The Hard Way on Purpose (15 page)

I had never been in a bar fight and I definitely did not want to start this way, with a drunk, old man, but John's face was deeply flushed and alarm was in his eyes, his head twisted sideways, hair askew. Bob appeared to be applying as much force as he could, and John arched his back and twisted his shoulders, trying to break free. Jerry had taken a seat at the bar and seemed not to recognize what was happening, and I was wishing I could do the same.

What was the protocol here? Can you punch someone old enough to be your grandfather? Can you bark out a command to him? Is he the responsibility of his friend? Do you ask the bartender for advice?

John, I think, had been working through the same moral dilemma, albeit to a more urgent degree. He was younger and stronger, but it took what seemed an eternity—in reality, maybe half a minute—for physical instinct to take over. Finally, his face now deep red, he grabbed Bob's forearm with both hands and pried the choke hold loose, yanking his head free and holding Bob at arm's length while he ran the fingers of his other hand against his neck.

“
Je
-sus,” he said, half-trying to laugh but mostly incredulous.

“That's how you play snooker,” Bob said, his diction all raw and broken free of its aristocratic restraint. “My boy.”

John and I quickly downed our drinks and left.

*  *  *

John S. Knight's newspaper the
Akron Beacon Journal
was housed in a stately art deco building, solid and imposing. It had that steadying effect that good institutions have. But most people didn't acknowledge the building for its lower architecture. They knew it for the giant, gaudy, rotating digital clock mounted on its top, one of the most prominent features of the downtown landscape.

The building dated to 1930, and the clock was added in the 1960s. This gangly, rotating rectangular spire, twenty-six feet tall, was turquoise, with the time and temperature flashing on two opposing panels and the huge, illuminated red plastic initials of the newspaper on the other two panels. So the local newspaper's defining symbol was a giant shaft thrusting into the sky, advertising
BJ
all night in bright red lights.

John and I called this “our” clock. This is how downtown was then. It was all personal. Your timepiece was a gleaming tower five stories above the street. You owned empty hotels and banks and canals and city streets. They were exclusively ours because they had lost their exclusivity. In many ways, within the central city, we felt like the luckiest generation ever to have lived here. Everything was left to us and was ours to reinvent. When we left the Met Lounge, the BJ clock told us it was still early. We would have enough time to go over to the factory.

*  *  *

Downtown's main street, which with very industrial and Midwestern purpose was called Main Street, covered exactly one mile through the business district, which was by then characterized by grimy windows blanked out by yellowing newspapers, taped there by forlorn landlords. Storefronts were littered with the remnants of the last claims whose stakes had been removed. A mannequin's arm. A lady's hat. Discontinued greeting cards. The city, desperate to attract tenants, had attempted an incentive campaign with a Monopoly theme, so now these windows also included faded, water-stained posters mimicking a game board, with a monocled cartoon aristocrat imploring anyone who might pass by to pick up property cheap. Land on Main Street. Collect $200.

This stretch of the central city made an Oz-like transition into the vast, sprawling, mostly abandoned campus of the B. F. Goodrich company, a science-fiction backlot, and that's where John and I were headed, lit by the glow of our clock and the random greasy-yellow lights of cockeyed upstairs windows.

Goodrich was the first tire company in Akron, the one that had set into motion the uncanny growth of the industry and the city, from a canal town that produced clay products—sewer pipes and marbles and teacups and glazed figurines—to a place that was entirely defined by things made of rubber. Akron became known as the Rubber City and had a Wonka-like fantasy to it all, as latex was poured into great vats, mixed with powdered carbon black, and came out as tires and belts and hoses and shoe soles and rafts and balloons and baby dolls and blimps. In the heyday, a street in Akron was paved with rubber, and people here, growing more confident in their own possibility, believed this would further prove the absolute worthiness of the city and its product:

Soon every town in America would pave its roads with rubber!

Unfortunately, the experiment fizzled. When the rubber road was examined after a decade of use, engineers determined that the surface fared about as well as regular asphalt, which cost three times less than the rubber paving material.

Akron, meanwhile, became defined by dense neighborhoods extending from the factories, populated by people who branded themselves variously as “Goodyear families” or “Firestone families” or “Goodrich families” or “Mohawk families,” and so on.

But nowhere was the cityscape more fantastical than in the acres and acres of the Goodrich complex. As the company grew, Goodrich developed a renaissance flair, taking on contracts that expanded its personality by tangents and exponents. The company would get a contract to make shoes and would build a little brick factory on the grounds specifically for shoes. There was a facility for rubber bands, another for golf balls, one for automotive hoses, and so on. In the 1960s, Goodrich landed a government contract to make space suits and hired local seamstresses to sew the space-age fabric into uniforms for Project Mercury astronauts, turning them into otherworldly Rosie the Riveters. In Akron, they made the suit John Glenn was wearing when he became the first American to orbit the earth. So the campus grew into a dense, haphazard maze of forty-five brick buildings in all sizes and shapes, from the hulking, six-story tire factory at its leading edge to single-room shops tucked here and there, to an ornate headquarters with a fanciful clock set into a bridge between two office towers. The industrial village was intercut with streets and alleys, crisscrossed with pedestrian bridges and walkways, and—maybe, or so John and I had heard—connected underground by a complex network of mysterious tunnels.

Now it was dark and empty. The headquarters had moved out toward the suburbs, and only a fraction of the local workforce remained—about fourteen hundred people, most of whom would be laid off within the next couple of years. Goodrich had begun something it called Operation Greengrass—a plan to raze the entire complex and plant grass seed. Soon it would be gone.

We slipped around a brick corner into the black shadows and found a barrel to boost us up to a ladder and then we began to climb. It didn't take long to find an opening to one of the main factory buildings. We each swung our legs over a sill and stepped down onto a concrete floor, glass and debris crunching under our feet. There was a complex sound of fluttering and scurrying, and the dripping of sourceless water.

It was less dark inside than I'd expected with the accumulated light of all those windows, half of them broken, the other half grimy, a kind of dingy glow, mostly from the moon.

“Jesus,” John said. “It's big.”

We'd both poked around down here, a lot, but I had never been inside one of the main buildings, and even in the dark its solidity and scale was impressive. Despite the decay, the overwhelming sense was of how well built this place was, of its enduring, defining quality.

No machines were left. Akron was filled with men haunted by a particular lament, a story told again and again: the same hands that had worked a machine for years had had to unbolt that machine, dismantle it, and crate it up to be shipped overseas where a cheaper worker would use it. These men were desperate to remake their lives. Through the 1980s, they scraped for any kind of work. Many had simply disappeared, gone South or West or just plain down into their basements. They were telling their children to get out as soon as they were able.

But much of what John and I loved about Akron was the very argument those fathers were making: the abandoned landscape, the hard challenge, the long odds. We saw the same things but in a very different way, with an absolute belief that something was to be saved here, that lives were to be made, that we could remake all this as our own.

This was the central question of our place, of all places like this, of the entire industrial Midwest, the Rust Belt, a question teetering on this very moment:

Is it something beyond salvation, or something to be saved? And what exactly is “it”?

Not long before, a columnist from the
Beacon Journal
had gone down Main Street, counting empty storefronts. In that stretch of a mile, he found fifty-two of them, businesses that had gone under. John and I calculated that as fifty-two places we could get cheap. We would start a magazine, make documentaries, build a sculpture garden.

It was all possibility.

Concrete pillars, fluted at each end, stretched from floor to ceiling, covered with graffiti: jagged letters and swirls of paint and tagger signatures layered one over the next. It was hard to make out the details, but some of it was elaborate. Murals covered some of the walls.

John followed the lure of one of these paintings, walking into the shadows for a closer look. It was creepy enough in there that I wanted to stay close and I moved to catch up with him. And that's when I saw it, all at once, opening in the dark like a phantom.

“John!” I screamed. “Stop!”

He froze and turned back to look at me. “What?”

“Stop!”

“What?”

“Look in front of you.”

There, one step ahead: an open elevator shaft.

*  *  *

We continued, much more carefully, making our way up stairwells, lost in the exploration. In the dark, we found hints of people's lives. A glove, a stack of work orders. Someone had written a message on a door:

ALL GONE

NO WORK

We found a staircase and made our way up, one turn, then the next and the next until we found a door that opened to the roof and then there we were, high up in the air, stepping out to the sky. We strode across the rubber roof as though it were a small frontier and leaned our elbows atop the parapet to see the glittering lights of the city that had all grown from here, this very spot. More than a hundred years before, the entire identity, the entire future, the entire legacy, of our city had begun on this very corner, when Benjamin Franklin Goodrich, an entrepreneurial New Yorker, had chosen Akron over all his other options.

We looked out into the night. The air was cool. The lights stretched farther than I expected. Forever, in every direction.

THE POET'S ASSISTANT

I suppose when you finish an English degree and turn to the local newspaper help-wanted ads looking for literary work, you deserve what you get. The classifieds had two listings under “Writing.” One was for a professional résumé service that was called, conveniently, A Professional Résumé Service, the
A
appended to the company name in the manner of exterminators and locksmiths vying for top billing in the yellow pages. The other was for a poet in need of an assistant. Where I come from, that sort of job opportunity does not often appear in the classifieds. This was like finding a listing for “sorcerer's apprentice” or “journeyman self-pleasurer.” I called.

The woman on the phone had a name that sounded like a pen name, curly and alliterative, delivered with an accent that was exotic and full of tongue, evoking desert sand and mosques and figs. She lived in a condominium development that I knew was filled with rich people, and she asked me to come by in the evening. I drove there in my secondhand 1980 Chevrolet Citation, a car that had aged so profoundly it looked as though it had wasting disease. It was not even eight years old, but had already been through a clutch, two starters, and a chronic series of brake problems. Discolored blotches had developed in the blue paint of the hood. I'd repaired the broken plastic turn-signal/headlight assembly with sheet-metal screws and Super Glue so it looked like Frankenstein's bad eye. The windshield leaked badly, and the rainwater that settled under the driver's seat had caused the floor and seat brackets to rust out. I repaired it with scrap lumber, so my car was slowly beginning to resemble a hay wagon. If you own a crap car long enough, eventually the entire thing becomes homemade.

I arrived at the address and parked the Citation (a car that I'd come to realize was named for a traffic ticket) at the curb, hoping it would look less unflattering from a distance in the dusk. I had brought a copy of my résumé, which I'd padded enough to fill two-thirds of a page, including my ball-boy experience, but mostly listing surveying and landscaping and construction jobs and a stint on a loading dock—jobs I'd loved because they were the sorts of jobs that felt authentic, but at the same time looked entirely unsatisfying on a printed page. I also included the titles of a couple of short stories published in the university's literary journal and a short essay I'd entered in the local newspaper's holiday writing contest, which was awarded the same “honorable mention” shared by all the other also-rans. Pretty much, then, I had nothing.

I touched the glowing button next to the front door and heard chimes echo from the other side. She opened the door, a late-­middle-aged woman, well fed, black hair streaked with gray, dressed in a shapeless, layered, silky, multicolored robelike dress that covered her like a set of draperies. She stood there a moment without saying anything, nodded her head, and said, “You look great.”

First of all, women never told me I looked “great.” The best I ever got was “cute.” Mostly I got “nonthreatening.” What I looked was perpetually ten years younger than my real age. I'd put on a pair of khakis that felt entirely like someone else's pants, which they were because I'd borrowed them from my brother, and I'd buttoned the top button at the collar of my white, thrift-store dress shirt because that look seemed to work for Peter Gabriel and David Byrne, both of whom were gainfully employed. My hair, which I preferred to rub around in a circle until it turned into sort of a bird's nest, was matted down and touched with gel. I wore big, black-framed glasses that had, on the loading dock, earned me the nickname Elvis Costello, which is not a good nickname to have on a loading dock, and a pair of loafers that looked as if I'd pulled them off a sleeping drunk. Men are almost always willing to believe a woman who pays them a physical compliment and in fact will use it as a launching pad for an exaggeration of what was actually said, but standing there at the doorstep of a mysterious poet who was advertised to be in need of an assistant, I could not avoid the obvious. I did not look great and this woman had a reason other than objectivity for saying I did.

She invited me in. The condominium was lushly decorated, all with the same accent of her diction, something deep and balmy and herby whose origin eluded me entirely, mostly because I'd never been anywhere more exotic than the Canadian side of Niagara Falls.

We entered the living room and she gestured for me to sit. The chair was deep and plush and I felt as if I wouldn't be able to spring from it quickly if I had to, which (for some reason was something) I was thinking might happen soon.

“Would you like a glass of wine?” she said, already pouring.

“No, thank you,” I said, as she turned and handed it toward me.

I accepted it and set it on the table beside me. She sat on a couch across from me, crossing her legs at an angle, draping an arm across the couch's back.

“So,” she said, nodding, and narrowing her eyes, examining me for a long moment before continuing, “Have you heard of me?”

I wasn't sure how to answer, wasn't sure why I would have heard of her, and I didn't like the question because I was sure that no was the wrong answer, but if I lied and said yes, I'd never get away with it, so I responded as carefully as I could.

“No, I'm sorry, I don't think I have.”

She told me that she was under contract with a Large Commercial Publisher and that her books were doing very well and that she'd been written about in the local newspaper, although the newspaper she mentioned was not the
Beacon Journal
but rather a small weekly shopper that mostly carried verbatim press releases and photographs of ribbon cuttings and handshake ceremonies of the presentation of oversize checks. I knew enough about poetry to know that books filled with it were published mostly by small presses run by other poets, whom I imagined as middle-aged idealists with strawlike hair and overtaxed oxfords, who grew their own produce and believed deeply in Ralph Nader. These books weren't even called books. They were called chapbooks, which made them sound homespun, like something hand-lettered by lamplight at the Ingalls family table, protected by a sheet of horn. They were not generally released by large commercial publishers, and not generally referred to as “doing well.” But I could have been wrong about this and was in no position to challenge.

“First,” she said, “would you read for me?”

I didn't understand this question either, but before I had a chance to try, she reached over to the table beside the sofa and produced a copy of the university's literary magazine, the sight of which made me blush hotly and tighten at the sphincter and wonder how in the hell she knew about this.

I had three poems in that issue. That was bad enough. Worse was that their publication was laden with complications of ethics and legitimacy. While serving on the journal's editorial committee, I had written these poems more or less spontaneously one afternoon in the library when I was supposed to be studying. I thought the poems weren't bad, but I wasn't sure because my problem with poetry had always been an inability to distinguish the bad from the good. I loved William Carlos Williams's poem, “This Is Just to Say,” which sounded like a note to his family about being sorry for eating the plums that were in the icebox but they were delicious. But then someone told me it actually
was
a note to his family about being sorry for eating delicious plums. So what until then was one of my favorite poems I now believed wasn't really a poem. Mostly I consumed poetry the way I consumed wine: I liked it all well enough and gladly partook whenever the opportunity arose, but I couldn't tell the high-end stuff from the low-end stuff, and the quantifiers of quality (metrical complexity, pathos, typicity, appellation) left me nodding my head as though I understood.

Because I couldn't properly serve on a committee that would be judging my own work, I had submitted these poems under a pseudonym, then sat nervously as the stacks of photocopied student literature were distributed among the three editors. Soon, my two colleagues, who didn't appear to have any better grasp of poetry than I did, were dispensing the sort of praise on my verse that student editors serve up like cafeteria scoops of mashed potatoes (“I really like the imagery”; “There's a relatableness there”; etc.). My ego couldn't stand the idea of not receiving these compliments directly, so I sheepishly admitted the poems were mine.

The woman reached across the void between us, handing the magazine, which she'd already folded open, to me. I accepted it like a subpoena. She half-reclined, leaning her head back, letting her eyelids relax.

“Read the first one,” she said.

I had avoided looking at these words on the page ever since they had found their way there by way of the conference room where three of us somehow decided they should be in the issue but only under my real name and at the expense of my resignation from the editorial board. (Poetry is complicated, but not always in the way you think.) I had never been comfortable reading aloud to begin with, much less reading my own writing, and certainly not reading writing that included ingredients of controversy and shame.

She waited. I realized I had no choice. I began:

Hey, Snakeleg.

Why not we sublimate

The deaf girls

And teach them to dance . . .

I could feel the air draining from my voice. After a long spell of trying, I suddenly was unable to fool myself about these poems. They were really, really bad. And bad poetry is something much worse than bad hair or bad shoes or even a bad stomach. Allowing the world to see your bad poetry is a deliberate act, and all its negative consequences are deserved. Because nobody asked to see it in the first place.

We oughta

Reel in some herringbone

And watchfob his kneecaps

With brickbats and a tommydog . . .

I wanted her to tell me to stop. It would have been worth the humiliation for her to just say this is horrible and I can't listen to another word, just so I could stop hearing it myself. But she just sat there, bobbing her head.

What the hell is a tommydog?
I wondered silently.
And how do you “watchfob a kneecap”?

I finished the last line. She took a sip of her wine, reached across to the same table, and produced a hardcover book. Without introduction, she opened and began reading. I assumed this was one of her own poems and soon made out her name on the cover and listened, trying to determine if it was any good, but I'd lost any power of discernment. She finished and set the book aside.

“Well,” she said, “now we know something about one another.”

Not really
, I thought.
Pretty much the opposite
.

She began to tell me about her family and walked me through the condo, showing me around. I was waiting for her to begin to interview me, or to tell me about the job, or even just to mention it, but the longer this went on, the more I began to doubt a job existed. She showed me a framed picture of her son, who looked to be about my age, a black-haired man in green military fatigues. He was pointing an automatic rifle at the camera.

“Very . . . nice?” I said.

I was ready to leave.

“So,” she finally said, “do you want to come work for me?”

“And do what?”

“Editing and filing. Help with the mailing.”

I was no poet, but I couldn't figure out any possible way this sort of work would require hiring an assistant.

“How many hours a week?”

“Oh, we'll figure that out as we go along.”

“And can I ask what it pays?”

She offered less than I'd made in my last job, as a construction grunt. I said I didn't think I could get by on that. She said she thought I'd change my mind once I had a chance to think it over. I eased my way toward an exit and left a quiet, uneasy exhale as I returned down the front walk to my car. I could feel her watching me. I settled into the front seat, the wood frame creaking beneath me, and felt the same tightness return to my throat that I'd felt when she asked me to read.

The next day I called A Professional Résumé Service. I got the job and spent the next few months writing prefab cover letters for people as desperate as I was.