The Hard Way on Purpose (20 page)

DO NOT CRY FOR ME, ARIZONA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At some point, it forces the hardest question.

Why?

*  *  *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why do I keep staying?

*  *  *

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

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

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

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

All my stuff is here.

*  *  *

A confession: I sometimes resent people who move back.

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

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

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

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

Wait. That sounds like a redemptive ending.

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

*  *  *

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

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

*  *  *

In 2008 the Rust Belt came into its power.

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

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

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

Hard times?

We are the Paris of Hard Times.

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

The newspaper conducted focus groups, and night after night I listened to tale after tale of a profound anxiety—of debt and uncertainty and diminished expectations. There was hope too, but of a ragged and stubborn sort. I wrote about people in bankruptcy and people who'd lost once-secure manufacturing jobs and people who worried they'd never be able to retire and people burdened with student-loan debt. I stood in a garage with a mother holding back tears as her just-graduated son backed a loaded-down midsize economy car out of the driveway and onto the street where he'd grown up, a street called Bittersweet Lane. This was the last of her three children, her last child to leave, on his way to New York City to test his possibility.