Real Music & Real Estate . . .

 
I was out of my skull. I broke into boxcars and unloaded Cutty Sark, golf balls and tires. Sometimes, tennis shoes. I had tin snips that cut right through corrugated boxcars roofs.

This was 50 years ago. Now I live a fairly quiet life. I’d rather not say where.

Let me tell you about my life. I never got married. I should have. There was this gal in the 1970s — Roz. She loved me but I wasn’t ready for her. Schmuck — me! I was 45, for God’s sake.

I was in the Marines. I couldn’t stand it. I was in for six months. Semper Fidelis was plain bullshit to me.

You ever notice how Italians swear all the time? It’s very big with them. If you’re Italian, you’re better than me, and you can say cuss all day long. You can be the dumbest dunderhead on two feet, but if you’re Italian, you’re it.

I could be Italian if I don’t want to be. I got enough spaghetti and wine in my veins. And don’t forget the goddamn hot peppers. I can eat a whole mason jar full.

Odd fact: I’m Jewish. I grew up in a deli on Kinsman in Cleveland. I remember the pickles. The cukes were right in the goddamn basement. They were delicious. And the goddamn gherkins.

My family disowned me after Marion. What was a nice Jewish boy doing in the joint? Not kosher! I haven’t talked to any relatives in, I bet, 50 years.

When I got out the last time, I made a clean slate of things. I sold stained glass to restaurants. Completely legit. I didn’t like it. So I went back to stealing. The hardest part was carrying the loot. I was that good.

Punchline: I was an accomplice several times but never killed anybody. The chickenshits from Murray Hill did the killings. They didn’t have my abilities. They stood around with their hands in their pockets, except they could kill.

Crime is a head game. Keep your mouth shut and show some intelligence and you’ll be fine. It has worked for me, most of the time. I’m paranoid. Sometimes you just know a place is a death trap.

It’s all trial and error.

My biggest mistake was quitting high school. I thought I knew more than the teachers. Again — schmuck! I hung out with boys who ran a stolen butter and cigarette ring on Woodland. An old fat Jew — The Eggman — was in charge. I rigged him up a walkie-talkie, which he appreciated.

Nowadays? For one thing I don’t have a dime. I spent everything I ever earned. I blew it all on cards, broads, beer and racehorses. It all fell through. I couldn’t deal with the thickheaded Italians at the track. I got out, but too late.

I live on wieners and beer. Love that combo. And the Browns. I remember when I pinched three cases of sausages from Red Barn. I didn’t fence it. I ate it all!

I’m 79 and in male menopause now. The docs talk about that on TV.

I love my TV. It doesn’t talk back to me. Perfect.

For the record, here’s my record:
NAME: JOSEPH A. MOSKOWITZ
ALIAS/NICKNAME: JOEY MOSCOW
DOB: 12-11-46
FACIAL ODDIITES: UNK
FACIAL HAIR: MUSTACHE
SPEECH: POLITE
COMPLEXION: MED
MISSING BODY PARTS: UNK
GENERAL APPEARANCE: UNKEMPT
TEETH: UNK
SCAR/BIRTHMARK/MOLE: UNK
TATTOO: UNK
WT: 245
HGT: 5-8
ADDRESS: UNK
CONVIC: MANSLAUGHTER, AGGRAV BURGLARY, LARCENY, KIDNAPPING, CRIMINAL TOOLS, GRAND LARCENY

 
Mark Schilling wrote this guest blog post:

Bert and I first met at Mich House (Michigan Cooperative House) in the fall of 1969. He was then a sophomore and I was a junior at the University of Michigan. We were both natives of Ohio or, as OSU football fans would say, “traitors.” I had lived in Barberton, Ohio, from grades one to eight, Bert in Cleveland from day one, so we shared memories of local TV shows and sports teams.

But our first and, for a while, foremost bond was musical. Bert, who had been a founder of the Ann Arbor Blues Festival, pronounced my record collection “cool,” especially for American Blues Festival, a rare LP of performances by Sonny Boy Williamson, Memphis Slim and other blues artists recorded in Bremen, Germany, in 1963. I’d found it in a cut-out bin in Dayton, Ohio.

Mark Schilling, 1970, Mich House

We listened to this and other records in Bert’s second-floor room, which he shared with John Cochrane, a laid-back Michigander who kept his hair short due to his service in the National Guard. We soon branched out to jazz, from Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington to Charlie “Bird” Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and other titans of bop.

A few ancient (i.e., over 30) grad students shared reminiscences about Dave Brubeck and other jazz favorites of their youth when they heard us spinning jazz discs (mostly borrowed from the Ann Arbor Public Library) on the record player in the living room, but other undergrads living or boarding at Mich House were rock fans so we became a Jazz Appreciation Society of two.

John, however, joined Bert and me on an expedition to Baker’s Keyboard Lounge, a jazz club in Detroit still in operation, to hear a “battle of the saxes” between Sonny Stitt and Gene Ammons, who had just finished a seven-year prison sentence for a narcotics possession charge. The place was packed but we were the only white guys in sight, save for the club owner, Clarence Baker, who was at first thrilled to see college kids in his joint, but became peeved when we didn’t order drinks for the second set. (I broke down and got another beer. Not sure about Bert and John.)

The music was great, prompting us to seek out more live jazz (if minus John). We caught a Duke Ellington concert at Hill Auditorium, sneaking down from the cheap seats to empty ones near the stage, as gray-haired audience members shot us looks both amused and surprised.

We also saw Rahsaan Roland Kirk in Detroit, where he played multiple horns simultaneously, blowing many minds, and Miles Davis at Hill Auditorium, where he and his quintet played tunes from his new album Bitches Brew. (Bert, who was sitting with me about 20 rows back, walked up to the stage and asked Miles something as he was preparing to play, which given Miles’ fearsome public image I thought took balls of brass.)

Then writing about music for the Michigan Daily student paper, Bert also caught folkies like Buffy Sainte Marie and Michael Cooney and blues greats like Mississippi Fred McDowell and Big Mama Thornton with me tagging along.

We also went to the John Sinclair Freedom Rally, a 1971 concert for poet/activist John Sinclair, who was then serving a 10-year prison sentence for selling two joints to an undercover agent. John Lennon showed up with a tune he had specially composed for the occasion, together with Yoko Ono, Phil Ochs, Bob Seger, Stevie Wonder, Commander Cody and others. Sinclair was sprung shortly thereafter.

Bert and I also ventured to the Cincinnati Jazz Festival at Riverfront Stadium in July 1971 to catch Billy Eckstine, Chuck Berry, Dizzy Gillespie, Herbie Mann, Lee Morgan, Rahsaan Roland Kirk (again) and Roberta Flack. A group of Black ladies sitting near us swooned over Billy but laughed at Chuck. His duck walk wasn’t their thing.

Along with all this concert- and club-going, Bert was playing the harmonica and the sax – the later to the annoyance of the guy across the hall, a music grad student from Texas who had the only single room in the co-op, which he wasn’t about to give up because of Bert. And Bert wasn’t about to stop playing in his room since he had nowhere else to practice. So the grad student, Morris, and Bert would exchange words while John buried his head in the blankets of his upper bunk bed, and I studied cracks on the wall.

Morris was not a jazz fan. And for Bert, klezmer was in the future.

—

Mark Schilling moved to Japan 51 years ago. He is the preeminent English-language writer on contemporary Japanese cinema. Mark was the “best man” at Bert’s wedding.

 
I got this text the other day: “Sir, there’s a cat in our restaurant that came through the ceiling.”

I rent to a restaurant. The cat belongs to a tenant who lives upstairs. The cat was in the restaurant, and I was getting calls. The cat-owner wasn’t around.

The access panel in the tenant’s bathtub was loose, and the cat had scurried down the pipe chase into the restaurant. I called the cops. “This is not an emergency,” I said.  I explained the cat-in-the-restaurant was a one-off freakish thing and wouldn’t happen again.

“It better not,” the cop said.

I shouldn’t have called the city. That often muddies things.

Eventually an animal warden came around and got the cat, and the tenant picked up the cat.

And then a couple days later, the cat fell through the ceiling again. My handyman had apparently not screwed in the access panel tight enough. Or maybe the cat was a tiger.

We got longer screws. We’re OK for the moment. Cat is not on the menu.

 
I was butt-hurt when my wife disparaged my klezmer lecture that I had given to a group of senior citizens. She criticized me about this the other day, even though the lecture was more than a decade ago.

I had done an “edu-tainment” lecture at a JCC “LearnInn” retreat in 2011. I had gone light on the dancing (which Alice led) and heavy on the talking.

Alice, the lecture was not a concert. It was a lecture.

I’m doing a klez lecture next Wednesday at the Cleveland JCC. Alice wants to add a PowerPoint this time around.

I don’t do PowerPoints! Alice said she’ll assemble the PowerPoint. OK, maybe a couple photos of Yiddishe Cup from the good old days. That would will be palatable. But no bullet points or text on screen  — no way. I don’t need PowerPoint. I’m a good lecturer. I’ve been on stage a million times. I don’t read from notes. I have spoken at the national Yiddish Clubs conference. I was stellar at the Shaker Heights Unitarian Church. I take questions, I talk about klez, I play clarinet.

I don’t want too many pics of random shtetl Jews with violins!

This is more fun:

Yiddishe Cup. 1993

 
“[Cleveland:] . . . its population abandoned to their fate, left to freeze their ass off, standing in the dirty winter slush, waiting for a bus that is a long time coming. Somehow they go on living.” – R. Crumb, cartoonist.

“Are you going to Florida?”

That’s what I hear this time of year. My tennis partner is in Fort Lauderdale. My real estate broker is in Sarasota. My lawyer is in Jupiter, Florida.

And I’m in Cleveland, freezing. I have a box of disposable hand warmers, flannel-lined jeans and a Patagonia parka. The first snow of the winter is nice, but the 15th snow — not so nice. And this winter — it started way too early, around Thanksgiving. The temperature was 12 degrees lower on average, per day, in Cleveland through Christmas.

Am I complaining? Just a bit. I like it here. My mantra is that bad weather is no excuse for bad attitude. If you don’t like gray, move or get a sun lamp. We accomplish more in gray weather. The Scots and New Englanders didn’t invent stuff sitting at the beach.

I’m a landlord, and a tenant recently called City Hall because the heat was too low in her apartment. The city of Lakewood — where my buildings are — mandates 70 degrees. That seems high to me. I keep my own house at 68. At my tenant’s apartment, the boiler’s flame sensor was going out. When I got the city’s low-heat call, I thought about Florida.

For one thing, Florida runs in my family. My late father said the best years of his life were his final years, in Florida. My wife and I — and our then-young children — went to Florida every winter. It was a good deal; my parents paid for the airplane and watched the grandkids for a week, and the only thing my wife and I had to watch out for were the golf-cart crossings.

The minute the plane landed in Florida, my dad would bug me about real estate opportunities down south. Florida bedazzled my dad: how it was growing so fast. We weren’t in the Rust Belt anymore, Son. On the drive from the Fort Lauderdale airport, my dad said, “This was a two-lane dirt road when we got here. Now it’s six-lane.” Glades Road, Boca Raton. “And there’s a bagel store on every other block.”

“We have bagel shops in Cleveland, too,” I said.

The Snowbelt . . . Is this the worst winter we’ve had since the 1960s — when I was shoveling driveways for a buck? It feels like it. Lakewood reinspected my (formerly) cold building. We got the boiler cranking and the thermostat up to 80 degrees. The tenants were hot. That was better than another no-heat citation. I’m not looking forward to my next gas bills, which will be record-breakers.

I haven’t been in Florida for more than a decade, but I remember an ex-pat Clevelander down there accosting me in a restaurant with, “Why are you still in Cleveland?”

That meant: “Are you nuts? Do you like snow, gray skies, slush and potholes?”

I do. As the Scandinavians say, there’s no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothes. A second ex-pat Clevelander said, “The day I hit 62 years old, I had to leave Cleveland.” She was considering Arizona, too. “But Arizona doesn’t have an ocean, and I like water,” she said.

Lake Erie is water. Look it up. Cleveland is doable.

One last word: layers.

—

This essay appeared in today’s Cleveland Plain Dealer.

 
Mike, an old friend from high school, found me on the internet and pummeled me with questions about  Cleveland real estate. He lived in Minneapolis. He ended by mentioning a few high school buddies’ names. He said, “I haven’t thought about high school in decades!”

Was he bragging — as in I’ve moved on? I think about high school fairly often. Maybe because I live five miles from Charles F. Brush High. I also think about elementary school and preschool. And I didn’t even go to preschool! News: “Nostalgia has been shown to counteract loneliness, boredom and anxiety,” John Tierney, New York Times.

I go to class reunions even when they’re not mine — like Cleveland Heights High’s 50th. I was playing a klezmer gig at a massive, multi-room party center and went into an adjacent room for the reunion, just for the atmospherics: Go Heights Tigers.

I wish teachers were invited to reunions. In the 1990s, my 12th-grade English teacher walked his dog by my house almost daily in Cleveland Heights. One day I got up the nerve to say hello. And he didn’t remember me.

“I had so many students,” he said.

“I’ll bet you remember Ann Wightman!” I said.

Yes, he remembered Ann, the salutatorian. Ann got all As and one B. I think she purposefully got the B to let a boy be valedictorian. That’s how it worked back then (1968). Some smart girls didn’t want to stick out academically.

I haven’t been back to Brush High in a while. It’s off my flowchart. If I entered Brush, I would probably feel very young or very old. I think “very old” would win. Not worth it.

—

A guy named Mel called. He was considering my band for his daughter’s wedding. Right off he asked where I had gone to high school. That’s the go-to question here in Cleveland. Mel himself had graduated from Cleveland Heights. I answered and then segued into the main topic: “It doesn’t matter what you want musically. What about your daughter? She’s calling the shots for the wedding band.”

“Did you play sports at Brush?”

“Tennis.”

“Do you know Joel Schackne?” Mel asked. (Schackne had been a champion tennis player at Cleveland Heights High.)

“I knew of him. He’s older than me. Whose idea is klezmer music for the wedding, yours or your daughter’s?”

“Schackne is in Florida. He’s still playing tennis.”

“What does your daughter think?”

“What AZA were you in?” (AZA is a national fraternal organization for Jewish boys.)

“I wasn’t in AZA.”

“Who do you see?”

“A guy named Mickey — a goy,” I said. “You wouldn’t know him.”

Most of my high school friends left Cleveland decades ago. The guys remaining are, for the most part, entrepreneurs and family-business owners. A few made serious money here. The intellectuals hit the road.

Do I have any kind of post–high school life?

Maybe.

 
One of my grandmother’s choice Yiddish expressions was “Geven-zhe nit a yold.” (Don’t you be a chump.)  My grandmother — Toby’s mother — owned a candy store, raised four kids almost single-handedly, buried a three-year-old daughter, and during her retirement years, owned a four-suite apartment building. She was nobody’s chump.

Anna Soltzberg (née Seiger) occasionally called her grandchildren — like me — foyl (lazy). She lived at our house for a while. I called her Bub — short for bubbe (grandmother). Bub was not into baseball; she was into the card game casino, the television show Queen for a Day; borscht and boiled chicken. She could eat. She had sugar diabetes. She wore bubbe shoes.

I couldn’t figure out where Bub was from. She was from Galicia, she said. Spain? Galicia was also a province in Austria-Hungary. Bub was from a shtetl called Grodzisk. She came to America at 20.

Anna Seiger Soltzberg (1884-1964). 1598 Laclede Rd., South Euclid, Ohio

In junior high I told my friends my grandmother was from Austria.  Not exactly Vienna, to be sure.  But “Austria” made sense to my friends.

Bub complained about the level of kashrut at my aunt’s house. Bub wanted my aunt not to keep kosher. Keeping kosher was too expensive.  Bub was an apikoros (non-believer), socialist and cheap.

Bub around 1904, New York City.

. . . Grodzisko, Galicia, Austria-Hungary. (The Yiddish name for the shtetl was Grodzisk, GRUD-zhisk) In the 1980s I located the shtetl on the Shtetl Finder map.

Grodzisk was about 60 miles west of Przemysl. The various shtetls had so many different names (Polish, Ukrainian, German, Yiddish). That was the tricky part.

I had a family postcard, postmarked “May 1, 1939, Grodzisko.” It was in Polish and said, “How are you?” On the flip side was a photo of a relative, Mili Seiger. The Germans invaded Poland four months after the postcard was mailed.

Mili Seiger, 1939, Grodzisko

I looked up “Mili Seiger” on the Yad Vashem online archives. There were so many Seigers, Siegers, Zygers, Zaygers and Zeigers, I couldn’t find Mili.

There are three types of Jews. Not Reform, Conservative and Orthodox. Try American, Israeli and victims of the Holocaust. Each about a third. These are my people.

—-

 Plotting Grodzisko [Grodzisk] by Teddy Stratton, 1998:

 
When I came home to Cleveland after college, I hung out at Case Western Reserve University. I wanted to stay in the college bubble. I didn’t like the alternative: the real world. I was helping my dad in the real estate business, and that was too real.

I met a medical illustrator at a Case party. When I told her,  “I manage apartment buildings,” she walked away. I had a harmonica in my pocket. She just didn’t know.

A friend whispered to me, “It’s not in her experience — apartment building management.”

A woman asked me, “Are you in OB?”

“No, I’m not in medical school.”

“Organizational behavior.”

“I’m not in that either.”

At Case, you were either a doctor, nutritionist, organizational behaviorist, or medical student. I ran into another medical illustrator. Nothing happened.

An OB grad​ student, Marcy, talked to me. She was doing her Ph.D. thesis on “the event of play in a closed group.” She had just graduated from Harvard.

“So many Harvard people here!” a man called out to Marcy. Three Harvard people, to be exact: 1.) The host,  2). Marcy, 3.) and  a Harvard grad on his way to Washington to become a lobbyist. All these Harvard people were on their way somewhere.

I was on my way to Lakewood. People called me up about low-water pressure, mice and clanging radiators. We had a tenant with no kitchen sink for two weeks because he ripped out the sink trying to install a butcher-block countertop. He wanted to charge us for dining out. Another  tenant lost his hot water for three days; I don’t remember why. I wrote him a Japanese-style apology. The tenant deducted a significant sum from his rent. I couldn’t blame him. A tenant saw a mouse and asked for a hotel room. That bugged me; mice are good people..

I recently googled the Harvard woman, Marcy. She’s a professor emerita at a university in Massachusetts (not Harvard). I don’t think I’ll contact her.

Maybe I should. I still have the harmonica.

Screw up

 
I grew up in Manhattan next-door to where John Lennon was killed. My parents ran an art gallery. They still do. They have a place in Switzerland and New York. I ran the Switzerland office for a while.

But I’m tired of the whole arts scene. I want out. I’m 30. I want to hang around with oil men, real estate guys and cowboys. Men who have never read the New York Times, particularly the Style section.

In college, at Kenyon, I had a roommate, Schwecky from Cleveland. I visited Cleveland a couple times with him and fell in love with the place. People in Cleveland have lawns and don’t pay $3000/month for a one-bedroom.

I have a one-bedroom in Cleveland Heights for $1200. Tricked out too. Marble countertops, dishwasher. I’m going to use my nest egg (courtesy of my old man) to buy up Cleveland. I can buy Cleveland’s whole East Side, I figure, for what my parents’ Central Park West condo goes for. But my dad wants me to stay in New York. No thanks. One question, Pops: what can I buy in New York for 1.5 million? Gornisht!

I’m hanging around with hustlers in Cleveland and loving it. This town – Cleveland’s East Side at least – is just old Jews, and when these boomers hear I’m from New York, they say, “I have a daughter in Brooklyn for you!” I groan. Those Brooklyn girls are trying to get jobs with my folks at the art gallery.

I’ve made some errors here in Cleveland, like an old Jew had me over for dinner and quizzed me on a couple things, and I guessed a milk chute is “maybe for the seltzer delivery,” and I didn’t know what treelawn meant.

I don’t think I’m ever leaving Cleveland. Cleveland Heights — where I live — is like Hoboken. Nice. Urban. But not too urban.

When I’m with my folks in the city, just going down to the deli for a sandwich is a major proposition. The crowd, the line, the elevator. I got mugged once. Eighth grade. Some kids pushed me over and took my book bag.

I don’t walk much in Cleveland. The roads here are bare — empty. There is infrastructure here for twice as many people as there are people. These are the wheels I’m going to buy:

fiction

 
Here’s my latest essay from the Cleveland Plain Dealer  . . .

Dick Van Dyke turned 100 on Saturday. That’s no big deal — in my world. Last month my klezmer band played a 100th birthday party — our fourth in three years. There was a chair placed prominently in the middle of the dance floor, to lift the birthday “girl” for “Hava Nagila.”

I said to myself, “No way.”

Correct: No way. We did not lift the celebrant on a chair. But the birthday “girl,” Etty Hoffman of Beachwood, did dance. She was out there on the dance floor. She boogied. And she gave a moving speech afterward, touching on more than five generations of her family, including “mommy and daddy.”

Nearly 10,000 Americans turn 100 each year, according to the Pew Research Center. The United States has the second-most number of centenarians in the world. Japan is first.

After the hora, I asked a dancer — Ms. Hoffman’s niece Joyce — if she was going to live forever. “What do you mean?” Joyce said. “Me or my aunt?”

“You. Do you assume you’re going to make it 100, too?”

“I’m planning on it!” she said. Joyce is in her 70s and plays flute, does yoga, lifts weights, walks a lot, and is skinny. Bonus: Joyce’s mom is 103. She’s Etty’s older sister. (Joyce’s mother was at the party, too.)

My dad made it to 68. Shvak. (Yiddish for weak). My mom died at 83. Better. A year before my father died, I interviewed him; I said, “You don’t talk much about your mother. Do you ever think about your mother?” I annoyed my dad. He said, “Of course I think about my mother!” My dad’s mother had single-handedly run the family’s candy store on Kinsman Road at East 151st Street. My dad’s father had been hit by a May Company truck in 1924 and spent most of his time hanging out at the pool hall after the accident.

At Julia Stratton’s gravesite in 2020, on the 100th anniversary of her birth. (Julia Stratton, 1920-2004.) From left: Lucy, Bert, Jack, Ted Stratton

At Ms. Hoffman’s birthday party, my band played: “My Girl” by the Temptations; “I’ve Just Seen a Face” by the Beatles; Tin Pan Alley classics; klezmer instrumentals; and some Yiddish songs. The partygoers applauded our wide-ranging set list. At a 100th birthday party, everybody is 100% mellow. A 100th birthday party is not a wedding — no anxious bride. It is not a bar mitzvah — no sullen 13-year-olds. There is no kvetching, period.

In the 1920s, Ohio-born vaudeville clarinetist Ted Lewis popularized the phrase, “Is everybody happy?” And yes, everybody was happy at Ms. Hoffman’s party. She was born in 1925 and grew up in the Glenville neighborhood and attended synagogue at the Cleveland Jewish Center (now Cory United Methodist Church) on East 105th Street. Etty was in the temple’s Confirmation class of 1941.

Her 100th birthday celebration was at Park Synagogue in Pepper Pike. Park Synagogue is a direct outgrowth of the Cleveland Jewish Center. Same congregation, different building. Ms. Hoffman has been a member of Park Synagogue since 1930. I wonder how many relatives at Ms. Hoffman’s party think they’ve inherited the family’s longevity gene.

They’ll find out.

Mary Tyler Moore died at 80. Keep that in mind.

And happy birthday to Dick Van Dyke, Etty Hoffman, and everybody trying to emulate them.

—

Link to Plain Dealer article here.

 
I knew a building inspector who could smell rats. He didn’t have to see rat droppings; he could smell rats.

I knew a handyman who could jimmy almost any apartment door with a credit card.

My talent is figuring out if a tenant has skipped out or not. I knock loudly on the tenant’s door. If there’s no response, I yell “maintenance” a couple times and bring out the master key. I yell “maintenance” a third time, and step into the apartment. A couch, a bed . . . always. Skippers leave behind the heavy stuff. TVs, for sure. Everyone upgrades his TV on move-out. Some small items are left behind: beer bottles, pennies, unopened bills. Usually enough to fill three or more garbage bags.

The stove is fried. The refrigerator is always missing a plastic shelf. Why?

Underwear and socks . . . gone.  No socks means no tenant. The guy definitely skipped.

Some of his clothes are on the floor. Some good, some bad. I found a tux left behind. The guy was 6-4. I had the pants legs shortened. (He wasn’t a skipper. He was a dead man. And his place was clean.)

I enjoy wrecked apartments. Who doesn’t? A building manager once phoned me with on-the-scene reporting from a wrecked apartment: “It looks like a cyclone went through here crossways!”

But occasionally a manager will not react positively. “I’m creeped out,” one manager told me, standing in the common-area hallway while I went into the suite. She was creeped out by a few bottles of beers, cat urine and cigarette butts. (Probably because she had to clean it.)

I phone the skipper to make sure he’s definitely gone. I say, “You out?”  Nothing more that than. No lectures about housekeeping. Nobody wants to be criticized on their house-cleaning skills. 

 
Why don’t columnists write about pet peeves anymore? That bugs me.

Why do nursing-home administrators insist on peppy tunes? Oldsters sometimes want to hear contemplative tunes.

Why do eyeglass adjusters have so much power over us? Did they all go to I.U.?

Why do “highly sensitive” people insist on telling us they’re bothered by the labels on their shirts? That’s irritating.

My wife took our electric toothbrush on her trip to Columbus. The electric toothbrush is a “permanent attachments to the dwelling,” ma’am.

What about those phone calls from my kids’ alma maters? I already give zero to my own alma mater.

When my computer messes up, why I do I feel like my arm broke? Why can’t I feel like a mosquito bit my ankle?

What about friends who grow arugula and offer you some? Why don’t they grow dates or figs?

Why do symphony-goers applaud wildly after every single piece? These people nap for 54 minutes during Mahler, then give the conductor multiple curtain calls. Applaud this!

Don’t get worked up over house address signs like “The Smith’s.”

I am worked up!

If you want to discuss cars, first ask: “Do you mind if I talk to you about cars?” Yes, I do mind.

Which is preferable: (1.) “He passed away” or (2.) “He passed.” Both stink. He passed what — Wendy’s?

Who’s nostalgic for mimeo machines? Somebody should be.

 
I came down with a bad case of Anglophilia. This happened decades ago. Via the Cleveland Press, I got a pen pal from Blackpool, England.

Bleak name –Blackpool. Then my Blackpool pen pal moved to Hamilton, Ontario, and that ended our correspondence. He lived several hours away. He was of no use to me any longer.

With no English pen pal, I decided to turn myself into a Limey.

And I’ve been a Brit-by-choice ever since. Everything about Limeyland fascinates me — in an off-kilter way: shandies, tyres with a “y,” cricket, venison faggots, regattas, even the bathroom graffiti. Bear with me. Check this out:

“This is not the place to sit and slumber but the place to fart and thunder.”

“The wall painter’s work was all in vain, the shithouse poet strikes again.”

These lines were on a pub wall in Bath. The year — 1980. You had to be there, and I was. I’ve didn’t visit the grittier parts of England. I didn’t need to see that.

Oh, to be in England.

I frequently go to the Cedar Lee Theater in Cleveland Heights to see films about England. My favorite  flicks are England-in-the-1950s films, like An Education and Nowhere Boy.

Clevelanders often complain about gray skies, but do Limeys? No, they don’t. They don’t get all cheesed off about rain and clouds.

Snow? I don’t think Limeys even have snow. But they would like it. I certainly do.

 
John Cermak installed a pool table, gun rack and shower in his parents’ basement. He lived down there his entire adult life. In his twenties, John drove a humpy Saab. Had to be a Saab. He showed me how to do oil changes on my car (a Plymouth Valiant) and helped me build a coffee table from pine 2x4s. We grew up across the street from each other.

John especially liked motors, fishing and woodworking, but that’s not the whole picture; he went to St. Ignatius High and graduated John Carroll University as an English major.

When I got into the landlord biz (thanks, Dad), I called John for advice on boilers, blown fuses, leaks and everything else. John was my guru of the physical world.

When John was in elementary school, he mounted a lawnmower engine on a tricycle. The guy knew everything.

John died in 1992 at age 41 from complications of mental illness and alcoholism. He could put away a case of Wiedemann’s in a day. Schizophrenia ran in his family.

A repairman called me and said, “The voltage at the cap is good.”

What’s that mean? If the voltage was good, why didn’t we have power in four suites? The man said, “The inside line, outside, is yours.”

John, you there?

 
Last month I ran into a tenant carrying an electric bass in a case. Or so I thought. Turns out he had a Stratocaster guitar. “I’m storing it for a guy,” he said.

“What do you play?” I said.

“I’m the vocalist.”

“What’s the band?”

“Home and Garden.”

[Later googled: Home and Garden is an avant-garde, post-punk band featuring some former Pere Ubu players. And by the way, the singer pays his rent on time.]

“My son is in a well-known band — Vulfpeck,” I said.

“What?”

“Vulf . . . Peck.”

“Never heard of it.”

“Well, I guess they’re not that well-known.”

—

I had been trick-or-treating with my grandkids in Chicago several days prior. I played clarinet while making the candy rounds. Two young dads requested a jazz tune, so I played “When the Saints Go Marching In.” I can get away with Dixieland because I’m old. The dads seemed OK with it. I asked if they played music. Yes, drums and bass. I didn’t ask them if they had heard of Vulfpeck. The trick-or-treating and my grandkids — the main attraction — threw me off my kvell game.

I bet they knew Vulfpeck!

The Strattons in Ann Arbor, 2010. Random old photo.

—

This reminds me of a Cleveland Jewish News article (3/31/2000) about the father of Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen:

“Would you, by chance, be a Steely Dan fan?” Beachwood resident Joseph ‘Jerry’ Fagen inquires wryly. It’s an unlikely question coming from an 80-year-old, but Fagen’s favorite conversation starter affords the opening he needs to do what any parent would do in his shoes: kvell a little.

“Reaching for his wallet, the spry sneaker-clad Fagen produces a computerized list in tiny type of the 13 albums released by his son, Donald Fagen, co-founder of the jazz-rock-pop recording group Steely Dan. His latest entry? Two Against Nature, the group’s newest release, which debuted last month at #6 on the Billboard charts.”

Full CJN article by Susan Rzepka here.

 
This essay is in today’s Cleveland Plain Dealer.

An apartment-building manager in Lakewood texted: “Plaster just fell. Nobody died.”

I’m a landlord. The building — on Detroit Avenue — is 100 years old. I called the tenant and apologized.

In old buildings, plaster — a limestone-and-sandstone paste — is squished between wood lath and joists, and can lose its key over time. “Losing key” means plaster cracks, crumbles and goes plop. Old plaster is often compromised by water leaks, decades of vibrations from Detroit Avenue, and plain old gravity. Things sag, as you’ve no doubt noticed if you’re over 50.

Heads up: Should I replace every bedroom ceiling with modern drywall? Should I pass out helmets to all the tenants?

I like old buildings. Not everybody does. I live in a 99-year-old house in Cleveland Heights. A lot of people prefer newer construction. My parents did, for sure. They grew up poor in the Kinsman neighborhood, and when they moved to South Euclid in 1951, they insisted on brand-new everything. Then, in 1973, they moved to an apartment building – also brand-new — in Beachwood. My parents didn’t want raindrops (from roof leaks) or plaster falling on their heads.

When I was young, I thought people in Beachwood – or, say, Solon, Westlake or Avon — were on the wrong track, with their in-vogue housing choices. Apparently not everybody aspired to be an elitist architecture snob like me. I’ve since mellowed on the subject of housing. To each his own.

Plaster fell onto a barber’s chair on Detroit Avenue. The barber rented a street-level storefront from me. The barbershop owner, Al, told me no one was injured. “But what about next time?” he said.

Good question. I thought about giving Al a reduction on his next month’s rent. The dilemma was how much of a reduction. Al is an Iraqi refugee who has seen more than his share of falling things. He worked at a commissary for the United States military in Iraq.

The plaster in the barbershop ceiling had been slowed in its descent by first hitting modern drop-ceiling tiles – those stippled white acoustical tiles you see when you look up in a barber’s chair, or at a dentist’s office. The drop-ceiling tiles at the barbershop camouflaged the original plaster ceiling. Acoustical ceiling tiles are cheap at Home Depot. I stockpile them. I gave Al half off his rent. Settling — money and plaster; that’s part of my job.

A second-floor tenant, above the street-level storefronts, called.

More bad vibrations? He called during a Browns game. He said, “People are literally stomping above me, on the third floor. I’m having heart palpitations right now. I’m calling the police. If I die, it’s on your head. I was pressing my arms over my ears so hard it took the muscle off the bone by my upper arm.”

“Have you tried earplugs?” I said.

“I had tubes in my ears as a child. I’m not sticking anything foreign in my ears.”

“I’ll send the manager right over,” I said.

“Don’t send her. She tried to kill me.”

“When?”

“Three years ago. She tried to force me to drink a beer. I’m a recovering alcoholic.”

“Is your ceiling shaking right now?”

“It’s rattling badly.”

The Browns lost. Does the team have any extra helmets? The sky is falling.

 
I was at the Fuji Rock music festival, where I hung out with British lads — guys in their twenties. I was at Fuji Rock, in Japan, to see Vulfpeck. The lads were from Leeds.  Japan was so hot, the lads went bare-chested and drank a lot, and were amusingly, obnoxiously inebriated. Jimmy, on meeting a genuine VulfDad — me —  bear-hugged me and said, “I’m the stickiest man you ever met!” It was 95 degrees. The sweat.

Booze, Brits and heat.

No sane tourist visits Japan in July, when Fuji Rock is. The lads repeatedly mentioned how “warm” it was. (Leeds people say “warm” to mean “hot.”) Jimmy said, “There’s moisture everywhere.” He schlepped around a four-pack beer caddy. The humidity was Houston-level.

The Japanese — they can handle it. They don’t drink much in public (except at salaryman bars) and don’t complain about the weather. Air conditioning is generally “low” in Japan, on purpose, to save energy. Another thing, off subject: Japanese restaurants play quality background music — sometimes even Coltrane — on low volume. And everybody talks quietly in public places.

The Brits: total aliens.

—
The above is autobiographical fiction. Yes,  I was at Fuji Rock but I didn’t hang out with Brits. However, I later watched a video about Brits at Fuji Rock. The vid is cued up below. Check out a few minutes.

 
I had an op-ed, “To Life, Marriage and Wine,” in the Wall Street Journal on Saturday. Here’s the essay:

I convinced my wife to go to synagogue, which is a hard sell. My come-on was the wine. The first Saturday of the month, our synagogue passes out free bottles of Israeli kosher wine to married couples celebrating anniversaries that month.

Two friends recently called to say they were separating from their spouses. I look for reinforcement for the institution of marriage wherever I can find it. Alice and I stood on the bimah (altar) with eight other couples while congregants sang along to “Siman Tov and Mazel Tov” (good luck and congratulations). Rabbi Joshua Skoff announced the winner in the anniversary derby, a couple celebrating 55 years of matrimony.

Everybody read from the supplementary prayer booklet: “These couples have come to the synagogue to give thanks for the institution of marriage and for their mutual love and devotion.”

Bert and Alice, Oct. 22, 1978. Columbus, Ohio

One married man had a gray ponytail. There was an accountant in a suit and an obstetrician in a red pantsuit. The Torah portion was from Genesis. The rabbi noted that because Adam and Eve sinned, we are all going to die, which makes things interesting because if we lived forever we’d never get around to doing anything: “Why would you diet if you can put it off for 500 years?”

Our marriage-boosting interlude ended with: “May it be God’s will that these married couples continue to live to a ripe old age together in happiness, lightening each other’s burdens, and reaping a harvest of joy from the seeds of love they have sown in the hearts of their family.”

To life. And free wine.

 
My roommate Ed died. In 2006. I just found out about it. I thought I saw him the other day walking in Lakewood. I recognized him from the back. Nope, he’s dead.

Ed was the archetypal Lakewood Man — a poor white guy wearing a Browns hat, smoking a cigarette, shambling toward Discount Drug Mart.

I shared a duplex house with Ed and two other guys for a couple years in Cleveland Heights in the mid-1970s. I met Ed via the apartments-for-rent bulletin board at Case Western Reserve University. (A major portion of my life revolved around that bulletin board, like I met my future wife via the board.)

Ed was a nonstop liar and enjoyed talking on the phone for hours about bills he claimed he would pay, jobs he had or didn’t have, money he had or didn’t have. He worked as a security guard at CWRU.

His room was filthy, and he stunk, and he smoked nonstop. He could cook. Grant him that. He said the rest of us “lived out of cans.”

Ed had epilepsy, and one morning he went thud on the floor and started foaming at the mouth and bleeding around his tongue. He was about 6-2 and fat, so the thud was real. It rattled the house — and me. Ed should have warned us he had epilepsy. I hadn’t seen a grand mal seizure before (and haven’t since). Ed didn’t take his meds regularly. EMS got him straightened out.

I didn’t see Ed’s obit in the Plain Dealer in 2006. But I googled him after I “saw” him in Lakewood the other day. He died at 59. He had a hard life.

 
Years ago I sent out two versions of Yiddishe Cup on a single night. We did business! But often the effort wasn’t worth the logistical contortions: Yiddishe Cup undergoing mitosis. Very messy.

I named the bands the “A” Band and the “B” Band; I should have called them the red unit and the blue unit. There would have been fewer bruised egos among the musicians. I was fortunate; I always got in the “A” Band.

I didn’t start the A/B band ploy until I was about 15 years into the band biz and had a full stable of subs who knew the Yiddishe Cup Method — whatever that is.

The “B” Band

Heads-up, bandleaders, don’t play the A/B game unless you’re very experienced and totally upfront with the clients. If you lie, you might encounter what the New York boys call a “screamer gig.” That’s when the mom screams, “I didn’t hire this band! Where’s your bandleader?”

Here’s what I said on the phone when booking the “B” band: “Bert Stratton won’t be there. Nobody will notice the difference.”

—

Yiddishe Cup plays 7:15 Tues. (Oct. 14) for Simchat Torah at Park Synagogue, 27500 Shaker Blvd., Pepper Pipes, Ohio. Free.