The Hard Way on Purpose (17 page)

John said he needed to get home, to his “safe haven.” But he couldn't leave until he had everyone out of the galleries, and the more he tried to create order, the more slippery everyone got. He had agreed to allow Scott and some of the others to sleep in the glazier's shop, but now he was worried about how to separate the responsible nihilists from the irresponsible ones.

Frankenstein wandered by, drinking a beer, seeming not to notice us, seeming to be noticing a lot of things that weren't there, and a menagerie of Philadelphians with bedhead and inside-out clothing came tripping through. Two, both dressed in ragged, homemade cutoffs and thrift-store dress shirts and ties, rode through on bicycles, a parade of freaks leading the way.

*  *  *

There is a kind of late-summer rain in Ohio that builds and builds in pent-up humidity, then comes gushing out in a climactic release that is also incomplete, so that it remains humid even as the sky carpet bombs the earth. The result is something like celebration mixed with apprehension, which is how things always seemed to go here—we could never just cut loose because we knew something would always go wrong. This was not pessimism or superstition, but a justifiable and quantifiable worldview. Annually, for each of the previous three years, we had stood at the verge of climactic victory and watched it all end in mind-boggling, history-making defeat. The Drive, in 1987, bringing a shocking end to what appeared to be a Browns play-off victory. The Fumble, in 1988, doing exactly the same. The Shot, in 1989, a stunning, last-second gut-punch that ended a Cavaliers play-off dream. That's all we understood: the anxiety of having hoped for too much and celebrated too soon.

So the notion of a downpour as a metaphor for release, for deliverance, for abandon, for soul-cleansing—that just doesn't work here. We know better.

And that was precisely the type of rain that began pounding the roof of the old Goodrich complex as my wife, Gina, and I sat with John in his office, the humidity intensifying the lingering smell of machine oil and metal that filled the old factory. Whoever had slept here the night before had left the place a wreck and had written
Lick the Earth
all over everything. For someone such as John, who had gone through art school at a time when the likes of Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat and Fab 5 Freddy were pulling the contemporary strings of street aestheticism, it was hard to get directly upset about graffiti. But still.

Frankenstein had become the symbol of everything that was happening: bludgeoning, oblivious, wayward, recalcitrant. We'd driven through the main gate to see him drenched, in a striped, button-down shirt, holding a beer cup in one hand, pissing toward a fence, like this night's version of a Buckingham guard. Despite the rain, Lick the Earth had set up its amplifiers and PA system outside, under a brick arch at the entrance gate, with sheets of plastic draped over the speakers. The opening had begun, and John's friends, people he knew from the art community, from school, from work, people we didn't know—they were dashing from the parking lot to the Millworks space with newspapers and umbrellas and shirttails held over their heads as the rain pounded without relent.

The fish had already begun to smell, raising the question of its future: the show was supposed to remain up for six weeks.

Gina and I followed John through the tunnels back to the galleries. We moved outside, close to the action, but under cover of an overhang. Two of the anarchy girls were dancing together out in the rain, streetlights casting them in yellow-black. One had stripped down to her bra. The space around the drum kit and the amplifiers was strewn with heavy chains and lengths of pipe, a battered trombone, and a trumpet. A hulking piece of semi­cylindrical, rusty steel sat in the center. These were pieces of their sculpture, intended now as living art. The drummer took his place and started a random pattern, and the guitar player and the bass player followed with a low, distorted nonmusical cacophony. Scott took one microphone and a guy in a black T-shirt and cap and a cast on his left arm took the other, and together they started a haunted caterwaul, growling and yelping in indecipherable improvisation. Scott picked up a length of chain and began stalking back and forth, trailed by its steely jangle, then turned and began swinging it against the big steel hunk, its harsh clank arrhythmic to the drums. He threw the chain down and picked up the trombone and began to blow squawks and blasts, holding the microphone in the bell so the sound came out drenched in reverb. Lick the Earth congealed into long, atonal loops, the sound of being boiled alive.

The
Straight Outta Philly
entourage began stalking the perimeter, flailing their arms madly in a dance that seemed interpretive, but of what I couldn't say. They moved out into the rain and seemed intoxicated by it, dancing in stutter steps and long body sways—boys in black T-shirts and tank tops, barefoot, pants rolled up; anarchy girls in peasant dresses and shorts. I couldn't count them, they seemed to merge and divide, merge and divide, rolling around on the slick paving bricks and throwing their hands up into the rain, clustered in groups then wandering off solo.

Cars were passing through the gates, couples and groups of friends out for an evening at Satchmo's. Some accelerated to get past these men swinging their chains and brass horns; others slowed to gape. One driver stopped and began honking his horn, either in protest or harmony, it was hard to say. One of the anarchy girls in a cardigan sweater and skirt began climbing the high iron fence at the entrance and was approached by another, a toothy, voluptuous brunette dressed in a too-small pair of short-shorts and halter top and a red plastic hard hat. She wore a pair of patent-leather pumps and walked in a perpetual tap dance, her spilling-out breasts bouncing and thick thighs alternating like diesel pistons. She reached up for a crossbar and began to climb too, stopping and swaying back and forth like a caged gorilla.

One of the lawyers who'd given John this space was in attendance, and he came over with a hey-I'm-just-tryin'-to-be-cool-here-but-this-is-a-little-too-much demeanor and asked John if he could keep them off the gate, as though there were some sort of boundary to the chaos and this was it. John approached the gate and told the girls they had to get down, and they slithered off the wrought iron and back into their dance without any direct acknowledgment of the order. The tap dancer skipped and twirled across the parking lot, cutting through the Satchmo's patrons who were dashing through the downpour toward the restaurant's lighted entrance. She took up a spot at the front door of the restaurant, dancing and flapping her arms as people rushed past her to get inside, frightened and confused, looking at her. She dropped to the ground and began rolling in a puddle, ending with her chin propped in her palm and legs crossed behind her, like a chanteuse splayed across a piano bar. The girl in the cardigan swayed wildly among two men who danced with faces up toward the sky, and she stopped suddenly, hands in pockets, as if she'd run out of ideas, gazing blankly for a long moment before dropping into a lineman's stance and rushing at one of the young men.

Scott was chanting something into the microphone as his friend blew long bleats from the trumpet and then grabbed the other mic, and the only words I'd recognized all night as words came tumbling out in a guttural chant:

All this rain is pourin' down!

All this rain is pourin' down!

All this rain is pourin' down!

All this rain is pourin' down!

All this rain is pourin' down!

The literalness of it took me by surprise; it didn't seem possible that any of them was reacting to anything that I could also understand, that there was any logic in the performance.

The girls were up the fence again and John went over calmly and told them to come down. They did. Frankenstein, standing among the onlookers, turned casually toward the brick wall behind them and began to pee again. A young man dressed in rags came bouncing heavily out of the Shoe Shop on a pogo stick made of an industrial spring and welded scrap steel, a piece of sculpture that was supposed to be on display in the gallery, and John tried to wave him back inside, but he just kept going and it appeared that stopping might be dangerous because this—none of this—seemed designed for stopping.

They were all made of liquid now. They would lean forward and squeeze out a shirttail or a long hank of hair and rain would gush out and immediately be replaced by more. The girl in the cardigan came rolling across the brick driveway in front of us and stopped, flat on her back in the rain, resting, and the tap dancer vamped over to Satchmo's door again, holding her hard hat in front of her like a cabaret derby. Scott, grunting in harsh rhythm, threw his microphone down and picked up a thick metal pipe with both hands and began beating against the hunk of steel with all his might, over and over and over until he dropped to his knees, exhausted, and then the man in the cast took up the rhythm with a battleship chain, beating and beating, the drums behind him seeming weak and thin in comparison. Cars continued to pass within feet of them, coming and going, but Lick the Earth never acknowledged them, never acknowledged us, never acknowledged the dancers, never acknowledged one another. There was nothing directly conscious about them, this was all of the gut alone.

I stood with my arm around Gina and saw in her face a reflection of what I was feeling—something like mesmerization. Not appreciation or revulsion or even fascination, but an involuntary submission to the rhythm of what we were observing, which rhythm was something that couldn't be measured except by that look on her face.

I watched Scott, speaking in tongues into the microphone, drenched but somehow not electrocuted, trombone dangling at his side like a missile launcher, and suddenly I resented him and the man with the broken arm and the one who'd put the fish inside and Frankenstein and the anarchy girls and the entire Company of Wolves. I resented them because they were defining what didn't belong to them, what they hadn't earned, and I was afraid they were doing it in a way that couldn't be erased, because I had no answer to what I was hearing and seeing.

This place was supposed to be ours, and we had inherited it the hard way, by discovery and loyalty and perseverance. I didn't want to give it up so easily.

The anarchy girls were climbing the fence again and there was no way to stop them.

*  *  *

John picked me up at my house late the next morning and we made the two-minute drive into downtown. The rain had stopped and everything was muggy again. Gina and I had left before Lick the Earth was done because it didn't seem as if they would ever be done, and John said it had never actually ended but rather died like a bored campfire and he had no idea what time, just that it had died. He'd waited until everyone was outside the galleries and locked the door, didn't offer anyone a place to stay.

As we drove down Main Street toward the Goodrich buildings, we began to see bodies on the sidewalk, one here, one there, random Philadelphians. Some were lying with heads in the crooks of their arms, others wandering zombielike. I don't know what they were looking for, but on a Sunday morning in downtown Akron in those years, they weren't going to find it. Ours would likely be the only car to pass down Main Street for hours. There were more bodies as we got closer, some moving, some not. Frankenstein sat on the sidewalk with his back against the fence at the entrance, one arm draped obliquely across the top of his head. The Company of Wolves were gathering together pieces of random steel, tossing them into the van. They were bloody and dirty and half-dressed, even more disheveled than when they'd begun. The guitar player had his dreadlocks tied up in a plume. The cast on the one guy's arm looked to be damaged. Scott was the only one whose heart seemed to be in the dismantling.

John parked and we went through a back door, into the tunnels, a direction I didn't know, down under the ground, and we emerged at the glazier's room and looked around. There was a mess to clean up. We got to work.

PART FOUR

THE MIDDLE IS NEAR

You know, it's funny. You come to someplace new and everything looks the same.

—Eddie, Stranger Than Paradise

BATTLEGROUND

For six weeks in the late summer and fall of 2004, I traveled the state of Ohio, trying to explain it.

I didn't really think of it that way. I thought I was doing something else. In fact, I don't think this felt like an attempt to “explain” until it was too late. That moment arrived just after dawn on October 15, when the red light on top of the camera in a suburban Cleveland production studio flashed on.

I was sitting alone on a stool facing the square lens, with a monitor showing a feed from the New York studio of
FOX & Friends
. Steve Doocy, one of the cohosts, introduced the segment, introduced me as a columnist for the
Akron Beacon Journal
who had been putting in nearly as many miles on Ohio's highways as the tour buses of George W. Bush and John Kerry, who were crisscrossing the state with such fervor that I'd envisioned them happening randomly into the same Duke & Duchess for a pit stop, reaching simultaneously into the drink cooler . . .

You?!

You?!

Well, at least there's one thing we can agree on—the cool, refreshing kick of Mountain Dew!

Doocy asked the question everybody was asking that fall: Which way is Ohio going to go?

My response began, something along the lines of “Well, you know, it's a lot more complicated than that . . .”

Although I was five hundred miles away, I could feel the wind come out from the anchor team in New York and imagined a producer on the other side of the desk frantically making that slashing motion with his finger across his throat, reaching for one of those giant shepherd hooks. Meanwhile, on my end, the producer in cargo shorts and T-shirt—who if he wasn't wearing a Cleveland Browns stocking cap may as well have been, he being of the styrofoam-cup-of-convenience-store-coffee sort, going about his work with the trademark nonchalance of the jaded cameraman—smirked knowingly.

You said the poison word, he told me.

Complicated?
I said.

Yep, he said. Those guys want red, and blue.

*  *  *

There's a regional quirk. Every native of the Rust Belt has heard it. Whenever someone mentions they've moved here from somewhere else, our involuntary response is “Why?”

Not as in “Why would anyone do such a thing?” but rather a genuine, hard-won curiosity. We're used to people leaving. We're not used to people arriving.

We're defensive. We just are. We're so conditioned to being overlooked or misinterpreted or invoked as a punch line that whenever someone else tries to paraphrase us in any way, we bristle. Cleveland was called the Mistake on the Lake for so long that the chip on the shoulder became a kind of beloved appendage. So now the local Great Lakes Brewing Company makes a Burning River ale, taking ownership of one of the city's most embarrassing public moments, when the tragically polluted Cuyahoga River caught on fire. I remember hearing a story once about the local music paper doing a big piece on Chrissie Hynde, the Pretenders singer who always seemed like our overseas ambassador. When arrangements were made for the cover shoot, she said she wanted to be photographed in a T-shirt that was locally popular at the time, with the motto
CLEVELAND—YOU GOT TO BE TOUGH
written in factory smoke over a gritty cartoon skyline. The editor mailed his own shirt to her address in London because, I think, he understood how important the message is, and specifically our ability to control it.

So, yes. We are defensive. (We get called Iowa a lot. Nothing against Iowa, but that's like being named Jenny and having a guy call you Jessa.)

Therefore, when all of a sudden we find ourselves in control of who will become the leader of the free world, and people all suddenly fix their gaze on us (e.g., April 25, 2004,
New York Times Magazine
cover: “Welcome to OHIO. A Swing State. Pop. 11,435,798”; or, e.g., September 9, 2012,
New York Times Magazine
cover: “Way to Go Ohio: . . . The answer could decide the next presidency”) and want to know what makes us tick, we tense up.

The problem isn't so much that Ohio is complicated. Every place is complicated if you apply yourself to trying to understand it. The problem is
how
it's complicated.

*  *  *

I set off early in the morning, headed south. It was late August, the day was hazy, and the heat was rising.

The first stretch of highway took me through the grimy fired-clay center of Akron, a landscape sketched with weedy railroad beds and crooked utility poles and chain-link fences, factories with the windows painted green, trees that always looked lost, prodigal, growing up from beds of rock and caked mud and crumbled asphalt where guardrails stand as empty-property lines.

I passed the imposing, abandoned brick wall of the Akron Brewing Company, its name carved a century before in sandstone set into the brick, a tree growing from the decay in its roof, looming above the highway. One wall after another like this, smoky brick pocked with windowpanes filmy and shattered. And then this morphed into the colorful signage of suburbia, the long stretches of Super Retail and the cattle-call restaurants where everything is grilled to perfection.

And then through Canton, the next urban center, ruddy and overcast. I drove past the world headquarters of Diebold, Inc., which had recently gotten into the business of manufacturing and selling touch-screen voting machines. These machines would transform voting for many Americans, a new technology for an old, inscrutable tradition. Those machines would raise all sorts of questions, all sorts of suspicions.
Somebody must be up to something. Something must be about to go wrong
. This more than anything else seems to be the spirit of the election season.

From there, the highway dissolved into the bucolic Ohio landscape, barns set off into the hills, clusters of horses and cows, long, soft furrows in the earth, the iron-rich intoxication of soybeans, gnarl of feral orchards, pillars of smoke every now and again celebrating an American freedom: to burn piles of rubbish on unincorporated soil.

I stopped at the exit marked
NEWCOMERSTOWN
, at a McDonald's entirely themed to Cy Young, who is buried nearby in an Amish cemetery; his fanciful monument bearing a winged baseball stands audacious among weathered slabs reading
YODER
and
MILLER
. The legendary pitcher is even more roundly memorialized in the fast-food restaurant, with museum boxes and framed memorabilia on the walls, his legend running all the way back to the antiseptic restrooms: a baseball with an indecipherable scrawl, a wool uniform under glass, a plastic action figure, cards and pictures. This was impressive at first, certainly a surprise, but ultimately unsettling. Do we want fast-food restaurants to double as repositories of culture? Maybe we do.

Then, soon, I entered a forest. Mile after mile it grew darker and greener, a dense tunnel of trees, winding farther and farther south, Wayne National Forest, covering 241,000 acres.

And that expelled me into my destination, Athens, the home of Ohio University, which traditionally comes in near the top of rankings of the nation's most noteworthy party schools, a town cut off from the rest of civilization, richly scented with patchouli and greasy onions and last night's beer, a place where the baby-boom generation's idealists can still believe in possibility because they live inside a forest, a place where chapbooks are published and read. My most significant personal connection to Athens was the number of friends and acquaintances I knew who'd been arrested there on Halloween, an Ohio rite of passage.

In a way (okay, completely), I was there for a cheap joke: in the county that is well-known as Ohio's party headquarters, I was planning to compare Athens's two party headquarters—Republican and Democrat. This was hardly a fair comparison. Athens is an anomaly in the midst of Appalachia, a liberal college town awash in Day-Glo and cappuccino and daddy's credit limit. A truer destination might have been the nearby Hocking College, which offers courses in lumberjacking, and where some students arrive for class on horseback. But because Athens-the-college-town dominates Athens-the-county demographically and philosophically (Democrats had outnumbered Republicans 9,214 to 2,632 in that year's primary election), visiting the political-party offices offered a dramatic contrast to explore.

I followed the address for the Democratic headquarters to a storefront next door to a burrito house with a sign proudly stating
WORKER-OWNED
, and whose bill of fare included tofu fajitas. In late morning, the town was mostly asleep in the way only a college town sleeps, its sidewalks stained and littered with the previous night's activity, a heavy atmosphere of metabolisms at a simmer. A young man in a baseball cap and loose shorts sat drowsily on the headquarters' doorstep, waiting for a bus. Otherwise, no one was outside.

The door was locked. The storefront windows were plastered with two dozen campaign signs. Peering past them, I could see a frat-house clutter of telephone lines, computer wires, pizza boxes, bumper stickers, and cardboard cartons askew in the aisles. Later, when I was allowed inside, I saw, on a desk, a handwritten thank-you note from Al Franken to the Democratic Party chairwoman. Even though it was early in the season, pre–Labor Day, young volunteers were constantly coming and going, picking up campaign materials, stopping in for information, chatting, eager, hopeful, certain.

Later that day, I made my way out to the Republican headquarters, in a strip plaza at the outskirts of town. It hadn't yet officially opened. There was only one phone line, compared to eight at the Democratic office. It could probably best be described as “broom clean.” The party chairman's air of resignation was hard to miss. Parked next to his SUV, with its
SPORTSMEN FOR BUSH
bumper sticker, was a car with a
KERRY/EDWARDS
sticker.

The answer is always in the journey, rather than its destination. It was not Athens, but rather the road to Athens, and the road that would continue for weeks, that illuminated why it was so difficult for me to answer “Whither goes Ohio?” Not because I didn't know (although I didn't), but because the question itself was too simple. In just this one leg of my campaign, I'd passed through major manufacturing centers, deeply rooted farm country, a national forest, gaudy suburbs, a third-world Appalachia that most Americans can't fathom.

Which way is Ohio going?

The answer is “Which Ohio?”

*  *  *

Just outside Cincinnati, I pulled into the auxiliary parking area across the road from St. Ignatius Catholic Church. The church's vast parking lot was full, much of it occupied by the tents and carnival rides of the parish's summer festival, the rest by rows of cars belonging to those attending the event. I parked on a baseball field, under a billboard with the words
IN GOD WE TRUST. UNITED WE STAND
over an American flag.

On the drive here, I'd been scanning radio stations: Christian rock . . . Christian hip-hop . . . Christian sports talk. I had never heard an all-Christian sports-talk station before, nor, as far as I can recall, even considered the genre. But here it was, and like all mainstream entertainment prefaced by Christian, it sounded exactly like the secular version, only with a highly tangential cast to the content—kind of like biting into a jelly doughnut to find it filled with peanut butter. The discussion that day involved the skimpy outfits worn by the Olympic beach-volleyball players and the larger issue of whether Christian athletes felt compromised by being forced to wear tight, immodest attire. Swimmers in swimsuits and whatnot.

Which is to say that, culturally, Cincinnati is distinctly different from the rest of the state. It's a river town, the beginning of the American South, the top edge of the Bible Belt, a highly conservative city whose modern reputation was forged in many minds by the 1990 censorship controversy over Robert Mapplethorpe's homoerotic photographs exhibited at the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center.

The event I'd come for was called Igi-Fest, named for the church's patron saint, and celebrated across a sprawling blacktop spread with children's bouncy toys and funnel-cake stands and vats of melty cheese and a game called Chippy Pot. I wandered for a long time, without approaching anyone, just trying to absorb it, to find a focus, an entry point. Throughout this whole process I had been trying actively, consciously, probably neurotically, to avoid presumption. It's the native instinct in a place that's been plagued by presumption. When you live in something called a flyover state, you recoil at even the slightest hint of pigeonholing.

I once was introduced to Ira Robbins, a New York rock critic whom I greatly admired. He asked where I was from and I said, “Akron,” to which he responded without hesitation, “Oh, I'm sorry.” I'd grown so accustomed to such exchanges that I skipped over anger and went straight to disappointment over the remarkable ease with which he'd exposed his own stupidity.

So, while I had come to this event knowing it reflected a prevailing Christian conservatism in Cincinnati, I wanted to try to get under that surface, or to circumvent it completely, and I knew enough about the gathering process to know that it's better to get ahold of nuance and contrasts and complexities and contradictions before the conversation begins than to try to extract them once the transaction is under way.

So I literally circumvented, just walking around the outside edge of the crowd, watching. What arose from the chaos of activity was a strong prevailing impression of families, of course—the white, middle-class families of Ohio and the wider region, conveying a nuclear, traditional demeanor of wholesomeness and politeness, entirely sincere and elemental. Golf shirts and department-store denim shorts, softball-league manners, and keg beer in moderation. What I found in greatest abundance in Cincinnati and pretty much everywhere else I went was a polite reticence, even among the most ideologically driven of the people I encountered. Often, people didn't readily reveal their party affiliation or which candidate they favored. It didn't seem to be out of suspicion or fear so much as my father's long-standing Thanksgiving instruction: “No religion or politics at the dinner table.”