City of Broken Dreams

"CLEVELAND, CITY OF LIGHT, CITY OF MAGIC,

CLEVELAND CITY OF LIGHT, YOU'RE CALLING ME.

CLEVELAND, EVEIU NOW I CAN REMEMBER,

BECAME THE CUYAHOBA RIVER

GOES SMOKING THROUGH MY DREAJVIf/'

-RANDY NEWMAN, "BURN ON"

LIFE WILL CRUSH YOU IF YOU'RE NOT CAREFUL. THAT'S WHY YOU HAVE TO BE TOUGH TO LIVE IN CLEVELAND

O LEBROIU FINALLY MADE HIS DECISION, AND GLEVE-

I land, the city I love, got dumped on publicly lagain. LeBron followed in the footsteps of his jock brethren Joakim Noah, Braylon Edwards and Charles Barkley. It was the same old bullshit mantra: Cleve­land is a dump. Cleveland is ugly and dangerous. Cleveland is a city full of fat, kielbasa-eating losers.

And if all that weren't enough, consider that Forbes magazine—eyebrows arched, nose held aloft in timeless patrician manner—recently described Cleveland, my working-class hometown, as the most miserable place to live in America.

I live in Cleveland. I love living in Cleveland. I love living in Cleveland so much that I moved back here after living for 30 years in places like Marin County, Maui and Malibu. So, speaking as a Clevelander, I want to get this out of the way,

right off tho top. Fuck Forbes magazine! Fuck Steve Forbes, that twit! Fuck all the other snooty, twitty Forbeses who have anything to do with the Forbes laniily or their supercilious rag! And yes, luck LeBron, too, mama's boy. Good riddance to you—and Delonte West, too, that motherfucker!

We knew what LeBron really thought of us when he wore liis Yankees cap to that Indians playoff game. Who but a roar­ing, sell-absorbed asshole calls himself King fames and has liis back tattooed ciioskn i in gigantic letters? Truth to tell, LeBron was never a Clevelander—he's a wimpy, spoiled kid not unlike Steve Forbes. He never belonged here. He belongs on the beach, not in a back alley. And who in the hell is LeBron to say he loves us after he leaves us? (No wonder he and Delonte West, the motherfucker, were once asshole buddies.)

So LeBron James, like Ait Modell, former owner of the Cleveland Browns, is history as far as my Cleveland is con­cerned, and they're selling T-shirts downtown that say modell

STILL SfCKS, BIT I.KBRON SWALLOWS.

Never mind all that. I will go to my grave—as will most Clevelanders—in the belief" that our town is still, as we've always said, the best location in our whole debt-ridden, unem­ployed, foreclosed nation.

Clevelanders have learned we've gotta hang tough in the face of all the insulting bullshit that keeps being tossed at us over and over again. Who in the hell is Forbes magazine to tell us that the town we love is a miserable place to live? That our potholes are the si/e of lakes? That our teams stink? That our politicians are crooks? That our strip malls are haunted houses and our major malls ghost towns? Why single out our town when that portrayal could define America itself in 2012?

It takes a lot of balls to accuse us of all that, especially when we are the City of Big Balls (male and female) and have mad-doggedly been fending oil scurrilous attacks from the time I was a kid growing up here. "Mistake on the Lake" is what they used to call us. We've been the pimpled butt of decades-long, generations-long Cleveland jokes, cousins to the supercilious Polack jokes told by our prissy WASP brethren.

There is no denying that fiendish, devilish things have befallen us: Yes, yes, we know—the Cuyahoga River caught on fire and so did former mayor Ralph Perk's hair. Another former mayor, Carl Stokes, was arrested for shoplifting. Indians fans rioted at Municipal Stadium, and Browns fans rioted at Browns Stadium. Rocky Colavito, Indians folk hero, got traded, and Indians folk hero Jim Thome loved us and left us too.

Here is even more satanic stuff: All the East Coast's power got blown out one day thanks to a malfunction at a Cleve­land power plant. Our foreclosure rate is among the highest in the country. Our town's biggest property owner is a Ger­man bank. It's so cold and gloomy and dank for much of tho year that freaky dudes surf in Lake Erie in the winter as a snarky protest. Dennis Kucinich, our former mayor, my former copyboy at the Cleveland Plain Dealer—who wrote knockout beat poetry, which he read aloud to us in the city room back in the day—still wants to be president of the United States after being arguably the worst mayor in Cleve­land's history. Dennis's wife, Elizabeth, definitely Playmate material, wants to be first lady even though she towers over Dennis worse than Katie towers over Tom Cruise and Nicole towers over Keith Urban.

Consider the things that have befallen some of the Cleve­land Indians we've loved: Joe Charboneau, rookie of the year, who opened beer bottles with his teeth and then sometimes

drank the beer through his nose, and whose whole career was over a year later thanks to a bad back. Tony Ilorton, slugger, who had a nervous breakdown and crawled from the plate to the dugout after popping out to the catcher. Bill Veeck, legendary team owner, war hero and chain-smoker, who carved himself an ashtray right into his wooden leg so he wouldn't have to carry one around. Gaylord Perry, pitcher, whose spitball made him one of the greatest crooks in baseball, right alongside home-run champion Albert Belle, whose bats were corked. Ray Chapman, infielder, the only man killed on the field in the history of major league base­ball (in a game against the Yankees). Herb Score, dazzling southpaw, whose career was ruined by a line drive to the eye (of! the bat of another Yankee).

And then we have some of the maladies suffered by our beloved Brownies: Jim Brown, greatest running back in the history of the game, retired in his prime because of a salary dispute with Benedict Ainold. Paul Brown, the greatest coach in NFL histoiy, fired by the same Benedict Arnold before he kidnapped the whole team to Baltimore. Bernie Kosar, maybe the greatest local hero in the history of the team, the com­plete Clevelander, a street kid from Youngstown (the place Bruce Springsteen made famous), a quarterback with back-alley smarts and balls of brass, cut by Benedict Ainold at the instigation of his Rasputin, coach Bill Belichick, the same Bill Belichick who transformed into Touchdown Jesus with the New England Patriots. Rasputin (continued on page 169)

(continued jram page in Cleveland, Jesus in New Kngland. Co figure. Say a prayer:

Lord have mercy on the best location in the nation!

The satanic attacks against us go on and on, even to this day. The Indians were pretty much the worst team in all the major leagues, just as The Sporting New* predicted they would be at the beginning of the season. At the same time, their general manager, Mark Shapiro, who assembled this worst team, is being promoted to team president. (Shapiro is not a Clevelander but a native of the same cursed Cheat City of Baltimore that wound up with the old Browns.)

And the Browns coach, Eric Mangini, whose first year at the helm resulted in one of the worst teams in Browns history, has been given a pat on the back and a vote of confidence by the team's new president. (Mangini isn't a Clevelander either. Some say he's from New York, some say he's from New England, some say he is the mutant elephantine offspring of Rasputin and Touchdown Jesus.)

Nolxxly in town understands why the team owners who arc Clevelanders—the Lerners, the Dolans—can't find any real Clcvclanders, who actually care about the Browns and the Indians, to run their teams.

I'm going to be fair about all this, so I will be the first to admit we have had some tough times. Kate has badly diddled us upside down and over again. Tornadoes have stripped us of our roofs. Hail has shattered our win­dows. Woods have given putrid expression to our sewer lines. Snowfalls have buried us. And buried us. And buried us.

We petition the Lard uith prayer!

We petition the Lard uith more prayer!

And when that doesn't work, in our gloom and in our depression, in our inner fury and frustration, we gaze lovingly (when we can see it through the fog or the snow) at the symbol of our town, the Ter­minal Tower, for so many years our tallest building. The Terminal Tower, I must make clear, is not the Cleveland Clinic's VIP can­cer ward—I know, because I've resided in that ward. No, the Terminal Tower is the biggest extended middle finger in America. A monument to Clevelanders. An expres­sion of integrity forged in rock and stone. Extended to Forbes magazine. Extended to Steve Korbes. Extended to Benedict Arnold in drag. Extended to Rasputin. Extended to Jim Thome. Extended to LeBron. Extended to motherfucking Delonte West. Extended to all the late-night jokesters tell­ing Cleveland jokes. Extended to the Creat City of Baltimore. And proudly extended to the New York Eucking Yankees.

Never mind all this macho talk. The women of Cleveland, I've noted, feel even more passionately about our town than the men do. I was having a meeting with a stu­dio executive in Los Angeles, and when I walked out, his assistant, a stunning red­head, came running after me.

"Hey," she said, "you're from Cleve­land, right?"

I said, "Right."

She smiled. She started unbuttoning her blouse. One button and then another and another and another. I stood there and thought, Groat, finally. I finally get my reward from God for being a Clevelander.

She pulled her blouse open and I saw them. On the front of a Cleveland Browns T-shirt: two Brownie elves. I stared at the...elves.

She said, "Do you love them as much as I do?"

I grinned and said, "Yes. I love them very much."

She smiled happily, turned and walked back to her office.

And before I met Naomi, in my admit­tedly adulterous first marriage, I had an affair with a young woman who was the daughter of a prominent politician in Cleveland. She was ever-orgasmic about her hometown. She drove her Dodge Dart cross-country from L.A. whenever she could visit it. She knew all about carbure­tors. She knew all about cheeseburgers. She knew all about the beer made at the Great Lakes Brewing Company. She loathed Benedict Arnold. She loathed Rasputin. She knew that Rocky Colavito was now an onion fanner in upstate New York. She had a crush on Bernie Kosar. And she knew all about rock and roll. She played Ian Hunt­er's "Cleveland Rocks" over and over again whenever she got the blues.

She's married now. She named one of her kids after three of the Beatles. Never doubt it: Cleveland really is the heart of rock and roll.

Miserable? We're not miserable in Cleve­land. We have fun in Cleveland. We wear T-shirts that say Cleveland—you gotta be tough and Cleveland—-it doesn't suck and i'm from Cleveland, so shut up and sit down. We go to the Indians games and yell "Frankentorre!" when we see foe Torre, historically with the Yankees and now with the Dodgers. We wear Yankees pinstripes at Indians-Yankees games with the number "666" and the words "the Beast" on the back. And when a Yankee hits a home run, we yell, "Nobody cares! Nobody cares!" We chant "Loser" when Jim Thome comes back to Progressive Field, which will always be "the Jake" to us. And we can't wait until the day LeBron comes back with the Heat to play the Cavs.

We go to see the Browns with our kids when the windchill is 20 below, when the beer in your hand freezes before you can get it to your lips and when your lip gets stuck to the beer when it tries to make its way back to your hand.

I took our smallest boy, Luke, seven at the time, to a game like that at Browns Stadium. He had to go to the bathroom at halftime, had to go very badly, and we went to the head of the line and found ourselves in a jammed men's room of smoking and drink­ing Brownie fans.

And the minute we went in, they started yelling, "Get out of the way; the kid's gotta piss!" They pushed everyone else out of the way and I.ukie and I went into the stall and he did the longest pee in world history. They cheered when we came out of the stall and high-fived him. He'll never forget it. It was the most fun he's ever had in ajohn (so far; he's young).

On the way out of the stadium, the wind

blew off I.ukie's hat. And then the wind blew somebody's cell phone into his face. And then it almost knocked him flat on his little butt. He loved every minute of it. It was one of the happiest days of his life— never mind, of course, that the Brownies lost. We were both so happy that on the way home I tried to drive over all the potholes I saw just so we could laugh and toughen up our kidneys.

When it got really bad here, when the Indians and the Browns had both bro­ken our hearts, when it was still snowing in April or even early May, when another of our favorite restaurants closed, when Dennis Kucinich announced yet another presidential run, we had one surefire way of pulling ourselves out of the doldrums, of finding redemption. We watched the Cavs play basketball. We lost oui'selves in LeBron. He was our gift from God.

But then he died. And was buried in Miami. We grieved. We're not insensi­tive here. Sure, we grieved. But then we figured—fuck him, he's dead. I jfe comes at you fast. Life is a beach. life sucks ass.

I moved back to my hometown almost 10 years ago with my wife and our four little boys. We had been living in Malibu, in a house overlooking the sea, just across the street from Bob Dylan's house. I knew what I was doing moving back to Cleveland. Really. Really! (Oh, up yours!)

My wife and I wanted to raise our little boys in a normal, ail-American setting—-in Ohio, where Naomi and I had both been raised. With the same values with which

we—the offspring of Hungarian, Polish and Italian parents—were raised. We didn't want our boys to be surfer dudes, growing up on the same beach where Sean Pcnn and Kmilio Estevcz and Rob Lowe had grown up.

Three of our four boys are teenagers now. 'Ihey are not surfer dudes. Ihcy have shown no inclination to go out and surf Lake Erie in hellish winter. Ihey are normal Clevelanders and Ohioans. They root for the Indians and the Browns, even when they stink, though one of them, Nick, 14, is a Yankees fan. (May God forgive me, I don't really know how I allowed that to happen, but I consider it one of my life's greatest failures.)

We have taught our boys not to start any fights, but being Clevelanders, they don't take shit from anybody either, thank you veiy much. Ihey go to church with us, although that doesn't mean they don't use a four-letter word every now and then. (You're fucking right we punish them for it.) Nick, the Yan­kees fan, a tough guy (you'd sure as hell better be a tough guy if you're going to be a Yankees fan in Cleveland), was suspended recently from his Catholic Youth Organiza­tion basketball team for loudly telling a ref that the call he made was "bullshit."

When it hits the fan, we hang tough. This is Cleveland, for Christ's sake! When I was a Hungarian immigrant kid growing up on the near West Side, I had three heroes. Shondor Birns was a racketeer of Hungar­ian descent who drove his sparkling green Cadillac convertible down Lorain Avenue, the street where my parents and I lived, on Saturday nights. Lou Teller, also of

Hungarian descent, was a bank robber who hit a bunch of banks in our part of town with his hot-mania gun moll covering his back. Rocky Colavito was the big Indians slugger, a matinee idol role model for a zit-faced Howdy l)oody-lking kid, his face smeared with Vaseline.

The shit hit the fan on all three of my heroes—life comes at you fast, lije is a beach, etc., etc. Shondor got blown into smither­eens by a rival gangster while sitting in another hot Cadillac. Lou got caught and did a long stretch in jail. Rocky got traded to the Detroit Tigers and even wound up doing a short stretch for the Yankees. (I forgave him; I still have his Indians base­ball card on my nightstand.)

The shit hit the fan on all three of my heroes, and I learned the lesson all Cleve-landers learn: You gotta be tough! How tough do you gotta be? This tough:

A member of our church drove down to Restland Cemetery, near our home, every week to visit his wife's grave. He was in his 90s. He'd been making visits to his wife's grave for a long, long time. Snow was falling when he made his visit one week in Janu-ary. It turned into a lake-effect blizzard. He didn't care. He was going to visit his wife, by God, snow or no damn snow! The hell with the damn snow! The hell with the damn lake effect! A little snow wasn't going to stop him! He was a Clevelander, by God.

So he drove to Restland. And the snow kept falling. And he kept praying by his wife's grave. And the snow kept falling. When he'd finished all his prayers, he got back into his car, and it wouldn't start. And the snow kept falling.

Well, the hell with the damn car! The hell with the damn snow! The hell with the damn lake effect! He got out of the car and started walking back home. He was a Clevelander, by God. And the snow kept falling. He suf­fered a heart attack. He fell to the ground. He died. And the snow kept falling.

Weeks later, when all that snow was melting, an elderly lady was visiting her husband's grave at Restland when she saw a shoe attached to a foot sticking out of the melting snow.

I admired that old guy so much.

So tough, I thought.

Such a heart, I thought.

So real, I thought.

So Cleveland.

I thought about going down to his funeral mass at our church as a kind of farewell gesture to a tough guy, a good guy, a true Clevelander.

But Nick, my son the Yankees lover, had a basketball tournament that day and I couldn't do it. I said to Nick, "Kick ass, but don't get caught." I watched Nick playing ball at just about the time the old guy was having his mass at Holy Angels Church.

Life goes on in our tough town in the usual hard-nosed, loving way. Nick kicked ass but didn't get caught. The old guy is resting at Restland, right next to his wife. May he rest in peace and may perpetual light—real sunlight, unfogged, unsmogged, unclouded—shine upon him. And may no lake-effect snow ever fall on his grave.