The Hard Way on Purpose (5 page)

The work is painstaking and tedious and raises the question why, which he answers in a brief, matter-of-fact introduction: “If this data had been readily available years ago, it might have prevented several poorly glued joints, burned drills, broken screws, and sloppy shellac jobs.”

After my grandmother died and he had to start cooking for himself, he took a shine to prefab, frozen supermarket dinners. But they were too big for one serving, so he took them to the basement, fired up that homemade saw, and sliced the frozen slabs in half.

*  *  *

By the time my dad returned home, grinning and caked in white, we'd flung layer after layer of snow onto the continuous mound that wrapped the edge of the driveway, growing and growing. He came right into step with us and we continued to try to scrape away what the night had left behind. The wind had calmed some and the snowfall abated, but not enough to settle the nerves. Nothing was moving, anywhere. Not a single car had passed our house all day, and the sounds of digging and scraping were distant, disconnected. The idea that all of this could have happened so unexpectedly, so quickly, so violently, and so completely disturbed us all, even my dad, I think, though he seemed invigorated by the challenge to set it right. Men like him are at their best when something needs unexpectedly to be fixed.

We worked until the driveway was clear, ready for whatever might come next, then Ralph and I, and our sister and our younger brother, began to dig again. We hollowed out a cave in a Volkswagen-size snow mound, scooping and shaping deeper and deeper, until we four could sit upright inside. Then we carved out another, then began a tunnel between them and then another, until we had a network like the tubes in a gerbil cage. The light inside was strange, an optical paradox: muted and radiant, opaque and incandescent, and the sound had a similar quality, compressed and private and complete. Even the temperature was ambiguous. The packed snow warmed like insulation, until the cold crept into the bones and refused to leave.

Later, when night had fallen, I went back out and crawled inside and lay there in the dark, in the snow cave. It smelled like mute earth. I felt as if I could stay there forever, in the peaceful silence that only cold can produce. I closed my eyes and allowed myself to be carried off.

*  *  *

We took turns on the sleds, sometimes riding double, sometimes the four of us piled one on top of the other in defiance of physical laws, teetering, elbows digging into backs, gathering just enough momentum for the cartoon spill. We rode on a golf course near our home, down a glorious hillside hooded with oaks and maples, deep into a valley with steep sides and one slope gentle enough to climb back up for another plunge. We rode this way into the afternoon, into the late shade of a complicated winter sky. The northern Ohio sky is perpetually overcast in wintertime, but the acclimated natives could pass a blind-test between the early dusk and the sunless midafternoon, just as a Las Vegas lounge lizard inside a casino can sense the difference between 3:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m. This was different, though. The sky had darkened in a way we'd never before seen, as if its humors were out of balance, blackening it with blood or bile.

Three days in, and the blizzard had only worsened. We were lucky; we had power and heat. Even so, we were isolated. Schools were closed, with no clue to when they might reopen. Most people couldn't go anywhere. Many were stranded wherever they had been when the storm hit. Those who did go out often had to turn back. It was hard to understand anymore whether this was an adventure.

Nature will always provide the best metaphors, and here amid the chaos, with the barometer lower than it had ever before been, was a strange coherence. Two weeks before this historic storm, Goodyear announced it was closing its main Akron factory. Nearly fourteen hundred people would be put out of work. A month later, Firestone would announce it was closing its big Akron plant, eliminating twelve hundred jobs. That year, 1978, four thousand people would lose their jobs in a city defined more than anything else by its work.

But as children, we didn't understand all that any more than we understood the barometer. What we understood was the velocity of steel and plastic on ass-groomed ice, caterwauling down the hills, cutting hard into turns and skidding, sideways stops, imagining ourselves at Innsbruck: Dorothy Hamill; Franz Klammer; Rosi Mittermaier. We'd brought along a pair of skis and tried those too, but the sleds were the thing, the flat-bottomed ones shooting us down the hills.

Our fingers and toes were deadened and impliable, such that the walk home was filled with complaining and the calculation of how bad these digits would burn when we filled the tub with hot water for the thaw. We played a game of frostbite one-­upmanship, insisting nerve damage or blackened skin or amputation was imminent. As we pulled our sleds across the white fairways and greens, the sky began to take on an eerie darkness and suddenly more snow came, not floating, but crashing down, handfuls thrown by the lesser angels and saints, the simmering ones, disgruntled seraphim of the back-office operation whose task it was to remind us that ours is, every so often, a petulant God. And that's when I heard, for the first time in my experience of Ohio snowstorms, thunder.

We stumbled toward home in ragged formation, trudging faster through the snow. If you have never experienced an electrical blizzard, it is flat-out unnerving. The difference between thunder in a rainstorm and thunder in a snowstorm is the difference between Jimi Hendrix and Black Sabbath. It is bowling balls hurled toward hell.

We all started to run, pretending not to panic, until we made it home.

*  *  *

Days. Days. Somewhere out there the trucker melted more snow, drawing oxygen through that tube. A meteorologist was stuck at the airport, unable to get home—the weatherman himself stranded by the weather. He was taping extra pages onto his chart, the valley of the barometer so low it went to the bottom of the paper scroll and beyond. Somewhere, people were dying and had died.

Faith and belief are not the same thing, and anyone who has lain inside a snow cave at night in the dark of the American Midwest knows this. Faith is the promise of what might be. It is the blood brother of hope. Belief is pragmatism in isolation; it is what exists even if the world doesn't know you're there and never will. That's something more like the place I knew.

*  *  *

Our igloos lasted till Easter, the packed crust holding its form and the burrows inside abandoned. Eventually, their roofs collapsed or melted through. Rain got to them. Mud and black twigs pushed up from underneath. We kicked at them, resentful of the lost thrill. And then that day came, the day no one around here ever really believes will arrive, a day drunk, stumbling home from late winter, glasses cracked, salt-stained boots kicking the cans of hard times down the storm sewer. Sun and warmth, riding like a white-hatted parasite on the spiny back of a cold breeze, euthanizing the briny, primordial ice clenched to the curb until it bleeds its last.

For one day in Ohio, we get something whispering low in our ear, something hard to appreciate unless you've been through the Delta lows and Alberta clippers. The sun comes with an offer, one we are never sure we deserve. We have waited, we have waited, we have waited, and finally it comes and we have no choice but to accept this, our fate: the discomfort of grace.

THE LAKE EFFECT

Have you ever seen Lake Erie in the winter? It's the strangest thing. It freezes, as water will do in places this cold, but it doesn't freeze flat and calm, like Norwegian fjords or Frostian ponds. It freezes in gnarls of turmoil, as if someone said, “Hey, Great Lake, if you keep twisting your face like that it'll freeze that wa—”

And then it does.

The water gets all heavy and slushy but continues to churn, defiant, dauntless, pissed off, slower and slower, and then, just like that, it loses the fight, froth and waves and swells caught midmotion. I once stood on a wind-whipped Cleveland beach and saw a plastic diaper sticking up from the crust of ice at the edge and wished that the water had been able to churn one final time to save us both—the lake and me—from the unpleasantness. It was ugly as hell and it made me smile.

*  *  *

The winter of my sixteenth year, my dad got tickets to a football play-off game in Cleveland, the Browns against the Oakland Raiders. He and my two brothers and I rode up in one of his company's beat-up surveying vans, all of us bundled against the cold. My dad always bought vehicles with a profound antithesis of style: three-on-the-tree, pie-pan hubcapped, olive-drab tin boxes with a blank plate where the AM radio belonged. Hard vinyl bench seats. No carpet. No ceiling padding. Even with the heat on full blast, the inside of the van felt like a meat locker. The interior was caked with dried mud and smelled strongly of last summer's mosquito repellent, cut with the sweet lumbery pine of the wooden property stakes that clattered around in the rear. My older brother, Ralph, had tied his orange plastic, kid-size Browns helmet to the top of the van with clothesline. Slapped together on the cheap, we looked like everyone else driving into Cleveland that day.

There was never any color in the thirty miles of sky between Akron and Cleveland. It was a masterpiece of monochrome. Until you hit the city limits. There, the celestial flatness was spiked by a huge steel-factory smokestack with giant, fantastical flames roaring out its top. It looked exactly like hell and smelled worse. That's how we knew we were in Cleveland.

The temperature that day was four degrees; the windchill was thirty-six below. At the time, it was the second-coldest NFL play-off game ever played, which is uncannily correct. When you live in a place like this, you come to understand that we are never first. In anything. Not even misery. The second-most-frigid game in history? Yes. Exactly.

We parked as close as we could get to the stadium, which stood like some outpost of the Great Depression at the edge of Lake Erie's polluted, gunmetal waters. My dad had a spare pair of galoshes in the back of the truck, surveyor's boots. Before we locked up and started our walk to the stadium, he told me to put them on, but I refused. They didn't look cool. I was wearing my black, high-top Chuck Taylors, and there was no way I'd be seen in front of eighty thousand people sporting those hideous boots.

I'd never been to a Browns game before. I had no idea that the entire crowd would be dressed like some hybrid of a Dickens backstreet throng and a postapocalyptic hunting party. Here, camouflage was the mark of a Sunday dandy. These fans, three abreast on the sidewalk, shuffling toward Cleveland Municipal Stadium, were a cattle call of dull parkas topped with bulbous, oversize jerseys; fatsos in earflaps; drunks with double-layered blankets wrapped crooked around their torsos. Meaty men layered in flannel with two-week beards and stretched-out stocking caps. Women in mismatched gloves and padded hunting pants. They looked like a rogue regiment of Michelin Men. We joined them in the long, slow walk up East Ninth Street toward the colorless, hulking stadium, its countless tons of dumped concrete tracked with wooden seats.

I, still clinging to the potential street credibility of my footwear, was a decided outsider. I was casually interested in the Browns, in football, in sports. But as family dynamics go, I was a rank amateur. While I was reading Sherlock Holmes stories, my brother Ralph was memorizing the Browns media guide. His favorite pastime was being quizzed on arcane roster details:

Brian Sipe?

Quarterback! Number seventeen! San Diego State!

Major?

Architecture!

Dave Logan?

Receiver! Number eighty-five! University of Colorado!

Hometown?

Fargo! North Dakota!

And so on.

Not until we approached the stadium gates did I begin to feel something of the upsweep. And then there it was, as sudden and profound as the olfactory poignancy of a hog pen: the spirit of thousands, roughing out their ardor. The city smelled of barrel fires and roasted hot dogs and cold wool: the aluminum tang of a Cleveland January. But the sound is what defined the day, spontaneous group cheers delivered in bellowing choruses:

Here we go, Brownies, here we go! Whoo! Whoo!

We made our way through the gate and entered the immense, creaky, old concourse, pigeons roosting in the rafters above, paint cracked and peeling from the supports, piss trickling from the restroom troughs. The sound here intensified, like a freight train in a tunnel.

Let's go, Browns!

Let's go, Browns!

Let's go, Browns!

They cared, but even with something as overt as football, it wasn't entirely clear what they cared about. It seemed to be more than just the outcome of the game. We climbed the cement stairs to the bleachers, entering a vast, roaring stadium, ungodly cold. There was a rancid spice of hot chocolate and cigar smoke. From our seats behind the goalpost, I could see mounds of snow plowed along the sidelines, where the players, all with long sleeves under their jerseys, danced in place, blowing thick steam into their hands, waiting for the game to start. They seemed to move in slow motion. The playing surface looked different from how it did on television, and my dad explained to me that it was mostly dirt, but the groundskeepers painted it green to look better on camera.

Three men behind us were passing a thermos back and forth, and when the game began and the Raiders quarterback, Jim Plunkett, took the field, one of them started hooting out, “Ya fuckin' Indian!”

The reference was loose at best. Plunkett's parents were Mexican American. But that mattered little. As the game went on, “fuckin' Indian” rolled from the trio of thermos drinkers behind us nearly as often as the deafening, hair-raising roar of
“DEE-FENSE”
overtook the stadium. If I was looking for a sound to define my day, that chant was the answer. It would begin small, somewhere indistinct, like a random match dropped in a dry forest, a single voice:
“Dee-fense.”
A section of the stadium would call back in response,
“DEE-fense!”
Then half the stadium, and by the fourth or fifth round, the syllables would thunder—
“DEE! FENSE!”—
from deep in the guts of every one of the eighty thousand of us, a bellow of shared passion for stopping someone who was trying to push us around.

We could do it with our voices. We could stop the Raiders. We were vital. All we had to do was make ourselves known, to roar back into the mouth of Lake Erie.

*  *  *

The cold was brutal. I couldn't understand how the players were able to catch a hard football or run into one another. Everything I touched felt as if it would shatter. My eyeballs were made of candy glass. My lips were hardened Silly Putty. Packed tight between my brothers, I kept dropping to my seat to rub my hands together between my knees. By the end of the first quarter, I couldn't feel my toes and was nearly in tears as I bounced on the soles of my thin, woeful sneakers, desperate for warmth.

“I told you, you should have put on those boots,” my dad said.

I refused to admit my pride.

Down on the field, the players seemed to be playing against the weather even more than themselves. Brian Sipe, the Browns quarterback, the SoCal native, looked desperate, with a turtleneck underneath his jersey, hands crammed into pockets sewn to the front. He looked as cold as I felt. When he dropped back to pass and tried to set his feet, he would slide on the icy brown-green surface. Offense was nearly nonexistent. Running plays looked like the ones my brother and I concocted on the vibrating metal sheet of our Coleco Electronic Football game, stiff-armed footballers pushing chaotically against one another without advancing. The two teams traded punts and interceptions, neither ever really moving the ball.

Halfway through the second quarter, I couldn't take the cold anymore and my dad sent me down to walk around in the concourse, where he thought it might be a little warmer. He didn't want me to go alone, but there was no way he was missing this. So my eleven-year-old brother, Louis, and I tramped down the stairs to the filthy promenade. It smelled like beer and piss and the flaccid perfume of boiled frankfurters. As we made our way through the interior, the sound of the slightly distant crowd was almost haunting:

“DEE-FENSE . . . DEE-FENSE . . . DEE-FENSE . . .”

But then, all at once, it changed. The sound rose above its already-impossible volume, a cacophonous roar. Something was happening . . . something big . . . something from which we had been omitted.

Louis looked at me.

“Shit,” he said, a word he'd just learned from the thermos drinkers.

He knew I'd made him miss something, and even then his freckled baby face seemed to reveal a bitter wisdom, that this was something he would regret in something like a historic way. We raced back to our section, catching the scoreboard on the way.

Browns: 6

Raiders: 0

“You missed it!” Ralph screamed, wild-eyed, holding his hands against the sides of his stocking cap. “Bolton intercepted! He ran it back for a touchdown!”

The three men behind us were a tangle of arms and blankets and slaps and head bumps.

“Take that, ya fuckin' Indian!”

The Browns lined up to kick the extra point. As Don Cockroft gingerly made his approach on the frozen mud, a Raiders player blasted through the line and blocked the kick.

The game continued on this way, a constant struggle for footing, for position, for inches of advantage. Failure. Failure. Failure. All afternoon, the wind kept ripping in from Lake Erie. The old concrete of Municipal Stadium felt like glacial ice and it just hurt, all of it: the cold, the frustration, the brutal brotherhood of violence.

By the fourth quarter, the thermos drinkers had fallen into bouts of slurred, profane nonsense, blasting racist spittle toward Plunkett. The game had continued in a series of jabs and punts and miscues. Sipe threw an interception. Reggie Rucker dropped a touchdown pass in the end zone. Cockroft missed a field goal. Plunkett was sacked and fumbled. Cockroft missed another. The Raiders crashed clumsily into the end zone.

The Browns were down 14–12 with less than a minute to go. Finally finding a frantic groove, they had driven the ball to the Raiders' 13-yard line. It was third down. Sipe called a time-out. Everyone in the stadium was standing, bobbing with anticipation. Eighty thousand of us. Although I was squeezed parka-to-parka among the men of my family, I didn't feel warm, but I did feel something oddly similar to warmth: a shared coldness. Many of the seats in that ungainly stadium were “obstructed view,” and part of the nuance of viewing a game there was adjusting position to see around the rusty, paint-chipped posts and I beams supporting the upper decks. We were all huddled close, the swish of nylon against nylon, the heavy murmur of anticipation, all of us sharing a calculation of the odds. All we needed was a field goal. No farther than an extra point. Then hold the Raiders for the remaining few seconds and this will all have been worth it.

The offense came back out onto the field. They lined up tight. Sipe raised his arms wide as he approached the line, trying to quiet the crowd. He leaned over the center, received the snap, looked across the end zone, drew back his arm, and released. The ball headed toward the goal line, toward the corner, toward tight end Ozzie Newsome, but it didn't look right, didn't zip through the air, was wobbling, caught up in the lake-effect wind, just long enough for a stumbling white jersey to cut in front of Newsome, the ball absorbed into the stickum-slathered arms of one of the Raiders, of someone who would be flying straight to California after this was done.

Intercepted.

The stadium fell silent. Browns players shrank from the celebration. The Raiders ran out the remaining seconds. It was over. Three weeks later they would win the Super Bowl. Everyone around us, wrapped in blankets and ponchos, looked dazed. What happened? We would soon learn that during the time-out, head coach Sam Rutigliano had called for a pass to the corner of the end zone, a play called Red Right 88. If no one was open, he'd told Sipe, “Throw it to the blonde in the second row.” That would leave one more play for the chip-shot field goal. But Sipe had tried to force the throw, and that was that. He tried because he believed, and that was the biggest mistake. He should have known.

*  *  *

But that's what we do best. We believe. We come by this honestly. Because it's not failure that we know. It's something different, more complex, maybe worse: the feeling of almost winning.

In the years that followed it would become galvanized truth.

In 1987, the Browns played the Denver Broncos for the AFC Championship at old Municipal Stadium. With the clock ticking down and the Browns in the lead, John Elway led the Broncos on an impossible (not improbable;
impossible
) 98-yard drive, which became known as The Drive, to win the right to go to the Super Bowl. It's regarded as one of the worst defensive letdowns in pro football history.

In 1988, the two teams met again in the AFC Championship. As the Browns were about to score a last-minute, game-tying touchdown, running back Earnest Byner fumbled at the 3-yard line to lose the game, in a turn of events that became known as The Fumble. The Broncos took over the ball with a minute remaining and went to the Super Bowl. It's considered one of the most monumental collapses in pro football history.