When I was a boy, my father would come home from the mill and wash his face and hands in the sink; I would tell him about my small day and watch the water turn brown as it swirled. When he was done he would wipe his face on the towel and leave behind the imprint of a red skull; he couldn’t wash enough to get clean.
I had a romantic notion that such filthiness was what it meant to be a man. But after a few weeks in the mill, I started dreaming about cancer. There was a story about some geese that landed in the vivid green wastewater–retention basin and sank right to the bottom. I’d imagine my body after death, completely decayed, only a man-shaped pile of rust in my coffin.
Those dreams weren’t enough to stop me from going to work, though. From my late teens—in those days when we weren’t all pretending a college education matters—until my mid-thirties when I decided that a master’s degree in fiction and poetry would somehow make my life better, I kept willingly walking into mills and factories and industrial complexes. Usually these excursions would begin with a brief safety video describing all the ways one was likely to be killed inside. The names on the mills changed: U.S. Steel became USS-Kobe, and LTV, which the old-timers used to call “Good old Liquidate, Terminate, and Vacate,” closed and opened and morphed around before becoming ArcelorMittal. Each time the names changed, fewer people had jobs.
The name that has stayed with me the most came from LTV: the continuous annealing line. Annealing is a process by which steel is heated and then slowly cooled so that the metal will be tough. Imagine being annealed continuously.
In those spare moments when I wasn’t sweating a mortgage payment or trying to coax some education for my children out of the region’s essentially rotten school system, I pretended to be an artist. In school, I was only interested in art and English, and after graduation I clung to those two things as a justification for why I was wasting my life working construction all over northeast Ohio. I fancied myself as one of those artists who would speak for common people, never really imagining myself as one of the commoners. The most consistent thing in my life was the terrible impracticality of my art. I wrote novels and sent poems to The New Yorker. On job sites, I would collect materials and wire them into sculptures—it’s hard to be discreet when you’re wiring rebar and scraps from the carpenter’s forms into things that look a little bit like birds. Draw a little on the back of a pay stub, paint with a set of cheap watercolors from Pat Catan’s. If anyone asked, I would curse my art by calling it a hobby. To be a native-born artist in Cleveland, you must master the art of self-deprecation. You must not let the normal folks know that you have been thinking, now and then, about immortality.
Of course, the newcomers mean well. They have come from other places in the country where it’s too hard to be an artist; perhaps the grant money ran out, or the colleges are only hiring adjuncts. It could be that the inspiration just disappeared, as inspiration sometimes does.
Since it’s so hard to be paid to live as an artist in Cleveland, the aspirant lives somewhere cheap. This neighborhood usually features a housing project and some boarded-up factories. Someone calls an abandoned warehouse a loft. A few more artists show up, and someone opens a gallery. Soon there’s a coffee shop and a diner and a Laundromat. Other people who have artistic temperaments arrive; a few of them mean well, but most of them call themselves artists despite the lack of any real talent. They want to be artists the same way that sports fans want to play shortstop for the Yankees. Instead of skill, they have disposable income. They have investments and trust funds. The coffee shop becomes a Starbucks, the diner an Applebee’s. The prices in the galleries reflect what everyone’s calling the “growing importance of the movement.”
The first sign of the coming apocalypse is the art walk: the Typhoid Marys of gentrification. Developers show up, displaying all the sensitive charm of a multinational corporation. The first thing they fix is the parking situation. They refurbish the factories because that’s the kind of news that looks good in the arts section, and they evict the last surviving members of the original neighborhood, the old immigrants and housing project leftovers, because that’s the kind of story that appears in a blurb at the back of the city section. Rent goes up. The air is thick with the smell of money. Money smells like being neighbors with a bread factory. Sure, you want to believe that’s what heaven smells like. But really, breathing has become a long struggle against yeasty suffocation. Meanwhile, the artists can no longer afford to stay in the neighborhood, and nobody knows what happened to the people who lived there before—shadows remain, or a few splotches of paint in the background of somebody’s landscape.
But it’s all okay. There’s a lot of good space farther out on the West Side or the East Side, cheap rent, a Salvation Army. Everyone’s moving there.
It was never really
