The Lives of Street Signs
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Art by Kayla Monis (2019 archive)
There is an average of two direct flights through Southwest from Nashville’s BNA to Cleveland Hopkins International airport per day. My fiancée L, a lifelong Middle-Tennessean and an entirely too experienced passenger of this same flight, always reports the same passenger-wide pessimism, feeling ostracized in her excitement to see me and my family. The parade of Cleveland Cavs shirts and Browns jerseys, with the names of players long excommunicated from the city, carries a proverbial cloud, an air of disdain. I can only imagine it feels like the parting of a midwestern Red Sea off the tarmac of Nashville; the weight of encompassing grunts only dissolving on entry into the soggy gray skyline spattered behind Lake Erie. Despite the max of 420 passengers direct from Tennessee, we born-and-raised think there are no tourists in Cleveland. A collection of familial descendants, convention attendees, and returners file into the pseudo-grid system of the city. Streets that cut through and divide the ethnic neighborhoods spearheaded during the industrial revolution, a construction that sectioned the ghosts of a proud, fading homeland. I lived through these divisions.
Scranton Rd. & Castle Ave.
On the cusp of the new millennium, my parents usurped an old Victorian in the heart of the inner-city Tremont neighborhood. Along with the progression of my mother’s homegrown marketing firm, late nights and weekends were obsessively dedicated to gutting the over-century old house out of its 80’s duplex overhaul. My parents romanticize the time: Plaster flying, my mom hand stamping the ceiling with gold paint, beer and Tito Puente melding with drywall particulates in the air. German marks, half-inch thick glass shards, watch-shaped jeweler business cards, and corroded wooden tops lined the counters like trophies throughout my childhood. My twin sister and I were born into the family business. My dad’s hands would guide my swing of a small mallet as we tore down a wall in their bedroom. As our weekend projects extended into summer, we were guided out from the hardwood floors, into the Cleveland streets.
West 11th St. & Kenilworth Ave.
Since before I was conscious, my cultural education was centered in Lincoln Park, Tremont’s unofficial town square. My mom and grandma, with the adopted name Memaw, would lug me and my sister in a wagon toward the gazebo at the center of the park. Too young to safely cross the boundary of the playground, we would ride like royalty, basking in the ripples of sun filtered through patterned oak branch shadows. Melding with the cacophony of youthful exasperations were laid-on car horns echoing out from duct-taped beaters; windows rolled down to stave off a Do the Right Thing level of heat insanity. Like the majority of Cleveland’s walkable neighborhoods, the narrow car-lined two-laners bordering the park almost beckoned reckless jaywalking. Cleveland’s right of way was determined by who jumped out into the street first. In the arrogance of my precollege ego, I thought of careless street crossings as a rite of passage, a coming of age. I wasn’t allowed to be wrong, and on my dad’s hand-me-down road bike, I was destined to sit illegally in a left turn lane at a red light, drowning out the screaming driver behind me with Elliot Smith and seething angst. In contrast, the local Ukrainian and Polski coffee shop loiterers were an elated stronghold of the park’s neighborhood. Their beloved café, Civilization, was practically an extension of the next-door Cleveland Ukrainian Museum archives.
West 13th St. & Abbey Ave.
In the late-night humidity of August lake weather, my family would venture back down to Lincoln Park for the Cleveland Ballet’s free contemporary summer shows. I was sucked into their hypnotic contortions, as sheet-covered and LED-bathed performers morphed into jagged abstracts. Tracers of the dancers echoed behind trees in the darkening twilight as we walked down to Sokolowski’s University Inn. Sokolowski’s was our local Polish bastion. Even decorated with the signatures of Tony Bourdain and Michael Simon, the cafeteria-style restaurant was built by and for eastern European immigrant families. We would walk in, get yelled at like relatives, and eat. Our family always sat next to the Steinway Baby Grand in the back room. I would watch as the pianist’s face contorted through the tip jar. I remember sliding my hand along the lacquer, feeling the vibrations pulse up into the wood as he played. It became an obsession-- the composition being played filtering through the crowd of mouth-full conversation and scattered bits of broken Polish. And when he finished for the night, my sister Nicole and I would headline the now nearly empty room with a bastardized rendition of "Heart and Soul." Shuffling our feet over the imitation stones back to the table, we would watch our parents’ beer glasses like sand timers. Nicole promptly fell asleep forehead-to-table while I took watch for the last drop to empty so we could go home.
My first winter back from college, I didn’t hit the ground running. I was overworked, lost in indecision, and I left L behind. The plane descent felt like being hurled headfirst into Lake Erie; dragging my oversized Walmart duffle was more like carrying a body off the frontlines, scuffling over the linoleum towards arrivals. It was the familiar welcome of the city, stark cold, cutting wind, pitch black sky. I hugged my dad, threw the body bag luggage into the trunk, and sank into my designated backseat leather divot. I studied the road salt stains on my Docs in the dark as my dad and sister laughed. We barreled away from the airport. Clear lake winter skies always make cars on the I-90 shoreline fly. We raced past the fluorescent field of Steelyard Commons, the combo strip mall steel mill that served as landmark for home. The asphalt expanse that lay out beyond the car window shriveled into a pocket-sized parking lot, crushed by emotion. I was ripped away from one home and thrown into another. It was such an overwhelmingly heartbreaking contrast. We passed over fields of ice, expertly navigated by my dad’s veteran snow driving, weaving between high-rise old folks’ condos and the burnt frames of houses, rotting away into the polluted city soil. Stumbling through the wrought iron back door portal and into the centralized heating of my family’s now-completed home, I made the slow retreat towards my room. I scrounged up obligatory hugs for my mom and my bounding dog Bowie, as he retired his normally austere attitude for pure, animalistic joy. It was like pulling teeth every step up the stairs. Drifting behind me were unwanted patterns of lights reflecting through the plastic threaded icicles on the tree, glimmering displays on the mantel, the gilded sequins of the tree skirt severely matted with hidden dog toys, craft store pinecone scents, and compiled dust still being coughed up by the house’s airways.
Collapsing into my bed, it was easier to just pull the blackout curtain shut, yank the chain on my childhood lamp, and sink into the sound of dripping oil cycling through my fire hazard space heater. The neighborhood still stirred at night despite the temperature dropping like a rock thrown into a quarry. Tourists and locals swarmed the breweries for their celebratory first tapping of revered holiday beers as the house where A Christmas Story was filmed, only blocks from my own, emanated laughter and a warm glow of nostalgic, shittily wired incandescent bulbs. I could feel the pull of Tower City’s downtown Christmas bazaars, soaking in the memories of grandparent shoulder rides, trying to catch a glimpse of a now extinct-parade. In my head and curling, cold body, Greater Cleveland and its 1.7 million residents were crushed like a tin can, compacted into a granule of emotion that I could not expand without my other home.
West 50th & Lorain Ave.
Urban Community School sits like a floating red buoy along I-90 West. Its flaming exterior dwarfs the abandoned firehouses and trash-filled front lawns of Lorain Avenue. As summer slowly sweated out of the city, we resumed our commute through the steel gates of the school. My sister and I would sprint out of the car doors onto UCS’s horseshoe driveway, past the teacher’s aide traffic guards. Our shoes skidded over the buffed tile as we moved toward the newly constructed middle school wing, starting 6th grade. In my anticipation for joyous reunion with school friends, I failed to acknowledge the creeping dread that cowered over me, that the rows of army-man green lockers, just as soldier-like in their stature, were occupied by my fourteen-year-old peers just the same. As explained by the school, we were the guinea pig class for the new middle school system. Shoved into a vastly different social environment with the two grades ahead of me, navigating my four-and-a-half foot, maybe ninety-pound body through the halls felt like controlling a city mouse as it dodged foot traffic during morning rush hour. My mouth was dry, and my hands were wet. I felt like a body hovering over my own, drifting through the ceiling tiles in tandem with my corporeal form as it made its way towards my homeroom.
Lake Ave. & Detroit Ave.
The first signs of my anxiety disorder were discovered far away from the school setting. It was more often in shifting through a nervous routine-- grounding myself with stinging hand sanitizer scent, nail bed pulling carpet, and hand-raking that quieted an unspoken isolation. My neurotic behaviors were only uncovered when I began stealing my dad’s phones to dial my mom in incessant worry and staring out the backdoor screen like a dog looking for its owner. In an effort to respond with understanding, my parents recruited a therapist, a word I didn’t really understand yet. My therapist’s office, on the Rocky River township end of Detroit Avenue, sat high above the street, towering over the suburban landscape, which itself overshadowed the Metroparks river valley. The steep stairs, marble with metal guards on the lip, led to a liminal hallway, like a distorted yet recognizable movie scene set. My mom sat in the waiting room, thumbing through outdated issues of The New Yorker, as I was transported through the doorway portal into her office. She was probably as tall as me, nearly swallowed by her chair. I sat opposite on the couch. The setup looked like that of a sitcom shrink, but her cracking floral deep yellow wallpaper, lavender diffusers, and white noise machine offset that narrative-- one that I would only be able to reference in retrospect. She would inquire into how I felt, covertly digging for answers with the aid of simple distractions. Games on a tablet, stories of her adult son, thunderstorm sounds emanating out of a dusty white noise machine. I was coached to breathe, suck in the stale air of the building, cut with the subtle breeze trickling in through her cracked window. Focus on the inhale, bring in new light.
L has this way about her, where she opens up my airways. Even through a phone screen, she breathed life into the kid bedroom around me. My strip LEDs peeling decade-old paint off the walls seemed to dim and intensify as her laugh was transduced out of my phone speakers. In disjointed freeze frames, she flipped through her annotated anatomy book, hurling medical terminology through the phone. Regardless of physical distance, her spirit seeped into the walls of a house her skin had never touched. A veil lifting. I could now smell my mom preparing poppyseed bread extracted off fading heirloom recipe cards, hear my sister plunking out the Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack on our piano lined with synthetic cotton snow and miniature picturesque holiday American Village scenes. The wood of the Victorian floorboards began to aerate as if in summer, where their expanding aroma often swallowed me in indulgent nostalgia as I fell asleep on July nights.
Even now as we commute together between rural Tennessee and the sprawling urban Cleveland landscapes, I tend to take for granted the kind of transformations these places take on with the presence of a single person. In sheer anticipation, I now speed off early from the house as L’s plane descends through that thick fog wall. Our turbulences hit in sync as the plane bounces through airstreams, like it's ricocheting off the frustrations of the homebound travelers, and my car screams past cement highway sidewalls. In this weirdly balanced culture teetering between cordial Midwest politeness and the Northeastern abrasion that followed the Rockefeller’s industry migrating train tracks, her glow stands strong. I like to imagine her as a lighthouse beacon that guides the plane down to the landing strip, rather than beckoning from the shore. It’s easy to feel that warmth as she drops her luggage to sprint towards our reuniting collision. We indulge in this embrace with the same hope of the ball dropping on New Year's. Family with family, home with home; a piece of Waverly, Tennessee contaminating my beloved Cleveland’s grayness with streaks of color that still track on my clothing after she’s gone.
