The Whore of Akron: One Man's Search for the Soul of LeBron James by Scott Raab

Author:Scott Raab
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Sports
ISBN: 9780062066381
Publisher: Harper
Published: 2011-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

Hater Daze

I land in Cleveland under the same sunless sky I left in May. Heavy weather coming. My bones know it. I smell it on the north wind. I grew up on this reservation.

The Cavs open tomorrow at home against the Celtics, who open tonight against the Heat. The guard at the car-rental parking lot gate was an usher at the Stadium on December 27, 1964. John. Eighty years old, a big-fisted ramrod. No one is a stranger to me here. I head for the Great Swamp Erie and follow North Marginal Road along its shoreline—past the municipal power plant that boy-mayor Dennis Kucinich refused to hand over to the bankers and monopolists who bled Cleveland dry, past the concrete pier that for many years pleaded “Help me. I’m dying. L. Erie” in shaky spray paint—and pull to the curb on a block of East 72nd Street. It was always a rough block. The graffiti on the rail bridge span above and across it featured in my day a swastika under the legend “White Power”—but now it’s glass-littered, half abandoned. I gaze up to the blind second-floor windows where the bedrooms of the Sisters Zimmerman, German goddesses of my early twenties, used to be.

Kelly worked occasionally as a topless dancer; Char, the smart one, was my first great love. Both are long, long gone.

“You can’t find any Jewish girls to date?” my mother used to ask.

I didn’t like Jewish girls, and even if I had, I didn’t know any Jewish girls looking for a tattooed college dropout who broke into vending machines for pocket money. Maybe I should have looked harder. Maybe somewhere in Beachwood or Shaker Heights my naked Jewess awaited, bent over a mirrored dresser, with a couple of ’ludes in her palm and a pint of Jim Beam.

Then away. From East 72nd back to the lake and up Liberty Boulevard, which now is named for Martin Luther King, snaking through cultural gardens planted after John D. Rockefeller bequeathed the land before the Great War. There is ghetto on both sides of the road, up the hill, beyond the trees, out of sight. Just off Liberty is where Big George bought me my first Polish Boy—kielbasa with fries, slaw, and BBQ sauce on top—paid for with the coins we had plundered from the dorm’s vending machines.

I watch the Miami-Boston opener alone in my room at the Residence Inn. The Heat look glum and play tight. James scores 31 points but turns the ball over 8 times in an 8-point loss. The Celtics fans boo him all game, hard. When he’s at the free-throw line, some of them wave sticks stapled with a photo of Delonte West’s face; West has signed with Boston, but he’s sitting out the season’s first ten games as a league punishment for his weapons arrest last season with the Cavs.

It’s a bitter sight to watch LeBron playing for the Heat. Tomorrow night at the Q, the lights will dim, flames will belch from

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