Goodbye, Pete

It’s difficult to discern if Pete Kotz, the former editor of the Scene, was a victim of the merging that publication with the Free Times, of if the joining of the two alt-weeklies gave him the opportunity he was seeking to move on to Nashville where he’ll continue as an editor for the Village Voice syndicate. In the end, the circumstances under which he left is of little consequence, what matters more is that I will miss his razor-sharp political humor writing.

I’ve done satirical writing on occasion and use barbs, ridicule and snarky comments on a regular basis in my work, so I know how difficult humor writing happens to be... especially good humor writing. It’s a skill few writers possess in abundance — at least at the high level where Kotz practices the craft.

However, Pete’s exceptional talent made him a complete enigma to me. I’d been reading and enjoying him for a quite a while before I heard some pretty negative things about him. I tried, without success to talk to him about what I’d heard, but to no avail.

I knew that, except for the rare occasion when a minority was transferred to the paper from out of town, the staff of the Scene was usually all-White; what I didn’t know was how far Kotz would go to keep it that way.

It’s an open secret that, across the country, alt-weeklies like the Scene and Free Times rarely hire Blacks... except occasionally as delivery drivers: Paperboys. And few Black journalists would attempt to integrate the staffs of those publications since the pay is better at mainstream dailies... but one Black journalist I know of did make such an attempt some years back.

Jimi Izrael is an exceptionally talented young African-American writer who was getting published in The Cleveland Tab, an alt-weekly that hired based only on merit; I was an associate editor at the publication at the time. The Rock Hall had mounted a major exhibit on Elvis Presley, and Izrael had written a scathing article, in which he took note of the fact that “The King” owed much of his success to his mimicry of Black performers — who had been doing much of the same things on stage for years without gaining any of the fame or fortune Presley had accrued.. His point was, to omit — to fail to acknowledge — the roots of Presley’s music made the exhibit a bit of a sham. It was an outstanding essay that sparked a bit of local controversy at the time.

Somehow Jimi (who possesses a mild-mannered, almost delicate persona) managed to get hired by the Scene as a writer. Perhaps the article I had penned about the lack of diversity had reached the weekly’s corporate offices. Anyway, the Black journalists in town celebrated the hiring as indeed a step forward; but Jimi’s tenure was to be short-lived. Within a few months Izrael had left the paper, saying that it was one of the most humiliating and demeaning experiences he’d had in his young life. He stated that Pete Kotz had created such a racially hostile work environment that it was impossible to stay. It’s interesting to note that he has since gone on to much bigger and better things, and currently works at a daily newspaper in Kentucky, and can be heard regularly as a commentator on National Public Radio. His talent is beyond question.

Since I’d been mentoring some of the local young Black writers, Izrael’s version of why he left the Scene was very troubling to me at the time. It was pretty much substantiated by some Whites whom I knew that also worked at the paper; it’s amazing that many people who harbor personal prejudices towards other racial groups tend to think that everyone around them who happens to be White also buys into their thinking simply because they remain silent; all of them don’t, but they remain silent because they are trying to keep their jobs; however, they often feel a need to talk to someone Black about what they are witnessing, some sort of explicating “confession” I guess.

The alleged subtle (and then outright) animus on the part of Pete Kotz was more than the young Izrael could handle. Kotz supposedly doesn’t believe in any of that namby-pamby political correctness stuff; he, if you’ll pardon the pun, likes to call a spade a spade — and he allegedly found creative ways to do so with regularity. Now, it could be that Izrael just wasn’t tough enough... I’m sure that would be Kotz’s version of the events. But just how tough should a Black, or a woman, or a gay have to be in order to keep their job? Hostile work environments are very real... and very unfair.

For me, the Kotz enigma was this: I’d been comfortable in my belief that people whom God had gifted with an intellect keen enough to write at such an exceptional level (no matter how ill-raised, or how infused with racial animus they were as children) would eventually come to the grown-up conclusion that skin color prejudice is really, really just sort of stupid. It just never occurred to me that an accomplished political humorist — someone bright enough to write at Kotz’s level — could also harbor such small-minded racial feelings. Many of us were passed on prejudices from our parents and the culture we happened to be raised in, but part of the maturation process of intelligent people is to outgrow such crippling feelings. Kotz’s personal development was somehow arrested at a juvenile stage vis-à-vis race, and that’s a shame. He self-limits his shot at journalistic greatness.

Now, I never managed to talk to Kotz, but it was not for lack of effort on my part. After Jimi told everyone how he had been treated at the Scene I wanted — and tried hard — to get into Kotz’s face and challenge him about it, but he continually ducked me. Kevin Hoffman, who was the assistant editor at the Scene at the time, tried to arrange an informal meeting between us on a couple of occasions but Kotz was always too busy playing the pussy, hiding behind his pen.

A source told me when he could be found at his favorite hangout, and I twice went down to Hopple’s, a workingman’s bar on Columbus Road in the Flats, where Kotz purportedly held forth with his redneck rants while exhibiting his faux two-fisted, hard-drinking, hard-driving persona. Allegedly, he even had the nerve to wear his baseball cap backwards. However, someone must have spotted my Black face coming through the door, thus giving him time to duff out the back. He must have known that I had a little pink tutu in my pickup truck that I was going to force him to metaphorically wear in repayment for how abominably he’d treated Jimi Izrael. And if he proved to be the better man... he could, of course, force me to wear it. But it wasn’t going to be one of those White-boy bitch fights that goes “Well, fuck you... no fuck you... nooo, fuck you!”

As a true bully, Kotz is a fake and fraud. He picked on the much smaller and younger Jimi simply because my friend was a quiet, thoughtful Black gentleman. But Kotz knew that I could and would hold my own verbally, and if he wanted to get physical... well, we could have “taken it outside,” which would have been just fine and dandy with me. Cowards carefully select the people they pick on, true tough bullies don’t; and, even at my age, I can take an ass-whipping if fate has one in store for me — and I can certainly still give one. But either way... I ain’t ducking no confrontations. Among even the most civilized of men, occasionally that’s what it comes down to: Sometimes you just have to lock ass.

The thing is, I never stopped reading Kotz... I continued to thoroughly enjoy his work in spite of my knowledge of his glaring, tragic and despicable flaw. And if he ever gets back up to Cleveland I sincerely hope he looks me up (I’m not hard to find), I’d still like to go out drinking with him... just to see what it would lead to. After a good fight we might even become friends — who knows? And sometimes, all it takes is a good public spanking to make someone grow up a bit, right Pete?

From Cool Cleveland contributor Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com

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