The Hard Way on Purpose (2 page)

As the ceremony finished and James gathered up his warm-up jacket and his award, I lingered in the room because I wanted to congratulate him. And also to fulfill an instinct left over from my younger days in an NBA locker room. I was curious how tall he seemed up close. (A universal male instinct: literally to size up other males. Once, lingering outside a concert venue, my brother eased in among the autograph seekers surrounding R.E.M. drummer Bill Berry and surreptitiously placed the flat of his palm atop his own head, extending it levelly toward Berry's, shooting me a revelatory and excited glance:
I am taller than a rock star!
) As James neared the door, I reached out my hand, and he reached back with a palm the size of a palm leaf. We shook.

“Congratulations,” I said.

He nodded awkwardly, avoiding eye contact. He was either just a kid or he was a burgeoning aloof celebrity. I couldn't answer which, but I believe it was the former.

“We went to the same high school,” I said. “Or I went to the same high school. That you go to now. I went to St. V.”

He smiled, but he didn't say anything. I'm sure all those he met, even at that early stage, were looking for some context, measuring themselves against him, as it were. His eyes drew him toward the exit.

*  *  *

And then, through the kind of fate that never, ever, ever,
ever
happens here, particularly with regard to sports, the woebegone Cleveland Cavaliers drew the first pick in the 2003 draft lottery and selected James, who emerged as a man in full, wearing a suit as white as ice, diamonds in his ears, to become the hero of a team that needed one deep down in its soul.

You're not the one who has to worry about everything.

The boy said something but he couldnt understand him. What? he said.

He looked up, his wet and grimy face. Yes I am, he said. I am the one.

—CORMAC MCCARTHY,
THE ROAD

I have spent my whole life watching people leave. This is a defining characteristic of the generation of postindustrial Midwesterners who have stayed in their hometowns. At every stage of opportunity, at every life crossroads, friends and family members and enemies and old lovers and vaguely familiar barflies depart. Piles of demographic and sociological data chronicle this, the term
brain drain
serving as a sort of catamaran counterpart to Rust Belt. Akron's population peaked the decade I was born and has dramatically fallen every decade since—from 290,000 in 1960 to 199,000 in 2010. High school graduation, college graduation, career opportunity, layoff, coming of age, crisis of confidence, marriage, divorce—the conditioned, perhaps prescribed, response is to go somewhere else. They all leave. A conversational quirk exists among natives of this region: Whenever we hear people say they've moved here from somewhere else, we instinctively respond, “Why?”

And so those of us who have stayed through all of our versions of those same life moments have a perpetual reflex of self-­explanation, a desperation of identity, an instinctive yearning toward legitimacy and a kind of pride that is a far piece from Chamber of Commerce jingoism. Something that allows us to coolly intone, “It's a Rust Belt thing. You wouldn't understand.”

Look, we don't get to be cool very often. We take it where we can get it.

There may, then, be no professional athlete in the history of American sports more directly connected to the narrative of his or her hometown. Plenty have played for the home team, certainly, but James seemed actually fated to play for the home team, as though he was conceived of this time and place, concocted from the ash of ourselves by some higher power, which power predestined the arrangement of those lottery Ping-Pong balls, and which power, if you're going to play along with this sort of stoner logic, would (if ours is a benevolent God) also have to have known about “The Decision,” thus implying that we need to understand why maybe that was a necessary turn of events. For
us
.

Once we began to believe we deserved him, we slowly began to recognize that we would also deserve whatever he became.

James grew up with a definition of loyalty much like the one I'd developed watching those shitty old wine-and-gold Cavs. He reveled in his closeness to his childhood friends, to the neighborhood barber, to those Swensons hamburgers. After turning pro, he got the Akron area code—330—tattooed in chunky script down his powerful right forearm: sense of place, writ large. He would repeatedly, in a way that only the true, ear-to-the-ground native understands, make a formal distinction between Akron and Cleveland, two places that stand shoulder to shoulder, thirty-five miles apart, and are entirely similar yet entirely something of themselves. (There's an old saying here: it's a half hour from Akron to Cleveland and two hours from Cleveland to Akron. [It's a Rust Belt thing. You wouldn't understand.]) We make this distinction in great part as a matter of identity, the way brothers and sisters choose to express their individual personalities, even within the family.

So it wasn't just that he was from here and identified overtly with being from here. It was the very notion of what that identification implies. Factory towns, places that make things, are defined by work. That should be obvious. But when that is the prime element of integrity, it insinuates into the pores the same way soot once did. Here, uniquely, we do things the hard way on purpose. We recognize a virtue and a necessary creativity in choosing to do things that way. I once heard Jack White—a native Detroiter; one of us—say that he preferred playing plastic guitars that didn't go into tune, that the challenge was inspiring. If the keyboard onstage needs to be two feet away for him to reach it, he moves it three feet away. The struggle becomes its own aesthetic.

And unto this place comes the most promising athlete in the world, and the most famous (and for us, the celebrity is vitally important), who, if you're going to do things the hard way, couldn't have asked for much better than the 2003 Cavaliers. Soon a cliché emerged, about James carrying the team “on those broad shoulders of his.” And not just the team, but all of us.

It wasn't that LeBron James was the solution to our identity crisis. It was that he was its embodiment.

*  *  *

I was working in my office on a gray Sunday afternoon near the end of the spring semester, chilly gusts sweeping at the windowpanes. In the middle of a recession that had gutted the industry, I'd left my newspaper job and begun teaching at the University of Akron. There was an echo of commotion from out on the commons, and I rose from my chair and looked down to see a steady progression of people heading toward the basketball arena, one building over from the English department. I was finished for the day and gathered my things and decided to walk the long way back to my car, to see what was happening. As I approached, I saw a big satellite dish above a television truck and realized what I'd just walked into. LeBron James was being awarded the NBA's 2010 Most Valuable Player award, and he'd arranged for the presentation ceremony to be held at the University of Akron gym, where he'd played many of his high school games. The year before, he'd also been named league MVP and had brought this same event to St. Vincent–St. Mary.

I arrived at a loose yellow police tape, clattering in the breeze, cordoning off the traffic circle in front of the arena. A couple hundred people had gathered, awaiting James's emergence from the building, hoping for a glimpse, maybe a wave, a handshake, an autograph. He'd led the team, once again, through a stellar season, and now, with a play-off series against the Boston Celtics about to begin, the hope was growing into something like belief that finally, after all these decades, our championship was within reach. He could be the one to take us there. I looked at my watch. I decided to stay.

Soon his teammates, who'd been there at his insistence to share the award, began to emerge, waving and joking as they slipped into expensive automobiles, some with drivers, some alone. The coach, Mike Brown, jogged past in a golf shirt, wiggling his hand in a goofy wave. And then, we waited. A lull settled. The sky bruised over with clouds. A cold drizzle began. Every now and again, a figure would emerge, generating a moment's excitement before the realization that, no, it's not him. TV guy. Security. Crew. Nobody.

The crowd began to dwindle. I stayed. I wanted to see him, this person I identified with in unique and paradoxical ways. We, who have nothing and everything in common.

The rain picked up. I reached into my bag for a little pop-out umbrella, soon realizing I was surrounded mostly by Sunday-afternoon dorm students and strays, and that college students, as a rule, do not own umbrellas, and so I felt a little guilty but also a little superior beneath the flimsy comfort of this one. My guilt and my superiority both were soon relieved when a grunt in a hoodie insinuated himself underneath.

Time dragged along. A half hour. Forty-five minutes. An hour. More. A late-afternoon chill had set in. The crowd grew impatient, small jeers brewing with each false alarm. A car pulled up, slowing into an auxiliary driveway right in front of where I was standing, stopping near the entrance where the TV crews had been soldiering in and out like ants after an ice cream social. It was the sort of luxury car that appears not to be a real model, but a full-size toy, a prototype for a movie, a gleaming two-tone sedan, classic yet inscrutable lines, a capped silhouette at the wheel. It sat there for a long time, chrome exhaust breathing papal smoke.

And then, finally, he emerged, in dark glasses, flanked by two hard men shaped like telephone booths. He was dressed in a silvery suit and a robin's-egg shirt, hurrying toward the car in a now-steady rain. The first shout rang from the crowd:

“Go
Celtics
!”

I looked in the direction of the voice, wondering. You stood out in the cold drizzle? For more than an hour? Just to do that?

James didn't respond. One of the attendants popped the trunk and James slipped off his jacket and handed it to him. The man laid it out carefully, smoothing the cloth. James hurried around the corner of the car to the back door, raindrops spattering his sunglasses.

“
Ass
-hole!”

He disappeared behind the rain-streaked glass. The car pulled out and away.

*  *  *

The Decision. Yadda.

*  *  *

So I watch him now in these games that he plays for Miami and try to unravel the complexity of my response. Because he's someone who still—just as others who've moved from Ohio into distant spotlights—represents my hometown, I want him to succeed personally. But not ultimately. Choosing Miami was choosing to
not
do things the hard way anymore. If there was a betrayal, that was it.

I want him to succeed, that young man from the newspaper conference room, so full of promise, of promises, of the hardest promises. But I want him to wish he were succeeding for us, for the only people who will ever really understand this desire of his to be, more than anything else, an identity.

I have heard James criticized for being more interested in his “brand” than his athletic legacy. But that's missing the point. His basketball talent, his basketball legacy, is a means to something else, and it's something unique in the history of sports celebrity. It's a means to the journey back through his own narrative, to translate the code written literally and figuratively on himself.

*  *  *

The
not
winning is the better story, you see, just in the same way that hope is harder than loss.

I say this as someone who came of age, who came to an understanding, in a city no one else wanted. I explored abandoned buildings in the years I spent downtown while attending classes at the University of Akron. I watched pieces of that ruin be reclaimed, adapted, not desperately, but methodically, through a Calvinist instinct adapted into the genetic code by way of the repetition of a three-shift factory town.

I don't know if James ever understood exactly why we needed him, otherwise he wouldn't have left the way he did. But I do think he understood—even (and maybe especially) in those insults—
how
we needed him. And maybe that's why he left the way he did.

Three weeks before
The Decision
, the University of Akron announced that it was launching the country's first baccalaureate program in corrosion engineering, a program that would soon attract millions of dollars in federal grants, the money indicating the value of research on how to repair and preserve rusting bridges and buildings and military facilities. It was a natural and poetic fit; understanding rust in Akron is like understanding grass in Tullamore. The first students entered the program just as James was beginning his career in Miami, a place that couldn't be more different from his home.

The city that had first introduced America to the notion of a Rust Belt was now offering America's first bachelor's degree in the subject. We dubbed it the Rust Institute.

We own that shit, and no one can take it away from us.

*  *  *

He'll be back. I write these words now on the night that it finally happened: James, the Most Valuable Player, leading the Heat to a decisive championship; I, having immediately turned off the television after the final buzzer, not wanting to watch a celebration that feels bitter and wrong. I look at those words and I really believe them—
he will come home
—but I know I need to qualify this belief. You come from a misunderstood place and you develop a habit of qualifying
everything—
and I realize “hope” is the only way to do so, to ultimately believe that
that
is the force that will conquer, and I curse myself for this, for the goddamned hope of it all.

STONES

I sat under a tree one summer afternoon around the turn of the millennium, watching men dismantle a giant smokestack.

This may sound like an overtly symbolic pastime, a depressing one too, for a young man in a city whose industry had collapsed. And a tedious one as well, considering the way they were going about it.

They were high up on a custom-rigged scaffold, a functionally ingenious contraption in a place whose defining quality is functional ingenuity. The ceramic-block smokestack was equally impressive: round and tall, elegant and unconcerned, a decommissioned leftover from a Firestone tire factory, with the company name lettered down its side. In its day, it looked like this

F

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R

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S

T

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E

with smoke and sometimes a long banner of flame rising out of its top.

The men had erected a platform that surrounded the spire so they could take it down methodically, course by course. Handwork. They were removing the intricate puzzle of blocks a piece at a time and loading them into a bucket, which was lowered to the ground, emptied, then hauled back up for another round.

I don't know why they didn't just whack the thing with a wrecking ball. Plenty of other stuff around here has been erased that way, including Firestone's main factory, many years before, which the guy from the wrecking company once told me was the toughest building he'd ever encountered. It took two years to demolish. Someone had, apparently, predicted permanence.

I was glad they didn't just smash this one down. It was a nice afternoon, and I was enjoying the show. I sat on a scrubby little hillside, an embankment that ended at the railroad tracks that used to serve this vast industrial campus, each warehouse with a loading bay at the rear that opened up to where the freight cars would stop to be filled with cargo. A train still passes by here every afternoon, but it doesn't stop anymore.

The smokestack and its dismantlers were off in the middle distance, along a row of eight buildings in various colors of brick—yellow and ocher and rust colored. This particular smokestack was in the dusty-yellow range. Such nuances were important. I'd grown up in an awkward, uncertain spell—after the factories had stopped working, but before most of the abandoned ones had been bulldozed or converted to some other use (every child of the Rust Belt has eaten a restaurant hamburger in a cloyingly authentic brick-and-exposed-ductwork dining room). Within this cityscape and within a new era, I'd come to identify each of my hometown's major industrial enclaves not by what they produced, but by the color of their often-empty buildings. Goodyear and its surrounding neighborhood was classic university redbrick. Goodrich was a dirtier oxblood. Firestone was a buff yellow.

If there was an equalizer, it was smoke. Those of us who live in old houses in the city know that anytime we open up a wall or ceiling for repair or renovation, we can expect a fine layer of lampblack, the old smokestack pollution that was a cost of doing business. The closer you get to the central city, the more prominent the dark patina—on brick walls, bridges, even trees. I grew up amid urban churches whose common façade was flat-black sandstone, and it was a long time before I understood that sandstone was not naturally black.

And so these tall spires were the defining architecture of my hometown, mostly by default, as Akron has never had much of a skyline and never had much occasion to define its architecture. The town was built up fast, in busy times, without the luxuries of deliberation. Like that round Firestone chimney, these stacks stood as towers across the sky, lettered with the company names:

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N

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R

A

L

G

O

O

D

Y

E

A

R

F

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G

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H

You could see them from anywhere. Through most of the twentieth century, smoke poured out, all day and all night—sometimes white, sometimes black, sometimes in between, describing a rich spectrum of grays that only places like this understand—and a smell, the sulfurous rank of production, that became the way people described the city itself. Anyone who's lived near a steel mill or a paper factory knows this cultural tic: to try to explain the place by its particular stink. Akron has a weird twist on this—in addition to tire factories, the central city also once housed the Quaker Oats empire, so natives of a certain age have to calculate a nostalgic compromise between toasted grain and burning rubber.

So to happen along one day as one of these chimneys was being dismantled was occasion to sit and watch.

*  *  *

Generations knew this part of the country as the region that built modern America. I'm of the first generation that never saw any of that.
Postindustrial
is a much more relevant term to me than any of the many words and phrases—the Industrial Heartland; the Steel Belt; Industrial Valley—that are used to describe this broad swath of the country that produced automobiles and glass and tires and steel and an aesthetic of work and, most important, a new middle class.

For my generation,
postindustrial
is a rangy and encompassing and provocative adjective: a genre of music, a manner of dress, a style of art, a sociological term, a well-worn neologism, the end of the American century, an entire lifestyle. Increasingly, it is a new American culture.

In its present context,
postindustrial
emerged first as an underground concept, in the early 1980s. From time to time, I'd run across stylish ectomorphs in the Cleveland record shops, wearing punctiliously shredded Einstürzende Neubauten T-shirts and Herman Munster boots and accessories made of duct tape and a general attitude of being darker and aloofer than me. They smoked clove cigarettes and seemed to be studying graphic design.

One of them was Trent Reznor, whom I knew of first as a member of a local synthpop band called the Exotic Birds, a favorite of pretty girls who went out dancing, and whose local legend was cemented, for better or for worse, when they were chosen to open for Culture Club at the Richfield Coliseum. Reznor came across even then as intense, brooding, and driven—as birds go, he was more raven than exotic. Soon, his would become a widely recognized persona, as he donned black leather and chain-link mesh, became the figurehead of Nine Inch Nails, and released his debut album
, Pretty Hate Machine
.

The first time I remember hearing the term
postindustrial
used in any kind of specific mainstream way was when Nine Inch Nails emerged into prominence. They were one of the main-stage bands on the first Lollapalooza festival, which made a tour stop at Blossom Music Center near Cleveland in August 1991. The show was sold-out, and by late afternoon the affably hip audience, encompassing the kind of nonexclusivity one finds at such events in Ohio, had been into pretty much every band equally: Butthole Surfers, the Rollins Band, Ice-T, and Body Count. But when Reznor took the stage to that harsh electronic backdrop, hundreds, maybe thousands, of rock fans rushed the pavilion, demolishing the crowd barriers, scaling the seats, a crush that brought a look of utter fear and helplessness to the faces of the overwhelmed ushers. I was caught in the middle of it, swept forward involuntarily. It was frightening and thrilling. Reznor almost immediately stage-dove onto one of his own keyboards, destroying it. I'd never seen anything like it, and I was directly aware, even as my body was crushed toward the stage, that this was a Beatles moment. It felt both spontaneous and defining.

The notion of postindustry had no negative connotation for me. I had no referent for the prefix. It seemed cool and groundbreaking and uniquely relevant to my surroundings in ways I was just beginning to recognize. I didn't then understand the losses encompassed by the
post
part, nor the sense of pride and security once encompassed by
industry
. I was aware of a void, of all the empty buildings and the general diaspora of people my age, the recent graduates and emergent climbers who'd hightailed it to more promising lands. But to me that void just felt like something to be filled. It felt like opportunity. And it felt as if it were exclusively my own.

*  *  *

In the 1980s and '90s, a mass exodus took place from the Rust Belt. This included alarming percentages of the region's native-born young people. In the 2010 census, a psychological threshold was passed, as Akron's census count fell to 199,000, meaning the population had recoiled all the way back to its 1910 level, a hundred-year low. Proportionally, this figure exactly mirrors Detroit's latest census revelation: in both cities, all the growth of the twentieth-century industrial boom has been erased.

Having never left, I often wonder two things.

First: why does everyone always talk about the 30 percent who have departed, instead of the 70 percent who have stayed?

And second: where did they all go?

I don't know the first answer. I do know the second.

Phoenix.

*  *  *

The same census-takers that haunt the industrial Midwest like decennial locusts report that the population of Phoenix has grown from 439,170 in 1960 to 1,445,632 in 2010. Metaphorically speaking, all 1 million of those new residents came directly from Ohio. I know many of them personally. They post Facebook photos of sunsets and the labels of craft beers I've never heard of, and they send obliquely condescending meteorological updates, leading me to wonder if “It's a dry heat” is truly a favorable replacement for “It's not so much the heat, it's the humidity.”

Phoenix: where the sports team is called the Suns, not the Browns; where there seems to be an entirely safe and logical set of career opportunities; where golf, not bowling, is the measure of a man's leisure; and where people from here go to die as though dying in a place with winter would simply be too much to bear.

The Rust Belt is the burden of America, and I don't mean in the sense that the rest of the country has to shoulder us. I mean in the sense that the 70 percent of us who have stayed have endured and tested and defined the burden in a way that might provide insight for a country that, lately, might welcome our lessons. We know the weight. We understand hard times. We've been called “dying” but haven't died. We know a few things.

*  *  *

If you want to nutshell the story of the American Industrial Belt, it's an ongoing narrative of arrival and departure. We understand America by virtue of living in melting pots that never completely gelled, and we understand America by virtue of living in places people had to leave.

I have spent my whole life watching people leave, but that's only a matter of timing. In another era, Ohio was the first safe stop on the Underground Railroad, a promised land of sorts, as escaping slaves crossed the Ohio River at the state's southern border. Prior to that, it was the farthest edge of the western frontier, a final destination until it was tamed enough for America to continue its expansion. Later, it was the destination of hopeful Europeans, countless scores of them, arriving by ship to work in the factories of Cleveland and Akron and Toledo and Youngstown and, more broadly, Detroit and Buffalo and Bethlehem and Duluth. And of poor Appalachians, who made their way up the pre-interstates, leaving dead farmlands and tapped-out mines behind. And African-Americans from the deeper South, seeking the same opportunity.

Many of them settled and acquired newspaper subscriptions and self-propelled lawn mowers and street-improvement tax bills. Others took the quick cash of a season in the mills and moved on. In a good healthy lapse in the middle, a stability, the culture matured. The culture of hard work and bowling trophies and Blatz and Pontiacs became a linchpin of Americana. But the notion of this new middle-class lifestyle as “having arrived” was a falsehood.

Sometimes I wonder if some of these cities were too big for their own good, often cramped and underplanned and overreaching and configured in such a way that the smell was the defining characteristic only because there was no logistical way to avoid it. A few years ago, Youngstown mayor Jay Williams launched a campaign called “Youngstown 2010,” a systematic plan to “right-size” his city, whose population plummeted from 167,000 in 1960 to 67,000 in 2010. The idea was to eliminate vacant houses and neighborhoods to compress the city's physical size and scope to reflect its current state. Not to be ashamed of the reduction, but to resolve it.

*  *  *

When the men finished their work that day, they'd left a massive visual pun. I doubt they did this on purpose, but I like to imagine they did. The smokestack was halfway down.

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was gone. What remained was

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I have one of those blocks now from that very chimney. It is impressively crafted, heavy firebrick, with a honeycomb of holes, seven and a half inches wide, with a slight curve to its glazed outer surface, the color of a dirty Labrador retriever. It is tapered, so that when one block was fitted to the next to the next, they would form the curvature that eventually became the giant cylinder.

Someone gave it to me, one of those men who'd put in decades at what old-timers call “the Firestone,” the definite article implying a sort of deification. He'd scavenged a few of those man-made stones, and he offered one as a gift.