Meet the People of 2018’s Cleveland People Issue

Kurt Zoss, Owner, Zoss the Swiss Baker With more than 22 years of night shift experience in his own bakery, Kurt Zoss, of Zoss the Swiss Baker in Cleveland Heights, has had a bit of time to figure out how to balance a family, a healthy lifestyle and a demanding business. The start time for Zoss’ quotidian night-owl stretch varies based on the volume of baked goods expected to leave the tiny workroom, but it’s always sometime between 10 p.m. and 3 a.m. And while Zoss has help in the bakery during business hours, it’s a one-man show overnight. At the beginning of what usually ends up being a 12-hour day, Zoss mixes, shapes and bakes dough for flakey pastries, hearty breads and tons of Bavarian pretzels. “The night shift is really special,” he says with a smile. “But you get used to it.” He’s had plenty of time to adjust, after all, since starting the business in 1996. “You have to be very strict on the sleep schedule,” Zoss says. “I figured out if I have to work at midnight, I should be in bed about 6 at night. So whatever time I start, I sleep six hours before.”

If Zoss isn’t in the bakery, you can probably find him riding his bicycle or motorcycle. He also loves traveling whenever he gets the rare chance. But most times you’ll find him in his shop, the final destination of a trip that began when he apprenticed in his home country of Switzerland at the age of 16. When Zoss moved to the States in the 1980s, he got a job at the highly respected La Brea Bakery in Los Angeles. After that, he moved to Cleveland Heights where his wife, Barbara, grew up. Fast forward a few years, and Zoss is no longer the only one in the bakery who grew up in the business. Barbara handles all the savory tarts that line the cases, and their sons, Roman and Ryan, started working in the shop as soon as they could, helping their dad make pretzels for local bars and breweries. In the summer months when his sons were growing up and helping out at the farmer’s market stands, Zoss says “they learned that money doesn’t grow on trees.” His sons are now grown, and family time is not what it used to be back in the day, but the bonds and lessons built over bread will never be lost. And that past, present and future of his business continue to drive him every day. “You’re doing something that you can see,” Zoss says. “You get to hold it. It’s instant, more or less … I always like that aspect. And, you know, it makes people happy.”

Malicia Morrigan, Dominatrix Malicia Morrigan’s 6-foot-2 frame (6-foot-9 in heels) drapes across a chaise longue, nestled between walls adorned with leather cuffs, whips, chains, ball gags, gimp masks and an assortment of prods. A St. Andrew’s Cross looms in the background. A human-sized dog cage sits in the corner. Her perfectly manicured toes peep out of her patent leather heels, and in the background a man is heard screaming in painful ecstasy. “Someone’s having a good time,” she says. For those with a more unique desire for thrilling adventure, the Red Door Dungeon is the oldest and largest professional in-person dominance dungeon in Cleveland. Malicia Morrigan works here as a giantess and domina. The Red Door Dungeon does not offer illegal services like sex solicitation, and Morrigan fulfills all of her work duties without ever removing a single article of clothing. There’s a stigma attached to sex work and those who patronize sex workers, but, “The main demographic are white-collar workers, usually between the ages of 35 and 55, although I’ve had clients in the age range of 29 through their late 70s,” she says. While Morrigan cannot disclose the identities or professions of her clients, studies on kink and BDSM (bondage, dominance, sadism and masochism) show that it is often men with high-pressure jobs or those working in high-power positions who find a cathartic release by experiencing femdom, or the act of being dominated by a woman. “They come here to let go and be free for a moment,” she says.

Morrigan offers a variety of services, including the surprisingly common fetish of sissification (to feminize a man, most often by forcing him to wear women’s clothing, typically gaudy and overly feminine to enhance his humiliation), offering her size-12 feet for worshipping, bondage, power exchange, mental and physical torture and full body weight distribution. “I’ve been asked to wrestle clients before, wanting me to use entire body weight to trample or sit on them,” she says. Morrigan enjoys her work and is willing to provide whatever sexual liberation her clients desire, but notes even this job has its tedious aspects: “Everyone sees these fancy rope designs and harnesses on Instagram, but then I feel like I’m tying shoes for a half hour.” When Morrigan isn’t working at the Red Door Dungeon, she also performs one-on-one online humiliation and domination shows via Skype, through private scheduling. As a member of the alternative community her entire life, Morrigan found her friends and social circles supportive of her decision to become a dominatrix. “Had I not grown up so alternative, I’m sure this decision could have been catastrophic,” she says. If you see her out and about around town, you might find her in something like a perfectly fitted corset and fishnet tights. It is clear that this isn’t just a hobby; it’s part of her identity. “There’s a misconception that the sex work I do is prostitution, and it’s not,” she says. “If anything, it’s a form of a therapy that happens to be sexual in nature. Being dominated is an immersive and vulnerable experience, and these clients are putting their physical and psychological safety in our hands. That’s not something we take lightly. It’s not easy work, because it’s incredibly cerebral. But I love my job. I love what I do. And I’m good at it.”

Kev Boycik, Manager, Cleveland Cinemas; host, Rocky Horror Picture Show screenings He wasn’t at the first screening of Rocky Horror at the Cedar Lee — he was recovering from knee surgery at the time — but he was there for the second. And he became a regular after that. Now, 31 years later, Kev Boycik serves as the host for the screenings that take place at midnight on the first Saturday of every month. Right before a recent showing, Boycik, who, with his sideburns and thick-rimmed glasses looks like a young Elvis Costello, runs to the front of the theater, microphone in hand. When he gets there, he welcomes patrons and then brings all the “virgins” in the audience up to the front of the room for a friendly hazing. “Give us your best fake orgaaaaaasm,” he intones as he hands the mic to each person. After their attempts, he playfully mocks their moans and groans and calls Opal, the theater’s veteran ticket taker, into the theater to help him judge the performances.

Boycik then runs through the 10 “rules” that fans must obey to avoid “premature ejaculation” from the theater. Patrons traditionally throw rice and toast during the screening, but Boycik wants to make sure they don’t damage the screen. “You break it, you buy it,” he warns. And he encourages everyone to stay seated during the screening since a local cast that calls itself Simply His Servants will perform a live floor show and act out scenes from the flick. “Because it’s been at the Cedar Lee for so long, it’s become generational,” Boycik says when asked about the campy movie’s appeal. “I can’t tell you how many people come up to me and say, ‘This is my son,’ or they say, ‘This is my daughter.’ Two months ago, there was a group that included a grandmother and her son and his son. They had all grown up seeing Rocky Horror at the Cedar Lee.” A manager at Cleveland Cinemas, Boycik says attendance for the midnight showings continues to be strong and that audiences still actively participate, shouting out alternative lines of dialogue and song lyrics throughout the screening. “For some people, it’s a rite of passage that they need to get out of their system,” he says. “Other people come to it and they never leave. Because of what the country is like right now, there are people who need a little bit of political incorrectness and a space to act like deviants and weirdos. Fortunately, The Rocky Horror Picture Show still works. It used to be just white college kids, but now we get white, black, straight, gay and trans people. It’s a great group of people that shows up. It’s like a social thing, and this place kind of turns into a nightclub.”

Maurice Summons, Custodian, Cleveland Hopkins International Airport Twice, in the beginning, Maurice Summons left work, got into his beloved Chrysler 300 and fell asleep before the keys slid into the ignition. He’d wake up hours later having never moved from the Cleveland Hopkins International Airport employee parking lot. “I’m sure you’ve been tired before in your life,” the night-shift custodian says. “But not like this. It’s not anything you can control.” These bouts of extreme tiredness came when he added a second job as a third-shift custodian (9:30 p.m. to 6 a.m.) at the airport, while also keeping his twice weekly shoe shiner gig at the Cleveland Shines station on Concourse C during summer mornings. “I’m used to it now, but it took a lot of getting used to,” the 37-year-old says. “I started the night shift in 2013, and I didn’t get used to it until 2014. Going to sleep by 3 p.m., you have to get used to that too. Everybody, the kids are getting out of school, you have to find your own quiet to get to work by 9:30 p.m.” Our interview with Summons takes place in the middle of the day, a time he has selected, meaning he’s functioning (impressively well) on a couple hours of sleep. Walking through the less-than-busy airport baggage claim, Summons greets every employee who passes by before settling down in a conference room to chat. Summons, a transplant from the South Side of Chicago, says this is the best job he’s ever had. He says that at night, when his crew is stripping, washing and buffing floors, “People [departing their planes] will tell us ‘thank you.'”

He finds as much satisfaction in keeping a clean home as he does a clean airport bathroom or polishing someone’s shoes (which he claims to be one of the best at). Summons says he probably has OCD. His DVD collection is always in order and no dish is left unwashed in the sink. But like any job, his gig has its concerns. A member of the Service Employee International Union Local 1, Summons worries about mandatory overtime and getting more workers hired for the night shift. Also, to schedule anything from family events to working out vacation time with the HR department, he has to be clear about dates and times. “I’m always a day ahead,” he says. On his two days off a week, he makes time for his kids and seeing friends. Still, there’s something about the hours that he loves, like beating the traffic in the evening and the morning. And he enjoys going to the grocery store right after work when the only people in the place are senior citizens. “I like being the guy making money while everyone else is asleep,” Summons says. “Sometimes it feels like I have the whole city to myself.”

Linda Mercadante, Depot Manager, the Plain Dealer Waking up in the dead of winter is the hardest, says Linda Mercadante at 3:12 a.m., sitting in her office at the Plain Dealer distribution depot on Van Epps Road in Brooklyn Heights. “When it’s pitch-black and the wind is …” — she waves her hands and goes whoosh — “it’s so hard to get out of bed.” But she does. And she has for the past 22 years. She’s the woman who ensures that the local newspaper arrives on local porches before the crack of dawn each morning. In the wintertime, she leaves for work from her home in Euclid long before the snowplows are out. Sometimes, she says, she wishes there were brake lights to show her the way. She arrives around midnight each night, though the depot doesn’t officially open until 1 a.m. The morning newspaper arrives in trucks from the Tiedeman production facility, warm and bundled, at about 1:30, and Mercadante begins the daily management of her distributors — 108 union drivers and 18 part-timers — who deliver not only the PD, but the Sun News and the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times and USA Today to the thousands of subscribers in the region. “I’m the bad guy,” Mercadante jokes. “Nobody around here likes me.” But she says someone has to remind the distributors of the contracts they signed, has to reinforce their commitment to the readers who expect a newspaper when they wake up (and who are eager to call and complain if an edition is late or absent). “It really is all about the customer,” Mercadante says. “That’s the bottom line.”

In her long career with the PD, much of the downsizing that she’s experienced has been shared by consumers. The reduction from seven to four home delivery days, for example, complicates Mercadante’s already complicated schedule — Mondays and Tuesdays are “skeleton days,” she says. But other shrinkages aren’t widely known. “When I started, there were 17 depots,” Mercadante says. “Now there are four.” Whether or not there will be further downsizing, she can only speculate. “I think there will always be the printed paper. Will there be home delivery? I don’t know.” Mercadante used to be a distributor herself — “distributor” being the new and gender-neutral term for “paperboy” — working a three-street route from 1987 to 1996 as she raised two young sons. She’d started on the path to becoming a dental hygienist, but working the route was a better fit with her home life. When she started at the depot, she was one of the only women employed, and she remains one of only two women in the PD’s distribution leadership. These days, she says she cherishes the slivers of time she enjoys with her husband — Saturday afternoons are special — and the fact that her social life hasn’t been utterly destroyed. It’s always a challenge, though, because, “If you want to go out, you’re going to suffer the next day.” She says she generally sleeps from about 6 p.m to 11 p.m., with an occasional catnap in the late morning or early afternoon. “I’m eight years away from retirement and I still haven’t adjusted,” she says of her wee-hour life. “But the traffic? The traffic is awesome.”

Tony Hanf, Production Supervisor, Playhouse Square As audiences flood into the streets of downtown hoping to catch a Hamilton actor outside the stage door, and the lights begin to dim inside the State Theatre, the work begins for a new batch of people. Production supervisor Tony Hanf has been part of the Playhouse Square family for 12 years, a decade of which he spent in the education department. Now he’s the man who organizes, arranges and helps bring to life the many productions that entertain the masses of Cleveland before a performer ever sets foot on the stage. Hanf is responsible for guiding each show from loading truck to stage. He helps determine what each production will require, what Playhouse Square already has on site that can be of assistance, and what needs to be obtained to make sure the show can be as successful as possible. “A few years back we were doing Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and suddenly everyone’s tickets had to be moved from the Palace Theatre to the State Theatre. The reason? Because the costumes couldn’t fit through the door in the Palace,” says Hanf. “It’s my job to make sure these iconic staples, like those costumes or like Pride Rock in The Lion King, can be successfully mounted at Playhouse Square.” With matinee performances and evening call times, sometimes the most opportune moments to begin putting these technical elements together are late at night and into the early morning. Hanf was fresh off of Jazz Fest when we spoke to him. “I didn’t see my girlfriend for four days,” he says. By now she’s used to his frequent late nights and unpredictable schedule. “I tried the internet dating thing for a while and people were always so excited when they heard what my job is, until they tried to schedule the date and realize I am never available when they are,” he says.

For events like Jazz Fest that take up an entire weekend’s worth of productions, Hanf will sleep in his office when a late night and early call are back to back, and proudly boasts about surviving 16- or 18-hour shifts. “Luckily for me, we have some of the best union workers in the country here at Playhouse Square,” he says. “Some of these guys have been working here longer than I’ve been alive, so I don’t have to stand over their shoulders and tell them how to do their jobs, otherwise I’d be here even later.” Fostering relationships is also an important part of the job and helps with the efficiency of loading in and out. “The Dancing with the Stars crew is really cool. It’s a different tour each year, but it’s the same crew each time,” says Hanf. When audiences ooh and ahh over the massive spectacles on stage, Hanf just shrugs, “This is my job. This is what I do every day.” After so many years and so many late nights setting up productions, one would think that Hanf would be disillusioned by the magic of the theater. He admits that he doesn’t actually get to see many of the productions fully realized because, after working odd hours in the theater all day, staying even longer to watch the show can be overkill. “When you’re immersed in the behind-the-scenes world for so long, it can start to feel like just a job. But then something like Hamilton will come through, and it’ll reinvigorate me and remind me why I love what I do.”

Jeff Weisenberg, Director of Screen Printing, Jakprints With just seconds left on the clock, a group of people kept their eyes glued to a television screen awaiting the final outcome of Game 7 of the 2016 NBA Finals. When the final buzzer sounded, the entire city of Cleveland erupted with joy and poured into the streets for a long night of revelry and celebration. For the screen-printing team at Jakprints, Inc., it was going to be a long night as well, but a long night of work. For the past 18 years, Jeff Weisenberg has worked as a screen-printer and is now the director of screen printing and embroidery at the Cleveland-based company. Fortunately, his late-night printing days are mostly behind him, but whenever there’s a “hot market” time frame for printing — something like the Super Bowl or the NBA Finals — Weisenberg joins the ranks for non-stop print production, with breaks and meals staggered between the entire department. “I’m a huge sports guy, so it’s difficult sometimes to be invested in a game knowing that I’m going to have to do twice the work if my team wins,” he says. Every day is a little bit different for the screen-printers, depending on the wants and needs of the customers, and each screen-printing project is treated with the utmost care and efficiency. Being in Cleveland, the environment for the screen-printers is always different, based just on the weather, alone. “Last week, the shop felt like it was 100 degrees,” he says, “but in February, it might feel like it’s 50 degrees. You deal with Cleveland in addition to your workload.” Not just screen-printing, the night team is often pulling double-duty as delivery drivers. Fast turnaround jobs need to be personally delivered to FedEx or UPS locations.

“I’ve tried to drive home after long nights of printing before and it feels like I’ve just drank 15 beers. It’s better to just stay,” he says. To his knowledge, the current record for longest shift ever worked is held by screen-printing job controller and Signals Midwest guitarist Jeff Russell, who logged in 36 hours. “It takes a special kind of person to work these shifts,” he says. “I have a family and a dog, so there have been times when my wife has had to take off work so I can fulfill a job.” Many of the late-night printers are single and have a more flexible schedule, and none of them would describe themselves as morning people. Weisenberg worked in bars for 10 years before he started screen-printing full-time, so he finds he works better at these hours. Hot market print nights are controlled chaos, and not always predictable in their demands. “When you’re printing for the Super Bowl, it’s just one game. We know when we have to come in and that we’re going to be printing all night,” he says. In comparison, for something like the NBA Finals or the Stanley Cup which can last four to seven games, it is much more difficult to plan out when the mad dash for rush printing will begin. “We always know it’s coming,” Weisenberg says. “But we can’t be sure exactly when it’s going to hit.”

Edwina Polk, Supervisor of Sleep Technical Staff, Cleveland Clinic Sleep Disorders Center For 14 years, Edwina Polk has watched people sleep, or at least watched people’s brains while they sleep. “People always want to know, ‘Are you watching me all night?'” says Polk, a supervisor at the Cleveland Clinic Sleep Disorder Center. “But I have so much to do, I don’t have time to stare. I’m watching brain waves and working on charts. If I watched people sleep on a monitor all night, I would go to sleep too.” Standing in one of the center’s comfortable patient rooms on a floor of the Clinic’s InterContinental Suites Hotel, Polk is showing off the dozens of blue and red wires used to record people’s sleep patterns. She explains these wires are taped to a patient’s head, arms, and chest during a polysomnogram test, used to diagnose sleep apnea, a disorder that causes a person to stop breathing during sleep. Polk admits she never thought about the importance of sleep until her work became about sleep. “Everybody is different. I personally need seven hours; if I don’t get that I’m not refreshed. I’m tired and groggy and I can be moody,” she says with a laugh. “It’s important to get the right amount for yourself for cell regeneration. We even burn calories during sleep.”

Two years after starting work as a sleep technician, Polk herself was diagnosed with sleep apnea. The irony isn’t lost on her. “I thought I was too young to get it,” the now 49-year-old says. “Prior to the diagnosis I was sleepy and working nights. I was in a fog. I would tell my sisters that I would do something, and they’d show up at my house and I wouldn’t remember saying anything about hanging out.” Polk, a native Clevelander, has worked a variety of shifts through her years at the center and since becoming a manager in January. This week, the mother of two grown children is starting a new middle shift, but could return to nights shortly. Anyone can have sleep apnea, Polk says, but there are some major risk factors, including excessive snoring, obesity, extreme tiredness, high blood pressure and being over 50. Polk says she understands when people are reticent to use the CPAP machine mask every night at home to help their breathing, as she was too. “I have a lot of success when I share that I wear the mask as well,” she says. “That’s why we can relate, where a patient may not open up to a provider. I love to help people when you see they have really bad apnea. You see them flopping like a fish in the bed during the test and then, once they’re on the CPAP, they stay in one place. It’s exciting to get the feedback from the patients when they say to me, “Wow, I feel great.'”

Richard Witkowski, Night Guard Supervisor, Cleveland Museum of Art It’s 8 a.m. on a Friday, and if we didn’t know any better, we’d think Richard Witkowski was just starting his shift. His blue sport coat looks like it’s just been pressed, and his tie is wrapped snugly around his neck. On his lapel, he has a pin featuring a picture of one of the spotted yellow pumpkins from the Yayoi Kusama exhibit Witkowski, of course, has actually just finished work. From midnight to 8 a.m., he helps guard the millions of dollars of art owned by the Cleveland Museum of Art. So what happens on a typical night at the museum? “Being security, you have to be careful about what information we hand out,” he says. “My official description of what we do is that my team and I are responsible for monitoring and reporting on environmental and security systems of the building and its contents and our employees. We have our mechanical issues. It’s a 100-year-old building. As far as attempted break-ins, I can’t talk about that.” Witkowski started working at the museum two years ago as a guard and worked his way up the ladder. “Coffee is my new best friend,” he says with a laugh. “I never drank coffee before this. I’ve always worked second or third shift, so the schedule just agrees with me. A big part of it is keeping the same sleep schedule. I stay awake all night. I am just a night person.”

When he’s not working at the museum, “I’m the creative type,” he says. “I do 3-D art and stuff you’d see in video games or Pixar movies. I design things on my tablet.” He says he appreciates the fact that he essentially gets a private showing of the museum’s art collection each night he goes to work. “I like having the place without any public,” he says. “It’s very intimate to walk through the building in that context. My friends and family like to joke that it’s like [the movie] Night at the Museum. I’ve heard that joke over and over. It’s not like that. Nothing comes to life. There are a few ghost stories floating around here, but I haven’t seen anything that makes me nervous.” He says he particularly loves walking through the Yayoi Kusama exhibit. “It’s something I was looking forward to since I started working here,” he says. “I do consider it a privilege to be able to experience it at my own pace when most of the public has to go through on a scheduled pace. Our walk through is unrestrained.”

Mike Vielhaber, Night Cameraman, WEWS Channel 5 On Nov. 29, 2012, news cameraman Mike Vielhaber was sitting alongside police Sgt. Ali Pillow for a ride-along. WEWS Channel 5, where Vielhaber has worked for the past 13 years, had given him the green light to do a story about what was then a new law enforcement initiative: V-GRIP (Violence-Gun Reduction & Interdiction Program). He was collecting footage near East 140th and St. Clair when the infamous 22-minute chase that resulted in 137 shots and the deaths of Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams began. “My V-GRIP story never aired,” Vielhaber tells Scene outside the Great Lakes Science Center on a recent night, though it’s superfluous to mention. “We had just taken some guns off a few kids at a gas station when we started hearing bits and pieces of the chase.” Vielhaber says he and Pillow had reached East 55th when the chase poured over the Innerbelt bridge. Pillow, mindful of his media guest, was stopping at every red light, but Vielhaber managed to get exclusive footage nonetheless. “I had video of the chase going down 90 and then down 72nd,” he says. “We followed all the way into East Cleveland. I wasn’t there for the shooting itself, but I walked up to the scene long before anyone else had gotten there. It was a lot of blank stares.” That night, Vielhaber says, was probably his craziest in the nine years he’s worked the overnight shift for Channel 5, a shift that began on Labor Day in 2009 and one that he’s occupied ever since. “We had a hole from 11 p.m. to 4 a.m.,” he said. “And our news director wanted 24-hour coverage. I jumped at it.”

Vielhaber had worked in both the Jackson, Tennessee, and Richmond, Virginia, TV markets after interning with Channel 5 when he graduated from the Ohio Broadcasting School. He says he’d done some overnight contract work in those markets and loved the solitary thrill of the chase. These days, he works from his SUV, which is stocked with camera gear and audio equipment, and lives at the mercy of the police scanners. He leaves his Wadsworth home at 10:30 p.m., and, until 7 the next morning, he’s humping it from blazing fire to car crash to homicide, often arriving before the police to capture footage for the morning news broadcasts. “These Cleveland cops are so strapped — the Fourth, the Fifth [districts] — sometimes they just can’t spare a car. And yeah, it can be scary, but you learn how far you can go, and how to make your approaches,” he says. (Vielhaber recommends Netflix’s Shot in the Dark to get a sense of what he does; the 2014 Hollywood thriller Nightcrawler, not so much.) This summer, in contrast to recent years, has been fairly quiet. And while Vielhaber concedes that that’s fantastic for everybody else — “I don’t want bad shit to befall people” — it’s boring as hell for him. “We’ve had whole weeks where we’ve shot only a couple of things,” he says. “I don’t want to compare myself to a fireman, but it’s kind of like that. When the radio goes, I go.” (Some early mornings, if he’s not chasing anything, he’ll capture the skyline at dawn, images and video of which have earned him a devoted social media following.) He says his sleep schedule hasn’t suffered too much working overnight — he’s pretty adaptable, he says, and gets his week off on the right foot with a long Sunday afternoon nap — and that working nights may prove to be an advantage now that he’s got two kids. (Taking them to after-school sporting events is no problem.) But Vielhaber says in a few years, when a wave of retirements is expected to hit Channel 5, he’ll think more seriously about shifting back to daytime. As we’re talking, a siren blares beside us and a police cruiser speeds by on the Shoreway. Vielhaber jets to the front seat of his vehicle to check his scanners. A minute or so later, he turns down the audio and says it’s not worth it. “That was a K-9 car,” he says. “It was probably just going to do a sniff at a traffic stop.” This isn’t big enough news to warrant a chase. Unless … Something occurs to him and he flashes a smile. “Hey,” he says, “maybe it’s a Browns player.”

Stay Connected with the Scene: Read the Latest Issue

Meet the People of 2018’s Cleveland People Issue

Related

Scene Staff