Chapter 28
Friday, September 14th came.
I dreamed that I left my body again. Up into the air above the room I ascended. I was out on Taft Avenue in Cuyahoga Falls, floating upward. My gravity was gone; my spirit rose quickly while my conscious mind watched my sleeping body back on the bed fifty feet below me. I got scared for I thought I was ascending too quickly, so I anxiously jerked into a half-awake paranoid state and with that, my spirit came crashing back through the bedroom ceiling and was thrown back abruptly into the breathing body mass that so temporarily was mine. I woke up and wondered where I was, now fully alert in the middle of the night of life in a cold, dark room in Ohio, with my forehead and chest soaking with sweat.
“You blew it,” I told myself.
And in the morning light, I went running with Luke. We ran lightly first, then we sprinted for 100 yards, ran lightly again, sprinted again, ran lightly, then sprinted one last time before stopping to catch our heaving breath. Decky and his dad Walter had gone off to play tennis.
Luke and I ran the neighborhoods of Decky’s past. We ran right by Cuyahoga Falls High School as the students were getting out of class. We ran into a peaceful cemetery as the wind rustled through the wet trees; the breeze soothed the moist granite headstones; it gently touched the chiseled names of once living souls. I read some of them aloud—“Kelly, Thatcher, Montgomery”—all of them once breathed and felt emotion as I did. There were hundreds of them. Their physical bodies (or what was left of them) now in the cold earth below us; our breathing flesh was the only thing that now separated us from them, for only their spirits still lived. And the earth that our sneakers treaded on was now the stark barrier between life and death. I thought about how the phenomenon of time itself separated the breathing from the dead. So many in our great race had come and gone, and we would one day join this great movement, for life was always fleeting, and there was no escaping it. Were they still asleep under this organic blanket of roots, leaves, grasses and moss? Or were they someplace else? Perhaps they were now in a much better place.
At one point as we paced steadily through the vast cemetery, I wanted to stop, for we were lost and I needed to rest until we could get our bearings again. My mind went errant. Everyone below us was connected to someone above, I thought. Through the generations we were all somehow descendants of peasants, kings, great chiefs, and skilled hunters: live, grow, die, be reborn. This was the amazing cycle of life. How complex it all was. But all of us living were still chasing this fleeting beauty called life. With advancing age and our ultimate infirmity certain, would we ever let go of the belief that we had something over those who came before us? God would show us all in the end that we were merely human too. All of the great books were the only thread that loosely held all of our histories’ humanity together. And no one was ever spared, not the great kings, not the famous actors, not even the presidents. How easy it was to mock God when we were living. What secrets did the peaceful souls before us now know? I wondered as I panted there, all hunched over, carefully looking for signs. There was a fallen tree branch on the road in front of us; a squirrel ran over a forgotten grave marker buried under some leaves. Perhaps it had a surname that was the same name as mine.
“Come on, you puss!” Luke pushed me. I was panting and out of breath. We both immediately realized that we needed to get to the other end of the cemetery. We needed to look for Thirteenth Street and then Jefferson. We were going in circles. We began to run at a good pace again. Eventually, we spotted the familiar big blue water tower of yesterday on the hill that overlooked the tennis courts where Decky and his father were volleying.
After a slow climb over the crest of the hill, we sat comfortably and watched the Bradys volley to each other on the court below us. I was still winded. In my high school track years, my coach, Mr. Malloy, always pushed me to go farther, faster; he pushed me like Luke had just pushed me out of the graveyard.
“Come on, Hogan, let’s go. Move! Get up there!” Malloy screamed at me as he paced the inside of the old track at Cauley Stadium. With newspapers in his hand, he swept the air along with the folded sports page as I came to the rounded corner. He half-smiled in loving disgust as he walked alongside me wearing a long tan raincoat and brown fedora hat. “Get up there with the rest of them!” he bellowed. He sometimes had his glasses off and clutched in his other hand, jogging to stay even with me as I gasped, showing me that I was hardly even moving.
“Come on! Will you get up there!”
I was always on that gravel track dying, lost in a world of my own pain, plagued by the terrible challenges of a sixteen-year-old, dreaming of the girls who ran on the other side of the field as I played the same Rolling Stones song over and over in my head so I could forget about the pain and reach the finish line . . . “Gimme Shelter.”
One more lap, I thought on those days, seeing a definite end to my pain the quicker I could finish this bloody run. Cutting into the turn, I swung into it with my arms. I huffed like a blowfish with every arm thrust . . . whoosh, who, whoosh, who, whoosh . . . the song playing over and over and over again in my head . . . If that was all I could focus on, if I kept the tune in my head, it would all soon be over.
And that is how I got through every race. Now, in 1984, Coach Malloy was a regular down at Tabor’s in Lowell, where my friend Richie sometimes tended bar. Yeah, good old Richie. Richie had almost come out to California with Caprissi and me after putting the idea in our stinkin’ heads three years before . . . good old loveable Richie. He told me in his letters now that Coach Malloy sometimes asked about me out in California from his comfortable end seat at the bar.
“How’s old Hogan doing? What’s he doing now?”
And they said that just like old “Crazy Legs” Brady, Coach Malloy was quite the runner in his day too.
“They used to call him ‘Feets’ ’cause he was so quick,” my father Frank told me over and over again. “Feets Malloy,” the pride of Lowell.
Luke and I sat atop the hill under the water tower. I wondered if old “Feets” had ever run into the likes of “Crazy Legs” at a Boston track meet during the ’40s, like maybe back when the Sox played with Williams, Pesky, and Dom DiMaggio, like the same year as the ’46 World Series.
“Crazy Legs” volleyed a tennis ball back and forth down on the green clay court below us with Decky. Those legs still worked madly, as if they still wanted to be that crazy track star of forty years before, I could sense it.
When they finished, “Crazy Legs” drove us all back to Taft Avenue again, where Luke, Decky, and I jumped in the Fairlane to go pick up Decky’s processed photos at a Fotomat parking lot booth. Later on, we showered and had dinner at the Bradys. Decky’s mother made lasagna; she served a big salad and poured everyone around the table a big glass of wholesome milk, for after all, we were all seated at the table of America’s heartland. After dinner, we went out again with Big Jim and Elaine, picking them up in the Fairlane. Big Jim’s tractor still sat in the front yard of their Boston Heights home and stared us down again as we approached. It was intimidating and eerily silent. All of us packed in the car, Luke and Big Jim up front, and headed north toward Cleveland.
“We’re off to the great North Coast of America!” Decky exclaimed.
On a wooded two-lane road, reminiscent of the back roads of my youth that we used to drive around in, Luke decided to stop at a roadside bar. We all walked into the bar from the rainy Ohio night and immediately encountered a contingency of craning curious locals whose eyes stopped what they were doing and fixed on our grand entrance. All of them were dressed in jeans and T-shirts, most with long hair, with rock star lookalikes everywhere in the crowd. Bob Seger, Ted Nugent, Grace Slick, and Janis Joplin . . . They were all there. I spotted them. The bar silence was deafening at first, but then their eyes stopped at Big Jim and methodically they turned, one by one, back into their own worlds again . . . rock-and-roll music, cigarettes, local sports, and liquor. I was happy that Big Jim was with us, for without him, we may have had trouble, for we were in the middle of a wooded nowhere, between Akron and Cleveland, where everyone knew everyone, and no one goes into other people’s neighborhood bars—except if you were us.
This place was worlds away from the college bar of Columbus and further away from the Huntington Beach disco clubs of August. We had entered back into a simple time again, a time before all of the charades. These were Ohio’s finest working-class heroes. They didn’t care how they might appear to us on the outside. They weren’t interested in trendy styles or trendy people; they were simply out to have a few beers and listen to juke box rock and roll on a rainy Friday night.
We all sat down at a picnic table next to the jukebox by the door. There were names scratched into the table, all kinds of stuff, like: “Betty and Dean ’78,” “Bill and Delores were here—1981.” Some little heart scratches were etched here and there, some profanity, and a loud “Ricky SUCKS.” Poor Ricky, I thought. There was a basket of popcorn that had been abandoned on the table by someone before us. All the while, Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water” rattled the black base front of the large jukebox beside us. Decky grabbed the old basket of leftover kernels and darted to the center bar. He came back quickly, bouncing with three fresh baskets of popcorn.
“Do you know what this song is about?” Decky asked as he put down the baskets. Big Jim was still at the bar asking about the availability of bottled Stroh’s Signature while Elaine was already on her way back to the picnic table carrying two pitchers of regular draft beer.
“No,” I replied.
“It’s about the time that Lake Erie was burning, The great North Shore of America! Fire on the water!” Decky laughed.
“Oh yeah, I think I remember hearing about that. Maybe you told us before?”
Bahhh, Bah, Bahhh, Bah Bahh, Ba-bahhh, Bah, Bah, Bah, Ba-bahhhh, the sound of that heavy guitar permeated our space. I imagined it might be as heavy as the film of filth that had caught fire on Lake Erie. I suddenly looked around and took notice that the whole bar seemed to be tapping their hands and rocking their barstools to this crazy riff. Heads rocked back and forth as people looked off into space, thinking back to their high school days. There was casual conversation here and there. I heard people discussing the Browns already having lost two at the start of the season. Denver would be in town this weekend; maybe they could get a win. Someone in the corner near the restrooms was lamenting about another disappointing Indians season while someone else spoke up. “What about Len Barker’s perfect game in ’81?” But others just resigned to tap their hands and shake their heads to the good old rock and roll that played above all of the background sports talk; a sound so uniquely akin to the true identity of what was Cleveland.
Everyone in the whole bar looked familiar to me, even though I had never met a single one of them. I was fascinated by this phenomenon. Were there never enough faces to go around the whole world or what? Maybe they were all ghosts. Besides Ted Nugent and Janis Joplin, there were others around that had a strange resemblance to the people I had grown up with. There was a Ray Champeaux lookalike standing over at the bar and staring me down; next to him was someone that absolutely could be my friend Dukie’s older brother. Lones was here too, except maybe a little bit shorter with darker hair, but those same big old inch-thick Coke-bottle glasses, and just like Lones, at the smack center of every important conversation.
Luke punched a cover of “Brown Eyed Girl” by Jimmy Buffet using the white buttons of the juke box. The machine’s robot arm moved up and back, finally grabbing the 45 from the catalog stack to place it onto the turntable, which was partially hidden from sight. How I loved that Van Morrison song no matter who was singing it. Heck, I loved listening to my own voice sing it.
Once both pitchers of beer were gone with the red popcorn baskets empty, we collectively decided to get out of there and proceeded to stumble into the dizzy drizzly night, leaving the people in their rock-and-roll bubble behind. As I turned back to watch our forever exit, nobody even turned to watch us leave. We were invisible again.
We drove on, approaching another big city in the middle of America with a crazy surfboard attached to our car. When we got close, Big Jim and Elaine pointed out Cleveland’s Terminal Tower to us. Its older architecture was completely illuminated in the sky of night with brilliant light reflecting off of the clean white stone of the building. It was a glowing iron whose white-hot color contrasted with the cooler, newer buildings in its immediate vicinity.
“It used to be the tallest building in the world before the Empire State Building was built,” Big Jim told us.
“What was the tallest building in the world before Terminal Tower was built?” Luke asked.
“Who knows? The Tower of Babel?” Big Jim answered with an optimistic chuckle.
I had learned about the Tower of Babel in catechism at St. Matthews as a child, a tower built by one people after the great flood with the desire to all speak one language. What’s the harm in that? Here the story was coming back to me from somewhere out of the thick, drizzling Cleveland air, with Big Jim the storyteller.
We drove through The Flats, and along the Cuyahoga River we saw a red iron swinging bridge that sat sideways in the darkness; it appeared to wait patiently for a passing barge before it could swing itself back and lock into place. The small bridge paled in size to a huge arch bridge of columns of white concrete and steel that crossed above it, a greater bridge to higher levels, higher planes running above The Flats. Without crossing the swinging bridge, we found ourselves in a rundown section of town and a local joint that Big Jim had wanted to take us to. Inside was a long, narrow bar running the length of the floor and a big group of Clevelanders congregated around the far end, where there was a dart board. I noticed that the clientele were mostly working class, some blue collar, like those at the roadside bar we had just been to, but there were a good mix of others a little more dressed up, with some wearing collared shirts instead of their T-shirted brethren. In a general sense, I noticed that the professional-dressed city folk had less weathered features than those in T-shirts beside them. They were polished and smooth with bigger paychecks, bigger egos, and a lot more to lose in life than the group throwing darts at the wall.
As we ordered drinks and tried to get settled, I took a step back and studied my physical surroundings further. A short, stocky, thirty-something bald guy at the bar talked to the others in my group about Europe. Big Jim slowly peeled away from this debacle, dismissing the overwhelming know-it-all that attempted to hold onto us all. Jim was an eddy in the tide, motioning to me to walk with him toward the cooler dartboard gang assembled at the far end of the bar.
“You don’t know how lucky you all are, the places you’ll stay, the people you’ll meet, pages of stories that aren’t even told yet,” the guy engaged Decky, where poor Decky couldn’t get away cleanly. I chased after Big Jim, but my feet momentarily stuck to the spilled beer floorboards. I thwack-thwacked away. It made my exit more noticeable to the midnight rambler.
“Yeah, that’s why he’s sitting here in Cleveland,” Big Jim said to me when I caught up to him.
Big Jim and I stood near the dart area. We had soon cased both levels of the place and now stood at the bottom of the wooden staircase in the corner and patiently waited for the others to catch up with us. But the mad bald fisherman had cast his loose net over them now and held them steady within his earshot as he droned on and on.
I saw Luke test the loose net from afar. He was first to break away and come over to us, leaving just Elaine and Decky behind. We talked for a minute about Luke’s little brother Nate while Big Jim snuck to the side of the bar for more drinks. Young Nate died a year earlier while on his way to work at his pizza parlor job; Nate flipped pies there. He was driving along a lonely two-lane Topeka country road and was hit head-on by a carload of drunken high school girls who themselves ended up with nothing more than a few scratches and bruises. It was an incredible tragedy for the whole Coppens family because Nate, being the youngest, was always so loved by everyone.
“And why is it that the drunk drivers always live?” I asked aloud. “How is that fair?”
“I don’t know . . . because they’re loose I guess. Their bodies are all relaxed instead of their stiffening up. I’ve determined that life is not always about what is and isn’t fair,” Luke answered.
My father Frank had always reasoned that the unexplained and the unfair was all the more reason to believe that there had to be a higher place, an explanation for it all. There had to be an ultimate peace that would finally be revealed on that certain day of reckoning. “That’s where it’s all going to come to you! Thwack!” he told me. “So you better listen up!”
Luke talked to Jim and I about the two Annas in his life. Anna his cute sister and another Anna, a girl he had met before we left California. “At the end of all this, you might go back there and marry her someday,” I said to him. While we talked, a disc jockey spun classic rock and roll throughout the club from a partially hidden booth up on the second-floor landing.
“Maybe . . . You never know what’s ahead for us all,” Luke agreed.
In the corner near the dartboard, a map of the state of California hung on the wall. Newport Beach was boldly circled with harsh pen-marking graffiti that notated boldly “Mae was here!” I wondered why the map was even here. No other maps on the walls were evident, just this one California map at the far end of the bar. If Mae was there, why did she ever come back to Cleveland? Was she visiting Newport Beach out there? Did she own this bar? Or was she just another drunk patron? Perhaps she was living with some guy named Kilroy now.
After we heard Bob Dylan’s howling cries for grace in “Saved,” the DJ put on The Who with “Love, Reign O’er Me.” The man in the booth worked autonomously through the night; his selections were his own. I could see that he was having a blast as he talked to himself up there, mixing records. The rain and the crescendo of The Who’s song slowly rose to the level of the crazy crowd amidst puddles of random conversation. It rained hard outside too. The beer was taking hold of me now; I could tell for I began to sing loudly and turned to stare out the window at the pouring rain on the empty street outside. My thoughts were a freeway inside of my head; The Who’s Roger Daltrey screamed to me. I sang aloud with him in the crowded bar, but no one wanted to listen to me. I could hardly hear my own beautiful voice above the din. The guy in the booth put on “Heartbreaker” by The Stones next. It was a song about a kid being shot down in New York City by mistake, shot down with a .44 by the cops, Dirty Harry style. I thought about the hard rain outside and how Neil Young and Waylon Jennings were supposed to be playing tonight at The Blossom Music Center back in Cuyahoga Falls. Would they still play? Luke, Big Jim, and I talked on and on about this. Someone in the bar mentioned that Cyndi Lauper only had 5,000 in attendance the night before because of the weather. I wondered what the almighty snobby stagehand thought about that. Who’s afraid of the rain anyway? After all, this was Cleveland where rock and roll reigned hard! Elton John would play tomorrow night on that beautiful rainy outdoor stage, but sadly, Luke, Decky, and I’d be gone.
We hopped across the river with our lonely group to another crowded bar. The swinging barge bridge this time allowed our passage to the other side of the city in the wet darkness. It must have quietly moved into place while we were drinking in the dartboard bar.
I was certainly drunk now and barely remembered a doorman that took a dollar off of me as I entered; my poor fleeting memory had stalled.
“Why is it only a dollar?” I asked the big guy.
“If you want to play you gotta pay! Nobody rides for free!” the big man said back to me and then chuckled aloud in a reminiscent San Francisco dream.
Inside now, Decky and I bounced around with our usual pickup lines while Luke played Pac-Man in the corner by himself; he had inadvertently hit the “one player” button instead of hitting the “two player” button when he started the game. Joining him for a moment, we decided to count scores, a turn at a time, instead of playing each other in the game.
While Luke gobbled the Pac-dots on the video maze during his turn, Decky walked up to a girl wearing a red double-breasted-style vest to say, “I see you’re double-breasted tonight!”
She was aghast. I thought she might smack him at first, but she simply walked away indignantly.
“You look like a nun who used to teach me piano in the fifth grade!” Decky said to another cute girl standing by the bar as she rolled her eyes at him and turned abruptly away. “Gosh, there’s something about that line that always gets them going! I almost had her! Did you see it!” He turned to me laughing.
Soon a girl appeared over Luke’s shoulder and began to watch him play Pac-Man. She had beautiful shoulder-length brown hair and brown eyes. She stood there alone in the night, a Van Morrison siren, but just like that, Decky swooped in like a hawk and started to talk to her before I could even stumble in her general direction.
I immediately noticed that she had a French accent. I overheard her respond to Decky with a smile. I moved from Luke’s opposite side now and tried my best high school French on her, slurring my speech, trying desperately to roll my drunken Rs.
“Je m’appelle Mike.”
“My name is Colette.” She wasn’t impressed with my French. And her name was Colette!
In broken English, Colette proceeded to tell Decky and Luke that she lived in a village outside of Paris. She was traveling America and was staying at youth hostels throughout the continent. She had been with some friends here in Cleveland, but she was moving on now. She had a bus ticket to Chicago, and from there, would go further west, eventually to Los Angeles and Newport Beach.
“Say hello to Mae for us in Newport Beach,” I said.
“Que?”
“What is your impression of America so far?” Decky asked her.
“Why do the French hate Americans?” I obnoxiously blurted out over Decky’s shoulder. “Is it because of the Cold War?”
“No,” she said, “I’m not sure how you would say . . . your arrogance?”
And with my arrogance still lingering there, Colette decided to say good-bye to Decky and walk swiftly away. I said good-bye to Colette as she walked into the crowd, but she didn’t turn back. Here I was invisible to another Colette, I thought. Why? Because love didn’t reign anymore. It would rain cool rain again someday though, I figured it had to, but when? Was I really that much of a jerk? All the while, the hard Cleveland rain still pelted the street in blowing waves outside.
“Must be, how do you say, my arrogance?” I turned to Luke. “You look like a nun who used to teach me piano in the fifth grade!” I yelled after Colette. Luke shirked his characteristic laugh at this. Decky seemed mad that I had chased Colette away. Again.
While Decky drove Big Jim and Elaine home that night to Boston Heights, Luke and I fell asleep in the backseat of the Ford. The cool, cool rain fell hard as I slept, banging like hard hail on the roof of the car. It rained all of the way to Taft Avenue.
We arrived at Decky’s parents’ house about two o’clock a.m. A note on the counter left by Decky’s mother Bridgie said that our friend, Eddie Kinsley, had called from California while we were out. Being it so late, I thought I’d wait until the morning to call him back.
The three of us raided the kitchen cabinets, opening the refrigerator repeatedly to pull out food. Luke laid sheets of white bread on the counter while Decky filled them all with ham, then placed all of the sliced cheese from a thick Kraft Singles package on each half. I moved down the line of open sandwiches and filled them with gobs of mustard before we put the top slice of bread over them all. The gremlins had returned. It made perfect sense to me now—it was the exposure to water that made them multiply.