The Hard Way on Purpose

by David Giffels

  He seemed aware that we were all losers by association, and that it wasn’t the worst thing in the world. In an interview one time, he referred to his team as the “Cleveland Cadavers.” The local media picked up on it and a new nickname took hold: the Cadavaliers.

  One night, Ford sat looking at his game check, leaning way back in the chair in front of his wooden locker stall. He wouldn’t be with the team much longer—everyone knew that—but he had another year guaranteed on his contract.

  “Mr. Stepien’s gonna pay me to sit on the beach for a year,” he said in a way that could only be described as cavalier.

  * * *

  I knew what a cavalier was. I’d devoted a great deal of my youth to reading about people who carried swords and wore capes and feathers and rode horses. As a result, I had yet another question about this enigmatic organization that employed me. My emergent sense of place told me I lived in a region fiercely proud of its grittiness and its blue-collar sensibilities and its disdain for foppishness and pretense. Even though the Cavaliers didn’t actually play in Cleveland—they played in a cold, rigid concrete tank called the Coliseum (another curious non sequitur) in a rural suburb called Richfield—they were Cleveland’s team, and the way I always knew we’d arrived in Cleveland on the highway from Akron was when I saw that tall, black, flaming steel-factory smokestack. None of this evoked the gallantry of the cavaliers I knew from books.

  Other teams in the region had names like Browns (because the first coach was a hard-nosed genius named Brown and because brown is the color of mud and dried blood and also the sky above a factory) and Steelers (because steel is made here and beer cans and Camaro rims are made of steel) and Indians (because we have a wooden ear in matters of cultural sensitivity). Why Cleveland’s basketball team would be called the Cavaliers remains almost as much a mystery to me as the three-second rule.

  Ted Stepien did not name the team. That was done a decade before, when Cleveland entered the league. To his credit, he did have a knack not only for marketing—he’d made his fortune as founder of Nationwide Advertising Service—but specifically for marketing to the sorts of fans who comprised the northeast-Ohio sports-consumption market.

  He adopted a polka for the team’s fight song. At one end of the floor, dressed in tube tops, short-shorts, and pantyhose, he installed the Teddy Bears, vampish cheerleaders who were the owner’s namesake, which gave the whole arrangement a daddy/daughter creepiness. Over on one side of the court was Superfan, a sort of everyman-slob-cheerleader whose gut bounced inside a too-tight, black T-shirt and whose gimmick was tearing apart beer cans with his teeth.

  * * *

  “Three seconds! Three seconds on that guy! Hey—three seconds, come on! Gene? Gene? Did you see that? Three seconds!”

  Stepien’s lament, coming from a floor seat behind the basket, would have cut through even a boisterous crowd, but often there were only a few thousand fans—the masochists and optimists that represent the demographic cornerstones of the Rust Belt—and the owner’s incessant refrain was all the more prominent.

  The play tumbled off to the other end of the court and I was left there with my towels and paper cups and my deluxe dust mop, folding tossed-aside warm-up pants and wondering why it was such an issue with him. I wasn’t completely in the dark. I’d long before calculated that three seconds was three thousand milliseconds and one-twentieth of a minute and therefore one nine-hundred-sixtieth of a game, which is to say that I worked a lot of recreational math to pass the time as I sat blankly staring at the hardwood during another interminable third quarter. It was always the third quarter, always that time that is no time when you’re working a job that holds nothing for you.

  I could even see that dead time on the bench sometimes. I don’t think anyone ever gave up, but when you’re losing and you know too well what it feels like to lose, and you’ve been psychically prepared your entire life to win, you just want that loss to end. The seated players would sometimes gaze emptily as the drudgery continued up and down the court, as though trying to see back into their boyhood selves who dreamed of one day being here, doing this, and the wonder of it all.

  I knew that the phrase three seconds represented some kind of violation because occasionally a whistle would blow and the whine from the floor seat would turn jubilant: “See? See? Three seconds! It’s about time. . . .”

  But what I never came to understand, and to this day still do not understand, is how, with the dizzying number of possible fouls—a hack over here, a push over there, a charge and a goaltend and an over-and-back—the referees could also possibly be running an internal clock measuring how long someone was positioned in the paint. The game moved so fast, I never saw anyone do anything for three seconds. Twenty hands and twenty feet and twenty elbows are on the floor at all times, each in constant motion, plus lines and arcs and planes to account for, such that it would take the mind of Euclid, the emotional resolve of Sgt. Rock, and the physical stamina of Bruce Jenner to keep it all together. Sometimes whole minutes would go by before I realized there’d been a substitution and I hadn’t offered the returning player a towel and the requisite drink menu—“Water or Gatorade?”—to the back of a man who never turned to answer, just reached for what he needed.

  * * *

  We had not been paid in more than a month and some of the ball boys were pestering the trainer, who oversaw us, to do something. But what could he do? Rumors were spreading through the locker room and the cavernous back hallways of the Coliseum that no one was getting paid. Even if that wasn’t true, we all understood that this was not an organization with any discernible justice system—or any discernible system at all. Things just sort of happened. Or didn’t. All I knew was that whatever money was on the table was not worth the growing pressure from my colleagues to exert my “head ball boy” authority. Even if I was to make a stand, I didn’t have a clue where to make it, nor to whom, nor how stands were made at all. I’d never been righteous a day in my life.

  One of the other ball boys latched onto me as we went through our pregame duties—hauling buckets of ice to the locker room, helping the trainer set up his cart, distributing towels, folding warm-up suits, avoiding staph infection, etc.

  “Stepien always hangs around courtside at halftime. Let’s ask him.”

  “Ask him what?”

  “For our checks.”

  “We can’t do that.”

  “Sure we can. It’s our money. It’s only right.”

  I wanted to believe that this was true, that being right justified doing something that seemed entirely wrong. But I didn’t believe that. The problem was that I wasn’t clear about what I believed, about anything, and this is how I found myself at halftime, when I should have been dust-mopping my end of the court, instead approaching Ted Stepien, who stood talking to another man in a suit.

  “Um. Mr. Stepien?”

  He turned those big, square glasses in my direction.

  “Uh, I was just wondering if, um, you could tell us when the ball boys were going to get paid . . . ?”

  * * *

  When I arrived for work the next night, the trainer called me into the back room.

  “What were you thinking?”

  I couldn’t answer, partly because of the lump rising in my throat, but mostly because the question was its own answer. What was I thinking? I think. I wasn’t. Thinking.

  I knew what was coming next. I’d been fired. Stepien had just finished screaming at the trainer about how he’d been embarrassed by some ball boy whom he didn’t ever want to see in the building again. I didn’t argue. I left, making my way back through the locker room. A few players were already there, easing into another miserable night, big, long, misshapen men half in street clothes and half out, stretching overtaxed knees and pulling cricks from their necks, preparing themselves to be beaten once more.

  I exited through the back door toward the parking lot. There, in the first row, was Mr. Stepien’s big, shiny car. I slowed. I looked behind m
e. Then I walked toward the car, at first not sure what I was about to do, then with an idea, and then something like conviction.

  I picked up my stride, and when I got to the car, I reached out for the driver’s door handle, gave it a yank, and kept on walking, the car alarm blaring its nonsense with undue urgency.

  Three seconds! Three seconds! Three seconds!

  PART TWO

  BE APPROXIMATELY YOURSELF

  We almost won.

  We almost always

  almost win.

  —Josh Cribbs, Cleveland Browns

  LOOKING FOR A NAME

  More than anything else that summer, I needed a bowling shirt. This seemed like the most necessary thing in the world, or at least in Ohio. A bowling shirt with fanciful embroidery and a cryptic team sponsor’s name stitched across the back, maybe a plumber or a garage, something involving the word scooter. A shirt with side vents and a contrasting yoke, made of good old-school rayon, with depth and heft. The weight of a cape, a habit, a mantle. Something the Stray Cats might wear to the diner for strong coffee in thick, white cups and cheeseburgers and unstudied flirtation. Something John Lurie would pluck at random from the bedside in a Jim Jarmusch joint. Something with Perma-Prest and drip-dry in the laundering instructions. Something with the right color scheme—black and red; turquoise and yellow; pink and almost anything. Maybe (dreaming here) something with buttons shaped like dice. And most important of all, a name above the pocket—Howie or Slim or Mack. The offer of personality.

  At eighteen, in a factory town where bowling was as culturally significant as church, I recognized something authentic about such a shirt, something tangible and true, and also something circularly ironic, that it was the costume of some other culture than my own that was in fact the culture of which I was made, and to which I now aspired with what I imagined was irony. But, at eighteen, I didn’t have much of a grasp on authenticity or irony or culture. Most of my spare time was spent looking for clues. And piles of discarded clothing were as good a place as any to start.

  All of our information about what was cool came in fragments and obliquely. In the 1980s, the mass culture of three-network television and Life magazine was actively fracturing, but for the time being, subcultures traveled on foot. A great gap lay between the underground and the mainstream. This was the technological interlude before the Internet. In fact, this suspended moment at the end of a generalized, shared American culture was probably the thing that made the Internet necessary. As the top-down approach was disintegrating, the bottom-up was being conceived. In that in-between moment, however, Akron was the hinterlands. We knew this information existed, but found it agonizingly elusive. We were restless therefore in our yearning, knowing that tantalizing new ideas were creeping in beneath our feet. We wanted to know.

  A newsstand at the mall carried New York Rocker, a low pulp fanzine I waited for monthly and devoured cover to cover, attempting to digest its secrets. How to cuff my jeans. The Gun Club. Am I a sunglasses person? Human Switchboard. Talking Heads. The meaning of anger. Bow Wow Wow. Sturm und Drang. Lust. But almost as soon as I’d made this a monthly pilgrimage, the magazine stopped appearing—gone, disappeared, a phantom. I stayed up late every night watching Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert and the outlaw Pee-wee Herman on HBO and Second City Television (SCTV) reruns and, on the weekends, New Wave Theatre on the USA Network. These things emerged like little Brigadoons. As soon as I discovered Rock Concert, it was canceled. Pee-wee Herman’s appearances were sporadic, hard to catch, and next thing I knew he surfaced reworked as a Saturday-morning network star. Every SCTV sighting seemed like a gift, a visit from Sasquatch. I happened, by total chance, upon MTV the night it debuted, and I really believed I’d discovered some obscure delight that no one else knew about or would ever know about. Akron was one of the first cities in the country to be wired for cable. We had it years before Manhattan, and while I’d like to think that made us pioneers, I think it was a greater indication that the channelers of culture recognized we needed it as a lifeline, that this information would be more precious to people like us, forsaken at the edge of Lake Erie, in the midst of the industrial wasteland.

  So I had visual information that informed me something about a bowling shirt would be beneficial to my image (or lack thereof), and while I might not have known precisely what that meant, I did know where to look.

  My friend Dave and I had been paying regular visits to the big, sprawling Goodwill store at the edge of the University of Akron campus. Our main purpose was to outfit ourselves for the Bank, a cavernous rock club in the middle of downtown that occupied the marble lobby and mahogany balcony of an abandoned bank. (Sometimes irony is unnecessary.) We were teenagers in a city that was fast losing its identity, ourselves just beginning to seek identities of our own. We needed outfits.

  Dave was looking for a suit coat with skinny lapels and sleeves he could roll up in the manner of an English synth-pop bassist. And I had determined I would express my individuality via a secondhand shirt with another man’s name trimmed over the heart.

  * * *

  Every time there is a monumental cultural shift, its spew lands in the Goodwill.

  You don’t have to look hard to find it, but you have to dig in deep to understand it; you have to enter the groove, slide your flattened hands between the fabric, layers upon layers, leafing through them like the living text of a place. But it’s there: a story full of endings.

  Slowly, it emerges from the chaos of high-school-band sweatshirts and hospital-sponsored 5K freebie T-shirts and Myrtle Beach souvenirs: patterns and the meaningful breaking of pattern. So first I came to understand what belonged and then to understand what didn’t belong. I came to understand that the racks and shelves contained more than just the usual hand-me-downs and castoffs. This Goodwill was Akron’s central warehouse, so it received much of the unloaded ballast of our diaspora.

  Akron had lost close to eight thousand factory jobs in the preceding decade, and forty thousand residents (which translates to roughly ten thousand bowlers). A lot of people were giving up. There was despair, but even more, there was an uneasy void. These people just vanished. Vaporized. All the layoffs and factory closings and civic collapses of the preceding decade had led to families’ picking up and leaving, often headed South, where corporations were reestablishing manufacturing in nonunion settings, the right-to-work states. Often these departures happened abruptly, and often bitterly, and often in the kind of separation that doesn’t want the burden of memory.

  So among the knickknack floor lamps and Reader’s Digest Condensed Books and discarded wooden crutches, we found too-recent high school yearbooks and frames with family pictures still inside and plastic, gold bowling trophies that ought to have been gathering dust in the attic of a house where someone ought to have stayed until retirement and then death. I found tools and album collections and golf clubs that I knew would only be left by a man who had to make a quick exit. I’d spent enough time in my grandfather’s and father’s exquisitely cluttered workshops to understand that men do not give their tools to Goodwill. It simply isn’t done.

  One of my most profound revelations came when I discovered three albums stacked together in a single Goodwill record bin: Elvis Costello and the Attractions’ Armed Forces, Adrian Belew’s Twang Bar King, and Pete Townshend’s All the Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes. There could be no accident about this. Those records, released within four years of one another, had to have come from the same collection. They had to have been in the collection of someone with specific, particular, rarefied taste, someone who really cared. They were not records that would have been discarded so soon after their release and their astute purchase. They were not records that belonged in a Goodwill. Not unless something had prompted a sudden liquidation. I would have bought them anyway, because, at 25¢ apiece, they represented a true windfall. But even more I bought them to honor whatever regrets had led to their present situat
ion, and to keep them the way they belonged. When I took them home, I put them in the wooden crate with my other albums, making certain to stack them together, intact.

  Akron, and places like Akron, are unusually rich with thrift stores. Some of this is because of the cultural shift: a profoundly strong middle class invests strongly in Middle Class Stuff. And then when that middle class falls on hard times, when it disintegrates, when it shrinks, some of that Middle Class Stuff is abandoned, to yard sales and thrift stores. It’s a matter of human mathematics: after the long division, the remainder doesn’t disappear. It has to go somewhere. Meanwhile, the hard times generate a clientele that needs thrift. And they also generate a clientele that recognizes the meaning of certain kinds of legacies. Bowling, for instance. So all those polyester shirts find their way to the Goodwill rack and so do the seekers, and the culture replenishes itself.

  (I think it is no coincidence that Akron and Dacron are not just phonetic but aesthetic homonyms.)

  By the time I started rifling through the cultural remains, thrift stores were operating at a high level of refinement, such that one understood the nuances between Goodwill, Salvation Army, and Amvets the same way Rodeo Drive sophisticates distinguish between Gucci, Armani, and Dior.

  The store where Dave and I shopped was near the university, and hence its book selection was huge, and excellent. In the same way that I had begun to gravitate toward Grosset & Dunlap spines as a child, I now received a slight electric charge when I spotted one of the icons that represented a kind of taste that was emerging in my new, older self. The orange-and-white penguin, the Viking ship, the stylized flame. Based solely on imprint association, I discovered William Kennedy, Mary Gordon, Gabriel García Márquez.

  It wasn’t so much that these books matched my aesthetic. I didn’t have one, not in any kind of evolved fashion. It was more that an aesthetic began to form amid the randomness and the seeking, and that these connections began to represent some kind of order. I was taking on the properties of my surroundings.