APARTMENT X

I was hanging upside down from the fire escape when the police arrived. Loose change fell out of my pocket, ting-tinging against the pavement. I squeezed the metal stair tighter, attempting invisibility.

Look, if you put four young men in an alley full of fire escapes under cover of darkness, one of them is going to start climbing. That’s just basic math.

And this moonlit back corridor had offered a stunning array of choices. So while climbing up here seemed like the most natural and logical thing to be doing at three in the morning, the arrival of local law enforcement was cause for reconsideration.

The building to whose back I clung was the Hotel Anthony Wayne. The hotel and the adjoining Bank nightclub had been abandoned for nearly a decade, which had only enhanced their mystique.

My brother and I had spontaneously begun. I gave him a boost to the first landing of the fire escape. He reached down with one hand and pulled me up far enough that I could grasp its steel lip with my fingers and pull myself up. We couldn’t get through the cage that enclosed the landing, so we started to climb the stairs on their back side, working hand over hand as though scaling a diagonal set of monkey bars from underneath. The climb was awkward; we were leaning backward, looking up toward the sky. But it wasn’t hard, especially with the fuel of adventure, of discovery, and of an evening’s beer.

John and our friend Larry stood at the bottom, watching, calling out instructions.

“If you go up one more set, you can get to the next landing. It’s open there,” John said in a stage whisper.

I watched Ralph as he led the way. He’d always been more athletic than me, and more willing to take on physical challenges. We progressed carefully—ten feet, fifteen, rising above the alley that ran behind the row of buildings, parallel to the old canal.

*  *  *

Every American Industrial Age city is defined by its water. For Akron, it was the canal. The city began as a rest stop on the Ohio and Erie Canal, and its entire shape and personality emerged from there. Akron was defined first by the vitality of the canal, then by its demise, and now by its charming obsolescence.

The canal smells sometimes, sewer overrun, a stench that seems to overtly demand attention. The waterway still crawls through the city, a slow, man-made riverish thing that defied geography and gravity and modernity, concrete-walled, polluted, utilitarian, unkillable. Until 1913, the canal was a main commercial vein from whose prime line the entire city was drawn. But that all ended in March of that year. The freeze-thaw-freeze cycle that defines an Ohio winter had encased the state in ice amid an Easter weekend whose meteorology seems bizarre unless you’ve lived here, in which case you understand why we talk so much about the weather:

Good Friday: sixty degrees and heavy rain.

Holy Saturday: twenty degrees and a hard freeze and more rain.

Easter Sunday: Heavy rain.

The frozen and saturated ground couldn’t absorb the precipitation that kept on falling—nearly ten inches in total—and the entire state endured devastating flooding that killed more than 450 people and washed out more than forty thousand homes. In Akron, the rising water threatened to overwhelm all of downtown, and city officials took the drastic and permanent measure of dynamiting the canal locks north of the central city to relieve the pent-up water. With railroads already well established, that one exploding night ended the practical use of the canal. So now, like almost everything else, it remained as impressive in its form as it was adrift from its function, another remnant of a world we never made.

Abandoned, it belonged to us. An entire canal, there for the taking, along with hotels and banks and whatever else was left for dead. We were like a garage band that had found ELO’s gear tossed on the curb.

*  *  *

In the moonlight, the shallow water was still and flat, barely moving forward, easing the bottom weeds in a slow, psychedelic dance. Whenever it rained, the canal’s pace quickened, but so did that smell, as sewage found its way into the mix. This night, it lolled sleepily.

There was little direct access to the canal, just worn footpaths where the underbrush offered least resistance, but from time to time I found myself down there, rarely as a destination, most often as a matter of having escaped from the street, but always, upon arrival, wondering about this concrete stream, a shabby living history with no one to explain it. One night in high school, my friend Dave and I camped out in front of the old downtown Akron Civic Theater, first in line to buy tickets to see the Clash play there on what would become their final tour. Once we’d established our spot with sleeping bags and lawn chairs, we took occasional breaks to sneak behind the theater and shotgun contraband beers. The theater spanned the canal by way of a bridge from the main building to the back dressing rooms, and we sat underneath, listening to the soft rush of a little waterfall echoing off the pillars and the theater above us. Across the shimmering water, we could see the date 1906 stamped into the concrete wall. We tossed our cans into the water and reestablished ourselves in our position of dominance out by the ornate box office.

For several years, I was in a band that played in a shabby club called the Daily Double, a converted warehouse that overlooked the canal half a mile to the south, the slow, anachronistic stream offering a place to wander to after the gear was loaded and it felt too early to go home.

This night, then, carried the slant echo of discovery as we trooped along in the weeds. From the fire escape, the vantage of my downtown was revelatory in its way, fifty feet off the promenade, scanning the buildings from behind and slightly below. Their fronts all displayed failure, plywood and cardboard and newspaper on either side of the doorways, covering the storefronts’ faces like sets of ashamed hands. Their façades were untended, cracked marble and glass, fading paint, dead neon, defeated brokers’ signs, abandoned pleas. But here in the alley, the backs of the buildings seemed self-assured, the brick arches of their windows like the brows of watchful eyes, the rusty iron staircases still offering escape. Holes were punched in the brick and missing windows, but that only seemed to underscore the prevailing survival instinct, which, more than anything else, defined this heady corridor. Weeds back here were mature, a horticulture of untended urbanity rustling in the night. The oxygen they breathed out was just as good as that from orchids and hibiscus. Unperfumed, but perfectly useful. The ground was uneven brick splotched with macadam and bituminous fill. Glass crunched underfoot. Stray clumps of paper, wet and dried and wet and dried, clung to rocks and weeds like plaster of a badly formed cast.

These were some of my favorite places in the world. These buildings never seemed dead to me. I found the empty, boarded-up downtown hotels far less dead than the falsely sterile, monotonous chains that stood submissive and unadorned at every highway exit. There were no surprises there, and the antiseptic air always felt like the whisper of a lie it thought I wanted to hear. Here, the decay was honest and full of life, vibrant in its constant self-creation. Every view was a thrill. In daylight, I’d seen where small plants had taken root in the mortar of the old brick buildings, growing sideways and upward out of the wall, as though to prove defiantly there was still life to give. These buildings were constructed to last forever; despite everything that had happened in the past decade or two, they maintained that presence. The new strip malls, on the other hand, offered a cynical implication that the buildings would exist only as long as their leases, that they had no need to be beautiful or permanent, because with their green lumber and hollow blocks they could easily be demolished and replaced with a new structure that better suited the corporate footprint of the new tenant. From Shoe Carnival to Hobby Lobby in three easy steps. (Liquidate, eradicate, fabricate.)

*  *  *

John was separated from his wife and living in a loft space downtown that had been empty since the 1970s. The building was just across the street from the Goodrich factory where a few years before we had commemorated the beginning of his marriage. So the location had something of a bittersweetness. Despite the seeming quaintness of the term, the notion of a “downtown loft” had nothing to do with yuppie gentrification. There was no trend, no glamour, no promise of future return on an investment. As far as we knew, only one other person lived downtown as a matter of choice, a photographer who had purchased cheap space for a studio above an abandoned storefront and had turned part of his loft into his home. His space, he claimed, had once been a brothel, and he described himself sometimes as the resident whore. The rest of the downtown dwellers were in the Mayflower Hotel or, worse, invisible in doorways and stairwells, their silhouettes impressed upon piles of wear-softened cardboard and cloth.

John’s apartment, decades before, had been occupied by the owner of the jewelry store two floors down. The name of the store owner—Fred A. Grimm—was memorialized in the mosaic tile at the threshold, though, like almost everything else downtown, that sign existed as a reference divorced from its referent, a puzzle piece without its mate, prompting John to make references to “Ole Lady Grimm”—a sort of specter to ease the loneliness. Now the space was occupied by a little restaurant called the Diamond Deli, itself a reference to the old jewelry store. On Sundays, Pat, the owner, made a big batch of soup for the coming workweek and made sure to feed John, whom she seemed to regard as a sort of stray.

When John took over the rent at 376½ South Main, the place was packed floor to ceiling with storage from the old owners. The landlord cleared most of it, leaving John with grimy, sprawling open rooms, undraped windows streaming sunlight through the dust. Oddball castoffs were left behind—a metal breadbox that John made into his mailbox; an antique porcelain sign listing shopping staples—bread, salt, flour.

Aside from the street address downstairs, John had no postal designation for his room, so he added it at the front door: Apt. X.

He replaced the flimsy wooden apartment door with a thick steel security door he’d found at a hospital rummage sale, along with some surgical lights that he set up in an attempt to illuminate a space that more resembled an indoor basketball court than an apartment.

Perhaps the best amenity of the loft was its roof access. The roof was like an elevated patio, and that’s where we’d begun this spring evening: at a cookout three stories above Main Street, open sky above, stunning views of the city all around. From there, we could see across to the Goodrich rooftops and over to the few tall buildings that defined our middling skyline. The glaring-red BJ spire above the newspaper building now served literally as John’s personal digital clock, visible from his bedroom window.

With no one to disturb, we played the music loud—Pavement, the Minutemen, the Feelies. John had set up a slide projector in one of his windows and aimed it across Main Street onto the white front of an old furniture store. I sat at the edge of the roof and we watched pictures flash in uneven staccato, a haphazard montage of how we had arrived here, on this perfumed night, under someone else’s stars, feeling like the only people in the world.

*  *  *

“Hold it,” John rasped suddenly. “Someone’s coming!”

We looked down and saw the headlights a block away, creeping forward along the alley. There was no way to get down quickly, and no obvious place to scramble to get ourselves off the back edge of the staircase. I swung my legs over a rusty step, hooking at the knees, and hung there, suspended. My brother looked back at me. The coins fell from my pocket.

“Don’t move,” he whispered.

John and Larry had shrunk up against the building, but they too had no place to hide.

Within moments, I could see that it was a police car. It moved at a pace nearly as slow as the canal, then stopped when it came up even with the Anthony Wayne. The spotlight locked on John and Larry, then slowly cast upward onto my brother and me. I couldn’t see through the car’s windows, and the light made it hard to see anything more than its chrome source and the general white shape of the squad car. The beam eased back down to John and Larry, holding for another long moment, then, suddenly, went dark. We heard the click of the gearshift and the car started moving again. We watched as it reached the end of the alley, turned, and disappeared in the fading reds of taillights.

Maybe we weren’t worth it. Or maybe he’d decided we belonged there. Or maybe, probably, he just didn’t care.

We never did find our way inside that night. There was no obvious entry point, and better judgment had begun to dull the adventure. Imagination would continue to fill all the empty spaces.