Bumping Into Big Al

Bumping Into Big Al



I hadn't seen Al Ezerskis for fifteen-some years, so when we met I hardly knew what to say. We bumped into each other on the corner of Ontario St. and Lakeside Ave. opposite the Lakeside Court House. I had come out of the courthouse where I had gone to drop off a document. As I was leaving I saw an inscription carved in a wall. It said, "Justice is the end of government. It is the end of Civil Society. It ever has been and ever will be pursued until it be obtained or until liberty be lost in the pursuit." It seemed both quaint and appropriate in the Age of the MAGA Party.
Al had come out of the Justice Center. Downtown Cleveland was back up and running after the thunderstorm and high winds that tore through the metropolis a week ago. Five tornadoes and widespread straight-line wind wreaked havoc across Northeast Ohio. Thousands of trees and utility poles were knocked down. Hundreds of thousands were left without power. The shoreline of Lake Erie, near where I lived, was hit especially hard, with more than half of everybody experiencing power outages. Many of them still didn't have power five days later. It was the worst storm to hit the city in thirty years.
"How are you doing?" I asked Al.
"I'm between everything annoys the crap out of me and I don't give a rat's ass," he said.
He had been cranky ever since coming into his maturity. He hadn't changed, although he had gotten older. He was the same age as me. We both grew up in North Collinwood's Lithuanian community. We were both in Boy Scout Troop 311. We both went to St. Joseph's High School in the 1960s, although he was an Honor Student and I wasn't. He was walking with a slight limp. I had walked with a limp, at first slight and then full-blown, for six or seven years before I finally had replacement joint surgery two years earlier. I was never overly concerned about the limping, but the pain of the arthritis in my left hip finally drove me to distraction. After the surgery I walked more than ever, breaking in my after-market substitute.
The Cleveland Clinic's Lutheran Hospital had been as high-tech as could be. The operating theater looked like the flight deck of the USS Enterprise. The road to recovery, however, was strikingly old school. "Walk as much as you can every day" was what all the physical therapists said.
"What are you doing downtown?" I asked.
"Jury duty," Al said. "Although all I've been doing for the past two days has been sitting in a room with a couple hundred other people waiting to hear if I've been chosen to be on a jury. If I get picked, whoever did whatever they did is going to be sorry to see me."
The jury pool had been released for lunch. It was a breezy mid-August day. The storm had broken the oppressive humidity of July. Al was on his way to the Warehouse District. "I have an hour and a half before I have to be back to decide somebody's fate," he said.
I held the view that there never was anybody worth a damn who wasn't irascible, except for maybe Mother Teresa and Willie Mays. Perhaps Al was worth a damn. He was irascible enough. On the spur of the moment I asked if I could join him for lunch.
"We can catch up on old times," I said.
He gave me a sour look, but said all right. I fell into step with him. He took long strides, one stride with a hitch to it, and I recalled that we had called him Big Al back in the day. He was six feet and a few more inches tall. He had been lanky as a teenager but wasn't lanky anymore, He was still big, though, and bigger still. He had packed on 30-or-more pounds. We walked down Lakeside Ave. and then up W. 9th St. The Warehouse District's eateries were buzzing. Curbside tables were filling up. Waitresses were taking orders. Lawyers were tossing back booze.
"There's a place here called Taza," I said. "My wife and I eat there sometimes. It's a Lebanese grill."
"I don't eat food made by Arabs," he said.
We went to Cleveland Chop on St. Clair Ave., a sports bar where they served steaks and handcrafted burgers. Al ordered bacon wrapped shrimp and a Tom Hawk pork chop. The pork chop looked to be at least a pound of meat. I ordered a plate of Ahi Poke tacos, even though I had no idea what Ahi Poke was.
"What do you think about that Harris wanting to be president?" he asked out of the blue, stirring the Manhattan in front of him with a swizzle stick. I wanted to say "Shaken not stirred" like James Bond, but I didn't. Big Al had never been known for his sense of humor. He had been class president in high school and twice ran for mayor of Brecksville, a south side suburb where he had long lived. He had twice lost but never lost his interest and concern with politics.
I was of the Mark Twain school of politics. "Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress, but I repeat myself," the writer once said. I didn't repeat that bit of doggerel at the lunch table. I suspected my companion would be sensitive about that kind of wisecrack.
"I haven't thought much about it," I said.
"You still have that beatnik attitude," he said, spearing a shrimp.
I let it pass. I had long ago lost whatever concern I ever had about what people thought of me. Everybody is entitled to their own opinions, if not necessarily their own facts, although that is changing.
Joe Biden, the incumbent in the Oval Office, had decided to not run for a second term and his vice president, who was Kamala Harris, had thrown her bonnet into the ring.
"I will say this," I said, "she's got about three months to campaign while Donald Trump has been campaigning for almost four years. I don't see that she has much of a chance. Donald Trump can't beat another man at the polls, but he's gangbusters when it comes to beating women."
"I'm glad to hear you say that," Al said.
"Why is that?" I asked.
"The last thing this country needs is a half breed broad in the White House," he said. "Or any broad, for that matter."
"How's everything?" our waitress asked, gliding up to our table. She was a looker. Al looked her up and down. He didn't keep it a secret. He wanted to be her long lost pal. I watched him while he watched her.
"This country is going to hell," Al said, cutting his pork chop into bite-sized pieces. It reminded me of what mothers do for their small children at the dinner table. He was a fastidious man. There probably wasn't much that satisfied him.
"Take that waitress," he said. "What is she doing in this country? You know she's from down there somewhere." He pointed at the floor with his fork. The waitress was brown skinned with black hair. I couldn't tell if she was Mexican or Middle Eastern. "They're lazy and shiftless. All they want to do is live on welfare, which we have to pay for."
I wondered why she was working if she was lazy and shiftless. Why was she taking jobs from American citizens? Why wasn't she on welfare, instead? Was she all mixed up?
"I tell you, they're poisoning the blood of our country."
"Your parents were immigrants, just like mine," I said." They made this country better, not worse."
"That was different," Al said. "They weren't Latinos, they were Lithuanians."
I was aware that many people conflated the word 'immigrant' with the word 'Latino.' Immigrants from Europe were acceptable. Immigrants from anywhere else were either suspicious-looking or unacceptable.
"There's millions of them here, tens of millions, undocumented, smuggling in drugs, committing crimes, raping our women. They've got to be kept out, one way or another. Kamala Harris will let them all in. Donald Trump will make sure there's a wall to keep them all out."
The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was one of the earliest pieces of legislation aimed at excluding foreigners based on their nationality. Congress said the Chinese were "lowering the cultural and moral standards of American society." The law stayed in effect for more than 60 years. Even though it was eventually repealed, anti-immigrant sentiment remained alive and well. Fans of the sentiment routinely cite national security, the economy, and cultural preservation.
When the play "The Melting-Pot" premiered in 1908 it portrayed America as a land "where all races and nations come to labor and look forward." Ellis Island that year admitted nineteen hundred foreigners into the country every day, day after day. The New York Times called the play "sentimental trash masquerading as a human document." A few years later the newspaper complained that "the melting pot, besides having its own color, begins to give out its own smell. Its reek fills New York City and floats out rather widely in all directions."
In our own day the Know Nothing Party of the 19th century has become the MAGA Party of the 21st century. Their aim seems to be to keep the home of the brave and land of the free alarmed by menacing it with non-stop threats about scary immigrants.
"Damned right, we should all be scared," Al said, ordering another Manhattan. The Manhattan demands respect. It is a heavy pour of bourbon, sweet vermouth, and bitters. It is strong stuff. Big Al seemed to be hanging in there.
"Donald Trump is doing God's work. God knows somebody's got to do it."
He wasn't the only one doing the heavy lifting. From 2020 to 2024 there were hundreds of anti-immigrant proposals across 45 states. During the 2021-2022 legislative session there were 145 proposals, which balooned to 365 proposals in the 2023-2024 session. For every anti-immigrant proposal in 2020 there was an average of 4.6 proposals in 2024.
"What about the economy" I asked. "It seems to me that immigrants are one of the driving forces when it comes to that. They only have one thing on their minds and that's improving their lot on life. Isn't their new blood and new energy exactly what's good for this country?"
"Grow up!" Al blurted, spitting some of his Manhattan on his shirt. "They're rotten, I'm telling you."
The National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine released a report in 2017 called "The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration." The report found that new immigrants tended to earn less than the native-born and so were more costly to governments, but their children exhibited higher levels of upward mobility than the native-born and "are among the strongest economic and fiscal contributors in the population."
I could have grown up there and then and told him about the report, but I didn't. I thought he would probably dismiss it as "fake news." I didn't think Big Al was big on hearing anything he disagreed with. I could have told him that Benjamin Franklin way back when had proposed restrictions on Germans coming to America, saying, "We're going to be overrun by them." I could have, but I didn't tell him that, either. Al's forebears had lived in Prussian Lithuania on the Baltic Sea coast for generations.
He ordered a triple chocolate cheesecake. I ordered coffee. When he was done with dessert he stretched his legs out, almost tripping the waitress as she walked past.
"They game the system," Al said. "Believe me, I know." I wondered if he knew first-hand, gaming the system himself. "They get paid in cash, don't pay taxes, but still want government benefits. Their kids go to our schools which have to cut programs to free up room in the budget for their special classes. Our kids suffer while their kids get ahead. It's not fair. They fill up our hospitals and our prisons. Who pays for that? We do. You can't deny the financial toll. It's got to stop."
"Immigrants have always come here to work," I said. "America was built by immigrants."
"You're a fool," Al said.
I don't like being insulted anymore then the next guy, although it did mean I didn't have to be friendly anymore. I stood up and looked down at Big Al. He looked like a rosy troll with the Manhattans in his blood stream. Maybe he would go easy on whatever poor sap he was sitting in judgment of at the Justice Center, but I doubted it.
"It's been fine having lunch," I said, and walked out of Cleveland Chop without paying my share of the bill. I don't know if I meant to stick Al with the bill, but that's what happened. I knew that wasn't going to put me on his good side, but I didn't expect to bump into him again anytime soon, anyway.