Letters from Cleveland

OHIO IS FURTHER FROM NEW YORK

2008-03-20T22:42:00.002-04:00

I subscribe to, and read, the New Yorker. My relationship to this fact is complicated and continually in flux. (I used to, all-to-frequently begin conversations with the almost ritual disclaimer: "I don't want to be one of those people who always asks 'did you read the thing in the new New Yorker' but... did you read the thing in the new New Yorker?")

In any case. In New York City, and thus in the universe of internet discourse, the new issue of the New Yorker appears each Monday. When I lived in California, i always received my copy on the following Wednesday. In Cleveland, I receive my copy on either Friday or Saturday. Thus I have two days to read the entire issue before the universe of internet discourse, and my NYC acquaintances, begin discussing the contents of the next issue.

I know, in my rational brain, that each copy of the magazine is not sent out from Lower Manhattan on Monday, moving at a constant rate, arriving in Pennsylvania on Tuesday, Texas on Thursday, and Alaska by the weekend. I know it doesn't work like that. But I can't help but feel that the New Yorker delivery schedule reveals a secret truth about geography that the map obscures. San Francisco is two days closer to New York City than Cleveland is.

SELF-PORTRAIT IN A SNOWSTORM

2008-03-07T21:57:00.003-05:00

Cleveland is supposed to receive between 12 and 18 inches of snow in the next 24 hours. My next-door neighbor has invited me to hike through the blizzard to go to the wine bar in our neighborhood. Could be fun! Or very cold!

ONE GOOD TURN

2008-03-04T00:17:00.004-05:00

Today the temperature reached 60 and all the snow melted and the sun came out. I got spring fever, practically running to work in my bright red Prada shoes with no coat on. I was giddy.

After yet one more day of being not very good at my job, it got rainy and cold again, and I was stuck in my office with no coat and no hat and no umbrella.

Eventually I faced the truth that I had no choice but to walk home in the rain. It is, as I may have said before, a one-mile walk that should take me about twenty minutes. But not tonight. Halfway up the hill I saw a man stumbling in middle of the street. I thought he was just drunk, but as I got closer I saw that he was rather elderly, and as he stumbled over to the far side of the street, where there is no sidewalk, only a muddy embankment, he clutched his chest and looked like he was in a lot of pain. So I called out to him.

I was right the first time. He was just very, very drunk. He was perhaps in his 70s, although it's hard to tell. At first I thought his pinky finger on one hand had been amputated, but in I saw later that the finger was normal, just curved in at a strange, painful angle. He was wearing a ratty hooded jacket and big cheap glasses.

"I'm drunk," he said.

"I'm really fucked up," he said.

"Where we goin'?," he said.

"I don't even know where the fuck I am," he said.

"I'm followin' you," he said.

He said these things over and over again. He said them all in the same tone of voice -- not pitiful at all, and not angry either, but sort of like he was giving a command, regardless of whether he was actually telling me to do something, asking a question, or stating a fact. The only thing in a different voice was a little terrified-sounding "woah!" when I started to get too far ahead of him. He'd lean against the fence for a moment, then revert to his normal tone. "Don't let me fall, motherfucker."

He only fell once. One of the lenses of his cheap glasses popped out, and a wad of cash fell out of his pocket. I thought that perhaps I would ditch him in a bus shelter and run home. It would have been easy, since we stopped in the bus shelter across from my house. He would never have remembered me, or remembered my failure to help him. And the only help I was providing was leading to the liquor store and the pay phone, which in the big picture was hardly any help at all. He wanted me to take him to a restaurant or a motel. Neither were a possibility in Cleveland Heights at midnight on a Monday. The liquor store was the best I could do.

And I did it. I got him to the all-night liquor store, walking slowly in the rain as my bright red Prada shoes got more and more waterlogged and my toes got more and more numb. I held his hand now and then, briefly, but mostly walked five steps ahead. Mostly I just wanted to keep him from walking into the road and getting hit. As he finally walked in the door of the shop, I ran back towards my house that we had earlier passed. He never told me his name or expressed any gratitude whatsoever, except for a moment when I handed him the lens of his glasses.

There was a moment, in the middle of our journey, when we stopped in a bus shelter, when he said "Wait, wait. I want to talk to you." He started to say "I'm from..." and then a long pause "I need to go to..." and then another long pause. He never told me where he was from, or maybe he didn't know anymore. After the moment, we fell back into his mantra of "I'm drunk...where we goin'...I'm followin' you."

He would not have remembered my abandoning him. He will not remember my helping him.

I'm back

2008-01-20T03:01:00.000-05:00

Since I last posted here, I descended in a difficult emotional space, and then began to climb out. Why was I unhappy, you ask? Well, lots of reasons, but it is perhaps illustrative that some people who live Cleveland still, in 2008, don't understand how AIDS works. (And are also fat.)

No, seriously it's not that bad. More soon!

FIRST STORM OF WINTER

2007-12-01T22:08:00.000-05:00

Tonight, while I was in the movie theater watching I'm Not There (sublime!) the first storm of the winter arrived.

Did you know? When you drive in snow and sleet and freezing rain, it freezes to your windshield until you can't see very well. So you turn on your windshield wipers, which spreads everything around, so you see even less well. So then you spray your wiper fluid, which adds even more to spread around and freeze, so you can't see at all.

I would suggest that you go through these steps before you are driving on an unplowed road, where even if your windshield were clear, you couldn't see the lines that indicate where you are supposed to drive.

It is an adventure! (Eventually your wiper fluid and warm-air defrost inside will make it so that there is no longer ice blocking your view, and the fun ends.)

I stopped for gas, and on the other side of the pump there was a man filling up a pickup with a snow plow on the front.

"I hate this weather!" he yelled to me.

"But if it didn't snow, you'd, you'd be out of a job," I pointed out

"This time next year, I'm selling this damn truck and moving to Florida. I mean it; I'll do it. I tell you what!"

GREG'S SENSE OF SNOW

2007-11-10T11:56:00.000-05:00

I have a strong memory of the first snowfall after I moved to Massachusetts to go to college. I was coming from California, and had convinced myself (or been convinced) that I would hate the cold weather. I made jokes about it, but I was genuinely afraid that I would spend months being unhappy. And then fall arrived, and it got chilly, but fall in north-western Massachusetts is so famously beautiful that the weather really couldn't get me down. But still I thought—when the snow arrives, I will be miserable.

And then the first snowfall happened, and it was sublime. It was like a cloud of soft white feathers. It seemed to be happening in slow motion. I was transfixed, like that dumb scene American Beauty where the kid films the plastic bag blowing in the wind, except instead of one anthropomorphized object, there was a swarm little dancers joyfully spinning all around me. I told myself to remember the experience.

This week, Cleveland had its first snowfall of the season. And it was like a thousand tiny little daggers stabbing my face again and again.

Coming soon on Letters from Cleveland: Greg reports on the special hell that is the "Wintry Mix." They have invented a whole new form of weather here, that I had never heard of! It's going to be a long winter.

RAPID TRANSIT, SEGREGATION

2007-11-06T10:57:00.001-05:00

So I'm back from a trip to Québec, where I spent most of the time explaining that Cleveland isn't really that bad and that my crippling depression really isn't that crippling. All in all, the trip was probably not worth the extraordinary expense.

But this blog is not about Québec or my not-that-crippling depression. It is about Cleveland! And my latest revelatory Cleveland moment was a my trip to the airport, my first encounter with the light-rail component of the dubious-award-winning Cleveland Rapid Transit.

The light rail stop that is walking distance from my house is at 120th and Euclid, which is essentially on the border between East Cleveland and Cleveland proper. East Cleveland has been systematically impoverished. (I have taken some snapshots which perhaps problematically aestheticize the picturesque urban decay and deprivation of East Cleveland.

The train came relatively promptly, and was relatively full. And I was the only white person on the entire train. More than that, I was the only non-African American.

Thinking back, I guess there were many times when I got on the (now defunct) #40 bus line from Oakland to Berkeley when I was the only white person, but then there were invariably Latino and Asian Oaklanders on the bus. I can't immediately call to mind occasions, before coming to Cleveland, that I found myself in entirely black spaces like this, although I'm sure there have been some (that fish and chips shop on Oakland's Grand Ave, maybe? Particular, rare moments at the Chicken and Waffle House?)

I have no particular insight about this fact, or how it felt—particularly because as soon as the train got past the University Circle station I was no longer the only non-black passenger, and by the time we reached Tower City the train was fully integrated. I only make the observation, especially since, like so many experiences so far in Ohio, it is a new to me, but only subtly so.

In related news, today is election day, and I'm not voting, since I never got around to registering. There is, apparently, a measure to fund the Cleveland Heights public schools better. (I heard about it on the radio; I'm too lazy to dig up a link to a news story.) It is predicted to fail, since all the white families send their children to private school, and won't vote to allow their taxes to pay for the consequently-mostly-black public schools. Ain't democracy grand!?

ETA! (Wednesday 7/11): The Cleveland Heights school tax levy passed, 5822 to 4723! Hooray for democracy! Or for noblesse oblige or whatever!

A PARAPHRASED CONVERSATION

2007-10-14T22:17:00.000-04:00

ME: I really love the clothes in your store.

SHOPGUY: Yeah, there's been a real explosion of great new labels recently, and they've been selling really well.

ME: I agree, especially in menswear.

SHOPGUY: Well, we can stock more interesting things for men here. Women in Cleveland don't know how to dress.

ME: What? Really?

SHOPGUY: Yeah. I can sell different, riskier, fashionable clothes to men here, but most of the women who come into the store just want things that are boring and cheap.

ME: That's... weird. You'd think it would be the other way around.

SHOPGUY: Trust me, I've been in retail for years. But just look around—Cleveland woman can't dress themselves.

ME: Why do you think that is?

SHOPGUY: I think women aren't doing well economically in this city, relatively speaking. I mean, when I do get a woman in the store who wants something good, nine times out of ten she says "I'll get my boyfriend or father to buy it for me."

ME: No kidding...

LAST RITES

2007-10-06T12:42:00.000-04:00

I live across the street from a significant cemetery, the final resting place of a number of nineteenth-century notables, most famously John D. Rockefeller and James A. Garfield (Ephs, represent! Or, um, not!).

One day, as I walked to work, I saw a woman walking on the other side of the street along the cemetery walls. She seemed to be in something of a hurry, but she was a short, somewhat elderly woman, so I was keeping up with her. From a distance, at least, she appeared relatively normal -- not dressed in rags or visibly crazy. Except for the fact the she was carrying a dead raccoon by the tail.

On the one hand, I wanted to cross the street and get a closer look. On the other hand, I wanted to stay as far away from this woman as possible. For a block or so, it wasn't clear where she was going, but when the two of us had both reached the intersection where the ornamental stone gates of the cemetery are, it was clear: she was taking the dead raccoon into the graveyard.

The obvious scenario is that she was going to try to bury to the thing somehow. But there are other possibilities: maybe she was going to leave the corpse as an offering to her departed, roadkill-loving spouse? Or maybe she was going to feed it to the pack of wild dogs or cougars of something that roam the cemetery at night. Or perhaps it was just part of a black-witchcraft ceremony. Who knows.

In any case, I was so enthralled with the woman that, just as she disappeared into the gates, I almost ran headlong into in a young black kid walking in an oversized sweatshirt towards me in the opposite direction. He wasn't watching where he was going either, since he too was staring at the roadkill-undertaker. "Did you see that?!" he asked, as if to confirm the he hadn't just imagined it.

"That..." I replied, momentarily at a loss for words, "...was disgusting."

I AM DUBIOUS

2007-10-01T21:44:00.001-04:00

Okay, so apparently Cleveland has the best public transit in North America. This seems a little bit crazy.

Granted, I've only lived here for six weeks, so I'm hardly an expert. But... um... New York? Washington DC? Mexico City!? Cleveland has exactly three rail lines (Red, green, blue! Happy colors!) with a fourth to open next year (Silver! The color of old age and decrepitude!). The bus that goes by my house runs twice an hour—even during the period when I was dependent on the dreaded 37-Corbett I never had to wait more than fifteen minutes.

Unfortunately, until The American Public Transit Association posts the full announcement on its website, we remain ignorant of the exact formula used to calculate the rankings, and thus we can't really refute or be convinced by the data. Perhaps this wasn't a quantitative award at all, but more of an expression of general approval and encouragement?

Because here is the fundamental issue: it is impossible to live in Cleveland without a car. I lived happily without a car for years in both San Francisco and London. Granted, I lived the life of a graduate student and had to rent a car now and then for trips or moving furniture or whatever. That I (and pretty much everyone I knew) lived without a car was due to much more than a transit system that took us most places we needed to go with relative predictability—it's a question of the urban landscape and the urban lifestyle in its entirety—but how any transit system than doesn't allow one to go most places one needs to go with relative predictability can be called the best on the continent leaves me furrowing my brow.

(And I'm not the only one)

THREE-BUCK-AND-THIRTY-NINE-CENT CHUCK

2007-09-24T23:57:00.000-04:00

At Trader Joe's in Ohio, Two-Buck Chuck costs $3.39. My cashier told me that Ohio has the most expensive Two-Buck Chuck in the country. Could this be true? Even if it isn't, I make a sad little face every time I see that $3.39 price tag.

At least I don't live in Britain, I guess. Oh, wait...

UNDERGRADUATE PARTY

2007-09-23T13:41:00.000-04:00

Last night I went to a party with undergraduates, in a absolutely dilapidated house in Little Italy. Not everyone at the party was an undergraduate—I had been taken to the party by my wonderful graduate student neighbor. But here's what the party looked like: foosball in the kitchen. Good beer, vodka, and clam dip. A very cute eighteen-year-old knocked on the bathroom door, realized it was occupied, and so went outside to vomit in the trash can. When he returned, smiling, I had to point out that he had a little schmutz on his tee shirt.

Meanwhile, in the living room, everyone was sitting on futons and watching a cable channel that I was heretofore unfamiliar with: Nick GaS. More specifically, they were watching seven-year-old reruns of Family Double Dare. You could tell the reruns were that old principally because of the prizes offered (a huge DVD player! A Nintendo 64!), and secondarily by the moms' hairstyles (the "Princess Di 1988"!). No one, to my knowledge, was stoned—they were just really enjoying watching small children climb through vats of ice cream. I will admit: their enthusiasm was contagious.

My wonderful neighbor and I stayed a little less than two hours. While I had been getting sucked into a succession of slime-based "physical challenges," the drunk teenagers in the kitchen were getting increasing rowdy, leading to a pile of gropey making-out on the kitchen floor. At this point, my neighbor fetched me from the living room and told me in no uncertain terms, "we're leaving." As we walked away from the dilapidated house, she furrowed her brow and said, "I think if they were all models and had been doing lines off the kitchen counters, that might have been acceptable behavior. But they weren't."

However, for the purposes of this blog, I did learn one piece of crucial Cleveland-related information: one of the sloppy drunk girls made me aware of the existence of the Cleveland Shuffle:

I honestly did not know that there were hip-hop line dances. Two of the sloppy drunk girls demonstrated the entire routine for me. I'm reminded of when I learned, during my very brief contact with the world of gay country-and-western bars, that there are particular line dance routines, which to the untrained eye are completely indistinguishable from any other country-and-western line dance, but which are only performed in gay country-and-western bars. Who knew? But back to Cleveland: I enjoy the knees-up-mother-brown quarter-turn, but most of all the there's-no-place-like-home heel-clicking. What could it all mean?!

GARY

2007-09-17T23:14:00.000-04:00

So, I'm walking through Little Italy on Labor Day, on my way to the office. The street is fairly deserted—one of of the few people I could see outside were a couple old men sitting outside the brightly-lit dive bar in the middle of the block. The bar is pictured above. At most hours of the day, that bench and the white plastic chairs are filled with large old men smoking cigars, and occasionally little old ladies smoking Virginia slims.

As I walked by, a large old man seated on the bench asked me if I had a light. I did. He then asked if I would join him in a smoke. I did. (Two smoking posts in a row! I'm still not a smoker, really! In fact, you can see in this story and the previous that the best thing about smoking is, in fact, the social space that it opens up, almost inaccessible through other means.) He said he liked my red striped socks, and then quickly qualified the compliment, "I mean they're not something I would wear..."

There was a Labor Day airshow going on, and the USAF Thunderbirds (or whatever) passing overhead prompted him to tell me about his childhood friend who is now an independent contractor in Afghanistan. This, in turn, led to his telling me his plan for Iraq, which was, in essence, a version of the fire-bombing of Dresden. Not a simplistic "Nuke 'em all," mind you, but rather an elaborately worked-out method for evaluating residential districts and leveling them one-by-one. I listened with the noncommittal smile-and-nod face that I have previously practiced during discussions with my racist uncle.

But this old man with dirty fingernails, whose name is Gary, was completely pleasant. Midwest-nice, in fact! As horrifying as his opinions were, I left the interaction smiling. He actually wanted me to have another cigarette, which I declined.

He also wanted me to come into the bar, where there was a Labor Day buffet set out. "Real good food," he explained, "not like the food you eat." I have no idea what he thinks I eat, but he said this simply as a statement of fact, as if it were self-evident, without a hint of insinuation or judgment.

In Cleveland, even the dirty old drunks are nice.

Note [23 Sept]: I actually wrote almost all of this this a week ago, but left it saved as a draft all this time.

È LEI!

2007-09-10T21:46:00.000-04:00

So in the evening of the very same day when I first heard her voice, I met my singer neighbor! Actually, to be precise, that's not true, since it was well past midnight.

I arrived home from the office rather late Sunday night, not because I was working, but because it's more pleasant to work in my comfortable, well-furnished and air-conditioned office than in my muggy, largely furniture-less house filled with cardboard boxes and strewn with the crumpled newspaper that until very recently wrapped my dishes. When I got to my front door, there was a note saying "Greg(?) - Party in Apt 8. Drop by! D—" The question mark after my name indicated that we had only met once in the laundry room, and she wasn't sure of my name.

Sure enough, there was a party downstairs from me, with D— and her friends in the midst of a spirited game of Jenga. D— is an elementary school art teacher. Also there was the neighbor from apartment 2, who works at the wonderfully-named Plain Dealer. We all drank beer.

I stepped outside to do a bad thing. A thing I only do socially, I swear!. And as soon as I stepped outside, a very small woman with her very big boyfriend staggered their way up the walkway. She was barefoot, while he held her shoes. (And they were beautiful shoes—kitten heels in a jewel-tone blue and green brocade.) It became clear in out earliest exchange that she was the singer whom I had first heard about, then heard. She complained about her music theory placement. She explained her fach. She encouraged me to come up an accompany her on the piano sometime. She was very drunk.

She asked for a cigarette. I looked quizzical, her boyfriend frowned. "I haven't touched one of these things in a month! Today was my audition! I can celebrate now!" I had heard her, that morning, doing final preparations for the auditions to cast all the opera productions for the whole term. She had, it seemed, been celebrating all night. She visibly enjoyed the cigarette.

And that melody that sounded so familiar, but I just couldn't place? Somewhere between Britten and Schubert? It was "Trees on the Mountain" from Carlisle Floyd's Susannah.

BEFORE AND AFTER

2007-09-09T17:46:00.000-04:00

This was my living room at 9:00 am on Thursday.

And this was my living room at 10:00 am on Thursday.

Having professional movers carry boxes off a truck and up the stairs for you really makes the whole process significantly less painful. Now, where is my army of lackeys to unpack the boxes for me?

QUAL VOCE LONTANA?

2007-09-08T20:15:00.000-04:00

This morning I started to unpack boxes, and then became discouraged and frustrated, and decided to curl up with the New Yorker and a mug of tea instead. (Speaking of: I am almost out of PG Tips. Where, oh where, in Cleveland can one find more?)

And through the walls floated the voice of my neighbor, the soprano. I've heard of her, but not yet met her; we do not share an entrance. This was the first time I'd heard her sing. She has a very beautiful voice, or at least, a voice that became very beautiful when filtered through a wall or two. I could not tell if she was actually practicing, or just noodling around. Maybe a little of both? It seemed to me she was just vocalizing on "ah," but I'm not quite sure, and I kept hearing snatches of melodies I thought I recognized. Was that Britten? Schubert? Handel? I could never pin any one thing down.

It was like the best performance of Salvatore Sciarrino's "Cantarellando" ever, except better. In "Cantarellando" (which means "Singing to Yourself") a trained operatic singer appears on a stage and sings bits and pieces of whatever pops into her heads while she does something else, like a crossword puzzle, or a flower arrangement, or washing dishes. This morning was like that, except the body of the singer seemed far away, and I was cocooned in my papa-san chair, with a mug of PG Tips reading Acocella on Dante.

And, just then, everything was perfect.

I AM NOT, IN FACT, SKINNY

2007-09-06T22:05:00.000-04:00

So, if you have not already clicked the little YouTube clip in the upper right-hand corner if this page, you should. It is funny. At one point, a stranger stops Tina Fey on the street and says "Are you a model? You're so skinny! You should eat something!"

THIS TOTALLY HAPPENED TO ME. For the record, the exact phrase was "Mary Kate Olsen thinks you need to eat a cheeseburger." And it was a co-worker, not stranger. And in his defence, I was wearing my grey flannel suit, which is rather flattering on me, if I do say so myself.

But still. Midwesterners: they are a large people.

MIDWESTERNERS ARE NICE

2007-09-04T00:01:00.000-04:00

The stereotype of the "nice" Midwesterner has proven to be true. I have been simply overwhelmed by the offers of assistance, advice, and flat-out charity that I have received, not only from co-workers and colleagues, but from absolute strangers.

The most extreme instance occurred after I'd driven thirty minutes to go to Trader Joe's. (This, incidentally, remains the further I've ventured from my house since arriving.) When I arrived, I discovered a TJ's "Customer Appreciation Day" just getting underway. This involved a free barbecue—not free samples mind you, but full-on heaping plates of food for free. And sno-cones.

So I was already in a good mood before I had even done any shopping. When I was ready to check out, I chose a register at random, and ended up being rung up by a middle-aged woman with loose gray earth-mother hair. Somehow she guessed I was new in town (was it the Marimekko shirt?), and the next thing I knew she was explaining the geography of the area to me, recommending auto mechanics, telling me a more efficient route home, and explaining where the speed traps are on that route. We discovered that I was exactly between the ages of her two children, so she wanted to know about my career prospects, my life history, my family...

It all culminated in her giving me her home phone number, with the understanding that I was to call her whenever I needed help or advice. "Everybody needs a Jewish mother close by," she explained. Perhaps this all sounds rather creepy in the retelling. It seemed utterly sincere at the time. I mean, I'm not actually going to call or anything, but it absolutely made my day at the time. And I'll probably see her again—she works a lot of shifts at TJs ("Always at register #1!"), and I certainly can't get by without my "Greens With Envy" and Portuguese sardines.

When I was ready to leave, she left her register and grabbed a potted plant, a Gerber daisy, and gave it to me. (Some readers may know that I can't keep a plant alive to save my life. It died after about a week.)

WELCOME TO MY BLOG

2007-09-03T17:27:00.001-04:00

Once again, I have a blog.

Like the last time I did this, the blog principally serves one and only one purpose: to let my friends know how I'm doing. I'm pathologically incapable of keeping in touch with people once I leave town (I blame my childhood. Seriously.), and keeping the blog updated has the only half-self-serving goal of making me feel less guilty about this.

Unlike that other blog, however, this one has a few more ground rules. There will be no discussion whatsoever of my job. With the kind of job I have now, any indiscretions could have very serious consequences.

So what else is there to talk about, considering my job takes up the vast majority of my time, energy, and thought? The answer, of course, is Cleveland! The Metropolis of the Western Reserve! The Jewel of the Cuyahoga Valley! Home of the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and the Cleveland Torso Murderer! And that thing with the river catching on fire happened a long time ago, so stop bringing it up already!

Won't you join me, as I explore all that C-Town has to offer?