Cleveland Rocks

I woke up this morning in Ohio. I still wanted to see the city of Cleveland in daylight and try not to get pulled over again by the police. Dee Dee wanted to take me to some museums and drive me around the city.
Morning holds interesting rituals in Cleveland. The sun will peak through sporadic rain showers that make their way through the day until around noon. I sat in the living room and listened to the rain and watched Dee Dee pray. She is a faithful Muslim, a woman of God who believes and raises her children up in the same way. Because of this, she and the women in her community catch a lot of hell from the people in the city. Cleveland has never boasted of being tolerant (although Cincinnati was proud of its “million dollar niggers”). And Dee Dee is a hijab wearing Black Muslim.

As she put away her prayer rug, there was a knock at her door, a woman named Hadiyah.

She was beautiful. Tall and bronze brown with thick eyebrows. Her hijab was humble and elegant and her gait was subtle and sensual. She looked like a painting from a hieroglyph.  She smiled when she greeted us,

“As-salamu alaykum.”

She was young, and giggled slightly when she spoke about happy things, she just smiled when she spoke about sad things.

She and Dee Dee sat in the living room and talked about her impending divorce.

And she talked about leaving the city. I tried not to seem actively listening to her story because I know she wouldn’t have involved me in her marital affairs on any other occasion, but she seemed so sad. Heartbroken sad. Serious in her sadness. The way she looked at her cell phone as if she were getting over the willing-it-to-ring phase, on the verge of apathy.

She talked about going somewhere else, moving somewhere she could start fresh and try to take advantage of career opportunities- there wasn’t a lot of job growth in Cleveland-in fact most of the devout Muslim community leaves below the poverty line. Now, faced with an impending divorce (and an illogical freedom that comes from abject heartbreak) Hadiyah wanted out.

“I am serious. There are really nice places in Virginia I saw online and there are jobs down there, there’s beach,” she giggled when she said it.

“I could finish school down there too. If I needed to come back to see my parents it’s only a seven hour drive.”

When she said it, I missed home a little. I don’t think I could ever live anywhere else in the continental United States that New York. I instantly and only briefly felt shamed that I was running around like a tourist. When Hadiyah left she hadn't come to any concrete decisions about where to go, she just knew it would be far the hell away from Cleveland.
We got in the car and jumped on Neff to get the highway 90, which makes the city surprisingly easy to navigate; it makes every location in this city reachable within 15 minutes. We passed the Mosque that Dee-Dee and Hadiyah go to.
We pulled into a highway of Euclid and Dee Dee took me to a gas station and ordered me a Roman burger.

“Dee Dee, you know your friend, do you think she would go?”

“She should, but she would never go.” 

“Why not?”

“Look around, this is all she knows.”

 We passed the Quicken Loans Arena, where the Cavaliers play. The name of that place sounded obscene. I thought about Citifield, and was comforted by an even more nauseating familiarity.
I probably wouldn’t go, either.
“Would you ever leave Cleveland, Dee Dee?”

“And go where/ Where else am I going to be able to raise these kids and keep them in a house with a yard to play in?"

Dee Dee was good for reading my mind sometimes.

We came off an exit around 98^th street.

“So is this still the hood, too?”

Dee Dee smiled. “If you wanna see tourist shit, we can do that too.”

She motioned up the street. “I wanna take you somewhere, my old job around the corner.”

We passed a couple abandoned buildings, some that looked like old mills and some that were half piles of bricks sitting properly in their perfectly allotted square.  I looked up at a sign that read, “Cuyahoga County Community College”.

Cuyahoga county Ohio is moderately populated, 27% of its residents are Black. Over 60% of its residents are White. The entire county is overwhelmingly poor.

 The houses seem like they would crumble if you looked at them too rudely. Random feral trees dominated some front lawns, loomed over cracked rough rooves and scratched at windows. Paint peeled and porches leaned. The houses differed too, multi tiered, some with brick, some just modern wooden structures. But the houses were still peopled, Blacks and Whites shrinking farther under the poverty line brought together in forced integration. So many of the storefronts and houses were dreary, rundown but familiar, same size, same shape. The blocks matched each other, in emptiness, in darkness, in geography, in economy, but not in color.

The beauty in this city is exists in its nebulousness.  Dee Dee and I drove down Quincy, just Quincy- the streets are not streets, or avenues, or even roads. They were just labeled, nouns, some adjectives, written subtly on a blue square above intersections.

We passed a block, a long leveled two way street with buildings that were boarded up and dilapidated. Then a church. The next block we turned on still boasted of build boards and signs in front of stores that were completely abandoned. Then another church. At the major intersection sat a liquor store, which monopolized the entire building in the architectural square of that block. Then down the block, another church.

Damnation and redemption and nothing in between but projects and low-income housing.

The projects in Cleveland are not sprawling, even in comparison to home, where we are literally stacked upon each other- but they are three level tenement townhouses on squares that reminds me of the opening of Roots when Kunta went about the village with the business of preparing to get his drum.

We made another left and came upon the center of the county.

 The dominant structure in the city aside from the community college is the courthouse.
Inside the courthouse is a large series of rooms passed security that are plush in furnishing, and politely silent. There are rooms that clients and counselors can meet. Each floor has security- a sheriff, labeled on a black shirt clad on a bulletproof vest around a big-bodied white man. We went into Criminal courts, and on this day there was a Black bailiff and judge presiding. The bay windows from their 4^th floor office gave way to the view of the entire city.
Parts of the county looked depressed-literally, like a comet or a meteor had struck the heart of the neighborhood. The flatness of the city on top of the poverty seemed so sad to me.  Farther out, like a small ship with trophies in it, was downtown, gliding amidst a lap of rock hills and house flats.

Dee Dee stood next to me.

“This is the Cleveland I know. When I worked in this building, this is the Cleveland I stared at every day.”

I put my arm around my friend. We stood there for a while until her old colleague, the bailiff, came and chatted us up about how nice Cleveland is.

“You should go to the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame.”

“I’ve never been and I have lived here all my life.”

“Is it far?” I asked.

“15 minutes.”

We Jumped back on I90 and pulled closer to the small ship of mini scrapers that constituted downtown Cleveland.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame sits in a structure is a sharp glassy oblong sight that sits on Lake Erie on the Ohio side of the water.

Johnny Cash’s old tour bus is parked outside the front.

Bill Wither’s face is projected over the entrance along with the rest of the class of 2014.

There is a giant painted and autographed guitar. There is a giant airplane model of the contraption that killed Richie Valens and Buddy Holly. There are jumpsuits Elvis Presley’s crotch sweat.

There are sketches that Jimmy Hendrix made during his downtime on tour.

This could have been in any city, Detroit, New York, Memphis, but it was here in Cleveland. The murky water from lake Erie reflects the light from the sun that makes the Hall of Fame look like a greenhouse garden for music.

Rock n Roll. When I was little, I was told that was an old slang term for making love.

It sounds a little grimy too. Rough.  Like this city. Cleveland boasts of the first rock n roll concert to have taken place on its soil. The old Disc Jockeys were the first to use the phrase on the air. The old radio stations still stand in the surrounding neighborhood, but they are abandoned. All the precious parts are locked away in that glass house. I wanted to hear that music all over the city. Maybe it was playing, but I couldn’t hear it, because it wasn’t the music that I knew. Like when you first drive away from home and reach far enough away that you can no longer get your regular radio reception.