Good Kids, Bad City Read online

  But on the far edge of the East Side, as the sunrise washed the residential streets in rose-gray light, Ronnie Bridgeman was already rolling awake in bed, his thoughts disconnected from whatever larger anxieties wound through the city. Early rising was a leftover habit from his old summer gig at the Northern Ohio Food Terminal—he had to be there around 4:00 A.M. to unload the trucks. Now the teenager’s eyes snapped open on bedroom walls that were a psychedelic smear of posters and black-light paint, Jimi Hendrix trashing his guitar, Wile E. Coyote with his hands around the Road Runner’s neck, Meep meep your ass! All night, while he slept, the radio had been leaking rock station WMMS—Where Music Means Something. He picked up a guitar, working his fingers along the frets with the FM music, waiting out the hours until everyone else woke.1

  Ronnie was out on Arthur Avenue around 8:00 A.M., seventeen but still baby-faced, a little swagger just starting to pop his steps. In a T-shirt and slacks, he walked from the modest two-story house he shared with his mother and Wiley, over three houses to where his older sister Beatrice lived with her own family. As usual, he loaded his sister’s four little kids into her station wagon and drove them over to Bolton Elementary, just a few blocks west. He did it every weekday. His sister’s kids, so he took her car.

  Kids and cars—Ronnie had a funny story about that. He had a whole bulging bag of stories, jokes, riffs; he was barely old enough to drive but already a precocious street corner raconteur. Words didn’t spook him—thank you, Mom—even though he was technically a high school dropout. Ronnie also didn’t freeze around strangers. Words plus wit—just like his hero Muhammad Ali, Ronnie was an easy charmer who could win over an audience with gab.

  This particular story was great. At the time he hadn’t been much older than the nieces and nephews he was hauling to school now—four years old, probably. The Bridgemans were living then in an apartment house off St. Clair. Ronnie was always hanging around with a little bucktoothed neighborhood girl his age named Candy. Their favorite game was playing “grown-up,” which was how they ended up in the front seat of Mr. Wittick’s brand-new Buick.

  The car was a beauty, powder blue with a checkerboard terry-cloth interior. Ronnie was in the driver’s seat, pretending to drive like he’d seen adults do, his little hands twisting the wheel he could barely see over. In the passenger seat, Candy played along, too, acting as she’d seen her mother act when driving with her father. “Ahh, motherfucker!” the little girl screamed, surprising Ronnie. “Goddamn bullshit!” Candy grabbed a cigarette butt out of the ashtray and fired up the car’s automatic lighter. She took one puff, hacked, then passed it to Ronnie. The smoke singed his lungs, and Ronnie tossed the butt into the backseat.

  The neighbors all collected outside to watch the firefighters try to save Mr. Wittick’s Buick. Ronnie stood innocently by his mother, while an old woman who’d seen Ronnie and Candy flee the burning car sidled up to Mrs. Bridgeman. “That sure is a shame,” Mrs. Bridgeman said. “Yeah, it’s a shame,” the old woman croaked. “Now you’re going to have to pay for that man’s car.” Ronnie fessed up right then. It seemed like the whuppin’ he got lasted three whole days. He never learned how his family settled up with Mr. Wittick. But it was a hard—and memorable—lesson in accountability. Still, the story always sent Ronnie laughing, a slow-starting giggle that then broke quick like a rocket.

  Just another Monday. After dropping his nieces and nephews off, the teenager was back inside his own home on Arthur. His mother was awake, but she was still in her room. Ronnie took a quick bath, then headed for the closet to pick out the day’s outfit. Every self-respecting dude on the block had his best duds, and today Ronnie reached for his: jacket and pants, both matching blue denim. Sharp, slick, cool. All the guys in the street at the time were getting cartoon characters inked into their clothes—superheroes or characters from the Archie comics. Ronnie’s brainstorm: get Spooky from the “Casper the Friendly Ghost” cartoons printed on this jacket. But the dude who did the drawings up behind the barbershop on Cedar was charging eleven dollars. Ronnie didn’t have the money yet, but soon enough. Nice clothes meant girls. Throw in music, and you had the three legs propping up his young existence right there. No doubt, Ronnie looked good in his denims now. But once he had that cartoon, he’d be set.

  * * *

  Arthur Avenue was an oddball slab of the East Side. On the map, technically it was part of the Cedar neighborhood. But the street and the surrounding blacktop were tucked on the city’s edge; rail tracks ran south, and Fairhill Boulevard, a four-lane runway for heavy traffic lifting off for the nearby suburbs, cut Arthur off like a river branch isolating a spit of land. As such, it was a neighborhood apart and intimate, everyone looped in with everyone else, a place booming with its own personalities.

  If the neighborhood had a soundtrack in the early 1970s, it was “Bound” by the Ponderosa Twins Plus One. These were local boys made good, five guys from the block who scored a record deal with their Jackson 5–like sound. “Bound,” a catchy high-whine slow burn that peaked at number 47 on the soul charts in 1971, shot them around the country on tours. Back home, it meant every smooth neighborhood kid—or wannabe smooth neighborhood kid—was in a singing group, hoping to repeat the same chart-topping dream. Ronnie Bridgeman threaded his tenor along with his brother and three other guys in a group they called the Golden Teardrops.

  The homes were set close, one family’s life spilling over into the next. Bloodlines weaved in and out of the block. That meant everyone’s business was broadcast loud and clear. Cooking smells from open kitchen windows flowed into one another. Even the littlest twerp on the sidewalk could explain the details of the Cotton family’s scheme for stripping stolen cars—ride the stolen one up front, have a truck behind it, a third car on lookout, strip the lead car of hubcaps, fenders, and other valuables by the time you turn the corner. When Billy killed Tommy, two best friends who had gone off to Vietnam together, it wasn’t a mystery to anyone: the whole neighborhood knew they were being played against each other by the same woman. The block was as intimate as a bear hug. It made for a good place to negotiate the lane shift from childhood to adulthood.2

  All the surrounding areas were just as tightly knit. That meant you had to be careful where your feet took you—go to the wrong area, you might get chased out. The way to the skating rink—everyone’s favorite pastime—was dicey. Ronnie and his friends had a rink around the corner for a while, the Playmore on Cedar. But after that closed, they had to trek all the way to East Ninety-third and Sandusky to the Eureka. The truce between the Cedar guys and locals: you can skate here, but if you start talking to girls, you better beat the bus back home. Even when it came to showdowns, the knuckle-ups were pretty innocent—a few flying fists. Once Ronnie followed a group of older boys up to Harry E. Davis High School, where they were set to face off; as the brawling started, one kid pulled a little .22 pistol. It seemed like a second later he was the only one still standing there.

  But Ronnie’s world was still brushed by the darker currents running through city life. Just around the corner on East 108th there was a coffee shop known as a front for the local bookie. Up on Superior Avenue to the north, pimps would shark around in big gangster Caddies while working girls flagged down constant business. Stickup men—pistoleros was the flashy name people called them on the street—regularly robbed local stores. Some of these triggermen’s street reps ballooned into legend, like Skip and Railroad King, gun-strapped brothers known for double-crossing the guys they worked jobs with.

  And the police brought their own menace. An unspoken rule in the neighborhood put a wall up between the people and the law. You didn’t mess with the cops, either getting friendly or telling them someone else’s business. Why? Ronnie wasn’t exactly sure—that’s just the way it was. But there was no missing the strong mix of fear and hostility standing up in folks’ voices when they spoke about law enforcement. Ronnie heard adults talk about Zippo lighter cases—when black men were shot down by officers clai
ming they had seen the man pulling a gun, afterward finding only a metal lighter on the body.

  Ronnie had his own close call. One afternoon, when he was fifteen and walking alone on Arthur to play some badminton, he was stopped by an unmarked police car. Plainclothes detectives jumped out. They told Ronnie they wanted him to come along with them downtown. But before they could put their hands on the kid, it seemed like every woman in the neighborhood—all the moms and aunties and grannies—were on their porches yelling. “What that boy do?” the chorus shouted. “Leave him be!”

  The detectives swapped a look, shrugged, got back in their car, and drove off.

  * * *

  Rickey stopped at the Bridgeman house midmorning. Time to fuck him up on the chessboard, Ronnie thought.

  The two sat down in Ronnie’s bedroom around the tree stump he used as a table. He regarded his best friend from across the arrayed pieces, wondering if Rickey was going to go with that pawn-to-king-four bullshit he always trucked out. Really, it wasn’t even fair—Ronnie had been moving chess pieces around for as long as he could remember, losing early and often to his mother until he was sharp enough to play with the big boys. But hey, Rickey tried. Ronnie made his own first move—the queen’s pawn up two.

  Rickey was as at ease at the Bridgemans’ house as he was at his own, and vice versa. They’d only been friends for a few years, but Rickey was glued to the family as if by blood. Rickey first clicked up with Ronnie when he was playing around on the street with a go-kart, crashing the rickety thing into bushes. Rickey, quiet and small yet tightly coiled, was the straight man to Ronnie’s blaring persona. In spite of different hardwiring, they were now rarely apart, always willing to act as partners in whatever scheme or plan the other had cooked up—like the time Ronnie fitted out a room in the basement for smoking weed, only later to learn from Mrs. Bridgeman that they’d forgotten about the vent in the ceiling leading right into her room. “I heard everything you were doing down there,” she told her son and his friend.

  Some days were far too pretty for chess. On this morning, Cleveland was unrolling a spring day, the kind where the city is caught in a warm crossfire of sunlight and glare bouncing between the sky and lake. After knocking out a few rounds of chess, Ronnie and Rickey stepped outside. In the driveway, there was Wiley, where he always was, polishing his car. He loved that thing, a white ’71 Sebring. The moment Ronnie spotted his older brother, he felt a pulse of pride. He always did. Wiley was the best—the coolest, smoothest, smartest. He dressed sharp. He could play any musical instrument he picked up. He was a tractor beam for girls. Yet Wiley wasn’t the kind of older brother who clowned his siblings or bullied; Ronnie’s brother always invited him along, always included him. Ronnie could say it without embarrassment: outside of Muhammad Ali, Wiley was his hero.

  Nothing was going to get Wiley to budge from washing his car. Ronnie and Rickey instead began walking toward a nearby elementary school. There were always some guys scrapping on the basketball court. They figured they’d go get in on a game.

  * * *

  Cleveland was a tinderbox in 1975, eighty-two square miles constantly bursting into smoke and flame.

  The bombings got most of the attention. In March, an underworld power struggle sparked. The city’s leading numbers figure, Alex “Shondor” Birns, was killed when his Lincoln Mark IV exploded outside a bar. Six weeks later, Danny Greene, a former Birns associate turned rival, survived a retaliation bombing at his apartment. Over the next two years, thirty-seven car bombings would blow in the area—the most in the country. Federal investigators nicknamed Cleveland “Bomb City U.S.A.” Dynamite packed with nuts and bolts for maximum damage was the preferred device. The explosions shattered windows for blocks. Cleveland bosses paid bomb makers extra if the detonations were big enough to make the nightly news.3

  But another wave of calamity—less Hollywood but larger, uglier—also disfigured the city at the same time. The riots in Hough and Glenville had done their damage to the real estate value of the East Side. Landlords, most living in the Cleveland suburbs, were suddenly holding duplexes, houses, and buildings no one wanted to live in. Many were just abandoned. The city offered to help with demolition, knocking down 1,412 buildings between 1972 and 1974. But city hall couldn’t keep pace with the market plunge and the decaying property.

  So the buildings started to burn.

  In 1962, Cleveland reported fifty cases of arson. A decade later, arsons were regularly swallowing more than a thousand properties a year. The year 1974 saw 1,593 arsons; 1975 would eventually tally 1,976. National insurance companies paid out millions a year to landlords, dubbing Cleveland the “arson capital of Ohio.” At the height of the epidemic, only three full-time arson investigators were tasked with solving the crimes. At first officials blamed thrill-seeking delinquents, but the frequency and targeted areas clearly pointed to a larger pattern of “insure and burn,” as one local newspaper put it. Yet as fires continued to saw through the East Side, city hall yanked away fire service in the poorer pockets of the city. Citing budget concerns, Cleveland closed five station houses and fired hundreds of firefighters.4

  Hough and Glenville had shocked the country. But as 1975 pressed on, fires and bombings, destruction and damage, became the regular background noise in Ronnie Bridgeman’s city.

  * * *

  Harry J. Franks’s hazel eyes bounced up and down the blue receipt one last time—all there? One hundred fourteen money orders sold, $4,161.15 gross, plus $51.55 in charges, minus $30.93 in commission—before handing the copy over to the store owner. Earl Rogers looked like he was ready to get back to his checkers game. Couldn’t blame him—as if pulling a living out of a drugstore wasn’t enough hard enough, here was Rogers, a guy with three wild young daughters to lose sleep over, too. “Well,” Franks said cheerfully to the store proprietor as he closed up his leather briefcase, perhaps cinching the straps a little tighter this time. “I’ve got to go to my last stop at Fairmount so I can go home.”

  Franks ambled out of the back room of Maxwell’s Drug on Monday afternoon. A large white man in a brown suit, he moved past the short aisles of bread and beer, Drano and Spic and Span, nodding good-bye to the two young black women at the register. Outside in the hot flare of the late afternoon, the sun barreled down right onto his thinning crown of gray hair. The Benrus ticking on his wrist showed it was about twenty minutes to three. Franks climbed into his bronze 1970 Dodge and started east on Cedar Avenue. The Fairmount Cut-Rate was less than ten minutes away, a straight shot.

  The fifty-eight-year-old’s thoughts likely drifted over to his leather bag. The money order salesman had been in the business for more than fifteen years, six with U.S.N. Inc. He knew the company’s rules on cash. The bag carried 460 money orders, blue-green check-sized papers that came in twenty-page booklets. On his weekly runs, Franks was supposed to collect payment from the store owners, minus commission, on whatever they’d sold. The company liked to see slips showing store owners had directly deposited money into U.S.N.’s bank account, or endorsed checks. But actual dollar bills? That was a liability, especially when you were dealing with these mom-and-pop stores. The Cut-Rate he was heading to now had been hit before. Hell, the brother of the man Franks had just been with, Earl Rogers, had been killed in a corner store robbery last year. But today Rogers had explained he didn’t have time to go to the bank to deposit what he owed. Franks had accepted his cash payment. Unfortunately, it was now after 2:00 P.M., so the salesman couldn’t get the money to a bank. He was stuck with it until morning, $429.55 there in his leather case.

  Franks slid the Dodge onto Petrarca in front of the Cut-Rate, his front bumper kissing the curb near a garbage bin. The Benrus said it was just after the hour. He got out, sun blinking off the gold clip holding his striped tie down against his gut, and strolled to the front door of the white brick building. The air conditioner inside was chugging full blast as Franks entered. The first sight that jumped out at you in the small delicatessen was a
wood carving nailed to the wall, two hands shaking in friendly, businesslike embrace. “WELCOME,” the carving read. “WE MAKE FRIENDS HERE QUICKLY.”

  * * *

  Karen Smith felt their eyes and anticipated the unwelcome sting of whatever rude catcalls or come-ons they were preparing to lob at her.5

  The two young guys were leaning on the brick wall of Bob and Anna Robinson’s store, strangers, not from the neighborhood—a red flag for the shy honor student who was embarrassed by any attention. Karen walked up Petrarca, clutching two empty soda bottles. After getting home from John Hay High School that day, her mother had asked her to return the bottles to the Robinsons’ store. Now here she was, eyes fixed ahead, trying not to be noticed.

  Luckily, the boys didn’t say anything as Karen strolled by. She fixed her eyes on the door, just noticing one nod in her direction as she passed.

  When the teenager walked into Mr. and Mrs. Robinson’s store, a tall white man in a suit was just gathering his papers into a suitcase and heading out. Karen placed the empty bottles on the counter above the glass showcase holding cigars and cakes. She asked Mrs. Robinson for a bag of Dan Dee potato chips. The snack was up on a high shelf, so the store owner told the clerk, an old man named Clarence, to get them. As Clarence was placing the chips on the counter, a groan sounded from outside, followed by a muffled noise—the rushed foot scrapes of a scuffle. Mrs. Robinson came around the counter to the front window.