Cementland
On their honeymoon, a teenage couple toured St. Peter’s Basilica when the madman Laszlo Toth ambled over some red velvet ropes guarding the Mother Mary and her Son.
Toth ran up on Michelangelo’s Pietá and shouted, “I am God’s only son, risen from the dead!” He swung a geologist’s hammer down on Mary’s white Luna marble arm, knocking it off at the elbow, and proceeded to crack into the blue-grey sculpture for a few more swings before Mike Hardcastle wrapped him up in a line-backer tackle.
Toth was clinically schizophrenic. He’d traveled from Pilisvörösvár Hungary believing he was the next Jesus Christ, here to redeem the world of sin and bring about a utopia of plenty. He managed to knock off a chunk of Mary’s nose, and chip an eyelid.
Toth was committed to an Italian psychiatric hospital, and the couple returned to our city in the Midwest. Interviewing with the paper, Hardcastle said he understood the teeth-gnashing desire to destroy something beautiful, because you have to have it if you want to be a sculptor
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The pope gifted Mike and Gail a cash prize. They used it to buy a studio; a dilapidated former shoe factory north of downtown. “Sixty-nine cents a square foot is basically free,” Gail said, and signed the papers despite cracks in the foundation. Mike poured cement for giant cement snakes to enclose the parking lot; big Egyptian serpent faces to guard the building. Gail knew he would always be the dreamer, and she would always be the practical burden dragging him back to earth, but maybe it would be fun along the way.
The couple bought scrap from all over the city—a city that had been in decline for half a century; a city where one could acquire giant iron textile looms, rusted clocks from bulldozed banks, school buses, dilapidated fighter jets, industrial fans, pipes, ornate sheet metal fixtured that had once belonged to opera house ceilings.
They filled the former International Shoe building with junk, and Hardcastle sculpted a giant bowhead whale on the first floor. It was the centerpiece of what would become the museum, where guests could walk up the white tongue of the whale and brush the bristle teeth made of brooms. “I call it the underground whale-way,” Mike said. The mouth led to a playground of caves with icicles cut from fiberglass insulation, and a large turquoise fish tank they had yet to fill with water, “But that’s coming soon.”
Half concrete amusement park, half art museum, Mike had a skateboarding half-pipe built on the third floor, and on the second, Gail restored braiding looms to weave shoelaces for children visiting the museum. The lobby and the walls and the bathrooms were all hand-tiled with shattered bits of aqua porcelain and bright green tile. Some of the porcelain was recovered from the lobby floors of rotten hotels and dining clubs where the old-time rich used to clink champagne glasses, and now they served as a glittering path which led into a whale’s mouth.
The museum opened to the public. Admission was free for three years until finances dictated that a sign be hung beside the stone snake heads outside: “Greedy Mike’s Lot - $5 PARKING.”
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Some years later, Gail filed for divorce and claimed the museum as a dual partnership. Mike fucked up the money. Everything was in debt, just as she’d known it would be. “Do you know how exhausting it is to be the money cop all the time?” she’d asked him again and again. “I’m tired, Michael. You can’t do whatever you want, all on your own, all of the time.”
But Mike tried.
He banished himself. Cementland became the name of his new project; a fifty-four-acre factory grounds on the far north side, Bellefontaine, near the Mississippi River. The property was at the edge of the poorest of the poor neighborhoods. It had been a cement factory, and a three-hundred-foot-tall smokestack stood like a middle finger at the center of the ruins.
Mike cleared the grounds with a bulldozer, and built rebar towers, and bridges between the roofs of the old rotary kilns. He was building an amusement park of limestone and shale; “Cementland will always be free,” he wrote in a red Five-Star notebook, living in a double-wide trailer at the edge of the property. “Crazy Mike demands free entry, free meals, free everything.”
He worked and worked over the years; pulverized rock, iron ore clay, clinker brick, ground gypsum. The iron ball bearings which ground the kiln rock became decorative flourishes on railings and roofs. Mike retooled conveyer belts to be slides for guests to slip from one area of the park to another like chutes and ladders. But as time went on, Mike began to doubt. “Is it all a shrine to me?” he wondered in his journal writing. “It is. It’s all just a shrine to me. Even if I build it with the greatest of intentions… I don’t want incense burned at my alter. That’s not the point. Just keep going.”
In September, a police investigation found Mike Hardcastle dead in the seat of his bulldozer. The report said he succumbed to internal injuries after his vehicle flipped down a hill, but somehow there was no blood in the cab, and the machine stood upright.
Nothing stolen, no forced entry, but Mike’s body was a beaten pulp. It was as if he’d been tumbled in one of the grinding kilns. There were no suspects, no evidence of foul play.
Some say he tipped the dozer on purpose, and now Mike haunts the ruins of the unfinished Cementland. You can catch his figure in the shadow of the weed trees growing around the smokestack. Green ivy vines and bubble-letter graffiti cover the walls, lost dogs roam the grounds barking. Elsewhere, Mike’s turtles, and snakes, and bowhead whales will stand for hundreds of years.
Devin Thomas O’Shea is a 2022 Regional Arts Commission grant recipient with writing published in Lapham's, Slate, The Nation, The Emerson Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Jacobin, Boulevard, and elsewhere. Northwestern MFA, 2018.