The Hard Way on Purpose (9 page)
Read The Hard Way on Purpose Online
Authors: David Giffels
But as seems to be the common evolution of our upheavals, the story took on greater complexity in the thrift stores. At the same time Browns fans were clamoring to keep their beloved team name and colors in Ohio, they apparently were throwing away any item of clothing that bore that name and colors.
In the weeks and months following the announcement, I found the thrift-store racks dense with orange-and-brown team apparel. Sweatshirts, T-shirts, jerseys, pajama pants, satin jackets, ugly orange stocking caps with brown pom-poms on top. Nothing defines the jilted more than the wardrobe tossed with hurt and anger out the front door.
Get out and stay out
, the thrift stores seemed to say, even as we were begging,
Please don't leave us.
This, as much as anything, captures the paradox of a culture that loves something that offers heartache upon heartache in return.
And then, fifteen years later, another turn of the screws. ÂLeBron James, who was supposed to deliver us from these miseries, announced that he was “taking his talents to South Beach.” In a region pocked with the scars of sports infamy, this was the deepest cut we had ever known, perhaps ever could know. The other incidentsâthe Shot, the Drive, the Fumble, etc.âall stank of ill fate. But this one was different because the notion of fate stretched all the way from James's birth in Akron through his rise in prominence. After he was drafted by the Cavaliers in 2003, Nike signed him to a $90 million endorsement deal, and the shoe company created the famous “Witness” campaign with all its messianic overtones, including a line of T-shirts that represented a new uniform for the region.
Within weeks after “the Decision,” I went to the Village Thrift, arguably the finest secondhand store in all of America. What I found was almost surreal. A density of black Witness T-shirts lining the racks, so many that it almost looked as if this were its own department. One of the ubiquitous television images in the immediate wake of James's announcement was of angry fans torching their LeBron gear. And while that purge was dramatic, it was nothing like what the racks of the thrift store announced. A complete disowning.
In addition to the Witness T-shirts, the racks were stocked with No. 23 jerseys and King James T-shirts and all other manner of clothing devoted to his brand. This display told the story perhaps even better than those video clips. Because the burningâthat seemed spontaneous and extreme, a public spectacle. But the funneling of all those countless items of clothing, discarded not as some sort of organized protest, but rather a cascading identical private act, suggested something of our shared subconscious. We all, without needing to be told, knew what to do. To shed the tainted skin before it defined us.
We are well versed in this.
*Â Â *Â Â *
Dave had found what he was looking for, a brown sharkskin suit jacket that fit well enough. He approached me with it draped over his arm.
“Any luck?” he asked.
I shook my head and paused, my hands parting the wall of shirts. “Not yet.”
He went down to the end of the rack where I'd begun, retracing my path through wrinkled polos and pit-stained dress shirts. I continued, locked in on the search, determined. I flipped through the hangered shirts mechanically, certain now of what I didn't want, which was a step closer to understanding what I did want. And then, deep into the line, I found one. A bowling shirt. I pulled it out. It was plain, barely adorned. Gray polyester, shapeless, more barber's frock than
New York Rocker,
with a wide collar that ended in long points. There was no team name across the back, just a simple black band around the bottom hem and at the end of each sleeve and across the top seam of the breast pocket. A name, not stitched but stamped, was in script appliqué above the pocket.
Dave
.
Really?
My own name?
I wasn't sure what to make of that. Was it more ironic? Or was this fate, an announcement that the shirt was placed there special, just for me? Or was it a mockeryâno one ever called me Dave except for my older brother, but only when he was trying to taunt. Long before, in second grade, I'd started writing Dave on my school papers. When I received my official-membership card signifying me as a “member in good standing” of the G.I. Joe Adventure Team, I wrote
Dave Giffels
on the line for my name. I thought it sounded more grown-up, more debonair. But my mother soon took me aside and explained kindly but firmly that she and my father had chosen the name David carefully, and it meant “beloved,” and I was not to defile it by shortening it to the familiar. So I was David. Yet the shirt offered to me by Goodwill suggested I was, in my new guise, to be Dave.
Or maybe fate hadn't even planted the shirt for me at all. Maybe it was meant for my friend there at the end of the rack, someone who actually went by Dave.
If the guiding coming-of-age question for the high school graduate (and the thrift-store seeker) is, “Who am I?” this shirt seemed to suggest an answer: “Approximately who you already are.”
Hardly a definitive revelation, but time was short and I was near the end of the rack.
With my friend still trailing behind, I completed my search with no further success. This shirt would have to do. We made our purchases and headed back into the world.
WORKING HARD OR HARDLY WORKING?
You really need to understand about the bowling. Nothing serves as a better cultural metaphor for the peak and dark valley of industrial America better than the game of tenpins. But not for the reasons you might think.
Bowling, to Akron, is something like sex to Paris and celebrity to Los Angeles and dry heat to Phoenix. It is the thing which informs the culture and that which the culture informs. It is language spoken back into the native mouth. All the plastic, gold trophies on display in the fellowship halls and the Chianti-bottle Italian joints are of men bent deeply forward, one arm extended, captured in the moment either of graceful release or of being yanked into their future by a dense, black sphere.
When you have a city built so directly on three thingsâindustry, hierarchy, and polymer compoundsâyou are bound to have some serious bowling leagues. And Akron did. You look in the old-photo morgues and you find stacks and stacks of things like black-and-white glossies of company bowling teams with the men posed shoulder to shoulder, photos that neatlyâuncannilyâjuxtapose with the portraits of Harvey S. Firestone's five blue-blooded sons, also standing shoulder to shoulder, and there's really no difference. Ultimately they are all heir to the same fortunes.
This idea of intense bowling activity was true everywhere in blue-collar middle-class America anytime in the postwar twentieth century. But in Akron, where the ideals of Work and Industry operated at such a level of high concept, the culture of bowling could not exist as a casual notion. It just couldn't. Akron has never done anything that way. Places like this are self-conscious, worried, busy, hardheaded, and diligent. These kinds of places leave nothing to luck. They are the opposite of cool, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but definitely is a necessary thing. In Akron, where bowling teams oozed from the tire factories like excess plastic from an extrusion, bowling had to be serious, otherwise it would seem counterproductive.
To correct this idea of bowling as a trivial pastime, Akron invented the Professional Bowlers Association. This ensured that the game would not be perceived as mere relaxation. Relaxation in heavily union towns can only be one of two things: a vice or a reward. As such, it needs to be done either in private or in Florida. Not in a bowling alley.
And that's how bowling, quintessential recreation of the middle class, was turned by Akron into a profession. In 1958 the Professional Bowlers Association (PBA) formed here and the notion of “organized bowling” became formalized. Firestone Tire & Rubber became the lead sponsor of the Tournament of Champions, the sport's Super Bowl, held in an Akron suburb.
Akron, seizing as it so often does on slim recognition, declared itself the Sports Capital of the World, a proclamation splashed across the frontispiece of the 1978
Akron City Directory
, which offered the evidence of “famous events like the All-American Soap Box Derby, the National Skate-Board Championships, the World Series of Golf and the $150,000 Firestone Tournament of Champions bowling tournament.”
Hyperbolic superlatives like this always seemed to be attached to my place, and I could never figure out how to process them. The Rubber Capital of the World also claimed to be the birthplace of the hamburger
and
the ice cream cone, and to have spawned the first American punk-rock club outside New York City. Cleveland, our next-door neighbor to the north, claimed to be the Rock and Roll Capital of the World. Canton, our next-door neighbor to the south, goes by the nickname Birthplace of Professional Football. As a teenager, I was fascinated by my hometown's reputation as pop music's “new Liverpool”âa designation sparked by the sudden popularity of the locally born Devoâand the widespread use of the term
Akron sound
to describe New Wave. When the Akron bands sought to capitalize on this attention, they collaborated to release a local compilation album and called it
Bowling Balls from Hell
.
Hamburgers and ice cream and bowling and rock music and soap-box racers and Chuck Taylors and football! And blimps!
Children! Why are you leaving here?
But I didn't know how to contextualize any of it. Either Akron was unusually culturally significantâspecialâor every place had its own version of this and was equally culturally significant, which would mean that my place was not special at all.
*Â Â *Â Â *
Just outside of Akron, off a two-lane highway that led into the neighboring town of Kent, was a bowling ball factory. It sat down in a valley, in concert with the river and the railroad tracks. It seemed exotic, but also entirely logical: We were a place that made things, by hand, from scratch, often with rugged ingenuity, like the Amish or the Little Rascals. We needed bowling balls and so we made them, there in that mysterious factory, a long whistle calling in the shift so that the men and the women could come in and craft sixteen-pound globes for the industrial leagues, some black, some neon, some fancy with swirls. I like to think that the factory workers themselves formed a company team, to bowl with the company balls, and that they were good, the best. That theirs was both the height and the justification of craft. Regardless of that desire, one truth stands clear. We were a closed loop. We completed our own synapses. It all made sense.
Until the night the factory blew up.
I don't know when it happened, maybe a long time before I heard about it, maybe two days before, but the legend was immediate and profound, of a night sky filled with an explosion of black spheres spewing in all directions, a confetti of cannonballs. Where did they land? Who found them? What destruction ensued? Was anyone killed? And what, then, was the logic in this?
*Â Â *Â Â *
I worked one summer with a guy named Keith. Keith liked his beer. We all knew that. Friday after work, he was gone, off to dollar-Âpitcher night somewhere or other. I was working that year on the dummy end of a surveying crew, and Keith was the sort of flawed icon who helps young men like me define what a man is. He was dark haired, rugged, and hardworking, fixed his own car, bitched about the government, wore combat boots and an army jacket and faded jeans, and he taught me how to steady a plumb bob over a nail head and also how to engage in the Banter of Guys. We spent our days hacking through brush with machetes, tanned and lean, waving our arms to shoo the bugs and pollen we'd disturbed, clearing sight lines to view the measuring rod once we'd located our corners, dragging a hundred-foot tape to measure the distances. We ate lunch and took water breaks in the hot metal shell of the company van, the air inside fragrant with the pine of property stakes and lath, the walls speckled with errant sprays of orange paint. That's the kind of work for which cold beer was invented as a reward. Beer was, for many generations of human society, served warm and heady. I like to think that it was an American man like Keith who deduced that, if thinned and chilled, beer would serve as the fittest reward for hot summer work and should therefore be offered at a discount price in the hours immediately following that work. That Keith himself invented happy hour. But even if he was not the originator, he was an avid practitioner.
And so one Monday morning he came into the office limping badly.
“What happened?” we asked him.
“Well,” he said, “I went out to Kent after work on Friday and had me some beers. When I came out of the bar, it was still light out. And as I was walking up to the next bar, I saw a ball on the sidewalk, like a kid's dodgeball, and decided I was gonna kick it down to the river. So I backed up for a running start and laid into it. And it didn't
move
.”
He looked at us a long moment.
“It was a bowling ball.”
He limped for a long time until he got better, and he told the story more than once, and I could never tell if he was embarrassed or proud, but I now understand that he must have been proud, that this was his story to tell, and eventually I wished it were mine.
I don't know if these two legends are connected in fact, but I do know that they are forever connected in my mind, and I can no longer extract one from the other and I no longer want to. I want to believe that all this happened together, that the shift ended at the bowling ball factory on a Thursday night, that everyone went home, that a stray, random spark found purchase in something powerful, powerful enough to do the job completely, and that the explosion sent those countless balls into a pattern of chaos, but one landed there on the sidewalk near the bar and lay there till the next evening, waiting with predetermination for Keith to get just tight enough to come outside, a grown man feeling as if the world still holds its possibilities for him, despite the day-after-day-after-days inside the hot company van, that joy and surprise and inspiration always exist and always will andâthere, just like that!âin his path was proof, and when he gave himself over to the act, fully, completely, and his foot struck nothing but the dense urethane of resistance, that nothing changed, that despite the pain, the disillusion, the bitter folly, that for all that, the bowling ball was an even better surprise. That right there in the hurt where the boot met the ball: proof there was meaning in this.