Glass House

by Brian Alexander

  Government stoked irresponsibility. “Today, for example, if we walked around, we could probably find large numbers of individuals sitting on their couches—free housing, free food, transportation vouchers, free health care—and they have no purpose in life except for their next paycheck. That’s how they live.” The unaccountable takers birthed babies they couldn’t provide for. They lived with “reckless abandon” and dived into drugs. And yet government seemed to be rewarding irresponsibility, so, naturally, “we have seen the wrong part of our society, so to speak, grow dramatically in population while the other side is having to pay for that.”

  Trimmer was sincere in his beliefs, and, based on lots of surface evidence, he wasn’t wrong.

  You could see his diagnosis play out a mile from his chambers, where I first met Ashley. There, down Main Street, and across Memorial Drive into the west side, in a little Dogpatch of rusty single-wide trailers, chunks of glass crunched under our feet. The remnants from what was once a window lay scattered over broken concrete like hundreds of pairs of tiny dice. An old beach towel fluttered in and out of the hole left by the shattered glass. A Big Wheel tricycle, repurposed as a wrecking ball that had crashed through the window the night before, rested on its side near the crumbly base of the trailer. In her defense, Ashley said she only heaved it through the window because the woman who lived in the now-windowless trailer stole her medicine—her Adderall and Xanax.

  That wasn’t all, Ashley said, enumerating the grievances that justified her rage against the neighbor, whose trailer sat about six feet from hers. She nodded to her own. A SpongeBob SquarePants beach towel served as a curtain for her still-intact window. Then she pointed to an old white Ford Expedition decorated with Hello Kitty license plate frames and Hello Kitty seat covers and a Hello Kitty steering wheel wrap. All four tires had pancaked onto the concrete. They’d been slashed, Ashley claimed, probably by the woman next door.

  Children, aged about six to fifteen, rode bicycles of the wrong size or walked around the broken glass, circling to eavesdrop. “She’s on drugs,” one of them volunteered. Whether the kid was referring to Ashley or the neighbor seemed irrelevant.

  “They were knocking on my door, come in, stole my medicine!” Ashley said, in a clittering, pleading voice, like a tired little girl lost in the woods. “I grabbed her by her bra ’cuz I heard it rattling in there.” I asked her if she was shooting up. “I don’t wanna wear no long-sleeved sweatshirt in the summer,” she insisted. As if recognizing that I might still have doubts, she added, “But my best friend is an addict.”

  Ashley insisted she was clean. She hadn’t used drugs since Halloween of 2014, about eight months before. She stayed clean the whole time she was pregnant, she said. Her baby was ten months old.

  The baby lived most of the time with Josh, her ex-boyfriend. Ashley lifted her left hand to show her fingers, on which J-O-S-H had been tattooed by “some guy.” Josh lived two trailers down with his girlfriend. “It’s weird living next to your ex and his girlfriend, but at least he’s my baby’s dad,” she said.

  She regretted the tattoo. Covering the letters on her fingers would be more difficult than it had been on her ankle, where an elaborate floral design had turned Josh into vegetation. MOM had been inked into her shoulder.

  Ashley lived on government checks. She was twenty-six, blond, short. Her ankles were swollen, her belly paunched, her back swayed. A couple of teeth had gone missing. She owed money to a high-interest furniture rental place, which was one reason why she never answered her door—bill collectors had started showing up. When she was using ten Perc 30s a day, she weighed ninety pounds and drank Ensure to keep herself alive. So you see, she said, “it didn’t do no good at all” to take her away from her own mother back when she was fourteen years old, even if her mother was a meth addict. And it wouldn’t do no good for authorities to take her other children—I couldn’t be sure if there were one or two others—and turn them over to the supervision of Fairfield County Job and Family Services. They’d be better off with her. She was going to get them back, soon, she hoped.

  A young girl, about fourteen, whom I’ll call Amanda, strolled up to us with a sashay that showed off her too-small denim shorts. Amanda was pretty enough that the missing bottom half of her left arm was not necessarily the first thing most people noticed. She’d taken care to apply mascara, and a little pale, glossy lipstick. She glanced up at me with the eyes of a coquettish puppy. Ashley looked at Amanda, and then at me, and said, “She’s growing up too fast.”

  Of course, in the most obvious sense, people like Ashley made a choice to take drugs. Of course, some people lived off the taxpayers. But the answers provided by the cult of “personal responsibility” were far too facile to explain those choices.

  Some people had always abused drugs. “Miss Lulu Ryder, age 16 years, who lives with her brother William Ryder, a glassworker … narrowly escaped death from morphine poisoning Tuesday night,” began a Lancaster newspaper story from 1904. There were no food vouchers in 1904, no free transportation, no SSI.

  Alcohol ruined a few families even when Lancaster was at its peak of prosperity. “My dad was an alcoholic, and, growing up, it was bad,” Wendy Oatney told me. “My brother didn’t like our mom’s rules, so he went to live with Dad. Well, when Daddy came home from work early in the morning from Anchor, you don’t go wake him up with something stupid. He went and said, ‘Will you take me to a friend’s house?’ This is six o’clock in the morning. Dad’s like, ‘No!’ Well, he goes back in and asks him again. The next thing I know they are in a fistfight in the living room.”

  A few people had always made lousy choices. But how had a preexisting human propensity for self-destructive behavior exploded into a plague? As Mark’s real, much more complete story—the one he didn’t tell Berens—proved, it wasn’t the increased availability of a drug like heroin, though that was gas on the flames. Lancaster’s drug problem predated heroin, OxyContin, Percs. The problem wasn’t caused by drugs at all, or government handouts, or single-parent families. While addiction could be as individual as people, common themes included alienation and disconnection.

  * * *

  Ilene and Kevin Crabtree were the opposite of Ashley, just the sort of young couple Trimmer preferred to see in Lancaster. They were both in their thirties. They were responsible parents to four little children. And they lived just three blocks away from Trimmer’s courtroom in Lancaster’s historic section. In many ways, the Crabtrees were the 2015 mirror image of Herb and Nancy George in 1949. But the differences between 1949 and 2015 were profound.

  Unlike Herb and Nancy, Ilene and Kevin did not choose Lancaster because of the schools, parks, or job opportunities. Ilene worked as a physical therapist in a Columbus hospital, Kevin as a nutritionist in another Columbus hospital. Both were part of the boom in health care, which by 2015 accounted for 17.5 percent of gross national product. Just as the hospital had become Lancaster’s biggest employer, the American economy was increasingly driven by the money that citizens and their government spent on their bodies.

  The Crabtrees lived in Lancaster and made the long commute every day because Ilene’s parents lived in Lancaster, and Ilene and Kevin, and the four little ones, all lived with them. This was an economic and logistical choice. Even with both of them working, the Crabtrees didn’t have the money to buy or rent a decent house in Columbus, close to work, and to pay for childcare, too. Ilene’s father was a retired army officer who could play Mr. Mom during the day. So her parents enlarged their own Lancaster home and invited the Crabtrees to move in to save money.

  When they first arrived, Ilene and Kevin, who had lived in other states, were greeted by a constant beat of bad news about the local economy and drugs. “I wondered,” Ilene said, “what was this little town we’ve moved to?” The house was crowded and chaotic—at any moment, a giggling child could come careening around a corner, sliding on stocking feet, being chased by a sibling. Privacy in what amounted to an eight-person fami
ly commune was precious. Even so, the Crabtrees, the children, and Ilene’s parents all seemed happy and loving. But the Crabtrees’ lives were as much in Columbus as they were in Lancaster.

  They’d made a few friends in town. Most of them commuted, too. A young college professor drove to Columbus, while her husband drove in the other direction to Athens. Lancaster just happened to be a spot between their jobs that was also suffering from depressed housing prices. So a young professional couple could buy a big old house on a leafy street and spend weekends playing do-it-yourselfers.

  Some believed that was a trend that would save Lancaster, but other than helping at their children’s Catholic elementary school and socializing with the few friends they’d made, the Crabtrees didn’t have time for civic projects or clubs. Ilene did join a hospital Twig, but she missed about half the meetings. There were no big parties, no major fund-raising dinners, no campaigns for school levies on their calendar. Mostly, they were just exhausted.

  Jon Hale would have understood. Hale was a city councilman who also commuted to a job in Columbus. Though he was born and raised in Lancaster, and worked at the local radio station for a while, he dropped out of the civic and social life of the town when he took the Columbus position for a better salary.

  “I’d drive up in the morning, work all day, drive back, eat some dinner, and go to bed,” he said over a beer after a city council meeting. “I felt I didn’t have time for anything else.”

  When he realized he’d fallen into a commuter rut, and out of Lancaster life, he decided to make a special effort to reengage and wound up running for his city council seat. Partly, he said, he was motivated by a family member’s addiction to crack cocaine.

  The growing commuting culture further fractured Lancaster life. The commuters left the Ashleys and Lloyds, and the Plant 1 workers, behind every morning. When they returned home at night, tired and focused on their own family concerns, they could close their doors and leave the Ashleys and Lloyds outside, and the Plant 1 workers to the late shift.

  They were not a drain on the society like those people Trimmer described. They were good people making their way in the twenty-first-century economy as best they could. But that economy didn’t include Lancaster, as it had in Nancy’s day. Even their payroll taxes went to Columbus, or wherever else they might drive to each morning. And with the narrowing of vision to themselves and their families, the vibrant little town Nancy loved so much became a more disconnected place.

  * * *

  The commuters were chasing an inchoate dream of security, or success, or career. Mark Kraft was chasing something, too, though he couldn’t tell you what it was. He tried not to ask questions about life’s meaning, about who he was, what he wanted and believed in. He wasn’t abused, neglected, impoverished. His family—his two-parent family—loved him. To say he was dissatisfied would make him sound like a spoiled asshole, so he didn’t say it. He could think of no good reason to be dissatisfied. And yet, he was crushed by ennui.

  Mark wished his life had more substance, though he wasn’t sure what he meant by that. Maybe “fulfillment” would be a better word, but he wasn’t sure about that, either. When he tried to think of a form fulfillment might take, aside from drugs, he couldn’t conjure an image in his mind. He knew that people sometimes claimed to be fulfilled, or said their lives were imbued with passion, but he was unable to step into the shoes of such people. They existed in a fantasy world. He could see them through the glass screens of his smartphone, his computer, his television. They were all far more glamorous and altogether happier than anybody he’d ever known. Mark’s world was Lancaster, and America as seen from Lancaster—and in them, with the exception of his own family, there was nothing deserving of his faith. Nobody inspired him. He didn’t think this situation was uniquely unfair to him: He imagined himself treading water, kicking his legs harder and faster to barely keep his head above it, but everybody he knew was stuck in the same water, treading just as furiously as he was. “The world’s stacked against everybody,” he said. That didn’t make him feel any less lonely, though.

  He didn’t notice so much when he was high. Dope’s warmth fulfilled him. Or it made him not worry so much about not being fulfilled. Either way, the loneliness vanished. He liked other addicts, too. Users looked out for each other when they weren’t snitching on each other. They were a tribe. They understood what it was like to need the drug, to risk obtaining the drug, to shoot or snort or swallow the drug. That was something, at least.

  The last time he felt that way about anything else was back when he used to ride his BMX bike at the Miller Skate Park, down by Miller Pool. On a BMX, you could fly up over the rim of the ramp, yank a 360, and, for an instant, exist suspended in air. Mark was pretty good on the bike. Not great, but pretty good. He liked it down there at the park. There were some cool dudes down there, kids like him who weren’t ever going to be, and did not want to be, the high school hero. There were some really good skaters and BMXers who could pull off wild tricks—like Ryan, a kid who spent parts of summers in Lancaster visiting his dad. Mark and Ryan became pretty close; Mark would later live with Ryan for a time. Ryan was a fucking badass on a bike. Mark got to know Brian Gossett down there, too. Brian could skate. But that was a lifetime ago: 2003, 2004, back when he was thirteen or fourteen.

  Mark started dealing at fifteen, after he burned his hand trying to release a frozen bolt with thread-loosening fluid and a torch, and the doctor prescribed the Vicodins, and a friend said, “Dude, you can sell those Vike 10s.” Mark had thought to himself, “Oh, I could sell drugs!” He’d always been an independent-minded-entrepreneur type, which sounded a little nuts, he knew—but that was about the only explanation he could offer. He sold every pill from the script, taking Tylenol for his hand.

  That required discipline—his hand hurt like hell. But Mark figured the sacrifice would be worth it, and it was. He’d already been buying a little weed from a much older teenager, Drew. Now Drew gave Mark some scales and two ounces of weed, telling him to come back with a hundred bucks off each ounce. That was easy in Lancaster, and, once Mark began to really apply himself, he discovered he was a natural at sales and marketing. In a couple of months, he was selling twice as much weed as Drew was.

  Being a teenager who could walk around a small town with a pocketful of money can make you feel almost as invincible as the people you saw through your screens. His parents rose early, went in to work, came home, and did it all again every day. They saved pennies and bought only what they had to, rarely splurging on anything except a trip now and then. Mark admired them for that, but he figured he’d found his own path in the drug business.

  Eventually, Mark teamed up with Dyke, a lesbian; Fat-Em, a big, fat guy; and Jim, a black dude. They’d met a guy in Columbus who knew a guy in El Paso. The guy in Columbus said the guy in El Paso would sell them bundles of weed for far less than they were paying by the time the shit got to Ohio. Of course, they’d have to go down to El Paso to get it, but Mark and the others knew an opportunity when it presented itself, and they weren’t about to let the distance stop them.

  They pooled some capital and paid a guy in a machine shop to modify the gas tank on a used car with quarter-inch steel to make a partition—one half for gas and the other for a cargo of weed. They lined the cargo space with a Vaseline-like goo to keep any telltale odors from escaping. Once they got to El Paso, they’d jack up the car, release three drop bolts, stuff bundles of weed into the tank, reset the bolts, and be on their way home to Lancaster.

  The plan worked just like they’d imagined it. Soon, as far as Mark could tell, there was only one other person in Lancaster—some older lady—moving as much weed as he and his friends were moving.

  That older people were dealing surprised Mark at first, but he quickly got used to it. Some of his friends’ mothers would party with them. Later, after heroin arrived, one mother somehow got a prescription for Suboxone, the drug used to wean addicts off heroin. She dealt her Suboxon
e through her daughter, a friend of Mark’s.

  Marijuana was their main product, but they’d sell anything: coke, Ecstasy, red rock opium (a substance that was supposedly crystalline opium but was usually found to be an herbal incense instead). There wasn’t much heroin around then. By his senior prom, in 2007, Mark had moved out of his parents’ house and into another one just a few doors away down Main Street. He had $40,000 in the bank, his own money from his own labor, and that didn’t count all the money he burned up or snorted or swallowed or gave away. He figured he’d won the capitalist lottery.

  He and a couple of friends splurged on $4,000 worth of drugs for prom night. A lot of it was Ecstasy. Even the kids who weren’t stoners did Ecstasy. At a party, they treated anybody who asked, and a lot of kids asked. “I don’t even know who the fuck they were. I just know we had a hundred rolls, like a hundred pills fucking right there, and we had fucking—every blunt we rolled had a half-gram of fucking—some good-assed coke in it, or whatever it was.”

  Of course, the crew would get busted. He could see that now, looking back on it. The dumbest cop in Texas couldn’t fail to spot a black dude, an eighteen-year-old butch dyke, and a fat white man heading north in an old Chevy with Ohio plates, a gas tank full of weed, and a gun in the glove compartment. Nobody was sure why they had a gun or what they’d do with it: It just seemed like you were supposed to have a gun if you ran drugs.

  Mark wasn’t along for that final trip. So some asshole and a couple of his goons in Lancaster figured Mark must have ratted out the crew. They showed up at his rental on Main Street, “fucking screaming at me, and they flipped the chair over when they came in and were just fucking getting ready to tear the place up.” So Mark stuck his hand into a recliner and pulled out a big fucking gawky gun, a .45 that looked all fancy and chrome-plated. He cocked it and put that fucking thing right up to the asshole’s face, but one of those little shitfuckers pulled out a snub-nosed .38 that looked like it had been fished out of a fucking sewer, like it had bodies on it. That wicked little thing was ten times scarier than his fancy gun that was too big for him.