The Hard Way on Purpose

by David Giffels

  I have no idea this is terrible. These are the Wombats and they have a record contract and they are going on tour.

  * * *

  The Bank was dying. I didn’t know that then. I didn’t have any sense of where these things came from and where they went and how tentative they always are, these places of minor personal legend. Ball fields, dance halls, banking institutions—they are all born dying and their moment of being alive is just that—a moment.

  * * *

  Ralph and I went one final time that winter before the Bank closed. We set out in one of those Ohio snowfalls that feels as if it were wrapping you up in itself for transport to another dimension, thick and deep and utterly transforming. The snow piled high even on the overhead wires and on the sidearms of light poles and draped itself into curved scallops over the heads of the elemental brick buildings that lined Main Street downtown. We had left home late, ten o’clock or so, and the snow had stopped falling by then, so that when we parked and got out of the car to cross the street to the club, a dense silence muted the scene.

  Akron was approaching the depth of its despair, close enough that its desperation felt alive, almost vibrant. This did not strike me as a paradox. It suggested possibility, adventure, a rough draft of legend. Many of the buildings downtown were abandoned. We’d heard that someone had broken into the Hony Wayne and happened into a room where a mattress was covered with blood and had done what seemed the only thing to do in a situation that was settling across all of us then: nothing. Because in a situation like that, the right thing doesn’t exist.

  Ralph and I went into the Bank, and it was warm inside, and yellow-gray, and we stayed and watched and listened and drank until closing. When we left and walked back outside and stepped from the sidewalk, we saw only one set of tire tracks in the snow: our own, from hours before, leading to where we’d parked the car. We followed them back home.

  867-5309: A LOVE SONG

  Sometimes my home did feel like the middle of nowhere. Or more accurately (and worse) like a confounding void in the middle of somewhere. Everything of note that was from here was literally from here. If it became known, it was almost a given that it no longer existed here. Devo, transplanted in Los Angeles, referred derisively to their Ohio hometown as “a good place to be from.” Chrissie Hynde, expatriated to England, wrote her long-distance ode to Akron: “My City Was Gone.” Even Firestone, one of the city’s signature corporations—motto: “The name that’s known is Firestone”—moved its headquarters away. And not once, but twice. First to Chicago, then back to Akron, then to Nashville, all within four years, as though to underscore and amplify its departure.

  It seemed that if anything had potential, it left. It began to seem necessary, the only option. Half my high school class was gone by the end of graduation summer, and the others trickled away, one after the next after the next. And conversely, everything of interest came, conspicuously, from elsewhere. Whatever we saw on television or heard on the radio or read in a magazine came from another place, and almost always the big cultural centers—New York or Los Angeles or, occasionally, Canada. Which made us seem even more disconnected.

  So it was with considerable interest, in the summer of 1982, that I heard this harmonized chorus . . . a song, a hit on the radio, by the band Tommy Tutone . . . a song of obsession, of unrequited love, for a girl named Jenny, whose number was found on a bathroom wall:

  Eight six seven five three oh ni-ee-niyne . . .

  Eight? Six? Seven?

  I put my ear toward the radio. I heard it again, a startlingly familiar series of numbers. This was a local telephone exchange, and not just a local exchange, but the one in my own neighborhood. Everyone I knew in the blocks surrounding my house had a number that started with an 8, and most of them started with that very one—867. Somebody had written a song about where I lived, and it was a good song, and it was a hit. My slowly emerging sense of art suggested that the most important songs were about real-life experiences, which was why everyone seemed so crazy about Bruce Springsteen, because everyone who listened to him literally had a “hungry heart” and could therefore relate personally to his lyrics. But now there was a song about a real-life experience that was not a familiar generalization; it actually referred to a specific aspect of my own life experience.

  America was vast and fascinating in its every region, infinite in its telephonic numerology, and the writer of that song (who was from California!) could have picked any exchange to represent any place—or could have picked 555-5309 to represent every place (which would inevitably have represented no place). But he didn’t. This Jenny person could be living a block away.

  We knew what we had to do. We went to the basement, where a wall-mounted telephone was next to the washer and dryer, useful for teenage privacies. My older brother took his position as overseer. I lifted the receiver and dialed: 8 . . . 6 . . . 7 . . . 5 . . . 3 . . . 0 . . . 9 . . .

  “Hello?”

  I didn’t have a lot of experience talking on the phone to girls, and so the notion of cold-calling—and particularly someone famous—took all the nerve I could muster.

  “Is? . . . Is Jenny th—”

  Click.

  * * *

  It would be years before I learned the full truth of the song. The cowriter, Alex Call, said in 2004 that he was looking for a simple pop hook, and something about the rhythm and syntax of those numbers found their way more or less randomly through his imagination.

  “Despite all the mythology to the contrary, I actually just came up with the ‘Jenny,’ and the telephone number and the music and all that just sitting in my backyard,” he told an interviewer for songfacts.com. “There was no Jenny. I don’t know where the number came from, I was just trying to write a four-chord rock song, and it just kind of came out. . . . I made it up under a plum tree in my backyard.”

  Under a plum tree. In California. This would suggest the meaningfulness-­to-catchiness ratio was approximately that of “a-wop-bop-a-loo-mop-a-wop-bam-boom.”

  Bruce Springsteen would later write a song called “Youngs­town,” about the actual Youngstown, with a love interest also named Jenny.

  Here in Youngstown,

  My sweet Jenny, I’m sinkin’ down . . .

  The name was literal, drawn from local history, and is well-known in that beleaguered city. Jenny was the town’s nickname for the Jeanette Blast Furnace, part of a vibrant steel mill that shut down in 1977. Jenny sat rusting for two decades until its demolition in 1996, a year after Springsteen’s song came out.

  This bold adherence to fact and emotional truth seemed almost like a make-up call from the songwriter community. But far too little and far too late for me.

  * * *

  It took a while for the news to reach us, mostly because it wasn’t really “news” so much as the opposite of news, but somehow that summer we learned there were 867–5309s in other places—apparently lots of other places—and the one that was getting all the attention was the home phone number of the daughter of the Buffalo chief of police, who was pretty unhappy about the whole thing.

  Which meant we were nobody again.

  We kept calling the local number from time to time because more than anything else, that’s what teenage boys do: the same thing over and over, expecting different results. But we never so much as got the satisfaction of being yelled at, and soon we learned that even that part of the unraveling myth was not exclusively ours; apparently everyone in the area code who owned a radio had thought of the same prank, and before long the seven precious numbers resulted in three atonal beeps followed by the sad, familiar refrain:

  We’re sorry. You have reached a number that has been disconnected or is no longer in service. If you feel you have reached this recording in error, please check the number and try your call again.

  PART THREE

  LOCAL MEN

  As we go up, we go down.

  —
Guided by Voices

  THE TAJ MAHAL

  The old man’s bar was called the Taj Mahal because one of the ancient brothers who owned the place was something of a world traveler and had decorated the interior with photographs of himself in European capitals and on African safari and shaking hands with Pygmies and whatnot. He’d spent his life visiting ruins, which was good training for operating a tavern in downtown Akron, Ohio, as the eighties drained down. Off to one end of the bar, displayed on a table, was a large model of the actual Taj Mahal, complete with a moat that was stocked with goldfish. This was unfortunate for many reasons, but mainly because the Taj Mahal was directly across the street from the Mayflower Hotel, which had once offered the finest lodgings in town, but now was a subsidized flophouse for drunks and crazies. You don’t really want goldfish swimming in open waters surrounded by people carrying glasses of alcohol, especially when you know that some of them will get the shakes before the night is through.

  This was the bar where we chose to celebrate John Puglia’s “bachelor party,” such as it was. No strippers, no tequila shots, no wild night in Vegas with a bunch of friends. John was getting married in a week, and the two of us wanted to go somewhere authentic, which notion was important to us—him studying art and me studying creative writing—even if we would never say such a thing publicly. Authenticity is something all young men crave, which is why we sometimes wear fedoras and restore cranky British motorcycles and listen to Frank Sinatra and why suspenders occasionally come back into fashion.

  We’d grown up in a no-man’s-land between two eras: the first, one of microdefined parochialism, and the second, one of amorphous mass culture. John and I were part of the first generation that didn’t directly associate all of our defining local institutions with a corresponding local founding figure. The daily newspaper, the Akron Beacon Journal, founded by Charles L. Knight and groomed through the twentieth century by his son John S. Knight, had become the cornerstone of the powerful Knight Ridder newspaper chain. But while his surname was also part of a national brand, Knight, the larger-than-life man who also walked among us, had died in 1981. The major American tire companies—Goodyear, Firestone, B. F. Goodrich, and General—each had its world headquarters here, and each had scores of former workers who remembered shaking hands with the founders and figureheads. My dad always loved to tell the story about having a drink with Jerry O’Neil, the CEO and son of the founder of General Tire. But those men were gone, and while their names were on street signs and school buildings and hospitals, we had no direct connection to the humans who’d borne them.

  Instead, we’d grown up with a strong sense of branding as massive, yet impersonal. Pepsi, for instance, was everywhere, and it was the same everywhere, but there was no sense of its personal mythology, its creator, its connection to any human endeavor other than consumption. It was no mistake that John had named his rock band the Generics. The arrival of generic products in our grocery stores had been a defining moment in our childhoods. Our dads proudly drank beer from a white can with black lettering that said BEER.

  And this homogeneity carried all the way across the culture. National chain stores and restaurants were proliferating, with an ever-growing sense of sameness, such that one could enter a Cracker Barrel or a Waldenbooks in any city in the country and feel immediately oriented, with everything where it was supposed to be, looking the way it was supposed to look. The idea of exploration and discovery was being replaced with comfort and familiarity. It was becoming impossible to get lost, which is where the imagination thrives. Yet, even though we always knew where we were, we had a nagging sense of disorientation. If the Waldenbooks self-help aisle in Denver was identical to the one in Milwaukee and identical to the one in Jacksonville, then the idea of being somewhere was more like being anywhere, which is uncomfortably close to the idea of being nowhere, or of where being an irrelevant notion altogether.

  So John and I weren’t directly defined by our place, not the way our parents had been. And we couldn’t be defined by what was replacing it because that was impossible. We were watching all of the old institutions that had given our city its personality be replaced by boxes containing TGI Friday’s and Super K-Mart—things that defined everybody’s life the same way, which means they didn’t define anyone’s in any particular way.

  Gold Circle had gone under, and although it was a chain, it was regional; it was close to home, and so it had some connection to my sense of place. I liked when I went to another state and realized they didn’t have a Gold Circle there, that it was somehow more mine because it wasn’t theirs. Other places had their own version of this—Piggly Wiggly or Big Bear. In a similar spirit, I was particularly fond of obscure rock bands because, when I found someone else who was a fan of, say, Hüsker Dü or Bush Tetras, it created a bond. (Unfortunately, this sometimes devolved into the inevitable affliction of choosing obscure things solely for the sake of their obscurity, the effect of which was a record collection with a considerable percentage of terrible music. But still.)

  So John and I had taken to exploring our downtown, a place almost nobody went, with some sense of purpose and even maybe urgency. Main Street seemed increasingly intimate because it belonged to increasingly fewer people and increasingly fewer people belonged to it. The act of consciously choosing it as ours seemed like a membership.

  Then again, an inventory of the Taj Mahal’s clientele suggested that maybe this was not such a hard (or desirable) association to crack. Many of the patrons were entirely defined by their deficiencies, in the way the characters of a formula detective novel are defined by their singular traits, and not just defined, but named: Toothless, One-Leg, Lumpy. They wore their drunkenness like hundred-pound cloaks. It covered them completely and bent them down. Half of them were socially withdrawn in ways that made newcomers uncomfortable; the other half were socially outgoing to the same effect.

  Again, this was where we went to celebrate John’s last night as a bachelor.

  * * *

  The man started a conversation with John. His name was Bob. He spoke in an affectedly elegant voice, the kind that takes dictation from a thesaurus. In the way that Hollywood used to attach an English accent to anyone sophisticated, regardless of nationality (Ashley Wilkes, Nazi officers, Roman senators, etc.), Bob seemed to have taken the continental route to his barstool at the Taj Mahal.

  “What do you know of beauty?” he asked, first looking at John, then at me.

  I didn’t know how to answer the question, and John didn’t either, but he was quicker on his feet and better at these games.

  “What do you know of beauty?” John responded with a sideways laugh, turning the question back to the old man. John was always best as a catalyst.

  Sitting next to Bob was a friend of his, a short, sturdy man with thick gray hair, neatly combed, and an elaborately waxed mustache. His name was Jerry and we knew him mainly for his public presence trolling the sidewalks wearing a sandwich board for one of the few downtown restaurants, which he did in return for being allowed to display his paintings there. He wore a suit with wide lapels, no tie, the collar of his shirt overlapping his jacket. Everything was just so. He smelled strongly of soap, which for some reason never makes a person smell clean.

  He lived in the Mayflower. He said he had a studio there, and the way he said the word studio suggested he took the work he did there seriously, with a little extra emphasis on the u syllable.

  “I have one piece that I painted,” he told me. “It’s a boy, and a dog. Both of them are on the grass, with their bellies down on the ground, staring, face-to-face. They’re tugging on a piece of rope. The boy’s holding it in his hand; the dog has it in his teeth. And they’re facing off. It is not a sentimental piece. It is realism. I call it Best Friend. The title is ambiguous. Is the boy the dog’s best friend? “Or”—brief dramatic pause—“is the dog the boy’s best friend?”

  The Jerry I knew in the daytime—the
downtown I knew in the daytime—held for me the same allure as, say, the music of Tom Waits and the notion of firing a Winchester: an exotic mystique that seemed directly American, slightly distant and illuminated, something directly of who and what I was, but also something “other,” something John and I both wanted to understand. Jerry in the nighttime, however, was a bit close for comfort, and I suppose by extension implied that maybe Tom Waits was just an excellent trickster and that I’d look foolish absorbing the kick of an anachronistic firearm. I didn’t know how to maintain my end of this conversation and drifted back toward John’s.

  Bob was still talking about beauty, becoming more specific, talking about a woman’s beauty and then a woman’s flesh and then a woman’s pink flesh. When he took a drink, he held it in his mouth for a while, not so much as if he were savoring, but as though in some brief indecision about swallowing it, although the only other option would be to spit it out, and I seriously doubt anyone in the Taj Mahal ever spit liquor out on purpose.

  “These people here, these are poor people,” he said. “Not poor in money. I don’t mean that. But poor in beauty. They have not been given the opportunities that we have had to see the beauty of the world. So they are poor. But it’s not their fault.”

  I wondered what it meant to put on a suit to go to a bar like this, not a business suit or a funeral suit, but what Bob might call a “suit of clothes,” something to complete a man. Bob came across as the fading shadow of an Esquire man, of the Norman Mailer Esquire. His Wild Turkey was Glenlivet; his polyester was vicuña. I was wearing an untucked oxford shirt, which simultaneously made me feel conspicuously overdressed, like a college boy misplaced in an old man’s bar (which I was), and also, in the shadow of Bob, underdressed. Either way, I didn’t fit.