The Hard Way on Purpose (16 page)

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 loft 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.

When John took over the rent at 376½ South Main, the place was packed floor to ceiling with storage from the old owners. The landlord cleared most of it, leaving John with grimy, sprawling open rooms, undraped windows streaming sunlight through the dust. Oddball castoffs were left behind—a metal breadbox that John made into his mailbox; an antique porcelain sign listing shopping staples—bread, salt, flour.

Aside from the street address downstairs, John had no postal designation for his room, so he added it at the front door: Apt. X.

He replaced the flimsy wooden apartment door with a thick steel security door he'd found at a hospital rummage sale, along with some surgical lights that he set up in an attempt to illuminate a space that more resembled an indoor basketball court than an apartment.

Perhaps the best amenity of the loft was its roof access. The roof was like an elevated patio, and that's where we'd begun this spring evening: at a cookout three stories above Main Street, open sky above, stunning views of the city all around. From there, we could see across to the Goodrich rooftops and over to the few tall buildings that defined our middling skyline. The glaring-red
BJ
spire above the newspaper building now served literally as John's personal digital clock, visible from his bedroom window.

With no one to disturb, we played the music loud—Pavement, the Minutemen, the Feelies. John had set up a slide projector in one of his windows and aimed it across Main Street onto the white front of an old furniture store. I sat at the edge of the roof and we watched pictures flash in uneven staccato, a haphazard montage of how we had arrived here, on this perfumed night, under someone else's stars, feeling like the only people in the world.

*  *  *

“Hold it,” John rasped suddenly. “Someone's coming!”

We looked down and saw the headlights a block away, creeping forward along the alley. There was no way to get down quickly, and no obvious place to scramble to get ourselves off the back edge of the staircase. I swung my legs over a rusty step, hooking at the knees, and hung there, suspended. My brother looked back at me. The coins fell from my pocket.

“Don't move,” he whispered.

John and Larry had shrunk up against the building, but they too had no place to hide.

Within moments, I could see that it was a police car. It moved at a pace nearly as slow as the canal, then stopped when it came up even with the Anthony Wayne. The spotlight locked on John and Larry, then slowly cast upward onto my brother and me. I couldn't see through the car's windows, and the light made it hard to see anything more than its chrome source and the general white shape of the squad car. The beam eased back down to John and Larry, holding for another long moment, then, suddenly, went dark. We heard the click of the gearshift and the car started moving again. We watched as it reached the end of the alley, turned, and disappeared in the fading reds of taillights.

Maybe we weren't worth it. Or maybe he'd decided we belonged there. Or maybe, probably, he just didn't care.

We never did find our way inside that night. There was no obvious entry point, and better judgment had begun to dull the adventure. Imagination would continue to fill all the empty spaces.

ANARCHY GIRLS

They were going the wrong way in the tunnels, and John didn't know what to do about it and I certainly didn't know what to tell him. Anarchy girls were always trouble, and these had arrived from Philadelphia stoned and of a number that was hard to determine because they never held still long enough to count them. Here were two, going off into one of the brick tunnels that led to what could be anywhere, and I almost opened my mouth to ask about the issue of liability, but even where anarchy girls are involved, no guy wants to look that uncool. So I said nothing, but stayed close to John, partly so he knew he had my support as a friend, but mostly because last time I'd been down here in the weak artificial light, I'd heard a great deal of varmintlike scurrying off in the dark corners.

It would be so easy to get lost down here in the underworld, and this was the key difference: the girls seemed to want to get lost and I was doing my best to remember the way back out.

John had discovered the tunnels. For years, we'd heard rumors, legends, that Akron had a vast, complex network of tunnels, connecting factories and other institutions. As the story went, some were for underground deliveries between manufacturing plants and warehouses, some were for access to the massive complex of utility lines and pipes that served the central city. And some were said to have been built for high-stealth, high-stakes security—Akron was considered a top potential domestic target during World War II, primarily because of the importance of the synthetic-rubber research taking place here. By developing an alternative to the natural rubber whose supply had been cut off by the Japanese, Akron's chemists helped keep the military rolling on tires, floating in rafts, and airborne in blimps and balloons. One expert proclaimed this research so vital that without it “there would have been no Manhattan Project, no Polaris submarine, no man on the moon.”

As time went on, John and I heard about more and more of these secret passages. We heard about a tunnel that started under one of the bars and led across the street to St. Vincent Cemetery. We heard about a tunnel from the storied, old hilltop house where Thomas Edison was married to the carriage house behind it. We heard about whorehouses on Howard Street connected by secret passages to the factories. John had actually seen a passage that started with a trapdoor in the ladies'-room floor at a local bar and led under the street to who knew where.

The notion of all these tunnels just below our feet, crisscrossing and meandering, of a world underground, a world darker and richer and fuller of mystery—this is what a child of the industrial Midwest craves. Because it disproved what the wider world wanted to believe—that our place was mundane, without intrigue or romance, that it was uncomplicated, unpoetic.

John had worked his way through college in a small rubber factory, not one of the main ones, but one of the countless others, the oddball places that produced things such as the pigment that makes tire whitewalls white and rubber floor mats and—yes—condoms. There really was a condom factory in town, which, among other things, served to complete the Rubber City joke.

Some of John's coworkers had spent time at the big tire companies, and they told stories about the tunnel systems under the sprawling corporate campuses of Goodyear and Goodrich. The tunnels were the domain of the pipe fitters, who used them to maintain the complex steam and water systems that supported the factories. But, the stories went, the pipe fitters also used them for a sophisticated underground network of drinking, smoking, gambling, and pornography. They set up projectors deep in the tunnels and ran a chauffeur service with their motorized carts, delivering their customers to the show. There, in a smoke-filled catacomb, a group of factory workers who'd stolen away from their machines would sit and watch stag films, drinking, staring into the flickering darkness.

So, yes, of course we wanted this to be true. And now John not only had found a set of these tunnels, but had managed more or less to have them turned over to him to do as he pleased. You could say this had happened by accident, but these kinds of accidents only happen to those who are seeking them. Not long after John and I had broken into the old Goodrich factory, Operation Greengrass had moved closer to fruition: 3.5 million square feet of factories and offices was about to become the biggest vacant lot any of us had ever seen. Its obliteration was such a fait accompli that the makers of a Sylvester Stallone / Wesley Snipes action movie called
Demolition Man
had approached Goodrich, asking if they could blow up one of the old, vacant factories on film. We, being Akronites, had taken this news as flattery: Hollywood had noticed us.

But then, at the eleventh hour, a private investor lured by the two Goodrich attorneys who'd been put in charge of decommissioning the complex had agreed to save it. For what, no one could say.

John knew exactly what to do. He approached one of the attorneys and asked if he could use some of the space for an art studio, which they'd agreed to, and then a gallery, which they'd also agreed to, because when you have that much empty real estate, you'll take in anyone willing to give it life. In this way the big idea that we had always talked about—to prove the worth of the condemned—took hold.

You have to come from a place like this to stake a claim in a decrepit thirty-five-acre brownfield and call it victory. Brownfield—that's what these abandoned factory sites were called, and they were all around us, everywhere we went. John claimed the old Goodrich glazier's shop as his “office.” The room sat to the side of an open factory floor.

Soon, as he began to clear out a space for the galleries, John discovered the opening that led into the underground.

*  *  *

I'd been through this passage that led from the gallery area to John's office many times, but it never seemed the same, and I had to navigate carefully when he wasn't there to lead the way. One stretch was too low to walk through upright, causing claustrophobia to gather in its passage; this also raised the question of its function. So now I felt that I knew something these anarchy girls didn't, but I also felt the opposite: maybe they did know what they were doing and maybe I was missing the point. I had felt this way most of my life, and particularly when in the company of free-spirited young women.

“You gotta go back that way,” John said resolutely, pointing in the direction of the gallery. “There's nothing down here. And it's dangerous.”

One held up her plastic cup, half full of beer, as though in toast to what might have been, and they headed back the way John had directed. He looked at me, shook his head, laughed, and we continued.

John's space was filled with artifacts of its past life, which seemed at once tantalizingly recent and cloudily distant. Clipboards held production schedules, the dates of the pay stubs discovered in desk drawers were not that long before. This aspect of time could be measured in months. But the tire molds and schematics he found suggested a long-gone culture, something measured in eras. Goodrich had an infinity of windows—fiftysome buildings, each with hundreds of panes—so glazier's were a constant necessity of maintenance. John's office was filled with pieces of glass and anachronistic tools that made it seem like a reenactor's set at one of those living museums: the Glazier's Shoppe at Rubberland.

This place was an abandoned shrine to something we couldn't fully comprehend. The sense of recently departed humanity was almost ghostly. John had found snapshots of some of the workers taken as they were out drinking at nearby bars, bars we ourselves had been in with the same attitude of camaraderie, bars like the ones we had left to come here the night before John's wedding. And he had found pieces of their clothing, cigarette lighters, family photos, the fallout of layoff slips that prompted rash exits.

A few of us regarded this state as beautiful. My wife and I had been helping John prepare the galleries and had attended his first show, an event that seemed to capture much of what we hadn't been able to define until then: the possibilities of a place no one else wanted. It seemed like a huge success—a hundred or so people came through this trio of homemade art galleries, which John named the Millworks. It was written about in the newspaper. John managed it all, bringing together something that seemed as relevant as it did unlikely.

For this next show, John had contacted a guy named Scott Moore. The two of them had been in art school together at the University of Akron. Scott had moved to Philadelphia, where he'd become part of a loose-bound art collective squatting on Mascher Street. John's idea was for Scott to organize some of his artist friends into a group show that would fill the three galleries in the old tire complex. The show would be called
Straight Outta Philly
, after N.W.A.'s album
Straight Outta Compton
.

*  *  *

They began haphazardly wandering in on the Thursday before opening weekend, one car and then the next and then another, like the advance guard from folkways unknown. Not one of them—the cars and maybe the people too—looked sound enough to have covered the 350 miles from Philadelphia. One of the first cars expelled a man we would only know by the nickname his physical demeanor immediately suggested—Frankenstein—and he stumbled forward a few steps, turned, dropped his zipper, and urinated where he stood. Two of the anarchy girls flitted from the rear and immediately disappeared into the web of alleys between the smutted brick factories. A battered van arrived, somewhere between bronze and brown, with a plumber's logo on the side—
FRANK WOLF COMPANY
—and the men from inside became known to John and me as the Company of Wolves.

John had driven to Philadelphia months before and made the arrangements. He was expecting maybe a dozen artists. But they kept coming—twenty, thirty of them, most of whom appeared to have taken this as a late-summer road trip and had little or nothing to do with the show. They unloaded case after case of Joe's beer—a Philadelphia product, thin, pale stuff whose local counterpart, P.O.C. (Pride of Cleveland), was a shared icon—and they took off in various directions as though they were sightseers stepping off the bus at Yellowstone.

The galleries were just inside one of the main iron gates leading into the factory complex, which opened into a brick parking lot / courtyard ringed with buildings. With so much real estate to redevelop, the new owners had concentrated first on the most visible areas, and here they'd leased space to a restaurant owner whose Main Street delicatessen had closed. He'd opened a cavernous restaurant and jazz-and-blues club called Satchmo's, which was so nice it seemed doomed to fail. But the Millworks galleries had the prime spot, just inside the main gate. One gallery was called the Shoe Shop because it occupied a small building where Goodrich employees purchased their work shoes and brought them for repair. When he first started clearing out the space, John found random shoes and boots in corners and cubbyholes. The next gallery occupied a long, upward stairwell and landing, with the art hung on the ascending walls. It was called the Big Hand. And the third was another staircase, this one descending, called Zone de Confusion. Every car that entered to go to Satchmo's had to pass the galleries. This was the sentinel.

*  *  *

By the time I arrived Friday evening, the night before the opening, John's usual calm had been replaced by a bad cross of whimsy and thinning patience.

“I've been out all day looking for a fish,” he said.

“A fish?” I said.

“Yeah. The guy with the dreadlocks needed a fish.”

“What kind of fish.”

“A whole one. With the head. And tail.”

“You mean a dead one?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you find one?”

“Yeah, finally. He was very selective.”

“What's he gonna do with it?”

“He's gonna wrap it up and nail it to one of his sculptures.”

“Won't it smell?”

John raised his hands halfway and shook his head, disavowing any responsibility, as if to say finding this fish was enough and anything beyond that was somebody else's problem or, maybe more to the point, was everyone else's problem, which made it the audience's problem, which made it the problem of Art.

It was hot and sticky and I thought maybe John and I could go into Satchmo's for a beer, but he had to stay and supervise the setup.

Through the window of the Shoe Shop, I could see the
Straight Outta Philly
guys hard at work, installing the show. They all were the kind of dirty that looked permanent. I recognized Scott Moore from his Akron days, broad-shouldered, dressed like a foundry worker in heavy Carhartt work pants and a plain T-shirt, unkempt but conventionally handsome, self-assured. Even more, I recognized his type, from the traveling hard-core bands that used to come through town. There was always a charismatic leader, an anarchist with organizational skills, who attracted the best and worst of whatever subculture he represented. Scott was heavily involved in music and had been in an industrial-noise band called Sink Manhattan, an offshoot of which would be playing at the following night's opening. They were called Lick the Earth. The guy with the fish was the guitar player.

Everything I could see half-assembled in the Shoe Shop was familiar to me: reclaimed steel, rusty, manipulated, welded, and bent. This seemed to be the only kind of art anyone from here was making then, intentionally unglamorous, pulling scraps from industrial sites and hammering them together or apart—whichever direction they hadn't already gone. I knew nothing about how to make art, but I had learned by osmosis how to oxidize copper into green and blue and how to accelerate rust and to abuse aluminum. I had seen a course title in a college catalog—Advanced Metals—and written its name on a slip of paper because I thought it was interesting, the idea of evolution applied to something so elemental. In Akron, rust was a legitimate medium.