The Hard Way on Purpose

ANARCHY GIRLS

They were going the wrong way in the tunnels, and John didn’t know what to do about it and I certainly didn’t know what to tell him. Anarchy girls were always trouble, and these had arrived from Philadelphia stoned and of a number that was hard to determine because they never held still long enough to count them. Here were two, going off into one of the brick tunnels that led to what could be anywhere, and I almost opened my mouth to ask about the issue of liability, but even where anarchy girls are involved, no guy wants to look that uncool. So I said nothing, but stayed close to John, partly so he knew he had my support as a friend, but mostly because last time I’d been down here in the weak artificial light, I’d heard a great deal of varmintlike scurrying off in the dark corners.

It would be so easy to get lost down here in the underworld, and this was the key difference: the girls seemed to want to get lost and I was doing my best to remember the way back out.

John had discovered the tunnels. For years, we’d heard rumors, legends, that Akron had a vast, complex network of tunnels, connecting factories and other institutions. As the story went, some were for underground deliveries between manufacturing plants and warehouses, some were for access to the massive complex of utility lines and pipes that served the central city. And some were said to have been built for high-stealth, high-stakes security—Akron was considered a top potential domestic target during World War II, primarily because of the importance of the synthetic-rubber research taking place here. By developing an alternative to the natural rubber whose supply had been cut off by the Japanese, Akron’s chemists helped keep the military rolling on tires, floating in rafts, and airborne in blimps and balloons. One expert proclaimed this research so vital that without it “there would have been no Manhattan Project, no Polaris submarine, no man on the moon.”

As time went on, John and I heard about more and more of these secret passages. We heard about a tunnel that started under one of the bars and led across the street to St. Vincent Cemetery. We heard about a tunnel from the storied, old hilltop house where Thomas Edison was married to the carriage house behind it. We heard about whorehouses on Howard Street connected by secret passages to the factories. John had actually seen a passage that started with a trapdoor in the ladies’-room floor at a local bar and led under the street to who knew where.

The notion of all these tunnels just below our feet, crisscrossing and meandering, of a world underground, a world darker and richer and fuller of mystery—this is what a child of the industrial Midwest craves. Because it disproved what the wider world wanted to believe—that our place was mundane, without intrigue or romance, that it was uncomplicated, unpoetic.

John had worked his way through college in a small rubber factory, not one of the main ones, but one of the countless others, the oddball places that produced things such as the pigment that makes tire whitewalls white and rubber floor mats and—yes—condoms. There really was a condom factory in town, which, among other things, served to complete the Rubber City joke.

Some of John’s coworkers had spent time at the big tire companies, and they told stories about the tunnel systems under the sprawling corporate campuses of Goodyear and Goodrich. The tunnels were the domain of the pipe fitters, who used them to maintain the complex steam and water systems that supported the factories. But, the stories went, the pipe fitters also used them for a sophisticated underground network of drinking, smoking, gambling, and pornography. They set up projectors deep in the tunnels and ran a chauffeur service with their motorized carts, delivering their customers to the show. There, in a smoke-filled catacomb, a group of factory workers who’d stolen away from their machines would sit and watch stag films, drinking, staring into the flickering darkness.

So, yes, of course we wanted this to be true. And now John not only had found a set of these tunnels, but had managed more or less to have them turned over to him to do as he pleased. You could say this had happened by accident, but these kinds of accidents only happen to those who are seeking them. Not long after John and I had broken into the old Goodrich factory, Operation Greengrass had moved closer to fruition: 3.5 million square feet of factories and offices was about to become the biggest vacant lot any of us had ever seen. Its obliteration was such a fait accompli that the makers of a Sylvester Stallone / Wesley Snipes action movie called Demolition Man had approached Goodrich, asking if they could blow up one of the old, vacant factories on film. We, being Akronites, had taken this news as flattery: Hollywood had noticed us.

But then, at the eleventh hour, a private investor lured by the two Goodrich attorneys who’d been put in charge of decommissioning the complex had agreed to save it. For what, no one could say.

John knew exactly what to do. He approached one of the attorneys and asked if he could use some of the space for an art studio, which they’d agreed to, and then a gallery, which they’d also agreed to, because when you have that much empty real estate, you’ll take in anyone willing to give it life. In this way the big idea that we had always talked about—to prove the worth of the condemned—took hold.

You have to come from a place like this to stake a claim in a decrepit thirty-five-acre brownfield and call it victory. Brownfield—that’s what these abandoned factory sites were called, and they were all around us, everywhere we went. John claimed the old Goodrich glazier’s shop as his “office.” The room sat to the side of an open factory floor.

Soon, as he began to clear out a space for the galleries, John discovered the opening that led into the underground.

* * *

I’d been through this passage that led from the gallery area to John’s office many times, but it never seemed the same, and I had to navigate carefully when he wasn’t there to lead the way. One stretch was too low to walk through upright, causing claustrophobia to gather in its passage; this also raised the question of its function. So now I felt that I knew something these anarchy girls didn’t, but I also felt the opposite: maybe they did know what they were doing and maybe I was missing the point. I had felt this way most of my life, and particularly when in the company of free-spirited young women.

“You gotta go back that way,” John said resolutely, pointing in the direction of the gallery. “There’s nothing down here. And it’s dangerous.”

One held up her plastic cup, half full of beer, as though in toast to what might have been, and they headed back the way John had directed. He looked at me, shook his head, laughed, and we continued.

John’s space was filled with artifacts of its past life, which seemed at once tantalizingly recent and cloudily distant. Clipboards held production schedules, the dates of the pay stubs discovered in desk drawers were not that long before. This aspect of time could be measured in months. But the tire molds and schematics he found suggested a long-gone culture, something measured in eras. Goodrich had an infinity of windows—fiftysome buildings, each with hundreds of panes—so glazier’s were a constant necessity of maintenance. John’s office was filled with pieces of glass and anachronistic tools that made it seem like a reenactor’s set at one of those living museums: the Glazier’s Shoppe at Rubberland.

This place was an abandoned shrine to something we couldn’t fully comprehend. The sense of recently departed humanity was almost ghostly. John had found snapshots of some of the workers taken as they were out drinking at nearby bars, bars we ourselves had been in with the same attitude of camaraderie, bars like the ones we had left to come here the night before John’s wedding. And he had found pieces of their clothing, cigarette lighters, family photos, the fallout of layoff slips that prompted rash exits.

A few of us regarded this state as beautiful. My wife and I had been helping John prepare the galleries and had attended his first show, an event that seemed to capture much of what we hadn’t been able to define until then: the possibilities of a place no one else wanted. It seemed like a huge success—a hundred or so people came through this trio of homemade art galleries, which John named the Millworks. It was written about in the newspaper. John managed it all, bringing together something that seemed as relevant as it did unlikely.

For this next show, John had contacted a guy named Scott Moore. The two of them had been in art school together at the University of Akron. Scott had moved to Philadelphia, where he’d become part of a loose-bound art collective squatting on Mascher Street. John’s idea was for Scott to organize some of his artist friends into a group show that would fill the three galleries in the old tire complex. The show would be called Straight Outta Philly, after N.W.A.’s album Straight Outta Compton.

* * *

They began haphazardly wandering in on the Thursday before opening weekend, one car and then the next and then another, like the advance guard from folkways unknown. Not one of them—the cars and maybe the people too—looked sound enough to have covered the 350 miles from Philadelphia. One of the first cars expelled a man we would only know by the nickname his physical demeanor immediately suggested—Frankenstein—and he stumbled forward a few steps, turned, dropped his zipper, and urinated where he stood. Two of the anarchy girls flitted from the rear and immediately disappeared into the web of alleys between the smutted brick factories. A battered van arrived, somewhere between bronze and brown, with a plumber’s logo on the side—FRANK WOLF COMPANY—and the men from inside became known to John and me as the Company of Wolves.

John had driven to Philadelphia months before and made the arrangements. He was expecting maybe a dozen artists. But they kept coming—twenty, thirty of them, most of whom appeared to have taken this as a late-summer road trip and had little or nothing to do with the show. They unloaded case after case of Joe’s beer—a Philadelphia product, thin, pale stuff whose local counterpart, P.O.C. (Pride of Cleveland), was a shared icon—and they took off in various directions as though they were sightseers stepping off the bus at Yellowstone.

The galleries were just inside one of the main iron gates leading into the factory complex, which opened into a brick parking lot / courtyard ringed with buildings. With so much real estate to redevelop, the new owners had concentrated first on the most visible areas, and here they’d leased space to a restaurant owner whose Main Street delicatessen had closed. He’d opened a cavernous restaurant and jazz-and-blues club called Satchmo’s, which was so nice it seemed doomed to fail. But the Millworks galleries had the prime spot, just inside the main gate. One gallery was called the Shoe Shop because it occupied a small building where Goodrich employees purchased their work shoes and brought them for repair. When he first started clearing out the space, John found random shoes and boots in corners and cubbyholes. The next gallery occupied a long, upward stairwell and landing, with the art hung on the ascending walls. It was called the Big Hand. And the third was another staircase, this one descending, called Zone de Confusion. Every car that entered to go to Satchmo’s had to pass the galleries. This was the sentinel.

* * *

By the time I arrived Friday evening, the night before the opening, John’s usual calm had been replaced by a bad cross of whimsy and thinning patience.

“I’ve been out all day looking for a fish,” he said.

“A fish?” I said.

“Yeah. The guy with the dreadlocks needed a fish.”

“What kind of fish.”

“A whole one. With the head. And tail.”

“You mean a dead one?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you find one?”

“Yeah, finally. He was very selective.”

“What’s he gonna do with it?”

“He’s gonna wrap it up and nail it to one of his sculptures.”

“Won’t it smell?”

John raised his hands halfway and shook his head, disavowing any responsibility, as if to say finding this fish was enough and anything beyond that was somebody else’s problem or, maybe more to the point, was everyone else’s problem, which made it the audience’s problem, which made it the problem of Art.

It was hot and sticky and I thought maybe John and I could go into Satchmo’s for a beer, but he had to stay and supervise the setup.

Through the window of the Shoe Shop, I could see the Straight Outta Philly guys hard at work, installing the show. They all were the kind of dirty that looked permanent. I recognized Scott Moore from his Akron days, broad-shouldered, dressed like a foundry worker in heavy Carhartt work pants and a plain T-shirt, unkempt but conventionally handsome, self-assured. Even more, I recognized his type, from the traveling hard-core bands that used to come through town. There was always a charismatic leader, an anarchist with organizational skills, who attracted the best and worst of whatever subculture he represented. Scott was heavily involved in music and had been in an industrial-noise band called Sink Manhattan, an offshoot of which would be playing at the following night’s opening. They were called Lick the Earth. The guy with the fish was the guitar player.

Everything I could see half-assembled in the Shoe Shop was familiar to me: reclaimed steel, rusty, manipulated, welded, and bent. This seemed to be the only kind of art anyone from here was making then, intentionally unglamorous, pulling scraps from industrial sites and hammering them together or apart—whichever direction they hadn’t already gone. I knew nothing about how to make art, but I had learned by osmosis how to oxidize copper into green and blue and how to accelerate rust and to abuse aluminum. I had seen a course title in a college catalog—Advanced Metals—and written its name on a slip of paper because I thought it was interesting, the idea of evolution applied to something so elemental. In Akron, rust was a legitimate medium.

John said he needed to get home, to his “safe haven.” But he couldn’t leave until he had everyone out of the galleries, and the more he tried to create order, the more slippery everyone got. He had agreed to allow Scott and some of the others to sleep in the glazier’s shop, but now he was worried about how to separate the responsible nihilists from the irresponsible ones.

Frankenstein wandered by, drinking a beer, seeming not to notice us, seeming to be noticing a lot of things that weren’t there, and a menagerie of Philadelphians with bedhead and inside-out clothing came tripping through. Two, both dressed in ragged, homemade cutoffs and thrift-store dress shirts and ties, rode through on bicycles, a parade of freaks leading the way.

* * *

There is a kind of late-summer rain in Ohio that builds and builds in pent-up humidity, then comes gushing out in a climactic release that is also incomplete, so that it remains humid even as the sky carpet bombs the earth. The result is something like celebration mixed with apprehension, which is how things always seemed to go here—we could never just cut loose because we knew something would always go wrong. This was not pessimism or superstition, but a justifiable and quantifiable worldview. Annually, for each of the previous three years, we had stood at the verge of climactic victory and watched it all end in mind-boggling, history-making defeat. The Drive, in 1987, bringing a shocking end to what appeared to be a Browns play-off victory. The Fumble, in 1988, doing exactly the same. The Shot, in 1989, a stunning, last-second gut-punch that ended a Cavaliers play-off dream. That’s all we understood: the anxiety of having hoped for too much and celebrated too soon.

So the notion of a downpour as a metaphor for release, for deliverance, for abandon, for soul-cleansing—that just doesn’t work here. We know better.

And that was precisely the type of rain that began pounding the roof of the old Goodrich complex as my wife, Gina, and I sat with John in his office, the humidity intensifying the lingering smell of machine oil and metal that filled the old factory. Whoever had slept here the night before had left the place a wreck and had written Lick the Earth all over everything. For someone such as John, who had gone through art school at a time when the likes of Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat and Fab 5 Freddy were pulling the contemporary strings of street aestheticism, it was hard to get directly upset about graffiti. But still.

Frankenstein had become the symbol of everything that was happening: bludgeoning, oblivious, wayward, recalcitrant. We’d driven through the main gate to see him drenched, in a striped, button-down shirt, holding a beer cup in one hand, pissing toward a fence, like this night’s version of a Buckingham guard. Despite the rain, Lick the Earth had set up its amplifiers and PA system outside, under a brick arch at the entrance gate, with sheets of plastic draped over the speakers. The opening had begun, and John’s friends, people he knew from the art community, from school, from work, people we didn’t know—they were dashing from the parking lot to the Millworks space with newspapers and umbrellas and shirttails held over their heads as the rain pounded without relent.

The fish had already begun to smell, raising the question of its future: the show was supposed to remain up for six weeks.

Gina and I followed John through the tunnels back to the galleries. We moved outside, close to the action, but under cover of an overhang. Two of the anarchy girls were dancing together out in the rain, streetlights casting them in yellow-black. One had stripped down to her bra. The space around the drum kit and the amplifiers was strewn with heavy chains and lengths of pipe, a battered trombone, and a trumpet. A hulking piece of semicylindrical, rusty steel sat in the center. These were pieces of their sculpture, intended now as living art. The drummer took his place and started a random pattern, and the guitar player and the bass player followed with a low, distorted nonmusical cacophony. Scott took one microphone and a guy in a black T-shirt and cap and a cast on his left arm took the other, and together they started a haunted caterwaul, growling and yelping in indecipherable improvisation. Scott picked up a length of chain and began stalking back and forth, trailed by its steely jangle, then turned and began swinging it against the big steel hunk, its harsh clank arrhythmic to the drums. He threw the chain down and picked up the trombone and began to blow squawks and blasts, holding the microphone in the bell so the sound came out drenched in reverb. Lick the Earth congealed into long, atonal loops, the sound of being boiled alive.

The Straight Outta Philly entourage began stalking the perimeter, flailing their arms madly in a dance that seemed interpretive, but of what I couldn’t say. They moved out into the rain and seemed intoxicated by it, dancing in stutter steps and long body sways—boys in black T-shirts and tank tops, barefoot, pants rolled up; anarchy girls in peasant dresses and shorts. I couldn’t count them, they seemed to merge and divide, merge and divide, rolling around on the slick paving bricks and throwing their hands up into the rain, clustered in groups then wandering off solo.

Cars were passing through the gates, couples and groups of friends out for an evening at Satchmo’s. Some accelerated to get past these men swinging their chains and brass horns; others slowed to gape. One driver stopped and began honking his horn, either in protest or harmony, it was hard to say. One of the anarchy girls in a cardigan sweater and skirt began climbing the high iron fence at the entrance and was approached by another, a toothy, voluptuous brunette dressed in a too-small pair of short-shorts and halter top and a red plastic hard hat. She wore a pair of patent-leather pumps and walked in a perpetual tap dance, her spilling-out breasts bouncing and thick thighs alternating like diesel pistons. She reached up for a crossbar and began to climb too, stopping and swaying back and forth like a caged gorilla.

One of the lawyers who’d given John this space was in attendance, and he came over with a hey-I’m-just-tryin’-to-be-cool-here-but-this-is-a-little-too-much demeanor and asked John if he could keep them off the gate, as though there were some sort of boundary to the chaos and this was it. John approached the gate and told the girls they had to get down, and they slithered off the wrought iron and back into their dance without any direct acknowledgment of the order. The tap dancer skipped and twirled across the parking lot, cutting through the Satchmo’s patrons who were dashing through the downpour toward the restaurant’s lighted entrance. She took up a spot at the front door of the restaurant, dancing and flapping her arms as people rushed past her to get inside, frightened and confused, looking at her. She dropped to the ground and began rolling in a puddle, ending with her chin propped in her palm and legs crossed behind her, like a chanteuse splayed across a piano bar. The girl in the cardigan swayed wildly among two men who danced with faces up toward the sky, and she stopped suddenly, hands in pockets, as if she’d run out of ideas, gazing blankly for a long moment before dropping into a lineman’s stance and rushing at one of the young men.

Scott was chanting something into the microphone as his friend blew long bleats from the trumpet and then grabbed the other mic, and the only words I’d recognized all night as words came tumbling out in a guttural chant:

All this rain is pourin’ down!

The literalness of it took me by surprise; it didn’t seem possible that any of them was reacting to anything that I could also understand, that there was any logic in the performance.

The girls were up the fence again and John went over calmly and told them to come down. They did. Frankenstein, standing among the onlookers, turned casually toward the brick wall behind them and began to pee again. A young man dressed in rags came bouncing heavily out of the Shoe Shop on a pogo stick made of an industrial spring and welded scrap steel, a piece of sculpture that was supposed to be on display in the gallery, and John tried to wave him back inside, but he just kept going and it appeared that stopping might be dangerous because this—none of this—seemed designed for stopping.

They were all made of liquid now. They would lean forward and squeeze out a shirttail or a long hank of hair and rain would gush out and immediately be replaced by more. The girl in the cardigan came rolling across the brick driveway in front of us and stopped, flat on her back in the rain, resting, and the tap dancer vamped over to Satchmo’s door again, holding her hard hat in front of her like a cabaret derby. Scott, grunting in harsh rhythm, threw his microphone down and picked up a thick metal pipe with both hands and began beating against the hunk of steel with all his might, over and over and over until he dropped to his knees, exhausted, and then the man in the cast took up the rhythm with a battleship chain, beating and beating, the drums behind him seeming weak and thin in comparison. Cars continued to pass within feet of them, coming and going, but Lick the Earth never acknowledged them, never acknowledged us, never acknowledged the dancers, never acknowledged one another. There was nothing directly conscious about them, this was all of the gut alone.

I stood with my arm around Gina and saw in her face a reflection of what I was feeling—something like mesmerization. Not appreciation or revulsion or even fascination, but an involuntary submission to the rhythm of what we were observing, which rhythm was something that couldn’t be measured except by that look on her face.

I watched Scott, speaking in tongues into the microphone, drenched but somehow not electrocuted, trombone dangling at his side like a missile launcher, and suddenly I resented him and the man with the broken arm and the one who’d put the fish inside and Frankenstein and the anarchy girls and the entire Company of Wolves. I resented them because they were defining what didn’t belong to them, what they hadn’t earned, and I was afraid they were doing it in a way that couldn’t be erased, because I had no answer to what I was hearing and seeing.

This place was supposed to be ours, and we had inherited it the hard way, by discovery and loyalty and perseverance. I didn’t want to give it up so easily.

The anarchy girls were climbing the fence again and there was no way to stop them.

* * *

John picked me up at my house late the next morning and we made the two-minute drive into downtown. The rain had stopped and everything was muggy again. Gina and I had left before Lick the Earth was done because it didn’t seem as if they would ever be done, and John said it had never actually ended but rather died like a bored campfire and he had no idea what time, just that it had died. He’d waited until everyone was outside the galleries and locked the door, didn’t offer anyone a place to stay.

As we drove down Main Street toward the Goodrich buildings, we began to see bodies on the sidewalk, one here, one there, random Philadelphians. Some were lying with heads in the crooks of their arms, others wandering zombielike. I don’t know what they were looking for, but on a Sunday morning in downtown Akron in those years, they weren’t going to find it. Ours would likely be the only car to pass down Main Street for hours. There were more bodies as we got closer, some moving, some not. Frankenstein sat on the sidewalk with his back against the fence at the entrance, one arm draped obliquely across the top of his head. The Company of Wolves were gathering together pieces of random steel, tossing them into the van. They were bloody and dirty and half-dressed, even more disheveled than when they’d begun. The guitar player had his dreadlocks tied up in a plume. The cast on the one guy’s arm looked to be damaged. Scott was the only one whose heart seemed to be in the dismantling.

John parked and we went through a back door, into the tunnels, a direction I didn’t know, down under the ground, and we emerged at the glazier’s room and looked around. There was a mess to clean up. We got to work.