I am aware of what is happening to many other people and have experience with these kinds of situations. Perhaps at some point that will give me the power to create change in a corrupt system.”

   “Is she still a vegan?” I asked her stepmother.

   Hildy had gone vegan while at Miami University, losing weight and waging battles about the ethics and viability of eating animal protein. A glow of virtue lit up her face whenever veganism and animal rights came up in dialog around the campus.

   “No, she now cooks pork chops for Emil and herself every morning.”

   Her uncle invited Hildy to dinner at his house, but Hildy turned down the invitation. “I would love to, but I might get an urge to assault Sadie for the things she has done in the metaverse, so I better pass this time. I don’t feel like entertaining shitty actors or scripted conversations. I refuse to be a victim for the rest of my life. I am not a project. Super appreciate you thinking about me, though.”

   One day her stepmother was driving up her street when she saw fire trucks in front of her house. One of the smoke detectors had started beeping and Hildy had called the Lakewood Fire Department, declaring that the house was burning down. When her stepmother dashed up the driveway to find out what was happening, the firemen told her nothing was happening.  

   “Your smoke detectors are on the old side. One of them was signaling that it needed to be replaced. I suggest you replace all of them.”

   “I don’t get why fire fighters say there is no smoke when there is,” Hildy said. “I smelled smoke and felt dizzy and couldn’t think. I checked the oven, the stove, the outlets, but could not find the source so I called 911. What did I do wrong here? I have had the same issues at other places I have lived at. In Connecticut the fire fighters told me there was nothing there, too, when I had symptoms of CO poisoning although no alarm went off. It’s like a psych game. It is gaslighting the individual to not feel confident in their experience of reality. I don’t need smoke detectors. I don’t need people telling me I’m crazy or schizophrenic when that is not the case. I need people to stop gaslighting me.”

   The day came when Hildy had to go, one way or another. She wasn’t paying her share of anything, food or living expenses, and was being bossy and noisy. She was playing techno music loud enough to annoy the neighbors. When she left, she left by herself, leaving Emil behind.

   “I left him with someone I thought would look out for his best interests since I have no way to take care of him with nonstop cyber-attacks and nanorobotics controlling me and throwing programmed errors at me hundreds of times a day,” she said. “I have tried everything I could think of for three years to escape being targeted. I’ve moved states four times, switched jobs four times, tried to lay low and see if it would stop. I tried resisting and suffered a brain injury. I don’t know what else to tell you. I did everything I could think of but it wasn’t good enough. I’m completely sane and aware. I’m not depressed. I simply refuse to be controlled by a corrupt system and insane people willing to do anything for a few bucks. If my life is not my own, it is no one’s.”

   Her stepmother already had a cat and two dogs. She called Hildy straight away and insisted she come back and pick up her dog. “I can’t have another dog in the house, much less an 80-pound dog,” she said. By the time Hildy got back her stepmother had changed the locks and wouldn’t let her inside the house. She brought the dog to the side door. 

   “Go away,” she said to her step-daughter, pointing in all directions.

   Hildy kicked up a fuss in the driveway but left soon enough when she realized nobody was watching or listening or paying attention. It was Easter Saturday. “I want people to listen to me, believe me, and help me solve the issues and attacks I’m experiencing so I can keep my job and be able to afford a home for Emil and me. He deserves better.”

   I hadn’t seen Hildy even once the six weeks she was in town. A week after she left Lakewood, I heard she had popped up in San Diego and was staying in an Airbnb with a kitchen and a big backyard. Emil was happy to be out of the car, 2,500 miles later, even though it had been a non-stop wagon’s ho. Hildy’s father was making the rental for her and Emil. She chipped in by fluffing her own pillows. She had gotten a sizable tax return and was bringing home the pork chops. It was a nice neighborhood, quiet and sunny. There were few weeds despite the abundant sunshine. 

   Ohio has more than its fair share of noxious weeds, given its damp midwestern climate, including giant hogweed and purple loosestrife. California is more like the home of invasive weeds, but since it is spayed, manicured, and polished, unless the weeds are unusually stubborn, they don’t usually stand much of a chance.

   The last word I got about Hildy was from Sadie, who said she saw the gone girl on Facebook attending a techno fest somewhere out west. It was the four-on-the-floor beat. It was the Call of the West. She wasn’t from around those parts, but she was staking her claim and grooving to her own beat, whatever the beat in her head happened to be.

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

“Bomb City” by Ed Staskus

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

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Cleveland, Ohio 1975. The John Scalish Crime Family and Danny Greene’s Irish Mob are at war. Car bombs are the weapon of choice. Two police detectives are assigned to find the bomb makers. Nothing goes according to plan.

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By Ed Staskus

   Ronald the Borgia wanted to be the mayor of some place. Wherever the place was didn’t matter. He wanted it bad. He was the richest man in Oklahoma. He knew that just like he knew he was smarter than everybody else in the state. They were rubes and easily led by the nose. They didn’t eat so much as swallow what you fed them. Even though he was already an old man, he had plenty of energy and so he ran for mayor of Oklahoma City. He told anybody who would listen, “I’m the only candidate who can save us. If I win, wonderful things will happen. If I lose, awful things will happen.” 

   He put everything he had into the campaign, crisscrossing the state, whipping up his audiences, doing jigs to Kid Rock songs, and showcasing pro wrestlers who endorsed him as better than blubber. He was sure he was going to be the next bossman of the little people. When he lost, garnering less than 20% of the vote, he was very angry.  He declared the election had been rigged and stolen from him.

   His hot as a hooker wife tried to console him. Natasha was from the Balkans but spoke passable English.

   “I am sorry for your loss, honeykins,” she said. “Maybe you find comfort in the hard work you make.”

   “Hard work doesn’t count,” Ronald the Borgia said. “Winning is the only thing that counts. Another word out of you and I’ll go looking for wife number four.”

   “I zip my lip.”

   Ronald the Borgia tossed her a handful of one hundred dollar bills.

   “Go doll yourself up,” he said.

   The man who would be mayor came from old Oklahoma stock. His great-great-great-great grandfather Frederick the Borgia had been one of the original Sooners. The original Sooners were men who knew full well that the only thing that counts is winning. Every Borgia descendant after 1889 got up every morning enthusiastically chanting the mantra of victory.

   “One, two, three, four, why are we here for? Five, six, seven, eight, what do we appreciate? Go Borgia World!”

   Before 1889 they were no-account cattle rustlers and occasional bank robbers. What transformed them was the Oklahoma Land Rush. The Federal Congress in Washington had decided to renege on an 1830 treaty with tribes living there and take back the two million acres the natives had been granted. The land was called Indian Territory until it suddenly became the Unassigned Lands. President Benjamin Harrison proclaimed all two million acres of the Unassigned Lands open for settlement. Anybody could claim 160 acres of public land if they could stake it out.

   The Borgia’s had other plans. They weren’t interested in 160 acres. They gathered together all their relations and as many footloose cowboys as they could. They planned to get a head start and stake out as much land as they could. After that they planned on getting into the real estate business with money they didn’t have. They knew they would get the money by hook or by crook.

   The Land Rush began at noon on April 22, 1889. 50,000 men, and a few hardy women, on horses and buggies were let loose by a blue-clad army officer firing his pistol into the air. The Borgia’s didn’t hear the pistol shot. They were far away. They had staked their many claims the day before. They weren’t Boomers at the starting line. They were Sooners.

   For the next ten years Sooner was a fighting word. It meant somebody who had cheated and so deprived land from the Boomers. After the dust settled, however, the University of Oklahoma football team quixotically adopted the nickname Sooner and in the 1920s the state was officially nicknamed the Sooner State. That was neither here nor there to the Borgias.

   They were able to stake out more than three thousand acres adjoining what would become Oklahoma City. The day after the Land Rush there were already 5,000 people living in tents on land that would become the place. By the early 20th century it was a full-fledged modern city of 64,000 people. The Borgias bided their time. When their time came and the city came to them, they made a fortune. They continued to make money hand over fist for the next one hundred years.

   But that was then and Ronald the Borgia was now. After losing his bid to become mayor of Oklahoma City he took a long vacation at a friend’s mansion in southern Florida and sulked. When he was done sulking he moved to Ohio. He abandoned the Sooners for the Buckeyes. He ran for mayor of Mentor, northeast of Cleveland, and lost big again. He ran for mayor of Parma, southwest of Cleveland, and lost big there, too.

   Ronald the Borgia cried foul again, crying the voting was rigged, but bit the bullet and hired a political consultant. Steve Brandman was grizzled and blunt spoken. He washed his voluminous hair every day. He never washed out his mouth. He got right to the point.

   “You’ve got to get God on your side and you’ve got to get yourself a Devil on the other side,” Steve Brandman said.

   “I don’t believe in God.” 

   “That doesn’t matter, just say you do. Lip sync a prayer or two, even if you don’t know the words. Wave a Bible in the air. Tell everybody you’re a big fan of the Ten Commandments.”

   “What are the Ten Commandments?”

   “We’ll get into that later.”

   “What about this Devil thing?”

   “That’s so there’s something really bad you can oppose with your great godliness.”

   “Like what?”

   “Migrants would be a good choice, especially the wetback kind. They’ve been whipping boys on and off for a long time. Whip up some fear and loathing. Whip up some frenzy. Whip up some hatred.”

   “I can do that with my eyes closed.”

   “There you go, be a Christian soldier, go strong and put your foot on the neck of the weak.”

   “I’ve been doing that my whole life. I’m a pro at it. Migrants won’t stand a chance when I get going. Where should I run next?”

   “Lakewood, right here next to Cleveland.”

   “Lakewood? That dumb-ass suburb is about as liberal as it gets.”

   “You’re right about that.”

   “If I’m right about that then you’re wrong about me running there next.”

   “You’re a three time loser but you think you know better than me? See you later.”

   “No, no, I’ll do whatever you say, but why Lakewood?”

   “One big reason. So far you’ve campaigned against three incumbents, all men, and lost three times. The mayor of Lakewood is an incumbent, too, but it’s a woman. Catch my drift?”

   “I’m with you,” Ronald the Borgia said. “There’s no way I’m losing to some broad. Is she ugly?”

   “What does that matter?”

   “It matters to me.”

   “Whatever,” Steve Brandman said. “Lakewood is just the start. If you can win there you’ll be able to win anywhere, and I mean anywhere.”

   “All right, all right.”

   “One last thing.”

   “What’s that?”

   “My fee is payable in advance, and on top of that, I don’t start working until the check has cleared.”

   “You know I’m good for it.”

   “I don’t know anything of the kind.”

   Steve Brandman knew his man. He got his check. After it cleared the Borgia for Mayor campaign office opened in Lakewood. The election for the mayor’s seat was in two months.

   “That’s not enough time,” Ronald the Borgia complained.

   “You let me worry about that, big guy,” Steve Brandman said. “You do the complaining and explaining. Leave the rest to me.” The big guy waved his hands in the air.

   When Steve Brandman looked at Ronald the Borgia’s hands they seemed unusually small for a man his size. He wondered what else was small on the man. It couldn’t be that, could it? He had it on reliable gossip that his man was a many happy returns customer at many Houses of the Rising Sun. He put his idle thoughts aside and got to work.

   It was a rough and tough campaign. The incumbent mayor campaigned on ethics and efficiency. She campaigned on principle and safe streets. She campaigned on all the new schools being built in town and all the upgrades to the water and sewage systems. She promised to continue the good work of her administration.

   Ronald the Borgia ignored all the issues except two, what he called the “waste of space” in the mayor’s office and the threat of migrants. 

   “She’s slow, she’s got a low IQ, and she’s lazy,” he said. “She’s dumb as a rock. She’s a horrible person. Does she drink? Does she take drugs? I wouldn’t be surprised. She has no respect for the American people and takes voters for granted. She’s on the radical side of the radical left. She’s a retard, mentally disabled, we all know that. She lies all the time. I believe she was born that way. She needs a doctor. Thousands of migrants from the most dangerous countries are destroying the character of Lakewood and leaving the community a nervous wreck. She doesn’t care that migrants are eating people’s dogs and cats, skinning them and barbequing them. I’m very angry about that. Vote for godliness, vote for me, and tell her, you’re fired, get the hell out of here.”

   He began appearing on the campaign trail as a Knight Templar, wearing a white cloak emblazoned with a red cross. He wore chainmail and a great helm with a narrow visor on his head. He carried a one-handed sword and a white Templar shield. His assistants dressed like monks in brown robes. They had to run to McDonalds in their sandals whenever their boss wanted a Big Mac. 

   “I love God, sure, but I really love my Big Mac’s,” he said before returning to a rant about migrants. “We have thousands of migrants overflowing into Lakewood from you know where. Many of those people have terrible diseases and they’re coming here. And we don’t do anything about it, we let everybody come here. It’s like a death wish for our town. They’re rough people, in many cases from prisons, from mental institutions, insane asylums. You know, insane asylums, that’s ‘Silence of the Lambs’ stuff. Hannibal Lecter, everybody knows Hannibal Lecter, right? Do you want him living next door to you? My opponent says, ‘Please don’t call them animals. They’re humans.’ I say, ‘No, they’re not humans. They’re animals.’ God doesn’t want us to live like animals. He wants us to live like gods. I’m already a god, so make sure you vote for me.”

   A week before the election the race was neck-to-neck. Ronald the Borgia seemed calm enough, but was sweating bullets. He called Steve Brandman into his office.

   “You said I was a sure thing,” he said wearing out the carpet.

   “Don’t bother putting words into my mouth,” Steve Brandman said. “I’m not the other side.”

   “I don’t care what you said, but do something, for God’s sake.”

   “It’s in the bag. The polls open on Tuesday. Wait for Monday. You’ll see.”

   Monday morning a fleet of Tesla Cybertrucks wound its way into Lakewood, They drove slowly so the body panels of the Cybertrucks wouldn’t fall off. Emil of Croesus was at the head of the fleet. The fleet stopped in front of City Hall. When Emil of Croesus got out of his stretch limo version of a Cybertruck an aide set up a golden card table and a golden folding chair for him in the middle of the street. Another aide put a cushion on the seat of the chair. Emil of Croesus sat down. A third aide massaged his neck. Traffic ground to a halt. Passersby gathered and gawked.

   “Get Your One Thousand Dollars By Voting the Right Way” a portable marquee sign declared blinking on and off. Emil the Croesus had a stack of one thousand dollar bills in front of him. It wasn’t long before the line stretched from the middle of Lakewood to all the corners of town.

   The next day the neck-to-neck-race became a rout. Ronald the Borgia won in a landslide. Lakewood’s many bars and eateries were full of people celebrating, eating and drinking their fill, at least until they tried paying with Emil the Croesus’s one thousand dollar bills, which nobody would accept. President Grover Cleveland’s face used to be the face on the denomination, at least until 1969 when the U. S. Treasury discontinued it. Emil the Croesus’s bill had the face of Bernie Madoff on it. The money was fake as fake could be.

   It was no matter to Doanld the Borgia, He had gotten what he wanted. He was the new mayor of Lakewood and everybody was going to have to do whatever he said. From now on the God’s truth was going to be coming out of his mouth. “If I don’t like somebody or something and need to get it straightened out, I’ll send in my clowns, I mean my law enforcement, and it’ll get done,” he said. He meant forget the saints above and the fiends below. 

   “Winning is the most important thing in life,” Ronald the Borgia said when Steve Brandman asked how he liked the result. “Losing is for suckers. Suckers are losers. I am the way. I am a winner. Winning first, no matter how, no matter what, everything else way back behind.” He smoothed his red tie. He made his little hands into fists. He pasted a left-handed smile on his face and smirked for all the world to see.

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

“Made in Cleveland” by Ed Staskus

Coming of age in the Rust Belt in the 1960s and 1970s.

“A collection of first-person street level stories blended with the historical, set in Cleveland, Ohio. The storytelling is plugged in.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

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By Ed Staskus

   Before Maggie Campbell’s husband Steve de Luca stopped blazing, he turned the younger of their two cats, whose name was Mittens, into a deadhead. They started calling him Stones because when the cat and Steve were in the bedroom together smoking weed, the way it worked was, whenever Steve exhaled the cat inhaled.

   Mittens adopted a rallying cry along with his new name. The rallying cry was, “Work is the curse of the smoking class.” Steve finally reminded him he had never worked a day in his life and to drop the catchphrase.

   He would lean up on his haunches and sniff for the smoke. He was a candy-colored longhair. The look Stones gave Maggie, whenever she caught them together, was the “Are you looking at me?” look. He thought he was a hepcat. Afterwards, after Steve gave up drugs, they changed his name back to Mittens and he went back to abusing catnip.

  They called Sebastian, their older cat, Big Blackie, until he got even bigger. He had his own take on life. He did backflips when he was a kitten. He ran into the backyard whenever he could and hunted, at least when he was young. Later, in middle age, he spent most of his time in the basement eating. Eating non-stop didn’t work out too well for him. As he got older, everybody started calling him Fatbastian. He didn’t seem to mind the moniker. He kept eating and getting bigger.

   Steve’s father wasn’t a gangster, but his father’s friends and his uncles and their friends were all gangsters. His father was an attorney for the Italian Mob. He was the lawyer for the hired gun who killed the Mob’s enemy Danny Greene with a car bomb in Lyndhurst. But, at the same time, he had been a good friend of the Irishman for many years. Their house in Little Italy was a gift from Danny Greene and the Celtic Club. He never told the Italians about that. It was a secret.

   Steve’s family had wads of money when he was growing up. Whenever he smashed up a car his dad had a new one for him the next day. Speeding tickets got taken care of. There was no need to slow down. Steve was using at eleven and selling at thirteen. His uncles were addicts and used to run and hide their stashes from the police under his bed. When Steve was older, he ran errands for his father. When his father was on the verge of going to jail once when he wouldn’t give something up to a judge, he told Steve he absolutely needed him to go to Columbus that day.

   “These papers must be in the state court system by 5 o’clock. Make sure you get there.”

   Steve sped down to Columbus, delivered the papers, and proceeded to get tequila trashed, to the degree he was swinging at and spitting at policemen who had been called to get him out of the bar he was making a mess of. He became a Steve-o-mess wobbling in mid-air when they got done with him.

   They finally hauled him outside and slapped cuffs on him. They pushed him into the back of a squad car. They allowed him one phone call. He called his father.

   “I’m in jail,” he said.

   “I have one question for you.”

   “What?”

   “Did you deliver the papers?”

   “Yeah.”

   “OK, sit tight, you’ll be out in one hour.”

   He was out in fifty-five minutes.

   Steve’s brother, Freddie, had a used car lot on Carnegie Ave. on the east side of Cleveland. Freddie was the boss and Steve was the workforce. Little Italy was a short walk south of University Circle, where bluebloods went to Case Western Reserve University and where all the museums were. The ghetto was a short walk north of University Circle. That’s where Steve and his brother got started rescuing dogs. Mean-spirited pet owners dumped animals in that neighborhood, behind abandoned houses and shuttered warehouses. 

   They found dogs on the street, picked them up, and brought them back to the car lot. They took care of them and tried to find them homes. Once his brother and he were looking at somebody’s old car for sale and saw a mistreated dog chained to a tree in the back yard. He was on his last legs, with barely a leg to stand on.

   “What’s with the dog?” asked Steve, keeping his eyes on the old car man whose dog it was.

   “Oh, he’s a bad dog, got to keep him tied up,” said the man.

   Steve looked at the dog. He looked at the man and then at the dog again. He didn’t see any badness in the dog. He saw plenty of misery.

   “I’ll tell you what, mister,” he said. “You keep your car, and we’ll take the dog. To make it an even trade we won’t say anything to anybody about you abusing animals.” 

   “No sir, you can’t have that dog.”

   Freddie put his right hand in his pocket and kept it there. He weas wearing a Chief Wahoo baseball cap. He always carried a handgun. The man looked at the pocket. “Oh, hell, just take it,” he sputtered.

   They untied the dog and took it with them.

   There was a pack of wild dogs living in a wooded field behind their car lot. Freddie and Steve put bowls of food out at the tree line for them. They didn’t like going too far into the woods. One day Steve heard howling, so he went into the gloom. He found a blind dog whose litter of puppies had been mauled and some of them eaten by other dogs.

   “Dogs will eat other dogs if they’re that hungry,” Maggie said. “They will. They’ll eat anything.”

   Steve grabbed the puppies that were still alive and ran. The blind dog howled for three days in the woods. There was nothing anybody could do. When the dog stopped howling everybody knew what had happened.

   Steve’s father died the same year Maggie’s father died. Afterwards, Steve was living with Freddie when he met Maggie, his wife-to-be. It was rocky at first, but they smoothed it out. After they got married, they shared the house with Steve’s older brother for almost a year, until Maggie couldn’t take it anymore.

   “He loves us living here because I grocery shop, cook, and clean. I am a clean freak. My vacuum never gets put away. That’s how much I love to vacuum. I don’t screw around.”

   Freddie and Steve had the same eyes, although Freddie was shorter and thicker than Steve, had curly hair, and was a deviler. Maggie had OCD, putting her at odds with all devilers. “Everybody knows you don’t screw around with someone who has OCD,” she said. “You just don’t do that! Except for Freddie, who thinks it’s funny to mess with me, even though I always get mad. That fool doesn’t seem to care.”

   There was no good place to do her make-up in the Little Italy house. The rooms were weirdly partitioned and there wasn’t any good lighting, so she had to do it downstairs. “I keep my make-up bag there. Your brother stuffs banana peels and old food wrappers into my bag when I’m sleeping. Do you know how dirty and disgusting that is?”

   Freddie would just laugh. He thought he was funny, although he wasn’t. His funny bone was bent the wrong way. But Maggie didn’t cry. It took everything she had to not punch him in the face. Her father was somebody who had always said, “Someone’s pissed you off? Go beat the hell out of them.”

   “You think you want to hit me?” Freddie would say. “Go ahead, try it, girlie, try it.”

   She got so upset that her fists balled up. More than anything else in the world she wanted to punch him in the face.

   “I’m not going to lower myself to who you are,” she said. “I’m not going to do it. I’m still a good person.”

   Freddie wasn’t all bad, though. In the morning he’d say to Maggie, “Pack some extra lunch meat for if we find a dog on the streets today.” She would pack their lunches, for them and anything that needed a square meal. If man’s best friend was in bad shape and had to be rescued, and when he barked saying something like, “You better cut that hunk of baloney into more pieces because I’m hungry enough to eat six of them,” they always had something in their Glad bags to offer the animal.

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

“Ebb Tide” by Ed Staskus

“A thriller in the Maritimes, magic realism, a double cross, and a memory.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

Available at Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CV9MRG55

Summer, 1989. A small town on Prince Edward Island. Mob money on the move gone missing. Two hired guns from Montreal. A peace officer working the back roads stands in the way.

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By Ed Staskus

  It was sometime during the Me Decade that I discovered I was poor as a church mouse. I owned lots of dog-eared books, some clothes, and a car I didn’t dare drive. I didn’t own an alarm clock. I didn’t have any money in the bank because I didn’t have a bank account. I was living at the Plaza Apartments on Prospect Ave., where the rent was more than reasonable. I got by doing odd jobs and taking advantage of opportunities, although I was far from being a capitalist.

   The Plaza was in a neighborhood called Upper Prospect. There were about thirty architecturally and historically significant buildings there, built between 1838 and 1929.  The Plaza was one of the buildings. Upper Prospect had long benefitted from Ohio’s first streetcar line that connected it to the downtown business district. Those days were long gone.

   In the 1870s Prospect Ave. advanced past Erie St., which is now E. 9th St., and kept going until it reached E. 55th St. That’s where it stopped. “Lower Prospect, closer into downtown, went commercial long ago, but Upper Prospect stayed residential longer,” says Bill Barrow, historian at the Michael Schwartz Library at Cleveland State University. Lower Prospect is where lots of downtown entertainment is now, including Rocket Arena, where the Cleveland Cavs follow the bouncing ball, and the House of Blues, where music fans have a ball.

   The Winton Hotel was built in 1916 on the far side of E. 9th St. It was nothing if not grand. It was renamed the Carter Hotel in 1931, suffered a major fire in the 1960s, but was renovated and renamed Carter Manor. I never set foot in it. The Ohio Bell Building went up in the 1920s before the Terminal Tower on Public Square was built.  When it was finished it became the tallest structure in the city. I never set foot in it, either. It was the building that Cleveland’s teenaged creators of Superman had the Man of Steel leap over in a single bound. The cartoon strip first appeared in their Glenville High School student newspaper, which was the Daily Planet.

   Before Superman ever got his nickname, the first Man of Steel was Doc Savage. There were dozens of the adventure books written by Lester Dent. When I was a child I read every one I could get my hands on. Doc Savage always saved the day. Nothing ever slowed him down, not kryptonite, not anything. 

   In the 1970s Prospect Ave. wasn’t a place where anybody wanted to raise children. Nobody even wanted to visit the place with their children in tow. The street was littered with trash, dive bars, hookers, and bookstores like the Blue Bijou. There was heroin in the shadows and plasma centers that opened first thing in the morning. The junkies knew all about needles and got paid in cash for their plasma donations.

   The Plaza was around 70 years old when I moved in. There was ivy on the brick walls and shade trees in the courtyard. There were day laborers, retirees, college students, latter day beatniks, scruffy hippies, artists, musicians, and some no-goods living there. “The people who lived in the building during my days there helped shaped my artistic and moral being,” Joanie Deveney said. “We drank and partied, but our endeavors were true, sincere, and full of learning.” Everybody called her Joan of Art.

   Not everybody was an artist or musician. “But anybody could try to be,” Rich Clark said. “We were bartenders and beauticians and bookstore clerks with something to say. There was an abiding respect for self-expression. We encouraged each other to try new things and people dabbled in different forms. Poets painted, painters made music, and musicians wrote fiction.”

   The avant-garage band Pere Ubu called it home. Their synch player Allen Ravenstine owned the building with his partner Dave Bloomquist. “I was a kid from the suburbs,” Allen said. “When we bought the building in the red-light district in 1969, we did everything from paint to carpentry. We tried to restore it unit by unit.”

   The restoration work went on during the day. The parties went on during the night. They went on long into the night. “I remember coming home at four in the morning,” Larry Collins said. “There would be people in the courtyard drinking beer and playing music. We watched the hookers and the customers play hide-and-seek with undercover vice cops. In the morning, I would wake up to see a huge line of locals waiting in line in front of the plasma center.”

   When I lived there, I attended Cleveland State University on and off, stayed fit by walking since my car was unfit, and hung around with my friends. Most of us didn’t have TV’s. We entertained ourselves. I worked for Minuteman whenever I absolutely had to. The jobs I got through them were the lowest-paying worse jobs on the face of the planet, but beggars can’t be choosers.

   I spent a couple of weeks on pest control, crawling into and out of tight spaces searching for rats, roaches, and termites. My job was to kill them with poison. The bugs ran and hid when they saw me coming. I tried to not breathe in the white mist. I spent a couple of days roofing, hoping to not fall off sloping elevated surfaces that were far hotter than the reported temperature of the day. The work was mostly unskilled, which suited me, but I got to hate high places. My land legs were what kept me upright. I didn’t want to fall off a roof and break either one of them

   I passed the day one summer day jack hammering, quitting near the end of my shift. I thought the jack hammer was trying to kill me. “If you don’t go back, don’t bother coming back here,” the Minuteman boss told me. “Take a hike, pal,” I said, walking out. I wasn’t worried about alienating the temporary labor agency. Somebody was always hiring somebody to do the dirty work.

   The Plaza was four stories tall and a basement below, a high and low world. Some of the residents were lazy as bags of baloney while others were hard-working. Some didn’t think farther ahead than their next breath while others thought life was a Lego world for the making. There was plenty in sight to catch one’s eye.

   “I had a basement apartment in the front,” Nancy Prudic said. “The junkies sat on the ledge and partied all night long. But the Plaza was a confluence of creative minds from many fields. It was our own little world. Besides artists, there were architects and urban planners.”

   Pete Laughner was a hard-working musician. He was from Bay Village, an upper middle class suburb west of Cleveland. He wrote songs, sang, and played guitar. He was “the single biggest catalyst in the birth of Cleveland’s alternative rock scene in the mid-1970s,” Richard Unterberger said. He led the bands Friction and Cinderella Backstreet. He co-founded Rocket from the Tombs. “They were a mutant papa to punk rock as well as spawning a number of famous and infamous talents, all packed into one band,” Dave Thomas said. After the Rockets crashed and burned, Pete teamed with Dave to form Pere Ubu.

   Dave Thomas was nicknamed the Crocus Behemoth because he was ornery and overweight. He went against the grain by occasionally performing in a suit. He was a tenor who sometimes sang and others times muttered, whistled, and barked.  “If nobody likes what you do, and nobody is ever going to like what you do, and you’ll never be seen by anyone, you do what you want to do,” he said. He commandeered the street in front of the Plaza for middle of the day open air concerts. “He never let the lack of any musical training get in his way,” said Tony Maimone, Pere Ubu’s bass player.

   Pere Ubu’s debut pay-to-get-in show was at the Viking Saloon in late 1975. Their flyer said, “New Year’s Eve at the Viking. Another Go-damn Night. Another year for me and you, another year with nothing to do.” Pete had a different take on it. “We’re pointing toward the music of the 80s.”

   When he wasn’t making his stand on a riser, Pete was writing about rock and roll for Creem, a new monthly music magazine which was as sincere and irreverent as his guitar playing. The magazine coined the term “punk rock” in 1971. “Creem nailed it in a way that nobody else did,” said Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth.

   Pete played with the Mr. Stress Blues Band in 1972 when he was 20 years old. They played every Friday and Saturday at the Brick Cottage. Mr. Stress called the squat building at Euclid Ave. and Ford Rd. the “Sick Brick.” When he did everybody called for another round. Monique, the one and only bartender, ran around like a madwoman. “The more you drink, the better we sound,” Mr. Stress said and picked up his mouth organ.

   The harmonica man was a TV repairman by day. The lanky Pete was in disrepair both day and night. He wasn’t a part-time anything. He wasn’t like other sidemen. His guitar playing was raw and jagged. While the band was doing one thing, he seemed to be doing another thing. 

   “He only ever had three guitar lessons,” his mother said. Pete was in bands by his mid-teens. “He was my boyfriend when we were 15,” Kathy Hudson said. “He still had his braces. He was with the Fifth Edition. They were playing at the Bay Way one time and he wanted them to bust up their equipment like The Who. The others weren’t down with it.”

   “He was so energetic and driven, but his energy couldn’t be regulated,” said Schmidt Horning, who played in the Akron band Chi Pig. “It could make it hard to play with him. He was so anxious and wouldn’t take a methodical approach.”

   Charlotte Pressler was the woman Pete married. “From 1968 to 1975 a small group of people were evolving styles of music that would, much later, come to be called ‘New Wave’. But the whole system of New Wave interconnections which made it possible for every second person on Manhattan’s Lower East Side to become a star did not exist in Cleveland,” she said. “There were no stars in Cleveland. Nobody cared what they were doing. If they did anything at all, they did it for themselves. They adapted to those conditions in different ways. Some are famous. Some are still struggling. One is dead, my Pete.”

   Not long before everything fell apart Pete stepped into a photo booth in the Cleveland Arcade, one of the earliest indoor shopping arcades in the United States. He was wearing a black leather jacket and looked exhausted. His eyes had the life of broken glass in them. He sent the pictures and a note to a friend. “Having a wonderful time. Hope you never find yourself here.”

   He played his kind of music at Pirate’s Cove in the Flats, along with Devo and the Dead Boys. “We’re trying to go beyond those bands like the James Gang and the Raspberries, drawing on the industrial energy here,” Pete said. He played at the Viking Saloon, not far from the Greyhound station, until it burned down in 1976. Dave Thomas was a bouncer there, keeping law and order more than just an idle threat. He wasn’t the Crocus Behemoth for nothing.

   “I’m drinking myself to death,” Pete wrote to a friend of his in 1976. “No band, no job, running out of friends. It’s easy, you start upon waking with Bloody Mary’s and beer, then progress through the afternoon to martinis, and finally cognac or Pernod. When I decided I wanted to quit I simply bought a lot of speed and took it and then drank only about a case of beer a day, until one day I woke up and knew something was wrong, very wrong. I couldn’t drink. I couldn’t eat. And then the pain started, slowly like a rat eating at my guts until I couldn’t stand it anymore and was admitted to the hospital.”

   The rat was pancreatitis. If you lose a shoe at midnight you’re drunk. Pete lost shoes like other people lost socks in the dryer. He didn’t need any shoes however, where he was going. It was the beginning of the end of him. It didn’t take long. He wouldn’t or couldn’t listen to his doctor’s orders. He went back to his old pal, which was booze.

   “Pete could do whatever he wanted to do,” said Tony Mamione. “He was instrumental in crafting the Pere Ubu sound, but, even at such an early age, had a deep understanding of all kinds of music.” Tony and Pete met when they lived across the hall from each other on the third floor of the Plaza Apartments. “I had just moved in and would play my bass and Pete heard it through the walls and knocked on my door. We started talking and he went back and grabbed his guitar and some beer, and we started jamming right away.”

  Pete was as good if not better on the piano than the guitar, even though the guitar was his tried and true. One day he found a serviceable piano at a bargain price and bought it. He and Tony picked it up to take back to the Plaza. “Here I was driving his green Chevy van down Cedar Ave. and there he was in the back of the van rocking out on the piano,” Tony said. “He was so special, a pure musician.” After they dragged, muscled, and coaxed the piano up to the third floor, they had some beers and the next jam session started.

   “I want to do for Cleveland what Brian Wilson did for California and Lou Reed did for New York,” Pete said in 1974. “I’m the guy between the Fender and the Gibson. I want a crowd that knows a little bit of the difference between the sky and the street. It’s all those kids out there standing at the bar, talking trash, waiting for an anthem.”

   They would have to wait for somebody else. Pete Laughner died in 1977 a month before his 25th birthday. He was one year younger than me when he met his maker. He didn’t die at the Plaza Apartments. Neither of us was there anymore. He died in his sleep at his parent’s home in Bay Village. There’s nowhere to fall when your back is against the wall, except maybe where you got up on your feet in the first place.

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. 

“Ebb Tide” by Ed Staskus

“A thriller in the Maritimes, magic realism, a double cross, and a memory.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

Available at Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CV9MRG55

Summer, 1989. A small town on Prince Edward Island. Mob money on the move gone missing. Two hired guns from Montreal. A peace officer working the back roads stands in the way.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Home Movies

Squaring Off at Maxim’s

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By Ed Staskus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Bomb City” by Ed Staskus

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

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

Cleveland, Ohio 1975. The John Scalish Crime Family and Danny Greene’s Irish Mob are at war. Car bombs are the weapon of choice. Two police detectives are assigned to find the bomb makers. Nothing goes according to plan.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Home Movies

Animal Crackers

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By Ed Staskus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   “That was the whole point,” she groused. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Bomb City” by Ed Staskus

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

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

Cleveland, Ohio 1975. The John Scalish Crime Family and Danny Greene’s Irish Mob are at war. Car bombs are the weapon of choice. Two police detectives are assigned to find the bomb makers. Nothing goes according to plan.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication