On Haunting and Heartbreak: Listening to Phoebe Bridgers in Cleveland
By Dan DiPiero
/ Nonfiction /
On a trip back home I decline the University’s offer to pick me up from the airport because I’m excited to take the Red Line, which goes where I need it to, if slowly. I am looking forward to it in part because the train feels like a miracle in a state that has always regarded public works as strange antiques, indecipherable curios from a time before reason. I am looking forward to it in part because I know the romance that inheres in infrastructure, and I am starved for swooning. It’s true that on a train you might meet anyone from anywhere who may come to be important. But what I mean by romance exceeds the meet-cute, has more to do with the improbability of tenderness in a universe of hostility. A train is always built to help people, which is why there are so few of them.
I anticipate this journey with so much specificity that I pull up the Lost in Translation soundtrack in advance, because its beautiful melancholy is so often set to scenes of solo voyaging. Or maybe I want to conjure that film as a means of extending the fantasy I’m willingly participating in: that the city I love is—like those in Japan—one you could fully traverse via public transit, all day long if you have it to spend. Feminist writer Raechel Anne Jolie rightly points out that The Jesus and Mary Chain’s “Just Like Honey” became a character unto itself in the movie’s final and most dramatic scene, less a contrast than an intensification of the film’s otherwise quiet exploration of normalized, slow-motion heartbreak.
34 years later, Phoebe Bridgers’s “Kyoto” picked up the same chord progression to narrate scenes that could have been taken straight from Lost in Translation, as if watching the movie and listening to The Jesus and Mary Chain set the affective terms through which Bridgers would experience her own travels. And those chords matter, I think: I Major 7 to IV Major 7, back and forth in a loop, chords you don’t hear all that often outside of a particular strain of indie rock that’s obsessed with nuanced explorations of feeling. These are chords that need no others to oscillate, that contain a whole world between them: beauty and pain, transcendence and longing, both sides of every duality at once.
What distinguishes the two tracks most notably is no harmonic scaffolding but The Jesus and Mary Chain’s use of the “Be My Baby” drumbeat, made famous by the Ronettes, a groove that, on account of that history, scholar Amy Skjerseth argues will always invoke that particular shade of loneliness that happens to people trapped in relationships. Usually with men, which we can extend to mean power.
I am trapped in a relationship with a city that does not remember what it means to reciprocate, and the loneliness I feel on this train is nothing like the glistening sheen I had wanted to immerse myself in—for I used to live here, and I am not immune from the pleasures of nostalgia. Instead, what I’m feeling is immediately and totally about grief. I am submerged in it, tar black and viscous, plunged by the smell of cigarette smoke caked into vinyl, by the tangle of iron and concrete we lurch past, liminal and vacant. Turning my head, it seems to me suddenly that the Red Line runs even though nobody’s left to ride it, an automaton oblivious to what’s happened around it. As if it’s moving precisely because everyone forgot about it.
Tomorrow, when I take it downtown, there will be a few of us to be sure—as there always will be. But there’s no denying how thin we have become, how surrounded by ghosts. And the haunting is central to my grief, because it means that there’s loss and not just emptiness. Something that was here is no longer. Yet people leave traces.
There are the tunnels, for instance. Underneath the city of Cleveland are caverns from a moment in history when its streets were so dense with life that the streetcar system found itself needing to expand all the way down into the earth. Today, if you know the right person, you can take a ghost tour. But not even what remains of our rail system runs through those tunnels, which carry only echoes. A corpse can become a monument if cast in stone. But what exactly do these tunnels memorialize? What does it mean to live in the wreckage of someone else’s civilization and to love it long after it was left behind?
* * *
It wasn’t the city’s residents that abandoned it—at least not at first. And those who could afford to leave did so in reaction to systemic disinvestment followed by privatized capital, opportunistic for the few who stood to benefit. Those who could not afford to leave were, of course, the most affected by these changes. I will never forgive the generations of developers and officials who plundered this place I love more than any, though different versions of the same people did so most everywhere else, too. Let me be clear about the fact that what I mourn when I visit home isn’t the fact that Cleveland used to be the center of the universe, more prosperous and more symbolic of a future being built than almost any place in the States. What I mourn is the fate this city shares with an infinite number of others. What I mourn is the loss of those humble frames upon which a life is built by anyone anywhere.
I’m thinking about this on the Red Line and experiencing what I’d call a panic attack except that feels too active for how heavy the feeling is. The train is running reduced service and there’s hardly anyone on it. It seems to me suddenly that it was built for a city that no longer exists, which isn’t to say that people don’t depend on it or that it’s useless. The state of this infrastructure is simply not strong enough for the lives of those who need it, not compelling enough to be widely used.
Yet it remains incredible to me that even these lines run. In the state of Ohio, famously hostile to public transit, with nothing much beyond inadequate buses and Cincinnati’s downtown circulator—here, Cleveland’s rapid transit service still moves more than 750,000 people a year on a system that hasn’t changed since 1980. This stubborn insistence makes the particular shade of my despair, because the situation is more complicated than simply watching something you love fall apart. When they built these routes and all the ones before, Cleveland had dreams of being other than what it was, other than what, it turns out, it would become. And I think nothing represents a city’s idea of itself so well as its infrastructure, what it does or doesn’t choose to build for the people who live there.
Most days, outsiders look at our city and shudder, which means that most days I am obligated to rage on its behalf, to defend that splendor you can’t see from a distance. Today, however, I am crying on the train, which I used to take all the time. A decade away can turn just about anything strange again, and any statistic can feel impossible when you’re living inside it. Today, this train is hollow in a way I can’t describe.
Later, I’ll stay awake late reading histories of the rail system, following video tours through routes that remain as well as those lost to time, learning about which banker or politician proved critical in the decision to expand or forsake this or that decade’s plan for a rail system. Once, there were proposals for a subway on par with Boston’s or Philly’s, and while this dream was stolen from us it turns out that the train I’m riding was still the country’s first direct line from a downtown to an airport. An ambitious achievement for a city that by then had been told its glories were behind it, confined to an age we can only imagine while reading the dates etched into all our grand buildings. There’s a certain humor in this, that Cleveland debuted this auspicious airport route in 1968, just at the doorstep of everything that would cause people to flee.
* * *
The rail system Cleveland does have meets beneath Tower City, Cleveland’s whole fantasy of itself contained in a single name and location. Tower City is a large complex of buildings initially envisioned as a train terminal, a kind of a Grand Central of the Midwest, where intersecting and tentacular tracks convened. Crowning this achievement was one of Cleveland’s once many and spectacular beacons to the future: the Terminal Tower itself, dead center of the edifice. From 1928 to 1964, it was the tallest building in North America outside of New York City, and most Clevelanders still know this if they know nothing else about it.
But by the time it lost that title, the idea of a magnificent train station was proving unsustainable in a world where tracks only existed to be destroyed. Because “demand” for trains was supposedly always on the decline, and because the Berlin Wall had fallen, Cleveland eventually repurposed Tower City into the perfect metaphor for what the future had become: a shopping mall. In the 80s and 90s, well after Cleveland had been the country’s sixth largest city but well before the realities of neoliberalism revealed themselves for what they were—back when a generic fantasy about global prosperity, cheap goods for everyone, and inevitable democracy were still possible to entertain—we made the trade gladly.
Consumerism has always resembled oblivion more than progress, and the demolition of public infrastructure for the sake of private retail was a dark omen about how the city measured what counts as success for the people who live there. Yet capital does nothing so well as seduction, and when I was a child, Tower City was the most wondrous place I knew.
Picture it in December, please, the month during which my family and hundreds of others made a pilgrimage downtown to see the mall’s central atrium—a vast archway cradling some 20,000 square feet—utterly stuffed full of fantastical zeppelins and hot air balloons, all candy stripes and string lights. Close your eyes and trust that it was then how it appears now, in the photographs that circulate online, which is to say brimming with people, simulacrum of the close-knit and interconnected community that Cleveland so often aspired to be, people spilling out of stores and taking rest at bistro tables or better yet the lip of that magnificent fountain, central to the whole affair, which danced and spurted and mesmerized kids for decades. Imagine floors upon floors and hallways that curve endlessly, everything alight, and a Christmas tree that actually felt appropriate to the space, nothing less than monumental. Imagine me or you or a dear one at eleven years old, heart set on a comic from the bookstore you remember being there last year, and the wonder at finding yourself somehow transported again because it’s there still just as you remembered it.
Malls have closed across the country, but there was no mall like this. Shopping isn’t something to be nostalgic over, yet Tower City was never just a place to spend money, despite how hard developers worked to confuse the issue. I don’t need Tower City full of retail again, but I do mourn what its vibrancy represented. Today the only trains that pass underneath are the three metro lines that exist, amazing that they’re there at all despite each sharing single tracks in a station whose guts hang out. On the day I feel depression crush me on the Red Line, I disembark at Tower City and emerge above-ground in the middle of an empty monument where my footsteps resound. Every shop in my eyesight is boarded. The fountain is long gone. In a strange twist of fate, people again use this building primarily as a means of passing through to elsewhere.
I am crushed by this because I remember the rush of devotion I felt when I first fell in love with my city. And maybe that duality is essential to the feeling—no love without heartbreak, no passion without betrayal. If crushes submerse us in the fantastical, that dreaming always comes up against whatever situation we find ourselves in—sooner or later. I fantasize about my city because of what it lacks, and all yearning hurts after long enough. Crushed and crushing both, enchanted and bereft at once: the version of any city you dream about is an architecture of your own desires, and desires are just ghosts with good outfits. An absence given life. Sound given a body.
