Tiorunda Stories

John Marohn
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"No one is immune from the imperfections, dark secrets, and daily foibles of a close-knit community where everybody’s business is everybody’s business.

A cynical nun, a jaded priest, a Polish aristocrat, a cuckolded policeman, an over-the-hill womanizer, an alcoholic, and a sado-masochist are just some of the characters in this novel set in a fifties housing project outside of Buffalo, New York."

Listen to an interview with the author, John Marohn,
by Spiritmorph Studio with Roxanne Amico

Chapter One - Tiorunda

Terry Milligan’s grandfather told him that Tiorunda was once a greyhound racetrack before the projects were built. Father Ludwig said that the track was supposed to ease people into getting used to real gambling. “Dogs are meant to be companions,” he added. “Companions don’t steal your money.” To kids who saw their parents play blackjack and poker at the Mother of Divine Grace lawn fetes, a racetrack of thinly-sliced greyhounds was merely innocent preparation for the more serious ventures into chestnut-colored horses and soft-clicking roulette wheels. These would come later in our lives. All we knew was that the Tiorunda projects were home to us, with their four-family row houses on the extreme west and east ends, and single-family homes and doubles comfortably segregated from the rented row houses.

There was a large field with a baseball diamond and a playground in the center of the projects. But even Charley Dittinger, the kid who ended up as a hotshot shortstop in one of the major leagues, said that he didn’t ever remember any families sitting in lawn chairs behind the chain-link fence at home plate rooting for their kids. On any Saturday in June or July, we just showed up after lunch with our Sears baseball mitts, our Woolworth’s sneakers, and a pack of Dentyne gum. Loyalty was an acquired taste; we never knew what team we would end up on the next week, so we had to hold back our enthusiasm.

The four-family apartments had pebbled parking spaces for one car, a coal bin, which became obsolete when the furnaces converted to natural gas in the early 1950s, and a small square porch with room for five or six empty milk bottles, a shovel, and a couple of roller skates during the summer. No one questioned why the kitchen was the first room any Tiorunda kid entered from the street. Foyers would have just delayed the rush to the kitchen table which was usually planted in front of the sink and gas stove. The furnace and utility rooms were separated from the kitchen by long cotton curtains. Mr. Loon was the only one on West 8th Street to use the utility room for a photography darkroom. Nancy Loon told Terry Milligan she thought he was developing photographs that he had secretly taken of her mother with her new boyfriend.

The projects formed a white ghetto running along Maryvale Drive, Harlem Road, and Genesee Street, all the streets that became the Mason-Dixon line between the Cheektowaga haves and have-nots. If any of us ventured out of the projects, it was usually to go swimming at Schiller Park; to see a thirteen-cent movie at the Commodore Theater next to Holy Redeemer Church on Genesee Street; or to visit a newly-acquired rich girlfriend in the Cleveland Hill district. On the weekends, those of us who didn’t have cars took the Harlem Road bus that went around the southern circle of the projects to Genesee Street, past the VFW Post, and up Harlem Road through Sloan, a neighboring village. Eventually, we would make it to Sattler’s, a department store, on our first stop; from there, we would cross the street to the Broadway Market with its endless assortment of Polish sausage, Easter eggs, and sponge candy. When the Tiorunda guys were old enough to drive, they would hang out at Posmanture’s, the men’s clothing store across from the Market, with its silk shirts, pegged pants, and black Italian shoes.

Many of the men worked at Westinghouse or on the assembly line at the Chevy and Ford plants. Mr. Jeffers worked at Bethlehem Steel and Bobby Jensen’s father managed the grocery store next to the Presbyterian Church off Maryvale Drive. Mr. Loon was a driver for Hall’s Bakery and one of the volunteer firemen who helped put out the fire at the Cleveland Hill Elementary School. From the parking lot of Mother of Divine Grace school, all the kids could see the black smoke billowing from the roof of the building. That was the year Father Ludwig and Sister Eustace never talked about salvation outside the Church. When two Protestant kids died in the fire, including the Presbyterian minister’s daughter, it seemed like a moot point.

Mr. Antoine, Sister Eustace’s father, was a Buffalo policeman at Precinct 12 on North Parade in the City of Buffalo; he tried to beat the city’s residency requirement by convincing himself that Tiorunda was close enough to the city line to take a trolley or a bus into the city. The local law, he figured, could easily accommodate itself to the hardworking second-shift cop who was willing to walk through a cemetery in the middle of the afternoon to get to public transportation and then to walk home through the same cemetery at one or two in the morning—an act of heroism, he believed, no matter how desperate the city was for residents.

There were few exceptions to the Tiorunda husbands and fathers who were hard-drinking, baseball-obsessed, weekend poker players always bragging about how long they were willing to sit up in a tree stand to bring home a deer. Mr. Jeffers claimed that he went without water, bread, or cigarettes for forty-two hours. Tony Muggadino’s father said that he started to hallucinate in the tree after ten hours. Mr. Smythe told his drunken wife that he wrote an entire play in his head during the three days he sat in the stand. They were the same men who ran the tents at the summer lawn fetes of Mother of Divine Grace. George Betz had gotten an early start. He became famous for having the quickest and strongest nineteen-year-old hands of anybody in the projects for opening clam shells, a talent we all envied when we fantasized about becoming adults and opening up our own seafood bars along the Old Lake Shore Road that ran along Lake Erie.

George was our mentor, our divinely-inspired local icon, who seemed to all the guys on West 8th Street just to know things, this jaded gigolo in tight white leather pants, brown cowboy boots, and two turquoise rings on each hand. On his Ja-Fa-Fa-hot-dog-stand income of twenty bucks a week, he led us to believe that he could afford his goldenrod Thunderbird convertible, the hottest pimp car in the projects with its shark-mouth grill and eyelid headlights on the end of two sleek fenders looking like strapped-on missiles. On a humid August Friday night at the Cheektowaga Town Park street dance, he would stand languorously against the rear fender in his large dark sunglasses, head cocked, his jaw resting in the crevice of his thumb and forefinger as he scouted the willing and the weak, his two turquoise rings glistening in the rays of the setting sun, his tanned, muscled arms exposed below the rolled sleaves of his T-shirt, a near-empty pack of Lucky Strikes nestled in one of the folds. It was then that we realized that he could open clam shells on a dime and break every Cleveland Hill girl’s heart in one stroke of cool indifference. George’s agenda was to woo, to seduce, to insinuate himself into the lives of the senior high bobby-soxers who were always humbled by what they were afraid George knew. George, as they say, worked the fear. If fear were absent, he could always rely on envy.

Joe Jeffers, the West 8th Street chronic drunk, lived from paycheck to paycheck. All the neighbors on the street knew when he came in at four on a Saturday morning, revving the motor of his Buick Riviera, burning rubber as he swung around the corner at twenty miles an hour, slamming on the brakes in front of his house. Mabel, his wife, would open the window and scream, “You’re not coming into this house drunk. Sleep in the car.” When the kids went outside to play over-the-roof or kick-the-can, Joe would be asleep in the back seat of his car, waking up as four or five kids stared through the rear window, their sweaty noses pressed against the glass. There were few adolescents on the street who hadn’t learned to say the Saturday morning Joe Jeffers prayer, “What the fuck you lookin’ at?”

Father Ludwig, the pastor of Mother of Divine Grace, had his hands full. One of the Dominican nuns collected holy cards of martyrs and saints being beheaded, racked, or tortured. Another nun loved to smoke cigars and do oil changes. Mrs. Smythe, the other drunk in the projects, would call the priest almost every week to complain about her husband and children. Mrs. Loon would show up for Mass every morning in her hot pink poodle skirt and black cinch belt. Father Ludwig himself had his own demons that he embraced whenever the dailiness of his life overwhelmed him. If he frequented Chippewa Street, Buffalo’s red light district, when the tasks of running a Church had stolen his serenity, we forgave him for having succumbed to the slippery devils that Tiorunda had become known for by the Cleveland Hill snobs. Since the Hill was unattainable for most of us, nothing it believed about the projects carried much credibility. And the demons became our creative trademarks, something that gave us the energy to squander what few talents we had.

Marriages in the projects were mostly death-do-us-part contracts, approved by the Vatican, monitored by Father Ludwig, and succumbed to by tired mothers and fathers who had been drained of their adolescent restlessness. Wanderings “beyond the hearth,” as Father Ludwig used to call them, were chancy ventures into the risk pool of gossip, quiet hints, and vocal junior-high schoolers who had refused to be embarrassed into silence.

When Terry Milligan was in eighth grade, he would see Mrs. Loon walking every day down Maryvale Drive towards Harlem Road. “Where’s Mrs. Loon going every day?” he would ask George Betz, the shaman of sexual conspiracies. “I see her walking down Maryvale Drive every morning at seven-thirty.”

“What do you think, kid? She’s not getting anything at home with the queer she’s living with. Where the hell you been? On Mars? She’s been pumping it out like a Las Vegas whore for the last couple of years. The Deco Restaurant on Cleveland Drive hasn’t rocked with that much trim since Goldy Pine gave a blow job to Father Ludwig in the parking lot after he heard her confession in the back seat of his Chevy Impala.”

At the Buffalo Drive-In, on a hot Saturday night in August thick with possibilities, the Tiorunda gladiators would sit in their used Buicks with their tanned Cleveland Hill conquests eating popcorn, drinking Coca Cola, waiting expectantly for the silence of vague permissions to do what was required to maintain reputations, to be the poets of rabid conquests and willing surrenders. Terry Milligan lied about his age and worked there as an usher. He quickly discovered the erotic appeal of his new job as he secretly watched the frantic and clumsy sex scenes in the back seats of cars during the horror films that offered numerous opportunities for the Tiorunda conquerers to seduce their dates. When he pointed his flashlight into the side passenger windows of the cars as they sauntered in like Roman chariots, Terry was able to recount to a captive male audience of altar boys and basketball jocks the full range of Cheektowaga female lips—the tight, thin lips of Betty Lou Bissinger; the full fleshy orange-shaped lips of Rhoda Fleming; the pale, shy lips of Rita Dobson; the oval, festive lips of Kathleen Donnelly.

Terry could easily move from lane to lane during the movies and watch the gyrating cars of George Betz or Johnny Lane energized by the easy willingness of all the girls who lived in the English Tudor homes off Cleveland Drive. He had to clean up after the movies, wearing rubber gloves to pick up all the safeties littering the grounds. He told Nancy Loon that Friday nights were the heaviest “fish mouth” nights. To the teenagers on West 8th Street, the drive-in was just another sexual venue competing with beaches, bars, cemeteries, rural roads, basements, attics, the last row of the Commodore Theater, the large water conduits under Maryvale Drive, Harry Bellow’s outdoor swimming pool on Pine Ridge Road, or “the bushes” off Harlem Road where the kids would go to scout each other out, pursue villains, tie up their imaginary horses to branches, give the bad guys a final chance to surrender, or catch a moonlit glance of George Betz’s bare ass pumping and swiveling against the earth’s gravity.

And George was the like the rest of the rabble that hung out at the Cheektowaga Town Park—Eric Hart in his Montana Hat and bulging gut that hung over his diamond studded leather belt like the Goodyear blimp; Betty Lou Mertz with her cyclotron Jane Russell breasts breathing life into her polka-dotted tight fitting silk blouse; the feather-framed Mike Jazinski leaning against the ribbed bark of the single oak tree a few feet away from the blocked off street, doing his sultry Frank Sinatra imitation in his black cotton shirt, his khaki pants with their sewn creases, a Camel cigarette dangling from his cracked lips; the Cleveland Hill Bettie Page vixen, Sue Peltro, her olive skin, jet-black bangs, and coal-dark eyes daring Terry Milligan to renounce his innocence.

In a sea of swirling pleated skirts and pegged pants, vines of arms gyrating, beckoning, holding, twirling, to the pulsing beats of “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” or “Rock Around the Clock,” the kids would do their jitterbugs with all of the Eggbeater, Butt Spin, Table Top variations of slides and bumps. Any thoughts of redemption or salvation were put on hold until Saturday night confession time with Father Ludwig.

July and August Saturday nights at Mother of Divine Grace, the summer purging rituals after the Friday night orgies of Tiorunda abandon, became the dance of the innocent and the guilty. Sixteen-year-olds recalling the number of times they disobeyed their parents or had impure thoughts about Nancy Loon in her flaming red poodle dress or Sue Peltro’s hair that folded onto her shoulders like dark corn husk silk; Noxema girls making their feeble attempts at guilt while holding on to their Hollywood fantasies about George Betz’s tight jeans or being whisked off from a street dance in his Thunderbird convertible, their white socks lingering in George’s glove compartment or back seat.

Adolescent cravings were placed on the platter of sins like hors-d’oeuvres, the small delicacies we were to learn were just the appetizers, the wished-for preparations for serious ventures into the inevitable. Adult sins. Grown-up faults. The revenge of the Medici. The infidelities of Cleopatra. Nothing, we were told by Sister Eustace, would escape God’s eyes. Confession, the less-than-cruel cleansing that would temporarily heal us of guilt, would redeem us back to a purged life, silencing the past to secrecy.

When the circuitry of the damned, like Charley Santano, was so damaged, none of us knew how confession could redeem him or return that innocence that we all thought had roamed freely in the hearts of children before that civilizing, but boring time the Baltimore Catechism called “being mindful.” And Mrs. Antoine and Mrs. Loon? Why would they be forgiven every week? How could they go through life with a few more decades of the rosary when the rest of us had done no more damage to the universe than a few broken windows or a stolen bike? God’s justice seemed too cruel when a harlot’s soul could be washed clean as a bed sheet while the rest of us stood in line, our trivial faults dropped into the basket of God’s felonies. Silence, acceptance, those quiet deferences to the conditions as they were became the calling cards of what we all knew to be the truth of our lives.

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Biography

John Marohn was born in Buffalo, New York and currently lives in the Elmwood district. The author grew up in the Tiorunda projects, now called Cedargrove Heights, in the fifties.

A graduate of St. Bonaventure University, Olean, New York, and Canisius College in Buffalo, John taught at St. Mary's High School in Depew, New York early in his career and at Niagara County Community College for thirty years. Retiring from the NCCC's English Department seven years ago, John is currently a freelance writer whose novel, Tiorunda Stories, will be available for publication in May 2008. He is also completing a non-fiction work related to alcohol recovery entitled, The Journey, and a third work, I'll Take You Home Again, a novel set in the thirties and forties in South Buffalo.

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