High and Low

High and Low

By Ed Staskus

   When your back is to the wall, you’ve only got one place to fall, which is face down. I didn’t want to do that. I had gotten married the year before and it was time to buckle up. I needed a steady job. I called Doug Clarke and asked if I could see him.

   “Absolutely,” he said.

   “What’s a good time?”

   “Anytime.”

   We made a time for the following Monday. I made sure to be on time. Doug was behind his desk at the back of the bullpen office. He was a few years younger than me and at least a hundred times the capitalist I was. Phones were ringing off the hook. Money was being made, by hook or by crook.

   I met Doug when he was in a small building in Rocky River. It was going on the late 1980s. He had been set up in business by his father, who was an account manager for Philips Lighting. Doug was selling commercial lighting and had lately started selling tanning bulbs. Philips had developed fluorescent UV tubes for the European market. They were new on the American market. They were going like hot cakes.

   There were three of them in the beginning, Doug, his salesman Marty Gallagher, and Chuck Pampush, who ran the warehouse and did the driving. The company truck was a red F150 Econoline and was called the Lightmobile. Doug had an office, but Marty’s desk was in a hallway leading to the warehouse. They had been friends growing up, but weren’t going to stay friends long. As tanning bulb sales grew by leaps and bounds Marty jumped ship and set up his own distributorship. It went to court, there were claims and counterclaims of theft of trade secrets, but in the end, they both stayed in business, personal enemies, and business rivals.

   Randy Bacon, Chuck’s brother-in-law, helped in the warehouse now and then unloading deliveries. He had a tattoo inside his mouth under his front lip. It said, “F**k You.” I gave him a wide berth whenever I saw him. I gave his junkyard dog a wide berth, too. The pooch was unusually tense all the time.

   By the time I sat down with Doug he wasn’t in Rocky River anymore. He had outgrown his first warehouse. He was in Lakewood on the third floor of a hybrid industrial and commercial building, renting space and then more space.

   “What can you offer us?” he asked.

   “I can offer you 20-some years. After that it’s up for grabs.”

   “Steady Eddie, is that right?”

   “That’s right.”

   “All right, you’re hired.”

   We shook hands. It  ended up being twenty-two years of the daily grind. In the end I didn’t get a handshake on my way out.

   When Doug was still in Rocky River I had teamed up with a friend of mine and set up a small tanning salon across the street from the Cleveland State University campus. We were in a five-story brick building at East 21st St. and Euclid Ave. The Rascal House Saloon was across the street. It was where concert goers at Peabody’s Down Under went after shows for a gorge fest. The Plain Dealer called it “Cleveland’s Best Pizza.” I went there whenever I was famished and down to a couple of bucks. 

   “Man, I spent a lot of book sale money there!” Carla Wainwright, a graduate of CSU, said. “You never got much for used books, but it was a win if you got enough for a beer and a slice.”

   We were on the lower level. Bill Stech, an architect, and the landlord, was on the top floor. He always wore the same black suit, white shirt, and black tie. He had black hair that looked phony. He always made promises and usually broke all his promises. After a while I stopped taking it personally. Whenever he didn’t want to see me, his receptionist said he wasn’t in, even though his car was parked in the back lot in its customary space. Sometimes I could even see him in his office, at his desk, his back turned to me.

   My business partner was a full-time fireman in Bay Village, so I did most of the work at the tanning salon. I drummed up side jobs at other salons, trying to make myself useful, doing repairs, selling, delivering, and installing bulbs. I kept my head above water, but I was treading water. When I was hired for part-time sales, I opened a savings account.

   Doug had moved to the Lake Erie Screw building in Lakewood. Madison Park was in front of the building and Birdtown was all around us. The neighborhood was not the greatest. One day after work, as I walked to my car, I saw a dead bird stuck headfirst in my front grill. I hadn’t heard or felt him hit the car that morning. He was stiff and there were flies buzzing around him. I pulled him out, wrapped him in a newspaper, and took him to the park, where I laid him down in a pile of autumn leaves.

   The brick pile we were in was going on a hundred years. It was on 18 acres with plenty of parking. From 1917 to 1924 it had been the Templar Automotive Plant. They built cars, trying to compete with Detroit. Dave Buehler, a Lakewood native, collected cars and had more than a dozen of the Templars. He restored them and kept them stashed away on the same floor where they had first been assembled. I sat in one of them one day. It was sizable enough but uncomfortable. The steering wheel was huge, and the mirrors were tiny. It looked like it would transition into a coffin at the first whiff of an accident.

   The building became Lake Erie Screw in 1946 when John Wasmer took it over and started manufacturing fasteners. In the 1970s he added large bolts to their line-up and growth accelerated. When most fastener manufacturers moved to China, the Wasmer family kept up the beat of the hometown maker and their growth continued apace. By the mid-90s the company was doing about a hundred million dollars in annual sales, all of it in cap screws and structural bolts.

   In the beginning my job was as thankless as it gets in the world of commerce. I had a cubicle the width of a toilet and was expected to make cold calls until I got sick of them. I got sick of them every day. There were few overworked business owners who wanted to talk to an eager beaver trying to sell them something. The other salesmen sat back and waited for calls to come to them. They racked up commissions while I racked up zeros.

   It took longer than I wanted, but I finally went full-time, got a real desk, and got to answer in-coming calls. I sat between Betty the typist and Jim Bishop. Betty was a looker who never looked at me, except when she had something sharp to say. She was doe-eyed on Doug. Even though Doug had a girlfriend who was going to be his wife soon enough, the talk was that he and Betty were close.

   He had a bedroom behind his desk and through a locked door. There was a king-size waterbed and a mini fridge. There were posters of muscle cars and hot girls on the walls. There were piles of dirty clothes and old mail everywhere. He wasn’t especially tidy. Being the boss, he didn’t have to be.

   One day when I was on the phone with a customer, Betty broke into her song and dance about what I was doing wrong and what I should be doing right to win more friends and influence people enough to make them buy our stuff. She didn’t stop even when I finished the call and was writing up the sale. I finally got fed up.

   “Look, s**t for brains,” I said loud enough for anybody listening to hear. “You take care of your business at that typewriter over there and I’ll take care of mine over here.” Nobody dropped a pin in case I had more to say. Betty sniffed and went to the bathroom. I went over to Doug’s desk and apologized for the outburst. He laughed it off. I never apologized to Betty. She was never going to become Mrs. Doug Clarke, anyway.

   We were riding the wave of the tanning boom. We had more sales than we knew what to do with. Doug rented additional space to stock our bulbs and hired more packers. They worked overtime day after day. Trailer loads of bulbs from Cosmedico, Wolff Systems, and Light Sources rolled in every week. We sent small orders out by UPS and FedEx, and pallet orders out by LTL.

   Doug started out as Efficient Lighting selling run-of-the mill commercial lighting. The tanning bulbs we sold under the name of Ultraviolet Resources were making him rich, but we still sold all kinds of incandescent, fluorescent, and high-pressure bulbs. I got into the swing of it and lent a hand, even though the commissions were less. Jim Bishop was the lead man. He sat on the other side of me. Betty hated him more than she hated me. He never stopped baiting her, no matter what, twisting a strand of hair and staring intently at her. 

   I couldn’t make him out. He looked like hell, even though John Elias, another salesman one desk down, told me he was trying to “hold on to his youth.” That horse was out of the barn. He lived in the Warehouse District, in the Bradley Building, which was an early pioneer of downtown’s revitalized housing. He wore his hair long, down to his shoulders, dressed better than anybody else in the office, and only took calls when he wanted to. He snorted coke on his lunch hour and was always more personable when he got back to the office.

   Coming back from lunch he liked to stop at Betty’s desk and hover over her without saying a word.

   “What do you want now?” she asked, breaking the silence.

   “What if I told you I was gay?” he asked.

   “Just go away, please,” she whispered.

   Kathy Hayes was Mrs. Doug Clarke in the making. There was no mistake about that. She was Doug’s pit bull sales manager. She brought her sister Maggie into the business, then her brothers Kevin and John. Kathy came from a family of thirteen. More brothers and sisters came and went as the need arose. Kevin, John, and Maggie stayed. The boys became Archie and Jughead in my mind. Maggie became Cruella. I put her out of my mind.

   Kathy was the Queen of Mean. She was a mix of go-getter, unapologetic greed, and a hair trigger temper. She calmed down after her kids were born, but never lost the mean streak. She was my immediate boss, so I watched my step. I was fake polite to Archie, Jughead, and Cruella. They were easy enough to be fake polite to.

   After I cold called myself into Kathy’s good graces, I settled into a routine of Monday through Friday. It wasn’t what I wanted to do but it was what I had to do. The only concession I was able to wrangle was a starting time of 11 AM to be able to work at my part-time job, which was more remunerative but not as steady. I would be getting a predictable paycheck every two weeks, making good on my bills, and paying into a 401k, which were good things. I never worked overtime and never volunteered for anything. They didn’t pay me enough to go an extra inch. The American Dream is only true blue for those who say so.

   Towards the end of the millennium Doug broke ground on a new state-of-the-art warehouse and offices in Brook Park. He spared no expense. It was 45,000 square feet next door to the 230-acre Holy Cross Cemetery. There were dedicated 18-wheeler loading docks and a separate dock for the delivery services. The head honchos had sizable offices with windows. There was a gym and a party center on the second floor. The lunchroom was all stainless steel and a huge flat screen. Christ on a cross was fixed to the wall above the front entrance doors. The cross looked like a cactus. Jesus looked like he had an itch.

   It rained money like nobody’s business. One day a Middle Eastern man walked in with a paper bag stuffed with more than $50 grand in cash. He was setting up a tanning salon. We were outfitting it with the equipment. I wrote up the sale but didn’t bother counting the loot. I left that to Cruella, who scowled mightily when I poured the legal tender out on her desk.

   We moved into our new building, shiny and up to date, at the beginning of the new century. It was the beginning of the end of the glad handing. It took five or six years but Light Sources, whose tanning bulbs were Doug’s meal ticket, decided they wanted a bigger slice of the pie. They offered Doug a choice. He could sell the tanning division to them, they would send somebody from headquarters to run things, or he could decline their offer, in which case they would open their own operation somewhere else, bypassing him. Doug went with the flow. Everything and everybody stayed put.

   It didn’t do any good. Inside a few years Light Sources moved themselves to Westlake, Beavis, Butthead, and Cruella jumped ship and went with them, and Doug was left holding the bag. He lost a ton of money in the stock market downturn of 2007. As the second decade of the century unfolded, he had to shed most of his remaining staff, including me, sell his big deluxe building, find an older, smaller building, then find something even smaller, until he finally ended up in a strip of mom-and-pop shops in Avon selling odds and ends. His kids didn’t re-enroll at their private schools. He lost his McMansion in North Ridgeville.

   In life Doug bore a resemblance to the late-night TV talk-show host Johnny Carson. He had a warm smile and went out of his way to make most people feel good, even though he was as oriented to the bottom line as any manhunter. He was elected president of the Brook Park Chamber of Commerce, where everybody was a manhunter. He spent money on himself and his family like he had money to burn. The money ran out slowly but surely. By the time he died there wasn’t much left to burn.

   Doug died when he was struck by a semi-truck trailer on Interstate 90. It was 2018 in the middle of a sunny day at the beginning of summer. He was taken to University Hospital in Avon where he was pronounced dead. He was outside of his car for a few minutes before he walked onto the marked lanes of I-90, according to the State Highway Patrol. They couldn’t explain why he had walked onto the highway.

   It happened so fast the truck driver didn’t have a chance to touch his brakes. “I feel bad for the victim,” Dan Darko of nearby Elyria said. “It sucks to feel pushed to that point. But I feel worse for the driver. One person’s choice will affect him for the rest of his life to the point where he may never be able to do his chosen profession again.”

   It was hard to believe it was an accident, but it was harder to believe Doug had deliberately done it. He was a Roman Catholic, taught Sunday School at his church, and was a member of Religious Readiness. According to Rome, death by suicide is a grave matter. It holds that one’s life is the property of God, and to destroy that life is to wrongly assert dominion over God’s creation. I never knew how sincere Doug was about his faith. I knew he sincerely valued prosperity. I don’t know if he had lost his faith. I knew he had lost his prosperity.

   The funeral was at St Clarence in North Olmsted. He left a wife and four kids behind. All his in-laws who had bailed out on him when Light Sources swallowed the golden goose were there. I didn’t go to the service. I had never been close to Doug or Kathy, keeping my distance. His in-laws liked to talk loud about what they didn’t like. They had their faults, but changing their tune about their long-held beliefs wasn’t one of them. The less I saw of them the better. 

   If Doug stepped in front of the semi-truck trailer on I-90 on purpose, I wondered if he did it for his kids. He probably had a loaded life insurance policy. There might have been a suicide clause limiting the payment of benefits. Maybe he thought he could kill two birds with one stone if it looked like an accident. He could stay in the good graces of the church and still provide for the future of his family.

   Nobody never doesn’t have a good reason for ending it all, especially if they believe hope is gone and not coming back. The problem is that the glow of how Doug lived his life is dulled by how he died. The chief thing I now remember about him is how his bound and determined life came to an abrupt end on a stretch of godforsaken concrete.

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