I Will Find You: In Search of the Man Who Raped Me. Joanna Connors

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СКАЧАТЬ one shah arrived with his own “volunteer” kidney donor in tow. Some said it was because he did not want to wait on an official donor list; others said it was simply a matter of not trusting the quality of our kidneys.

      A couple of blocks from the clinic is Hough, the poor, predominantly black neighborhood where a six-day riot, sparked by racial tensions between black residents and the police and white business owners, broke out in 1966, the middle of the decade of urban riots in America. Four people died. Two years later, in Glenville, another neighborhood that borders University Circle, a shoot-out between black nationalists and Cleveland police sparked a three-day riot that left seven people dead.

      When we moved to Cleveland from Minneapolis in the summer of 1983, we knew little of this. Most of what my husband and I knew of the city fit on the invitation to our going-away party, which featured a picture of that burning Cuyahoga River and a woman from a ‘50s horror movie running away in terror. “Cleveland, City of Light, City of Magic,” it said, adopting Randy Newman’s ironic ode to our new home.

      None of our friends could imagine why we would move to a city that was a punch line for late-night comedians: First prize: A week in Cleveland! Second prize: Two weeks in Cleveland! Ba-da-bum. The city offered so much material for mockery. The burning river. The stinky steel mills. The mayor who set his hair on fire with a blowtorch when he cut a ceremonial metal ribbon to open a convention. The wife of that same mayor, who declined an invitation to the Nixon White House because it was her bowling night. (It was, in her defense, the league championship.)

      Our reason was simple and embarrassing: We moved to Cleveland because we had quit our jobs at the Minneapolis Star on impulse, in a buyout, and The Plain Dealer was the first paper to offer us both employment. We were twenty-nine. We decided we would stay five years, then move on.

      That summer of 1983 was the summer of Return of the Jedi, which supposedly completed the Star Wars trilogy but did not. Madonna released her first album. Michael Jackson introduced the Moonwalk. WMMS was the hot radio station in Cleveland, playing “Every Breath You Take” and “Beat It” in constant rotation. That summer, Scientific American reported that crack cocaine, which in 1983 was just beginning to creep onto the streets of big cities like Cleveland, was “as addictive as potato chips.”

      In Cleveland, it was also the summer of the smash-and-grab. That was the first thing everyone warned me about when they discovered I was new to town. “Don’t leave your windows open or your purse on the passenger seat,” they said, over and over again, those first months. “At stoplights, they smash the window and grab it before you even know what’s happening.”

      “They,” while never overtly identified, implied the black men and boys in the designated danger zones of the city—Hough, Central, Fairfax, Glenville: neighborhoods that still showed the scars of the riots in 1966 and 1968. Block after block was pocked with weedy vacant lots and houses with windows covered in plywood and graffiti, where people slipped in and out of the back doors like shadows. Many of them came from the suburbs. In 1990, the celebrated, and winning, and white, coach of the Cleveland State University basketball team was one of those shadows, caught leaving a crack house with a prostitute on his arm.

      Hough, once a fashionable neighborhood of three-story houses with wide front porches, changed in the space of a single decade, going from 95 percent white in 1950 to 74 percent black in 1960. Urban renewal and the last gasp of the great migration from the South pushed black people out of the central city and into Hough. Realtors lit the flame of panic selling and white flight to the suburbs up the hill, Shaker Heights and Cleveland Heights.

      By the summer of 1983, Hough was a place I was told you did not go if you were white. Of course, black people had danger zones, too. They were warned not to go to Little Italy, where the aging vestiges of the Cleveland Mafia passed the day drinking espresso at sidewalk cafés and young white men attacked black people who dared cross into their territory.

      You drove through Hough, along Chester or Superior Avenue, to get from the suburbs to downtown. But you didn’t turn onto the side streets. Or so I was told. My husband, working the police beat that first year, told me not to stop at red lights if I ever came home late at night.

      Sometimes that first year I felt like a child listening to fairy tales about the dangers lurking in the woods. Go straight to work, Little Red Riding Hood, and don’t stop or the wolf might get you.

      What did I know? I had lived in Minneapolis–St. Paul for a decade, where the black population appeared to consist of Prince and about a dozen other people. A black reporter who had recently arrived from Texas came into the newsroom one day and said she’d spotted some black people on the street and followed them in her car, hoping to find out where all the black folks lived. She left after a year. “This place is just too white,” she said as she departed.

      In Cleveland, smash-and-grabs turned out to be the least of the dire warnings. When I went to look at an apartment in Cleveland Heights, the landlord warned me of an epidemic of carjackings. As we stood in the living room, the sun slanting on the polished wood floors, he told me that one of the women in the building had just bought a BMW, and I should think about it, too.

      “She used to have a Mercedes,” he said, “but that’s one of the cars they like to take. A little dangerous for a woman to drive. BMWs are just as good a car, but they’re not as flashy.”

      He clearly had no idea where newspaper reporters lined up on the pay scale.

      Monday, July 9, 1984.

      It’s 5:15 p.m. when I pull into the parking lot at Case. I run to Eldred Theater, stumbling a little in the heels and linen skirt I put on that morning to look professional. The doors into the building are open when I get there. Maybe they’re still rehearsing and haven’t even noticed I’m late. I run up the stairs to the small lobby area on the second floor and look into the theater.

      Empty. The whole place is empty.

      Damn it! They’re gone.

      I must have said it out loud, because a voice comes out of the shadows across the landing. “They said to wait a few minutes. They’ll be back.”

      The guy who said it is leaning against the wall, smoking. He’s wiry, not much bigger than me, with an Afro and plastic-framed glasses the size of salad plates, just like mine. It’s the ‘80s, the decade of the Giant Glasses.

      “They did?” I say. “Oh.”

      I wait, sticking to my side of the little lobby. I feel awkward, like I should say something else, but he’s not saying anything, either. I think about asking him for a cigarette, even though I don’t really smoke. I used to, starting when I was a freshman in high school, and hid my cigarettes in a metal Band-Aid box, right up until I was twenty-two and my chain-smoking father died of a heart attack at the age of forty-seven. The day after his funeral I quit, though I still bummed cigarettes when I was in a bar or around other people smoking.

      I’m about to ask the guy for one when I smell menthol in the smoke curling across the lobby. Forget it. I hate menthol.

      A couple of minutes pass. He stubs out his cigarette on the floor, shakes another from his pack. Kools.

      As he lights it, I decide I’m done waiting and turn to go back down the stairs.

      “I’m working on the lights,” he says to my back, his voice mild. “Do you want to see what I’ve been doing?”

      A yellow light flashes briefly in my head: Caution. You don’t know this guy.

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