76 brief views of Cleveland: #3-4

3.

My friend says I'm going to be published soon. He says he can feel it. I hope he's right, and secretly I know I've felt it too. Odds are, that's me wanting to feel it.

We talk about fame. The three of us, we've never been this masculine before: guys watching basketball in a Detroit Road restaurant, one of those places that place the televisions just so so that wherever you look there one is. It's Saturday night and the place is a mere quarter full.

I don't know either team but I root for the team friend number one roots for. It's an amazing victory. Friend number two drinks his beer slowly; it's a boy's night out, and we agree: there's something the final minutes of a basketball game got that no other sport's got.

We watch the last of the Cavs game and chuck masculinity-pretensions out the window by using words like "passion" and "oh!" when we talk about the famous female singers we'd like to meet. We're not sure where to go next so we sit. That's a perpetual weekend problem, here.

The Cavs fall way behind. This is why I don't have cable: I'd never leave the couch.

Eventually we leave. But not until an opponent tosses up an unnecessary shot in the final second of the game, perhaps a joke. Either way, he sinks it. Cleveland loses by 31.

4.

Give this city a dash of sunlight and less-than-frigid air and everybody decides it's time to go mailing. The line in front of me at the Lakewood post office is four deep with four customers at the counter and four bored-looking clerks behind it whose faces I know almost by heart by now, have been starting to learn their faces ever since I started mailing stories off to literary journals earlier this year. A moment after I walk in there's four more people behind me in line. I've just got one envelope that I could slap a random number of stamps on and be assured it would get where it needs to go, but what's the fun in that? You can thank Kurt Vonnegut's talk at Severance Hall a couple years back for inspiring that in me.

It's sunny in Cleveland for the first time in years and everybody's going mailing. The girl behind me who can't be more than sixteen but is probably much older than that and the old woman in front of me who forgot her purse in the car. I hold her place in line for her while she runs back outside to get it. Everyone else has something to mail that looks more interesting than what I'm here to mail: odd-sized packages that require special services, stacks of bulky yellow envelopes and bags that can only possibly be holding sweaters that are getting shipped off to northern climates. We got sun now and we won't need the sweaters anymore. Everyone's patient though they look bored. I'm the only idiot who has to fight the urge to crack a smile. You can thank Kurt Vonnegut for that.

My turn comes and goes, the easiest of anybody's, and driving back to work, I notice for the first time, you can't see the river from Rocky River Drive.