Rabbit Hole(Ed Staskus) By Ed Staskus

It was ten minutes before 5 o’clock on a Friday that David Myers asked me to come into his office. I knew his plan was to get rid of me. Efficient Lighting was going downhill fast. There wasn’t much that was efficient about it anymore. I also knew I wanted to stick it out before it all went to hell and the doors closed for good. There was still some blood in the turnip. All I had to do was somehow convince my boss to let bygones be bygones.

That was going to be easier said than done. David Myers was a son of a gun whose bite could be worse than his bark. When I walked into his office and saw him with his Daschund in his lap, sitting behind his St. Bernard-sized desk, I thought if I played my cards right, I might have a chance. He was high-handed but he could be flighty, too. The dog was the key.

“You wanted to see me, Dave?”

He gave me a sour look. He didn’t like me calling him Dave. He would have disliked the other things I might have called him even more.

Efficient Lighting was the parent company of several children. We sold commercial lighting of all kinds for all kinds of uses, from illumination to heat to disinfection. Our big seller was Light Sources tanning bulbs. We sold them by the boat load, although the boats had been slowly getting smaller since the start of the aughts, after tanning beds got mixed up with cigarettes. It was a slow death, but it was the kiss of death. Fewer and fewer people wanted to risk skin cancer for a drop-dead tan.

The first time I met David Myers was at the Light Sources offices and factory in Connecticut. Our sales guys were there for a tour of the plant, to see how fluorescent UV bulbs were made. I was one of the sales guys. When we were introduced to him, I couldn’t help noticing his office was spacious, something on the order of ten times the size of my cubicle. He was some kind of executive in charge of something. It seemed he was close to Christian Sauska, the boss man of the operation. I found out later David Myers was married to a woman from the Sauska clan.

Light Sources went back to 1983, back to Hungary, when Christian Sauska and some long-gone buddies got the company off the ground. All the top guys in Connecticut, the site of their American factory, were Hungarians. David Myers was enough Hungarian to count as one of the guys. When Light Sources engineered a takeover of Ultraviolet Resources International, the golden goose of Efficient Lighting, they sent David Myers to us in Brook Park, Ohio to run the show. He became our Dutch uncle.

Doug Clarke was the proprietor of Efficient Lighting. He had built a state of the art 45,000 square foot warehouse and offices in Brook Park at the turn of the millennium, across the street from the Holy Cross Cemetery, after more than fifteen years in the light bulb business, most of them in a ramshackle building in Lakewood. When Light Sources took control of Ultraviolet Resources everything stayed the same for a while. Everybody stayed right where they were. I stayed in my cubicle where everything was at arm’s reach. The only change was that Doug was kicked upstairs and David Myers took over Doug Clarke’s ground floor office and day-to-day operations.

I was a jack of all trades, working general lighting, salt-water fish lighting, and tanning bulbs. Everybody was the boss of me at the same time nobody knew what to do with me. I kept my head down and kept moving through the weeds. I went to all the sales and motivational meetings and tried not to doze off. I had trouble concentrating on the blather.

The second time I met David Myers was at a trade show in Las Vegas. By the end of the day I thought, “This guy must get the same briefing the President of the United States gets every morning.” He seemed to know everything about anything and everything. I never ventured an opinion to him after that. I didn’t need him turning me over every chance he got.

I was civil to David Myers from the day he showed up to the day he left for greener pastures with Beavis and the Buttheads. The family firm was splitting up and the day they would split up for good was fast approaching. Kathy Hayes, Doug’s wife, had brought her brothers and sisters into the business one after the other. They were all on the verge of jumping ship and signing on with Captain Bligh on the HMS Bounty. In the end that is what happened.

Patty Hayes was our sales manager for the moment, but she was too mild-mannered to last and didn’t last. John Hayes, Kevin Hayes, and Maggie Hayes ran the show. They were mean-spirited and fit the bill. They rotated who was Beavis and who were the Buttheads on a near daily basis. Maggie did her best to be Beavis as often as possible. She took the trophy home more often than not. Kevin took personality lessons from David Myers. John handled big accounts and tried to look too busy to care about trophies. What he cared about was his super-sized paycheck. Kevin’s wife was our long-time bean counter. There was no rolling the dice with her. She controlled the bones with a left-handed smile.

David Myers and the Beavis and Butthead crew were on the verge of leaving Brook Park for a bigger building in Westlake. He was dreaming up a new business venture with Wisconsin-based Tan-U, a regional distributor in the upper Midwest. He had plans for becoming the top dog of the tanning bulb world.

“As the indoor tanning industry evolves into a more mature market, consolidation makes a great deal of business sense,” he said. “I can’t think of another company which could result in a better fit and look forward to cementing the new company’s position as a major player in the market.” David Myers could be straightforward when he was doing his song and dance, but he was a big fan of corporate snake oil, too.

He started by asking me if I liked my job.

“Sure,” I said.

“Are you satisfied with how things are going?”

“Sure,” I lied.

“What are your goals?”

He was getting to be too much with his business school questions, but I played along. I made up some goals. Dave liked the sound of his own voice far more than he liked the sound of anybody else’s voice. I kept it short. The less said the better, unless I wanted to be treated like a country cousin.

He nodded, looking down, stroking his middle-aged wiener dog, thinking my goals over. He stroked his own neatly trimmed beard. I knew it was in one ear and out the other. The dog was recovering from hip surgery. One of my middle-aged hips hurt. I was taking yoga classes. I was taking them two and three times a week.

He started explaining how the business world works. He was snarky and patronizing while talking at me. He told me that to understand how business works, you must have a firm understanding of how people think and behave, how people make decisions, act on those decisions, and communicate with others. At its core, every enterprise is a collection of people whose work and processes can be reliably repeated to produce a particular result.

“Do you understand what I’m getting at?” he asked after tossing me his guidance counselor crumbs.

“Sure,” I said. “How is your dog doing?”

“Much better,” he said. “Thanks for asking.” He described the limp the dog had had to live with, the operation, his recovery, and the first day the purebred had stepped out on grass and run a few steps, wagging its tail. He brought the animal to work every day. The dog slept in a custom-made bed in the corner. He ate a special diet catered to him in special doggie bowls. David Myers encouraged the dog to follow at his heels whenever he went anywhere in the building in order to build its strength back up.

“If there’s one thing that man loves without a shred of contempt, it’s that dog,” I thought.

We talked about pets, animal cruelty and animal rescue, the companionship of dogs, the loyalty of dogs, and whether dogs were better people than people. By the time he was done, since he did most of the talking, it was past six o’clock and he said he had to pack up for a weekend trip. He gave me a bottle of fancy wine from the 100-or-more bottle custom-made walnut wine rack in his office.

“Thanks, Dave,” I said, hefting the bottle like a trophy. It was probably worth more than my paycheck that week. Maybe I could sell it on eBay. Maybe I would just pour it down the drain.

He had forgotten to fire me, thanks to the dog. I tiptoed away to my cubicle, got my stuff, and left. In the parking lot I saw his four door luxury ride and his natty ragtop sports car. They were parked on either side of my Chevy sedan. I made sure to not dent, scratch, or otherwise molest one or the other of his rides. The last thing I wanted was another lecture from a clubhouse lawyer.

When Westlake was ready for Ultraviolet Resources International, David Myers, John, Kevin, Maggie, Kevin’s wife the cagey accountant, somebody’s dodgy sister-in-law, and some others of the sales force went to the outer-ring suburb. Our building felt half-empty after that because it was half-empty. We were going to struggle for the next three years until all the downsizing that could be done was done and the building had to be sold. I was one of the last to be laid off, but I didn’t mind. There was hardly any work left for me to do, anyway. I had gotten tired of taking long lunches with nobody to talk to.

The next thing I heard through the grapevine was that David Myers wasn’t with Ultraviolet Resources performing his silk stocking tricks anymore. He was up to his own tricks. He had set up an ISO Italia office near the Chagrin Highlands, with a full-time secretary and part-time warehouseman, selling high-end Italian tanning beds and shoddy Canadian-made Sylvania tanning bulbs. I was sure he could explain away the performance problems of his bulbs.

The following year I heard he had been charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission with insider trading. He had always been bullish about the stock market. I wasn’t sure he could explain his exploits away. Federal agents didn’t usually like it when their suspects talked down to them.

“Baltimore-based consultant Brett Cohen received coded e-mails from a fraternity brother about two biotechnology companies and passed the information to an uncle, David Myers, of Cleveland, Ohio who traded on the tip,” the Securities and Exchange Commission said.

The fraternity brother got the information from his real brother, who was a patent agent for California-based Sequenom, which made genetic analysis products. The patent agent passed along non-public information about the company’s plans to acquire Exact Sciences. David Myers bought 35,000 shares of Exact Sciences on the sly before the acquisition was announced. The news sent Exact Sciences’ stock up 50 percent, setting him up to pocket first class profits by selling most of the stock over the next few weeks. “David Myers garnered more than $600,000 in profits trading on the inside information,” the Securities and Exchange Commission complained.

The patent agent also passed on tips about an up-coming announcement that investors should no longer rely on Sequenom’s data about its Down syndrome testing. David Myers bought Sequenom options just before the announcement, which caused a 75 percent drop in the company’s stock, according to the Securities and Exchange Commission complaint.

“David Myers later sold that entire position for illegal profits of more than $570,000,” the complaint alleged. He knew how to put his nose to the grindstone when he had to. He knew how to generate cold hard cash out of nothing and spend it on himself, no problem.

On top of everything else, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of California filed criminal charges against Brett Cohen and David Myers. My Dutch uncle was going to have to spend some of his gains on a mouthpiece. Their mouthpiece was no great help. They both eventually pled guilty to conspiracy to commit securities fraud.

“Holy Moses,” I thought, shutting off my Apple iPad. I didn’t wish Dave any real harm, but it was a relief to know he didn’t know everything after all. I didn’t care how much he knew because I knew he didn’t care. I had forgotten the wiener dog’s name but wished him the best, on and off the leash, although I thought he would be better off if he made a break for it, so long as his new hip was good to go. No good dog wants to end up bad to the bone.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street at http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”


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“Bomb City” by Ed Staskus

“A Rust Belt police procedural when Cleveland was a mean street.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction


Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F1LM1WF9/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2MYAQAOZIC2U9&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.hTm7BGbiQbSe5ZapFwYPPfcwOpTe-Vdg6VLE4aGyTyk.Z0R-VNBWWEcvKcNaO9LdCOUnNIOOXgvYkRS_FXiXuHk&dib_tag=se&keywords=bomb+city+ed+status&qid=1742136726&sprefix=bomb+city+ed+staskus%2Caps%2C84&sr=8-1

Cleveland, Ohio 1975. The John Scalish Crime Family and Danny Greene’s Irish Mob are at war. Car bombs are the weapon of choice. Two police detectives are assigned to find the bomb makers. Nothing goes according to plan.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

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