The Last Street Before Cleveland In the series Class in America Series Editor: Jeffrey R. Di Leo Editorial Board: Michael Bérubé, Laura Hapke, Steve Parks, Paula Rabinowitz The Last Street Before Cleveland h An Accidental Pilgrimage Joe Mackall University of Nebraska Press Lincoln and London Parts of this book appeared as “The Private Wars of a Dying Storyteller” in the Plain Dealer. Copyright © 1992 The Plain Dealer. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission. A brief portion of this book appeared in Short Takes: Brief Encounters with Contemporary Nonfiction (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005). © 2006 by Joe Mackall. All rights reserved. Manufactured in the United States of America. Book set and designed by Richard Eckersley in Galliard. Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc. © Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication-Data Mackall, Joe. The last street before Cleveland : an accidental pilgrimage / Joe Mackall p. cm. – (Class in America) isbn -13: 978-0-8032-3255-6 (cloth : alkaline paper) isbn -10: 0-8032-3255-1 (cloth : alkaline paper) 1. Mackall, Joe. 2. Working class – Ohio – Cleveland – Biography. 3. Catholics – Ohio – Cleveland – Biog- raphy. 4. Ex-church members – Catholic Church – Biography. 5. Depression, Mental. 6. Cleveland i ii (Ohio) – Biography. . Title. . Series ct m a 275. 1365 3 2006 977.1'32043'092–dc22 2005022823 To my dad, Jim Mackall, and to the memory of my mom, Chris (Gervasi) Mackall (1934–79) It looked . . . like a place where people lived – a place where the difficult, intricate process of living could sometimes give rise to incredible harmonies of happiness and sometimes to near-tragic disorder . . . a place where it was possible for whole summers to be kind of crazy, where it was possible to feel lonely and confused in many ways and for things to look pretty bleak from time to time, but where everything, in the final analysis, was going to be all right.—Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road I know nothing except what everyone knows – if there when Grace dances, I should dance.—W. H. Auden 1 We pull through the gates of Holy Cross Catholic Cemetery and park at the curb. Bobby – a complete stranger to me until fifteen minutes ago – knows the location of Tom’s grave because of a water pipe sticking up among the gravestones. It’s nice to know my old friend had somebody in his final days. His final days. Makes it sound as if Tom died in bed, covered by crisp and clean home-worn sheets in the last days of his eightieth year after a good long life full of love and success, modest failures and seasoned pain, where grandchildren filled long Sunday afternoons crawling up on his aching knees as he dreamed of the long-ago kiss under a black umbrella in a light rain from a girl whose name still brings a small, sweet smile to his lips. But no. Tom (aka the Ragman) was thirty-seven years old when he died. On a hot August afternoon in 1997 Bobby found him furled up cold, alone, and dead in the front seat of a used Buick in a run- down neighborhood. “It’s right here,” Bobby says, using his boot to brush snow off the Ragman’s stone, which is between the paid-in-full but still empty grave sites of his parents. Bobby crosses himself and says a quick prayer over the Ragman. Suddenly I have the feeling that I’m trespassing, that I have no right to be here. Surely some of these stones read Rest in Peace. I too make the sign of the cross and bow my head as if in prayer, something I gave up forever on Valentine’s Day 1979. Instead I look up at Bobby and observe a moment of real prayer, when a person full of faith prays for the lost soul of a close friend. 1