A Test Drive to Chicago: And Other Trips and Tales

By David J. Suvak

Back when I was seventeen, a buddy and I took a car for a test drive. I guess we really wanted to test it because we drove it all the way from the suburbs of Cleveland to Chicago. That was one of the first of many trips in my life. Since then, they have been tamer and less intense but, certainly, still exciting.

Ive come across quite a few memorable people and places, and this story touches some of those experiences. We all have our little story to tell about our lives, and this is mine. It is here that I share them with you, and I hope you find some enjoyment out of it.

I look forward to someday reading about your story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 29, 2012
• ISBN: 9781479755554

David J. Suvak

A native of Ohio, David Suvak has crisscrossed the country the past fifteen years working as a park ranger. He currently resides in Missouri with his cat, Katmai.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

EARLY MORNING CRIMINALS

I had lived in Parma for about three years when I started to help Roy with his paper route. Everyone wondered why in hell anyone would want to wake up at five in the morning to help deliver newspapers and not even get paid for it. To be honest with you, I truly loved it. It not only gave me a chance to spend quality time with a good friend of mine, but also gave me an opportunity to have the neighborhood to myself.

For Roy, who was the same age as I, this kind of independent experience was long gone by the time I came along. The thought of having to wake up so early every day was pure insanity. For me, it gave me a chance to live in a world were I could do whatever I pleased, as long as it didn’t wake anybody.

It was the feeling of having the world to myself, and I enjoyed the intense quiet, the darkness just before the anticipating light of day, and the knowledge of knowing that I got up before everyone else in the world. I felt a step ahead of everyone else. I guess it was a new thrill, and thrills didn’t happen very often for a fifteen-year-old living in a typical, boring American suburb.

I was on to something because this new idea of helping a buddy with a paper route began to gain interest. Soon, Jim would come out to join us every now and then. The same phenomenon was happening for Derrick who had his own paper route three streets away. Some of his friends would help him deliver papers. I never knew I could be such a trend setter.

It would be on a typical Saturday morning, or if it was the summer, any morning, I would roll out of my bed. Quickly, I would change clothes and grab a bowl of cereal before I navigated Parma’s dark streets to Roy’s house. Everything was dark and still. Only the first birds of the day would be chirping, and a car or two would pass down Fifty-Fourth Street.

I would tap a slight knock on Roy’s side door, and his father would answer. Now, I had gotten to know Roy quite well over the last year, and we had become close friends. After a while, I felt like a member to his small family. He was an only child and I became quite close to his parents as well.

His father opened the door and left it open as I let myself in. To the right, I climbed the three steps into their kitchen. It was a rather worn kitchen. I seated myself at the table and waited for Roy to climb down the steps. I was always ready before he was.

We had a great time talking about anything and everything as we walked up and down a dark Theota Ave. I remember how grown-up I felt talking about the 1991 Persian Gulf War when it broke out and how it would effect us. Of course, we had no idea how short of a war it was. But, usually, we talked about rock music and girls.

I helped him on his route so often that I had it memorized. I knew what papers went to what house and on what day. So when an opportunity arouse for Roy to escape on a summer vacation, he entrusted his route to me. I did get paid while doing this but I could care less if I did or didn’t.

Over time, though, differences arose between the two of us and our friendship began to wane. I started to hang out with Derrick and another neighborhood kid, Justin.

At this age of my life, as is usual for all, I was getting all the more restless. I had a burning desire growing in me, a desire to do something reckless and daring. Something I someday could look back on and say, I did that, with some satisfaction. I was young and didn’t know any better but I got away with it, or Ya, I did it. I got caught and learned something, but I was a teen. Teens always do those sort of things. I could have done worse.

It is better to do something when you’re young. If you wait too long to screw up, the consequences will be greater. I just wanted to do something different, something bad.

The early morning was a great time to cause trouble. Nobody was awake, and nobody suspected anything. People always suspected trouble at night, not in the predawn morning. In addition I didn’t have to worry about trying to sneak out of the house or the city curfew. It was perfect!

So just what was it that I did? It started when I began to help Derrick with his paper route. Derrick was almost as quiet a person as I was, but just beneath the skin was a very mischievous temperament. He and some neighborhood cronies, two brothers in fact, Ben and Kevin, would be known to cause some ridiculous pranks up and down the neighborhood. That sounded like my calling.

So one particular early summer morning, the four of us decided to take a stroll around the neighborhood after finishing Derrick’s route. I had no idea what their intentions were until I noticed Kevin and Ben running away from the front porch of an old woman who happened to live across the street from me.

They were running as fast as they could down the empty street while trying not to bust out laughing. I looked back and saw a whole bundle of flowers freshly picked from the old lady’s garden and placed neatly on her front porch. This was the beginning of a rash of neighborhood terrorizing that morning.

It was to continue for another hour or so before everybody began to rise out of their beds. The four of us went down the surrounding streets causing havoc to whatever we saw fit. We would remove people’s lawn ornaments, garbage cans, and newspapers and place them in odd places.

Of course, we made sure we struck houses that did not belong to Derrick’s paper route. Great care was taken to avoid any loud noises that may awaken our victims. No windows were busted, and no cars were broken into. In all sincerity, no real damage was ever done. We just did silly useless thievery and pranks.

Some of the newspapers from another kid’s paper route would be thrown into someone else’s yard. Pieces of patio furniture would be placed in the middle of the driveway or on the porch of their neighbor, therefore instigating a possible fight among neighbors.

Plastic flowers would be removed and kept as souvenirs. For-sale-by-owner signs would be moved from one house to another, half a block away. I could just imagine the look on the woman’s face when she awoke that morning to find that her husband is selling her beloved home without consulting her.

I vividly remember watching Kevin drag a large plastic deer from someone’s yard. He carried this silly thing for several hundred yards before finally ditching it in a nearby creek. I had found a liking to that deer. Later, I retrieved it and stored it underneath my back porch. There it found a home with street signs and welcome mats that would say, The Henderson’s, which normally would be found at the front door of the Henderson’s.

The Parma neighborhood along Tuxedo Ave. and the adjacent Fortieth Street experienced a few more early morning escapades by us. Eventually, I moved on to much bigger things. The two brothers, Ben and Kevin, hung on to the hobby a bit too long. Suspicious neighbors got the idea of what was going on. One early morning, they secretly placed themselves on the roof of their house and videotaped the boys and their evil deeds. Later that morning, they got a visit from the Parma police.

I told my other friend, Justin, about these events. He was rather intrigued by my exploits. Justin, too, had a history of getting himself into some illegal operations. Soon, we developed into a new pair of troublemaking friends. It was a friendship that would take us quite far, both literally and figuratively.

CHAPTER 2

PARMA, OHIO

The story you have just read and the others to follow are true. A few slight modifications have been created or changed to fill in for those memories that have died due to time. Some of those changes have also taken place to make the stories more interesting or understandable, but everything is based on true, actual events. Of course, the names have been changed to avoid any libel suites, but they are real people. So this book could very well be found in the nonfiction section of a bookstore or library instead of the fiction section.

For quite some time, I have had a burning desire to tell these stories that are really just one big story, the story of my life. My life is like any other. There is nothing here that makes my life better than any other. If you do find my life interesting and worth spending your time reading, then it is only because I left the interesting parts of my life in this book. All the boring, dull stuff (which makes up the majority of my life) have been conveniently left out. Anyone can create a similar work because we all have a story to tell.

English scholars will no doubt turn their nose up at my creation. I have little care to follow proper grammatical English styles and creative writing techniques that are attempted to be installed into our youth in the schools. The story is full of fragmented sentences, and I hate to type dialogue with all the quotations and commas, so you will find very little of that. Besides, this book is really an autobiography, and autobiographies usually don’t have dialogue. The only difference between this autobiography and all the others is that I’m not famous.

The beginning portions of this story take place in the city of Parma, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland. During my residence there, Parma was the eighth biggest city in the state. It is a community of tightly packed houses and a fine mixture of small and large businesses.

It has a mall, Parmatown, which is slowly dying out of existence due to bigger and greater malls built in suburbs farther to the south. It has no real downtown. There is no Main Street that would be considered the heart and soul of the city. It had grown too fast to build itself any kind of town spirit or identity. This is true for most American suburbs.

The northern half of the city grew rapidly after World War I, as homes were built quickly to house the returning veterans. All the remaining space was quickly gobbled up by even more subdivisions that housed the World War II vets. I had lived in two homes in Parma; they were not close to one another at all, and both were built in 1928.

As with any city, its economy is rooted to what it could produce. A Chevy plant was within its borders, and Parma grew a reputation of being an affordable blue-collar community. As the twentieth century came to a close, its reputation included one of being a haven to very slow driving senior citizens and, unfortunately, of having a prejudice toward African-Americans.

At that time, I’m sure the town was over 90% white. I vividly remember two events, growing up in my hometown, over this issue. One was overhearing an elderly lady praising Mayor Petruda (whose popular reign of power was during the 1950’s and 60’s) for keeping the blacks out of Parma.

The second event was when I was riding the public bus home from school. The bus was mostly populated with kids my age who were going to my school. It made a stop, and on came aboard a number of African-Americans. As the African-Americans were coming on board, many of the passengers got up to sit with others so they wouldn’t have to sit with them. They made it quite obvious why they were moving. This has always bothered me. I couldn’t tell if this was Parma, Ohio 1991 or Montgomery, Alabama 1956.

As you may have noticed in the last paragraph, I had to take public transportation to and from school. Our school district had suffered decades of school levy failures and lost school buses because of it. I used to think this happened only to us before maturing and realizing that every other American town suffered similar fates.

The reason Parma schools were always so pathetically poor was because so many old people lived there. They didn’t want to spend their retirement fund on something they personally didn’t need. Remember, Parma is full of slow driving senior citizens, and they have no personal stake in the school system. Their grandchildren must live in other communities. But then they wonder why the kids of the neighborhood were always causing trouble.

Another annoying factor about living in Parma were outsiders who remembered some stupid and forgotten politician who once remarked that Parma people do nothing but wear white sox and have pink flamingos in their front yard.

The comment was made some forty years ago, and people still ask me if I wear white sox and have a pink flamingo in my front yard. Whenever I hear that, I want to punch them in the face.

It often seems that, when growing up, people are not very fond of their hometown. Only later, after moving away, does one begin to miss it and the innocent days of youth. I may bash my hometown, but it is home; so nobody else should.

But one realm of Parma that I am not particularly proud of today is its police department. A while back, it got a black eye for paying its cops overtime when there was no overtime. Off duty cops were being paid for places they were not patrolling.

A massive public relations campaign took place to clean its image especially when a bond issue came to the voters. The campaign included scare tactics where the mayor would complain to the news media about criminals escaping the boarding Cleveland cops into Parma.

The tactic worked, and the bond issue passed. The very next day, a fresh scandal came to light on how some cops had sex with a minor while on duty in the parking lot of a local school. Of course, the police chief denied reports of covering up the news until after Election Day, but whatever good will the police department had restored was thrown out the window.

I moved to Parma when I was thirteen. I escaped from another Cleveland suburb, Brecksville, and its snobbish reputation. In my last year of living in Brecksville, I had come to hate those evil, characterless culprits I went to school with. I will say this about Parma; they are more down-to-earth, no-nonsense folks. What you see is what you get. In Brecksville (I actually lived in neighboring Broadview Hts., but went to school in Brecksville.), so many of them were fake and thought they were the most important people ever created.

Instead of hanging around in their presence, I would escape into the woods that stood beyond my house. It was great exploring the wooded hills and changing eroded creek. There were vines to swing on, crayfish to catch, and little forts to build.

One time, someone had the audacity to place a Private Property sign at the edge of one of those wooded hills while my nearby fort was torn down. I looked all around for a trace of human life, and when none was detected, I tore that sign to pieces and threw the stake down into the creek. Neither the fort nor the sign were replaced. These days in the woods must have had a profound influence on me. Later in life I would often seek out such habitats.

At my first day of school in Parma, I was beginning the eighth grade. I could tell almost immediately that the kids were ten times friendlier and accepting. It was on that day that I first met Justin. A grade and a year younger than me, Justin lived just down the street from me.

I found him to be very energetic, charming, and loved to do just about everything. Any kind of event going on in town, new fad, or crazy sport, he was ready to try it. He could be so amazingly friendly when meeting people especially with adults, which I found quite mature. It seemed to put everyone around him into a better mood. I had never met such an enthusiasm for life in anyone before.

He introduced me to Derrick and some of the other neighborhood kids. I soon met Roy and Jim, and, before I knew it, I had more friends than I ever had.

In the old neighborhood of Broadview Heights, there were hardly any kids, at least those who were my age. To suddenly be surrounded by them and even have a couple cliques of friends to choose from was quite revolutionary for me. I had a social life instead of exploring the vast woods behind my old house. So I found growing up to become rather normal after all.

I still remember those fun summer nights when we had so much freedom. There was no school and no responsibilities, and we were still too young to have any kind of job to keep us occupied. Swimming the pool at Walters Grove, playing football in the middle of Bradley Street, bowling at Tuxedo Lanes, playing video games with the stoners at Space Invaders, or seeing free movies at the grand opening of Ridge Park Square, that’s how we spent our time.

Often, we would go bike riding. We would go as far as our bikes could take us and be gone as long as daylight would allow. Derrick, Justin, and I would ride our bikes eight miles along the Big Creek Parkway to Wallace Lake and then a ton of other places.

On my first trip to the lake, I could not believe I had made it that far. It was actually quite a simple ride; and what was to stop me from continuing on? It was the beginning of my explorations and adventures.

CHAPTER 3

GOLD CADILLAC

Time moved on, and I traded the bike for a car. My sense of causing trouble from Derrick’s newspaper days grew as I got deeper into high school. Justin moved from his home that was across the street from mine and lived in another part of town. We still went to the same school but hardly saw each other anymore.

During my freshman and sophomore years, I hung around with Jim and Roy a lot, but we started to grow apart when I became a junior. I was getting especially irritated with my old friends over mostly trivial matters. This seems to happen to all of us when we hang around with the same people for too long whether it be friends, family, or spouses.

I was getting bored and, like I said, I wanted to cause some trouble. That wasn’t going to happen with the crowd I was in. Somewhere, somehow, I became reacquainted with Justin again. The distance of his home didn’t matter anymore now that I had a license. The fact that he had the same sense to get into mischief also helped.

Life in Parma may have had its moments, but it was generally unexciting. There were only so many movies to go to, basketball games to play, and batting cages to swing at. Most of Parma’s teenagers spent their weekend evenings driving around town finding things to do. Justin and I would find that something but it would often be illegal. One of our favorite activities was collecting hood ornaments.

Not very long ago, a number of automobiles carried hood ornaments at the tip of the hood. Some, such as the Cadillac and Jaguar, were quite elaborate while others, like the Buick, were rather simple. There was quite a variety of them, enough to make a nice little hobby of collecting them.

In the summer of 1991, Justin and I decided this would be a fun activity to partake in. I had turned seventeen that year. We had the relatively new freedom of driving around and going to places we once could not reach.

Justin and I collected just about every kind of hood ornament there was: the Cougar’s with the metal design of an open mouthed cat in a circle, Chrysler’s in its shiny diamond shape, Chevy’s and Monte