113 Brooklyn Ave.

The story you are about to read is true. Names have been changed to protect the identity of the guilty, where necessary—which is pretty much all the time with everyone mentioned. Be that as it may, should you believe that you recognize yourself in this piece, please be advised that I am action proof.

I guess that it would have been early in 1973 that the outfit I headlined, Dr. Moishe, the Night Electrician & the Luftwaffe Band, played our last gig. It was a 3 a.m. eviction party taking place on the 9th floor of some apartment building and let us just say that we barely had time to get through our opening number before we had to make our escape. But there was nothing too unusual about that. We often had to flee and it wasn’t always from the cops.
So then, did I mention that I also had to move? Well, I did, though not as a result of the eviction party. No, it was time to give up on my promising career in music {I played ironing board and step-on garbage pail better than anyone before or since} and work on developing another character, Mr. Universe, {steroid free, naturally} in a new environment.
It may have been an ad in the newspaper that led me to 113 Brooklyn Ave. The house was a 3 story brick monstrosity that was right on the corner of Dundas between Pape & Jones ; a decidedly working-class area of town. The fellow I went to see about sharing the house called himself Alex and he had a 5 year old son who went by the name of Steve. Alex told me that he was a teacher and that there was also a really quiet guy, Bob, who had a room on the top floor. The front room on the middle floor seemed ideal and so I took it.
It was not very long after moving in that I began to notice a few things about Alex that made me think that Mr. Sheriff might not be the simple school teacher he claimed to be. You see, he never seemed to leave the house very much, except late at night and it was the exception when he would return alone. Indeed, every evening he would return with a new woman. Now it wasn’t so much that he was the first womanizer that I had ever run into. It was more the fact that Alex looked like Charlie Manson’s shorter brother with the big nose. And he had no obvious preferences: young, old or inbetween; short, of average height or tall; black, white or yellow; blonde, brunette or redhead: so long as they were female, each got to come home with him.
After a couple of weeks of this, curiosity got the better of me and I asked him why it was that I never saw him leave for work. He told me that he was on a sabbatical from the U. of Penn., where he was an associate professor of pharmacology. Given that his car plates were from the Keystone State, that made sense to me.
What did not make sense to me were some of the women he brought home, a good deal of whom I got to meet and one in particular just seemed such an odd choice. I no longer recall her name, but I do remember that she was the second saddest looking person that I have ever encountered. I mean this girl wore her depression like a badge of honour. And she had what to be depressed about. As a youngster, she had lived in a rather dysfunctional house. Her mom was psychotic while pop took his nourishment from a 40 pounder and his frustrations out on whoever was handy. Well, one fine day in front of this little girl, mom gave pop what-for with a frying pan at the top of the stairs. He was dead before the ambulance could arrive. Her mom was sentenced to live with other people considered to be not guilty by reason of mental defect or insanity and she went off to some crummy orphanage.
There was no way for Alex to explain this to me without telling the truth. And I must say, it was not what I expected. Alex told me that while he was an associate prof (who drove stock cars on weekends) as stated, he was not on sabbatical. No, he was on the run from the law; wanted for kidnapping and living here under an assumed name. [It would be several months more before he told me his real name, Craig S. Kruger, though I have continued to think of him as Alex.] It turned out, as he told it anyway, that he had been married with two kids when his marriage soured and his wife moved out, taking the children with her. Their separation agreement entitled him to see his kids every weekend, or something to that effect and it all went well until one fine day his wife vanished with their children. Unable to find them on his own, he hired a private detective and after several months, that person located them living in small-town California. Armed with this knowledge, Alex loaded his life into his car, leaving space for 2 children sans luggage, then headed cross country to the Golden State. He told me that he had firstly obtained a legal opinion that the California courts would not enforce an order from a Penn. court and so his only option—as he saw it—was to kidnap his children. Well, he staked the place out for a few days before he made his move. Apparently his wife came out of the house just as he pulled up in the car and recognizing danger, she called out to the children, biding them to run. He was able to grab their son, whose real name I believe was actually Steve, but not their daughter. It must have been a horribly gut-wrenching moment for all involved, filled with primal emotions not soon forgotten. At any rate, Alex made the decision to not try and pry the little girl away from the mother and just get the hell away from there as fast as he could before the cops showed up; which he knew they would, for this was happening out on the street in broad daylight.
Well, he made a successful getaway and with his phony i.d., he was able to cross the border into Canada. But he was quite naturally concerned with being caught and returned to California; for though he had kidnapped his own son, it was still kidnapping and that was a capital offense. And so he was determined to do what he could to make it more difficult to extradite him should he be caught. His master plan was to marry a Canadian. Each woman he brought home, he proposed to. It was all just as simple as that really. Perhaps what is strangest of all from this—and the parade of prospective brides went on for many months—is that despite the willingness of so many to entertain a proposal, not one would say yes to him.
Alex would get married to a nice girl from Canada, but that would not take place until later that summer. He married Audrey Rebecca Elijah. I was living with Audrey at the time. She had a big heart and wanted to help Alex out. I was fine with that. I mean, it was her decision to make and I had helped him out along the way;getting him an idle social insurance number so as that he could work here without drawing attention to himself, as well as a few other things. As I said, they did get married. We found a minister out in Mississauga who made it his (only) business to marry folks; not asking too many questions along the way. The minister did not ask why little Stevie insisted on calling Alex “daddy” when Alex claimed never to have been married and Audrey could only be his mother if she gave birth at age 12. And his hearing aid surely malfunctioned when Stevie refuted the contention of the only other guest there, Larry, who had clumsily proffered that Stevie calls all men daddy. I can only guess that the minister feared that if he asked too many questions, we might demand our money back. What I do know is that sham marriage or not, I got to sleep with the bride on her wedding night. It would be the only time in my life that I could make that statement.
Of all the many marital prospects that Alex/Craig brought home, only one ever got to see the inside of the house twice and that was the really sad girl I mentioned earlier. She made her second appearance about 4 months after the first. If anything, she seemed even more depressed than I had recalled. And as it turned out, there was good reason. In the interval, her mother had been released from having to live with other criminally insane folks. A dozen years of treatment had worked its magic, or so they thought. The girl rented an apartment so as that her mother could live with her and sure enough, mom moved in. Well, her mom seemed to be making the adjustment back to civilian life; or so she thought. The first real clue that mom might be having more trouble with the transition than she was letting on to occurred around the end of the first week. Her mother waited until she got home and then killed herself in front of her daughter, slashing her own throat.

But all of that would come later. At this point Alex had only revealed the truth of his situation to me. Audrey had not yet arrived on the scene. Nor had Lillith, a rather precocious 16 year old, or the fellow she brought home one evening after a party, Jim. Jim had the dark soul of a Russian poet and a twice a day shooting habit. He would move in and become my best friend. Later, we would take in folks claiming to be American draft dodgers. None of them were of course.

Anyway, if you have enjoyed this little story and would like to hear others having to do with that house and the relationships that got their start there; well, you know what to do.