76 brief views of Cleveland: #9

9.

For the longest while, you could enter the apartment building's parking lot from either side of the block. Then for a while, you couldn't enter from the north side, because a yellow chain was draped across the driveway between two yellow poles, sunk into concrete under the grass, to prevent people from using the apartment building's parking lot as their own private cut-through. The chain stayed up until one Friday night, Saturday morning, not so long ago, about three in the morning, when someone drove straight through it, at I imagine a speed high enough to be physically impossible, not stopping even when the impact made a sound loud enough to wake the neighbors, not stopping for a second as the car, truck, van, fighter jet, who knows, dragged the chain and one of the poles straight through the parking lot and out to the south. All that was left behind was the other pole, the one that didn't get ripped out of the ground, the pole that I found, when I arrived, five, ten minutes later, bent at a 90 degree angle, to be left parallel with the ground beneath it. Had I driven in to the lot that night those five or ten minutes sooner--the delay of a few minutes conversation with my girlfriend at the end of the night, the delay of random moments over the course of the entire evening--I'm sure I'd have seen it happen, and then I'd have been there to be, myself, a second, much more brutal, point of impact.

I've had problems; everyone's had problems. But when you try to gain perspective, try to put everything in its place, you realize: there's something troubling about living in a troubled city--a city that, it seems, slaps its own chains into place, chains that keep the city from going that way or that other way. And there's lots of talk of the chains. Of what's to be done with the chains. How to build around the chains. Who should manage the chains. What color should the poles be? How much concrete do we need to pour to hold them in place?

I wonder if what this city really needs is someone willing to slip behind the wheel, rev the engine, and say: Fuck the chains. Someone willing to drive through.