Winter in Cincinnati

alien paths and irrelevant junketings

At 7 a.m. on a rainy Wednesday in January I rented a car and drove slowly into the city. Glancing across at the drab and obese occupants of other vehicles on the snarled highway it was clear that I was back in the heart of the country. I put up at the Vernon Towers, a large hotel in Clifton, took a xanax and fell asleep.

I rose in the middle of the afternoon and looked out across the soaked skies. The city was submerged in a wintry gloom that wasn’t nearly as seductive as I’d anticipated.

I felt dead. I felt like driving. I didn’t get very far. Lured by the irresistible inducement of inclement nocturnal racing, I made it out to Turfway Park in time for the third race of the evening. The seductive sounds of Sinatra singing ‘You Can’t Take That Away From Me’ blasted from the track sound system as I entered the rundown facility to engage in some frankly sinful horseplay.

At ten o’clock the races were over, and Sinatra’s ‘Witchcraft’ drifted mockingly across the empty parking lot. They had taken it away from me, and it had taken a lot out of me.

In a familiar post-track frazzled haze, I sat at the bar in Kaldi’s. Under the graffiti I had left on the restroom wall a few months earlier some wag had scrawled ‘Maybe you should try fucking with their minds instead.’

A woman with guitar warbled inoffensively in one corner, alone and unappreciated. As I perused the following night’s racing program, a girl clinked bottles with me, and I pondered the unfortunate fact that the cooling arms of a woman would be most remedial at this time. The night before I left town I had done something unprecedented: I corresponded with a stranger over the internet, on a Cincinnati-based website. The unknown woman described herself as ‘a red-headed chick who’s really not like anyone else you’ve met before... and not too hard on the eyes either.’ The use of gratuitous intensifiers in this context was somehow troubling, but I decided to contact her the next morning.

As I walked out the girl singer looked up and smiled at me in mid-song.

I drove up and down Vine and its adjoining vice-ridden arteries. There weren’t many whores on the streets. It was too cold for them or anyone else. I hadn’t really expected or wanted to find Sylvia. A woman like that doesn’t stand on the street corner for long before being picked up. I hoped that she was back in Lexington with her daughter. Sheer chance had brought about that one charmed encounter three months ago. She was beyond me now, had always been beyond me. The corner of Fourteenth and Vine was enshrined. But she wasn’t there now. Her spot was occupied by an obese hag in an anorak.

I moved on to another bar, the Northside Tavern on Hamilton. Another girl singer was warbling, but not so inoffensively, and she was backed by a band. The guitar player looked like Dick Cheney with long hair. The patrons were an ugly lot too. I downed a beer and left. I didn’t have the heart to make another stop on the way back to the hotel.

I lay on the bed and pained myself. Cincinnati... what was I thinking? The city seemed bleak and prosaic, stripped of the magic apparent on the last-go-round. I had longed to return and savor again the mysteries of this place that had taken a strange hold over me, and had specifically wanted to return in the bleak midwinter, preferably when it was snowing. But there was no snow predicted on the weather channel, just more and more rain. If I had learned one thing in my life it was the folly of attempting to repeat a memorable experience. Yet here I was, doing it again. I wondered if this idiotic trait lay in attempting to recapture the magic of youth, those moments of new live emotion, the pure driven now that can never be repeated.

Sleep came with difficulty and didn’t last long, disturbed as it was by the continual clatter of rain on the exposed radiator outside the window. I wriggled around uncomfortably in the overheated room and turned the air conditioner on to no avail. Eventually I took a xanax and passed out.

Almost as soon as I awoke, around midday, I called the internet woman from the phone on the bedside table. She was in the process of parking outside a hair salon. Her sunny manner jarred on my delicate sensibilities. I decided that no further contact would be necessary and told her I would check in later.

Borne on a current of stifled agitation and grinding myself down with a constant whining soliloquy, I drove down to Kaldi’s. The cute waitress that called me ‘honey’ three months earlier now addressed me as ‘sir’. I sat there blearily, wondering how I could kill the day... the next six days, and tried to take solace in the knowledge that many other trips had begun just as inauspiciously.

The coffee jangled my nerves. Police cars, which were numerous, instilled irrational fear, as did the sight of most people. I drove in murky drizzle to the Oakley neighborhood, because somebody I vaguely knew had mentioned it in passing. It turned out to be an unendurably dismal suburb with some obscurely hovering element of threat.

What a way to live. Most people took trips in order to relax and enjoy themselves, whereas I subjected myself to some sort of endurance test, an ideal ordeal, placing myself in alienating surroundings and watching myself squirm.

At the end of a mercifully short afternoon I stopped in Newport for a late breakfast. The twin communities of Covington and Newport held considerable charm. There was a time when they were notorious as vice-ridden burgs on the wrong side of the river, and since their heyday, fifty years ago, they seemed to have been left to fade away undisturbed.

The waitress at the Pepper Pod—a restaurant on Monmouth street, Newport’s main stem—served me with hostile politeness. While clearing the dishes she spilled jelly on my coat. “I’ll get you a rag,” she said, and never returned. It was another one of those days. I found a highway entrance and headed south towards Northern Kentucky and the sanctuary of horseplay; I needed to get out to Turfway in a hurry.

A calm descended as I approached the dependable comfort zone of the track. Once I passed those gates, nothing could touch me beyond the action. The pursuit, at times, seemed so honest and refreshing. For four or five hours, nothing would enter my mind beyond the immediate concern of handicapping horse races, one after another, and I would gladly keep going were the races to last all night. And thus, predictably, another night was spent, yielding a slim profit.

A loud jazz band, heavy on the vibes, were playing in Kaldi’s. I sat in a booth, on the other side of which a group of young girls kept erupting in giggles like a nest of newly hatched chicks. How to offset this awriness? To apprehend it with grace and kindness? I fled into the night and stopped at a Walgreen’s for pomade and water. The lady at the checkout counter seemed to spring out of her fluorescent torpor when she saw me. “How are you doing tonight?” she asked in an emphatic manner. I held her gaze lest she think I was avoiding the sight of her unusually dappled skin but this thoughtful move had the opposite effect, and she shrank away.

I returned to the hotel and lay in the bathtub, studying maps. There were some racetracks in West Virginia that I would have driven to had they been open at this time of year. Although I liked to think of myself as a connoisseur of industrial decay, I had, shamefully, never visited Detroit. Or I could retrace the route I took in the fall, up to Cleveland and along the shores of Lake Erie. These prospects held little appeal. I stared at my reflection in the circular drain cover at the end of the tub, distorted by the nut in the middle. I listened to the hum of the heating system. I realized that there was nowhere I wanted to go.

In the morning, after a few hours of clammy sleep, I rose slowly, packed my bags and left. I was sleeping badly, eating badly and running my nerves ragged. It was a familiar exercise in self-mortification, my idea of fun.

I checked into the Newport Travel Lodge, at the other end of the bridge, where I had stayed several times the previous year. The first room I took possessed such a suffocating reek that I demanded a new one from the surly blonde at the front desk. The new one wasn’t much better, permeated by the sour smell of worn-out air-conditioner filter. Fresh air was a rare and precious commodity in these parts. I pulled back the curtains and opened the sliding window. Frigid air poured in. I lay on the bed and stared out at some bare trees in a grey sky: an intolerably bleak prospect, entirely lacking in promise or forgiveness. I didn’t want to go out to Turfway Park for the third night in a row, but what else could I do? At least it would distract me for a while.