The Last Street Before Cleveland: An Accidental Pilgrimage

by Joe Mackall

The old neighborhood was the place Joe Mackall left. It was a place where everyone’s parents worked at the factory at the dead end of the street, where the Catholic church and school operated like a religious city hall, and where a boy like Joe grew up vowing to get out as soon as he could and to shed his blue-collar beginnings and failed, flawed religion. When the mysterious death of a childhood friend draws him back to the last street before Cleveland, however, he discovers that there is more to “old haunts” than mere words—and more to severing one’s roots than just getting away.

 

The Last Street Before Cleveland chronicles Mackall’s descent into his the story of how, looking for answers about his lost friend, he stumbles on larger questions about himself. With clear-eyed candor, Mackall describes the resurfacing of dormant demons, the opening of the old chasms of depression and addiction, and the discovery, at rock bottom, of a flickering faith that casts a surprising light over everything that has come before. Mackall’s is, finally, a story about life—lived and lost, given and earned.

Genres: Memoir

152 pages, Hardcover

First published January 3, 2006

Reviews

[Boyd Addlesperger · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully written, painfully revealing. My only problem was with his moment of epiphany...too quick, too clean, too willing to give up his non-belief for a return to an unseen god. Makes me wonder if there was always a Catholic waiting for an opportunity to re-emerge from his shell of atheism.

[Marie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Despite those tasty bits of local color, ("stickers depicting a cartoon buzzard" and "a local candy store known for its chocolate-dipped strawberries" are all-too vivid descriptions if you happen to be from Cleveland) this was ultimately a very disappointing book about one extremely self-involved man's self-involved journey to justify his own self-involvement.

Ostensibly it starts out good, he's visiting the grave of a high school friend who was found dead in his car on a Cleveland street corner of a "self-administered drug overdose" according to the coroner's report. He has just found the grave with the help of one Bobby, who is enigmatic and well-described and then completely dropped. You are lead to believe he will be on a quest to learn about his dead buddy, that we'll learn about how he found said Bobby and connected him to the dead buddy, but our narrator cannot even once let go of his own angst at not feeling happy in his adult, white-collar life and vaguely guilty about his blue-collar childhood.

Grow the hell up, dude. At the end there's a religious epiphany that makes the whole thing make more sense - of course, it's a book about his journey from unbelief to belief, that's why all the stupid crap about religion and so-and-so saying such-and-such lame-ass story that's sorta not very miraculous. I kinda wanted something that was actually about something, though. The epiphany was cheap. If he wanted to tell about it, he should have shown us more of what led him there.

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

I raced through this book in one day. I loved it.

[Charles Jr. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Writer Mackall’s sobriety-memoir narrative anchors itself to the 1997 death of a cousin, Tom `The Ragman’ McGinty, a casualty of drink and drugs at age 38, dying a shabby death alone in a used-car lot on the near-west side Cleveland, Ohio. Mackall, a writer-reporter with a handful of years of sobriety behind him, now has a second wife he praises to the heavens and nice teaching position at Ashland University.

McGinty’s demise prompts him to return to the Old Neighborhood he’d vowed to put behind himself forever, the blue-collar residential streets around the Chevy and Ford plants in Brookpark, literally the last streets before Cleveland's border begins.

Mackall re-unites with childhood friends, now grown, and wonders what it is about this place – the factory-smoke air, the immigrant-Catholic culture, the porno parlors and nudie bars right across the street from the cemetery – that turned them from innocent little boys to divorced alcoholics. He rages particularly against organized religion, not just Catholicism but Buddhism, New Agers and the hated Born-Agains (Islam he leaves out; the party line among college academics must still be that Muslims never hurt anybody). He excoriates Parma as a stronghold of vicious racism. And he relapses, though his return in the end to write the book is pre-ordained.

There is not much in the slim hardcover that would fit with all the pro-Cleveland media boosterism campaigns (with which I have had the bad luck to grow up amidst; maybe THOSE are what get people around here drinking like maniacs). I guess Alcoholics Anonymous gets their usual plug, and another adjunct professor didn’t have to lose his gig, move back to Cleveland’s bombed-out economy to work a minimum-wage job to get by and have beer money. Note to self: in next life, don’t be in Cleveland. I give the book three stars for its warning.

[Laine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Loved the start and the middle, but utterly disliked the ending. Too much psycho/spiritual babble for my taste. Finding god is not the answer to a miserable life- not in my book anyway. If only there'd been a bit more moderation..... really liked the beginning.... sigh.

[Tess · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book was very hard for me to read, it was depressing, whiny, and annoying. Basically about a guy who relives his childhood through memories, just not a fun read.

[John Mulholland · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great read on depression and addiction. Worth the read especially if you have been either.