THE MONSTER THAT DEVOURED CLEVELAND
a short story written and published by
A.M. Murray
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Blame TV for the monster if you like. Or blame other modern menaces like pollution, politics, technology or Vietnam veterans. But don't blame the old Dobie Gillis TV show, where Maynard G. Krebs, the cool beatnik character, would often "ooh-ooh" and "oh-wow" and wax eloquent about his favorite movie, The Monster That Devoured Cleveland. That was just a joke.
Cleveland was the butt of that joke due to the fact that back before the current Cleveland Renaissance the city was often referred to as the "mistake on the lake," and it's only real distinction was that its Cuyahoga River had once caught on fire. (Twice actually, but who's counting.)
And the joke might have had nothing to do with Cleveland per se or even the Cleveland Monster hockey team because the is America and not Canada, eh, and who even thinks about hockey unless it’s the Olympics and you have no choice.
The devouring monster joke actually may have simply been a play on the monster genre and the satiric concept of how and why any monster could or would even want to devour, as in eat, any city. Cities are mostly concrete, asphalt, brick, stone and steel after all. Good roughage maybe, but not the stuff of a feeding frenzy. Or so one would think.
The saga of the real-life monster began on a warm spring day as Cleveland native, Louis Williams, sat in his kitchen eating the first of two foot long Deluxe Turkey, Bacon & Cheese sandwiches with all the fixings. Louis, a bald brown man of about three hundred pounds with a gut like a bay window, loved to eat. Prophetic, that.
Louis' repast was interrupted with a crash as a wall buckled, the ceiling cracked and plaster came down like a snowstorm. He reluctantly put down his sandwich and ran outside to find a backhoe ramming his house. There was also a pair of cops, a TV news crew, and curious onlookers. "Hey, stop! Stop it!" Louis shouted.
"What are you doing here?" said one cop, "This place is supposed to be vacated. They sent you plenty of notices. We got a court order."
"Shove your notices and your court order. A man's home is his castle," responded Louis. He posted his bulk solidly in front of his house, arms spread wide. It was certainly no castle and not even much of a home, a tiny little shack, which actually used to be a garage, but at least it was all his. Even so, it and all the houses for blocks around had been condemned and were to be torn down in a vast and sweeping urban renewal. They dragged Louis away, kicking and screaming and the demolition proceeded. It was on TV that night.
"The spirit of renewal is sweeping through our city and making Cleveland truly the best location in the nation," said Thelma Jones, a new six o'clock news anchor from Chicago, who'd anchored in Buffalo, Pittsburgh and Indianapolis before and had touted all those cities as the best with equal conviction. She was a true professional. And best of all, she was quite beautiful with a hint of color to her skin, which gave her universal appeal, race wise, and optimized her value, ratings wise. It was hard to tell if she was black, Hispanic, Mediterranean, Asian or even Italian. Actually she was Californian, which was tantamount to all of the above. And her exquisite coiffure and good dental work and broad white smile and Monica Lewinsky lipstick put to shame all the sculpted hair, gleaming smiles and accented lips of all the other local news nymphs.
She introduced the mayor who came on to explain how Cleveland was once known as the Forest City and would be again, with all the federal stimulus money aimed at ending urban blight. And if Cleveland wasn’t number one in anything else, they frequently took first place for urban blight at least. But that would be a thing of the past. Now they would tear down old decrepit neighborhoods, create more green spaces, and make the city more livable and enjoyable. This was truly the era of a Cleveland Renaissance. Just look at the Cleveland Cavaliers, the mayor said, pointing to a skyscraper sized picture of Lebron James that looked like he was dunking the sun. Noticeable by omission was any reference to the Cleveland Indians and the Cleveland Browns. (There’s always next year, sports fans.)
They cut to the video of a construction rig ripping up the ground. The voiceover said, “This is just one of the many monster machines assigned to renovate this blighted neighborhood. It's going to be a huge task tearing down all these old shacks and hovels. There's a mountain of work to be done but nothing will stand in our way, we have monster machines to do it."
This first hint of a burgeoning monster went unnoticed by anyone except Louis Williams, watching TV in a tavern across from the County Courthouse where he had been arraigned and released. He got an idea. With a vengeful gleam in his eye Louis slid off his stool and jogged (or walked fast actually) several blocks to where they were tearing down his old neighborhood. Louis had driven a tank in the Army. Construction rigs worked like tanks, he figured. Several of them stood unattended with their diesel engines idling, ignored by the construction crew that was watching a monitor and admiring themselves on a replay of the newscast. Louis slipped past them unnoticed.
The sound of an over-revving engine filled the air like an air raid siren, as a Louis-driven backhoe reeled about in a spastic fit for a moment and then roared clumsily out of the worksite. He yelled from on high in the control cab, "Down with the Court House! Down with City Hall! Nothing will stand in my way!"
“This could be a disaster," said Joyce, the one-man TV crew, or one woman actually, to be politically correct. (And quite sexy woman too, to be politically incorrect.) But bad news is always good news in the news business and she saw the potential for a national story here. She grabbed her camera and set out running after Lewis and the backhoe.
This turn of events was not lost on Cody Greene, a sandy-haired, lantern-jawed backhoe operator. He saw his chance to be a hero and make an impression on Joyce, whose camera technique and tight jeans he'd been admiring for some time. Cody clambered into his rig and set out in hot pursuit. "I'll catch him," he shouted. Police sirens began to wail in the distance as Cody caught up to Lois on the Main Avenue Bridge where the Cuyahoga River oozed along a hundred feet below.
He crashed into his opponent, his opponent crashed back; they butted heads like two large mechanical rams trying to assert dominance. Two monster machines (hint, hint) plunged off the bridge spanning the Cuyahoga and sank into the fetid waters like a ton of bricks, or two tons of bricks. Or steel actually. Whatever. Cody came up out of the river, coughing and gasping. Louis never surfaced. Not in any recognizable form. Divers sent down to find his body couldn't even get at the backhoe's crushed cab, buried upside down, in the river muck.
In the immediate aftermath, Cody and Joyce shared a drink on the outdoor deck at a bar in the revived party district known as The Flats, situated on the banks of the Cuyahoga River where it fed into Lake Erie. Joyce told Cody he was lucky to be alive. "Yeah,” he replied, “that was some drop. Even worse was that nasty water." He sniffed as if fighting back a cold, pulled tight at the woolen blanket in which the paramedics had wrapped him. "Think I'm gettin' a sore throat," he said as he gave his best hang-dog look, hoping for sympathy and tender comforts.
"Poor baby," said Joyce. She patted one of his hands. "We'll get you some nice hot tea." Not what Cody had in mind. He sniffed again, held her hand, said, "Sounds good. Uh, I gotta get home and get a hot shower first though. Gotta wash this river water off me, it itches like battery acid or something. Can you come over to my place?” She could and would.
Actually the Cuyahoga had been cleaned up a lot since the infamous fire-catching and even if it was still unfit for human consum
ption or bodily contact and didn't smell real good, it was quite scenic and just fine for floating a boat. So, to clear the all-important shipping and recreational boating lane of the river, a trawler was dispatched to drag away the sunken bodies of the crashed construction rigs. A thick, angry cloud of deeply disturbed underwater goo trailed the submerged wreckage all the way to into Lake Erie where it was laid to rest. Lake Erie had overcome its old pollution problems even more than the Cuyahoga River. So much so that your average angler could expect to easily catch his or her limit of the abundant perch and walleye which thrived in the lake and were big and fat and delicious to eat and had only trace amounts of dioxins in them. Not enough to be significant. At least not to the charter boat captains and the lucrative Lake Erie