Nothin' but Blue Skies Page 8

  “I love this city and pick on it like the little brother I never had,” Polk told an interviewer. “But don’t mess with my fictitious little brother unless you’re also in the family.”

  Cleveland is even jealous of Detroit, its annual rival for poorest city in America, because Detroit’s Roman decay has drawn the cameras of filmmakers and photographers from all over the world. Rotting unnoticed on Lake Erie’s other shore, Cleveland is as unromantic as a worn-out strip mall.

  When LeBron James appeared on an ESPN special to announce he was leaving the Cleveland Cavaliers for the Miami Heat, TV cameras at taverns all over Cleveland recorded the anguish and deflation of sports fans, who buried their faces in their hands, cried, “I feel like my girlfriend just left me!” then burned the deserter’s jersey in parking lot “LeBronfires.” All the subsequent parodies—such as Steve Carell discussing his decision to eat at the Outback Steakhouse—made fun of James’s self-importance in scheduling an hour-long special around the two-minute sound bite in which he revealed his free-agent signing. James was the joke, but Cleveland’s low civic self-esteem made the city feel like the butt. A Cleveland-born sportswriter wrote a book entitled The Whore of Akron, which both impugned James’s fidelity and reminded readers that he wasn’t really a Clevelander. Fans in Memphis, Kansas City, or even Milwaukee would not have reacted with such a sense of betrayal. But LeBron had big-timed Cleveland, just like the Browns, who moved to Baltimore, changed their name to the Ravens, and finally won the Super Bowl they’d been unable to attain in their hometown. (The fact that no Cleveland pro sports team has won a championship since 1964 is assumed to be part of the same local curse that caused Ted Kennedy to drive a young girl off a bridge, thus bringing undeserved attention to the Cuyahoga River.) When the Dallas Mavericks defeated the Heat to win the 2011 NBA championship, bitter Clevelanders dubbed them “the Mavaliers.” If we can’t win, let’s live vicariously through the losses of our enemies.

  MAYBE CLEVELAND has never gotten over its decas horribilis, but the politician and the river that caused it so much humiliation have both been rehabilitated. After losing the mayoralty to Voinovich, Kucinich exiled himself to California, where he lived with actress Shirley MacLaine, who helped him pay the mortgage on the tiny West Side house he’d bought for $23,000. In 1982, the year Kucinich returned to Cleveland, he reported an income of $38. Kucinich was elected to the city council in 1985, but after a failed campaign for governor the next year, he disappeared again, this time to New Mexico, where he spent nearly a decade on “a quest for meaning.”

  When he finally got back into politics for good, with a run for Ohio state senate, Kucinich ran, defiantly, on his mayoral record. His campaign button was a lightbulb with the slogan “Because He Was Right.” It illuminated the fact that holding on to Muny Light had saved Clevelanders millions of dollars in utility fees. The generation-old memory of the little guy who’d stood up to the bankers was cherished by Cleveland’s ethnics, who sent Kucinich to Congress in 1996. Never satisfied with the office he occupied, Kucinich then ran for president of the United States, promising a cabinet-level Department of Peace. The first time he did it, in 2004, some Clevelanders were proud of their irrepressible congressman. He had spoken out against the Iraq War when it wasn’t politically safe, and if he reveled too much in the spotlight—appearing on a Dating Game skit with Tonight Show host Jay Leno, for example—well, America was just getting a look at their Dennis, a Cleveland idol. Cleveland being Cleveland, though, others fretted that his quixotic campaign was setting the city up for more embarrassment. (Kucinich didn’t win any delegates during that campaign, but he did win a third wife. During a party at Shirley MacLaine’s house, he met Elizabeth, red-haired, a head-taller, half-his-age Englishwoman with a tongue stud.)

  The second time Kucinich ran for president, in 2008, his hallucination of a St. John Cantius graduate in the White House seemed like an ego trip, especially to Clevelanders who thought they’d heard him promise not to run for president again. Cleveland was leading the nation in foreclosures, they grumbled, while Dennis was eating sushi in Hollywood with Sean Penn. Big timing.

  Cleveland forced its UFO-watching congressman to phone home. Kucinich dropped out of the presidential race early that winter to defend his congressional seat against four impatient constituents in the Democratic primary. The first week of February, Cleveland State University hosted two political debates: a presidential debate in the basketball arena between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, which was televised on CNN, and a congressional debate at the music school, between Dennis Kucinich, a city councilman, a nonprofit executive, a suburban mayor, and a Gold Star mother. It was broadcast on public radio. I was in Cleveland that week, doing a book signing for The Third Coast, a Great Lakes travelogue I’d written, so I attended, as a reporter for Salon.

  Before I met Dennis, I met his main opponent, City Councilman Joe Cimperman, who had raised enough money to frighten Kucinich into shutting down his presidential campaign. On the night of the Big Debate between Barack and Hillary, Cimperman sat at the polished slate bar of a nightclub across the street from Cleveland State, hosting an Obama party. In Clark Kent glasses, a sack suit, and a crew cut that needed mowing, Cimperman looked like two hundred pounds of Cleveland—the same role Drew Carey played on TV. In fact, he fancied himself a younger, more practical, post–Rust Belt iteration of Kucinich. As a young councilman, Cimperman had idolized Kucinich so much he raised $30,000 for a mayoral portrait. (Kucinich blew off three sittings.) Like his onetime hero, Cimperman came from a working-class, Slavic background—his father was a union machinist, his mother a Slovenian immigrant—and was elected to city council in his twenties. In his pursuit of federal office, Cimperman had also adopted some of Kucinich’s abrasive theatrical traits. To taunt the incumbent for no longer being down with his hometown, he cut a spoof Western ad titled “The Good, the Bad, the Kucinich,” in which he walked into his rival’s office with a “Missing Congressman” poster. (Kucinich complained about the stunt to the Department of Homeland Security.) Then he got even more personal, visiting Kucinich’s house with a Welcome Wagon basket containing sausage and a map of Ohio.

  “For me, the bloom really came off the rose when he announced that he was running for president again, and just the joke he made of this community on Letterman and Leno,” Cimperman said. “It was time to come home and he never came home. For an ethnic person, the worst thing you can do is forget where you came from.”

  Because of its proximity to Obama, the club was filling up with celebrities almost as famous as Kucinich’s followers—Timothy Hutton shook everyone’s hand, and a Don Cheadle rumor swept the room—but Cimperman had to run to his next event. It took place in a well-restored old house that could have served as the exterior setting for the classic holiday film A Christmas Story—which passes for a major tourist attraction in Cleveland. Cimperman, who could make a hockey announcer sound laconic, delivered a speech accompanied by so many finger thrusts and air grabs he looked like his own sign-language interpreter.

  “We have an amazing resource in this community,” Cimperman said. “We’re a place where things are made. While once we were the kings of steel, now we’re a growing factor in the medical economy. Through the Cleveland Clinic.”

  Then came the Q and A …

  “If you’re elected to Congress, will you become yoga partners with Shirley MacLaine?” the host asked.

  Another guest seemed anguished about abandoning Kucinich, a politician who had been the strongest voice against a war that she, too, hated.

  “In the past, he was a different kind of congressman,” the woman said. “This is a very difficult decision for me, because I’m with him one hundred percent on the war. But he hasn’t done anything on foreclosures.”

  The next morning, I drove around the Tenth Congressional District, from St. John Cantius parish to the Madonna-in-a-bathtub suburb of Parma, looking for people who still believed in Dennis. Snowy lawns were brightened by ma
rigold signs shouting “DENNIS!” with a peace symbol dotting the exclamation point. At Kucinich’s West Side headquarters, I met Arthur Ebenger, walking out the door with an armful of Dennis!wear—T-shirts, rain slickers—to distribute in the precincts. A retired pipe fitter, Ebenger had grown up playing baseball and basketball with Kucinich—“I went to St. Colman and he went to St. John Cantius”—and remembered him as a feisty, political teenager, fighting to increase access to a neighborhood political center. When Ebenger boxed, Kucinich cheered him on. A die-hard supporter of Kucinich’s presidential campaigns—he supported everything Dennis had ever done, including changing his position on abortion from pro-life to pro-choice—Ebenger was convinced his boyhood friend would be the nation’s first Slavic president.

  “If I live long enough, I’ll see him in contention for the presidency,” Ebenger predicted. “When he believes in something, watch out. Full bore, coming down the track: that’s my boy Dennis. This primary’s going to be a slaughter. He will beat everybody hands down. Dennis will set the record straight, that he is not what they are trying to make him out to be. He’s a full-time Congressman.”

  A few blocks away was Caffe Roma, the storefront joint where Kucinich often stopped in for spaghetti aglio e olio, his favorite vegan Italian meal. (Kucinich’s veganism was as much gastrological necessity as New Age affectation: as a young copy editor, he’d had part of his intestine removed after downing ten martinis in thirty minutes to win a news-room bet.) When one of the cooks had a visa problem, Kucinich straightened it out, owner Joe Coreno told me. Coreno also owned the video store across the street, where Dennis rented his movies.

  “He doesn’t go to Blockbuster,” Coreno said. “That’s more than I can say for some people.”

  “So are you going to vote for him on Tuesday?” I asked.

  “I vote for Dennis all the time, no matter what he’s running for.”

  Kucinich’s local appeal was the obverse of his national image: he had an emotional bond with older, working-class voters, to whom he embodied the spirit of a city that had survived fire, insolvency, and ridicule; the young professionals, too young to remember the floppy-haired mayor calling the bankers’ bluff, disdained him as yet another embarrassment to Cleveland. But even those who accused him of putting idealism before results in Washington admitted that his constituent service was the one effective element of his populism. At home, he was the quintessential Rust Belt politician. When LTV Steel (the product of a merger between Jones and Laughlin and Republic) declared bankruptcy in 2000, Kucinich held hearings until a buyer was found. As a result, 1,500 steelworkers still worked in the plant along the Cuyahoga.

  On debate day, snow blew in from Lake Erie, eddying ghostily over the crowned streets. The clouds, the flakes, the salt-crunchy sidewalks, the Eastern European complexions between Browns beanies and acrylic scarves—everything in Cleveland was the same pale hue as a black-and-white documentary about Admiral Byrd’s Antarctic expeditions. Kucinich arrived at the music school ten minutes late. He crept down the auditorium steps, smoothing his forelock as the moderator chided, “Not even a congressman can control the weather.”

  Kucinich’s hair was still dark, his suit was baggy, but it was difficult to see the smooth-cheeked Boy Mayor through his gnarled, deep-set sexagenarian features. Whenever he caught sight of his wife Elizabeth sitting in the third row, a blissful glow sparkled across Kucinich’s face, as though he’d been dosed with an opiate. When he dropped his eyes, he suddenly looked like a worn Balkan judge, taking notes with a felt-tip pen.

  Before Kucinich had a chance to speak, Councilman Cimperman unloaded on him for blowing off his congressional duties to pursue a presidential campaign that barely received the support of 1 percent of the Democratic Party.

  “I feel very passionately about the fact that our congressman has been absent,” Cimperman said. “We wouldn’t have this group up here today if someone hadn’t run for president twice, and that person is Mr. Kucinich.”

  “I led the effort in the United States Congress in challenging this administration’s march into this illegal war,” Kucinich responded. He spoke loudly and gravely, not like the excitable terrier of local legend, but like the near-elderly pacifist sage he had become. “Is this war not an issue for Cleveland? This war has cost every household already sixteen thousand dollars. We’ve lost brave young men and women from Cleveland. I made that war an issue in the presidential campaign. Is health care not a Cleveland issue, with one-third of Clevelanders uninsured and underinsured?”

  The only time Kucinich raised his voice was when one of his opponents pointed out that he had passed only two pieces of legislation—one allowing a Cleveland museum to show a government film.

  “In a Republican Congress!” Kucinich snapped.

  After the debate, I waited for Kucinich in front of the proscenium.

  “Congressman,” I said, introducing myself, “I’m writing an article for Salon.com. Have you heard of our website?”

  “Come ahhhn!” he snapped in his well-known Midwestern accent.

  “A lot of people in Cleveland have heard of it.”

  “There are a lot of progressive people here,” he said.

  Kucinich stepped down from the stage. At five foot seven, he was not as short as he appeared on television, where he was always standing next to aristocratic senators—or his wife. I asked him about his pledge not to run for president a second time.

  “I never promised not to run for president,” he said. “I said that I had no intention of running and what happened was the Democrats decided they were going to continue to fund the war, and I felt it was important to challenge that. Listen, do you know what this campaign is really all about?”

  Kucinich was standing so close I could identify the Teamster pin—his father’s union pin—on his suit jacket lapel.

  “My opponents are funded by Cleveland developers who’ve hated me since I was mayor in the 1970s,” he said. “These interest groups have a lock on the politics of this city, but they’ve never had a lock on me. I beat them years ago and they see this as an opportunity to just grab this congressional seat for the purposes of their own moneyed interests.”

  Even though he had been named one of the ten worst mayors in american history, Dennis Kucinich was a huge success. Not only was he still in politics after forty years, he was one of the most famous politicians in America. How many congressmen have appeared on The Tonight Show? After befriending celebrities, he’d married a woman half his age, published an autobiography blurbed by Gore Vidal, and was invited to share his opinions on nationally broadcast talk shows. Yet he still thought of himself as the scrapper taking on the fat cats, to use one of his favorite terms from the seventies. That attitude, that image, had won him a following, made him a first-name-only politician. There was no reason to change now, in late middle age, just as there was no reason to move out of the house he’d lived in for forty years. It was paid for and part of who he was.

  Because he had been campaigning for president, Kucinich was badly behind in fund-raising. The celebrity that had made him a target also provided him the wherewithal to fight back. On his campaign site, he posted an appeal for money, claiming he was under attack by corporate interests. The president of the far left knew how to rally his constituents. He quickly collected $700,000, including donations from New Age author Marianne Williamson and singer Bonnie Raitt. Sean Penn flew to Cleveland, joining Kucinich onstage at a heavy metal benefit for a college radio station. As Dennis’s friend Arthur Ebenger predicted, the election was a slaughter. Kucinich defeated Cimperman by twenty thousand votes, 50 percent to 35 percent. Another of Ebenger’s predictions was wrong, though. Kucinich will never be president, unless the West Side of Cleveland secedes from the union. (Maybe not even then. In 2012, Ohio lost two congressional seats—a decennial Rust Belt tradition. The Republicans in Columbus made sure one of them was Kucinich’s. They combined Kucinich’s district with the district of a Toledo congresswoman, who defeated
him in the primary.)

  Despite his international profile, Kucinich is as uniquely Cleveland as Slovenian polka. Cleveland thinks of itself as an underdog among cities, so it likes to vote for underdog politicians. Getting 1 percent in the primaries only endeared Kucinich more to his hometown.

  IN THE SPRING of 1971, the second year after the inferno, a reporter and photographer from the Cleveland Press canoed the entire Cuyahoga River. It wasn’t any cleaner.

  “People will dump anything at all into a stream,” wrote John Randt. “Among other things that could be identified, we saw bedsteads, white enameled stoves, ice boxes and other appliances.

  “We saw paint cans, coffee cans, and all kinds of plastic containers, detergent boxes, and rubber balls. We saw broken wooden boxes, and in one place we saw a discarded old yellow school bus.

  “There was still an occasional faint odor of Akron sewage and every rapids foamed up into detergent suds.”

  Forty years later, I took the same trip—or at least the last leg of it. My guide was a young schoolteacher named Mark Pecot, who runs a kayak adventure service named 41° North, after Cleveland’s latitude. We put our boats into the river behind a supper club in the suburb of Valley View, fourteen miles south of Lake Erie as the carp crookedly swims.