The Hard Way on Purpose (14 page)

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.

But John did. Because John knew how to listen and he knew how to banter. He worked part-time in a rubber factory. This was a good way to understand how to talk to people because the conversation on the shop floors never stopped. Not ever. That was how those guys got through eight hours of dirty, monotonous work: by talking over (or against, really) the machinery. I was listening to Jerry, but I think I was just a convenient replacement for his usual audience of half-conscious drunkards. John, however, was having an actual conversation with Bob. They were getting somewhere.

*  *  *

“Do you know what snooker is?”

John and I looked at Bob. I thought it might be some kind of profane euphemism, but I wasn't sure.

“No,” we both said.

Snooker is a game like pool, Bob told us, but stressed that it was a “gentleman's game.” He mentioned Sir Neville Chamberlain and again the notion of gentlemanliness, noting that we, all of us in this group, were gentlemen, and that we should play snooker.

The accuracy of this notion of the four of us as “gentlemen” aside, the Taj Mahal didn't have a pool table. Before anyone had a chance to make this observation, Bob had risen from his chair, slid a few bills onto the bar, smoothed the front of his blazer, and turned toward the door, pausing to indicate we should follow.

I looked at John. He looked at me. I knew he wanted to go along. I wanted to want to go along too, but something was beginning not to feel right. The more Bob and Jerry drank, the more red and watery their eyes became, and the more slurry their speech. Whatever distinction they made between themselves and the rest of the Mayflower/Taj Mahal community seemed to be eroding. Jerry had continued to regale me with stories of his life in art, and to make random references to the likes of Degas and Miró and Monet, whom he called a hack. He talked a lot about technique, about using charcoals to capture the darkness of the human condition and so forth, but it was all beginning to sound like things he'd heard or read somewhere, and not like something he understood from his own experience.

Nevertheless, we all got up, paid, and headed toward the door, following Bob.

“To the Met Lounge,” he said.

The Met Lounge was almost directly across Main Street, another low-rent tavern that was a holdover from what people were beginning to call the “old days,” which actually had not been long before, when the Akron day was regulated by three factory-shift changes, which, in turn, represented three drinking shifts. As the prevailing culture had disintegrated, the falling of its pieces into new hands was clunky and random. Some places, such as the Bank, had been readapted in a low-rent sort of way before being abandoned again. Others were still running down the last revolutions of their decline, and this described the Met, which was basically the Taj Mahal without the charm or the moat but with a pool table. A story about the Met made the rounds, about how two frat boys happened in one night to find the place empty except for the barmaid, who'd fallen asleep sitting on her stool, chin propped against the heel of her hand. They decided to steal the Ms. Pac-Man machine. They unplugged it and began to carry it out the back door, but got stuck halfway through, and the struggle to get it free woke the barmaid and foiled the plot.

The four of us got ourselves situated at the pool table with fresh drinks, and Bob began to enlighten us on the game of snooker, which didn't sound any different to me from pool. I couldn't quite follow his instructions, so when we began, I just tried to hit the balls toward the pockets, and since I was a terrible pool player, I missed right away and nobody knew if I understood the rules or not.

This went on for a while, but as it did, Bob began to lose what remained of his elegance; his eyes reddened and he started to call John “my boy,” and by about the third use of the phrase it sounded like a cruelty and then he had John in a headlock.