Chilling at Irv's

Chilling at Irv's

By Ed Staskus

   Every Friday and Saturday night Solomon’s in South Euclid, Budin’s in Shaker Hts., and Irv’s in Cleveland Hts. were packed to the gills. The minute the front doors opened the smell of pastrami and corned beef wafted out like doormen. We followed our noses. The minute anybody sat down was the minute a cup of coffee and a menu appeared. After that it was anybody’s guess when a waitress might show up.

   Even though I hardly ever went to Solomon’s, and only stopped in at Budin’s when we were going to the nearby Shaker Movie Theatre, I would have liked to have been at Budin’s the time Sandy Herskovitz was there. “I was sitting with a friend,” he said. “A few tables down there were some women. One of them had on a straw hat. A countermen walked by with a jug of coleslaw and my friend says to me, ‘How much do you want to bet that guy is going to dump the coleslaw on them all?’ Sure enough, he tripped and dumped his coleslaw all over the straw hat.”

   We always went to Irv’s Deli in Coventry Village. It was closest to where we lived and it was where the fun beatniks and hippies, cops and lawyers, college students, cutie pies, no-good bookies and gangster wannabees, and some Jewish folks went for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. There was the occasional misfit everybody ignored. We went there late at night, after everything else closed, and hung around. Irv’s never closed. There were Outlaws and Hells Angels lurking here and there, at least when the weather was fair, but we avoided them. They spent most of their time drinking heavy down the street at the C-Saw Café, anyway.

   How Irv made any money with us hunkering down in his diner and spending the night ordering free refills of coffee is beyond me. Matzo ball soup was a buck a bowl and corned beef sandwiches were a buck-and-a-half. Somebody said Irv printed money in a room behind the kitchen. “You know how those Jews are,” a Case Western Reserve University student said. “They’ve always got secrets.” He was wearing bell bottoms and a turtleneck sweater and sported a Prince Valiant. One time when a waitress was complaining about the bikers and hippies who hung around without ever leaving a tip, Irv, who was always there, said, “You know how those losers are.” He knew how to give as good as he got.

   Although we went there all the time we didn’t usually eat there because we were chronically short on cash. We always had 15 cents for a cup of coffee, but not much more for food, unless it was a free deli roll and butter. Besides, the kitchen was dodgy. None of us ever got sick eating at Irv’s, but all of us closely inspected our food whenever we ordered it. Nothing that appeared on a plate in front of us ever bore any resemblance to the way it was described on the menu.  One night a hippie girl at our table said the sinks and stoves in the kitchen were filthy. We all laughed. Beggars can’t be choosers.

   “No, I mean it,” the girl said. We laughed because the kitchen couldn’t have been any dirtier than her. She needed a bath right away and an appointment at a hair salon bad. When my friend Jimmy the Jet said he was willing to send an SOS to Mr. Clean, she got into a huff. She thought he was talking about her. “No, babe, your beauty shines through,” he said. He was a smooth-talking devil.

   Jimmy was called the Jet not because he was fast on his feet but because he talked a mile a minute. Everything he said was a springboard for the next thing he was going to say. He always had an ace up his sleeve, and then another one, and another one. We knew he kept little white pills on his person at all times. He was the only one of us still bright-eyed as the night wore on, rapping with his dope fiend friends along for the ride. He was always the last to leave, talking to himself as he walked back to his apartment on Mayfield Rd.

   Irv’s was a Jewish deli that served Chinese food, among everything else culinary, and a bar that specialized in strong shots and weak beer. It was on the corner of Hampshire Rd. and Coventry Rd. in what was called Coventry Village in Cleveland Hts. Irving Gulko opened the delicatessen in 1959. His father and grandfather had both operated eateries in Cleveland. It was in his blood, even though his food was generally bloodless. There were rumors that he wasn’t really in the deli business, but was in the drugs, prostitution, and bookmaking businesses. We never saw any wasted w****s lounging around and laying down bets, but that was neither here nor there.

   The prostitution supposedly went on in the basement, spilling over into the apartment building next door. Jimmy told us there was a secret door leading from Irv’s basement to the apartment’s basement. “Everybody knows that,” he said. None of us knew it, but we didn’t have enough money to rent a hooker even if we wanted to. Besides, at the time, we believed in free love.

   Seventy years earlier Coventry Village had morphed into a retail and restaurant venue for Cleveland’s Jewish community. The Mayfield and Euclid Heights streetcar lines met at the Coventry Rd. and Mayfield Rd. intersection making coming and going convenient. By the 1920s a profusion of walk-up apartments had been built. There were bakeries and tailor shops. There was a kosher poultry slaughterhouse. By the time we showed up, however, many Jews were packing up and moving to Beachwood, and the neighborhood was filling up with head shops and record stores.

   We hung around Coventry Books and flipped through books we weren’t going to buy. Reading was what libraries were for. “The bookstore is a place for youth to come and see people that you wouldn’t see at home,” said owner Ellie Strong. We followed her advice and did more people watching than reading.

   We didn’t buy books unless they came from Kay’s Used Books downtown, where “War and Peace” could be had for 50 cents, but we did buy new records. We bought them at Record Revolution, which had opened a few years earlier. They sold tie-dyed t-shirts and pot paraphernalia they called “smoking accessories.” The walls were covered with autographs by Lou Reed, Led Zeppelin, and The Who, among others. Rock critics called it the “coolest place to buy records in Ohio.” The rock station WWMS-FM routinely inquired about what was selling and added the albums to its playlist. 

   Many of us didn’t have cars, but some of us had bikes. We kibitzed at Pee Wee’s Bike Shop where they knew everything. If it wasn’t too involved a repair, Marvin Rosenberg, who was Pee Wee during working hours, fixed things for free. When he was done he always said, “And don’t come back unless you have cash next time.”

   We meandered through the High Tide Rock Bottom gift shop. Marcia Polevoi, the owner, never had any advice for us although she kept an eagle eye on our doings. Shoplifting was endemic. The only customers who always paid were the Outlaws and the Hells Angels. They were criminals but didn’t do any petty thieving.

   The Coventry Street Fair happened for the first time in 1974, drawing close to 50,000 people in a neighborhood where 5,000 was too many. It was dreamt up to draw a new crowd to the scene. There were magicians and fire eaters. We checked out the scene but ran out of breathing room. The crowd was mostly suburbanites curious about the counter culture. “It got so big that the neighbors said they liked it, but whenever it was on, they left town,” said Bruce Hennes, president of the Coventry Neighbors Association. We didn’t leave town although we did what amounted to the same thing. We weren’t able to elbow our way to Irv’s, anyway.

   We went to the Dobama Theatre. It was a small place in a renovated bowling alley that mostly featured serious style shows. I never saw a musical there. I saw Gore Vidal’s 1972 play “An Evening with Richard Nixon.” The playbill said, “ It is the playwright’s contention that American citizens don’t really remember anything. And a politician is thus able to re-invent himself on a day-to-day basis. Unless it is otherwise noted in the dialogue, what the Nixon character says and does this evening is what Mr. Nixon has really said and done.” I put my toy G.O.P. elephant away in a corner so it could repent for its sins. 

   The Saloon was where we went to hear bands. It was more-or-less a rowdy local bar, which worked well when the music was bad, but not so well when the music was good. Stairway and Rocket from the Tombs played there. Our favorite was the Electric Eels. The lead singer liked to dress up in tin foil and rat traps. “Wake up you miracle dumbbells!” he sang. “It’s time to fall out the window!” Their songs were more anti-social noise attack than music. They liked to bring a lawnmower on stage with them. Whenever fans got out of hand the Eels threw glasses of water on them. When that happened, we left.

   When we wanted a milkshake we stopped at Tommy Fello’s new dinette, which he called Tommy’s. It was small place with a small menu. He had bought the seven-seat Fine Arts Confectionary two years earlier. He knew how to make three dishes, which were all three of them Lebanese. We stuck to the milkshakes. They were fit for a king and only 35 cents each.

   We went to the Heights Art Theatre all the time. It was a 1,2000-seat movie house that opened in 1919. They showed movies nobody else was showing in northeastern Ohio. I saw “The Discrete Charm of the Bourgeoisie” there. The surrealist Spanish movie bowled me over, so I stayed for the midnight showing of it and didn’t make it to Irv’s that night.

   “The Lovers” was screened there in 1959. It had won a Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival the year before. The local cops weren’t handing out any awards. They cleared the theater and confiscated the film. The Cleveland Plain Dealer called the movie “shockingly nasty.” The manager got arrested and convicted of “public depiction of obscene material.” He cried foul and appealed the verdict. The case worked its way up the chain of command. Five years later the Supreme Court overturned the ruling. They said the criminal conviction was improper and the film was not obscene. “I know it when I see it,” is what Justice Potter Stewart said about obscenity. When I saw the movie years later I thought, “What was all the fuss about?” It was a French movie, and everybody talked and smoked cigarettes more than they did anything else.

   Irv’s Deli was where we hung out and where we went when we were down to spare change. It was also where we ran seeking sanctuary whenever things went wrong out on the street. Even though we went to the C-Saw Café sometimes, we generally avoided it. The baseball fans who rioted at Municipal Stadium during Ten Cent Beer Night that summer, in the middle of a game between the Texas Rangers and Cleveland Indians, and who ended up at the C-Saw Cafe later that night, didn’t know what they were getting into when they started arguing with the bikers at the bar. It is one thing to drunkenly storm a playing field and attack baseball players. It is another thing to drunkenly attack Hells Angels. The bikers drink more than anybody but never get drunk. When they fight they are all business. They don’t hit singles. They hit home runs.

   Jimmy the Jet and I were walking past the bar when a man came stumbling all arms and legs out the door and landed on his back. All the breath went out of him. He started gasping. He was followed out the door by a Hells Angel who began kicking him. Before long there was blood coming out of the man’s mouth. His friends poured out onto the sidewalk but stayed back. The Hells Angel continued to kick the man. Before I knew it Jimmy was stepping in. “Hey, stop that!” he yelled and pushed the biker. That was a mistake.

   “What the f**k?” the biker bellowed and swung his arm at Jimmy. He was unsteady on his feet, however, and the momentum toppled him over. When he did other Hells Angels came out of the bar. When they did they saw Jimmy and me standing over their fallen biker brother. When they glared at us we knew the jig was up

   We ran into Irv’s, the Hells Angels on our heels. We barreled past Irv who was sitting where he always sat. I followed Jimmy when he ran to the back of the deli and through a door. It was the door to the basement. He fastened the dead bolt as soon as we were through the door. As soon as he did we heard fists and boots banging on the other side of it. We ran down the stairs and into the basement of the apartment building next door. I looked around for a helpful w***e, but there weren’t any, not even one. We ran up the apartment building’s stairs to the first floor and back out onto Coventry Rd. There was a crowd of bikers milling around Irv’s front door.

   “What’s going on?” Jimmy asked breathlessly.

   “Some punk jumped one of us,” a biker said. “When we find him we’re going to feed him to the rats.”

   Jimmy wished him and his friends the best of luck and we hurried away. We race walked to his apartment. When we got there he locked the door behind us. We sat in the gloom. Jimmy kept the lights off like in a movie. He hadn’t said a word since we left Irv’s, setting a new world’s record. He lit a Lucky Strike and started to chill out. He put a record on the turntable and lowered the needle. It was Jim Croce singing “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown.”

   “It’s too bad men aren’t angels,” he said blowing smoke. “If they were we wouldn’t need to sit here in the dark.”

Ed Staskus posts on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com.