The Hard Way on Purpose

by David Giffels

I wanted to tell someone this, but there was no one to tell. A few men in hard hats were outside the doorway, but they wouldn’t have cared. All my adult life, I’d been semiconsumed with this notion of who I was and whom I was supposed to become, and only then was I coming to realize that circumstances had filled in the blanks. I was born into a place and time that needed me. That’s who I was: a product of all this.

  A few weeks later, on a Saturday morning, a crowd gathered a block away, held back by a police barrier. Jimi Imij was there, holding a video camera, which itself seemed science-fictional, a caveman discovering technology, and led me to wonder if he’d fashioned it from beads and kindling. His hair was long and stringy, a baboon ass of baldness at the crown where once he’d shaved strange shapes. Jimi had become a self-made, oddball historian, starting a loose collective called the Ohio Hystairical Musick Society—acronym OHMS (appropriately, the measure of resistance)—gathering up memorabilia of Ohio’s music history, all these scattered pieces of a hard-to-assemble past. He’d learned how to burn CDs on a borrowed machine and cobbled together homemade compilations with taped-paper sleeves, giving them away for free. Now he stood amid the crowd on Main Street.

  An amplified voice counted down to one, and then, with a loud explosion the back end of the building, behind the old bank, imploded, toppling breathlessly into a cloud of dust, creating a perfect void. But the main section, the Bank and the Hotel Anthony Wayne, remained.

  “That big son of a bitch is still standing there!” someone said.

  “I guess they put the charge down in the vault,” someone else said.

  “Hey—put somebody in there that can do it!”

  Before the words had a chance to find a hold, another charge boomed and the second half of the building followed the first, disappearing in a billowing cloud. A hole was there so suddenly it took the very breath.

  * * *

  With the building of the stadium—whose redbrick architecture unambiguously reflected that of a factory tower—a momentum of reclamation began. Soon my job at the newspaper became, more or less, to go into these old places and see what they were becoming. I toured an old building with a warren of rooms upstairs, a boardinghouse/brothel that (so the story said) had housed a speakeasy in the basement. It was becoming a bar and restaurant. I explored the ceiling of the old Civic Theater from above, an ingenious gray plaster honeycomb that I viewed from a catwalk that surrounded it. I went through a former Goodyear factory whose closing had destroyed an underpinning of identity and pride, but which had since been reinvented as Goodyear’s research and technical center.

  And I took one last walk through the old Goodrich factory, the big one at the corner, the one John and I had gone exploring in. The building was being converted into the headquarters of a polymer research firm that was moving to Akron. Polymers are first cousins to rubber, and the idea of the old tire factory’s being repurposed for a new form of the old story—and bringing jobs into a place that had lost so many of them—offered a form of hope. Nothing is simple, however, nothing is easy, we certainly know that here. But for that very reason, we are experts at knowing hope when we see it, and for accepting it with the proper caution. Hope here is like an offered stick of cartoon dynamite posing as a cigar.

  The center of each floor had been cut out inside the thick concrete pillars to create an atrium that went all the way up to the roof, to let in the light. The edges of the cuts were left exposed, and although concrete is man-made, it has the character and beauty of natural stone, exhibiting strength and ingenuity. (In all these old factories, if you look closely at the ceilings, you can see the grain of the plywood forms into which the concrete was poured. This gives the effect of a fossil, of seeing the organic evolution of the place.) All the graffiti had been sandblasted, but a group of University of Akron photography students had first been allowed to go through and document it on film.

  None of this felt like a victory. We’d been in recession, more or less, since the year I’d graduated high school. The population was still receding. Three of the city’s four major tire companies had been purchased by foreign competitors, their world headquarters uprooted and moved to other places. Only Goodyear remained, along with the research wing of what was now Bridgestone/Firestone. All of which meant that we were something different that we still couldn’t quite put a name on. But it also meant we hadn’t given up.

  This place has never been defined by success anyway, even when things were at their best. It’s always been more about how we deal with failure.

  DO NOT CRY FOR ME, ARIZONA

  Remember how, on M*A*S*H, whenever a character would leave the show, the casting director would pull off a brilliant replacement, a new ensemble member who served a parallel function, but in totally different guise? So Hawkeye Pierce’s trusty sidekick Trapper John McIntyre became Hawkeye Pierce’s trusty sidekick B. J. Hunnicutt, and commanding officer Henry Blake became commanding officer Colonel Sherman T. Potter, and buffoonish foil Frank Burns became buffoonish foil Charles Emerson Winchester III.

  That’s kind of what my adult life looks like.

  Just about every time I make a new friend or get a good boss or find a decent barber, that person leaves, and then another traipses along, and then that one leaves, and then another, and so on. Every space between is filled with a particular kind of hope, one outfitted with a trapdoor, as though any of these departures could in equal measure represent the final episode or the bridge to the next. I guess that’s just the nature of a place whose population has been in steady decline my whole life. I’m in a grudge match with arithmetic.

  A century ago, Akron was, briefly yet conspicuously, celebrated as the fastest-growing city in America, a vibrant industrial success. The story goes that a 1920-ish Los Angeles Times editorial wistfully mused, Perhaps one day Los Angeles can become the Akron of the West!

  Like most Eastern and Midwestern factory cities, the place ballooned in the two World Wars, working through the growth spurts of immigration and fat money, developing company neighborhoods, adding landmark downtown institutions, expanding its girth, generating its geographical, demographical, philosophical, and architectural personality. Its meaning, in other words. Its big shoulders. Then, in the second half of the century, as these places slid into decline, so did that meaning, and all the logic of its previous trajectory.

  Akron, in 2010, had to face that its population had recoiled, for the first time, all the way back to its 1910 level. Population-wise, a city built on the auto industry was literally back to the horse-and-carriage days.

  What that means on a personal level is that I have spent my whole life watching people leave, such that it has become my sad-sack cartoon catchphrase. For anyone who has committed his or her self to a place like this, that becomes a defining characteristic, perhaps the defining characteristic. That we have stayed when it seems as if everyone else has left.

  At some point, it forces the hardest question.

  Why?

  * * *

  My friends Michael and Chuck and I used to hang out regularly at a terrible bar I’ll call the Withering Frog, whose business model was selling overpriced drinks in a blandly decorated room to a clientele that pushed dollar bills into a jukebox with no good songs except maybe Creedence’s “Fortunate Son.” They did serve a decent hamburger, but I’m hesitant to add that fact because in Middle America this can only serve as a backhanded compliment. It’s kind of hard to mess up Angus in the heartland. On weekends, the Frog was packed with Dave Matthews fans, who, interestingly, seemed to thrive in a bland place with insufferable music. Weeknights, we had it mostly to ourselves.

  The only reason we went there is because Chuck possesses a strong personality and insisted this be our regular gathering place because it was about fifty yards from the front door of his apartment.

  “What are the three most important qualities in a bar?” he was fond of asking cheekily. “Locatio
n, location, location.”

  The only time I ever appreciated this was one night when I had to carry him home.

  So for a few years, we were established “regulars,” in the sense that our waitresses vaguely recognized us and we had no other options within Chuck’s draconian parameters. The place being rather desolate on a random Tuesday night, our server would sometimes bring us a round of shots, including one for herself, and join us for a few minutes of conversation. (Those drinks always showed up on the bill later. It really was a terrible bar.)

  So this went on for a few years until Michael one night announced that he was moving to Boston for graduate school. This was certainly a good move for him, forward and upward, and we celebrated his departure at the Withering Frog, toasting his future and wishing him Godspeed.

  With Michael gone, Chuck and I held auditions for his replacement. This is neither a metaphor nor an exaggeration. We scheduled a series of tryouts among our acquaintances whose alcohol tolerance and trivia capacity suggested potential. The competition was robust. The winner was our friend Greg, who proved a brilliant replacement. Where Michael had provided a dry wit and deep knowledge of sports statistics, Greg tended to get loud and passionate when drunk and also possessed a remarkable knowledge of the funeral industry, adding an entirely new aural and material dynamic to the gatherings.

  Then after a year or so, Greg announced that he was taking a job in Cincinnati. So once again we gathered at the Frog, toasted our farewells, and as the evening dwindled, Chuck and I scanned the holdouts, wondering who would be the next point of this little triangle. Another round of interviews and auditions. The winner was our friend Eric, who at this point was like the drummer in Spinal Tap. Eric was yet another excellent choice, brimming with energy and personality and an impressive expertise on early Killing Joke minutiae.

  So we cruised along, not missing a beat, until the night Chuck announced that he was moving to New York City. Hawkeye Pierce, in other words, had gotten his transfer to Honolulu. We held Chuck’s going-away party at the Withering Frog. He left town and I never set foot in that goddamn place again. It burned down a short time later.

  Eric and I carried on in the manner of AfterMASH. It was a great friendship. Unlike Michael and Greg and Chuck, Eric was a local native who’d moved away for several years, then returned, so we shared a parochial bond, an understanding of place. Therefore, the day Eric announced he was taking a new job in Washington, DC, was pause not just for the usual melancholy and social adjustment, but for a sudden, jarring reassessment of my own self.

  The old question—why do they keep leaving?—jumped on me like a knuckleball.

  Why do I keep staying?

  * * *

  The whole idea of a “best friend” is borderline silly when you’re a middle-aged husband and father in Ohio, a state that, according to the voting record, tends to view with suspicion any sort of same-sex partnership, bowling leagues notwithstanding. And the parsing of the idea seems even sillier.

  Even so, other than my wife, I’ve always had roughly two official best friends—one who tends to be the person I most often hang out with socially (see above), and the other who is John Puglia. Throughout all of this change and departure and disillusion and evolution, he has always been here as coconspirator and reinforcement and reminder. We went through college and early postcollege sharing a fascination for the faded circumstances and the grit of our landscape, running around in it as if it were ours alone, which mostly it was. We were groomsmen in one another’s weddings, bought old houses and became fathers around the same time, and began our careers in parallel fashion, both joining deeply rooted local institutions with some sort of national presence. John worked his way up through the ranks of Roadway Express, which was established in Akron in 1930 to transport tires manufactured here and quickly became a pioneer in freight trucking. He was director of corporate communications—the kind of fancy job at a Fortune 500 company that people from other parts of the world often forget exists even now in cities like ours. Or that they simply assume does not exist here. John helped guide the company through a 2003 merger with the Yellow Corporation, with corporate power transferring to the new parent, YRC, in Overland Park, Kansas. Meanwhile, I got a job at the Akron Beacon Journal, which, helmed for decades by Pulitzer Prize–winning newspaper icon John S. Knight, was the cornerstone of the powerful Knight Ridder newspaper chain and had a strong national reputation, even as the corporation was overtaken by the Ridder family and the headquarters moved to the Silicon Valley at the height of that region’s fashionable opulence.

  Although both John and I had ambition and both of us had good opportunities elsewhere, at some point, we felt as if we’d beaten the system, having found stability and opportunity and happiness in our hometown. Our lives had greater meaning here. Many of our friends who’d departed had landed in big cities perceived to have more of an upside. Bigger skyscrapers, more immediate power, prestigious national profiles. Chicago, New York, Seattle. These places also had stress levels and costs of living and degrees of alienation two or three or four times that of Akron. Here, rush hour is about ten minutes and graceful old houses in stable neighborhoods can be had for less than $100,000. Our extended families were nearby, and the easier lifestyle allowed us to pursue personal projects that made us happy. The Millworks, for instance.

  By the time I felt like a grown-up, I had a solid and admittedly simple answer for the question of why I’d stayed in my hometown:

  All my stuff is here.

  * * *

  A confession: I sometimes resent people who move back.

  I don’t resent that they moved back. That would be entirely hypocritical. My resentment is only maybe 22 percent hypocritical. What I resent is when they move back and presume to understand. There’s my hypocrisy: I want to be understood. But I also harbor the old Shaft-esque one-liner: “It’s a Rust Belt thing. You wouldn’t understand.” Because really—if my having never left doesn’t at least provide me with some version of authority, then what have I got?

  I sat on a radio panel one time with a man who’d done just that, gone off and lived much of his life in New York City, then returned to his hometown of Cleveland, and he wanted to tell the world that we in Ohio had just as much going for us as the Manhattanites among whose number he had until recently counted himself. He was telling us—his fellow panelists and whoever was listening—about all these local treasures as though we needed to be reminded of our worth, or perhaps that we had not done a proper job of calculating and projecting it. The Cleveland Orchestra. A local jazz club. A Great Lake. And it’s not so much that he was condescending (though he was condescending). It’s that he wasn’t giving us credit for our least-appreciated, yet perhaps most important, asset: the ownership of loss.

  We’re not Manhattan. But for some reason this comes up time and time again, this suggestion that our worth can only be measured upward. Cleveland has been called the Paris of the Rust Belt. Pittsburgh has been called the Paris of Appalachia. Detroit’s been called the Paris of the Midwest. Cincinnati, for God’s sake, has been called the Paris of America. But what about living in the Akron of Ohio? What about saying it’s my favorite city, and not because it compares favorably to other cities—places I also love—but because it doesn’t.

  The place I love is a three-legged dog. Everyone who’s ever loved a three-legged dog knows you love that dog more than one with a handsome pedigree. Because it needs you more. And that’s what true love is: the warmth of being needed.

  Wait. That sounds like a redemptive ending.

  There will not be a redemptive ending. Redemptive endings are easy, and we’re not wired that way.

  * * *

  In that same radio conversation, another panelist declared that it was time to hang up the tired old term Rust Belt and find something new, something more hopeful and uplifting. A lot of people in these parts are partial to the term North Coast, ref
erring to our location on Lake Erie. Soon the conversation developed into a debate about whether Cleveland would be the literal north coast of Erie, or if that would be Canada on the other side, the whole thing devolving into an Escher-like debate about spatial perspective. This is how self-conscious we are, how wired we are to second-­guess, how prone we are to craft a preemptive defense. (For a long time, remember, Cleveland was called the Mistake on the Lake. It’s understandable.)

  We need to be the Rust Belt. We’ve paid so dearly for that designation that we deserve to have it as our own and to allow it to represent the fullness of its story. It’s our blues.

  * * *

  In 2008 the Rust Belt came into its power.

  It didn’t recover, or rather didn’t reach some magic level of recovery. Rather, it matured in its perspective as it continued to struggle back. We had endured this way for a quarter century, long enough to have gained insight and a bigger-picture view: that resiliency and persistence and an instinct for reinvention in the face of ongoing hardship offer better lessons than an ultimate redemption.

  The presidential election that year focused on the economy, on the housing crisis, on the loss of manufacturing, on the auto industry plight, on the potential weakening of the American Dream. Our region had been working through these realities for a generation, had taken ownership of them, and was evolving from them in a realistic way.

  For the first time in a long time, we in the Industrial Belt could step forward and offer ourselves as a useful example, as experts on something, as the very best.

  Hard times?

  We are the Paris of Hard Times.

  I spent that year reporting on the election again, this time with a more immediate focus. My colleague David Knox at the Akron Beacon Journal had conducted groundbreaking research to show that we were living in the first American generation in which parents could not statistically expect their children to do better than they had. The defining tenet of the American Dream was endangered. His research was well ahead of the mainstream, preceding the widespread perception of a deep-in-the-culture financial crisis by nearly a year.