My Cleveland School

If you pull the trigger you will find the party.

I did not want to go out. I was sad (hey: it’s February); I had spent the day inhaling a Sally Rooney novel (she’s a goddmaned genius), and rearranging furniture, trying make my recently-leased rental in Tremont less of a house and more of a home. I had already purchased a ticket, so I had shown my financial support for the PD Guild Local Number 1. But I sucked it up and headed for the concert organized to support the newspaper union.

It was too dark out, the streets suffused with a thick mid-February shroud that even the trying-too-hard lights of downtown could not alleviate, and as the Lyft driver drove on 90 and exited, our car framed by the stranded street art of Waterloo, it was unnervingly quiet. It did not feel foreboding—that’s an easy move. It just felt hollow. I opened the car door and walked up to the Beachland then…. I was as if Natasha Lyonne, forlornly looking into the bathroom mirror, all still and internal, surrounded by black walls, and then whoosh it’s Gotta Get Up and lights and bodies. Whoosh I open the door and three different people call out my name and the band is playing I Want You To Want Me. I had it all wrong: the city hides its life. Hundreds of backslapping how’ve you beens, klieg lights of energy on a stage.

I do not know what will happen with the continually declining local newspaper, or the shrinking alt-weekly, or the union. I cannot say I am optimistic about their futures. But I am hopeful about those who left warm homes to wind through bruised purple four-lanes to cram next to each other inside one big room. That mass is critical, a critical mass to figure out what’s next.

By the end of the night I was at my favorite watering hole, drawn into a fevered discussion about where a nice couple from Youngstown should buy. A vaping man in a thin leather jacket was (perhaps synthetically) animated, telling them “West side! West side!” They showed me Zillow on their phone, a picture of a lovely Cleveland Heights half-timber with wood built-ins they had looked at that day and I said oh yes, you should buy that house. I gave the spiel about high property taxes not really being high when you break it down, not to mention the virtues of taxes, how I had been unable to walk on the sidewalks of Tremont for a week after the last storm, which left an inch of ice along my daily route. My antagonist was having none of it, and by the end he just said, arms raised to the side, leaning over the couple: “Shaker Heights: 90% black. Cleveland Heights: 90% black.”

***

I was delighted by responses to last week’s post about the industrial sublime, particularly the verbs people used to express their emotional reactions: thrill, swoon, inextricably attracted, right-sizing. A friend tells me that my obsession with ruins, and my decade-long attempt to articulate my love for them, be they in Rome or Glenville, must have some deep personal source, and wants to hold a mini-therapy session to dredge that fount up. I demur. What—that I, too, am decaying? Neglected? This seems an unwise line of conversation. On Twitter, someone suggests I read David Nye’s The American Technological Sublime. That, I immediately respond to, ordering a used copy online.

Five years ago, when I was first starting Belt Magazine, I was also teaching half-time at Oberlin, writing a book on handwriting, freelancing, and single-mothering. I was busy, manically so. Despite all those jobs, I was having a hard time making ends meet (thus the freelancing). When Belt turned one in fall of 2014, I had yet to pay myself for that work (that would not happen for another two years), but I needed…something. Something to mark the occasion, something for myself, something material, and something to articulate the connection between my emotional self and the intellectual work I was doing. Impulsively, I took out my credit card and purchased “Snuggle” by Amy Casey.

Amy captures it all for me, the emotions I am perhaps running from, the economics on display for all, the empty streets that hide rooms full of jocular humanity. Her paintings map how the city feels.

I’ve paid off “Snuggle'“ by now. Someday, soon I hope, I will take a risk again, and buy a painting by the other beacon in my own private Cleveland school, Randall Tiedman. I met him once, years ago, in a drafty warehouse somewhere, and he showed me piles of canvases. I browsed through them all, the Industrial Valley, over and over again.

Cleveland Chronicles is a record of life in Cleveland throughout 2019 as filtered through the lens of the chronicler. Please sign up to receive it via email. You can do so for free, or, to support it and/or access the archives, for a small fee. I take posts down from the web after a bit.