I used to shop at the West Side Market to see humanity.  I didn’t care about the food; I was looking for real, working people.  I ran the gauntlet of Italian produce vendors, who would say to me, “Hey, how about a couple peppers?”  I wouldn’t answer. I didn’t even like vegetables.

I liked meat — greasy meat.  I picked up a couple links of Farkas’ hot Hungarian kielbasa.  That stuff could kill you, unless you were 25 and immortal.

Now the produce vendors are mostly Arabs, and I’m no longer looking for humanity.  It comes to me.

I was at the market with time to spare; I was waiting to meet a tenant across the street at the Cleveland Mediation Center.  I had a delinquent tenant who was also delinquent in showing up for the meeting.   So I went to the market.

The market was, still, a good cheap exotic trip.  A vendor carried an eviscerated goat over his shoulder.  You don’t see that at Heinen’s.  I bought a loaf of bread and returned to the mediation center, which was in a dilapidated 1920s office building.  There were stenciled signs on the office doors for abogados (lawyers), bail bondsmen and Middle Eastern doctor / Welfare Patients Accepted.  My delinquent tenant, Mr. Rice, hobbled in to the mediation center on a cane.

He spent $400 per month on prescription drugs, he said, and couldn’t afford the rent.  Apparently, he didn’t know anything about Medicare’s supplemental prescription plan.

The mediator — “I’m Bob” — told Mr. Rice he could address neglected building repairs.  Bob had just set me up.

Mr. Rice shook his head and said, “The man wants his rent and I don’t blame him.”

You had to like a tenant like that.  A stand-up guy.

I put up with Mr. Rice and his late rent payments because, among other reasons, I liked his accent.   He was an old black from Gallatin, Tenn.  I said, “My mother was from the South.  I could listen to you all day. That’s why I’m here [at the mediation center].”  Another reason was he owed me $890.

Mr. Rice skipped out several months later. He left behind ratty furniture, Playboys, old clothes and a stove that looked a piece of fried chicken.

You want that stove original or extra crispy?

Mr. Rice said, “Don’t put me out.”

I didn’t put him out.  He left on his own.

—-

Tomorrow (Thurs. July 29)
Driving Mr. Klezmer
Cain Park, Alma Theater, Cleveland Hts., 7 p.m.

My son Jack, suddenly, will be in the show.  He’ll play the iPhone, beat-box, play drums, and do a comedy sketch.

$20 in advance, $23 at the door.
$2 off for 60+ and students.
216-371-3000 or www.cainpark.com.

“Driving Mr. Klezmer” is Bert Stratton, Alan Douglass and Jack Stratton.

The meanest, baddest landlord in America is John T. Reed, a West Point grad in Alamo, California.  In Reed’s world, if you’re a day late with your rent, you’re on the curb with your cat and kitty litter.

Reed lost a ton of money in real estate, and made a lot of money writing about it.  I’ve read most of his books; he’s a good writer and smart.  (There are many savvy landlords but not many can write.  They’re too busy at target practice.)  Reed shows you how to twist tenants’ arms until they say: “Here’s the rent, sir, and it’s a day early!”

Reed claims you can mail it in — not the rent, but your on-site supervision.  Reed, living in California, owned apartments in Texas, so he sent postcards to his tenants, instructing them to drop dimes/postcards on his custodians and their job performances.

That long-distance supervision doesn’t work.  If I don’t check my buildings  at least once a week in person, the buildings will turn into dumps — Magic Marker on the mailbox labels, the exit lights burned out, and 100 cigarette butts on the stoop.

Nothing gets done if I don’t show up.  The painter, his back goes out until I show up.  I’m better than a chiropractor.  The Yellow Pages directories pile high in the lobby until I show up.  The grass doesn’t get cut until I show up.  I understand all that.

I say to my building managers: “You need to take care of this right away.”  And I show up.

I conduct exit surveys. I ask my former tenants if my buildings and managers are good.  The ex-tenants, long gone, are totally honest because they face no repercussions from building managers.

Here is a sample of  former tenants’ replies:

The apartment flooded.  It was not my fault!

I didn’t know I would need air conditioning in Ohio. And there wasn’t any!  [From a Californian.]

Water pressure — terrible.

Workers parked in my spot, and I was paying for it.

The marijuana smoke from the alley was very strong, and spending the summer with the windows closed was not acceptable.

The favorable comments, you don’t want to hear.  Too self-serving, too bubbly.

Maybe I should write a Nice Guy Landlord handbook.  That’s a niche John T. Reed won’t fill.  My title: How to Manage Apartments and Jam with Your Tenants, with accompanying CD featuring the songs “You Tore Out My Window Screens, Now my Heart?”, “I’d Like to Go Month-to-Month with You, Baby” and “I Can’t Find the Handle (To Your Refrigerator of Love).”

John T. Reed could be my sound man at real estate conventions.  We could share a booth. Do a good cop/ bad cop thing and split the profits.

—-
1 of 2 posts for 7/21/10.  Please see the post below too.

Yiddishe Cup is the house band at the Lake County (Ohio) Heritage Festival.  We play there every July.  Twenty years in a row.

Why don’t the organizers get somebody else?

Because we talk.  Bluegrass bands and old-time musicians don’t talk.  They just pick.  Folk musicians, they’ll talk, but it’s pabulum about trees and trysts.  Polka guys, they talk — to each other.  And they mumble.

Lake County, just east of Cleveland, is a stronghold of Italians and Slovenians.  Many are retired railroad and factory workers.  They like to hear “Eaton Axle,” “Fisher Body,” and “Collinwood Railroad Yards.”

Those aren’t songs.  They’re just words, and I like to say them. For instance, I’ll say, “Who remembers the Collinwood Yards on East One-hundred Fifty-second?”  There are a couple klezmer train songs.  There’s a hit from Russia: “7:40.”

We do “Gino,” an Orthodox Jewish tune with an Italian-sounding name.  We also do “That’s Morris,” a parody of “That’s Amore.” We introduce it with: “This is by that great Ohio Jewish composer Dean Martin.  His name in Hebrew means ‘flying tiny octopus.’”

You have to be there.

The Slovenians like to hear “Slovenian” pronounced properly: Slovene-yun, not Slovene-ian.

I explain Hebrew is loshn kodesh, the holy tongue, like Latin. Yiddish by contrast is mama-loshn, the mother tongue.  “Mama Lotion. You can buy it at CVS.”

You have to be there.

—-
2 of 2 posts for 7/21/10

—-

Sun. (July 25):  Yiddishe Cup is at the Lake County Heritage Festival, formerly the Little Mountain Folk Festival.  Painesville, Ohio. $. www.lakehistory.org.  Final revised schedule: Yiddishe Cup is on at 11 a.m., 1 p.m. and 4 p.m.

—-
Thurs., July 29:  ”Driving Mr. Klezmer” duo show at Cain Park, Cleveland Hts., 7 p.m.   $20 in advance, $23 at the door. $2 off for 60+ and students.  216-371-3000 or www.cainpark.com.  If you miss this show, your last words might be “I really screwed up.”

My cousin Bill is a big fan of Yiddishe Cup.  I’m five years older than him, so whatever I say goes, and I say, “Like my band.”

Bill flew Yiddishe Cup to Atlanta for his son’s bar mitzvah party.  (Note: my cousin Margie brought Yiddishe Cup to Kansas City for her four kids’ simchas.  Margie is also younger than me.)

We cousins usually meet up at simchas and funerals. One time, though, Bill came up to Cleveland on biz, and we weren’t at a simcha or funeral.  What to do?  Where was the smoked fish?

We went out to a Korean restaurant and a cemetery on the West Side.  The restaurant was across the street from where our grandparents were buried.

The cemetery was closed, so we crawled underneath the iron grating and looked around in the near twilight for our grandparents’ graves.

A security guard with a German shepherd approached.

I said to the man, “I know you’re closed, but my cousin came all the way from Georgia.”

The guard asked, “Are you Polish?”

“No, Jewish,” I said.

“That’s the right answer,” he said.  It was like a World War II checkpoint scene.  He let us stay.  (There had been vandalism at various West Side Jewish cemeteries.)

***

A friend, living in Israel, came home to Cleveland to bury his mother.  He had nowhere convenient to sit shiva, so he rented a room at an I-271 hotel.

He hung around that room for a couple days.  Visitors knocked on the door, which was kept ajar, to announce themselves.  Ten Jews in a suite, chanting Hebrew prayers was mystical and somewhat subversive.

My friend left after three days.  It was no picnic, that hotel, except for the picnic I brought in: $204  of kosher chicken Marsala and sides, from Norman the caterer.  (Norman is not his real name).

Norman, years ago at a gig, had thrown dirty plates all over the kitchen floor at the auto museum.  So many plates, we couldn’t roll our carts over the jumble.  It was like a Greek party center at 4 a.m.

When a wedding client called and asked about Norman, I said, “I wouldn’t use him.” Then she promptly told Norman.

It was just business, Norman! It wasn’t loshn hora (evil gossip).

Norman said the messy gig had been his first off-premises catering job. I hadn’t known that.  I told him I wouldn’t bad-rap him again.

So I dropped $204 on Norman for hot food.  Everything is kosher now between us.  He is a good experienced caterer.

My cousin Margie is coming to Cleveland next week to visit.  Where’s the food?  What to do?  Crawl under a cemetery fence in Parma?
—
1 of 2 posts for 7/14/10.  Please see the post below too.

Harvey Pekar wasn’t that funny in real life.  He was a campeón del mundo bitch-moaner.  He would drey you with pedantic lectures on, say, an avant-garde jazz musician or a neglected writer such as George Gissing.  Harvey threw in gobs of “you know’s,” connectors that allowed him to talk for a half-hour nonstop and still retain membership in the Youse Guys Club.  The lectures were always about Harvey, with the occasional aside about the neglected artist, who was also really Harvey.

When Harvey edited his work for his comic books, he distilled a year’s worth of  harangues and keen journalistic observation into a few thousand words.  The comic book — the insights, the dead-on dialogue and the self-deprecating humor — was the opposite of his rambles.

Ray Dobbins (a.k.a. Jim Flannigan), the author of Don the Burp and Other Stories, was an ex-Clevelander in New York who lived in the East Village near a Village Voice critic.  Dobbins showed Harvey’s early comic books to critic Robert Christgau and his wife, Carola Dibbell, who wrote up Harvey for the Voice, Dec. 31, 1979.

Onward.

Through the ensuing acclaim and fame, Harvey was, still, the Kinsman Road boy who unfortunately attended Shaker Heights High.  That move — from proste Kinsman to fancy-schmancy Shaker of the 1950s –  contributed mightily to Harvey’s me-against-the-world attitude.  Read about it.  It’s in his comic books.

At my first son’s bris in 1981,  Harvey gravitated toward the mohel, an Orthodox rabbi.

Harvey told me he was going to write about the bris.  Something about the mohel raising his arms and saying, “Golden hands!”

Pekar saw things others missed.  And he got it down on paper.

—-
["Drey" is  turn/pester.  "Proste" is common/boorish.]

[More on Harvey at "Where is My Harvey Pekar Bobblehead?", a Klezmer Guy post from 2/3/10.]

—
2 of 2 posts for 7/14/10
—

See “Driving Mr. Klezmer” 7 p.m. Thurs., July 29, at Cain Park, Alma Theater, Cleveland Heights.  $20 in advance. $23 at the door.  Call 216-371-3000 or visit www.cainpark.com.

“Driving Mr. Klezmer” is a clutch-popping trip through the states of klezmer, pop, Tin Pan Alley and spoken word.  The ride: a Ford Tsuris.

The show is a nudnik/beatnik mash-up of music and comedy.  Bert Stratton is on clarinet and spoken word (i.e., this blog). Alan Douglass, the chauffeur, is on vocals and keyboards.

–

Subs are often the best musicians.  They’re great ear players.

I’ve subbed a few times.  One time I wore a suit instead of a tux and got The Ray (the stare) from the bandleader.  Another time I iced my tendinitis during a break and almost missed the downbeat (the start of the next set).

I don’t do much subbing.  I’m not the greatest ear player and my sight-reading skills are only so-so.

The worst player in the band should be the leader, who then hires people better than himself.

[Subliminal message  for non-readers: Jump to the video at the end of this post.]

Playing by ear . . . that’s the big mysterious matzo ball of music.  Fact: You can get better at playing by ear. A little better.  First, close your eyes for a minute before practicing.  Listen to the clock and your neighbor’s barking dog.  Then play a couple notes, eyes closed, like C, D, and E, and imagine why they’re different.  What is the distance between the notes?

You have no idea.

Follow up with a chromatic scale, C-C#-D-D#-E, and you’ll have an idea.  The chromatic run sounds like swarming bees, à la “Flight of the Bumblebee.”  This chromatic run “looks” zig-zaggy, as if you’re walking up the fire-exit steps at a downtown hotel.  C is the first floor, C# is the landing, and D is the second floor. You begin to feel the intervals (the leaps).

Don’t underestimate the eyes-closed part.  Pretend you have eye strain and need to rest your eyes.

If you’re a professional musician, try playing with your eyes closed on stage occasionally.  It’ll clear the visual clutter.  I spent 30 minutes at a concert trying to remember my kids’ preschool teacher’s name.  She was in the audience.  My kids are in their twenties.  I should have had my eyes closed.

***

I encouraged a gentile Yiddishe Cup musician to attend KlezKamp, the klezmer convention, to learn klezmer conventions.  When the KlezKamp registrar asked his Yiddish name, I interrupted, “Farbisener.” (Bitter One.)

My musician wore his Farbisener ID badge for five days.  He could take a joke — barely.

I’ve had goys in Yiddishe Cup since the beginning.  That’s no surprise.  Have you been to an Orthodox Jewish wedding in the Midwest?  The sole Jewish musician is often the singer, because he has to know Hebrew.  The rest of the band might be jazzers, many of whom are cool dudes with cigs, fraying tuxes, and war stories about backing up Jerry Lewis and Tom Jones.  Divide everything they say in half.   But they can play — anything from Charlie Parker to Madonna.

Some subs, on the other hand, are not old jazzers; they are young music school grads who don’t smoke, don’t dress like shlubs, and know all the tunes — and are also full of BS.  If a young sub says he just made $500, that means he drove to New York, slept on a couch, and didn’t calculate his travel expenses.  He has never heard of depreciation.

I hired a sub from a small town near Canton, Ohio.  (Yes, Canton is small, but this guy’s ville was very small.)  He played terrific guitar and sang in Italian, Spanish and English. He had grown up in three countries.  He claimed he did 260 gigs a year — a lot.  Most were quality gigs, he said, although some were “wallpaper” (background music), and some outright sucked: “I had a gig playing dinner parties for the Hoover vacuum family.”

Subs need quips to regale the band at breaks.  The regulars demand it; they are sick of each other’s jokes and stories.

The toughest job in music — subbing.

—-

This vid clip is from the “Driving Mr. Klezmer” show.  Includes klezmer and Mickey Katz’s “16 Tons,” followed by Alan Douglass, on keyboards, reciting the first verse of Genesis in Hebrew.  Not bad for a gentile.

See “Driving Mr. Klezmer” 7 p.m. Thurs., July 29, at Cain Park, Alma Theater, Cleveland Heights.  $20 in advance. $23 at the door.  Call 216-371-3000 or visit www.cainpark.com.

“Driving Mr. Klezmer” is a clutch-popping trip through the states of klezmer, pop, Tin Pan Alley and spoken word.  The ride: a Ford Tsuris.

The show is a nudnik/beatnik mash-up of music and comedy.  Bert Stratton is on clarinet and spoken word (i.e., this blog). Alan Douglass, the chauffeur, is on vocals and keyboards.

Congregation Beth Am’s social hall smelled.  The stained drop-ceiling tiles were caked with decades of latke grease.  And where did Beth Am get that gefilte fish air freshener it used in the back entrance?  My bubbe’s place on Kinsman, 1960, smelled crisper.

Yiddishe Cup played the last wedding at Beth Am in 1999.  The Cleveland Heights building is now the New Community Bible Fellowship, with crowds like for Yom Kipper every Sunday morning.

Beth Am had approximately 400 adult members on closing day. The shul debated downsizing, closing, or merging with a bigger temple.  Syn biz: shul income comes from dues, social hall rentals and contributions.  That’s it.

I voted not to merge with the bigger, newer shul out east.  “If I forget thee, O Heights . . .”

One-fifth of the congregation voted to stay.  Four-fifths said, “Let’s get out of here!”

The rabbi, Michael Hecht, said “Let’s go, people.”  His opinion counted.  Like most congregants, I respected Rabbi Hecht.  He liked opera, classical music and musicians in general.  He put musicians in the same category as physicians.  That alone was worth paying full dues.  Rabbi Hecht, who knew some Greek, said “musician” meant “healer by Muse,” and “physician” meant “healer by physics /nature.”

He also said a congregant, no matter how poor, can give tzedakkah (charity).  If you’re broke, give blood, he said.  That stuck with me.

Rabbi Hecht was not warm and fuzzy. He was not Mr. Jingeling.  He wouldn’t go full-costume on Purim.  Maybe a crazy hat.  That was it. He was a Yekkie (German Jew) who sermonized on how life is not fair.  He said we should try to incrementally improve the planet.  He called that distributing “artificial justice.”

***

Richard Shatten, a Beth Am congregant, indirectly gave me the nickname Klezmer Guy.  He didn’t realize it.

Richard died of a brain tumor at 47.  When I went to his shiva, Richard’s wife said, “Here’s the klezmer guy.”  She blanked on my name.  Richard had known a lot of people, the room was crowded, and I didn’t blame his wife for not knowing my name.  Richard had been an urban-planning strategist, who via non-profit and academic jobs tried to halt the town’s economic decline.  He also played clarinet.

Richard took a solo at his oldest daughter’s bat mitzvah party.  Gutsy, because he hadn’t played much since high school.

Richard liked to schmooze with me at shul, because for one reason I had “primary source data,” as he called it; I knew tenants’ credit histories, their education levels, where the tenants were moving from, and where tenants’ parents lived.  Richard couldn’t get enough of that.  He wanted to attract young people back to Cleveland.  He himself had gone to Harvard and come back.

He hosted his kid’s bat mitzvah party at a formerly anti-Semitic country club near Shaker Square, just to do something totally urban.  No way was he going to the generic party center out by I-271.

When Richard died, his funeral was out by I-271.  Couldn’t be helped.  The newer shul out there – the one Beth Am merged with, and Richard had voted against — was the only place big enough to hold all Richard’s friends and family.

I am the Sol Hiccup — maybe — of klezmer shows in Cleveland.  I am a volunteer on a Workmen’s Circle committee that has brought in Kapelye, Pharaoh’s Daughter, Theodore Bikel, Chava Alberstein, the Klezmatics, the Klezmer Conservatory Band, Shtreiml, Beyond the Pale, Susan Hoffman Watts and many more.

It’s not my money; it’s the Workmen’s Circle’s concert endowment earnings.

Many committee members don’t know much about Jewish music, so my opinion carries weight. Sometimes my picks work, sometimes, not.

Anything experimental, feh.  Too much kvitching (squeaking) on the clarinet, feh.  Hebrew songs — no thanks, it’s a Yiddish concert. Obscure Yiddish songs — no thanks.

Last year the committee brought in Yiddishe Cup (from a distance of  7,920 feet).  The band played mainstream klezmer and did Mickey Katz–style Yinglish comedy.

A committee member said the band didn’t play enough klezmer instrumentals.  He said, “That’s what the Russians wanted to hear. They came to hear klezmer music, not  . . .” He paused.  “Ech, you were OK.”  Not a bad review, considering this critic  — a 94-year-old Yiddishist — often favored “horrible,” “not Jewish enough,” and “jazz - why jazz?”

Giora Feidman, the renowned Israeli clarinetist, played all instrumentals one year.  That was nisht gut (no good).  No vocals.

Where was the road to a good program? “Call Zalmen in New York,” according to one veteran committee member.  Call Zalmen Mlotek.

Zalman is not 94 years old, even though his name is.  Zalman is a baby-boomer pianist, theater director, and macher in the klezmer world.  He knows just about every quality Yiddish performer.

Zalman’s job, from the concert committee’s standpoint, was to forestall repertoire malfunctions.  The committee, which included several lawyers, stipulated performers should deliver “at least 70 percent Yiddish content.”  No more all-instrumental shows or predominately Hebrew and English song fests.

For instance, the headliner in 2007 had counted “Di Grine Kusine” (The Greenhorn Cousin) 100 percent Yiddish content, even though his group’s version was mostly instrumental jazz solos. When I told him he hadn’t fulfilled his Yiddish quota, he said, “Why are you telling me this the minute I walk off stage!”

He had a point. I should have waited.  But his pianist had taken more solos, on the clock, than his Yiddish vocalist.

I was only doing my job.  And I was in trouble. I was coming off a bad year; I had recommended an “experimental” act the year before.  I was losing my Sol Hiccup credibility.

We brought in a Canadian band, Beyond the Pale.  They covered the bases, mixing klezmer instrumentals and Yiddish songs. I was redeemed for a while.

Then a long-time committee member quit.  She said there wasn’t enough Yiddish, and hadn’t been enough mama-loshn (Yiddish/mother tongue) for more than a decade.

Azoy geyt es. (So it goes.)

A majority of the Yiddish-speaking audience was in the cemetery along with the committee’s top pick, Bruce Alder, a terrific Yiddish song-and-dance man who had died in 2008.  Our concert ushers — World War II Jewish War Vets — were also with Bruce.

I played a party for Jewish war vets. They were Vietnam guys, looking just like World War II vets, except breathing. The vets liked “Old Time Rock and Roll.”  I couldn’t see them ushering a klezmer concert.

This summer’s Yiddish concert is Sunday, featuring “New Voices of the Yiddish Stage,” an ad hoc musical variety show from Folksbiene — Zalmen Mlotek’s theater in New York.  The musicians are in their twenties and thirties.  Clarinetist Michael Winograd alone is worth the price of admission. 

Aside to the  “New Voices”  performers: Jazz is a four-letter word west of the Hudson.

—

The 32nd annual Yiddish Concert in the Park is 3 p.m. Sun. (June 27) at Cain Park, Evans Amphitheater, Cleveland Heights.  Free admission.  The concert is a co-production of the Workmen’s Circle and the City of  Cleveland Heights.

My father, Toby, ate his last meal out at Wendy’s on his way to Columbus, Ohio, for experimental leukemia treatments.

He checked in to the hospital, then checked out, so to speak.

My father liked Wendy’s (headquartered in Columbus) because he had a quasi-business relationship with the company.  Toby had almost invested in Wendy’s before it went national.  Almost. Toby’s near-miss with Wendy’s stock topped any of my uncles’ near-miss sagas at Seder.

Toby liked fast food. He and I often ate at McDonald’s on the West Side.  I got the Filet-O-Fish.  I thought it was good for me.

Toby explained franchising: the franchisor took a percentage of the action for eternity. Toby had been a franchisee/sucker with a cosmetics company - and he knew something about the food business too.  He especially knew about chazerai (junk).  Toby had worked in his mother’s candy store, dipping ice cream bars into vats of chocolate, and writing “free” on a few wooden ice cream sticks.  Very few.

When I visited my father’s grave the first couple times, I brought along Mr. Goodbars.  Once, a Planters Peanut.  (The bars were for me, by the way.)

***

I raised the rent on the flower-shop guy a mere $10 per month. Toby smiled and said, “You’re a nice guy.”  I think Toby’s smile — a rarity — meant he was glad I wasn’t a total hardass like him.  We had arrived.

Decades later, I sat at the West Side McDonald’s with my oldest son, Ted, 28.  I now knew the Filet-O-Fish was a calorie bomb, so I ordered the chicken Caesar salad.  Ted, like his late grandfather Toby, ordered a huge burger.

I was instructing my son on the watchword of our people: Don’t be a sucker.

Lesson one: The first generation (Grandpa) scrapes, the second (Dad) tries to keep things on keel, and the third (Ted) needs tutorials in toughness because he doesn’t remember his grandfather.

During Toby’s final days, the Cleveland Clinic nurses called him “chief” because he was so bossy.  A doc said, “You’re a hard one.”  Toby answered, “That’s right.  It’s my life.”  A nurse wondered if Toby was in the medical field because he had a stack of homemade medical folders.

Toby was flattered. The closest Toby had come to the medical field was a dental school acceptance in the 1950s, but he couldn’t afford to go because he had kids.

I told my son not to forget the little things: pens, checks, camera, Post-It notes.  Lesson one: “Write everything down.  You don’t want to think about ‘cold water leak, Webb #24 bathroom sink,’” I said.

Lesson two: Be wary of restaurant workers, particularly chefs and servers.  They come home late, party hard, and wake up the solid-citizen tenants in the building.

Lesson three: Always Be Closing.  ABC.   That was from a David Mamet play/movie, and was a joke between my son and me.  My son, like every other young person, enjoyed quoting movies verbatim.

I thought of a non-movie line for Ted.  I said, “If the tenant hasn’t mailed his rent, say, ‘Do not mail in your late rent.  Hand it to the custodian.  Hand it.’ We don’t want to wonder if the post office has lost the check.”

Ted seemed more interested in his burger.  I wasn’t up to Mamet’s standards.

“The job sucks on some level!” I said.  That got the boy’s attention.  “You make it interesting.  It took me a while.”

***

My father dragged me to a lightning-round tutorial with Cousin Gershy.  (Gershy is short for Gershon.)  Gershy looked horrible — three strokes and two heart attacks.  My dad didn’t look much better.

Gershy had shotguns over the mantle, plus a longhorn steer horn and shalom plaques.  ”You wouldn’t believe it, but I used to be a shtartker,” Gershy said.   (Strong guy/bully.)

I believed it.

Gershy said, “You’ve got that little curl in the tail — that little something different — that something the new treatment doesn’t cure.   You’re in trouble.  They say, ‘We can’t straighten out your tail. You’re dead.’  That’s what the doctors tell me.”

Gershy’s steer horn cost $50.  A gun dealer, who had sold the horn to Gershy, wanted it back.  “Gun dealers is a funny ballpark,” Gershy said.  “He could shoot me, but a deal is a deal.  That’s the way it is.”

Gershy owned a shopping strip center on Mayfield Road in Cleveland Heights.

His price was too high, Toby said.

“If the kid is interested,” Gershy said, looking at me. “I’d come down.”

“It’s up to the kid,” Toby said.

“I’ll work with him,” Gershy said.

***

Driving home, Toby said, “Gershy has mellowed.”

Mellowed? Gershy would not pass for mellow in my Donovan world.

“And he’s a gonif,” Toby said.  “Don’t buy anything from him.”

I didn’t.

At McDonald’s, I told my son, “If a real estate broker claims operating expenses are forty-five percent, he’s delusional.  Building operating ratios are higher than that.”  I slid a Wall Street Journal across the table.  “Take it.  Take the paper.”  The Journal was the best I could offer.  I didn’t see any Gershys or Tobys around.  Unless you count me.

I played a crummy clarinet, blasting against the side of a barn door on a bike trip in rural Ohio.  I nearly destroyed my lip.

Last summer my friend Mark Schilling from Japan said he wanted to ride the Great Ohio Bicycle Adventure (GOBA), so I couldn’t very well say: “Mark, I’m passing on GOBA.  I have a big gig coming up and need to practice.”

I had to practice for Yiddishe Cup’s twentieth anniversary concert, which was the day after the bike tour.

Some musicians don’t need to practice; they practiced in music school and can wing it as adults.  I wasn’t a music major.  I have to feel the notes in my fingers and brain almost daily before a big show.

My borrowed, cheap clarinet had decayed pads, squeaky keys and cracked dirty reeds.  The mouthpiece had layers of caked lip gunk. The axe was plastic and generic.  No name.  I got it from a friend.  Ray-somebody in Sioux City, Iowa, had once repaired it; his card was in the case.

Why didn’t I have a back-up axe of my own? Was this an example of rigid thinking on my part?  I had put my professional clarinet through so much — parades and other outdoor indignities — and didn’t own a back-up.  For example, I should have had a plastic horn for the 2004 Israel Independence Day parade when we marched outside in 40 degrees. (One Yiddishe Cup musician went AWOL on that parade because he didn’t play under 50.)

On the GOBA trip, I played next to the Wood County Fairgrounds sheep barn.  If I had stood in the middle of the horse-showing ring and played — without the barn wall to bounce sound off — I would have blown my lip out even more.

I had to practice high notes, which cheap clarinets don’t do well.  You need a decent mouthpiece and a quality reed.  I bit down hard and tore my lower, inside cheek.

Nobody on the bike tour – about 2,500 riders — complained about my playing.  Midwesterners, particularly bicyclists, are very tolerant and polite.

I also practiced at a high school football field. That town, Elmore, had a bass drone coming from the Ohio Turnpike a block away.

I used cortisone cream on my cheek.

The final day of the ride, my friend and I performed at the bike rally’s talent show.  Mark and I had written a song about aching backs, bad food and smelly port-a-potties.  So had all the other contestants.  The difference: our tune had a klezmer clarinet.

We riffed on the melody “Nayer Sher,” a.k.a. the “Wedding Samba,” popularized by Xavier Cugat.  I had heard that 1950s tune on Muzak in a Cleveland grocery store.  The song had crossover appeal.

But we didn’t win.

A barbershop trio did.  They sang about tandem bike riders smelling each other’s gas.  We hadn’t thought of that.

Irwin Weinberger, a veteran GOBA cyclist and Yiddishe Cup’s singer, came in second.  Irwin inserted port-a-potty lyrics into the Kinks’ “Lola.”

Irwin hadn’t practiced all week.  Irwin is a natural.  And he’s a gas.

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GOBA begins June 20 in Logan, Ohio. The GOBA encampment is half Pilot Gas rest stop, half Cabela’s.  There are six semi-haulers and many tents.  The semis carry the cyclists’ baggage.  Two of the semis are actually mobile shower trucks (which are sometimes used for natural disasters). There is close-quarters snoring on the football field, with hundreds of tents pitched within several feet of each other.  Rated: Difficult.
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Yiddishe Cup plays the post-parade concert at Parade The Circle 1 p.m. this Sat. (June 12).  Wade Oval, Cleveland. Traffic tip: Ride your bike to the parade and park in the Ohio City Bicycle Co-op lot.