Clevelanding

I drove the moving truck into Cleveland this morning after midnight.

At best, the giant truck seemed unnavigable. I lurched down the highway, attempting not to sideswipe anybody (with success, although I did scrape the back tire rim on a toll booth. Classy.) In Cleveland, the streets got unruly too. They started to be either potholed or torn up to fix potholes.

I drove through some pretty profound ghetto the likes of which I haven't seen too many times. (For reference: outside my high school I saw tires on fire in the street. I regularly saw crack vials.) There were abundant boarded-up and decaying houses and storefront churches and check cashing places. There were bars surrounded by late-night smokers forced outside by a smoking ban. All the bar patrons were black. Sometimes the houses gave way to nothing. Just empty lots with tall grass. In Chicago this kind of empty lot used to be called a prairie, but now they've been pretty well gentrified out of existence. Not so in Cleveland. The city also seems to be as profoundly segregated as Chicago. Maybe moreso. That's really saying something.

All of a sudden, the torn up streets and burned-out houses gave way to spectacular parks, museums, monuments to wealth and its culture. That was the destination.

Dropping off the truck today, I drove an easy walking distance away from the new apartment. On one block, grand brick houses. The next, a yuppie-ish condo building renovated from a turn-of-the-century building. On that same block, though, boarded up buildings and the ruins of a corner store with hand-painted ads for popsicles and beer. You could see the sunlight straight through the drooping ceiling and broken glass windows.

The guy at the truck drop-off ran a tire repair shop. On the phone I heard him say his name was Jay. He was wearing a wife beater and a do-rag and his front tooth was missing. He was sucking down menthols. He also voiced his disgust with the inventory practices of the trucking company and made several phone calls in which he instructed the truck company people how to navigate their software. He seemed irritated that he had to be dealing with that instead of fixing some tires. He also yelled about how Herbert, his apparent coworker, had moved the boxes of oil. A toothless old dude called Pop came in and out.

Outside, a woman was playing a real piano and singing hymns on the street corner. A congregation of two young girls attended.

This town is going to be pretty fascinating, I'm guessing.

A meta note: I intend to post a lot of photos here, but I'm surrounded by an outlandish number of boxes and I have to find my camera. I'm also a little shy about taking pictures of people and of being a white social tourist. So what, though? Blog photos will be starting up soon.