Glass House

by Brian Alexander

  “No,” I said. “Do you think she’ll do it?” “Prob-lee,” he said. “It’s fer National Geographic.” He cackled with so much enthusiasm, he coughed up beery nicotine phlegm. Racism in other parts of town was subtler. It revealed itself in conversations about “strangers” and “newcomers.”

  The roots of racism in those who expressed it were more tangled than simple hatred sparked by skin color. Lower-class whites were cut off from all the college campus rhetoric about “white privilege,” but they wouldn’t have understood it anyway, because they, with good reason, didn’t feel privileged. Most of them hadn’t done anything wrong, but they believed some malevolent force had reached into their community and punished them. Somebody, they thought, was screwing them out of the good-life lottery. Somebody was screwing them. It just wasn’t who they thought.

  “They’re racist because they look at those people as getting all the breaks,” Harris explained. “‘Why do they get all the breaks? My life sucks. Why don’t I get breaks like they do? They get into all the best schools ’cause they’re black. I wish I could go into a job interview and be black.’ I’m always like, ‘Then do it. Trust me, you may find out that was not the best choice you ever made.’ So, yeah, there’s a huge amount of racism in this community.” But it was resentment based on “that perception that African Americans are getting special treatment.”

  Harris considered the possibility that guns, race, the belief that the drug problem could be pinned on blacks and Mexicans in Columbus or Detroit, the generalized fear that turned parents into ever-vigilant kid guardians, might be the result of a strategy. Referring to Lancaster’s tax-starved schools, he said, “Of course, you could be really cynical, which I get sometimes, and say, ‘Well, that’s one reason to keep ’em stupid.’” Harris, raised a Catholic, continued. “It’s the old Catholic philosophy of the Middle Ages: Don’t let ’em learn to read, because as long as we’re telling them what the Book says, then they’ll listen to us.” He blamed the dominance of the local Republican Party hierarchy. He was the only Democrat serving as a city-or county-wide elected official. He managed to win by running as a Republican, then switched parties. “It doesn’t make any sense at all. I believe it’s because you convince people that it’s all Obama’s fault, it’s all the Democrats’ fault, it’s all this or that, and they’ll believe it.”

  Trying to explain that the roots of Lancaster’s problematic changes were deep and old was a futile exercise. A few people who were executives at Anchor at the time remembered Icahn, but nobody else did. Almost nobody knew the true story of the Newell takeover and of the shady dealings of Newell’s felonious financier, Gary Driggs. Cerberus had come and gone so quickly that the episode blurred. The vast majority of Lancastrians couldn’t name Monomoy, to say nothing of Barington Capital, Wexford Management, or the Clinton Group. They didn’t follow the intricacies of carried interest, the decline of union power, Wall Street lobbying, or the political contributions made by the predatory-lending industry. It wasn’t that they were rubes, as so many big-city liberals took comfort in believing. It was that they had lives to lead and work to do. Both the national and the local press, which might have once briefed them on how The System had been turned on its head, were themselves eviscerated by digital culture, by their own insular preoccupation with themselves, and by the drumbeat message from cable news and Internet propaganda to never trust “the media.”

  John Oatney didn’t follow politics. He voted because he was a good American who felt it was his duty to do so. When he did, he usually voted for Democrats, because he’d been raised to believe the Democrats looked out for poor people, and he’d never had much money. But then he returned to the Lord. A nice man at church named Tom began educating John. Among other things, Tom told John that he could not call himself a Christian and vote for Democrats. Also, “Obama was a mean and evil person” who was trying “to drive the country down to where it will be easy for somebody from the Middle East, or somebody, to come and harm us, or take over.”

  John hadn’t been aware of any of this until Tom explained it. Tom told him not to feel bad about not knowing. John had just been kept in the dark by watching 4, 6, and 10, the major network TV channels in Columbus. Those stations weren’t allowed to tell it like it really was, Tom said. Instead John needed to watch cable news. When John replied that he had “poor boy” TV—that is, no cable—Tom said he had to get himself somewhere so he could see the cable channels that told the truth.

  By the end of the day, July 4 didn’t feel like much of a happy birthday. But, finally, a crowd of several thousand gathered at the fairgrounds for the traditional fireworks show. They surrounded the racetrack made famous by gas-illuminated harness racing and Peggy Cummins. The fireworks burst, sparkled, and flashed. Rousing, coordinated music blared over hundreds of radios. The booms were loud. Little kids covered their ears with their hands. A few people chanted, “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” And then everybody went home.

  * * *

  Just before the festival started, the Rotarians gathered for their regular Monday meeting at The Lodge, the former Elks hall, on Main Hill, which had been turned into a bar and restaurant. A woman stood before them to speak the invocation. As everyone bowed their heads, she spoke to God. “This is an exciting time for our community. We pray for our director, Joe, and our conductor, Gary. Please lay your hands on our orchestra members.” Her voice cracked. Tears streamed down her face. She read from Psalm 150: “Praise him with stringed instruments and pipe. Praise him with resounding cymbals.”

  “Our” director, “our” conductor, “our” musicians. There wasn’t much left of what Forbes had found, and Lancaster stood to lose more still: The hospital the town had built for itself—now its largest employer—which had just celebrated the completion of a $38 million expansion, was under attack. Big regional corporate health systems, following a grow-or-die mandate, wanted to steal its independence by absorbing it into their chains. The festival, though, was wholly Lancaster’s. “It’s about community, it’s about people,” orchestra conductor Gary Sheldon told the Rotarians.

  The festival couldn’t start soon enough for Joe Piccolo. In late June, he’d told me, “If I am still pushing against an immovable wall in two years, I am not going down with the ship.” The board was reluctant to accept the changes he wanted to make, he said, but the operation needed to change. Hundreds of volunteers made up the workforce, but that squadron was graying. A few part-time paid employees served in crucial positions, but two women in the office were in ill health, and there were no contingency plans for replacing them. A small minority of aging donors wielded too much control. Lancaster itself was just too old-fashioned. Piccolo was getting heat for hiring Blues Traveler, but young people weren’t interested in orchestral music. The festival had to look to the future.

  His other frustrations were minor, though many and varied. There was a snafu over rental buses to shuttle ticket holders to the big concert site at OU Lancaster. A group of ministers had hired a nationally recognized Christian singer to appear during the festival period, piggybacking on the sanctioned events Piccolo was trying to sell. Tickets to that event cost $15 or $20. Lancaster’s consumer buck would go only so far.

  And Christians weren’t his only competition. When nearby communities witnessed the success of Lancaster’s festival as it grew in popularity, some of them decided to mount their own. Pickerington, a once-tiny farming village in northwestern Fairfield County that had become a Columbus bedroom community over the past thirty years, started the Violet Festival in 1997. This year, the graying rock band Kansas would appear there, on the same weekend Blues Traveler was performing in Lancaster. Dublin, closer to Columbus, was holding its Irish Festival. And the Ohio State Fair was being held July 29 through August 9. Reba McEntire, Meghan Trainor, Patti LaBelle, Alabama, Peter Frampton, Cheap Trick, Dru Hill, and Deep Purple were all slated to appear.

  One day, while visiting with him in his office, I commented on a picture of J. Robert Oppen
heimer displayed on a computer screen. Oppenheimer’s fedora, as well as the cigarette punctuating his gaunt face, reminded Piccolo that Oppenheimer overcame every obstacle to lead the creation of the atomic bomb.

  “But, Joe,” I said, “he later regretted it.”

  “Well, we try not to think about that.”

  By the opening-night concert, a program of Mussorgsky inside St. Mary’s Church, controversies had receded into the background. The day had dawned brightly—sunny and warm. Phones in the box office rang with more persistence. And now a sellout crowd of seven hundred had crammed into St. Mary’s, one of Lancaster’s grandest and oldest churches.

  Piccolo seemed to be everywhere at once, huffing and perspiring outside the church, in the back of the church, in the sacristy at the front of the church. Spotting a couple of older female volunteers handing out programs, he dashed up to them and offered to take a handful. But he offended them. Didn’t he think they were doing a good job? Did he want to take over?

  “I was only trying to help,” Piccolo pleaded. But he’d underestimated the importance of their involvement. They’d helped for years. The small bit they contributed to the success of the festival in their community gave them purpose and ownership at a time when there was so little of either.

  * * *

  Joe Boyer didn’t get to hear the Mussorgsky; he worked the night shift that night. He’d work nights all through the festival, so he wouldn’t see any of the events. Brian Gossett and Aaron Shonk didn’t attend, either. Instead they had some friends over to the Colfax cabin. Aaron built a big fire in the backyard and cued up big band music and some blues on a boom box. Sitting around by a fire, drinking some beer, being as loud as they wanted—that’s why they’d moved out there. The cheap rent was important, too, of course, and Colfax was a straight shot down 22 to work at Drew, but nights like this were what they’d been looking for.

  Brian was in a mood to chill. Over the July 4 weekend, he and Mike had gone to a rave out in the country, and they’d had fun, but he came home deciding that he’d had enough of the rave-fest scene. “I was sitting on this bench, and Mike was sitting near me, across from me, and he’s like, ‘Are you waiting in line?’ And I didn’t know what he meant. I looked down, and there’s this circle of people sitting on the ground, waiting their turn to inject themselves.” He motioned to the skin between his thumb and forefinger. “And that’s so fucking retarded.” Flakka (akin to meth and moon rocks), sass (related to MDMA), ketamine, and heroin were wrecking everything. He may have been a libertarian when it came to drugs, but people didn’t use any sense at all. “Like, what are they going to do with those needles, man? Leave ’em on the ground? That just goes to show they’re not responsible enough to even be doing that shit in the first place.”

  The topic of his own generation led him to tattoos. “Fuck tattoos!” he said, with real anger. “This one time, Renee came home, and she had this big picture down her side, and, I mean, it was really good, looked great, but I told her, ‘If you like it, why not hang it on the wall?’”

  When Brian first moved in and showed me around the tiny space he’d picked as his bedroom—a side-entrance mud porch just off the small kitchen—a print of a Picasso nude from the Blue Period lay on his bed. A 401(k) enrollment form lay next to the art. I had picked up the 401(k) brochure and smiled.

  “They’re gonna get me, man,” he’d said, referring to The System. His parents had lost a significant portion of their life savings in the 2008 financial collapse. Brian was still angry about it.

  “You’re going mainstream,” I joked. “Well, they say it’s like free money,” he said. “I don’t like it, but…” He shrugged. Now the Picasso was hung up behind his bed, but he still hadn’t enrolled in the 401(k). He was thinking about it.

  The work at Drew was okay—mindless, with the personalities in the warehouse a little hard to take, but he liked it better than he’d thought he might. His first performance review was positive and came with a raise. He still missed Anchor, though.

  They hadn’t yet installed a landline phone, and since Brian refused to get a cell phone, the only way to reach him was to drive out and knock on his door. If you made the trip, it meant you really wanted to see him. Brian still didn’t get the point of the twenty-first century.

  He left the fireside and walked back into the little house. Before everyone arrived, he’d been tuning the heads of his drum set, and he wanted to finish the job. He asked me if I knew anything about Dave Brubeck, whose jazz he’d recently discovered. I was a fan, I told him. To Brian, something about “Take Five” sounded honest and cool. With jazz on his mind, he slipped an old Lionel Hampton record out of its sleeve and placed it gently on a little turntable he’d set up on the kitchen counter, then picked up a small tool to tighten the skins of his drums. Swingy vibes, interrupted every few seconds by Brian’s tap on a drumhead, wafted out into the hot night, blending with the crackling fire and crickets at the corner of a country crossroads surrounded by fields of tall cornstalks.

  * * *

  The stage and band shell rose up out of the field by the creek. Portable toilets stood ready for duty. Generators, lights, and speakers loomed from eight-story scaffolds. The sun was out, and the grounds, swampy just three days before, had dried enough. The creek had returned to a normal level. The crew was exhausted. One member had reported for work a few days before at 8:30 a.m., carrying morning doughnuts to share, only to discover that it was 8:30 at night. They’d worked through wind and rain this year, but now they sat under the shade of a blue tarpaulin, sipping from beer bottles and surveying the work they counted as good.

  Piccolo, though, stood by the stage like a nervous cat. “People in this town don’t realize how dire the budget situation is,” he said. “We couldn’t have survived another rain event.” But he didn’t seem soothed by the sunshine. His new problem was sound. Mo Pitney would be fine, but Thompson Square had been very loud during the sound check. The orchestra was irritated. Nobody would be able to hear a note they played under Thompson Square’s volume. With Blues Traveler already having refused to play with the orchestra, Piccolo faced the prospect of both the audience and the orchestra calling for his head. “I guess tonight will decide if I have good judgment,” he said.

  The sun was still high when people began finding their tables and staking out their real estate on the hillside. Sundresses, madras shirts, and khaki pants were favored at the dining tables, while jeans, shorts, and T-shirts were in vogue on the hill. Eric Brown, Rosemary Hajost, Mayor Dave Smith, and Jen Walters were all there, along with about three thousand other Lancastrians and visitors from around the county. None of Anchor’s top management attended: They hadn’t come to the festival in years.

  Caterers set up meals on the tables. People sitting in the grass opened coolers. Everybody was happy to be there, no matter where they sat. Maples and sassafras, ripe with fat, green leaves, formed woody curtains around the perimeter of the hillside. As the sun descended, the sky glowed, illuminating a few wispy, friendly clouds with orange-red highlights.

  When the percussive downbeat and rapid-fire string notes of Aaron Copland’s “Hoedown” arrowed through the dusk, thousands of Midwest smiles lit thousands of faces. A few small children in short pants bobbled with unsteady toddler rhythm in front of parents with guardrail arms stretched out, just in case. Lovers looked at each other and kissed.

  The orchestra played Hungarian Dance No. 5, by Brahms. Everybody nodded in recognition. Some knew it as Brahms, others as the soundtrack for a dozen different TV commercials. Rimsky-Korsakov’s Capriccio Espagnol was less familiar to most, but it was joyous, like summer, and showcased the talents of individual musicians—Lancaster’s own musicians for these two weeks—even more effectively than the more famous compositions.

  The two big country acts would follow—Mo Pitney (young, charming, and unpretentious) and Thompson Square (loud, slick, and canned)—but right then, nobody cared about the night’s headliners. Nobody cared abou
t trying to book Taylor Swift or about drawing people from out of town as a way to boost economic development. They cared about being out in their town with their friends, milling about and seeing people they hadn’t seen in a while, listening to music they wouldn’t normally listen to, as they admired the skill of musicians who’d devoted their lives to making art. They wanted to drink a glass of wine or a beer and eat a fried chicken leg. They wanted to share all of this with one another.

  Over the successive days and nights, the weather continued to cooperate—for the most part. Artwork hung in banks, stores, churches, restaurants, the library. More than fifty musical and other events—whether at a charge or free—went off as scheduled, most of them attracting audiences. None of them were held on the west side.

  When the day of the big Saturday finale arrived, a crowd once again gathered at the tables and the hillside: Once again, a nice day turned into an ideal Ohio evening. There’d been backstage drama—a Blues Traveler member somehow wound up stranded in Columbus, for example—but by show time everything was ready.

  Piccolo cleaned himself up, put on a new shirt, and stepped on the stage to introduce Sheldon. The orchestra played Sheldon’s arrangements of Journey, Aerosmith, and Radiohead songs, followed by an intermission.

  During the pause, I ran into festival cofounder Eleanor Hood. “Are you happy?” I asked.

  “Relieved,” she said. She cried the way people do when pressure is suddenly lifted. She and her friend Barbara Hunzicker had started the festival thirty years before, as if they’d foreseen what the town would face and wanted to manufacture a balm to soothe it. “We really needed this. This is the best night we’ve had in five years or so. Thank this,” she said, pointing at the sky.