The Last Street Before Cleveland: An Accidental Pilgrimage (Class in America)

161 Pages·2006·0.58 MB·English

by  Joe Mackall

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