The Hard Way on Purpose

by David Giffels

  She invited me in. The condominium was lushly decorated, all with the same accent of her diction, something deep and balmy and herby whose origin eluded me entirely, mostly because I’d never been anywhere more exotic than the Canadian side of Niagara Falls.

  We entered the living room and she gestured for me to sit. The chair was deep and plush and I felt as if I wouldn’t be able to spring from it quickly if I had to, which (for some reason was something) I was thinking might happen soon.

  “Would you like a glass of wine?” she said, already pouring.

  “No, thank you,” I said, as she turned and handed it toward me.

  I accepted it and set it on the table beside me. She sat on a couch across from me, crossing her legs at an angle, draping an arm across the couch’s back.

  “So,” she said, nodding, and narrowing her eyes, examining me for a long moment before continuing, “Have you heard of me?”

  I wasn’t sure how to answer, wasn’t sure why I would have heard of her, and I didn’t like the question because I was sure that no was the wrong answer, but if I lied and said yes, I’d never get away with it, so I responded as carefully as I could.

  “No, I’m sorry, I don’t think I have.”

  She told me that she was under contract with a Large Commercial Publisher and that her books were doing very well and that she’d been written about in the local newspaper, although the newspaper she mentioned was not the Beacon Journal but rather a small weekly shopper that mostly carried verbatim press releases and photographs of ribbon cuttings and handshake ceremonies of the presentation of oversize checks. I knew enough about poetry to know that books filled with it were published mostly by small presses run by other poets, whom I imagined as middle-aged idealists with strawlike hair and overtaxed oxfords, who grew their own produce and believed deeply in Ralph Nader. These books weren’t even called books. They were called chapbooks, which made them sound homespun, like something hand-lettered by lamplight at the Ingalls family table, protected by a sheet of horn. They were not generally released by large commercial publishers, and not generally referred to as “doing well.” But I could have been wrong about this and was in no position to challenge.

  “First,” she said, “would you read for me?”

  I didn’t understand this question either, but before I had a chance to try, she reached over to the table beside the sofa and produced a copy of the university’s literary magazine, the sight of which made me blush hotly and tighten at the sphincter and wonder how in the hell she knew about this.

  I had three poems in that issue. That was bad enough. Worse was that their publication was laden with complications of ethics and legitimacy. While serving on the journal’s editorial committee, I had written these poems more or less spontaneously one afternoon in the library when I was supposed to be studying. I thought the poems weren’t bad, but I wasn’t sure because my problem with poetry had always been an inability to distinguish the bad from the good. I loved William Carlos Williams’s poem, “This Is Just to Say,” which sounded like a note to his family about being sorry for eating the plums that were in the icebox but they were delicious. But then someone told me it actually was a note to his family about being sorry for eating delicious plums. So what until then was one of my favorite poems I now believed wasn’t really a poem. Mostly I consumed poetry the way I consumed wine: I liked it all well enough and gladly partook whenever the opportunity arose, but I couldn’t tell the high-end stuff from the low-end stuff, and the quantifiers of quality (metrical complexity, pathos, typicity, appellation) left me nodding my head as though I understood.

  Because I couldn’t properly serve on a committee that would be judging my own work, I had submitted these poems under a pseudonym, then sat nervously as the stacks of photocopied student literature were distributed among the three editors. Soon, my two colleagues, who didn’t appear to have any better grasp of poetry than I did, were dispensing the sort of praise on my verse that student editors serve up like cafeteria scoops of mashed potatoes (“I really like the imagery”; “There’s a relatableness there”; etc.). My ego couldn’t stand the idea of not receiving these compliments directly, so I sheepishly admitted the poems were mine.

  The woman reached across the void between us, handing the magazine, which she’d already folded open, to me. I accepted it like a subpoena. She half-reclined, leaning her head back, letting her eyelids relax.

  “Read the first one,” she said.

  I had avoided looking at these words on the page ever since they had found their way there by way of the conference room where three of us somehow decided they should be in the issue but only under my real name and at the expense of my resignation from the editorial board. (Poetry is complicated, but not always in the way you think.) I had never been comfortable reading aloud to begin with, much less reading my own writing, and certainly not reading writing that included ingredients of controversy and shame.

  She waited. I realized I had no choice. I began:

  Hey, Snakeleg.

  Why not we sublimate

  The deaf girls

  And teach them to dance . . .

  I could feel the air draining from my voice. After a long spell of trying, I suddenly was unable to fool myself about these poems. They were really, really bad. And bad poetry is something much worse than bad hair or bad shoes or even a bad stomach. Allowing the world to see your bad poetry is a deliberate act, and all its negative consequences are deserved. Because nobody asked to see it in the first place.

  We oughta

  Reel in some herringbone

  And watchfob his kneecaps

  With brickbats and a tommydog . . .

  I wanted her to tell me to stop. It would have been worth the humiliation for her to just say this is horrible and I can’t listen to another word, just so I could stop hearing it myself. But she just sat there, bobbing her head.

  What the hell is a tommydog? I wondered silently. And how do you “watchfob a kneecap”?

  I finished the last line. She took a sip of her wine, reached across to the same table, and produced a hardcover book. Without introduction, she opened and began reading. I assumed this was one of her own poems and soon made out her name on the cover and listened, trying to determine if it was any good, but I’d lost any power of discernment. She finished and set the book aside.

  “Well,” she said, “now we know something about one another.”

  Not really, I thought. Pretty much the opposite.

  She began to tell me about her family and walked me through the condo, showing me around. I was waiting for her to begin to interview me, or to tell me about the job, or even just to mention it, but the longer this went on, the more I began to doubt a job existed. She showed me a framed picture of her son, who looked to be about my age, a black-haired man in green military fatigues. He was pointing an automatic rifle at the camera.

  “Very . . . nice?” I said.

  I was ready to leave.

  “So,” she finally said, “do you want to come work for me?”

  “And do what?”

  “Editing and filing. Help with the mailing.”

  I was no poet, but I couldn’t figure out any possible way this sort of work would require hiring an assistant.

  “How many hours a week?”

  “Oh, we’ll figure that out as we go along.”

  “And can I ask what it pays?”

  She offered less than I’d made in my last job, as a construction grunt. I said I didn’t think I could get by on that. She said she thought I’d change my mind once I had a chance to think it over. I eased my way toward an exit and left a quiet, uneasy exhale as I returned down the front walk to my car. I could feel her watching me. I settled into the front seat, the wood frame creaking beneath me, and felt the same tightness return to my throat that I’d felt when she asked me to read.

 
The next day I called A Professional Résumé Service. I got the job and spent the next few months writing prefab cover letters for people as desperate as I was.

  APARTMENT X

  I was hanging upside down from the fire escape when the police arrived. Loose change fell out of my pocket, ting-tinging against the pavement. I squeezed the metal stair tighter, attempting invisibility.

  Look, if you put four young men in an alley full of fire escapes under cover of darkness, one of them is going to start climbing. That’s just basic math.

  And this moonlit back corridor had offered a stunning array of choices. So while climbing up here seemed like the most natural and logical thing to be doing at three in the morning, the arrival of local law enforcement was cause for reconsideration.

  The building to whose back I clung was the Hotel Anthony Wayne. The hotel and the adjoining Bank nightclub had been abandoned for nearly a decade, which had only enhanced their mystique.

  My brother and I had spontaneously begun. I gave him a boost to the first landing of the fire escape. He reached down with one hand and pulled me up far enough that I could grasp its steel lip with my fingers and pull myself up. We couldn’t get through the cage that enclosed the landing, so we started to climb the stairs on their back side, working hand over hand as though scaling a diagonal set of monkey bars from underneath. The climb was awkward; we were leaning backward, looking up toward the sky. But it wasn’t hard, especially with the fuel of adventure, of discovery, and of an evening’s beer.

  John and our friend Larry stood at the bottom, watching, calling out instructions.

  “If you go up one more set, you can get to the next landing. It’s open there,” John said in a stage whisper.

  I watched Ralph as he led the way. He’d always been more athletic than me, and more willing to take on physical challenges. We progressed carefully—ten feet, fifteen, rising above the alley that ran behind the row of buildings, parallel to the old canal.

  * * *

  Every American Industrial Age city is defined by its water. For Akron, it was the canal. The city began as a rest stop on the Ohio and Erie Canal, and its entire shape and personality emerged from there. Akron was defined first by the vitality of the canal, then by its demise, and now by its charming obsolescence.

  The canal smells sometimes, sewer overrun, a stench that seems to overtly demand attention. The waterway still crawls through the city, a slow, man-made riverish thing that defied geography and gravity and modernity, concrete-walled, polluted, utilitarian, unkillable. Until 1913, the canal was a main commercial vein from whose prime line the entire city was drawn. But that all ended in March of that year. The freeze-thaw-freeze cycle that defines an Ohio winter had encased the state in ice amid an Easter weekend whose meteorology seems bizarre unless you’ve lived here, in which case you understand why we talk so much about the weather:

  Good Friday: sixty degrees and heavy rain.

  Holy Saturday: twenty degrees and a hard freeze and more rain.

  Easter Sunday: Heavy rain.

  The frozen and saturated ground couldn’t absorb the precipitation that kept on falling—nearly ten inches in total—and the entire state endured devastating flooding that killed more than 450 people and washed out more than forty thousand homes. In Akron, the rising water threatened to overwhelm all of downtown, and city officials took the drastic and permanent measure of dynamiting the canal locks north of the central city to relieve the pent-up water. With railroads already well established, that one exploding night ended the practical use of the canal. So now, like almost everything else, it remained as impressive in its form as it was adrift from its function, another remnant of a world we never made.

  Abandoned, it belonged to us. An entire canal, there for the taking, along with hotels and banks and whatever else was left for dead. We were like a garage band that had found ELO’s gear tossed on the curb.

  * * *

  In the moonlight, the shallow water was still and flat, barely moving forward, easing the bottom weeds in a slow, psychedelic dance. Whenever it rained, the canal’s pace quickened, but so did that smell, as sewage found its way into the mix. This night, it lolled sleepily.

  There was little direct access to the canal, just worn footpaths where the underbrush offered least resistance, but from time to time I found myself down there, rarely as a destination, most often as a matter of having escaped from the street, but always, upon arrival, wondering about this concrete stream, a shabby living history with no one to explain it. One night in high school, my friend Dave and I camped out in front of the old downtown Akron Civic Theater, first in line to buy tickets to see the Clash play there on what would become their final tour. Once we’d established our spot with sleeping bags and lawn chairs, we took occasional breaks to sneak behind the theater and shotgun contraband beers. The theater spanned the canal by way of a bridge from the main building to the back dressing rooms, and we sat underneath, listening to the soft rush of a little waterfall echoing off the pillars and the theater above us. Across the shimmering water, we could see the date 1906 stamped into the concrete wall. We tossed our cans into the water and reestablished ourselves in our position of dominance out by the ornate box office.

  For several years, I was in a band that played in a shabby club called the Daily Double, a converted warehouse that overlooked the canal half a mile to the south, the slow, anachronistic stream offering a place to wander to after the gear was loaded and it felt too early to go home.

  This night, then, carried the slant echo of discovery as we trooped along in the weeds. From the fire escape, the vantage of my downtown was revelatory in its way, fifty feet off the promenade, scanning the buildings from behind and slightly below. Their fronts all displayed failure, plywood and cardboard and newspaper on either side of the doorways, covering the storefronts’ faces like sets of ashamed hands. Their façades were untended, cracked marble and glass, fading paint, dead neon, defeated brokers’ signs, abandoned pleas. But here in the alley, the backs of the buildings seemed self-assured, the brick arches of their windows like the brows of watchful eyes, the rusty iron staircases still offering escape. Holes were punched in the brick and missing windows, but that only seemed to underscore the prevailing survival instinct, which, more than anything else, defined this heady corridor. Weeds back here were mature, a horticulture of untended urbanity rustling in the night. The oxygen they breathed out was just as good as that from orchids and hibiscus. Unperfumed, but perfectly useful. The ground was uneven brick splotched with macadam and bituminous fill. Glass crunched underfoot. Stray clumps of paper, wet and dried and wet and dried, clung to rocks and weeds like plaster of a badly formed cast.

  These were some of my favorite places in the world. These buildings never seemed dead to me. I found the empty, boarded-up downtown hotels far less dead than the falsely sterile, monotonous chains that stood submissive and unadorned at every highway exit. There were no surprises there, and the antiseptic air always felt like the whisper of a lie it thought I wanted to hear. Here, the decay was honest and full of life, vibrant in its constant self-creation. Every view was a thrill. In daylight, I’d seen where small plants had taken root in the mortar of the old brick buildings, growing sideways and upward out of the wall, as though to prove defiantly there was still life to give. These buildings were constructed to last forever; despite everything that had happened in the past decade or two, they maintained that presence. The new strip malls, on the other hand, offered a cynical implication that the buildings would exist only as long as their leases, that they had no need to be beautiful or permanent, because with their green lumber and hollow blocks they could easily be demolished and replaced with a new structure that better suited the corporate footprint of the new tenant. From Shoe Carnival to Hobby Lobby in three easy steps. (Liquidate, eradicate, fabricate.)

  * * *

  John was separated from his wife and living in a lof
t space downtown that had been empty since the 1970s. The building was just across the street from the Goodrich factory where a few years before we had commemorated the beginning of his marriage. So the location had something of a bittersweetness. Despite the seeming quaintness of the term, the notion of a “downtown loft” had nothing to do with yuppie gentrification. There was no trend, no glamour, no promise of future return on an investment. As far as we knew, only one other person lived downtown as a matter of choice, a photographer who had purchased cheap space for a studio above an abandoned storefront and had turned part of his loft into his home. His space, he claimed, had once been a brothel, and he described himself sometimes as the resident whore. The rest of the downtown dwellers were in the Mayflower Hotel or, worse, invisible in doorways and stairwells, their silhouettes impressed upon piles of wear-softened cardboard and cloth.

  John’s apartment, decades before, had been occupied by the owner of the jewelry store two floors down. The name of the store owner—Fred A. Grimm—was memorialized in the mosaic tile at the threshold, though, like almost everything else downtown, that sign existed as a reference divorced from its referent, a puzzle piece without its mate, prompting John to make references to “Ole Lady Grimm”—a sort of specter to ease the loneliness. Now the space was occupied by a little restaurant called the Diamond Deli, itself a reference to the old jewelry store. On Sundays, Pat, the owner, made a big batch of soup for the coming workweek and made sure to feed John, whom she seemed to regard as a sort of stray.