Cooking Up Trouble

Cooking Up Trouble

By Ed Staskus

   “Mom, you know it’s not dinner without a napkin,” Matt said. 

   He was on the third floor on his cell phone talking to his mother Terese who was in the first- floor kitchen. She answered on the land line. She had made a 3-course dinner for him and taken it upstairs a minute earlier. She made dinner and took it upstairs to him every night, at least on those nights he was at home. When he wasn’t, she caught a break. She would then quick fry some chicken and kick back in front of the TV. She liked B & W movies, mostly comedies and melodramas. Her husband worked split shifts. She had the house to herself those nights to yuk it up at the funny parts and cry at the sad parts.

   My mother-in law Terese Parello was a self-taught chef. She got the bug from her mother Stefanija Stasas, who had emigrated from Lithuania to the United States after World War Two. Stefanija worked in the kitchen of Stouffer’s flagship restaurant in downtown Cleveland for most of her life. After she retired, she compiled her favorite Lithuanian recipes and published them in a book called “Kvieciu Prie Stalo.” It means “We Welcome You to the Table.”

   Terese taught herself well enough that she could make anything, from sloppy joes at feed-the-poor kitchens to wedding cakes for millionaires. She only ever glanced at cookbooks when she had to. No matter that she was intrepid and skilled, having conceived and operated several restaurants, as well as working as a pastry chef and a caterer, she had to play dumb waiter once a day.

   “I’ll bring one right up to you,” she said to her son. What else could she do? She had taught him his table manners.

   Matt lived on carry out dinners except they were carry up dinners. His mother did the cooking and carrying. Matt did the eating. When he was done he dutifully brought his dishes downstairs. My father-in-law Dick washed them by hand every day. They had a dishwasher, but he preferred to stand at the sink and get his hands dirty while getting the dishes clean. He had been a war-time MP in Vietnam before becoming a bartender. He was a hands-on kind of man.

   Their house was on East 73rd St. at the corner of Chester Ave. in the Fairfax neighborhood. It was built in 1910, three stories, four bedrooms, two baths, two fireplaces, and a full basement. The third floor was originally servant’s quarters. The foundation was sandstone quarried in nearby Amherst by the Cleveland Stone Company. Amherst was the “Sandstone Capital of the World” back in the day.

   There were stores, churches, and schools everywhere back then. There were light industries and warehouses. Street cars ran east and west day and night on Euclid Ave., which was one block north of Chester Ave.. The Karamu House Theater opened in 1915. Langston Hughes developed and premiered some of his plays at the playhouse. Sears, Roebuck & Co. built a flagship store there in 1928. 40,000 people lived in Fairfax in the 1940s. Sixty years later, when my mother-in-law showed up, only 5,000-some people still lived there. 

   By the 1950s the servants on the third floor were long gone and so were the well-off families who had raised their children in the house. They moved away to the suburbs. Urban renewal was in full swing. As 1960 rolled around the neighborhood was nearly all-black and low-income. The house was divided up and converted into boarding rooms. By the 1980s it had gone to hell, in more ways than one.

   Terese and her husband were living in Reserve Square in a 17th floor three-bedroom corner apartment overlooking Lake Erie on East 13th St. and Chester Ave. when they bought the house with the intention of bringing it back to life. They were living well enough. They owned and operated a bar restaurant on the ground floor of the apartment complex. They didn’t realize how much trouble they were getting into making the move. It was the kind of trouble wise guys beyond their ken had dreamed up.

   The neighborhood they moved to was three miles from their former digs in downtown Cleveland. The Fairfax neighborhood was on the edge of University Circle, where most of the city’s major educational institutions and museums were. The eastern side of the locality was dominated by the Cleveland Clinic, which was growing by leaps and bounds. The Hough neighborhood was just to the north and the St. Clair-Superior neighborhood was north of that.  On the other side of the city limits was the lake, where yellow perch and walleye lived rent-free.

   The house was being flipped when Terese and Dick first saw it. The flipper put the house back together as a single-family home, putting in a new central staircase, a new kitchen, and a new two-car garage. He stopped there. He bought the house for pennies on the dollar. He sold it to my in-laws for dollars on the dollar. They paid $135,000.00 for the house, more than double and nearly triple what almost all the other houses in Fairfax were priced at. A vacant lot next door was thrown in as a bonus. There was another vacant lot across the street. There were several others within sight. The empty lots were like tumbleweeds. The neighborhood was more ghost town than not. 

   Hough was where race riots happened in 1966, when Terese was in her mid-20s, married to her first husband, with a child and another one in the making. They then lived on the border of the Euclid Creek Reservation, bounded by North Collinwood and Richmond Hts. It was a family friendly neighborhood with good schools. All the men drove to work in the morning. Most of the women kept house. The kids walked to school. Their backyard was a forest. On clear days in the winter, they could see Mt. Baldy in the distance.

   The Hough Riots started when the white owner of the Seventy-Niners Café on Hough Ave. and East 79th St. said “Hell, no” after being asked by a passing black man for a glass of water on an oppressively hot day. One thing led to another, an angry crowd gathered, there was some rock throwing which led to looting and vandalism, arson and sniper fire followed, and two days later the Ohio National Guard rolled in with .50 caliber machine guns mounted on their Jeeps. They carried live ammunition.

   Terese and Dick opted for the Fairfax house because Terese was pining for a house on the near east side near where she had grown up. She grew up in a Lithuanian family, her father and mother and four sisters in a two-bedroom bungalow where she slept on the sofa. It didn’t matter to her that the house she wanted was on the wrong side of the racial divide. Dick wanted what his wife wanted. They lived for each other. He cashed in his 401K to make the down payment on the house. The next summer they took out a second mortgage for $85,000.00 to replace the roof, replace all the old windows with vinyl windows, blow liquid polyurethane insulation into the walls, and side the exterior. They painted the interior, which meant Matt and I pulled on our painter’s pants and got to work.

   The floors were hardwood from back when there were man-sized forests. They had them refinished. When the floors were done, they sparkled like the clock had been turned back a century. No matter how old anything is, everything was once new.

   They blew through their second mortgage fast. When ownership of Terese’s downtown lunch counter in the National City Bank building on East 9th and Euclid Ave. slipped out from under her feet, her partner getting the better of her, they began living partly on Dick’s paycheck, partly on her freelancing, and partly on their credit cards. It wasn’t long before they were making only the minimum payment on their multiple credit cards. It was a downward spiral.

   Matt moved in with his parents after sampling the bachelor life in Lakewood. He was working full-time for General Electric and going part-time to graduate school to get a second high-tech degree. He played lead guitar in a local rock ‘n roll band, keeping his eyes open for girls who might become his girlfriend. He paid some rent for his third-floor space and helped out around the house. 

   My wife landscaped the front yard and Dick put in a sizable garden in the back yard. Terese liked herbs and fresh veggies where she could get her hands on them in a jiffy. They adopted a handful of stray cats. They invited Terese’s sisters and their husbands over for holiday dinners. Dick’s family lived in New York, which was a long drive and short excuse away. The house was spacious and cozy at the same time. The house was pretty as a postcard when it was lit up and full of people on Christmas.

   They had barbeques in the summer, opening the garage door and wheeling out a grill. Dick was a driveway cook. He wasn’t a chef, but he was a master at charcoal-broiling when it came to hot dogs, hamburgers, and steaks. We played horseshoes in the vacant lot where there was plenty of room for the forty-foot spacing. Dick was a big man with a soft touch and almost impossible to beat when it came to pitching. He was King of the Ringers. Even when he didn’t hit a ringer he was always close. The game is deceptively simple, but hard to master. When I vented about losing to him over and over again, he said, “You can’t blame your teammates for losing in horseshoes.”

   We brought skyrockets, paper tubes packed with rocket fuel, for Independence Day and shot them off from the vacant lot when it got dark. One of them went haywire and flew into the garage through the open door. Dick was standing at the grill in the driveway but ducked in the nick of time. The cats went running every which way. They stayed on the run for two days, until they got hungry and came back.

   Their garage got broken into. It got broken into again. It wasn’t the safest neighborhood. They installed a security system. They lost their front porch patio furniture to thieves. Terese saw the thieves dragging the furniture down the street in broad daylight, but she was alone and there wasn’t anything she could do about it. She called the Cleveland Police Department but there wasn’t anything they were inclined to do. The crime rate in Fairfax was high and the cops had better things to do. Dick replaced the furniture, chaining it down to the deck of the porch. They went on litter patrol most mornings, picking up empty wine and beer bottles, and sweeping up cigarette butts and plastic bag trash.

   What few neighbors they had watched out for each other. A mailman lived in a newer house catty corner to them where Spangler Ct. met East 73rd St.  He clued them in on the workings of Fairfax, what to watch out for and what didn’t matter, and after they took the measure of the neighborhood they got as comfortable with it as they were ever going to get. Terese started ministering to some of the kids who lived in the run-down walk-up four-story apartment building behind them. She made lunch for some of them, took some of them on day trips to nearby museums, and drove some of them to school when their parents were incapacitated.

   There were cluster homes and McMansions being built in both Hough and Fairfax, but they were far and few between. Police cars and ambulances sped up and down Chester Ave. every hour on the hour sirens blaring. There was an occasional gunshot in the night. Everybody locked their doors at sunset.

   One day, sitting on the steps of their front porch, I watched three men tie a rope around a dead tree in the vacant lot across the street. They were going to try to yank it out of the ground with a pick-up. The first time they tried the rope snapped. The second time they tried they used two ropes. They put their pick-up in low gear and tugged. The rear bumper got yanked off and the truck shot forward, the driver slamming on the brakes, tearing up the turf. They came back with a bigger truck. When the tree started to lean it fell over fast, cracking, the roots ripping loose, barely missing them. I thought they were going to saw the branches off and section the trunk after it crashed to the ground, but they didn’t. The tree lay moldering in the grass all summer.

   Neither Terese nor Dick lived to see their house vanishing in front of their eyes. If they had they would have seen their one asset in life reduced in value by 90%. All the money they had was tied up in the house. They would have been left with nothing. They could see it coming and it made them miserable. Their health started to fail. The wise guys who blew up the housing bubble until the bubble blew up walked away free and clear. Alan Greenspan, who ran the Federal Reserve Bank for nearly twenty years, said the meltdown was due to a “flaw in the system.”

   Terese died on New Year’s Eve 2005 and Dick died on Easter Saturday 2006. She collapsed  on the landing of their central staircase. She was dead by the time 911 got her to the nearby Cleveland Clinic. Dick collapsed in the wine room of their house in the middle of the night four months later while working on a crossword puzzle. He never used a pencil. He always filled the squares in with a pen. When Matt found him in the morning, he had almost finished the puzzle. His pen was on the floor. It still had plenty of ink in it.

   It was at that time that house prices started to crumble and the collapse that was going to push the United States into a recession picked up speed. Matt stayed in the house for a few years, trying to make the bank payments, taking in Case Western Reserve University student boarders, but it was no good. When he walked away it was for good. My wife and I helped empty the house, giving most of everything that wasn’t a personal effect to whoever could use it. 

   When it was all over Matt moved away and never went back. Whenever he found himself driving through the Fairfax neighborhood, he avoided the crossroad at East 73rd St and Chester Ave. He preferred to avoid looking backward. He had no taste for what he might see, or not see.

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. 

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