By Ed Staskus

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

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

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

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

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

   “All right,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Bomb City” by Ed Staskus

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

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

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

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

By Ed Staskus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   “Are you high?” I asked him. 

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

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

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

   “Your brother was an addict,” he said.

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

   “He’s fat, too.” 

   “What? Are you two?” 

   “He replaced drugs with food.” 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   “Do you have my suitcase?” I asked.

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

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

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

   “No, you’re wrong,” I said. 

   “No, I’m not.” 

   “Are you ever wrong, Jimmy?” 

   “No.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   “What are you making?”

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

   “Oh, you mean spanakapita.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   “Yeah.” 

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

   “Yeah.”

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

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

   “Yeah.”

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

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

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

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

    “I’m being honest,” he said.

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

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

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

   “I can control it,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   “That’s not true,” he said.

   “How do you see it in your world?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   “I’m coming to Cleveland.”

   “Why?”

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

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

   “I’ll think about it.” 

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

   “Yes.”

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

   We met him for breakfast when he got to Cleveland.

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

   “I’ll fill your tank up,” I said.

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

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

   Jimmy called me again about buying the Home Depot card.

   “How much is it?” I asked.

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

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

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

   “Who did you piss off?”

   “Nobody,” he said. 

   “Did you steal some drugs?”

   “I just need to go,” he said.

   “You are such an asshole.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   “A guy’s got to eat,” he said.

   The next day JJ called.

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

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

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

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

   “Why Canton?”

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

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

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

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

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

   “That’s right,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

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

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

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

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

By Ed Staskus

   I was ten years old the first time I saw a dead man. It was the morning of Holy Saturday. The sky was low and thick with clouds. It looked like it might rain any minute. My best friend Feliksas, a Lithuanian kid like me who everybody called Felix, and I had walked to the VFW hall behind the Gulf gas station at the corner of Coronado Ave. and St. Clair Ave.  It was a log cabin-like building with dusty windows. We didn’t have anything in mind except seeing the sights and messing around. We liked to slip behind the steering wheels of unlocked cars waiting to be repaired in the lot next to the gas station and pretend adventures on dangerous roads.

   When Felix noticed flashing lights on St. Clair Ave. we went around the corner to the front of the gas station. There were two black and white Cleveland Police Department prowl cars and an ambulance there. We called their rotating lights gumball machines. We called the sirens growlers. The black and white ambulance was a Ford station wagon that was both a police car and an ambulance. A policeman was standing around doing nothing while another one kept the crawling traffic on the other side of the street on the move. The traffic on our side was filtering down side streets. The ambulance men were standing beside their black and white station wagon smoking cigarettes.

   We stood to the side of a cluster of grown-ups who were tossing glances at the dead man on the ground. Nobody was saying much. We stepped closer to the man until we were standing over him. We looked down at him. He was lying on his back, partly on the sidewalk and partly in the street. He was wearing a white shirt and a plaid jacket. One of his shoes was missing. The other one was a tasseled loafer. One of his front teeth was cracked from when his face hit the concrete going down.

   The front of his white shirt, open at the neck, was a blob of red. Some of the red was damp while the edges of the blob were going lifeless. Flies were buzzing around him. We  jumped when the dead man moaned.

   “Do you need some help?” Felix asked

   “Getting bumped off is the only help for being alive,” the dead man said in a low tone of voice.

    Felix stepped up to the stone-faced policeman doing nothing. “That man is trying to say something,” he said.

   “That man is dead,” the policeman said. “Leave him alone.”

   “Who is he?” I asked. I had never seen him in our neighborhood before.

   “He was a hoodlum.”

   “Did you shoot him?”

   “No, not us. He spun the big wheel and lost.”

   “What’s the big wheel?”

   “Never mind kid.”

   There was a dark green car parked between the gas pumps and the station. It had white wall tires. We went over to look at it. The windshield was smashed, like somebody had thrown a rock through it. We looked inside. There was dried blood on the front seat. When I looked up I saw ‘Happy Motoring!’ stenciled on the plate glass windows of the station. We turned back to the street.

   “Tell them not to bury me in the Glenville Cemetery,” the dead man said.

   Glenville Cemetery was a graveyard next to the New York Central railroad tracks not far away. It lay in a triangle of land between St. Clair Ave. and Shaw Ave.  We could walk there down E. 129^th St. in ten minutes. We always passed it on our way to the Shaw Hayden Theater where we went to see  monster movie matinees.

   “Too many Jews,” the dead man said. “And now they’re burying niggers there.”

   What does it matter, I thought, even though I didn’t know very much about Jews or niggers. I didn’t know much about graveyards, either.  I always wondered what my father meant  when he said he had to work the graveyard shift. How much work do the dead need done for them? I had never been to a funeral, except for two funerals at St. George Catholic Church, where I was training to be an altar boy. I had sat in a back pew those two times and observed the goings-on as part of my training. I dozed off during the second service.

   I noticed the knot of grown-ups was gone. The stone-faced policeman and the ambulance men were still standing around waiting for something. The other policeman was standing on the corner waiting for the traffic light to change, except there weren’t any more cars. There wasn’t anybody in sight. There wasn’t a single person going into a single store even though it was shopping day. St. Clair Ave. was usually busy with women shopping at the A & P and all the other stores. Nobody seemed to be going home with a ham for Easter. Where was everybody? 

   A young woman came running down the street, pushed past the policemen, and threw herself on top of the dead man. Her hair rolled down her shoulders. The curls of her hair smelled like wet ashes. She started to cry, quietly rubbing the tears off her face with the sleeve of her dress.

   The dead man wiggled a forefinger and motioned for me to come closer.

   “Do a pal a favor, kid,” he said. “I don’t want her to cry over me and I don’t want her asking me for anything. Get her off me and help her home. It’s just around the corner. I was on my way there when I got mine.”

   The two ambulance men lifted her off him, got her steady on her feet, and Felix and I helped her back to her apartment. She lived on the second floor of a two story brick building on Dedman Ct. a block away on the other side of Lancelot Ave. It looked like nobody lived there. Most of the windows and the front door were broken. The roof was partly caved in. The lawn was choked with weeds.

   “Nobody lives here except me,” she said.

   “Was that man your boyfriend?” Felix asked.

   “No, my boyfriend disappeared two years ago, on the second day of 1959. I heard he joined the merchant marine, hauling ore on the Edmund Fitzgerald.” The Edmund Fitzgerald was the biggest boat on the Great Lakes. “Whoever that is lying on the cement over there looks like he’s got a free pass to the graveyard down the street.”

   “He asked us to make sure he wasn’t buried there.”

   “I don’t know why. He always said he was Italian, but he was half Jewish and half Negro, too.” 

   She turned to Felix. “Isn’t your name Feliksas?” she asked.

   “Yes, how did you know?”

   “Do you know your name means lucky?”

   “No, I didn’t know, nobody ever told me. How do you know my name?”

   “I know everybody’s names, everybody in this neighborhood, everybody on their way to the boneyard, where everybody is going, sooner or later, trying to not hear their own hollow footsteps. Forgiveness of sins and resurrection of the flesh.” Felix’s eyes got wide. I was getting spooked. A crow on top of the roof cawed three times.

  “What was your boyfriend’s name?” Felix asked.

   “I don’t know,” she said. “I think it was Frankie Paramo, but I’m not sure anymore. I’m starting to forget what he looked like.” She leaned against a shadow. Her face was going limpid. “May he rest in peace,” she said. Her voice was a thin lament. We went down the front walk to the sidewalk. When we turned to wave goodbye she wasn’t there anymore, like she had never existed.

   The gas station was in front of us before we knew it. I felt torpid and restless at the same time. The dead man was where we had left him. We took a step over to where he was. He looked up at the sky and said, “Life, what did you ever do for me? It’s my turn now. I’m not going to do anything for you anymore.”

   His words were muffled. His eyes were like dull marbles. Felix yawned like he was nervous. When we glanced at the dead man again he was blurry like there was an eclipse of wet moths around him flapping their wings. A dog barked monotonously in a backyard on Coronado Ave.

   A four-door Oldsmobile raced down St. Clair Ave. “What the hell does he think he’s doing,” one of the policemen groused. Not everybody saw the big car go past. It was like trying to see a falling star during the day. Felix said it was his Uncle Gediminas. Most of the Lithuanians in Cleveland lived in Glenville, although all of them were moving to North Collinwood. I had heard my father tell my mother one night they would have to start looking for a new house soon, or urban renewal would make our family home worthless. I didn’t know what urban renewal meant, although it sounded bad. I knew worthless meant bad. 

   Uncle Gediminas was an middle-aged undersized man with an old man’s turkey neck. He was an accountant and could afford a new car whenever he wanted one, even though he unfailingly bought used cars that burned oil. “He’s always staring down his kids,” Felix said. “All his kids are afraid of him. He bosses them around day and night.” 

   The street was full of echoes, even though the few people on the street weren’t saying anything. It felt like somebody was following us. We looked everywhere but couldn’t spot anybody.

   “Do you want to wait for him to die?” Felix asked.

   “I don’t think he has much time left even though the policeman said he’s already dead.”:

   “Not dead enough,” said a man walking past. His hair was shiny with Brylcreem and he was wearing a bowling alley shirt. He spit in the gutter before crossing St. Clair Ave.

   “Let’s wait,” I said to Felix.” I don’t want to just sneak away.”

   “You found out I’m not long for this world?” the dead man said. “I’ve known that for a while now, since the beginning. I don’t like it when people talk about me like I’m not here. You kids should go home where you belong.”

   “Is your name Frankie?” Felix asked.

   “Yeah.”

   “Do you believe in Heaven?”

   “I believe in Hell.”

   The sky got dark. It started to rain. It was a steady rain. The ground got full of worms. The dead man started to melt. When he started melting there was no stopping him. Five minutes later he had come undone and was a pile of mud. One of the policemen stepped up to him. “There’s no sense in getting worked up about it. Call off the pathologist. Call the fire department instead. They can hose him down the drain. It will save the taxpayers the trouble of an autopsy and a burial.”

   We were soaking wet after a minute of rain. We got chilled and goosebumps popped up on our arms and legs. Felix ran home down Coronado Ave. and I ran home down Bartfield Ave. Even though it was storming and had gotten darker, none of the houses were lit up. They were all shade and shape. We lived in a side-by-side Polish double that my parents bought on the cheap with my father’s sister and her family when they had emigrated to the United States.

   Our front door was locked. I ran to the back door. It was locked. I knocked but nobody came to the door. I kicked at it but still nobody came to let me in. I went into the backyard to the tornado doors. They were never locked. One of the doors had a handle. I pulled on the handle. The doors were locked.

   A German widow lived next door to us. Her husband was dead and her children had moved away. She was alone in the world. In a week she would be one hundred years old and her solitude would be full-fledged. I ran to her house. She was sitting on a lawn chair in the middle of her basement. A small storage room was where she kept her canned goods. She kept carrots, radishes, and potatoes in bins. She was writing in a spiral-bound memo pad. 

   Her memory was on the fritz. She wrote notes and Scotch taped pictures in her pad. There were pictures of my father, mother, brother, sister, and me, and our names in the pad. There were pictures of her fridge and stove and what they were called, which was fridge and stove. There were diagrams of all her rooms and everything in the rooms, what they were for and what they were called. There was a scrap of paper pinned to the front of her house dress. Her name, Agatha, was written on the paper in block letters.

   “My stomach is shriveled up from hunger,” she said, even though she had enough food stored in the basement to last a year. She often forgot to eat. My parents checked up on her every few days.

   “Where is everybody?” I asked.

   “Your family is all in the house. They are watching the TV. They will be sorry if a tornado comes. I told them so, but they wouldn’t listen.”

   “Can I borrow the key to get into our basement?”

   She had it in a pocket of her apron. She handed it to me. I unlocked the doors and swung them open. The concrete steps led to the cellar. They were slippery with slime. It was where our father told us we had to go whenever there was a tornado. He told us about the last one in Cleveland in 1953 that killed nine people, injured three hundred, and left two hundred homeless when their homes were blown away. “The cellar will protect us from high-speed winds and flying debris,” he said.

   I ran up the stairs to our kitchen. All the lights in the house were on. My  brother and sister were arguing on the living room floor while my parents watched the weatherman on the TV. We had an old Zenith. The only time it worked right was when there was a clear sky. There was a clap of faraway thunder. The TV went fuzzy. I couldn’t understand a word the weatherman was saying.

   “Where have you been?” my mother demanded. “You’re all wet. Go change your clothes before you catch your death of cold. And don’t touch the Easter ham. That’s for tomorrow.”

   “I didn’t know you were home,” I said. “The house was dark and locked up.”

   “What do you mean dark and locked up? Your father and I went grocery shopping but got back an hour ago. It was so busy out there. What with this gloom in the middle of the day, the house has been lit up since we got home.”

   My brother, sister, and I slept upstairs in the front bedroom. Our sister slept in a corner. Our parents slept in the back bedroom. They needed privacy by night. There was a bathroom and a linen closet. I dried off with a bath towel. I changed my clothes and sat on my bed looking out on Bartfield Ave. All the houses on the street were suddenly bright in new sunshine. The police cars and ambulance in front of the Gulf gas station were gone. The pile of mud that had been the dead man was gone. A firemen had a hose on the ground, where he had flattened it, and was rolling it up to put back on the pumper. 

   I ran up the street and found Felix on his way to meet me. We got our bikes and rode down Eddy Rd. and through the village of Bratenahl to Gordon Park on the Lake Erie shoreline. The sun made the mist in the air sparkle and bent the light. We sat on the edge of an overhang on a steep bank of the lake and watched a rainbow hover in the sky until it vanished off the face of the earth.

Photograph by Fred Lyon.

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

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

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

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

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

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

By Ed Staskus

   The day my nephew, who was going to be known by the name of Ike from that day on, told me he was changing his name to Wyatt, all I could think of saying was, “Why?” He looked up from his Xbox. He was sitting in a special gaming chair. There was carnage all over the big screen. The game was called Streets of Rage. It looked like everybody was losing.

   “What do you mean, why?” he asked.

   It turned out he had watched the horse opera “Tombstone” the night before and been enchanted by Wyatt Earp.

   “That might not work,” I said. 

   “Why not?”

   “Wyatt Earp was a lawman through and through. Your law-abiding ways are sketchy at best.”

   “Oh, right, I see what you mean. How about Doc, like Doc Holliday? He was smack.”

   “He was that, but he’s more along the lines of a Greek tragedy. I don’t see you as tragic.”

   “Hell no, I’m not tragic. The girls wouldn’t like that.”

   “How about Ike?” I suggested.

   “Who’s that?”

   “He was one of the cowboys in the movie, fast with a gun.”

   “OK, that sounds good. Ike it is from now on.”

   I didn’t tell him Ike was one of the bad cowboys who had tried to kill Wyatt Earp at the OK Corral.

   Ike was smart enough to make the grade and get admitted into St. Edward High School but scatterbrained enough to get suspended. St Ed’s is a Catholic school in Lakewood, Ohio in the Holy Cross tradition. Thousands of teenage boys apply to get in every year. A couple of hundred make it. Ike  had enough applesauce in him to not get expelled. He made it to graduation day by the skin of his teeth.

   He wasn’t so lucky at Cleveland State University. CSU is a state school. So long as your high school grades are somewhere near consciousness there is no problem getting admitted. After one thing and another he was told in no uncertain terms he had to find another school. When he left CSU, leaving his student housing apartment in need of disaster relief, he started looking for another place to live.

   His problem was no landlord with even a grade school education would rent to him. He camped out at his sister’s apartment until she said he had to go. His father suggested his uncles. He stayed with one after another until the last one told him he had to go. He stayed at my mother’s house, throwing parties for his friends whenever she broke a leg and was recovering at the Cleveland Clinic or had a stroke and was recovering at the Welsh Home in Rocky River. 

   When my brother asked me to throw some work his son’s way, I was of a mind to say no. It was almost the first thing I said. It was what I should have said. I had already hired Ike to waterproof our basement walls and repaint the concrete floor some months earlier. Every time I looked, he was easing himself down onto one of our lawn chairs and lighting up. He liked to smoke reefer rather than attend to the job at hand. When he wasn’t blazing, he was talking on his cell phone. In the end it was such a makeshift effort that I spent almost as much time in the basement as he had done, following up on his no effort work.

   I thought, that’s the last time. What I said, though, when my brother asked, was OK. I could have kicked myself.

   I worked more-or-less full-time for Light Bulb Supply in Brook Park. There were no brooks or parks anywhere in Brook Park. The biggest greenspace was Holy Cross Cemetery, 240 acres of it, across the street. I went there for walks instead of taking lunch whenever the day was dry and sunny. The office work more-or-less paid the bills. It was a family business, however, and I wasn’t a part of the family. I wasn’t going to get anywhere by relying on their good will, of which there was little. It was like my paycheck, on the stingy side.

   I got ahead by repairing tanning equipment part-time, on my own time, stand-ups and lay-downs, at tanning salons, beauty salons, gyms, and people’s homes. Indoor tanning was booming. I bought a tool box and electrical tools. I taught myself how to do it. My hourly rate was more, by far, than what Light Bulb Supply paid me. If it was an insurance job, I raised the price. If the insurance agent protested, I hung up.

   Allstate Insurance sent me to Dearborn, Michigan to inspect a tanning bed that had been under water for a few days in a family’s basement rec room. They found out their sump pump had failed when they got home from vacation. I drove there on a Saturday morning. It was going to be an all-day job getting there and back.

   Dearborn is just west of Detroit. and home to the most Muslims in the United States. It is also home to the largest mosque in the country. I thought I would stop and check it out. I got my signals crossed, missed the turn-off off I-75,  and missed the mosque. When I got to Detroit what I saw was an exit for Dearborn St. I took it. It was the wring exit. When all I saw were bars, funeral parlors, beauty shops, empty lots, and no white faces, I parked, found a phone booth, and called the folks with the soggy tanning bed. I told them where I thought I was.

   There was a pause. “Get back in your car and drive away from there right now,” the man of the house said. “It’s not safe.” There was no sense in tempting fate by sightseeing. I got back into my car and followed the Rouge River to Dearborn.

   I told Ike I had a job at a big tanning salon in North Royalton south of Cleveland. There were some repairs involved and re-lamping 9 or 10 tanning beds. It was going to take Ike and me a weekend and two or three nights. In the end it took me closer to a weekend and a week of nights. Ike was supposed to re-lamp during the day, since he was unemployed and had the free time, while I did the repairs at night, except he only showed up once and didn’t finish even one of the tanning beds.

   One day he wasn’t feeling well. His stomach hurt. Another day his garage door broke with his car inside it. Another day he didn’t bother to call to say he needed a mental health day. The last time before I told him not to bother anymore, he said the laundromat was closed and he didn’t have any clean clothes to wear to work. In the end I chalked it up to experience.

   “Nobody wants to hire me,” he complained, one of his many complaints. He seemed to think he could get the job done without going to work. He liked to say, “I don’t want to be tied down.” He didn’t want to be another cog in the wheel. There was little chance of that. Who wants a buzzkill of a cog?

   My brother asked my sister to let Ike move into her house. She lived nearby, had the space, but was reluctant. There was finally some peace and quiet in her house. She and her husband had split up. He had moved out and was on the road most of the time working as a long-haul trucker. Her daughter had graduated from Miami University and struck out on her own. There were two empty bedrooms. She could use the rent money. I suggested she get it up front.

   She told my brother she had reservations, especially since everybody knew Ike wasn’t just smoking reefer. He was selling reefer and branching out into fun pills. She didn’t want a drug dealer in her house.

   “He doesn’t have anywhere else to go,” my brother said.

   “What about your house?”

   “My wife doesn’t want him in our house.” His wife was Ike’s foster mother. She was a schoolteacher. Ike had been a student in her class during middle school. She probably knew what he was up to, although she was quiet as a mole snake about it.

   Ike was arrested one night in the middle of the night strolling down Detroit Rd. on the Cleveland side of its west side border. He was puffing on a stogie-sized spliff. It was the Dark Ages. Reefer was illegal. He was packing pills and cash in his pockets and having a high old time. A year later he appeared in court and was rewarded with intervention instead of jail time. My brother spent a small fortune sending him to assessment counseling treatment and prevention classes. I drove Ike to the classes now and then. He was like a honey badger talking trash.

   When he moved into my sister’s house, he brought clothes, shoes, and a safe with him. He kept the key to the safe on his person at all times. He moved into one of the vacant bedrooms. My brother paid his rent occasionally. Ike kept his clothes within easy reach and his shoes on display. “He thought nothing about buying $150.00 tennis shoes,” my sister said. “He had lots of them.”

   She didn’t ask what he kept in the safe. She didn’t want to know. One day she noticed one of the floorboards in his bedroom had been pried up and put back in place. When she looked under the board, she saw a green stash. She put the board back in its place. Boys and girls drove up to her house day and night, leaving their cars running at the curb. When they did, Ike ran outside, handed them something through their open car windows, and they gave him something in return.

   He texted his girlfriend a photograph of tens, twenties, and fifties fanned out across his bed cover. “Top of the world,” he seemed to be saying. When he was done with the display, he neatly packed the dough up and put it back in his safe. He was feeding the crocodile, hoping it would eat him last.

   My sister had told Ike, “No friends in the house.” A week later, pulling into her driveway after work, she saw more than a dozen boys and girls on her front porch and front steps. Two of them were sprawled over a railing. They were waiting for Ike. My sister called my brother.

   “Get over here right now and tell your son’s friends to leave.” 

   I happened to be driving by and stopped to see what was going on with the crowd on the front porch. When I asked if they were waiting for somebody, one of the youngsters on the railing said, “We are the ones we’re waiting for.” I assumed it was a smarmy Millennial trope. “Never talk to the monkey when the organ grinder is out of the room,” I said. “I understand,” the youngster said, which surprised me. I barely understood it myself. I left when I saw my brother’s car coming down the street and my sister storming down the driveway

   When Ike showed up, she asked him, “What do you not understand about no friends?”

   He was fluent when it came to complaining and explaining. Before he was done my sister cried uncle. “Just don’t let it happen again,” she said. He promised it wouldn’t happen again. It happened again and again. Ike could be sincerely insincere when he had to be.

   The driveway was delineated by the two houses on its sides. It wasn’t a wide driveway by any means. There was a grass strip on one side of the driveway but no buffer on her house’s side. Fortunately, Ike drove a compact car. Unfortunately, he had forgotten what he learned in driver’s education. He bounced off the house several times, denting his car, and ripping vinyl siding off the house.

   He liked to text my sister, asking if she needed anything done around his crash pad. When he wiggled down the driveway and hit the house he texted her, promising to fix it right away. He never did. He never did anything else, either, except breaking into the house through the back kitchen window whenever he locked himself out. Every time he did my sister had to replace the screen. A neighbor called the Lakewood Police Department when they noticed one of the break-ins, but Ike was able to explain it away. 

   After the intervention went bust, he was arrested again and charged with drug possession, possessing criminal tools, and a trafficking offense. He pled guilty since law enforcement had the goods on him. His charm, good looks, and a silver tongued lawyer carried the day. He was ordered to be drug tested on a week-to-week basis. 

   Something needed to save the day for my sister. She wanted Ike gone but didn’t know how to get it done. He was a blood relative and needed a place to live, even though he wasn’t willing to do what it takes to civilize an apartment and stock the shelves. It was a stand-off. My brother insisted there wasn’t anywhere else Ike could go. He had burned one bridge too many. She bit the bullet, but it tasted bitter.

   The magic bullet turned out to be the court-mandated drug-testing Ike was obliged to undergo. When spring turned to summer and summer turned to fall, he fell over his up-market tennis shoe laces and tested positive. Boys just want to have fun, even though I had told him not to squat with his spurs on. It meant the slammer. It meant he was packing up, shoes and safe and all. It meant my sister could slam and lock the door behind him the minute he left, which is what she did.

   The state of Ohio has the power to seize cash and property involved in drug trafficking. Asset seizures and forfeitures are a deterrent and a tool to take down criminal activity. “We generally seize assets that are believed to be the fruits of drug trafficking or used to facilitate the crime of drug trafficking,” Paul Saunders, a senior police official, said. “The courts have a litany of rules that are applied to each case to determine whether assets will be forfeited.”

   The last thing my sister needed was to have her home seized and taken away from her because of somebody else’s bad behavior. Fortunately, no searchlights were searching for her. She went back to mowing her lawn, walking her dogs, and watching “Law and Order” on TV.  When the crime drama wrapped everything up on a happy note, she went to bed snug as a bug with nothing bristling in her bonnet.

   I chewed on the idea of telling Ike who Ike really was, but never got around to it. It’s been said the truth will set you free. Sometimes it can feel good. Other times it can feel bad. I wasn’t in the advice business, however. I thought it best that Ike take whatever fork in the road he thought best.

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

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

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

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

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

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication