By Ed Staskus

   Kevin Rourke was an engaging young man with handsome eyes, handsome hair, and a handsome man’s love for all women, from Plain Jane’s to Jane Russell’s. He was charming but unscrupulous, especially when it came to sexpots. He was slowly going to paunch but still young enough that nobody noticed it except us, his roommates, who saw him flip flopping to and from bedroom and bathroom every morning with a towel wrapped around his spreading mid-section.  

   He was in his late-20s, but his belly was going on late-40s. He liked food as much as he liked women. He was always eating sirloins and plucking daisies. The only time he wasn’t was when he went to Florida, which he did for one week twice a year. When he did he only took toothpaste and a toothbrush, two pairs of clean socks and underwear, and a fistful of cash with him. He had a small safe in his closet full of paper money.

   He always wore a baseball cap, safari shorts, and a yellow shirt on the flight. He wore the baseball cap because his hair was thinning.

   “Why yellow?” we asked. 

   “It’s a cheerful color,” he said.

   “What do you do there?”

   “I don’t do anything. I hardly ever leave my room. I sit on the balcony sometimes at night.”

   “How about getting some sun?”

   “No,” he said. “I keep the outside where it belongs, which is outside.”

   “What do you mean? There’s a beach right there.” He always stayed in the same hotel, the Pier 66 Hotel, within sight of the Atlantic Ocean. “What do you do in your room?”

   “I sleep, and other things,” he said.

   “What about food?”

   “It’s my week to diet.”

   “You can’t lay around doing nothing all day every day for a week.”

   “I’ll take that bet,” he said.

   His Lebanese fiancée Leyla took the bet and won. When she did she wouldn’t take his calls for three weeks, but he wormed his way back into her good graces after he got back to Cleveland and their wedding back on track, except when it wasn’t. They had been engaged for more than a year. Day after day went by and they were unable to set a firm date. In the meantime, Kevin kept hedging his bets, sowing his wild oats.

   He took more showers than anybody we knew. He showered every morning and again in the evening after work. He even showered those nights he wasn’t going out but staying in. He wrapped his dampness up in a bathrobe those nights and watched TV. Neither Matt Lavikka, our other roommate, nor I minded. We didn’t watch much on the boob tube, anyway, except in the fall when the Cleveland Browns were launching pigskins.

   When he was spic and span, Kevin worked for ABF Freight Systems, which was a national LTL motor carrier based in Arkansas. We called it All Broken Freight. After calling it that to his face a few times and seeing frown lines break out around his mouth, we eased off and stopped with the buzz talk. His paycheck meant everything to him.

   He was an orphan, or at least said he was an orphan, and had thrown in with ABF like it was a second family. He had a desk in a bare bone’s office in Brook Park, although he hardly ever went there. His paycheck depended, since he was largely commissioned, on being on the road. He never missed a day of work. Most of the time he worked overtime, pressing the flesh day and night. Some nights he slept in his car in his suit when the drive back to Cleveland from Akron or Canton was going to take too long. When he showed up in the morning he took a shower, changed his clothes, and went back to work.

   Even though he was making a boatload of money, he didn’t seem to own anything except half a dozen expensive suits, a rack of long-sleeved starched white shirts, a trove of status symbol ties, comfortable Italian leather shoes, and a 1980 Mercury Marquis. The car was nearly new and was reddish purple with a leather-and-velour interior. It featured split-bench seats and the driver’s seat reclined. We called it the land yacht. He kept it even cleaner than he kept himself. If there was anything he loved beyond any doubt, it was that car.

   I was taken aback the first time I saw Leyla, Kevin’s girlfriend and treasure chest in the making. She was dark-skinned like she had just crossed the Jordan River, with black hair and a hook nose. Her nose was problematic, but he wasn’t marrying her for that. She was swank the night I met her, with some kind of fur wrapped around the top of her. Her dress was cream-colored and designer. She wasn’t half as good-looking as Kevin. I pegged her at about ten years older.

   Kevin lived by the mantra that when he found a woman with millions of dollars, who would sign over most of it to him, and promised to be dead within a couple of years at the most, that was the woman he was going to marry. “It’s just as easy marrying a rich woman as it is marrying a poor one,” he explained. Leyla didn’t look like she was going to drop dead any time soon, although she looked like she had a million dollars, for sure. We found out her father was a big-time import-export businessman.

   The groom-to-be knew that married couples become in the eyes of the law one person, and that one person was going to be him. Even though it is true enough that one shouldn’t marry for money, since it is cheaper to simply borrow it, he had a one-track mind. He had a bad case of the gimmes. He ran the rat race day and night.

   I was dating a queen bee by the name of Dana Price the year I roomed with Matt and Kevin. Her family lived in a new house in a new development in Solon, a bedroom suburb about twenty minutes southeast of Cleveland. She was a saleswoman for IBM, selling hardware systems to banks, and lived in an apartment twice as large as she needed at the top of Cedar Rd. in Cleveland Heights. Her father was the head honcho of Mrs. Weiss’ Noodles.

   The business had been another family’s business for more than forty years. They were Hungarian, churning out Ha-Lush-Ka noodles for casseroles and dumpling-style Kluski egg noodles at their Woodland Ave. plant. When it burned down in 1961 they built a new plant in Solon. By 1968, after they merged with American Mushroom, they were a multi-million-dollar company and still growing. After the Hungarians retired, and ten years after the merger, Dana’s father Jim Price became president.

   I called him Big Jim because he was a big man with a big mouth. He knew everything about everything. There was no mistaking where you stood with him. He told me so himself when he told me to stay away from his daughter. He didn’t want her marrying an immigrant son with nothing in the bank and anarchist leanings. But she was as stubborn and determined as her father and ignored him.

   We talked about her father’s concerns. She wasn’t planning on marrying me or anybody else to reform them. “That’s what reform schools are for,” she said. Dana was like the highway between Akron and Cleveland, no curves, being up-to-date fit and trim, but I liked her for sticking up for me.

   Kevin hated Dana. She had swagger to spare, and he knew it. She wasn’t curvier than his Lebanese steady but was better-looking by far. He resented her faux Boston accent. He resented her family, her family’s wealth, and their lifestyle. The family house in Solon had four bedrooms and a hot tub on the back deck. Big Jim drove a Caddy. It seemed like it was a new model every year. Kevin hated all of Big Jim’s Caddy’s.

   Dana had gone to college in Boston and flew there every two months-or-so to get her hair done by her favorite stylist. That winter, when I was thinking of breaking up with her, she asked me if I wanted to go to Aspen for some skiing. Before I could say anything, she stuck an airline ticket in my hand and said she would meet me there. She was going a few days in advance. She was more like her father than she knew.

   “I’ve only down hilled a few times,” I told her. “I mostly cross-country ski on the golf courses around town, which are mostly flat.”

   “You’ll get the hang of it,” she said. She was a can-do gal. She could be unconsciously smug.

   I felt like I was being hung out to dry with a broken leg in the making. Aspen Mountain is almost 12,000 feet up and has a vertical drop of more than 3,000 feet. The ticket was like an albatross around my neck. I went for a walk around the block to work it out. I couldn’t work up an angle to get out of the suicide mission.

   “Why don’t you give the plane ticket to Matt?” Kevin suggested. “He’s always skiing. He would love to go to Aspen.” Matt’s parents were from Finland, where skiing is second nature. They always said, “One cannot ski so softly that the tracks cannot be seen.” It was some kind of Finnish proverb. I had no idea what it meant.

   That’s what I did. I gave the ticket to my roommate. I didn’t say a word to Dana about it. She could be a hothead. After he got back from Aspen, Matt told me Dana was dumbfounded when he arrived in my place, his gear in tow. After she got her feet back under her, she swore up a storm and swore it was over between us. She was true to her word.

   “How was the skiing?” I asked.

   “It was great,” Matt said. “You should try it.”

   The on-again off-again wedding of Kevin and Leyla was back on when spring began to bust out all over. They planned to get hitched in June. I had majored in English at Cleveland State University and when my school days were over was minoring in unemployment, and so had time to spare for errands and lending a helping hand. I addressed all the invitations, sealed, and stamped them. I mailed them out. The replies started coming back the beginning of May. It was shaping up to be a sizable wedding followed by a chock-full reception. Kevin was opting out of hot wet love and into cold hard cash.

   I thought all his talk about marrying for money was just talk since a lot of what he said was all talk. I found out otherwise. He was going to marry for money. He was inviting anybody and everybody, no matter how distantly related by blood or friendship, adding up what their envelopes stuffed with fifties and hundreds might amount to.

   Kevin was like the Three Musketeers of repartee. There was nothing any woman could say to him that he didn’t have a better retort for. That was his number one problem. What woman was going to put up with a smart-ass day in and day out, much less for the rest of her life? The second problem was he never dated anybody who was better looking than him. When that became clear to whoever was princess for the day, she chopped his head off with words and moved on. Leyla was willing to put up with both problems. She wanted Kevin so she could make him into what she wanted him to be. The wedding was supposed to be at St. Marion’s, which was a downtown Maronite church. The congregation had been around since before World War One.  It was the center of Lebanese culture in Cleveland, both religious and ethnic.

   Kevin was still wrestling with doubt and indecision a week before the wedding. When he went down for the count, he called it off. He was giving up the task of loving his lady love. He had enough money in his safe so that he could stay a playboy for a few more years. Leyla was going to find out soon enough she had been made a monkey of.

   Matt and I were watching the Kardiac Kids on an old black and white TV when we found out what was happening. The Kardiac Kids were the exciting new version of the Cleveland Browns. They snatched victory out of the jaws of defeat most Sundays. Kevin walked in on the broadcast and tried to break his news flash to us. Brian Sipe was lofting a Hail Mary Pass. We motioned for Kevin to wait. When the Dawg Pound erupted, their prayers answered, we turned to him.

   “What’s that you were saying?” we asked, high fiving each other.

   “The wedding is off,” he said.

   “It’s off?” we asked, flummoxed.

   “Finito,” he said in an Italian accent phony as a bag of baloney, making a slashing motion across his throat. “You’re going to have to let everybody know.”

   “Hey, that’s all right,” I said turning back to the football game, making sure Don Cockcroft had kicked the extra point. “No man should get married until he’s studied some anatomy and carefully dissected the corpses of one or two women, so he knows exactly what he’s going up against.”

   Matt and I were at his parent’s house the next Sunday. They were from the old country. They had gotten a new Philips color television and we were watching the adventures of the Kardiac Kids again. The game hung by a thread. In the middle of the drama a slew of commercials interrupted the action. We told the old folks all about Kevin’s misadventure.

   “Life is not a waiting game for better times,” Matt’s dad said when the commercials were wrapping up, the game coming back on, and we were done with our account of the no-wedding.

   What does that mean? I wondered. I thought it had to be another Finnish proverb. What about all good things come to those who wait? “Even in Helsinki they don’t keep a maid on the dresser too long,” Matt’s mom said as though she had read my mind. I didn’t have to parse that. Matt and I went back to watching Brian Sipe side-stepping a defensive bull rush and pitching a tight spiral. It was flying colors right, left, and center.

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

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

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

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

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

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication