The Hard Way on Purpose (8 page)

PART TWO

BE APPROXIMATELY YOURSELF

We almost won.
We almost always
almost win.

—Josh Cribbs, Cleveland Browns

LOOKING FOR A NAME

More than anything else that summer, I needed a bowling shirt. This seemed like the most necessary thing in the world, or at least in Ohio. A bowling shirt with fanciful embroidery and a cryptic team sponsor's name stitched across the back, maybe a plumber or a garage, something involving the word
scooter.
A shirt with side vents and a contrasting yoke, made of good old-school rayon, with depth and heft. The weight of a cape, a habit, a mantle. Something the Stray Cats might wear to the diner for strong coffee in thick, white cups and cheeseburgers and unstudied flirtation. Something John Lurie would pluck at random from the bedside in a Jim Jarmusch joint. Something with
Perma-Prest
and
drip-dry
in the laundering instructions. Something with the right color scheme—black and red; turquoise and yellow; pink and almost anything. Maybe (dreaming here)
something with buttons shaped like dice
. And most important of all, a name above the pocket—Howie or Slim or Mack. The offer of personality.

At eighteen, in a factory town where bowling was as culturally significant as church, I recognized something authentic about such a shirt, something tangible and true, and also something circularly ironic, that it was the costume of some other culture than my own that was in fact the culture of which I was made, and to which I now aspired with what I imagined was irony. But, at eighteen, I didn't have much of a grasp on authenticity or irony or culture. Most of my spare time was spent looking for clues. And piles of discarded clothing were as good a place as any to start.

All of our information about what was cool came in fragments and obliquely. In the 1980s, the mass culture of three-network television and
Life
magazine was actively fracturing, but for the time being, subcultures traveled on foot. A great gap lay between the underground and the mainstream. This was the technological interlude before the Internet. In fact, this suspended moment at the end of a generalized, shared American culture was probably the thing that made the Internet
necessary
. As the top-down approach was disintegrating, the bottom-up was being conceived. In that in-between moment, however, Akron was the hinterlands. We knew this information existed, but found it agonizingly elusive. We were restless therefore in our yearning, knowing that tantalizing new ideas were creeping in beneath our feet. We wanted to know.

A newsstand at the mall carried
New York Rocker
, a low pulp fanzine I waited for monthly and devoured cover to cover, attempting to digest its secrets.
How to cuff my jeans. The Gun Club. Am I a sunglasses person? Human Switchboard. Talking Heads. The meaning of anger. Bow Wow Wow. Sturm und Drang. Lust.
But almost as soon as I'd made this a monthly pilgrimage, the magazine stopped appearing—gone, disappeared, a phantom. I stayed up late every night watching
Don Kirshner's Rock Concert
and the outlaw Pee-wee Herman on HBO and
Second City Television (SCTV)
reruns and, on the weekends,
New Wave Theatre
on the USA Network. These things emerged like little Brigadoons. As soon as I discovered
Rock Concert
, it was canceled. Pee-wee Herman's appearances were sporadic, hard to catch, and next thing I knew he surfaced reworked as a Saturday-morning network star. Every
SCTV
sighting seemed like a gift, a visit from Sasquatch. I happened, by total chance, upon MTV the night it debuted, and I really believed I'd discovered some obscure delight that no one else knew about or would ever know about. Akron was one of the first cities in the country to be wired for cable. We had it years before Manhattan, and while I'd like to think that made us pioneers, I think it was a greater indication that the channelers of culture recognized we needed it as a lifeline, that this information would be more precious to people like us, forsaken at the edge of Lake Erie, in the midst of the industrial wasteland.

So I had visual information that informed me
something
about a bowling shirt would be beneficial to my image (or lack thereof), and while I might not have known precisely what that meant, I did know where to look.

My friend Dave and I had been paying regular visits to the big, sprawling Goodwill store at the edge of the University of Akron campus. Our main purpose was to outfit ourselves for the Bank, a cavernous rock club in the middle of downtown that occupied the marble lobby and mahogany balcony of an abandoned bank. (Sometimes irony is unnecessary.) We were teenagers in a city that was fast losing its identity, ourselves just beginning to seek identities of our own. We needed outfits.

Dave was looking for a suit coat with skinny lapels and sleeves he could roll up in the manner of an English synth-pop bassist. And I had determined I would express my individuality via a secondhand shirt with another man's name trimmed over the heart.

*  *  *

Every time there is a monumental cultural shift, its spew lands in the Goodwill.

You don't have to look hard to find it, but you have to dig in deep to understand it; you have to enter the groove, slide your flattened hands between the fabric, layers upon layers, leafing through them like the living text of a place. But it's there: a story full of endings.

Slowly, it emerges from the chaos of high-school-band sweatshirts and hospital-sponsored 5K freebie T-shirts and Myrtle Beach souvenirs: patterns and the meaningful breaking of pattern. So first I came to understand what belonged and then to understand what didn't belong. I came to understand that the racks and shelves contained more than just the usual hand-me-downs and castoffs. This Goodwill was Akron's central warehouse, so it received much of the unloaded ballast of our diaspora.

Akron had lost close to eight thousand factory jobs in the preceding decade, and forty thousand residents (which translates to roughly ten thousand bowlers). A lot of people were giving up. There was despair, but even more, there was an uneasy void. These people just vanished. Vaporized. All the layoffs and factory closings and civic collapses of the preceding decade had led to families' picking up and leaving, often headed South, where corporations were reestablishing manufacturing in nonunion settings, the right-to-work states. Often these departures happened abruptly, and often bitterly, and often in the kind of separation that doesn't want the burden of memory.

So among the knickknack floor lamps and Reader's Digest Condensed Books and discarded wooden crutches, we found too-recent high school yearbooks and frames with family pictures still inside and plastic, gold bowling trophies that ought to have been gathering dust in the attic of a house where someone ought to have stayed until retirement and then death. I found tools and album collections and golf clubs that I knew would only be left by a man who had to make a quick exit. I'd spent enough time in my grandfather's and father's exquisitely cluttered workshops to understand that men do not give their tools to Goodwill. It simply isn't done.

One of my most profound revelations came when I discovered three albums stacked together in a single Goodwill record bin: Elvis Costello and the Attractions'
Armed Forces
, Adrian Belew's
Twang Bar King
,
and Pete Townshend's
All the Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes.
There could be no accident about this.
Those records, released within four years of one another, had to have come from the same collection. They had to have been in the collection of someone with specific, particular, rarefied taste, someone who really cared. They were not records that would have been discarded so soon after their release and their astute purchase. They were not records that belonged in a Goodwill. Not unless something had prompted a sudden liquidation. I would have bought them anyway, because, at 25¢ apiece, they represented a true windfall. But even more I bought them to honor whatever regrets had led to their present situation, and to keep them the way they belonged. When I took them home, I put them in the wooden crate with my other albums, making certain to stack them together, intact.

Akron, and places like Akron, are unusually rich with thrift stores. Some of this is because of the cultural shift: a profoundly strong middle class invests strongly in Middle Class Stuff. And then when that middle class falls on hard times, when it disintegrates, when it shrinks, some of that Middle Class Stuff is abandoned, to yard sales and thrift stores. It's a matter of human mathematics: after the long division, the remainder doesn't disappear. It has to go somewhere. Meanwhile, the hard times generate a clientele that needs thrift. And they also generate a clientele that recognizes the meaning of certain kinds of legacies. Bowling, for instance. So all those polyester shirts find their way to the Goodwill rack and so do the seekers, and the culture replenishes itself.

(I think it is no coincidence that Akron and Dacron are not just phonetic but aesthetic homonyms.)

By the time I started rifling through the cultural remains, thrift stores were operating at a high level of refinement, such that one understood the nuances between Goodwill, Salvation Army, and Amvets the same way Rodeo Drive sophisticates distinguish between Gucci, Armani, and Dior.

The store where Dave and I shopped was near the university, and hence its book selection was huge, and excellent. In the same way that I had begun to gravitate toward Grosset & Dunlap spines as a child, I now received a slight electric charge when I spotted one of the icons that represented a kind of taste that was emerging in my new, older self. The orange-and-white penguin, the Viking ship, the stylized flame. Based solely on imprint association, I discovered William Kennedy, Mary Gordon, Gabriel García Márquez.

It wasn't so much that these books matched my aesthetic. I didn't have one, not in any kind of evolved fashion. It was more that an aesthetic began to form amid the randomness and the seeking, and that these connections began to represent some kind of order. I was taking on the properties of my surroundings.

*  *  *

My strongest previous connection to the commercial center of the city was my family's annual visits to see the Christmas windows at the two big department stores, Polsky's and O'Neil's, which sat directly across Main Street from one another, five-story opposing façades positioned for a retail standoff. My two brothers and my sister and I would stand on the sidewalk, our breath fogging the plate glass as we peered at the jerky repetition of mechanized elves, steam rising around us from the manhole covers as my mother read the script verses describing the various scenes.

But now Polsky's had been closed for four years, and O'Neil's, deep in decline, had discontinued its displays and there wasn't much reason to go downtown. Akron's first suburban shopping mall had opened the year after I was born. My parents had a seven-inch promotional record with a snappy jingle and a ­driver's-ed filmstrip narrator championing the virtues of the department stores and the wide concourses and the safe, easy parking. Nobody was chirping for us to go downtown. Nobody was cutting records about anachronistic urban consumerism.

Despite that, or maybe because of it, the central city held something different for me and my peers—the promise of rummaging and cheap discovery. So that day when we went looking to outfit ourselves, Dave drove us there in his epically crappy, maroon Pontiac Astre and we approached the store full of hope and, well, goodwill. The long, low cinder-block building extended at one end into a loading dock. This was the main warehouse for drop-off and distribution, so the vast detritus of the community was sorted here and categorized and put on display.

We entered through the double glass doors. Before us were long racks packed densely with the ends of things and the beginnings of others, a tangible circular narrative with card-stock signs suspended from the ceiling as monuments to the various divisions: Men's Coats; Girls' Dresses; Small Appliances. The store was blankly lit with fluorescent tubes and steeped in a complex aroma. From within, it emanated the musty, piss-tinged acridity of used clothing and the occasionally hygiene-deficient clientele. But it also gathered the prominent sour-sweetness that meandered from the big Wonder-bread factory across the street, an institution at the edge of the University of Akron campus whose brick, like all of central Akron's brick, was darkened by years of carbon black from the tire-plant smokestacks.

In a city that had always been described by its smell, students at the university invariably defined their college experience by the scent of Wonder bread. But it didn't smell like bread. It smelled like bread
baking
. There's a difference. In a manufacturing city, the distinction was vital: the experience defined not by the product, but the making of the product.

Dave went off to the row of sport coats and I started sorting methodically through the men's shirts. As a result of my regular visits, I knew that a focused, systematic approach was the only way to find anything good. This was not a venue for browsing. Chance was not enough. You start at the beginning and you don't take the easy way out, and you stay that way until you've reached the end.

*  *  *

On November 6, 1995, one more in an incessant series of officially-­bizarre-couldn't-happen-anywhere-else events involving northeast-Ohio sports happened. Cleveland Browns owner Art Modell announced that he was moving his football team to Baltimore. The region was stunned and outraged. An immediate surge of resistance began, from street level on up through the legal system. The eventual result was an equally bizarre compromise: Modell would keep his team (i.e., the players, administration, organization), but Cleveland would keep the Browns' name, colors, history, records, etc. In a region defined for the previous generation by an identity crisis, here was one we could really sink out teeth into—an empty suit.

A familiar plain brown uniform with nothing inside.