The Hard Way on Purpose

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For John Puglia, who always ventured first
1964–2013

CONTENTS

PART 1: THE HEART OF THE HEART OF IT ALLl

The Chosen Ones

Stones

Popular Stories for Boys

Delta Lows

The Lake Effect

All Stars

Kareem's the One with the Glasses, Right?

PART 2: BE APPROXIMATELY YOURSELF

Looking for a Name

Working Hardor Hardly Working?

Cutting the Mustard

Houserockers

Trapped in a World That They Never Made

867-5309: A Love Song

PART 3: LOCAL MEN

The Taj Mahal

The Poet's Assistant

Apartment X

Anarchy Girls

PART 4: THE MIDDLE IS NEAR

Battleground

Demolition

Do Not Cry for Me, Arizona

Pretty Vacant

Unreal Estates

Ascent

Acknowledgments

About David Giffels

PART ONE

THE HEART OF THE HEART OF IT ALL

It's practical to hope.

—Studs Terkel

THE CHOSEN ONES

On the very afternoon I write these words, the second planet is about to pass directly in front of the sun, an event called the Transit of Venus, which, in silhouette, looks (though it cannot be viewed without appropriate eye protection) like a pea passing in front of a Hollywood searchlight, a minor epic of the cosmos that occurs just once every 105 years, which seems like a very long time until you remind yourself that this is Venus and the sun we're talking about. And also tonight, June 5, 2012, LeBron James will play an ostensibly meaningful basketball play-off game with the word
HEAT
lettered across his torso. And he will lose.

Whenever I try to unravel the Homeric epic of LeBron James (humble beginnings; burden of expectation; killer biceps; purpose-­driven departure; grand quest; home, home, home, home, home; daddy issues; failure of pride; etc.), I find myself invariably, involuntarily, incessantly tracing a line backward through personal chronology and geography (his and mine), and then conversely forward, toward the potential infinity of those same territories. And I'm still, every time, left wondering whether this is as important as I think it is, and then utterly convinced that it is.

LeBron James was born into an identity crisis. He came into the world on December 30, 1984, and not just
the
world, but
a
world, a very particular world, one that would make him irrevocably who he is, and one from which he will never be able to extract himself. He was born into Akron, Ohio, at exactly the moment the city was losing all sense of what it was about, all confidence, all antecedent. He was like Swee' Pea in the
Popeye
cartoons, crawling out of the womb, oblivious and innocent, onto an I-beam dangling from a wire, everything falling apart methodically and chaotically behind him.

Two years before his birth, the last-ever passenger tire was built in Akron by a man named Richard Mayo, who paused afterward to look into a newspaper camera, a sturdy man in a V-neck T-shirt, thirty years on the job, his gloved fist perched on his hip, the other against his forehead, hands unsure what to do with themselves. The furrowed brow, the narrowed eyes, the strain at the corners—this was a look shared by men across a vast and hard-to-harness region, one defined ultimately and elliptically by water, by the Great Lakes and the Wabash and Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, routes of entry and departure to and from cities where the certainty of old factories was sagging and imploding.

Until then, for as long as anyone in my city could remember, Akron had been known as “the rubber capital of the world.” Like most manufacturing cities in the industrial Midwest, this was plenty enough identity, and the reputation carried far enough and wide enough for the people here not ever to feel obscure or irrelevant, and this reputation rested on a civic infrastructure that provided solidity and security. Akron was the birthplace and the center of the world's tire industry, the most singular and therefore the most overtly significant supplier to Detroit's auto industry. Which, yes, represents a stature something akin to being the Ralph Malph of the American industrial belt, and also a civic identity that requires being inordinately passionate about radial tires. (In defense: the profoundly intertwined, ultimately tragic histories—personal and corporate—of the Ford and Firestone families would have sent Shakespeare positively apeshit.) Anyhow, what more did we need to know? All the major American tire company world headquarters were here. Much of the production. Virtually all the high-tech research and development. The headquarters of the international rubber workers' union.

Tire-building was the city's defining profession. Tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands had made a good living at it, generation after generation. And then, one afternoon in August 1982, suddenly and completely that was gone.

A few months before, a photography exhibit called
Factory Valleys
opened at the Akron Art Museum. It made the city uneasy. Three years prior, the museum had commissioned Lee Friedlander, one of the most significant photographers in America, to come to Akron and make pictures. Any subject of his choosing.
We must be important,
the city thought
. And lovely to see
. Friedlander set off and started shooting. Cracked, empty streetscapes. Forlorn factories. Bent fences. Skewed signs. Punch-clock workers in ragged routine. He went up to Cleveland and down to Canton and over to Pittsburgh and came back again and again, through the monochrome winter of 1979 and into 1980. A pattern revealed itself into a story, and it was a story of ourselves and one we didn't yet quite know, and that is the worst kind of story: the one about yourself that you ought to know but somebody else has to tell you. Friedlander finished his work, and when executives of the bank that had sponsored his commission saw the grimy, hardbitten black-and-white pictures, they said this was not what they'd expected. This is not what we look like. This is not how we ought to be seen. They paid him his money but never showed the pictures in their branches. While the museum exhibited its collection, the commissioned pieces went into storage, locked in the dark. The bankers never gave a reason, but who can ever put reason to identity?

Then that same summer, a new term popped up in the American lexicon: Rust Bowl. It derived from Dust Bowl, another time, another place, someone else's eyes, the grim matrons of Steinbeck and Dorothea Lange. Soon it was bent into Rust Belt, and then it stuck like a barb. The first known use of the term was in a politician's speech in 1982. Akron, because it was so closely tied to a single industry, one that was disappearing like an exhale in the quick of a Lake Erie winter, was feeling a sudden and profound loss of identity. The term Rust Belt was sucked hard into that void and there it would stay.

If you look at a socioeconomic map of the broad Rust Belt region, you find, unmistakably, Akron at the dead center, geographically and philosophically set squarely between the automotive and steel regions. The city was among the first to hit bottom.

As all this was taking hold, right in the middle of that city ­LeBron James pushed his first basketball up into the air.

*  *  *

I graduated high school that summer of 1982, the same high school James would attend, St. Vincent–St. Mary, home of the Fighting Irish. We had many of the same teachers, sang the same “high atop a hill in Akron” alma mater, idled in the same “learning resource center,” departed through the same glass doors every afternoon into a city we both love, but one best described as “unbeautiful.” In fact, James and I share a unique quirk in NBA history: both of us went directly from St. Vincent–St. Mary to the Cleveland Cavaliers. I was an entry-level ball boy. He was the first pick in the NBA draft. But still. We knew what that meant. We both grew up well aware that Cleveland bears the unfortunate distinction of having suffered longer than any other American sports city without a championship in any major league.

The last time it happened was the year I was born, 1964, when the Cleveland Browns won the NFL championship game, which is what it was called then—the NFL Championship Game—which is to say the term Super Bowl didn't even exist yet. A lifetime like this. That's what LeBron James and I and our people share. A lifetime, one might say, of loss, but we here recognize something much different, more nuanced, more full of shadows. A lifetime of hope.

And anyone who's done both—hoped and lost—knows that in many ways hoping is worse.

My professional basketball career was short and relatively uneventful. I served during the worst seasons in the history of the team, some of the worst times ever endured by any sports franchise, an epically bad spell of losing and bizarre management and shabby catering and forgotten players in a time when the NBA was not yet prime entertainment. Eventually, I was fired by Ted Stepien, who is generally considered the most profoundly inept team owner in the history of American professional sports. The highlight of my tenure was the day the Cavaliers' arena, the old Richfield Coliseum, played host to the NBA All-Star Game and I escorted Bob Hope from his courtside seat to the home locker room so he wouldn't have to use the public restroom, then stood guard while he did his Bob Hope business at the urinal. My grandmother was stone-cold starstruck when I told her of this.

My tenure was marked by long, mind-numbing nights of home-team loss after home-team loss—twenty-four games straight, which stood as the longest losing streak in NBA history until 2011, when it was surpassed by . . . wait for it . . . the Cleveland Cavaliers. Inside that hollow concrete arena, I came to recognize the peculiar nature of loyalty, the way a small core of people kept re-upping their season ticket packages for a team that you couldn't give away tickets for. (And I mean this literally. Part of my ball-boy compensation was two complimentary passes to every game, and most nights those sat in the box office, unclaimed.) I came to recognize true loyalty in the likes of Joe Tait, the meat-and-­potatoes Cavaliers radio announcer, who, despite Stepien's attempt to unseat him, returned after Stepien flamed out, and then Tait remained in the announcer's chair until retiring in 2011. And in Rick Hofacker, the de facto manager of the ball boys who got me my job and went on to become a foot doctor specifically so he could in some way continue to serve the team he loved, which he has done now for many years, basketball feet being rather like NASCAR tires. And in Andy Bell, the team's equipment manager, whom I would spot off at the fringes of TV shots for years after my employment ended, still doing his job, much of which involved rich men's laundry. I saw a sometimes inexplicable but undeniably charming core of support for something that wasn't easy to support or even understand, and I came to regard it not as charity or mere fandom but something more complex: a symbiotic relationship of need.

The Cleveland Cavaliers of my adolescence needed to be loved. And the people of my place and time needed something to love. The seeds of this understanding were sown as I sat on my bony, polyester-warm-up-clad teenage ass on the hard wooden floor watching the nonsense of sport yearning for relevance, World B. Free gunning rainbows from the corner.

Give us something to root for. We'll take anything.

As I grew into early adulthood and observed a larger pattern of hope and loss and hope and loss and hope and loss, and the concurrent resilience thereof, I came to a begrudging conclusion: neither of these things—hope and loss—can exist without the other, and yet at every turn it is necessary to believe that at some point one will ultimately conquer. And that will be our legacy.

*  *  *

Half a generation after I graduated from that drab, ungarnished school building near the decaying central industrial core, James entered as a freshman and began one of the most star-crossed careers in the history of American sports. As a youth-league player, he had found the group of people he knew he belonged with, a tight collective of schoolyard friends who called themselves the Fab Five and who made a vow to keep their team together into high school. By his junior year, James was on the cover of
Sports Illustrated
, under the audacious title “The Chosen One.” After that, everything got weird, in a specifically parochial way. James, a local teenager, was also an international superstar, the most promising athlete in the world. He represented a bizarre divide between the hyperreal details of my own place—living two miles from my house, walking the same hallways I had, eating carhop hamburgers at Swensons Drive In, befriending my best friend's son—and the notion of external identity that had vexed and eluded my hometown since I'd first begun to explore it. We in Akron began measuring James's personal reputation against our civic reputation, and hungering for the ways those two notions were aligned.

Who was he? Who were we? Were we him? Was he us?

Could this be what we've been longing for lo these many years?

In 2002, James, then a junior, was named
Parade
magazine's high school basketball Player of the Year. I was working as a columnist at the local newspaper, the
Akron Beacon Journal.
Because the paper carried
Parade
on Sundays, the magazine arranged for us to host a small awards ceremony in a meeting room just down the hall from the newsroom. A number of us made our way to the gathering that afternoon, drawn by the curiosity of this growing phenomenon whose story had become part of our daily working lives.

I sat in the back, watching. James had requested that his teammates join him, and so this group of young men in sweatpants and letter jackets all growing into themselves—one the size of a fifth grader; another who would soon sign as an Ohio State defensive lineman—sat at his flank with the awkward politeness endemic to Catholic schoolboys.

James was young, still slender, uncomfortable speaking in front of the small gathering, but he did his best and thanked his teammates and coaches, and everything he said seemed careful and true, in the give-110-percent-it's-all-about-the-team sort of way. He has always seemed earnest in such settings (a certain hour-long ESPN special notwithstanding). He has improved at public speaking, certainly, but even then there was an inscrutable purity about him—can one be confidently humble?—which has always been central to his demeanor. That afternoon, he seemed like a young man being fitted for a tuxedo, trying on a shell that didn't seem natural yet, but one—like this national award—that he was willing to grow into.

LeBron James had become a wrinkle in our journalistic routine. Almost daily, one of us had to answer the phone call, or the e-mail, or the chance query in the grocery store—why do you give so much attention to a high school athlete when there are real problems in the world?

The growing reality, however, was that maybe he was the solution to one of those problems, the answer to the very real, legitimately grave question of postindustrial American cities. Who are we? What are we?