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West Park Blues

Born and Bred

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By Ed Staskus

   Maggie Campbell was a Bay Brat, which means she grew up in Bay Village, Ohio, where the well-off live west of Cleveland, while the not so-well-off live back east in Cleveland. She lived there her whole life growing up. When she was a girl, she picked up every lost bird and squirrel, every lost cat and dog, and every injured anything still alive and brought it home to protect it.

   She was an animal lover from the get-go. She got it partly when she was born, in the blood, partly from her dad, Fred, but not from her mom. Alma never liked any of the animals they ever had in the house basement garage backyard.

   Her parents met at Lycoming College in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, a few hours from Philadelphia. Her grandparents on her dad’s side had moved from Ohio to Philadelphia a few years earlier and enrolled in college there after high school. Alma was working in the town library, which is how they met. He fell head over heels for her, swept her off her feet, or at least he thought so, and they got married.    

   “We’re out of here,” is what he said the minute they got married. They moved right back to Cleveland. Even though they were married for more than forty years it might have been the worst thing either of them ever did. But Fred was stubborn, and Alma could be mean as a junkyard dog.

   Maggie had a mom who didn’t love her dad, and a dad who was frustrated about it, and the way he tried to make his wife happy was to rough up their kids. So, it was a tough childhood. Either you were being totally ignored or you were being roughed up.

   There were four of them. First, there was Elaine, then two years later Maggie, and then Bonnie hard on her heels, and last, three years later, Brad. Alma always said Fred tricked her four times. He zipped it up and from then on kept his thoughts to himself.

   He was from Cleveland, from the west side, where he grew up almost rich for his time. Alma was from Jersey Shore, just a few miles from Williamsport, where she grew up poor. Jersey Shore isn’t anywhere near New Jersey, the Jersey shoreline, and the shoreline it had didn’t live up to the name. There used to be silk mills and cigar factories in Jersey Shore. Later, factories made steel rails for train tracks there.

   During the Depression Maggie’s paternal grandfather was the only teenager in his high school who had a car. He used to follow her grandmother down the street trying to get her to come in his car with him, saying he wanted to help carry her books, so along the way what happened was they got cozy and got married.

   Her grandfather in Jersey Shore had three jobs the minute he stopped being a teenager. He was a coal miner, a school bus driver, and a milkman, but his family still stayed in the dumps. They were too poor to paint but too proud to whitewash. Even though they were always short they built their own house on the Susquehanna River. Maggie didn’t know how they got it built since they were strapped for hard cash most of the time.

   The river was their front yard. Susquehanna means Oyster River and it was on the Susquehanna where the Mormons say they got their holy orders delivered to them by divine beings. It was a big comfortable house. It’s still standing, although it’s not been taken care of, so it’s falling apart fast.

   Her grandmother lived in the house into her 80s, but then sold it and moved into a trailer, in a trailer park in the mountains above Jersey Shore. She started believing people in the other trailers were trying to shoot her with laser guns. She slept wrapped up in foam rubber holding an umbrella over her head for protection. Alma never wanted to talk about her mom because she thought she was crazy, and a Jesus freak to boot.

   Maggie didn’t know her Jersey Shore grandfather. He died young. He had arthritis from tip to toe, and it finished him off. It didn’t help working underground coal mining. She knew her grandmother well enough. Whenever her sisters and she visited her, she taught them how to pull taffy and fudge. They played with her paper dolls. She didn’t have any real dolls. They sat on the front porch in the afternoon and waited for the bean truck.

   “Before dinnertime she sent my older sisters to the side of the road. When the bean truck, or sometimes the vegetable truck, went by on the unpaved road beans bounced off the back of it and they would run and gather them up. My grandmother cooked them for dinner. If no beans fell off the truck, there was no dinner, although she usually had a little something else in the house.” Most of the time it was something cold she had canned months earlier.

   Fred went to Upper Darby High School, starting when he was a sophomore. His parents moved him to Philadelphia from Cleveland, and he never stopped saying he hated it. He was a Cleveland Browns fan and wore their colors, so he got into fights every day with the other kids who were Philadelphia Eagles fans.

   “My dad liked telling us stories when we were growing up, like the one about how one day he and his friends went to the second story of their high school and jumped up and down all at once all together until the second floor fell in on the first floor.” The school’s mascot is a lion, but when Fred was there it was a court jester.

   Fred’s parents were from Akron and lived in Lakewood for a long time. They had to move when the new I-90 highway was being built. It was called the “Main Street of Northern Ohio.” When they were growing up Fred would drive them to a bridge over the highway and show them the exact spot below the bridge where their house used to be.

   It was when they had to sell the house to the state that they moved to Philadelphia. After Fred and Alma came back, they lived in Lakewood in a rented house for a few years. Maggie’s sister Elaine was born there. The rest of them made the scene in Bay Village. The family had moved to a short cul-de-sac, five blocks south of Lake Erie. Her dad designed the house, and it was built just the way he wanted it. He died when she was thirty-three years old. The next thing she did was get married to Steve de Luca.

   The crow’s nest was where Maggie grew close to Brad, who when he was small fry looked just like Bamm Bamm in the Flintstones cartoons. They even called him Bamm Bamm, although after he got his drum set, they called him Boom Boom. Brad brought home a drum set somebody had thrown out on their tree lawn and set it up in the basement. He taught himself how to play. He called himself Ginger Boom after Ginger Baker, his favorite drummer. He had thrown down the gauntlet. After he did no animal nor human would go down to the basement. It was too noisy, to begin with, and damp as his underarms, besides.

   They all had our own rooms, although Brad and Maggie shared a room because the house was a room short. Her sisters had separate bedrooms down the half-story stairway from them, and her parents were at the other end of the hallway. They lived in the crow’s nest until Elaine moved out and got married and Maggie finally got her own room.

   Maggie was Brad’s number one protector when he was growing up, like she was with all the neighborhood’s lost cats and dogs. She and Brad sold bananas, bread and butter sandwiches, and hard-boiled eggs on their front lawn whenever their mom wasn’t looking. They ran to Bracken Way with money in their hands when they heard Uncle Marty’s Ice Cream truck coming.

   But Maggie could never protect Brad from Coco, their poodle, who bit and tore his diapers off when he was little. He could never crawl away fast enough, no matter how fast he scurried on his hands and knees. The dog was quick as the devil and cut him off.

   Sometimes Maggie didn’t try to stop Coco, even if she could have. She had some of her mom’s tough love in her. Other times Brad had done something she didn’t like, and it was just his tough luck that Coco was on the rampage. She could be a brat when she had to be.

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

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

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

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

Late summer, New York City, 1956. The Mob on the make and the streets full of menace. President Eisenhower on his way to Brooklyn for the opening game of the World Series. A killer waits in the wings. Stan Riddman, a private eye working out of Hell’s Kitchen, scares up the shadows looking for a straight answer.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Accidental Reality

Career Day

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By Ed Staskus

   All through my junior and senior years at St. Joseph High School, which was within walking distance of where we lived, my father pressed me to focus on something that would lead to a career. He was big on the idea. He was himself a career man. During those two years I told him I didn’t know what I wanted to focus on. I didn’t tell him I wasn’t enthralled by guidance counselors. I was reading Charles Baudelaire, a mid-19th century French prose-poet, who had  told his parents, “I don’t feel I have a vocation for anything.”

   I wasn’t especially interested in seeing my picture on a baseball card or a wanted poster.  Photographs are full of lies and labels. I wanted to take my own picture and tuck it away somewhere private.

   I read Charles Baudelaire’s book “The Flowers of Evil” the winter of my senior year at St. Joseph’s. It wasn’t assigned reading, not by far. St. Joseph’s was a traditional college preparatory high school, focusing on core academic subjects like math and science, social studies, and English. Religious instruction was a required feature of every day. Our teachers, the Marianists, brothers of the Society of Mary, made sure it was an everyday thing. There was no arguing the divine with them. There were vocational courses, as well, but my father was determined that I go to college. He didn’t want to see me repairing cars or working a tool and die press.

   My favorite class was English. My favorite thing to do was read books. I always did my homework. I read assigned books like “The Great Gatsby” and “Of Mice and Men” and “To Kill a Mockingbird.” I wrote sincere essays and aced tests. I neglected my other classes, reading books that weren’t assigned. I read “Lord of the Flies” and “Nineteen Eighty-Four” and “The Catcher in the Rye.”

   “The Catcher in the Rye” wasn’t banned at St. Joseph’s, but reading it was strongly discouraged. The official explanation was we should stick to our program of studies. The unofficial explanation was the book was depraved, full of vulgar language, sexual references, and anti-establishment themes. The Marianists were concerned about the book’s morality, or lack of it.

   After graduation I opted to attend Cleveland State University. It was close to hand, a twenty minute bus ride away, and affordable. The school had been established as a state university in 1964, taking over the buildings, faculty, and curriculum of Fenn College, a private engineering and business school of several thousand students that had been founded in 1929.

   I spent my freshman year at Cleveland State University the same way I had spent my junior and senior years at St. Joseph’s, attending English classes without fail and neglecting my other classes. At the conclusion of the school year my father sat me down and read me the riot act. It led to a stinging argument, but in the end, since I was still living in my parent’s house and my father was paying part of my tuition, I agreed to participate in a kind of career day scheduled for the next month in the Flats, the city’s industrial valley.

   Most of my father’s friends were Lithuanians and most of them were professionals. They were doctors, lawyers, and engineers. My father was a certified public accountant. One of his friends was a mechanical engineer. He had a son my age who was majoring in engineering at Cleveland State University. One of his classes had a field trip to the Flats planned. They saved a seat for me.

   The day of the field trip I waited on our front steps for my ride. It was June 22, 1969, early on a Sunday morning. The factories in the Flats never closed, but slowed down somewhat on Sundays, which made it less demanding to accommodate college students wandering around. When my ride came down our street I saw it a mile away, it being a chrome yellow color. it was a 1965 Ford Econoline Club Wagon. It didn’t have a front end to speak of but there were plenty of windows. Half of the  family van was windows. There were two bucket seats up front and three rows of bench seating in the back. My father’s friend was driving and there were six engineering students in the van. They had saved the front passenger bucket for me. It was a lonesome seat, but I wasn’t one of the rank and file, anyway, so I didn’t mind.

   We got on I-90 and drove to the Flats. There was hardly any traffic. When we got downtown we drove into the industrial valley. It was a warm and sunny day. It was more warm and less sunny in the valley. The air smelled like sewage and rotten eggs. The A. W. Stadler Rendering Plant near the Harvard Ave. Bridge added the odor of rotting animal matter to the stench.

   The Flats were located along the Cuyahoga River where it snaked through the north side of the city and drained into Lake Erie. It is bottom land there, the floodplain for the river. The earliest settlers in Cleveland settled in the floodplain, but it was swampy and they soon moved to higher ground. The Ohio & Erie Canal spurred lake shipping in the 1830s and rail lines spurred commercial growth in the 1860s. The Flats became the cradle of heavy industry in Cleveland. Business boomed exponentially. After 1870 the Flats teemed with foundries, iron furnaces, rolling mills, oil refineries, and chemical factories. The river was where they dumped their waste. It was their liquid landfill.

   A century later the Flats was dank, begrimed, and very polluted. Nobody went there other than to work in the warehouses and steel mills. There were dive bars like the Harbor Inn and the Flat Iron that served greasy food and cheap booze to working men. The air was bad and the waterway was worse. No one had dared to swim in the Cuyahoga River for decades. A journalist described braving the water as “no person drowns in it, they decay.” All the fish in the reach from Akron to Cleveland had long ago died. Nothing except Japanese movie monsters could survive in the thick sludge that had once been water

   “The river was a scary thing,” Tim Donovan explained. He was a high school graduate that summer, saving up for college, working as a hatch tender unloading ore carriers. Dead rats floated past the dockside cranes, bloated to the size of dogs. “There was a general rule that if you fell in, God forbid, you would immediately go to the hospital.”

    We toured Republic Steel and Jones & Laughlin Steel. They were colossal enterprises. We could have saved time by just going to one of them since they were so much alike. There was an unbroken roar of loud machinery. The fires, furnaces, and molten metal made the factories hot. Dust and black soot covered everything. The gasses in the air didn’t make for garden variety air pollution. Breathing as we walked from one end to the other end of the factories was like breathing something poisonous.

   The reason the engineering students were on the field trip was to help them bridge the gap between classroom theory and real-world application. Manufacturing steel involved many engineering disciplines. Seeing it happen in real time gave them a chance to see complex machinery involved in large-scale processes. They got to see first-hand how their classes in mechanical design and material science applied to the steel industry. It was eye-opening to them, and me, too. I found out there and then that I wasn’t prepared be an engineer.

   It was mid-day when the field trip wrapped up. We piled back into the Ford Econoline Club Wagon, drove in one direction, and then another direction. The through streets in the Flats generally followed the Cuyahoga River, running parallel to its banks. The side streets connected to surrounding neighborhoods like Ohio City and Tremont. Nonetheless, we got lost. We finally found ourselves on the Campbell Rd. Bridge, 

   There was a Plymouth Barracuda at a dead stop ahead of us on the bridge. We stopped and waited. A police car, its lights flashing, pulled up behind us. We stayed sandwiched where we were between them.

   “What’s going on?” one of the engineering students asked.

   “There seems to be a small fire down there somewhere,” our driver parent said, peering over the dashboard. 

   There was a sudden whoosh. Oily clouds of heavy black smoke rose up. We got out of the family van and went to the railing to get a better look. The smoke became a sky-high wall obscuring everything beyond the opposite bank. A fire department tanker truck crept onto the bridge. A fireboat by the name of Anthony J. Celebrezze made its way under the bridge to the wall of smoke. 

   What was going on was the Cuyahoga River was on fire.  It wasn’t the first time it had caught fire. It had happened a dozen times since 1868. This was the thirteenth time it caught fire. A flare tossed from an overpassing train had ignited the  petroleum-covered water. 

   The worst of the earlier fires happened in 1952 when oil and industrial debris on the river’s surface ignited. The fire destroyed three tugboats, three buildings, and some ship repair shops. It damaged a railroad bridge. It caused over one and a half million dollars’ worth of damage. Nobody in Cleveland was shocked by the river catching fire. It didn’t flow as much as ooze. Everybody was resigned to the city being one of the most polluted cities in the United States. “It’s the cost of doing business,” city fathers and business moguls said.

   The fireboat crept close to the blaze, began drawing water directly from the river, and used its deck guns to try to smother the flames. It was like pouring gasoline on gasoline. The flames leapt higher. Three fire battalions drew water from hydrants and discharged it onto the fire from the river bank. They were far more effective. 

   We watched from the deck of the bridge, standing in a cluster behind a railing. The summer breeze was blowing our way, but from behind us, so we weren’t smothered by the smoke. It was still noxious. It was sharp and acrid, like burnt toast that had been buttered in sulfur compounds. We got back into the Ford Econoline Club Wagon and rolled up the windows. It didn’t help all that much.

   The inferno lasted thirty minutes. Once it was out a policeman waved us forward and we drove away. We drove along the river. As we went the water became orange from the pickling acid used by the steel mills. We got lost again and ended up on the Jennings Rd. Bridge, which connected Abbey Ave. to W. 25th St. Our driving parent knew W. 25th St. well because he shopped for fruits and vegetables at the West Side Market. He knew how to get home from there. Crossing the bridge I looked down. There was a slaughterhouse below us. I could see blood and animal parts streaming out of  outfalls and into the Cuyahoga River.

   “That was amazing,” one of the engineering students said.

   “Who ever heard of water catching fire?” another one said. “Somebody should do something about it.”

   “And put us out of a job?” a third one said.

   Once I got home I threw my clothes down the clothes chute and took a shower to wash away the smell. I put on a clean pair of jeans and a t-shirt. I combed my hair. My father was taking a Sunday late afternoon nap in the backyard. He woke up when I threw myself down in a lawn chair.

   “How was your career day?” he asked.

   “We toured a couple of steel mills and saw the Cuyahoga River catch fire,” I said.

   He seemed unfazed by the news. He had lived through World War Two as a teenager on his own. He had seen his share of bombs and fires. He fled Lithuania in 1944 and spent five years in and out of refugee camps, working black markets until he found steady work with a relief organization near Nuremberg. When he finally made it to North America he ended up in Canada, where he worked digging up nickel and copper in the Sudbury ore basin for eight years. We had been in the United States the past ten years.

   “Have you thought about getting into engineering?”  he asked.

   “I don’t think I have a talent for engineering, although I understand engineers make the world go round, at least our modern world,” I said. “But you’ve got to watch out for them. They start by making sewing machines and end with crazy hellfire.”

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

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

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

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

Late summer, New York City, 1956. The Mob on the make and the streets full of menace. President Eisenhower on his way to Brooklyn for the opening game of the World Series. A killer waits in the wings. Stan Riddman, a private eye working out of Hell’s Kitchen, scares up the shadows looking for a straight answer.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Accidental Reality

Maybe Later Baby

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By Ed Staskus

   “The end is always near,” Greg Smith said, sinking back into the firm as Jell-O bench seat. Flying bugs recently alive littered our windshield. One of them left a big yellow blob behind him the instant he hit the glass. It was a fine summer day. Jimi Hendrix’s song “Stone Free” was playing on the car radio.

   Greg’s driving hand was easy on the steering wheel. His other hand was wiggling in the outside air. He was driving well enough to keep us on the road, but his eyes were like pinwheels. The magic mushroom he had popped into his mouth a half hour earlier was working its magic. I couldn’t tell him to slow down because he was going slower than a horse-drawn buggy. I reached for the seatbelt, anyway. When I did I found out the top drop Chevrolet Impala SS didn’t have seatbelts. 

   I had taken a Greyhound bus from Cleveland down the hillbilly highway and hooked up with my friend Greg in Athens. It wasn’t Greece. It was southern Ohio in the northern Appalachians. I called him Jonesy for fun, even though he didn’t think it was funny. “I don’t like glibness,” he complained like an offended grade school teacher.

   SS stood for Super Sport. There was nothing super about the car anymore, which came off the assembly line in 1961, except for the engine. It was still super when it had to be. The rocker panels were rusting out, the front of the hood was gashed, and the tires were bald as baloney skins. The car was Roman Red on the outside while the interior was scuffed black leather. I reached for the grab bar attached to the padded dashboard.

   “Do you know this car was built by union labor right here in the United States?” Greg asked, apropos of the Japanese and German cars we had been seeing here and there.

   “No, I didn’t know that,” I said.

   “It’s got a V-8 engine. One of my uncles might have built it.”

   “Is that right? By the way, what do you mean the end is always near?”

   “Like they say,” he said, “the future’s uncertain and the end is always near.”

   At the moment the Chevy Impala SS was running on one of the V-8’s and none of Greg’s car-making relatives were in sight. What was in sight was the future. There was a flashing red light behind us. It was the kind of light that always looks makes you feel blue. The Meigs County policeman didn’t have any trouble getting on our tail. He had some trouble pulling us over, however, even though the road was straight and narrow as a preacher. The manual steering took several turns of the steering wheel to go from lock to lock. In the state he was in it took Greg a few minutes and a mile-or-so to master the mechanics of pulling off onto the shoulder.

   The policeman didn’t bother asking for his driver’s license. “Step out of the car, son, and let me smell your breath,” he said.

    Greg didn’t like being called son. He scowled patting himself down for his wallet. He huffed and puffed in the policeman’s direction.

   “You smell all right,” the policeman said. “It don’t seem like you been drinking or smoking stinkweed.” The Chevy had a vacuum powered ash tray that sucked ashes to a container in the trunk. “Why are you going so slow when you got that power horse under the hood?”

   “I know this road doesn’t go anywhere but I’m looking for the end of it,” Greg said. “I don’t want to miss it.” The policeman wasn’t fazed by the nonsense. “It don’t go nowhere but it always brings you back again,” he said. Greg was flummoxed for a minute. The policeman looked the Chevy Impala SS up and down. “This is the car the Beach Boys wrote a song about, son.”

   The song was a big hit in its day. “Nobody can catch her, nothing can touch my 409, giddy up, giddy up, my four speed dual quad 409,” Brian Wilson sang in his big falsetto while the rest of the boys layered the harmonies. The fired-up 409 was fitted with a 4-barrel carburetor and a solid lifter camshaft. The pistons were made from forged aluminum. The heads and engine block were made from cast-iron.

   “Those were the days, boys. Make no mistake, that Impala is a real fine car. Try to put some giddy up into your driving. And keep it on the yellow line.” He got back into his black and white Dodge Coronet patrol car and u-turned, going the way he had come. He drove away in good order.

   I was along for the ride on Greg’s ride that day. I had spent the spring, summer, and fall of the previous year in a nearby town called Carpenter living with Virginia Sustarsic in an abandoned general store. She wasn’t my girlfriend, but we got along, even though she was a dyed in the wool hippie and I wasn’t. She rolled her homegrown delicately and deliberately. We kept two goats, gleaned plenty of food, and brewed our own beer. I drank most of the beer. A stray kitten made us his crash pad. The town wasn’t a town so much as a whistle stop. The railroad had long since abandoned the place, though. There were maybe a dozen residents, including us. There were dust balls in all the corners of the crossroad. At night every star in the universe twinkled in the nighttime sky.

   Carpenter was in Meigs County. It was named after Return Meigs, Jr., who was the fourth governor of Ohio. The county is on the Appalachian Plateau in the southeast corner of the state. The Shade River and Leading Creek drain into the Ohio River. Leading Creek ran right through Carpenter. In the 1970s the county’s population was less than 20,000. As far as I could tell there were no Asians, Native Americans, or African Americans anywhere. There were trailer trash on every other hillside.

   Greg was a friend of John McGraw’s, who was Virginia’s on-again off-again boyfriend back home. They both lived on the bohemian near east side of downtown, near Cleveland State University. John was a part-time writer and drank whiskey straight from the bottle. Greg came from a more polite class and drank from a glass. He and John had planned on sight-seeing Meigs County, but at the last minute John bowed out. Greg went anyway, cruising all the way from one end of the state to the other in his big Chevy SS.

   Virginia dressed like it was still the Summer of Love while John more like the Age of Beatniks had never ended. Greg wasn’t any better off than them, living half on and half off the American Dream, but he dressed like a preppy. He read the classics. He was studying Latin so he could read Ovid and Seneca in the original. Nobody ever suspected he kept magic mushrooms in his wallet.

   Something came over him the minute the policeman was out of sight. He fired up the Chevy SS. He spun gravel getting back on the asphalt. The next minute we were doing eighty in a forty. The Doobie Brothers came on the radio belting out “Rockin’ Down the Highway.” I took a peek in the rearview. There was nobody behind us. I looked through the windshield at what was in front of us. All the danger was in front of us.

   “We should maybe slow down,” I calmly suggested as loud as I could. 

   The Chevy SS was a four on the floor. She wasn’t good on gas and burned some oil. Greg picked up speed. We were doing a hundred in no time. There were no more gears to shift up into. His eyes weren’t pinwheels anymore. They glinted like icepicks. He leaned over the steering wheel. The car wasn’t sloppy, nor was Greg’s handling of it sloppy, but we were headed for trouble. We were blasting down a back road. It was cracked and rough and more gravel than not. Meigs County didn’t have the tax base to keep its roads in any kind of Daytona 500 shape.

    “I’m not asking for a miracle, Lord, just a little bit of luck will do,” I whispered.

   “Every minute counts,” Greg shouted above the wind noise.

   “Keep your eyes on the road,” I shouted back. “You never can tell what’s around the corner.”

   He waved at the outdoors with his left arm. Southeastern Ohio on a sunny day in the summer is beautiful. When we roared around a blind curve there wasn’t anything there, to my relief, until there suddenly was. It was a roadhouse with some cars and pick-ups in the front, which was a small parking lot full of potholes. The sign said Frank’s Roadhouse. There were worn-out antlers nailed to the outside wall above the front windows. We pulled in, skidding in three or four different directions. A long-tailed weasel ran the other way. There were half a dozen bungalows in the back.

   Inside there was a bar, a kitchen, some tables, a dance floor, a riser protected by chicken wire, and a pool table. A man and a woman were having mashed potatoes with pulled pork at one of the tables. A bottle of BBQ sauce stood at the ready between their plates. There was some action going on at the pool table but none on the dance floor. Before I knew it Greg had found unexpected action at the bar, where a cute brunette was sitting, a lowball glass half full of red wine at her elbow and a paperback book in front of her.

   There was an oblong mirror on the wall behind the bar. It was too smudged to see into. There was a hand-written warning on a greasy piece of cardboard below it. It said, “Don’t eat the big white mint!” I didn’t ask what it meant. I didn’t want to know. What’s a simple man to do? I looked around for something to do. I put a dollar on the lip of the pool table marking my turn in line. There were two men playing nine ball. It was the middle of the day on a Thursday. Neither of them was on union soil. Neither of them was being especially efficient. There were seven or eight bottles of Burger Beer on a small round table behind them.

   One of the men looked me up and down. “I’m a pretty big man around these parts,” he said, flashing a Mighty Mouse grin. He had sharp yellow teeth. He was shorter than me, but I knew what he meant. “I thought you’d be bigger,” I said. He didn’t laugh. He had the sense of humor of a circus strongman. The other man laughed his head off. My man broke the rack. He was no Minnesota Fats. When my turn came I ran the rack and took my dollar back. I collected a dollar from the local yokel. He tried his luck two more times and paid me two more dollars. He didn’t know, and I didn’t tell him, that I spent more time than I wanted to admit, even to myself, shooting snooker at Joe Tuma’s Pool Hall back in Cleveland.

   I bought them both beers, they clapped me on the back, the circus strongman harder than he needed to, and I went back to the bar, joining my friend and his new friend. He wasn’t paying any attention to her book. He gave me a wink, suggesting the main drag from the eye to the heart doesn’t go through the intellect, or words to that effect.

   Her name was Annie. She was a third-year student at Ohio University in Athens, 20-some miles to the northwest of where we were. She was majoring in English. She wasn’t enrolled in classes that summer but had stayed in Athens instead of going home to Cincinnati. She spent her spare time exploring. She had found Frank’s Roadhouse by accident, liked the looks of it, and stopped in for the afternoon.

   “What do you like about this dump?” I asked.

   “It looks real,” she said.

   I was willing to grant her that. When the bartender approached I ordered a Vernors Ginger Soda. Between the earlier psychedelics and shots of roadhouse whiskey stirring up my tour guide, I knew one of us had to stay on the wagon. 

   “Who is Frank,” I asked the bartender. 

   “There ain’t no Frank, at least not no more,” he said. 

   “What happened to him?” 

   “Nobody knows,” he said.

    The middle of nowhere is as good a place to disappear as any.

   I reminded Greg we had promised our farmhouse friends where we were staying we would stop at the grocery store in Pomeroy and pick up milk, cheese, and toilet paper. Toilet paper was like gold where they lived. Greg’s eyes had gone soft and fuzzy in the meantime. He needed reminding. I had to remind him twice. He finally slid off the bar stool glowing like a full moon in a clear sky.

   Annie followed us out to the Chevy SS. “I like your car,” she said. Greg asked her if she wanted a ride back to college town. She pointed to a VW Beetle. “Fontasse postem infantem,” she said, jotting her name and phone number down on a  scrap of paper. She pressed it into his open hand. She rose up on her tiptoes and gave him a kiss on the cheek. I never saw a man go head over heels as fast as he did that day.

   Once we were in the car, humming along Route 143 on our way to Pomeroy, I asked him what Annie had said.

   “Maybe later baby,” he said. “That’s what she said.”

   The Milky Way was in his eyes. “Keep your eyes on the road and your hands on the wheel,” I reminded him for the last time. I didn’t have to remind him to keep his hands off the magic mushrooms in his wallet. He was riding high on a different kind of magic. Love may not make the world go round, although it can make the ride around the world worthwhile.

Photograph by Elaine Mayes.

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

“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

West Park Blues

Maggie’s New Digs

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By Ed Staskus

   Maggie Campbell grew up in Bay Village, ran around like a squirrel on her dead-end street and through nearby back yards, went to grade school and high school in Bay Village, got her first job at the Bay Pool, and didn’t know West Park existed until she moved away from home and got married. West Park is eight miles from Bay Village.

   At first there wasn’t anybody anywhere in West Park. The wilderness didn’t have a name. There were some Indians who came and went. At the turn of the 19th century, it was lots of land, a handful of homes, and a few wagon paths. The paths were rutted and often impassable. The land was named for John West, an early pioneer.

   John West and his wife were from Ireland. They weren’t the founders of the new community, but they had a 600-acre farm with a 25-acre front yard and an artificial lake with rowboats on it. The land around the lake was called West Park. Over the years everybody came to call the entire locality the same thing.

   The terrain is bordered to the north by Lakewood, which is on the south shore of Lake Erie. It is west of Brooklyn and east of Fairview Park. Everything else is south of it. It is twelve and a half square miles formed as Rockport Hamlet in 1892, incorporated as Rockport Village in 1902, and finally renamed the Village of West Park in 1913. In the 1920s it was its own city with its own government. It became the last independent city to be annexed by Cleveland in 1923.

   George Reitz, who was the mayor at the time, said, “I’m no longer going to be mayor of West Park. I’m going to be a resident of Cleveland.” Cleveland was the fifth largest city in the country in thew 1920s.

   After Maggie and Steve de Luca got married, they moved in with Steve’s brother Fat Freddie in Little Italy, but it got off to a bad start and went downhill. Fat Freddie had a heart of gold but a Red Skelton sense of humor that got on Maggie’s nerves. It wasn’t long before she wanted to do him in. She might have but for Fat Freddie being friends with the pastor of Holy Rosary Church and the local mobsters. Besides, he was her brother-in-law and murdering him would have looked bad at the next family picnic.

   The first road in West Park was a wooden plank toll road. Horse drawn streetcars went back and forth. All the other roads were unimproved, a mess of mud every spring and buried by snow every winter. Oswald Kamm opened a grocery store at the intersection of what is now Lorain Ave. and Rocky River Dr. Most people called West Park the “lost city.” Getting to the grocery store was an ordeal. Whenever a thunderstorm broke out everybody stabled their horses at the store and stayed the night.

   There are four West Park neighborhoods, which are Kamm’s Corners, Riverside, Bellaire-Puritas, and Jefferson. Kamm’s Corners is Irish Catholic. There are taverns right and left of the corner. Riverside was largely unsettled until Cleveland Hopkins Airport was built there in 1925, when it became airplane country. Bellaire-Puritas is manufacturing intensive, largely due to the presence of many industrial parks. It is adjacent to highways and has access to the Norfolk-Southern and CSX rail lines. Jefferson was thinly populated for a long time but following annexation residential development moved forward. Grayton Rd. is north of the airport and more-or-less follows the lay of the Rocky River. Alan Apelt grew up on Grayton Rd. when it was a dirt road and everything around it was farmland. 

   “If a car was driving down our road we knew they were lost,” Alan said. His grandfather August farmed vegetables there in the 1920s. After he passed away one of his four children took over the family farm. Rudy Apelt built a greenhouse while still farming outdoors. In the 1950s Cleveland was known as the “Greenhouse Capital of the Americas.” Through the 1960s there were more than fifty of them around town growing cucumbers, tomatoes, and leaf lettuce. It was where the Central and West Side Markets got their produce.

   After Rudy met his maker Alan and his brother Ron took the helm. They specialized in English seedless cucumbers. When his brother passed away Alan turned the greenhouses into a hydroponic operation. He gave it up in 2016 and dismantled them. In their place he planted 400 Chinese Chestnut trees.

   “Chestnut trees are the easiest things to manage on a day-to-day basis by yourself,” he said.

Three years later he had a harvest to meet the rising trend in cooking of using chestnuts. They have a sweet flavor and potato-like consistency. When they fall from their branches, they are enclosed in spiney burrs. Picking them up means wearing gloves. Picking them up barehanded means getting stabbed by a spiny burr.

   John West’s red brick house still stood on W. 138th Street when Maggie and her husband bought a house on West Ave. in the Jefferson neighborhood. John Marshall School of Engineering was at one end of the street and Cleveland Police First District headquarters was at the other end. Steve’s father had been a lawyer for the Cleveland Mob. Steve was ambivalent about law and order being close to hand.

   There weren’t any farms left. All the greenhouses were gone. Three interstates were nearby. There were three rail transit stops within hiking biking distance. Almost everybody was Irish, Latino, or Black. Maggie was Scottish, which was close enough. Steve was Italian, which wasn’t close, at all. But he had been born and bred in Little Italy, where the Dago’s were surrounded by Wasps and Jews. He knew how to mix it up with folks who were nothing like him.

   If things got sketchy, being from Little Italy, he knew how to take care of himself. If they got dangerous, he knew who to call. If Fat Freddie proved to be not enough back-up, he knew his brother knew enough dangerous men to set things right. In the event, their home was their castle. Just in case, they always had two or three dogs in the house. They weren’t Chihuahuas or Miniature Poodles, either.

   “A good dog makes good neighbors,” Maggie always said.

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

“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

Accidental Reality

Thirty One Words

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By Ed Staskus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Bomb City” by Ed Staskus

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

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

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

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Vera Nyberg

Not Dead Enough

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By Ed Staskus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   “Did somebody fall into the valley?”

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

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

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

   “Rough night Vera?” he asked.

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

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

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

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

   “Who called this in?”

   “Your neighbor one house over.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   Vera got the gist, ignoring the jargon.

   “So what did he die of?”

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

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

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

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

   “He’s not dead,” Vera said.

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

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

   “Wait,” Vera said.

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

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

   “How do you know that?”

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

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

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

   “I’ll be back in five minutes.”

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

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

   “Where to?” Vera asked.

   “The airport.”

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

   “I’m Walter,” the man said.

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

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

   “This will only take a minute.”

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

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

   “Is he dead?” Walter asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   “That’s on me,” Vera said.

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

Image by Joan Miro.

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

“Bomb City” by Ed Staskus

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

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

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

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Accidental Reality

Gimme Shelter

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By Ed Staskus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Bomb City” by Ed Staskus

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

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

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

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Accidental Reality

Full Steam Ahead

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By Ed Staskus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   “What about Joe?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Bomb City” by Ed Staskus

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

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

Accidental Reality

Clown Car

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By Ed Staskus

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

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

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

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

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

   “I zip my lip.”

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

   “Go doll yourself up,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   “I don’t believe in God.” 

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

   “What are the Ten Commandments?”

   “We’ll get into that later.”

   “What about this Devil thing?”

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

   “Like what?”

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

   “I can do that with my eyes closed.”

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

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

   “Lakewood, right here next to Cleveland.”

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

   “You’re right about that.”

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

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

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

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

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

   “What does that matter?”

   “It matters to me.”

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

   “All right, all right.”

   “One last thing.”

   “What’s that?”

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

   “You know I’m good for it.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Made in Cleveland” by Ed Staskus

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

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

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A Crying of Lot 49 Production

West Park Blues

Saved By the Bell

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By Ed Staskus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   “I’m in jail,” he said.

   “I have one question for you.”

   “What?”

   “Did you deliver the papers?”

   “Yeah.”

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

   He was out in fifty-five minutes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

   “No sir, you can’t have that dog.”

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

   They untied the dog and took it with them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Ebb Tide” by Ed Staskus

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

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

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

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication