By Ed Staskus

   The mid-summer day I walked across the Rainbow Bridge the sky was getting dark and stormy. I had gotten to the border by leaving the driving to Greyhound. The driver wore a uniform and a cap. It made him look like a mix of state trooper and doorman. Since the bus had no acceleration to speak of, once he got it up to speed leaving the downtown terminal he kept it at speed all the way from Cleveland, Ohio to Niagara Falls, New York. We passed sports cars and station wagons.

   The driver’s seat was high up with a vista vision view of the highway. The transmission was a hands-on four-speed. There were only a few instruments on the panel on the other side of the steering wheel, a speedometer, air pressure gauge for the brakes, oil pressure gauge, and a water temperature gauge.

   When I stepped foot on the Canadian side of the Rainbow Bridge it wasn’t raining, yet. The Border Patrol officer asked me where I was from, where I was going, for how long, and waved me through without any more questions. I found the bus station and bought a ticket for Toronto, where I was going. I was going to see a girl, Grazina, who I had met at a Lithuanian summer camp on Wasaga Beach a couple of years before.

   It rained steadily all the way there, past Hamilton and Mississauga on the Queen Elizabeth Way, until we got to the big city, where the clouds parted and the sun came out. Everything smelled clean. I picked up a map of the bus and subway system and found my way to my friend Paul’s house where I was going to stay. His family was friends with my family from back when we lived in Canada.

   Paul lived in a two-story brick row house off College St. near Little Italy. I was polite to his parents and ignored his two younger sisters. I roomed with him, but ditched him every morning after breakfast, hopping a bus to Grazina’s house. Girls came first. Her house wasn’t far, 5-or-so minutes away near St. John the Baptist Church. Lithuanians had bought the church in 1928 and redesigned it in the Baltic way in 1956. They tore the roof off and replaced it with a traditional Baltic village house roof with a sun-cross on top.

   Grazina, whose name meant “beautiful” in English, met me on her front porch and took me on a guided tour of Toronto. We went by tennis shoe, streetcar, and the underground. We looked the city over from the observation deck on top of City Hall and went to the waterfront. We strolled around Nathan Philips Square. We had strong tea and swarm cones at an outdoor café. Grazina popped in and out of shops on Gerrard St. checking out MOD fashions. At the end of the day I was dog tired. I begged off a warmed-over dinner that Paul’s mother offered me back at home away from home and fell into bed. 

   The next morning Grazina had a surprise for me. We weren’t going wandering, even though I felt refreshed. We were going to a funeral. 

   “Who died?” I asked.

   “Nobody I probably know and for sure nobody you know,” she said.

   She was dressed for death, all in black. I wasn’t, wearing blue jeans and a madras shirt. We stopped at a second-hand clothes store. I bought a black shirt so I wouldn’t stick out like a sore thumb.

   “Why are we going to this funeral?” I asked.

   “Because it’s Friday and it’s a Greek funeral,” she said as though that explained everything.

   I was an old hand at funerals, having swung a thurible at many of them when I was an altar boy at St George Catholic Church. I had only ever been to Lithuanian funeral services. “Because it’s Friday and a Greek funeral” were obscure reasons to me, but I was willing to go along.

   Toronto was full of immigrants. Immediately after the World War Two both war-time brides and children fathered by Canadian soldiers showed up. Post-WW2 refugee Italians, Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, Central Europeans, and Balts poured in. In 1956 after Soviet tanks rolled through Budapest, many Hungarians came over. Through the 1950s and 60s the old-stock Anglo-Canadianism of Toronto was slowly transformed.

   The church, Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox, in the former Clinton Street Methodist building, was somewhere up Little Italy way. We got on a bus. When we got there a priest sporting a shaggy beard, Father Pasisios, was leading the service. He wore a funny looking hat. The church was small on the outside but big on the inside. We sat quietly in the back. When the service was over I finally asked Grazina, “Why are we here?”

   “For the repast.”

   “What’s that?”

   “Food, usually a full meal.”

   “Doesn’t your family feed you?”

   “It’s not that,” she said. “I went to a Romanian funeral with a friend a few months ago, and they served food afterwards, and it was great, the kind of food I had never had before. After a while I started going to different funerals whenever I could, always on Fridays. It didn’t matter if they were Sicilian, Czechoslovakian, Macedonian, only that I could sample their national food.”

   “How do you know where to go?”

   “I read the death notices in the newspaper.” I had heard of wedding crashers, but never a funeral crasher.

   The repast was at the next-door community hall. Grazina was dodgy when asked who she was, telling both sides of the family she was distantly related to the other side of the family. “Memory eternal” is what she always said next, shaking somebody’s hand. She knew the lingo. The lunch was delicious, consisting of moussaka, mesimeriano, and gyros. We had coffee and baklava for dessert. By the time we left we were well fed and ready for the rest of the day..

   We went to Yorkville and hung around the rest of the day. There were coffee houses and music clubs all over Yonge and Bloor Streets. The neighborhood went back to the 1830s when it was a suburban retreat. Fifty years later it was annexed by the city of Toronto and until the early 1960s was quaint and quiet turf. Then it morphed into a haven of counterculture.

   “An explosion of youthful literary and musical talent is appearing on small stages in smoky coffee houses, next to edgy art galleries and funky fashion boutiques offering trendy garb, blow-up chairs, black light posters and hookah pipes, all housed in shabby Victorian row houses,” the Toronto Star said.

   It was fun roaming around, hopscotching, ducking in and out of stores, even though a police paddy wagon was parked at the corner of Hazelton and Yorkville. There had been love-ins, sit-ins, and so-called “hippie brawls” in recent years. Some of the city’s leading citizens were up in arms. The politician Syl Apps said the area was a “festering sore in the middle of the city.” 

   There were wide-eyed teenagers and tourists, hippies and bohemians, hawkers and peddlers, and sullen-looking bikers selling heroin. There were black-haired girls playing guitars and preppy guys wearing elbow patched sport jackets. There were bookstores and head shops. A young man was slumped on the sidewalk. We stopped to take a peek at him lying dazed against a storefront. An old woman wearing a babushka and walking with a cane crept carefully past him. I couldn’t tell who was more over a barrel. We went our own way.

   We weren’t able to get into the Riverboat Coffeehouse, which wasn’t really a coffeehouse, but a club with the best music in town. We peeked through the porthole windows but all we saw were shadows. The Mynah Bird featured go-go dancers in glass cases. Some of the glass cases were on the outside front of the club. We saw Rompin’ Ronnie Hawkins perform back flips across the stage while doing guitar solos at Le Coq d’Or.

   Starvin’ Marvin’s Burlesque Palace was upstairs in a brick building, but we didn’t go there. All the music clubs were small and most of the doors open to catch a breeze. We sat on curbs and heard a half-dozen bands free of charge. Grazina called it a ‘Knees Up Mother Brown’ day. We stayed until midnight. By the time I got back to Paul’s house I was more than tired again and fell into bed. I caught my fair share of forty winks.

   The sky on Saturday morning was clear and bright over Lake Ontario. Grazina and I went to the Toronto Islands. We took the Sam McBride ferry and rented bikes. There were no cars or busses. We stopped at the new Centreville Amusement Park on Middle Island and rode the carousel. When we found a beach we changed, threw a towel down, and spent the remainder of the afternoon in the sun. We ate bananas and threw the peels to the seagulls, who tore them apart and downed them like it was their last meal.

   Grazina invited me over for dinner. She told me her mother was a bad cook, and it was my choice, but I went anyway. She set the table while her mother brought platters of cepelinai with bacon and sour cream on the side, serving them piping hot and covered with gravy. They were fit for a king. I told Grazina her mother was the queen of the Baltic kitchen.

   The next morning was Sunday. After going to mass at St. John the Baptist Church with Grazina and her family I caught a bus for home. At the border I waited my turn to answer the Border Patrol man’s questions. I had all the answers except one. When he asked me for I. D., I said I didn’t have any.

   “How did you get into Canada?”

   “I walked over the bridge.”

   “Didn’t they ask you for I. D.?”

   “No,” I said.

   “Jesus Christ! Well, you can’t come into the United States without identification.”

   I was born in Sudbury, Ontario and had returned to Canada many times since for visits and summer camps, but had never overconcerned myself with the legalities. I left that to whoever was driving the car, who were my parents or somebody else’s parents.

   I was speechless. Distress must have showed on my face. The Border Patrol man told me to call my parents and ask them to bring identification. It sounded like a good idea, except that it wasn’t. My father was out of town on business and my mother was a cashier at a supermarket. Even if she could get time off, she had never driven a car that far in her life.

    “Is there any place I can stay?”

   “Do you have any money?

   “Just enough for a bus ticket home.”

   He said Jesus Christ a few more times and finally suggested what he called a “hippie flophouse” on Clifton Hill. He gave me directions and I found it easily enough. I used the pay phone to call my mother, reversing the charges. After she calmed down, she said she would send what I needed the next morning by overnight mail. I was in for two nights of roughing it.

   The flophouse was an old motel advertising “Family Rates.” It was next to a snack bar selling hot dogs and pizza by the slice. There were young guys and girls loitering, lounging, and smoking pot in the courtyard. One of them offered me a pillow and the floor. I accepted on the spot before he drifted down and out. It was better than sleeping in the great outdoors.

   I spent the next day exploring Niagara Falls. There were pancake houses and waffle houses. There were magic museums and wax museums There were arcades and Ripley’s Odditorium. I took a walk through the botanical gardens and to the Horseshoe Falls. That summer the Horseshoe Falls were tilting water over the edge like there was no tomorrow. The American Falls, on the other hand, had been shut down by the Army Corp of Engineers to study erosion and instability. They had built a 600-foot dam across the Niagara River, which meant 60,000 gallons of water a second were being diverted over the larger Canadian waterfall. It was loud as a mosh pit and a vast mist floated up into my face. 

   The Niagara River drains into Lake Ontario. I lived in Cleveland a block from Lake Erie. If I threw myself into the Niagara River I would first have to avoid the falls and then swim upstream all the way to Buffalo before I could relax and float home on Lake Erie. It was an idea, but the practical side of me discarded the idea.

   Many people have gone over the falls. As far as anybody knows, the first person to try it was Sam Patch, better known as the Yankee Leaper, who jumped 120 feet from an outstretched ladder down to the base of the falls. He survived, but many of the daredevils who followed him didn’t. The first person to successfully take the plunge in a barrel was schoolteacher Annie Taylor in 1901. Busted flat, she thought up the stunt as a way of becoming rich and famous. The first thing she did was build a test model, stuff her housecat into it, and throw it over the side. When the cat made it unscathed, she adapted a person-sized pickle barrel and shoved off. It was her birthday. She told everybody she was 43, although she was really 63.

   After she made it to safety with only bumps and bruises she became famous, but missed out on riches. Everybody said she should have sold tickets to the show, but it was Monday morning quarterbacking. She never tried it again. Two years later the professional baseball player Ed Delahanty tried it while dead drunk. The booze didn’t help. He drowned right away. About twenty people die going over the falls every year. Most of them are suicides. The others amount to the same thing.

   The last person in the 1960s to go over the falls with the intention of staying alive was Nathan Boya in a big rubber ball nicknamed the “Plunge-O-Sphere.” When it hit the rocks at the bottom it bounced and bounced. He didn’t break any bones, although he had friction burns all over him.

   I got my official papers on Tuesday, dutifully displayed them at the border, and walked into New York. I bought a bus ticket home. I sat in the back of the Greyhound bus and stretched my legs out. When it lumbered off, I took a look back, but it was all a blur through the smudgy window.

   Grazina and I wrote letters to one another that winter until we didn’t. We slowly ran out of words and by the next year were completely out of them. She was enrolled in a Toronto university full-time by then while I was working half the year and going to Cleveland State University the other half of the year. She found a hometown boyfriend and I found an apartment on the bohemian near east side of Cleveland.

   It was a few years later that Henri Rechatin, his wife Janyck, and friend Frank Lucas rode across the Niagara River near the downstream whirlpool on a motorcycle, riding the cables of the Spanish Aero Car. The friend piloted the motorcycle while Henri and Janyck balanced on attached perches. Since they didn’t have passports, when they got to the far side, they hauled the motorcycle and themselves into the aero car and rode back to the Canadian side in comfort.

   The Border Patrol was waiting for them. They were arrested for performing a dangerous act, but formal charges were never filed. They were free to go. For my part, I made sure to always have something official with my picture on it whenever I went anywhere foreign after that. I had learned my lesson in Niagara Falls. Getting stuck in limbo, no matter if it’s one of the ‘Seven Natural Wonders of North America’ or not, is captivating for only so long.

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

By Ed Staskus

  By Ed Staskus

   I hadn’t seen Al Ezerskis for fifteen-some years, so when we met I hardly knew what to say. We bumped into each other on the corner of Ontario St. and Lakeside Ave. opposite the Lakeside Court House. I had come out of the court house where I had gone to drop off a  document. As I was leaving I noticed an inscription carved in a wall. It said, “Justice is the end of government. It is the end of Civil Society. It ever has been and ever will be pursued until it be obtained or until liberty be lost in the pursuit.” It seemed both quaint and appropriate in the Age of Make America Great Again.

   The Republicans had controlled Washington, D.C. more often than not in my lifetime. How had they managed to screw things up so much that America’s greatness evaporated? Gasbags are always complaining. It was time for them to stop complaining and start explaining.

   Downtown Cleveland was back up and running after the thunderstorm and high winds that had torn through the metropolis a week before. Five tornadoes and widespread straight-line winds wreaked havoc across Northeast Ohio. Thousands of trees and utility poles were knocked down. Hundreds of thousands were left without power. The shoreline of Lake Erie, near where I lived, was hit especially hard, with more than half of everybody experiencing power outages. Many of them still didn’t have power five days later. It was the worst storm to hit the city in thirty years. 

   Al had come out of the Justice Center across the street. “How are you doing?” I asked when I unwittingly happened upon him.

   “I’m between everything annoys the crap out of me and I don’t give a rat’s ass,” he said.

   He had gotten cranky after coming into his maturity. He hadn’t changed, although he had gotten older. He was the same age as me. We both grew up in North Collinwood’s Lithuanian community. We were both in Boy Scout Troop 311. We both went to St. Joseph’s High School in the 1960s, although he was an Honor Student and I wasn’t. He was walking with a slight limp. I had walked with a limp, at first slight and then full-blown, for five or six years before I finally had joint surgery two years earlier. I was never overly concerned about the limping, but the pain of the arthritis in my left hip finally drove me to distraction. After the surgery I walked more than ever, breaking in my after-market replacement.

   The Cleveland Clinic’s Lutheran Hospital had been as high-tech as it could be. The operating theater looked like the flight deck of the USS Enterprise. The road to recovery, however, was strikingly old fashioned. “Walk as much as you can every day” was what all the physical therapists said. It was a no-tech solution.

   “What are you doing downtown?” I asked.

   “Jury duty,” Al said. “Although all I’ve been doing for the past two days has been sitting in a room with a couple hundred other people waiting to hear if I’ve been chosen to be on a jury. If I get picked, whoever did whatever they did is going to be sorry to see me.”

   The jury pool had been released for lunch. It was a breezy mid-August day. The storm had broken the oppressive humidity of the past few weeks. Al was on his way to the Warehouse District. “I have an hour and a half before I have to be back to decide somebody’s fate,” he said.  

   I was of the opinion that there never was anybody worth a damn who wasn’t irascible, except for maybe Mother Teresa and Willie Mays. Perhaps Al was worth a damn. He was irascible enough. On the spur of the moment I asked if I could join him for lunch.

   “We can catch up on old times,” I said. 

   He gave me a peevish look, but said all right. I fell into step with him. He took long strides, one stride with a hitch to it, and I recalled that we had called him Big Al back in the day. He was six feet and a few more inches tall. He had been lanky as a teenager but wasn’t lanky anymore, He was still big, though, and bigger still. He had packed on 40-or-more pounds. We walked down Lakeside Ave. and then up W. 9^th St. The Warehouse District’s eateries were buzzing. Curbside tables were filling up. Waitresses were taking orders. Lawyers were tossing back booze.

   “There’s a place here called Taza,” I said. “My wife and I eat there sometimes. It’s a Lebanese grill.”

   “I don’t eat food made by Arabs,” he said.

   We went to Cleveland Chop on St. Clair Ave., a sports bar where they served steaks and handcrafted burgers. Al ordered bacon wrapped shrimp and a Tom Hawk pork chop. The pork chop looked to be at least a pound of pig. I ordered a plate of Ahi Poke tacos, even though I had no idea what Ahi Poke was.

   “What do you think about that Harris wanting to be president?” he asked out of the blue, stirring the Manhattan in front of him with a swizzle stick. I wanted to say “Shaken not stirred” like James Bond, but I didn’t. Big Al had never been known for his sense of humor. He had been class president in high school and twice ran for mayor of Brecksville, a south side suburb where he had long lived. He had twice lost but never lost his preoccupation with politics.

   I was of the Mark Twain school of politics. “Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress, but I repeat myself,” the writer once said. I didn’t repeat that bit of doggerel at the lunch table. I suspected Al would be sensitive about that kind of wisecrack.

   “I haven’t thought much about the election” I said. “I’ll think about it in a month-or-two.”

   “You still have that beatnik attitude,” he said, spearing a shrimp.

   I let it pass. I had long ago lost whatever concern I ever had about what people thought of me. Everybody is entitled to their own opinions, if not necessarily their own facts, although that was changing.

   Joe Biden, the incumbent in the Oval Office, had decided to not run for a second term and his vice president, who was Kamala Harris, had thrown her bonnet into the ring. “I will say this,” I said, “she’s got about three months to campaign while Donald Trump has been campaigning for almost four years. I don’t see that she has much of a chance. Donald Trump can’t beat another man at the polls, but he’s gangbusters when it comes to beating women.”

   “I’m glad to hear you say that,” Al said. 

   “Why is that?” I asked.

   “The last thing this country needs is a half breed broad in the White House,” he said. “Or any broad, for that matter.”

   “How’s everything?” our waitress asked, gliding up to our table. She was a looker. Al looked her up and down. He didn’t keep it a secret. He wanted to be her long lost pal. I watched him while he watched her.

   “This country is going to hell,” Al said, cutting his pork chop into bite-sized pieces. It reminded me of what mothers do for their small children at the dinner table. He was a fastidious man. There probably wasn’t much that satisfied him.

   “Take that waitress,” he said. “What is she doing in this country? You know she’s from down there somewhere.” He pointed at the floor with his fork. The waitress was brown skinned with black hair. I couldn’t tell if she was Mexican or Middle Eastern. “They’re lazy and shiftless. All they want to do is live on welfare, which we have to pay for. They’re stealing our jobs.”

   I wondered why she was working if she was lazy and shiftless. Why was she taking jobs from Americans? Why wasn’t she on welfare, instead? Was she all mixed up?

   “I tell you, they’re polluting the blood of our country.”

   “Your parents were immigrants, just like mine,” I said.”They made this country better, not worse.”

   “That was different,” Al said. “They weren’t Latinos, they were Lithuanians.” 

   I was aware that many people conflated the word ‘immigrant’ with the word ‘Latino.’ Immigrants from Europe were acceptable. Immigrants from anywhere else were either suspicious-looking or unacceptable.

   “There’s millions of them here, tens of millions, undocumented, smuggling in drugs, committing crimes, raping our women. They’ve got to be kept out, one way or another. Kamala Harris will let them in. Donald Trump will make sure we keep them out.”

   The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was one of the earliest pieces of legislation aimed at excluding foreigners based on their nationality. Congress said the Chinese were “lowering the cultural and moral standards of American society.” The law stayed in effect for more than 60 years. Even though it was eventually repealed, anti-immigrant sentiment remained alive and well. Fans of the sentiment routinely cite national security, the economy, and cultural preservation.

   When the play “The Melting-Pot” premiered in 1908 it portrayed America as a land “where all races and nations come to labor and look forward.” Ellis Island that year admitted nineteen hundred foreigners into the country every day, day after day. The New York Times called the play  “sentimental trash masquerading as a human document.” A few years later the newspaper complained that “the melting pot, besides having its own color, begins to give out its own smell. Its reek fills New York City and floats out rather widely in all directions.”

  In our own day the Know Nothing Party of the 19^th century had become the Make America Great Party of the 21^st century. Their aim seemed to be to keep the home of the brave and land of the free on edge day and night by menacing it with non-stop threats about scary immigrants.

   “Damned right, we should all be scared,” Al said, ordering another Manhattan. The Manhattan demands respect. It is a heavy pour of bourbon, sweet vermouth, and bitters. It is strong stuff. Big Al seemed to be hanging in there. I was impressed with his capacity for the bottle.

   “Donald Trump is doing God’s work. God knows somebody’s got to do it.”

   He wasn’t the only one doing the heavy lifting. From 2020 to 2024 there were hundreds of anti-immigrant proposals across 45 states. During the 2021-2022 legislative session there were 145 proposals, which ballooned to 365 proposals in the 2023-2024 session. For every anti-immigrant proposal in 2020 there was an average of 4.6 proposals in 2024.

   “What about the economy” I asked. “It seems to me that immigrants are one of the driving forces when it comes to that. They only have one thing on their minds and that’s improving their lot on life. Isn’t their new blood and new energy exactly what’s good for this country?”

   “Grow up!” Al blurted, spitting some of his Manhattan on his shirt. “They’re lazy and rotten, I’m telling you.”

   The National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine released a report in 2017 called “The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration.” The report found that new immigrants tended to earn less than the native-born and so were more costly to government, but their children exhibited higher levels of upward mobility than the native-born and “are among the strongest economic and fiscal contributors in the population.” 

   I could have grown up there and then and told him about the report, but I didn’t. I thought he would probably dismiss it as “fake news.” I didn’t think Big Al was big on hearing anything he disagreed with. I could have cheered him up by telling him that Benjamin Franklin had proposed restrictions way back when on Germans coming to America, saying, “We’re going to be overrun by them.” I could have, but I didn’t. Al’s forebears had lived in Prussian Lithuania Minor on the Baltic Sea coast for generations.

   He ordered a triple chocolate cheesecake. I ordered coffee. When he was done with dessert he stretched his legs out, almost tripping the waitress as she walked past. “Watch your step,” he said. She gave him a wary look.

   “They game the system,” Al said. “Believe me, I know.” I wondered if he knew it first-hand. Was he gaming the system himself? “They get paid in cash, don’t pay taxes, but still want government benefits. Their kids go to our schools which have to cut programs to free up room in the budget for their special classes. Our kids suffer while their kids get ahead. It’s not fair. They fill up our hospitals and our prisons. Who pays for that? We do. You can’t deny the financial toll. It’s got to stop.”

   “Immigrants have always come here to work,” I said. “America was built by immigrants.”

   “You’re a  fool,” Al said.

   I don’t like being insulted anymore then the next guy, although it did mean I didn’t have to be friendly anymore. I stood up and looked down at Big Al. He looked like a rosy cheeked troll with the Manhattans in his blood stream. Maybe he would go easy on whatever poor sap he was going to be sitting in judgment of at the Justice Center, but I doubted it.

   “It’s been fine having lunch with you,” I lied, walking out of Cleveland Chop without paying my share of the bill. I don’t know if I meant to stick Al with the bill, but that’s what happened. I knew that wasn’t going to put me on his good side, but I didn’t expect to bump into him again anytime soon. Besides, by then I would know better and it wouldn’t be any more than a close call.

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.”

“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

Available on Amazon:

A Crying of Lot 49 Production

By Ed Staskus

   When Matt Lavikka and I slowly but surely stopped playing chess and started playing Go we didn’t know we were sitting down to the oldest board game played continuously to the present day. The game was invented in China 3,000-some years ago. It is a contest for two players in which the goal is to capture more stones and surround more territory than your opponent. The way of the game is inexorable. The way anybody plays is one’s own choice.

   The playing pieces are called stones. One player uses the white stones and the other one the black stones, taking turns placing them on the vacant intersections of the board. The stones can’t be moved once placed, but are removed from the board if it, or a group of stones, is surrounded on all adjacent points, in which case it is captured. At the end the winner is determined by counting each player’s surrounded territory along with captured stones. 

   Games can and do end when one player is very tired or has gone brain dead. Our games usually went for two to three hours. The longest game ever played was played in Japan in 1938 between two Go masters. It lasted 54 hours. Shusai Meijin, the older of the two masters, died immediately after the marathon due to the aftereffects of the ordeal. He played the game with life and death determination. 

   The chess board starts with everything on it. The last man standing wins. The Go board starts with nothing on it. Whoever is the more ruthless and determined ends up on top. It’s the way of the world. Even though the rules of Go are simple, the play is complex, especially the longer the action goes on. It has a larger board than chess with more scope for play and more alternatives to consider. The number of board positions in Go has been calculated to be greater than the number of atoms in the observable universe. The Japanese believe no two matches have ever been or ever will be the same. They deem the game to be a microcosm of everything everywhere all at once.

   If we had known that we probably would never have started playing. By the time we found out it was too late. We had been sucked into the black hole of Go. Getting out of the hole meant going down to the Harbor Inn for a pick-me-up. It was another hole, on the west bank of the Cuyahoga River in the Flats. It either was or wasn’t the oldest bar in town. Either way, the place wore its reputation on its sleeve.

   “The place was always shoulder to shoulder with bikers and their molls,” said Dan Coughlin, a sportswriter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer. “Wally had a virtual armory behind the bar. He had pistols and shotguns. One night in the middle of the summer we stacked up cases of beer bottles and fired at them from the hip, with shotguns blasting away. I put a hole in the stop sign in front of his bar.”

   Wally was Vlado Pisorn, an immigrant from Slovenia who had taken over the Harbor Inn sometime in the indeterminate past. We called him Vlad the Impaler. He had the kind of beer we liked, the kind from Germany and Czechoslovakia. The wine came from a hose and died on the tongue. After a couple of near deaths, we never drank it again.

   Matt had served a tour of duty in the armed forces, was on a prolonged stretch of R & R, and in the meantime was boning up for the entrance exams for mailman, fireman, and policeman. He was hedging his bets. He finally found employment with the Bay Village Fire Department, which was like working at a posh nursery school. There were hardly ever any fires anywhere near the lakefront suburb. There were, however, lots of old folks having heart attacks and strokes and the EMS trucks kept up an endless shuttle to St. John West Shore Hospital.

   One night Matt and his duty partner Chuck were called to a house where the man of the house was having chest pains. He was on his back in bed, his eyes closed. When they stepped up to him in the bedroom his wife whispered that she thought he was dead. “The poor dear man,” she said. Chuck was in the lead. As he walked up to the bed, he slipped on a throw rug and went head over heels on top of the man, body slamming him, the bedsprings recoiling.

   “If he’s not dead yet, he’s dead now,” Matt thought. 

   “Is he OK?” the woman asked, alarmed. 

   “Your husband will be OK,” Matt said. 

   “No, not him,” the woman said. “I meant the other fireman.” 

   “What the hell is going on!” the dead man suddenly spat out, jolting awake. “Get your fat ass off me.” He rolled Chuck off the bed, who fell to the floor. From then on, Chuck was known as Lazarus back at headquarters. It took years for the sobriquet to fade away.

   Virginia Sustarsic introduced me to Matt. How they knew each other was beyond me. She was Slovenian and a hippie through and through. He wasn’t, not by a long shot. He was a cool customer and Finnish on top of everything else. He played chess, like me, and we got to know one another playing now and then. I had moved out of the Plaza Apartments, where Virginia still lived, and was living on a forgotten street in North Collinwood, a couple of blocks south of Lake Erie. I lived upstairs in a two-bedroom Polish double. Ray Sabaliauskas, a fellow Lithuanian, owned the house and lived downstairs with his Southeast Asian wife and a prize German Shepherd. He had come home safe and sound from the bright shining lie that was the Vietnam War.

   I found my Go game at a garage sale in the neighborhood. It was practically brand new, the instruction sheet still in the box. I paid a dollar for it in pocket change. Reading the rules took less than five minutes. Explaining the rules to Matt took less than one minute. Our first game took five hours. We played on the front porch. The contest was suspended due to darkness when the sun set.

   “The best strategy is to spread the pieces far apart and stretch them out, to encircle and attack the opponent, and thus win by having the most points vacant,” Go master Huan Tan said nearly two thousand years ago. We were both bug-eyed after our first game. We didn’t know the game’s strategy from a seesaw. It was like wrestling a gorilla. You don’t quit when you’re tired, you quit when the gorilla is tired. Go is considered the most difficult board game in the world. Sleeping became my new go-to after a long match.

   I started jogging on Lakeshore Blvd. west out of North Collinwood, where everybody was a working man in one way or another, through the village of Bratenahl, where everybody was tall, trim, and filthy rich. They oozed pride in their state of being. When I was running in their neighborhood I hesitated to even spit on the tree lawns. I had put exercise on the back burner in my early 20s. I never thought I would be working out again to be able to sit quietly hour after hour staring at a square board of intersecting lines.

   When I was a teenager I ran track and field as part and parcel of Zaibas. It was a Cleveland Lithuanian sports club formed in 1950. In 1951, at the 1st North American Lithuanian Games, members participated in basketball, volleyball, and table tennis. The next year the club hosted the games in our hometown and fielded a full team in track and field. 

   In the 1960s I ran around in circles encouraged by Algirdas Bielskus. He was a small man with a round face and a championship head of hair. He was the director of a men’s vocal ensemble, co-founder of a choir, and concertmaster of the Ciurlonis Ensemble. He was also the Zaibas track and field coach for sixty years. He had the voice to make himself heard loud and clear from the far end of any quarter-mile track. Every weekend fair or foul all I heard was “Go! Go! Go!”

   He always carried a briefcase, briefcases he was always losing, stuffed with notes about how we were progressing. Rita Kliorys, one of his top-notch runners, made him a Christmas gift of a new one in 1966. “It was the accordion kind,” she said. “I remember it cost $100.00, and I collected one dollar from many people. He actually did not lose it, either.”

   He coached thousands of youngsters who ran hundreds of thousands of miles. “I thought of him afterwards whenever I saw a turquoise and orange Howard Johnsons and would remember how he took us there for ice cream sometimes,” Regina Thomas said. “Although I was a klutz at sports, he never made me feel like one. I never thought much about it as a kid, but what a commitment to youth and sports.” The small man with the big voice was seemingly tireless, championing fitness among Cleveland’s Baltic off-spring.

   “He worked for my dad’s company, Transmission Research, in the basement of our house,” Dalia Nasvytis said. “Sometimes we would hear strange noises downstairs late at night and realize he was still down there running off schedules for the next athletic meet he was organizing.” He was unrelenting about the fettle of immigrant kids.

   Once we started playing Go, Matt and I made a commitment to it. We played all that spring, summer, and through the winter, two and three games a week. It wasn’t an obsession, although it was. We played on the front porch until it got too cold to play outside. After that we played in the living room at a coffee table, sitting opposite one another, all four of our eyes glued to the board.   

   The game demands concentration, which is born out of silence. Some of our best moves and long-term maneuvers were made quiet stealthiness. I found out the more time I spent noiseless, the more illumination lit me up. We hardly talked, going for a half-hour without saying a word. Every so often Matt smoked a Marlboro. Before long he would tap another one out of the red and white flip-top box. Whenever I joined him, the living room filled with smoke, a gray-white cloud stewing over the entanglements of Go.

   When we first started playing our plan of attack was capturing stones. We both saw that surrounding other stones and taking them prisoner yielded points. It was like taking a piece in chess. After a while we discovered the object of Go is not to surround and capture the opponent’s stones. The object is to surround empty territory on the board. The way to do it is by building walls around empty intersections. If your territory includes some opposing stones, all the better. Then it’s grab and go. From then on it became a contest to capture territory rather than simply capture stones.

   In the Eastern world Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War” reads as an introduction and exposition to the game. Real life warlords back in the day of every stripe were always big on blockading their enemies and capturing territory. The times they were not a-changing, not anytime soon. The Vietnam War was over, but there was always another war on the horizon.

   There’s an old saying, “Chess is a battle. Go is a war.” The more we played the more we discovered it was a war of attrition. It was like breaking stones in the hot sun. Both of us knew how to make the other guy sweat. There was no fighting the commandments of Go.

   Oskar Korschelt, a German chemist, brought the game from Japan to Europe in the 1880s. Even though it was slow to catch on, by the 1950s championship-level tournaments were being organized. By the early-70s it was filtering into the United States. I never met another Lithuanian who played the game. My kinsmen are instinctively suspicious, somewhat superstitious, sometimes curious, usually sensible, always pragmatic, hard-working, conformist, and punctual. They are often reserved except when they get together. Once they establish their bona fides it’s time to pick up a drink and run off at the mouth, getting communal. They play volleyball and basketball like nobody’s business. They probably couldn’t stand the prolonged silence of Go.

   One night after a long back-and-forth on the board we drove to the Harbor Inn. We were looking for some downtime. The two-story building was a home-away-from-home for dockworkers and salt-miners. A lonely man who didn’t mind a lumpy mattress could even grab some shut-eye upstairs. It might have been a dive way back when, but it was no ifs ands or buts about it still a dive, slinging suds to third shifters in the morning and anybody else who had a buck the rest of the day and night. There was a coin operated bowling arcade game downstairs and battered dart boards upstairs. We ordered bottles of Pride of Cleveland instead of imported European brew, being short on ready cash, and picked up a handful of house darts.

  Nobody knew how long the Harbor Inn had been there, but we thought it had to be from the day after Moses Cleaveland settled the land centuries before. It reeked of smoke from long-gone cigars and cigarettes. The shadows smelled even worse, like ammonia had been set on fire. Looking around there was no doubt some of the men at the bar only bathed once a month.

   The beer was cold and refreshing and playing darts was fun. We played 501 Up. Both players start with a score of 501 and take turns throwing three darts. Bullseye scores 50, the outer ring scores 25, and a dart in the double or treble ring counts double or triple. The tally is calculated and deducted from the player’s total. The goal is to be the first player to reduce the score to exactly zero, the only hitch being that the last missile thrown must land in a double or the bullseye. 

   Darts are front weighted for flight and are several inches long with a sharp point. A big part of playing darts is the throwing part. The rest of it is mental toughness, staying on the button, stinging the cork like a bee. It was like Go except we could let ourselves go. We wrote our names in chalk on the brick wall, adding them to the hundreds of other names reaching to the ceiling. After a couple more Pride of Cleveland’s we got sloppy, but it was no matter in the juke joint that was the Harbor Inn.

   When I took a good look at the dart board, there weren’t a hundred-or-more darts crowding it, like all the stones on a Go board. Every throw was always at an empty target, every throw a new chance to get it right, unencumbered by the past. Go was all about the past, the past of all the carefully placed stones on the board. Playing darts was right now. It was a relief to see the target and hit the target, except when we completely missed and the dart bounced off the brick wall. When that happened we yukked it up, not like the game of Go, which was never a laughing matter.

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 Fiction

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

Late summer and early autumn, New York City, 1956. Stickball in the streets and the Mob on the make. President Eisenhower on his way to Ebbets Field for the opening game of the World Series. A killer waits in the wings. A Hell’s Kitchen private eye scares up the shadows.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication