Norman Minnick - The Indianapolis Anthology

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Car Bombs to Cookie Tables: The Youngstown Anthology, Second Edition

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Rust Belt Chicago: An Anthology

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Copyright 2021, Belt Publishing

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

First Edition 2021

ISBN: 978-1-948742-91-7

Belt Publishing

5322 Fleet Avenue, Cleveland, OH 44105

www.beltpublishing.com

Book design by Meredith Pangrace

Cover by David Wilson

Dedicated in memory of

Mari Evans (19192017)

Jim Powell (19502020)

devoted advocates for writing and community

You can make something out of nothing in Indianapolis.

Zero Boys

Are you still in basketball-crazed Indianoplace?

This gem was made by none other than Hillary Rodham Clinton in an email to an aide in 2010. It was a joke, Clinton later claimed. I know even people in Indiana make that joke.

Isnt she Hillarious? Allow me to break this down.

1. According to Urban Dictionary, this derogatory name for Indianapolis comes from the evident lack of anything to do other than get drunk and watch sports and the appearant [sic] resistance of many of its inhabitants to allow culture, change, or diversity into the mix. While getting drunk and watching sports is indeed a pastime in Indianapolis, it isnt a result of the evident lack of anything to do. And, while many of its inhabitants are resistant to allowing culture, change, or diversity into the mix, culture, change, and diversity are definitely in the mix in Indianapolis.

2. Indiana may be known as a basketball-crazed state, but it isnt. Maybe in its heyday when throwing chairs across the court was fashionable, but I can tell you, being a basketball fan from Kentucky, I was flummoxed when I moved here by just how few people are crazy about the sport.

3. Hillary Clinton may be known for her scintillating one-liners such as, I dont know who created Pokmon Go, but Im trying to figure out how to get them to have Pokmon-go-to-the-polls or By the way, you may have seen that I recently launched a Snapchat account. Those messages disappear all by themselves, but lets face it, Sasheer Zamata she is not.

4. Only Hoosiers can make this joke.

But to say that Indianapolis has no reason to exist, thats another topic for debate. This bon mot opens Joseph S. Petes literary tour of Indianapolis in the magazine Thoughtful Dog. He notes, Most American cities grew organically by harbors, river oxbows, and Great Lakesassembling around ports that made them hubs of commerce and connected them to the wider world. Indianapolis was plunked down on a flat, swampy, heavily forested tract of land to serve as a state capital.

It is, perhaps, the flat terrain and unnavigable river that adds to Indianapoliss mystique as a dull, monotonous city lacking culture, change, or diversity. Even its famed racecourse is flat and, according to Bleacher Report, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway is second only to Pocono Raceway as the least exciting racecourses in the country.

Its landscape is as flat as a basketball court. This is a lie, of course. The highest point in Indianapolis is in Crown Hill Cemetery at the tomb of famed Hoosier writer James Whitcomb Riley. Anyone from Indianapolis will tell you this. It is also a lie.

What do you call someone from Indianapolis, anyway? Hoosier is more of a rural thing. It evokes images of rusted basketball hoops drooping from the sides of barns surrounded by acres of corn. Ive heard suggested Indianapolitans, which I rather like. But Nap-towners wins the day. Not only does it cleverly make use of a play on words better than Indianoplace, but the n and p and ow sounds lend themselves to the quintessential Midwest nasal accent where common speech sounds like a band saw cutting galvanized tin and employs a vocabulary as un-ornamental as a monkey wrench. This may offend some, but Kurt Vonnegut said it, so its okay.

Kurt Vonnegut is, of course, from Indianapolis and is known for his dark humor and his novels Slaughterhouse-Five, Cats Cradle, and my favorite, Breakfast of Champions. We like to quote him a lot. All my jokes are Indianapolis. All my attitudes are Indianapolis. My adenoids are Indianapolis. Kurt Vonnegut.

You know who else is from Indianapolis? Kenneth Babyface Edmonds, David Letterman, Steve McQueen (the actor; not the director), Steve Ells, founder and CEO of Chipotle Mexican Grill, and Black Doug from The Hangover. But they dont have murals in the city. You know does? Kurt Vonnegut. There is also a mural of the late Mari Evans, a leading poet of the Black Arts Movement and one of the most influential Black poets of the twentieth century. Although she was celebrated more outside the city she called home, she did more for the people of Indianapolis, especially youth in urban communities, than any poet I have ever known.

The poet Etheridge Knight also did a great deal for his community. He led Free Peoples Poetry Workshops, which were free and open to anyone who wished to attend. He does noes not have a mural. Neither does Freddie Hubbard, J. J. Johnson, Wes Montgomery, or Albert Von Tilzer, whose song Take Me Out to the Ballgame is sung countless times each summer in baseball parks across the United States.

Marguerite Young doesnt have a mural either. Her 1965 novel Miss MacIntosh, My Darling was considered by the New York Times Book Review to be a work of stunning magnitude and beauty in the great styles of Joyce or Broch or Melville or Faulkner. It is also one of the longest novels ever written; longer than Les Misrables or War and Peace.

In her Paris Review interview, Young said, I was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, the Athens of the West, as it had been called in an earlier day. That was when Booth Tarkington, Meredith Nicholson, James Whitcomb Riley, various writers of the old Hoosier group lived there. We were brought up to believe that to be born in Indiana was to be born a poet.

As a poet, when I see the word used in this context, I think not just of people who write poems but anyone possessing unique powers of imagination or expression such as those listed above and those in the book you hold in your hands. Here is a taste of what you will find in the following pages: lawn chairs in the beds of pick-ups; front porches; pool memories and hot pavement; jazz and blues; classical; punk rock; railroads and breakneck highways; the magnificent stench of diesel, sweat, and sweetly hissing charcoal; limestone; grocery stores; suffragists and entrepreneurs; cement Piets; cicadas; popcorn; kites in trees; mixtapes and thrills; sneakers dangling from power lines; prom corsages and teens with frohawks; community gardens; soybeans and hog reports; Jim Nabors greatest hits; perpetual road construction; city busses; hook-up hotels; dog bakeries and yoga studios; red brick bungalows and war memorials; steakburgers and Mexican seafood; Vietnamese pho and sauerbraten; shade tree mechanics; lots of bars and churches; drive-ins; racecars; mosquitos; drag shows and cocktail lounges; Shakespearean theatre; jokes that are not funny. And some that are.