Really? It's been seven years since I offered up a new installment of "Books on the Nightstand"? Negligent of me — or of you. You're supposed to keep me on my toes, chide me about such things. "Hey Neil! Aren't you reading anymore? Spending all your time watching clips of 'Young Sheldon' on Instagram, are ya?"
No. Still reading, still researching. Which is how I stumbled upon Scott Raab's "The Whore of Akron: One Man's Search for the Soul of LeBron James." Published in 2011, the book is an example of that once common, now rare literary form: a philippic, a screed against an individual, an ad hominem attack, in this case keelhauling LeBron James, NBA superstar and the titular whore, roundly damned him for abandoning his Cleveland Cavaliers and flouncing off to Miami in search of championship rings.
Not the sort of book you'd imagine me reading; me, who nearly asked Michael Jordan who he was when I met him. But I am working on something related to our mutual hometown, came across the book, and figured it would fill holes in my knowledge base. Boy, has it ever.
Frankly, I was a little surprised I hadn't heard of Raab previously. We share at least half a dozen common characteristics, being both: 1) from Cleveland; 2) Jewish; 3) alcoholics in recovery; 4) prone to fatness; 5) associated with Esquire; 6) experience drinking with Wright Thompson, the ESPN scribe. It's a big world, I suppose; you can't keep track of everything.
Though Raab far surpasses me in #4 (topping out at 388, while I never weighed more than 225) and #5 (he started as a writer-at-large for Esquire in 1997, while I wrote one profile and contributed a few items to the "Dubious Achievement Awards.")
What makes "The Whore of Akron" well worth seeking out is Raab's voice. I sincerely couldn't give a shit about LeBron James or his championship hopes in the first decade of the 21st century. But Raab performs the same magic trick that Robert Caro does — taking someone you'd otherwise care nothing about and turning him into a font of fascination, though the book is about Raab far more than LeBron. The author is virtuosic at plumbing the queasy mix of pride and resignation that afflicts all who harbor a little patch of Cleveland in their hearts, starting with his Lost Eden, the 1964 Cleveland Browns championship, which he had the misfortune — in my view — of attending as a 12-year-old.
"That flag still flies in my soul," he writes. "The roar still echoes in my ears. The vision — of Cleveland triumphant, of Cleveland fans in communal thrall to a joy beyond all words, of a Cleveland team lifting the town's immortal heart to heaven — still fills my eyes."
Me, I'd observe that success is an addiction too, like anything else, and if you find yourself wanting something too much, and chasing it too relentlessly over the years, maybe it's time to forswear it and find satisfaction elsewhere. But I am not a sports fan. A guy who has written every day for 11 years plus shouldn't lecture anybody on abandoning oneself to pointless pursuits.
Raab is a searing, fearless writer. I thought I was candid, having written a frank book about sailing with my father. Raab writes about trying to kill his father: "Once, my brother David and I tried to kill the old man. While he was at shul, we wedged the front and side doors tight, waited on the upstairs back porch until he came around the back door,and then fired every knife in the house down at himi the hope of poleaxing his yarmulked skull with one of them."
I deploy my cute little metaphors like paper boats in a bathtub. Raab rakes his cheeks with his fingernails and scrawls his thoughts in blood on a white wall. Reading Raab, I felt an emotion that I can't recall ever feeling reading another writer: shame. I felt kinda ashamed, of myself, and my own weak tea craft, compared to the high-octane heat he brings to cavailing James as a loser and headcase. My favorite passage, the one I read out loud to my wife, is:
"I'm calling my wife now. As ever, I get rolled into voicemail. I try the landline. Hope. I try her cell again. Nada. Landline. Cell. Landline. Cell. Landline. Cell. She is unavailable. Unreachable. I miss her. I want her to be there for me every time I want her to be there for me. I want to whisper in the small pink shell of her ear that as our years together have unfolded, the mystery of our love grows ever more unfathomable, especially the mystery of where the fuck she is or why the fuck she doesn't answer her fucking cell phone."
That last sentence, the pivot it makes, is brilliant. Though speaking of his wife, the book does have a notable flaw — in my view. And to give you an idea of the gap between us, I can hardly articulate the sin he commits. But here goes. His beloved, respected, wife makes her first appearance in the book when he calls her over for a handjob, an act which is almost a leitmotif in the book. That doesn't seem respectful. While I'd never judge another man's relationship with his wife, I do know that if I presented my wife in that fashion in a book of mine, she would rip my heart out and taunt me with it as I died. So if you do read the book, and you should, know that's waiting in there.
Otherwise, it's all pain and Cleveland fandom, set out in Hunter S. Thompson level prose that snaps between Los Angeles and Miami and Cleveland. There are descriptions of basketball games, but not too many. A book should create a world, and as someone who only vaguely knew that James eventually won a few of those championships — I think, I'll have to check (four; quite a lot, really) — it's a joy to see him portrayed as a quitter and a crybaby. Yes, I wish Raab could put some distance between himself and the salmon-to-spawn desire for a championship that so animates sports fans, step back, and explore why the self-worth of an individual — many individuals — can rise and fall on the record of a team whose efforts, really, have nothing to do with them. To him, it's a given.
"I truly believe that Cleveland's collective soul will be redeemed on that great and glorious day," he writes. "Nothing less."
Trust me, as someone associated with a city whose baseball teams have won a World Series apiece in the past 20 years: redemption is elusive.
Plus I wish he could have considered how a guy supposedly in recovery can take that much Valium and Vicodin.
But those are quibbles. October hasn't been the best month, and "The Whore of Akron" is one of those books I opened with gratitude and read with pleasure, an escape from grim reality hanging all around like fog. I've already picked up his second book, "You're Welcome Cleveland" and will turn to that next.
Sometimes, when someone accuses me of being successful, I point out that I'm not even the most successful writer living in Northbrook — that would be Bob Kurson, author of best-selling "Shadow Divers" and other wildly-popular volumes. Now, with the discovery of Scott Raab, I can say I'm not even the most successful alcoholic Jewish writer from Cleveland with a troublesome family. Still, given what Scott Raab has gone through, and how excellent he is at conveying it, I do not begrudge him the title one bit. Okay, well, maybe a little.