Cincinnati in the Fall

The bald and paunchy night clerk at the Newport Travel Lodge asked if I was in town on business. I mumbled affirmatively and handed over sixty dollars. Upon entering the room I yanked the cord of the loudly humming refrigerator from the wall socket, lay down on the bed and masturbated languidly, letting all the anxieties of a long day on the road ooze out.

I drove over the bridge into Cincinnati and headed straight to Kaldi’s. The rail-thin waitress who winked at me six months earlier wasn’t present. I took an ancient paperback copy of Hugh Walpole’s Portrait of a Man with Red Hair from one of the bookshelves and began reading it: A gothic romance concerning an American man who journeys to a remote and idyllic English town, seeking peace and beauty; upon arriving he encounters a distressed girl and is drawn into a web of intrigue...

Something in my peripheral vision flared up. Further down the bar sat a woman with a doomed look in her eyes. While she was lighting a cigarette her hair had caught fire. She put it out as if nothing had happened and kept smoking and drinking in a nervously dedicated manner. I should have sat down next to her. Instead, I drove back to the motel and watched World Series poker on TV until three a.m..

The leaves were not falling and it was too warm. Beulah Park racetrack, outside Columbus, looked simple enough to locate on the map but there wasn’t any signage, and eventually a kindly soccer mom, from whom I sought directions, led me to the gates in her van.

Attendance at this decrepit racetrack was sparse even for a weekday afternoon. A hulking Black groom with a saddle slung over one huge shoulder nonchalantly flipped through a thick wad of bills, seemingly oblivious to the prospect of being rolled, as he leaned against a rusting pillar in the gloomy interior—doubtless the beneficiary of inside information. Nobody else out there looked as if they were making any money.

This was the end of the line for slow or infirm thoroughbreds that couldn’t win anywhere else, before they were dispatched to the glue factory. The air of irreversible decline that permeated the facility was relieved only by the presence of the Beulah Twins, two generously proportioned young blondes who served as novelty handicappers and broadcast their picks from the secluded Paddock Grill between races. They had no contact with the track riffraff and appeared to operate the cameras themselves. They could be seen slouching and sprawling like exotic caged animals in a room filled with tables and chairs but no other person, and they laughed at me as I peered through the window.

The jockeys lounged in the shade by the paddock stalls, a timeless scene, timelessly serene. One in particular was striking to observe, ‘a raddled and emaciated specimen’, like something out of an 18th century Hogarth print. He sat there bootless, leg-wrappings exposed, wizened, smoking, grinning. He must have been pushing sixty. He rode one horse all afternoon, in the last race, a bottom-level claimer, and it trailed the field throughout, coming in last by about fifty lengths.

I parked on 4th and Main and took a walk around downtown Columbus. I asked a security guard where the cobblestone streets were but he didn’t know what I was talking about. A notice in a coffee-house window requested information regarding a recently murdered gay man, the victim’s fated features staring forth sadly from badly xeroxed paper. At a restaurant called Haiku: Poetic Food I dined on a vegetable stir fry and imagined how a serial killer might work himself into a lather of misogynistic hate while listening to a couple of secretarial types at the next table squawking loudly, bitterly and incessantly about their colleagues and men in general.

Sleepy La Beef was in town, and he was playing at the Hey Hey Bar. Sleepy La Beef, the human jukebox, who recorded immortal rockabilly sides for Starday, among other labels, was performing at a corner tavern in the quaint old German Village neighborhood. As I arrived he was beginning his second set in front of a small but raucous blue collar crowd. I stood against a pillar with my precious pint of beer, watching other people enjoy themselves. The dancers in front of the stage were led by an attractive dark-haired girl who kept trying to get her moody and unobliging boyfriend to dance with her. It looked like there would be trouble between them later.

The Walpole novel was propped open on my lap while driving north and I read snatches of the early chapters in which a sensitive young man, caught between two worlds, recounts his itinerant interactions as a series of romantic and potentially sinister events begin to unfold around him.

“Are you that guy who used to be in the Partridge Family?” asked a tramp as he rose from a prone position on a grassy patch in Cleveland. I replied in the affirmative, walked on, and found the Flats, the once desolated section known from Pere Ubu lore, unrecognizable from my fanciful imaginings and sadly fallen out of neglect.

At the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame I found the administration office and inquired after an old friend who was employed there as a member of the education department. On this particular afternoon he was away from his desk: he happened to be at the hospital where his wife was in the process of giving birth to their second child. The education department: what a joke, a sad attempt to tame that which is famed for being untamed. Some interesting artifacts were probably housed therein, but I wasn’t going to find out.

“May I have a banana?” I asked one of the women that were loading up boxes of bananas to hand out to runners in a charity marathon on the lakefront. “Can he have a banana?” she asked one her fat colleagues. “Are you in the race?” she asked me. I replied in the affirmative. “Give him a banana,” she said.

As I checked into the Edge-O-Town motel outside Ashtabula, the night clerk voiced some concern regarding the whereabouts of a retarded young man who had also just checked in, apparently without entirely understanding the logistics of paying for a room, after he had been kicked out of the house by his mother. Ashtabula: a town with a beautiful name, and the birthplace of Charles Burchfield, although no indication could be found of the great artist being honored there.

The clouds drifted over Erie on a perfect sunny autumn afternoon, a tough town fallen on hard times. Sad-eyed ex-steelworkers panhandled outside the few open businesses. The short, plump, bespectacled Starbucks barista was almost unbearably sweet. At the city limits a sign plaintively read ‘Thank You For Visiting - Please Come Back’. I resolved to return.

There wasn’t a single open restaurant and little sign of activity of any kind in downtown Youngstown, a once-thriving steel town plunged into hopeless and ominous stagnation. I began to consider the potential benefits of setting forth with a destination in mind. Out there, stranded in other people’s reality, one’s usual sense of priorities evaporates. Traveling, unraveling... one can get into some strange states in some strange states out on the road alone. I drove on, sinking, spiraling, pinning my hopes on a redemptive evening walk in Akron.

A bright sterility encumbered the city of Akron. I walked around aimlessly in the hope of getting lost but there was nothing to get lost in, nothing in the air, or maybe it was just me. Once again, I had over-idealized a place in advance, and the eagerly anticipated evening walk was curtailed after an hour due to lack of transcendence.

Everybody in the one open bar downtown was toothless, even the young people. The doddering old bartender bestowed a hard candy upon each customer when they ordered a drink at the counter. I stood on a bridge and gazed down at the water trickling along a concrete riverbed, idly contemplating the fate of John Berryman. Upon the approach of a stranger I moved along guiltily.

The further I drove the more I realized that I didn’t want to stop anywhere else, that I was intent on winding up in Cincinnati. The city held a strange allure. It was one of those cities whose rough exterior harbored a certain warmth, and this was a quality I hadn’t encountered anywhere else I had stopped along the way. I drove straight there, regaining energy as that destination neared.