But as Iraq fell apart on sectarian lines, Cleveland’s Little Iraq fused closer together. The eating, the visiting, and the gathering continued—a birthday party for a family’s first child born in America, a Quran ceremony for the deceased, a tea party to distract someone missing a wedding back home.
My parents and their friends had spoken of the siblings’ weddings they’d missed, the funerals they’d only imagined from afar. Now I was watching these emotions play out firsthand—the grief a missed happy occasion could inspire, the regret that could take mourning to excruciating heights, the nagging question of whether the costs of coming to America had been too high. Through the tears, I heard the same line over and over again: “If it was for me, I wouldn’t have come, but we have to endure this for our children.”
There is no word for “stress” in Arabic with the same connotation of strain on one’s physical and mental well-being, and so many of the newest arrivals say of the American lifestyle “Kulla stress,” using the English word in an otherwise Arabic sentence. They have adopted the word “busy” as well. “Ani sayra haweya busy,” they say when they fall behind in their social calls. They say it with regret because there is a loneliness to their new lives they cannot shake.
Cleveland’s Little Iraq is becoming a hybrid just like this mix of Arabic and English, just like me. Every year that passes, I watch the Iraqi children’s accents drop away. They arrived not knowing more than a handful of words, but now their tongues have swallowed English, adore English, think and dream and play in English.
On New Year’s Eve, we gather in the apartment of friends. One of our recent arrivals plays the guitar. I can’t sing along to any of the Arabic songs our group belts out with relish.
In between songs, our hostess asks me, “Are you bored?”
Over the years, my friends have come to know the limits to my vocabulary; they can anticipate the cultural references that I will miss. They are sensitive to this, but I no longer am. This is the gift living in Cleveland has given me. It has made me comfortable in my role as a translator, a bridge.
“Let’s find an English song,” she calls out.
Our guitarist strums the tune to “Hotel California.” The lyrics leave our mouths, off-key, sometimes thick and accented, but familiar to everyone.
Geography of the Heartland
JOHN LLOYD CLAYTON
A Night at the Golden Lion Lounge
I
Gary’s really not a bad guy. He always gives some bit of advice or counsel gleaned from years of trial and tribulation. He’s a good listener. He smiles and he means it. He always remembers your name. But I’d cover his tab for a month if he would just stop referring to everybody in the place as “old queens” and “us old fags.” Invariably this begins complaints about his poor health, his doctor appointments up at Good Sam, his medications, his surgeries, and the daily aches and pains that cause him to be unable to work a normal job. With a face that has lost all decorum and droops like a basset hound’s, he drinks gin and tonics by the liter, wears flimsy plastic sandals that show his hairy, bulbous toes, and works from home as a telephone operator for an HMO. Finished with his litany of pains and his sixth G&T, he falls into far-too-detailed reminiscences about his lost loves. When the crowd has turned and every man begins looking down at his watch, he ends by invoking all of us in the drama: “Well, you know, Dorothy just needs a good hard fuck now and then!”
This might turn a few heads at one of the trendy coffee shops down the street. But he’s saying it at the Golden Lion Lounge, the kind of Cincinnati gay bar where time has less stopped than never actually caught up in the first place. You could find it at Clifton and Ludlow, right in the middle of a municipal neighborhood that was swanky a hundred years ago, became a drug-infested slum after the war, then in the nineties became an eclectic neighborhood of French bakeries, Indian restaurants, and clothing shops selling hemp jewelry and organic cotton tees at 45 bucks a pop. UC is just up the street and DAAP kids pace the sidewalks, intentionally scuffing their $400 sneakers so they look all broken in and worn.
Golden Lion, however, has never changed. It has no windows. It stands upright covered in dull beige plaster from sidewalk to roof. It has no sign, though legend says affixed to the other side of the plywood plank that serves as a door were some sticky letters unevenly applied, the kind you use on your mailbox. But you heard others call it “Golden Lions” and so you did the same. Take away the cellular phones and color photographs and it could be 1929, you sliding in with your brother-in-law after a terrible day on the stock market. Stonewall could be two days away. That eighty-six Camaro parked out back? It might actually just be new. Gary himself might range from thirty to sixty-eight, but in this light he’s ageless.
II
I have never been much on bars in general, and a detailed chronicle of my experience with the Cinti gay scene would make little more than a frightened haiku (“Hey Handsome-Lookin?”/ Snarls the sketchy lumberjack/ Time to run back home). For actual drinking I prefer, like George Thorogood, to do it alone, and for company I prefer some place
