The Hard Way on Purpose

by David Giffels

  A code, an ethic, among the strictest adherents approached something like a religion, complete with ritualistic tattoos, symbolic hairstyles, and strict rules of dress. (No stonewashed jeans, of course. But also no shiny leather or overt hats or other such indication of having considered “style.” Even though most of us spent inordinate percentages of our waking hours considering our appearance, and how to groom it in such a way as to seem we’d never given it any thought at all. Such studied nonchalance is pretty exhausting. That’s why hipsters are so skinny. They burn a lot of calories trying to look as if they couldn’t care less.)

  The hierarchy of the local punk-rock scene tended to break down by hairstyle. Skinheads, by virtue of what they had sacrificed for their art (i.e., hair), represented the supreme leadership. Anyone with a socially risky novelty haircut (Mohawk, dreads, etc.) operated on the level of a high diplomat and usually got asked to be in other bands. The rest of us accepted our role as semi-insiders and tried to hide that we had middle-class parents and middle-class haircuts and middle-class futures and also a battery-operated, plug-in guitar tuner. Any outward suggestion of musicianship or ambition was suspect.

  In similar fashion, devout Amish men stop cutting their beards and women grow their hair long after marriage, a symbol of their maturing in their commitment. (In 2011, a group of Amish radicals, in a series of attacks on peers whom they considered untrue to the Church, violently hacked off their victims’ beards and hair. The ringleader of these attackers, it’s worth mentioning, had the last name Mullet.)

  In the Akron-Cleveland scene, the skinheads were the opposite of the aggressive, often-racist skinheads in other cities. Ours were basically hippies without the hair or the drugs. They were all pacifists. Some were vegetarians. Many were straight-edge, with black X’s drawn (or sometimes even tattooed) on their wrists indicating they didn’t drink or smoke or get high. The most austere of these also abstained from sex, although it’s hard to say whether that was by choice. The purest of them all, a soulful, organic guy named Jimi Imij, embraced his ancestral Sioux culture so that he made traditional jewelry and knew the dances and lived in a commune of sorts, a punk-rock flophouse behind the hospital. I became fascinated with Jimi because he seemed heroically idealistic—the first genuinely indigent person I’d ever known, and who seemed to have chosen the condition as a moral imperative—and also because he reminded me of one of my fictional heroes, James Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumppo, wearing Levi’s shredded to fringe and living by a code I couldn’t begin to understand. Jimi made something out of everything he found. As far as I could tell, he had never purchased anything in a store. He was always piecing together jewelry on the coffee tables in the rented houses where he flopped, working with serious intent in darkened living rooms crawling with cats and smelling of Bugler tobacco and hobo stew. Jimi would come across abandoned shoes and collect them, so that when I went to visit him, he’d offer me a pair of moldy combat boots from a box in the basement. My brother and I used to joke that if Jimi had a guitar—which he didn’t because of his self-inflicted, semitranscendent poverty—it would be made of dirt. Years later he finally did have a guitar. He showed it to me; he had made it out of a piece of driftwood that had washed up from Lake Erie.

  At first, Jimi was a fascination. For a while, as I was undergoing my sometimes awkward postcollege entry into something like a traditional middle-class indoctrination, I wondered if he was avoiding his own such transition. But now—and I still see him often—I respect him deeply as a pure soul. He has evolved, yet remains committed to his old ideals, the same ones that informed me. Sleeping on the floors of musicians’ apartments in other cities and giving them a floor to sleep on in your own, sharing a drum kit, catching someone who gets knocked asunder in the mosh pit, splitting the door money evenly—these mature into lessons of generosity, of tolerance, of charity. I feel a strong, old connection to Jimi. We understand each other. We live differently, but we return to a shared culture.

  Now middle-aged, Jimi is Amish in the same way that an old-order Mennonite is punk rock. Both wear big, black boots. Both maintain highly symbolic hair. Both have chosen their path deliberately, knowing full well there are easier paths to have chosen.

  * * *

  I’ve heard others accuse the Amish of hypocrisy. They’re criticized because they shun the conventions of mainstream society yet market their wares aggressively. They will not own or drive cars, but will allow themselves to be driven in other people’s vehicles. They eschew pleasures of the flesh yet allow for a spell of adolescent hedonism called Rumspringa.

  The opposite of that criticism is to admire the extent to which they maintain their traditions and convictions despite a society in which this is nearly impossible. The Amish man who told me the voting joke, for instance, allowed himself to be photographed, but only from a discreet distance, and in silhouette, without turning his face to the camera.

  I spent a long afternoon talking with an old-order Amish man who owned a furniture shop.

  He had no electricity or telephone in his home, but allowed both in his office. No electric lights in the workshop, but gas lights were allowed.

  His thirty-four Amish employees couldn’t drive or own cars, but were picked up each morning by passenger van.

  He can’t own a television or computer but told me he’d watched FOX News that morning on a laptop owned by one of his drivers.

  A Trans Am was for sale at the end of his driveway, out near the road, and when I asked about it, he hedged at first, then asked me not to include it in my newspaper story. It belonged to his son, he explained in a tone that suggested he wished this high-concept simple life of his were easier.

  But he was trying.

  His shop makes furniture to a high standard of craft, and without the relative ease of fully modernized production. People buy it in great part because they recognize and respect the reputation of Amish workmanship. It’s a mark of quality.

  One of the greatest challenges, he told me, has been coming recently from overseas. Imported furniture, mass-produced with cheap labor in Asia, then stamped AMISH MADE, is sold in the same places where his is sold. But with a much higher profit margin. Even to him, and even on close inspection, it’s hard to tell the real Amish products from the knockoffs.

  This tension carries over into the notion of casting a vote, which is one of the ways Americans are privileged to feel a relief from certain tensions, feel some sense of power or control.

  The usual estimate is that fewer than 10 percent of the Amish vote, but this man—who follows news and public opinion closely in his own delicate process—told me he believed the Amish voter turnout would be much higher, probably closer to 40 percent. Most of those votes would be cast absentee. Discreetly.

  * * *

  I continued into October—south to a county full of dead coal mines with a 27 percent poverty rate and then west to a farming community where, in the 2000 election, 74 percent of the presidential votes had gone to George Bush. And then north, to an inner-city Cleveland precinct where, in that same election, zero people had voted for Bush.

  And then to Columbus, the state capital and the center of Ohio politics, a city so political that drinking establishments are described not as “biker bars” or “gay bars,” but rather “Democrat bars” and “Republican bars,” a city so political that—I guess I should have seen this coming—no one would talk openly to me about politics. Even the guy selling flowers from a street cart was guarded. It was all too much of a game. Somebody could be listening. Everyone was thinking three steps ahead. They wanted me to play along. That was the only way in.

  I left.

  Finally, I went to a town I’d never visited before but had always wanted to, a mile from the Indiana border, a town whose name I’d circled on the map way back before I began this long exploration: Hicksville. I went there for the opposite of the cheap joke. I went there for something other than a
n easy answer. I went there because every four years Ohio comes under this national lens, and I suspect the coastal media forces, and the consumers of that media, sometimes regard us collectively as their own personal Hicksville.

  It was now just a few weeks till Election Day. As everyone had predicted, Ohio had evolved from being a battleground state to being the swing state. Everybody knew this. We knew it. It was exciting in some ways, and it also made us nervous. Partly because of the louder and louder whispers dreading the specter of becoming “another Florida.” Mostly because there were too many ways to get it wrong.

  So my purpose in Hicksville was to undermine the shorthand, to look at this place the way I’d looked at all the others, to allow people to speak, to challenge my own perceptions, etc. But a strange thing happened there as I finished a club sandwich in the Sunrise Café and approached the table full of retirement-age, midafternoon coffee drinkers, whom I’d been eavesdropping on during my lunch. I introduced myself, said I’d been traveling the state to write about the election, and they spontaneously, spiritedly, one by one, picked it up from there, responding in a way that seemed completely natural, as though they’d been expecting me, and completely unnatural, because, why would they have been expecting me?

  Man #1: “I have voted Independent; I’ve voted Democrat; I’ve voted Republican. And I’m a Bush guy.”

  Man #2: “I’m for Bush.”

  Woman #1: “Me too.”

  Man #3: “Put this in your paper—Bush is gonna win.”

  Then all four turned toward their friend at the adjacent table, a man wearing a hat with the word ROGUE across the front. He shrank back in mock defensiveness.

  “I’m a Kerry guy,” he said.

  But I’d never asked them how they were voting. All I’d said was that I was writing about the election and they’d taken over from there, as though they’d been conditioned by the ubiquity of media to categorize themselves. Maybe they understood what I was after better than I understood it myself. Steve Doocy, the FOX anchor, might agree with that assessment. Maybe I was trying to hard.

  * * *

  What I was after was where we are in agreement. Not long before, I’d spent a day with an apple farmer in northwest Ohio, talking about all sorts of things, one of the best conversations I’d had in a season full of excellent conversations. We were well past lunch before we ever got around to the specifics of this election and his vote. On this warm and generous Ohio autumn day, drunk with bees and plump with squash, the kind of day we acknowledge as the dividend for our investment in an unruly climate, he’d shown me the gorilla costume he keeps in one of his barns (“I just always wanted one”) and poured me a glass of unpasteurized cider to demonstrate (convincingly, I’d say) why less government makes for more delicious apple juice. He’d described the corn maze he makes for visiting children each fall. Then he asked if I wanted to see his corn cannon.

  We went into a cluttered barn and he rooted around and pulled out a bazooka-like contraption made from two hunks of PVC pipe with an air compressor hookup, self-invented and homemade, the kind of thing farmers do just because they can. He carried it outside into the blue afternoon and dragged an air hose over and hooked it up.

  “Wanna try?” He offered the cannon.

  I took it in both arms and he explained how to get it balanced and where to aim. Then he tossed a dried hunk of corncob down the five-foot length of pipe and let the pressure build inside the chamber.

  I let the barrel rest against my hip and eased the front end toward the sky.

  “Ready?”

  The farmer squeezed the trigger, and with a resounding THOOP! the corncob blasted out, clearing the county highway, arcing across the cerulean sky, spinning and tumbling, wild and free, finally landing in the next acre, announcing its completion with a distant, little plume of dust.

  I looked back and he was smiling and he didn’t even have to ask. He grabbed another corncob and tossed it down the pipe.

  DEMOLITION

  This was most definitely the first time I had requested permission to get inside the Bank. For all the times I’d been in there, I’d never actually asked. I’d snuck in underage. I’d tried to break in through the old hotel. I’d walked right through the door as though I belonged. For a while there in the beginning, I thought I needed permission. I’ve come to realize, though, that elitism doesn’t work well in places like this. Excluding people is a bad idea when you don’t have that many to begin with.

  So the fact that I was asking meant either that I had changed, or that something else had changed.

  Probably both.

  The Bank and the adjacent hotel had been boarded up for more than a decade. All those years, whenever I passed by, I felt, more than anything else, a weird sense of ownership, as if it were partly mine because I had been there when no one else wanted it. A time-share in a ghost hotel. Meanwhile, the city had been clawing its way back from its worst years. The Bank, the Hotel Anthony Wayne, and the surrounding, abandoned buildings were about to be torn down to make way for a minor-league baseball stadium. The Cleveland Indians’ AA affiliate would play there. The stadium was to be called Canal Park because the canal that ran behind it was also being reclaimed. Mile by mile, a walking trail was being developed along its length. Since that dynamite explosion in 1913, the canal had continued to exist without context, incongruous, and now a new context was being applied. The following spring—1997—the stadium would open, and an entire corridor of restaurants, bars, new businesses, and housing would follow.

  * * *

  In the industrial Midwest, we tend to describe places not by what they are, but by what they used to be.

  So I went to a college with dorms called “the old Holiday Inn,” and an art building called Van Devere, after the name of the Pontiac dealership that used to occupy it. The old Quaker Oats grain silos, one of the city’s defining features, had been converted into round hotel rooms, the Quaker Hilton.

  It seemed appropriate, then, that when Cleveland Browns owner Art Modell covertly sold the team to Baltimore, abandoning us, that the prevailing outcry was to let us keep the team name. It’s not so much the idea of clinging to the past as it is a deep understanding that progress is not linear, and the beginning is just as important as what follows. In cities where things were made, we understand the notion of cycles, the way things are worked and reworked, the way excess is gathered from the floor and used for the next job, the way things change and improve, but never completely untie from their origins.

  Therefore, when so many physical places were emptied out and left behind, there was constant intrigue in their past, even when they were desolate and even when they were abused, and then later, when they were reclaimed.

  Soon after the Bank closed, I started playing in a band, in little rock clubs, and almost every place bands like mine played in was some version of this—a cast-off, a hand-me-down, a curb-find, the architectural equivalent of a thrift-store acquisition. In Akron, in Cleveland, in Pittsburgh, in Youngstown, music centered mainly in bars that had been pulled from the junk heap or fashioned from abandoned warehouses and storefronts. (And almost exclusively, for some reason, at the bottom or top of a steep, cramped staircase, which made the hauling of amplifiers a Sisyphean chore. Everyone who has ever played in a rock band in the Midwest knows this: it is always three in the morning, and it is always snowing, and you’re always in a tow-away zone, and there are always stairs.)

  I played on a stage with a stripper pole in the middle and on one with abandoned disco lights in its floor and in old movie theaters and a deserted frat bar. Without realizing it, my instincts were being tuned. Eventually, I would establish my family in a forlorn house that was facing condemnation.

  I loved wrecked and abandoned buildings not out of a morbid fascination or a sense of exploitation, but because they felt like home.

  * * *

  So in my role as
an Akron Beacon Journal reporter, I called the city building department and asked if I could get inside the Bank to look around and was given surprisingly easy access. A pre-demolition crew was working there and I could go in anytime during the day, the man said. Try not to get hurt. It felt kind of like the doorman giving a cursory glance to my obviously fake ID.

  I went there on a fall afternoon. The façade still looked exactly as it had when I was eighteen, with its name still above the door—THE BANK—in block letters, serifed like the name of a Western saloon. I went through an opening in the back, a way in I didn’t know existed, and slowly entered the vast, open room. The cavernous space was filled with murky, indirect light. I’d never been in here in the daytime, and that was the first thing that felt strange—a bar in the daytime that’s no longer a bar offers rarefied disorientation—but soon enough everything felt strange, changed completely. At the far end of the room was where the stage should have been, but it was gone. So was the parachute that used to hang from the ceiling. The ornate millwork up there was all punched with holes. Plaster crunched underfoot. The bar was gone. The balcony railing was gone. There was no furniture, no shelving or mirrors. The art deco lightshades that used to hang from the ceiling were gone. The only thing left was the huge steel vault door, which had always felt like the building’s anchor and still did. I wanted to feel nostalgic, or sad. I think I insisted on feeling that way, and for a minute or so I tried to force it, the way you try to allow tears at an uncle’s funeral but find that they won’t come. I remembered where I sat that night when the Generics played. I walked straight to the spot, or about where I thought it was. I shifted my weight from one foot to the other. I found it interesting to be inside, certainly. But this was little more than a game. I was in the shell of a life that no longer existed except inside me.