We'll Always Have Cleveland

Excerpt from

I Barely Ever Heard of Cleveland

Chapter 1

Each time I've sat down to begin a new novel, I've always thought of my first three months in Cleveland, and remembered what captivated me, made me move here, and inspired me to write thirteen books and countless short stories about a city that is too often like Rodney Dangerfield—it don't get no respect.

When I first arrived here in January of 1987, I was a complete Cleveland virgin. Born and raised in Chicago back in the day when my parents didn't own a car and taking a three-state jaunt over the weekend just for fun was unthinkable, and living all my adult life in New York and then Los Angeles—with a couple of time-outs in Georgia, courtesy of the United States Army, and in Hong Kong to write a very bad film project that some twenty-five years later turned into a novel—all I knew about Cleveland was Bob Feller, Jim Brown, and the Cuyahoga River catching fire.

I'd heard all the Cleveland jokes perpetuated by television's Johnny Carson and his Cleveland native-son head writer, the late Pat McCormick, when they finally tired of poking fun at Pittsburgh. However, I was laughing over something I knew virtually nothing about. I was vaguely aware that there was a Great Lake up here somewhere. I knew it wasn't Lake Mich igan because that body of water was the eastern border of Chicago and I had spent my childhood in a seventh-floor apartment looking out on the waves crashing against the rocks of that lake, so I figured out the big body of water just north of this city is Lake Erie. Otherwise, I'd barely ever heard of Cleveland.

When I accepted a job at Marcus Advertising to come here for three months to conceptualize, create, and get on its feet a weekly television game show for the Ohio Lottery—a show called Cash Explosion which, eighteen years later is still on the air, albeit in a slightly different form, and which hasn't paid me a nickel's worth of money since 1987—I had to ask exactly what everyone did in Cleveland. At that time I had no knowledge of the Northeast Ohio steel industry, about which I've since written with such affection, nor the immigrant culture that the steel business spawned. I knew Detroit made cars and Pittsburgh was a steel town, but I hadn't a clue as to what economic engine floated the boats on the North Coast.

In fact, I didn't know it was called the North Coast until I got off the plane and saw the sign in the Cleveland Hopkins Airport, welcoming travelers.

I arrived in the evening on the first Sunday in January of 1987, and I'm sure it will surprise no one that it was snowing, because that's generally what it always does in a cold Cleveland January. I'd seen my share of snow as a child in Chicago—which probably doesn't get as much snowfall in any given year as Cleveland does, but I was younger. I was a lot shorter then, too, and it seemed like a lot of snow. After more than two decades living in Los Angeles, the gently falling flakes that landed in my hair and on my eyelashes on that January Sunday were the first of many things that made me think I might learn to love Cleveland.

It didn't even matter that, because in Southern California it never drops below fifty degrees, all I'd brought with me in the way of outerwear was a flimsy trench coat with a removable lining that would prove as effective at keeping at bay the blizzards of a Cleveland winter as a flashlight would be in illuminating the Grand Canyon at night.

Nevertheless, I'd been working in network and syndicated television for too long, and was thrilled to be getting out of la-la land long enough to get acclimated somewhere else for the first time in more than twenty years. I needed a chance to experience how the rest of the country—the real people, not the show business egomaniacs—lived.

I was picked up at the airport and driven across town to a hotel in Beachwood—just a few blocks from the offices of Marcus Advertising—until more suitable accommodations could be found. As we crossed the Main Avenue Bridge, I looked out across the Flats at downtown and the Terminal Tower, all lit up and glistening through the falling snow. The scene was so warm and welcoming that it occurred to me I might like this new city very much.

I had no idea how much it would eventually get under my skin and into my bloodstream. There are those who smoke one cigarette, drink one drink, or try a sample of one drug and they are hooked from the beginning. Cleveland hooked me, beginning that very first night.

It's a city that has steadily fired my writer's imagination, a place I've grown more and more crazy about with every passing month (despite all its warts and wens)—a destination in which I have really felt a part of the community. I've learned an awful lot about the city and region, and the wonderful and sometimes maddening people who live here. I know the area very well now, although I'm still learning—east to Warren, south to Holmes County, west to Elyria, and of course every inch of downtown and the Flats and Tremont and Ohio City, and every street in Cleveland Heights and Shaker Heights.

I've lived here for a decade and a half now, but I still can't drive downtown or across the river to the West Side without feeling a little lump of pride in my chest as I think, “This is my town.” It really is, too.

Cleveland is a major-league city with major-league sports, a huge fan base for arts and culture, and a diversity of citizens whose backgrounds cover almost a hundred different ethnicities. Unlike Los Angeles, where I could live for ten years and never have the opportunity to speak to my next-door neighbor, Cleveland and its suburbs are a busy maze where everyone seems to know everyone else.

For all its big-city perks and activities and attractions—and scandals, too—Cleveland is a small town, or at least a medium-sized one broken up into many small neighborhoods. I hardly ever go out of the house, especially in Cleveland Heights and Shaker Heights and of course Cleveland itself, when I don't run into somebody I know.

Living here for so long that I now think of myself as a Clevelander, it tickles me to remember back to that first week, when I went into raptures at seeing my first frozen pond in twenty-one years, when I was forced to go out and buy a pair of rubber overshoes to protect my flimsy California shoes from nearly a foot of slush, or how amused I was after I'd put in a full day at work and came outside at five o'clock to see everyone who worked in my building at Landmark Centre chipping ice off the windshields of their cars, their breaths freezing in a puff of smoke and their noses turning red with the cold. Then realized I'd soon be driving a rental car—and having to chip away at my the ice on my own windshield.

It was an actual season, like the kind I'd grown up with in Chicago. There would be four of them! Summer heat would give way to the cool, snappy breezes of autumn, then to cold and snowy December through March, and then to warm and green spring again.

I'd grown bored with the unchanging seasons during my California years. In Los Angeles, it's summer for eleven months, followed by heavy cold rains in February, and then the cycle begins again. I actually found myself relishing the bad weather on the shores of Lake Erie as I drove around and looked at the sights, the old and interesting architecture, and the people who lived here and dressed up in protective clothing—virtually everyone here wears a parka, most with interesting color combinations.

When I submitted The Lake Effect to my agent, who lives in New York, he observed that my first four books in the Milan series all had something about Cleveland in the title and this one should, too. I had to point out that everyone in Northeast Ohio knows that anything called The Lake Effect has something to do with them. That's because we all listen to the weather reports each night; it would be crazy not to. I'm not sure New Yorkers have ever heard of the lake effect. I know I hadn't, in Manhattan or in Los Angeles, either, until I moved to Cleveland. All these years later, I still enjoy the winter—but I have to admit I don't have to go out in it every day, either. I enjoy looking at it, though, through the windows on three sides of the second-floor sunroom in which I spend most of my day, writing.

When I actually moved to Cleveland back in the winter of 1990, I'd driven all the way from California with not much in my old car except three days' worth of clothes (I stopped at my daughter's house in Denver and got them washed) and, of course, my computer. I was passing through Columbus, Ohio, looking forward to taking possession of my house the next morning, and as I fiddled with the radio dial I somehow heard a broadcast originating in Cleveland that informed me that there was currently an area blizzard and an ice storm on Cedar Hill—the only way I knew (at the time) how to get to Cleveland Heights from downtown—and that driving was particularly hazardous. After spending a generation in Los Angeles, that weather report gave me a chill that had nothing to do with the winter temperature.

I found out the next morning, when I finally arrived, that the “blizzard” had not been a problem at all. While it can snow like murder here, the very next day the white ground cover often begins melting away.

What truly struck me about that initial week in Cleveland in 1987, beyond the exhilarating weather and the beautiful architecture and the friendliness of the people, was Browns Mania. I wasn't a huge football fan during my Southern California stay, even though, like everyone else, I perked up during the Super Bowl; baseball was more my game, specifically the Los Angeles Dodgers. But in the 1986 season, quarterback Bernie Kosar and coach Marty Schottenheimer had led their team to the playoffs for the first time in decades, and when I got here—the evening after they'd won their first postseason game (over the New York Jets)—the whole city was agog with excitement.

That was a change for me as well. In Southern California, when the Dodgers or the Rams or the Lakers won a championship, only half the local citizenry even knew about it, and only five percent of them actually cared one way or the other—more than enough to fill the stadiums, of course, in a community of fourteen million people. Still, there was little civic boosterism for sports in Los Angeles, or, frankly, much of anything else except movies and TV. It's a city where the population lives and dies on the box office success of their last picture or the ratings of their most recent TV show and doesn't much worry about such trivia as sports.

In Cleveland, the Browns are everybody's business. Every time we trade a player or hire a new coach, there's nobody within a hundred-mile radius of Public Square who doesn't have an opinion about it one way or the other, a wise and learned opinion they are more than happy to share.

The day before the playoff game against the Denver Broncos—the one that would be played in a blizzard forever known as “Ice Station Cleveland”—came six days after I arrived in Cleveland. It was a Saturday, and I had stopped into a little delicatessen in Shaker Heights to order a takeout lunch. Standing in line directly in front of me were two elderly Jewish ladies, both in their eighties or perhaps even older. The taller of them was probably four feet eleven inches, and both were adorable all wrapped up in their cold-weather gear so that only their eyes and noses showed. They looked around the deli at the walls plastered with Browns stuff—orange pompons and banners, posters of Bernie Kosar and Ozzie Newsome, and panoramic views of the now-gone Cleveland Municipal Stadium. One lady turned to the other and said fervently, “Oy, that Bernie! Is he wonderful? Could he throw that ball! I love that Bernie!”

My love affair with the city began that frosty Saturday, and many years later with a closet full of Browns and Indians shirts and jackets, that civic lust burns as hot as ever.

I received another real tug at my heartstrings that same week when I visited another store and on the wall was a poster of the rival quarterback, Denver's John Elway, hung upside down like some sort of icon in a satanic ritual, with an X drawn across his face with a thick Magic Marker. Clevelanders showed that they were not only fiercely loyal to their team, but had a sense of humor about it, too.

They don't have much of a sense of humor about the Pittsburgh Steelers, though—or, about the Baltimore Ravens and former Browns owner Art Modell. When the Cleveland football team returned to the NFL after a long absence in the late 1990s, one of my California friends, mystery novelist and football fanatic Gar Anthony Haywood, asked me if the Browns would have the same kind of rivalry with Baltimore as they did with Pittsburgh. I had to reply, “With the Steelers it's a rivalry; with Art Modell's Ravens, it's a jihad.”

Along with most Cleveland-area sports fanatics, I am still angry with the Baltimore Ravens. When my son, Darren, intro duced me to the beautiful young woman named Anne Kelley whom he ultimately married on a beach in Maui, he told me she was a Baltimore native now living in Los Angeles. I grew to love her only after she assured me that she and her family members were not Ravens boosters.

The Browns, by the way, lost that 1987 playoff game to the Broncos. It would be a better story if they'd won, then gone on to capture the Super Bowl, coinciding with my first visit here—but there I go, writing fiction again.