Bomb City

Elevator to the Lake

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   By Ed Staskus

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

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

   “Good,” Frank, his father, said.

   “One last thing.”

   “What’s that?” 

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

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

   “That’s good,” the dentist said.

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

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

   “Because it will take us to the top.”

   “Why can’t we walk?”

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

   “I could do it.”

   “Maybe next time.”

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

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

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

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

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

   “Can we go see all of them?”

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

   “Can we do it tomorrow?”

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

   “I’m older now.”

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

   “I don’t want to go to school.”

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

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

   “What do you mean?”

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

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

   “Why is she so mad all the time?”

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

   “Is she coming home soon?”

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

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

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

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

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

   “How fast are they going?” Stanley asked.

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

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

   “Is that fast?”

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

   “When can I start racing?” 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   “Vegetables are good for you.”

   “Aren’t hot dogs good for me?”

   “Not all the time, no.”

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

   “Because milk and cereal are for breakfast.”

   “Why can’t I eat Play-Doh?”

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

   “Captain Kangaroo loves Play-Doh.”

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

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

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

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

   “Why do we eat fish?”

   “Because they are food.”

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

   “I don’t think so.”

   “Should we tell them?”

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

   “Why not?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Excerpted from the crime novel “Bomb City.”

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

“Bomb City” by Ed Staskus

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

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

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

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Home Movies

Ring of Fire

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By Ed Staskus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   “You mean like a club?”

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

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

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

   “It sounds like Iggy Pop,” I said.

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

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

   “A boxing match happened.”

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

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

   “What did he do after he got home?”

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

   “That’s too bad,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Bomb City” by Ed Staskus

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

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

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

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Home Movies

Boss Man

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By Ed Staskus

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

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

   “You wanted to see me, Dave?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   He started by asking me if I liked my job.

   “Sure,” I said, stretching the truth.

   “Are you satisfied with how things are going?”

   “Sure,” I lied. 

   “What are your goals?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Bomb City” by Ed Staskus

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

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

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

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Home Movies

Bust Up at White City

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By Ed Staskus

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

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

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

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

   “It’s a pit bull,” she said. 

   “Why a pit bull?”

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

   “Is the dog a biter?”

   “Yes.”

   “Is it going to bite me?”

   “No.”

   “Why not?”

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

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

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

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

   “It’s a yoga thing,” she said.

   “What’s yoga?” I asked.

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

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

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

   “No biting,” Agnes said. 

   “That’s it?” 

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

   “When will you be back?” I asked.

   “On the Saturday night after Thanksgiving.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   “Are you all right?” I asked.

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

   “Were they shooting at you?”

   “You saw what happened, right?”

   “I didn’t really see much.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “You mean money?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Bomb City” by Ed Staskus

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

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

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

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Home Movies

Feed Your Head

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By Ed Staskus

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

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

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

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

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

   “All right,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Bomb City” by Ed Staskus

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

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

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

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Barron Cannon

Stumbling On Barron Cannon

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By Ed Staskus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   “It’s a yurt,” he said.

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

   “Whatever,” Betty said under her breath.

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

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

   Frank noticed a yoga mat rolled up.

   “Where do you practice yoga?” he asked.

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

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

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

   “I thought you were down on yoga.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Bomb City” by Ed Staskus

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

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

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

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

West Park Blues

Here and Now

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By Ed Staskus

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

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

   “What do you mean?” he asked. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   “Go to hell, Jay,” she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

   “I just have the flu,” Alma said.

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

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

   “You have to take these,” Maggie said.

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

   “Take your medicine.”

   “No.”

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

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

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

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

   “’No, I already ate some.”

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

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

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

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

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

   “I don’t want to,” Alma said.

   “But why, mom?”

   “I don’t know.”

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

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

   “OK, so that’s what he said?”

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

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

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

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

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

   “That’s not being nice.”

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

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

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

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

“Bomb City” by Ed Staskus

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

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

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

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Home Movies

Inside the Box

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By Ed Staskus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   “Try and return that, son!”

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

“Bomb City” by Ed Staskus

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

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

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

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Home Movies

Up the Country

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By Ed Staskus

   The morning Arunas Petkus and I left for California 2500-some miles from Cleveland, Ohio, the Summer of Love was a few years over. It had been a phenomenon in 1967 when as many as 100,000 people, mostly young, mostly hippies, converged on the neighborhood of Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, hanging around, listening to music, dropping out, chasing infinity, and getting as much free love as they could.

   We were both in high school at the time and stumbled into the 1970s having missed the hoopla. The Mamas & the Papas released “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)” and it got to number four on the Billboard Hot 100. It stayed there for a month, a golden oldie in the making, while the parade across Golden Gate Bridge went on and on. The vinyl single sold more than 7 million copies worldwide. 

   Arunas found a bucket of bolts, a 1958 VW Karmann Ghia, somehow got it running, brush painted it parakeet green, and was determined to hit the open road to see what all the excitement had been about. He also wanted to visit the spot at Twin Peaks where Chocolate George’s ashes had been scattered.

   George Hendricks was a Hells Angel who was hit by a car while swerving around a stray cat on a quiet afternoon in as the Summer of Love was winding down, dying later that night from his injuries. He was known as Chocolate George because he was rarely seen without a quart of his favorite beverage, which was chocolate milk, usually spiked with whiskey. He was a favorite among the hippies because he was funny and friendly. His goatee was almost as long as his long hair, he wore a pot-shaped helmet when riding his Harley, and his denim vest was dotted with an assortment of  tinny pin badges.

   One of the badges said, “Go Easy on Kesey.” The writer Ken Kesey had been the de facto head of the Merry Pranksters. Much of the hippie aesthetic can be traced back to them and their Magic Bus. Arunas was an art student and liked the way the bus was decked out.

   The Karmann Ghia was a two-door four-speed manual with an air-cooled 36 horsepower engine in the back. The trunk was in the front. Unlike most cars it had curved glass all the way around and frameless one-piece door glass. My friend’s rust bucket barely ran, unlike most of the sporty Karmann Ghia’s on the road, but it ran. There was still some magic left in it.

   When Arunas asked me if I wanted to join him, I signed up on the spot. The two of us had gone to the same Catholic boy’s high school and were both at Cleveland State University. We threw our gear and backpacks in the front trunk of the car, sandwiches, apples, and pears in what passed for a rear seat, a bag of weed in the glove compartment, and waved goodbye to our friends at the Plaza Apartments.

   The Plaza was on Prospect Ave., on the near east side, near Cleveland State University. It was an old but built to last four-story apartment building. Secretaries, clerks, college students, bohemians, bikers, retirees, and musicians lived there. Arunas was still living with his parents in North Collinwood, while I was a part-time undergraduate and part-time manual laborer trying to keep my head above water in a one-bedroom on the second floor.

   We got almost as far as the Indiana border before an Ohio State Highway Patrolman stopped us. “Where do you think you’re going in that thing?” he asked after Arunas showed him his driver’s license. He wrinkled his nose looking at the car’s no-primer paint job.

   “California.”

   “Do you know you’re burning oil, lots of it?”

   We knew that full well. That was why we had a case-and-a half of Valvoline with us. We had worked out the loss of motor oil at about a quart every two hundred miles and thought our stockpile would get us out west before the engine seized up.

   “All right, either get this thing off the road or go back to Cleveland,” the patrolman said, waving us away with his ticket book.

   On the way back home, we decided to go to Kelly’s Island, since we had sleeping bags and could more-or-less camp out, staying under a picnic table in case of rain. We took the Challenger ferry out of Sandusky, leaving the Kharmann Ghia behind. We landed at East Harbor State Park and stayed here until the end of the week. There were a campground, beach, and trails at the park, which were all we needed. We bought homemade granola and a couple gallons of spring water at a small store and settled down on a patch of sunshine. We met some high-class girls from Case Western Reserve University and played volleyball with them.

   When we got back to Cleveland everybody marveled at our quick turnaround from the west coast and attractive tans. “We didn’t actually make it to California,” we had to explain to one-and-all.  “We didn’t even make it out of Ohio.” We had to endure many snarky comments. When Virginia Sustarsic, one of my neighbors at the Plaza, said she was going to San Francisco and invited me to try again, joining her, I jumped at the chance. My feet got tangled up coming down when she said she was hitchhiking there.

   “You’re going to thumb rides across the country?”

   “Yes,” she said, in her detached but friendly way. She was a writer, photographer, and cottage craftsman. Virginia was a raconteur when she wanted to be one. She made a living dabbling in what interested her. She lived alone. Her boyfriend was an unrepentant beatnik.

   “How about getting back?”

   She explained she had arranged a ride as far as Colorado Springs. She planned on going knockabout the rest of the way, stay a week-or-so with friends on the bay, and hitchhike back. When I looked it up on a map, she was planning on hitchhiking four thousand-some miles. I didn’t know anything about bumming my way on the highway. When I asked, she confessed to having never tried it.

   Our ride to Colorado Springs was a guy from Parma and his girlfriend in a nearly new T2 Microbus. Although it was unremarkable on the outside, the inside was vintage hippie music festival camper. It was comfortable and stocked. We stopped at a lake in Illinois and had lunch and went for a walk. I veered off the path and got lost, but spotted Virginia and our ride, and cut across a field to rejoin them. I tripped while running, fell flat on my face, but was unhurt.

   We got to Colorado Springs in two days. The next day I found out what I had fallen into in Illinois was poison ivy. An itchy rash was all over my calves, forearms, and face. I tried Calamine lotion, but all I accomplished was giving myself a pink badge that said, ‘Look at me, I’m suffering.’” Virginia’s friends where we were staying let me use their motorcycle to go to a clinic. The doctor prescribed prednisone, a steroid, and by the time we got to San Francisco I was cured.

   In the meantime, leaving the clinic, since it was a warm and sunny summer day, I went for a ride on the bike, which was a 1969 Triumph Tiger. I rode to the Pikes Peak Highway, 15 miles west, and about half the way up, until the bike started to dog it. What I didn’t know was at higher altitudes there wasn’t enough air for the carburetor. By that time, anyway, I had gotten cold in my shorts and t-shirt. It felt like the temperature had dropped thirty degrees. I turned around and rode down. There was a lot of grit and gravel on the road. I rode carefully. The last thing I wanted to happen was to dump the bike. I found out later that Colorado snowplows spread sand, not salt, in the winter. 

   All the way back to town, as dusk approached, I saw jumbo elk deer and walloping antelope. Even the racoons were enormous. I stayed slow and watchful, not wanting to bang into one of the beasts. We stayed a few days and hit the open road when my rash was better. There was no sense in scaring anybody off with my pink goo face. We had a cardboard sign saying “SF” and finally hit the jackpot when a tractor trailer going to Oakland picked us up.

   The Rocky Mountains, left behind when the glaciers went back to where they came from, were zero cool to see, although I wouldn’t want to be a snowplow driver assigned to them. The weather was fair but cold with a high easterly wind the day we crossed them. Every switchback opened onto a panorama.

   Virginia’s friends in San Francisco lived in Dogpatch, which was east of the Mission District and adjacent to the bay. It was a working class partly industrial partly residential neighborhood. They lived in a late nineteenth century house they were restoring. They went to work every day while we went exploring.

   We stayed away from downtown where there was an overflow of strip clubs, peep shows, and sex shops. Skyscrapers were going up, there were restaurants, offices, and department stores, but it still looked like the smut capital of the United States. Elsewhere, rock-n-roll, jazz fusion, and bongo drums were in the air, especially the Castro District and Haight-Ashbury. Dive bars seemed to be everywhere.

   Virginia went to Golden Gate Park and took pictures of winos, later entering one of them in a show at Cleveland State University. She had a high-tech 35mm Canon. When her photograph was rejected with the comment that it was blurry, she said, “That was the point.” I went to Twin Peaks and took a picture of the spot where Chocolate George’s ashes had been strewn. When Arunas saw it later on, he said there wasn’t much to see. I showed him some pictures from the summit facing northeast towards downtown and east towards the bay. “Those are nice,” he said, being polite. My camera was a Kodak Instamatic.

   Twin Peaks is two peaks known as “Eureka” and “Noe.” They are both about a thousand feet high. They are a barrier to the summer coastal fog pushed in from the ocean. The west-facing slopes get fog and strong winds while the east-facing slopes get more sun and warmth. The ground is thin and sandy. George was somewhere around there..

   We stayed for more than a week, riding Muni city  busses for 25 cents a ride. No matter where we went there seemed to be an anti-Vietnam War protest going on. We rode carousel horses at Playland-at-the-Beach and went to Monkey Island at the zoo. We ducked into Kerry’s Lounge and Restaurant to chow down on French fries. We stayed away from all the Doggie Diners. We listened to buskers singing for tips at Pier 45 on Fisherman’s Wharf. Jewelry makers were all over the place. Virginia was on Cloud 9, being an artisan herself.

   When we saw “The Human Jukebox” we went right over. Grimes Proznikoff kept himself out of sight in a cardboard refrigerator box until somebody gave him a donation and requested a song. Then he would pop out of the front flap and play the song on a trumpet. I asked him to play “Stone Free,” but he played “Ain’t Misbehavin’” instead.

   “I don’t know nothing about Jimi Hendrix,” he said.

   Everywhere we looked almost everybody was wearing groovy clothes made of bright polyester, which looked to be the material of choice. Tie-dye was on the way to the retirement home. Virginia dressed in classic hippie style while I dressed in classic Cleveland-style, jeans, t-shirt, and sneakers. I didn’t feel out of place in San Francisco, but I didn’t feel like I belonged, either. There were no steel mills and too many causes to worry about.

   When we left, we started at the Bay Bridge and got a ride right away. By the time we got to the other end of the bridge the man at the wheel had already come on to Virginia. We asked him to drop us off. When he stopped on the shoulder and I got out of the back seat, he pushed Virginia out the passenger door, grabbed her shoulder bag, and sped away. She didn’t keep her traveling money in it, but what did he know? We saw the bag go sailing out the car window before he disappeared from sight and retrieved it. We smelled a brewery on the breath of the next driver and turned him down. After that a pock-marked face stopped and  asked us if we were born again. When I said I had been raised a Catholic, he cursed and drove off.

   We liked talking to the people who gave us rides but avoided talking about race, religion, and politics. I carried a pocket jackknife but wasn’t sure what I would do with it if the occasion ever arose. We never hitchhiked once it got dark, because that was when lowlifes and imbeciles were most likely to come out.

   We went back the way we had come, to Nevada, through Utah, Nebraska, and Iowa to Chicago, and returning in the middle of the day to the south shore of Lake Erie. We thumbed rides at entrances to highways, at toll gates, and especially at off-the-ramp gas stations whenever we could. Gas stations were good for approaching people and asking them face-to-face if they were going our way. 

   One of the best things about hitchhiking is you can take any exit that you happen to feel is the right one. One of the worst things is running into somebody who says, “I can tell you’re not from around these parts.” We avoided big cities because getting out of them was time-consuming. We avoided small towns because we didn’t want to be the new counterculture archenemies in town. We got lucky when a shabby gentleman in a big orange Dodge with a cooler full of food and drink in the back seat picked us up outside of Omaha on his way to Kalamazoo. He listened to a border blaster on the radio all the way. We ate the sandwiches he offered us.

   Our last ride was in an unmarked Wood’s County sheriff’s car. He picked us up near Perrysburg on his way to Cleveland’s Central Police Station to pick up a criminal. It was the same station where Jane “Hanoi Jane” Fonda was put behind bars a couple of years earlier. She was famous and not a real criminal and so didn’t stay long.

   “They said they were getting orders from the White House, that would be the Nixon White House,” she said about the arrest. “I think they hoped the ‘scandal’ would cause my college speeches to be canceled and ruin my respectability. I was handcuffed and put in jail.” The day  she was arrested at Cleveland Hopkins Airport, she pushed Ed Matuszak, a special agent for the U. S. Customs Bureau, and kicked Cleveland Policeman Pieper in a sensitive place.

   The city policeman later sued Jane Fonda for $100,000 for the kick that made him “weak and sore.” The federal policeman shrugged off the shove. The charges and suit were eventually dropped.

   The Wood County sheriff was a friendly middle-aged man who warned us about the dangers of hitchhiking and drove us to near our home. When we got out of the car, he gave us ten dollars. “Get yourselves a square meal,” he said. We walked the half dozen blocks to the Plaza, dropped off our stuff, and walked the block and half to Hatton’s Deli on East 36th St. and Euclid Ave. where Virginia worked part-time. There was an eight-foot by eight-foot neon sign on the side of the three-story building. It said, “Corned Beef Best in Town.” We had waffles and scrambled eggs.

   The waitress lingered at our table pouring coffee, chatting it up while we dug into apple pie. We split the big slice. The butter knife was dull, so I used my jackknife. She asked how our cross-country trip had gone. I gave her the highlights while Virginia went into details. When the waitress asked why we hadn’t gone Greyhound, Virginia smiled like a cat, but I put my cards on the table.

   “I had an itch to go and the stone free way was the way to go.”

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 gets personal.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Home Movies

Jimmy Crack Corn

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By Ed Staskus

   When Layla told Jimmy she had called the police, he hustled to his pick-up truck and started scrounging, searching for his paraphernalia and drugs, especially the crack. He took a garbage bag full of narcotics into the big house and hid it. Afterwards he couldn’t remember where he had put it.

   “The devil knows where I stashed it!” he said. He was so mad about what had happened he could barely talk, which for him was spitting mad, since he talked at ninety miles an hour.

   “The pony run, he jumped, he pitched, he threw the master in the ditch, Jimmy, crack corn and I don’t care.”

   Layla and Jimmy had gotten into a knockdown fight a month earlier and he had left the big house in Florida, going to work in Pennsylvania. He was a heavy machine operator. When she called him after a month he high-tailed it back to her. But it wasn’t what he thought it was going to be.

   “Do you know this could put me back in prison?” Jimmy asked.

   “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to, but my lawyer said I had to.” She was already regretting it.

   The police arrived and before he knew it slapped handcuffs on him. 

   “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” he said. “What are you arresting me for?”

   “You stole that pick-up truck,” one of the policemen said, pointing at the truck.

   “That is bullcrap,” Jimmy said. “I’ve been making payments every month to her for it. I was just in Pennsylvania for a month with it. She was fine with that. I can show you our text messages, where she always says, your truck, your truck, not my truck, yours.”

   “Let me see those text messages,” the policeman said.

   He went to their squad car. He scrolled through the texts. He fiddled with his vehicle’s mobile radio. When he came back he returned the cell phone to Jimmy.

   “I’d say it’s his pick-up truck,”  the policeman said to Layla. “That’s what you’ve been saying in all your text messages.”

   They took the cuffs off. They had to work out a few more details but finally drove away. Jimmy heaved a sigh of relief

   “You called the police on me,” he said to Layla, glaring at her.

   “We can work this out,” she said. She gave him a piece of paper, signed and dated, saying, this is my truck, in my name, but I have given Jimmy full power over it. 

   “There’s no working this out, night and day” he said. “You ruined everything.” 

   “No, Jimmy,” I told him later. “You ruined everything by going out and having a crack weekend. Maybe you shouldn’t have been that stupid.” He didn’t like that. “Don’t blame Layla because she called the cops. Yeah, it’s a crappy thing to do, but it gets to the point where you don’t give people too much choice. It’s always your way or the highway, and if they don’t like it, they can go, so, honestly, I can see where she’s coming from.”

   “Hey, I’m paying her every month for the pick-up,” he said.  “I’m not going to go back on my word. I’m never going back to her, either. She ruined everything.”

   He was talking on his cell phone. I could tell he was driving. I asked him where he was going. “I packed my stuff and I’m going to Colorado,” he said. His boys lived in Colorado. One of them was a Marine. The other one wanted to be a pilot, but his eyes were bad. 

   “Are you high?” I asked him. 

   “I don’t want to answer that,” he said.

   “You’re a special kind of stupid,” I said. “Getting high and drinking and driving, putting yourself and others at risk, you selfish bastard. What’s wrong with you?” 

   “They can’t nail me. I’m not drunk enough.” He had a forever taste for drink and cocaine. I was at a loss for words.

   “Your brother was an addict,” he said.

   “What’s that got to do with anything?”

   “He’s fat, too.” 

   “What? Are you two?” 

   “He replaced drugs with food.” 

   “I have no idea why you’re bringing Brian into this. And he’s not fat, not by far.” 

   “Don’t bother defending your fatso brother,” he said. He hung up and blocked me. He unblocked me a few days later. I sent him a text.

   “This friendship has reached its end. There’s nowhere for it to go.” 

   A month later I got an oversized letter in the mail. It was addressed to Jimmy. He had lived in our house for the best part of a year, getting back on his feet. Some of his mail was still being delivered to our home. He never bothered going to the post office to set up a forwarding address.

   He doesn’t want to hear how he used Shirley and me and never paid us back for everything we paid for while he was living in our house. He doesn’t want to acknowledge we took him in when no one else would, fed him, clothed him, and got him on his feet. What we got in return was nothing, not even a thank you.

   Inside the oversized letter were his new heavy machinery training certificate and new union membership card. Jimmy is notorious for ignoring people. I wasn’t like him. I texted him about the letter.

   “I got your working stuff, where do I mail them to? If I don’t hear from you, they’re in the trash tomorrow.”  He sent me his new address right away.

   We weren’t friends anymore, but we were still friends on Facebook. He posted things about me, playing the victim. “When people throw you out of your life” are the kinds of things he posted. He became a drama queen. 

   I admit when I’m wrong, and I would say to Jimmy, don’t be a dirtbag your whole life. I didn’t know what to do with him. He was constantly pretending he never did anything  wrong, no matter what side of the truth he was on.

   Jimmy and my brother Brian were once best friends, better friends than Jimmy and me, but not anymore.

   “I don’t want to see you again,” he said. “You bent over backwards for your brother but you’re always laying into me. This is the end of the road.”

   But Jimmy is a bad penny and bad pennies always turn up. He complains and explains night and day. “Inside of me are two dogs. One is mean and the other one is good. They fight each other all the time. When asked which one wins, I answer, the one I feed the most.” I expected Jimmy to resurface someday soon.

   When I couldn’t find my favorite suitcase a few days before Shirley and I were going down to Mexico for a week, I called him.

   “Do you have my suitcase?” I asked.

    “I’ve had it for three years,” he said.

   “We take it to Mexico every year. You haven’t had it for three years.”

   “Yes, I have, you’re wrong,” he said.

   “No, you’re wrong,” I said. 

   “No, I’m not.” 

   “Are you ever wrong, Jimmy?” 

   “No.”

   “You sound like you’ve had a few drinks,” I said.

   “Yeah, a few, but I work hard and I need recreation. After this I’m off to see the smoke  wizard. I’m not telling you for fun. I’m telling you because you want me to be honest. I don’t need any judgement from friends.”

   “I’m sorry, but you can’t have it both ways,” I said. “Either you have friends who care about you, or not, so I’m going to say you’re a good for nothing for smoking crack.”

   “I work hard all week. Layla knows what I’m doing,” he said. He was back in Florida in the big house.

   “Then she’s a bigger fool than I thought she was, for letting you smoke crack while you’re supposedly taking care of her.” Layla had more than one health issue. On top of that, she liked watching horror movies on TV and liked being disturbed by them.

   “What are you doing this weekend?” he asked, out of the blue.

   “It’s a blizzard outside, so I’m in the house cooking.”

   I did the cooking at home, although Shirley boiled water, peeled potatoes, and washed the dishes. I like to cook when it’s storming.

   “What are you making?”

   “I’m making spanakopita. It’s a Greek spinach pie, with onions, cheese, and herbs. It’s folded up in a flaky crispy dough.”

   “Oh, you mean spanakapita.”

   “I’m pretty sure it’s pronounced with an O,” I said. 

   “You’re a dimwit,” he said. “You never admit when you’re wrong, do you?” 

   “OK, you’re right. I’m making spanakapita. Happy now?” Why do I talk to Jimmy, I asked myself. Shirley refuses to speak to him.

   “Why do you even talk to that jackass?” she asks me.

   “Why are we even friends?” I asked Jimmy.

   “Are you going to tell me you’re not my friend anymore?”

   “Unfortunately, Jimmy, you and I have been friends since the 3rd grade. There’s just no getting rid of you.”

   “I took Layla to a French restaurant last week.”

   “So, you’re back in her good graces?”

   “Yeah.” 

   “How’s your dad? Is he still alive and kicking?”

   “Yeah.”

   I didn’t ask if his father hung out at Layla’s house anymore. For a while Jimmy’s father, an ex-Cleveland cop who retired south and lived nearby, had tried to get Layla for himself, before Jimmy finally won her over.

   “I heard Layla’s dad has showed up again down there.”

   “Yeah.”

  Layla’s father was a rich man with a twisted mind. like many rich men. Last year, when Jimmy started seeing Layla, he had a fit. In the first place, he hated Jimmy. He called him a loser. He said he was going to shoot him, although he never did. He was a coward at heart. He had an undying love for his daughter, but not the right kind of love.

   “I’m not allowed to be there when he comes over,” Jimmy  said. “I take off.”

   He knows it’s weird, but he makes himself scarce when Layla’s father comes over. She has a big spread, what with her polo ponies, so there’s a lot of landscape to lose yourself in. He didn’t lose himself on horseback. He couldn’t ride to save his life.

   “I don’t understand your life,” I said.

    “I’m being honest,” he said.

   “That doesn’t mean I have to like it. It doesn’t mean I don’t worry about you. You’re romancing a woman 20-some years older than you, who has a father who’s like a hundred, and who, we won’t even talk about that, and you are smoking crack every chance you get.”

   “Everybody has a few drinks. Why can’t I have some crack?”

   “They don’t serve crack at bars in this country, not even Florida, that’s why,” I said.

   “I can control it,” he said.

   “Right, says every crackhead and none ever did,” I said.

   “When I was young I used to wait on master and give him his plate, and pass him the bottle when he got dry, and brush away the blue tail fly, Jimmy, crack corn and I don’t care.”

   “I do my work, then I chill, hang out, be myself,” Jimmy said. He works construction all week, and had started working for Layla, too, doing small jobs, in her house and around her property.

   “Why shouldn’t I do the work, instead of the wetbacks?” he said. “Why shouldn’t I earn the money?”

   What Jimmy likes is Layla has got money and a big house. What she likes is the fun, games, and sex. They are both getting what they think they want. They don’t care about rain as long as they get their rainbows.

   “Basically, you’re doing whatever the hell you want, and she’s doing whatever the hell she wants,” I said. “You’re both femme fatales.”

   That didn’t go over well. Jimmy says he’s being honest whenever he says whatever he says, but he doesn’t want any trueness in return. He thinks you’re getting in his face. Every time we talk, he tells me why he’s the greatest and why Shirley and I are idiots. 

   “Why won’t your wife talk to me?” he asked. 

   “Because you ran out on us after we took care of you when you were down and out,” I said. 

   “That’s not true,” he said.

   “How do you see it in your world?”

   The crack he’s smoked for years hasn’t changed Jimmy all that much. He’s still as selfish and self-righteous as he always was. Shirley says that he will never grow up because he thinks he’s not wrong and will never be wrong, 

   When I told him Shirley’s new business had turned the corner and was doing well, he didn’t want to hear it. When I first told him about it, what she was planning, he told me she would fail, for sure. Nothing is what Jimmy said when I told him her business was growing. For once, he had nothing dismissive to say.

   When Jimmy broke up with Layla the second time it was because, when she got fussy about his drug use, he told her that her addiction to pain medicines and her drinking weren’t any different than his smoking crack and drinking. He told her he was going to smoke crack every day, and that was that. When Jimmy gets it into his head that something is going to be, there’s no changing his mind. Layla thought he was crazy. They got into a knockdown fight.

   “I’m never coming back,” he said at the end of the fight. He walked out of the big house and gave his pick-up truck back to her, but before he did he went mud bog racing with it. .When he was done, the first place trophy in his lap, the pick-up truck wasn’t good for anything anymore. He left with his suitcase, his phone, and his wallet. He walked to the bus station.

   “I dropped a truth bomb on her,” he said.

   “I’m going to drop a truth bomb on you,” I said. “You’re homeless, you’re living out of your son’s van, and you don’t have a job.”

   “I’m trying to find work,” he said.

    JJ and Alex, his sons, had a house in Colorado. They invited him to visit them, with the intention of doing an intervention on their father. He got stoned and stayed stoned the whole way, hitching rides with truckers, lost his phone, lost his wallet, and lost his way, but somehow made it there. When he found out what they were up to, he got his hands on Alex’s new van one night and beat feet. 

   “How dare they pull that bullcrap on me!” he fumed.

   Trying to get Jimmy to do something he doesn’t want to do is like trying to dam up Niagara Falls with toothpicks. He drove to Oklahoma where he drove the van into a ditch. He stole two old tires and got back on the road. He made it to Georgia. He called me. He had gotten another phone, somehow.

   “I’m coming to Cleveland.”

   “Why?”

   He showed up a week later. He didn’t have any money. He had stolen his way from Atlanta to Cleveland. He would go to a Walmart, steal bread and cold cuts, go to gas stations, and steal gasoline and snacks. When he had to, he found a backyard bird feeder and ate all the seeds.

   “I have a Home Depot gift card,” he said. “Can you buy it off me?”

   “I’ll think about it.” 

   “You know it’s stolen, don’t you?” Shirley asked me.

   “Yes.”

   Jimmy steals merchandise from big box stores, returns it later for a refund, claiming he has lost the receipt, and gets gift cards in return. He can be slick when he’s beggared.

   We met him for breakfast when he got to Cleveland.

   “I don’t have any gas,” he said, wolfing down ham and eggs and a plate of pancakes.

   “I’ll fill your tank up,” I said.

   He was hoping we would ask him to stay at our house. I could tell. I brought it up to Shirley later at home. But, buying him breakfast and filling up his gas tank was as far as it was going to go.

   “He’s not sitting on our sofa, much less staying at our house,” she said.

   Jimmy called me again about buying the Home Depot card.

   “How much is it?” I asked.

   “It’s $186.00, but you can have it for a hundred.”

   I knew it was throwing money away. We would never use it. It would just be something to help Jimmy out.

   “I have to get out of Cleveland,” he said.

   “Who did you piss off?”

   “Nobody,” he said. 

   “Did you steal some drugs?”

   “I just need to go,” he said.

   “You are such an asshole.”

   “All right, but are you going to buy this gift card, or not?” 

   “OK, I’ll come and get it. I just need to stop at an ATM.”

   “No, I’ll come and get you,” he said.

   Like a fool, when he came over, I got into his van to go to the ATM. He went flying down Detroit Rd. in Lakewood and sideswiped a parked car. He didn’t stop. He just kept going.

   “Stop the car,” I yelled. He stopped some blocks later when he ran into a fire hydrant. It began to spay water.

   The side of his son’s new van, on the passenger side, where I was sitting, was potholed from bumper to bumper. The front bumper had fallen off when he hit the hydrant. Trash and empty cans of Mountain Dew were scattered everywhere inside the van.

   “Do you know you just smashed your kid’s new van? And you drove away. You could have killed me.”

   “I know, but I promise I’ll be good.”

   “Did you steal all that food?” I asked. There were loaves of white bread, jars of Jiffy peanut butter, and half-eaten candy bars a gogo.

   “A guy’s got to eat,” he said.

   The next day JJ called.

   “Alex is in Cleveland,” he said. “He’s gone there to get the van back from our dad.”

   “JJ, why didn’t you tell me he was coming? Jimmy was here yesterday, but now he’s gone.”

   “We called him yesterday and said Alex was coming.”  

   “That was a mistake,” I said. “He’s gone to Canton.”

   “Why Canton?”

   “Because Alex isn’t in Canton, that’s why. He’s hiding from you.”

   They finally located him and Alex went to see him. They met in Canton behind a bowling alley. But Jimmy parked the van a couple of blocks away, so Alex wouldn’t see it and take it away from him. They talked, but Alex never got the van back. He went back to Colorado and Jimmy went back to living in parking lots.

   “When he’d ride in the afternoon, I’d follow after with a hickory broom, the pony being rather shy when bitten by blue tail fly, Jimmy, crack corn and I don’t care.”

   Jimmy thought I had led his sons to him. He thought I was conspiring with them to take the van away from him. He called me on the phone and called me every name in the book.

   “Even though you do what you do to your kids?”

   “That’s right,” he said.

   “You treat them worse than junk yards treat their dogs.”

   He barked like a dog, trying to get under my skin.

   “The only way you’ll ever get that van back is if you report it stolen,” I told JJ when I talked to him later.

   “No, I can’t do that,” he said. “My dad would go to jail if I turned him in.”

    “Maybe that’s what he needs,” I said. “Maybe he needs to be behind bars for a while breaking rocks and thinking things through.” JJ and I both knew he would end up behind bars sooner or later, but whether he would turn things over was anybody’s guess. Jimmy was not especially a thinking kind of man. He was a cracking the corn kind of man.

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

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

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

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

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication