Turn It Around, or Turn It Up?
Joe Hoch looked up at the TV hanging over the Pink Cricket bar to watch a pundit on CNN. “Hell, I wanna be one of these people yakkin’ on TV,” he said. “Yak, yak, yak. Make a shitload of money for yakkin’ on TV and not saying a damn thing.”
Ben Martin sat on the stool next to Joe’s, the beads of sweat rolling off his glass of white wine. Paul Hoch, a retired Anchor Hocking Plant 1 employee, stood behind the bar. Wide suspenders stretched over a white T-shirt, itself stretched over an enormous belly, to hold up a pair of jeans. They were three old men in one of Lancaster’s oldest taverns.
Joe had just been reminiscing about working for Dr. Fox, a founder of Lancaster Glass. Hochs had painted homes in Lancaster for at least sixty years, and Joe himself had probably been in half the houses in town. He liked sitting at the kitchen table over a beer with a homeowner after a day’s work, he said. They could be rich, but that never mattered much. Joe said he learned a lot around kitchen tables. Dr. Fox, for instance: Sometimes the multimillionaire gave Joe advice, like how to invest money. One of the things Dr. Fox always told him was to “stay involved in the community.”
Ben Martin looked at Joe through his round tortoiseshell glasses and nodded his head. Back when he’d headed up the international division for Anchor Hocking, he lived in Europe, where he was able to indulge his passion for art. He owned scores, maybe hundreds—he wasn’t sure—of French and American paintings, from late-nineteenth-century Impressionism to twentieth-century abstraction. Small sculptures, books, and copies of the New York Times crowded his living room. He was an aesthete and a liberal, though he didn’t broadcast his philosophy around Lancaster.
Joe finished off his Miller Lite and said he had to get going. He had a couple of acres to mow. It had been a wet spring so far, and the grass was growing so fast people couldn’t keep up. Joe figured he had about another two hours of daylight.
“Okay, buddy,” Martin said, and he meant it.
* * *
Joe Boyer couldn’t be sure if he first felt the heat or saw the fire on Shop 1-2, about three feet away, but by the time he’d turned around, an angry-looking blaze had swarmed it. Rivulets of flame flowed upward on the pipes and columns rising from the machinery. With plenty of fuel and a clear path, the fire raced toward the roof of Plant 1. It was early evening. Boyer had just reached into his press machine—Shop 1-1—to change a bolt. So this particular fire took him by surprise, but he wasn’t surprised there was a fire in general.
During normal operation, a burst of acetylene gas combusted to deposit a lubricating layer of fine carbon soot onto the interior of a mold. This allowed for the smooth removal of hot, newly formed ware, much like a fried egg slides out of a Teflon skillet. There was always a little carbon overspray. Over time, the machines became coated with flammable carbon, grease, and dust—but they hadn’t been shut down for a thorough cleaning in a long time. So much goo clung to the machines that, with enough heat buildup and any stray spark, they could ignite. Boyer knew a shop could go up at any moment, and now one had.
As a floor operator, Boyer was assigned to open a series of valves to release water in case of a fire. He ran to the valve that controlled a sprinkler above the Shop 1-2 machine—but by that time the flames had climbed beyond the sprinkler and were on their way to the clamshell, the giant, pincers-like structures on Plant 1’s roof that provided exhaust and ventilation. He rushed to another set of valves.
He managed to open some, extinguishing part of the fire, but others wouldn’t budge. “There was three of us on one of these valves, and we couldn’t turn it,” he said. The fire raced horizontally, across the top of the clamshell high above his head. As he and his shift supervisor and a mechanic struggled with the valve, a high-pressure spray of water shot from the pipe joints: a bad leak that drenched him “like one of those submarine movies.” Finally, they managed to twist the valve open, but it was too late. A finger of the fire had found refuge in a ventilator. Lancaster firefighters had to haul hoses up into the clamshell to extinguish the flames. It was about 8:30 before they declared the emergency over.
“The stuff’s wore out,” Boyer concluded, referring to the fire safety valves. “They don’t do anything, maintenance or anything, that they’re supposed to do over there.” The plant had to be shut down most of the night.
They were still mopping up Plant 1 the next evening when Lancaster’s elite pulled into the long driveway leading to Brad and Penny Hutchinson’s restored and modernized 1835 redbrick farmhouse, close to the OU Lancaster campus. The Hutchinsons were hosting a festival benefit—though they seemed mysteriously absent.
Every spring, Cameo League, a volunteer group that supported the Lancaster Festival, organized a preview of the upcoming event. In return for a donation, the price of admission, attendees were served drinks, hors d’oeuvres, and a helping of festival PR, including a sneak peek at the attractions. At this year’s party, most were also getting their first real look at Joe Piccolo, though some were even more interested in the Hutchinsons.
The party wasn’t Piccolo’s first public event. He’d held a Q&A and open-mic poetry reading the week before, but that had proved to be an awkward bust—one in a series of incidents that made him privately question his decision to come to Lancaster.
He hadn’t been in town a week when a woman pulled him aside and said, “You know, your job’s more important than the mayor’s.” She was partly joking, but he thought that was an odd thing to say. He’d since learned what she meant. So many people seemed to be counting on the festival—and on Piccolo—to elevate the entire town that he was starting to get twitchy with worry over what he’d walked into.
Piccolo had had several careers already: a classical musician, a logistics-and-staging manager in Aspen, a laborer in a northern Ohio foundry that made wheels for railroad cars. He had just interviewed for a sales manager job when he saw an ad for the Lancaster Festival position. He’d never run an entire two-week production, but he had hoped Lancaster might prove to be the start of a new career in arts management.
He had come to put on a small-town festival, only to find that he was expected to help save the place. People kept talking to him about economic impacts, and town promotion, and the development role the festival was expected to play, but that was a responsibility he didn’t want, and one he didn’t think the festival—or any festival anywhere—should have to bear. The pressure to piece together this first edition under his leadership, with its constrained budget and thirty years of set-in-stone tradition in a town where everybody seemed to know everybody else, was plenty enough for him.
He kept these concerns to himself. After all, he was new to Lancaster, and Lancaster was new to him. Maybe both sides just had the jitters.
The Q&A should have been easy. The setting was Art & Clay on Main, an interactive art studio where people, especially those with physical or intellectual challenges, could come and make clay mugs, or glass earrings, or paint. For decades, Len Hajost, Rosemary’s husband, had operated the local office supply store out of the space—until there were no more offices to supply. Becky Hajost, Eric Brown’s wife, then turned it into Art & Clay and had since allowed the Fairfield County Board of Developmental Disabilities to run it. A coffee shop, Square Seven, opened inside the studio. You could hear live acoustic music on some weekend evenings during the spring and summer. So the mise-en-scène was ideal for promoting both an arts fest and Lancaster’s new identity as a leisure destination. And Piccolo didn’t have to do much other than answer a few questions, then turn the stage over to Lancaster’s literary set.
But Piccolo was nervous, and it showed. Portly before he came to town, he’d since packed on a few more pounds, thanks to an overworked bachelor’s diet. The buttons of his shirt strained against his belly, and though the evening wasn’t particularly warm, damp continents of perspiration migrated through it. His forehead glistened.
Perhaps if more people had showed, he would have been a little more relaxed. He’d pictured a crowd, vibrant poetry readings, lots of espresso drinking. But only eight of us sat on the wooden chairs that faced a small alcove at the front of the gallery. There wasn’t going to be much poetry reading. Piccolo would have to carry the evening.
The master of ceremonies, a diminutive man somewhat challenged by a speech impediment, who sometimes submitted freebie reviews of local arts events to the paper, began by turning to Piccolo and, playing the role of Lancaster’s Walter Winchell, saying, “I can make you in this town, or I can break you.” He was joking, too, but the comment slotted easily into the pattern of wary judgment Piccolo had already experienced from many Lancastrians. He squeezed out a thin smile.
Piccolo took the mic—an unnecessary prop, given the small space and its small group—and hit most of his talking points. “My goal for the festival is to create excitement about the city.” He talked up the headliner acts: Blues Traveler, Mo Pitney, Thompson Square. Anybody who followed the festival knew there were budget concerns—though few understood just how fragile the money situation was—so Piccolo promised that “this year, we have a good, solid budget.” He stressed that the budget had been set before he was hired, but quickly transitioned to his dreams beyond 2015, for what might be possible in three years, maybe five. He had visions of building a bigger stage, of attracting Harry Connick, Jr., or Sheryl Crow—performers who could straddle a generational divide.
The festival had to grow, he said, and he had some exciting plans to make it grow: more gallery space for art shows, more opportunities to exploit the Lancaster Festival Orchestra, expanding free events like the Rising Park Day for the kids. He embraced his assigned mandate by saying the festival should advertise to bigger media markets like Cleveland and Cincinnati, to draw new people to town who just might look around and say to themselves, “Hey, maybe I should move my business to Lancaster.” But residents had to show a little patience. Meanwhile, he said, pray for good weather.
The emcee then kicked off the poetry segment by reading a composition of his own. About halfway through, overexcited by his rhythm, he spit his upper denture plate out of his mouth. Everyone pretended not to notice.
Jeff Barron, a reporter for the Eagle-Gazette, took the next, and last, turn at the mic. He read some well-crafted verse, ostensibly about Asbury Park, New Jersey. Asbury Park was “a town that fell apart,” Barron recited. “Surely those fools must know that a Lost Paradise is forever gone.”
The party at the Hutchinsons’ home was cheerier, despite a persistent sprinkle. (Every time I ran into festival cofounder Eleanor Hood, she looked to the skies as if in prayer.) About a hundred people came. A local folk singer entertained, the gin and tonics were plentiful. Gary Sheldon, the orchestra director, flew in from Miami, taking the spotlight off Piccolo. Joe only had to introduce himself, express his excitement about Lancaster and the program for the coming event, and turn the microphone over to Sheldon. Sheldon, revered in Lancaster, lent Piccolo a warm public endorsement. He made a pitch for Blues Traveler, assuring his listeners that he was not at all offended by the band’s refusal to play with the orchestra, and that Piccolo was doing a fine job.
Whatever interest the festival news and Piccolo’s brief debut may have held for the partygoers, they were secondary to the warm-weather coming out of Lancaster society. People stood, their hands gripping highball glasses, napkins wrapped around the bases, and exchanged tales of winter trips to Florida. They debated whether Donald Trump could be a savior after the perfidy of Obama, and whether Ohio governor John Kasich, the presidential preference of most, stood a chance against Jeb Bush, who seemed a sure bet to win the nomination.
Pretty girls in yellow spring dresses, their hair curled so it wouldn’t look curled, their makeup applied so their faces wouldn’t look made up, chatted easily with their mothers’ friends, who asked polite questions about the just-ended college semester back east, or out west, or down south, while their fathers’ friends tried to suppress the wistful sighs of late-middle-aged men. It was a scene that could have taken place forty years before, down to the dialogue.
The party also represented the coming out of the Hutchinsons, though they were nowhere to be found. Their absence only made them seem more exotic.
“Have you seen her yet?” one woman asked another, referring to Penny Hutchinson as if Penny were Garbo.
“No, have you?” answered her friend.
“No, but I’ve heard she’s nice.”
“Well, the house sure is.”
Lancaster’s pooh-bahs had no idea what to make of the Hutchinsons. They were discomfiting forty-one-year-old arrivistes whose own amplified light illuminated how much the brightness of the old gentry had dimmed. For two generations, young people who left town for school rarely returned to live in Lancaster, and after Newell wiped away so many young executives who would have taken the place of the soon to retire, a gulf had opened. The elite around town consisted largely of the sixty-something sons and daughters of former high-ranking industrialists, a few doctors, some lawyers. Some of them didn’t even live in Lancaster. They drove in from Granville or from Columbus suburbs.
Forty years before, the party would have been hosted by an Anchor wife or an executive with Diamond Power or Lancaster Glass. They would have had excellent university pedigrees and low handicaps. Brad Hutchinson, though, was a west-side boy whose mother had died of a drug overdose, whose father had served time, whose siblings were either dead from drug and alcohol abuse, in jail, or addicted. He spoke with the accent and grammar of Lancaster and rode his lawn tractor with a nine-millimeter semiautomatic strapped on his hip as if he were expecting a mower hijacking. His formal education had stopped after high school. That he happened to have built a company with revenues of about $80 million per year made him one of the richest people in town. But he was as uncomfortable with the status his bank account and grand house conferred on him as Lancaster’s old guard was mystified as to what it should make of him. So the Hutchinsons stayed hidden, self-consciously and deliberately—because they “didn’t fit” with the crowd they’d invited.
Brad had never seen the Lancaster Festival and had no desire to see it. “We don’t go because we don’t like to,” he told me. “I don’t like to be in big crowds of people, and, quite frankly, most of those people act like they’re better than you are. They feel like they’ve reached some stature level. I just don’t ever wanna be that guy who the people think, ‘Well, he thinks he’s better ’n everybody ’cause he’s got a little bit of money.’ I’ve told people, ‘If I ever get to that point, I want someone to kick my ass.’”
Hutchinson had a chip on his shoulder, but he wasn’t alone. The perception that the festival was “just for rich people”—a table in front of the stage cost $500—was common around town, though the founders created it specifically to bring the arts to the whole community.
Even if Hutchinson perceived more snobbery than there was, it was at least true that scenes like the one inside the Pink Cricket with Ben Martin, the well-to-do former international executive, and the Hochs, the retired glassworker and the painting contractor, had become the exception. There were no more Ellwoods at Old Bill Bailey’s, no more local executives walking through plants and asking working men and women about their families, very few lodges or other organizations where the banker and the glassworker served on a committee together and drank beer together. The rich even shopped out of town, because there were no more department stores carrying fashionable items. A high-end men’s haberdashery that once drew customers from Columbus had closed. Now the moneyed drove to Columbus or Cincinnati, or shopped during trips to New York or Florida. Ironically, the festival Hutchinson avoided was one of the few environments in town where volunteers from the upper crust and the hoi polloi seemed to work together for a common goal.
Otherwise, many people on each side of the class divide retreated into their own lives and their own prejudices. Behind these invisible walls, they no longer learned from, or empathized with, the other. The Hutchinsons weren’t sure just where they belonged. On one hand, Brad wanted to retain his self-made pride and to never be seen looking down on anybody by associating too closely with town society. On the other, he and Penny bemoaned the Lancaster “mentality” they found among the class they’d left behind.
“It’s always been a rough town for me,” Penny said. “The people are rough. The people have just a mentality that’s just, like, a baser mentality.” She was born and raised around Granville and Newark, on the north side of Route 40, the unofficial but long-standing border between the perceived jerkwater towns to the south and east and the progressive, educated burgs to the north. “You know, Gap couldn’t make it here. Gap clothing store in the mall couldn’t make it, ’cause it was a higher-end clothing. The Gap! The Gap was a higher-end clothing store.” Her eyes widened. “That’s the people’s mind-set in Lancaster. The Gap! I go to visit other places, like Savannah, and Providence, Rhode Island, and think, ‘Ah, civilization.’”
Brad was rooted in Lancaster, though, and he refused to budge, so Penny determined to make the best of it. After building their business, they both decided to start giving back to the town by planting their stake in civic life. For years, they’d lived in a country village outside Lancaster. Transforming the old farmhouse and moving in, taking on the Mithoff rebuilding project downtown, and hosting the Cameo League party were announcements that, however reluctant they were, they intended to play a part in Lancaster’s future.
Penny had just become involved with the board of the Heritage Association, and it was her idea to host the Cameo League party. “Some of the people I’ve really embraced—there’s a lot of people that are, like, down-to-earth, and they’re real wholesome and conservative, and they love their country, they love their guns. I love that. But then there are other things that are just that attitude of me-first, and I’m gonna take care of me, and nobody else matters. And people around here are just oblivious to everybody else, just oblivious.”
If nothing else, Lancaster’s civic-minded upper class needed the Hutchinsons because there were so few with both the means and the drive to do what Nancy Frick’s generation had done. But it was going to be an uncomfortable fit. Many were skeptical of the Mithoff project, for example. They didn’t begrudge Brad Hutchinson the effort—it was his money, and he could do what he wanted—but some wondered why he wouldn’t just mow the wreck down and start over, maybe make a federal-style building, but with all the modern innards a business might want. After all, there wasn’t anything special about the Mithoff, either architecturally or historically. It had once been a whorehouse. But Hutchinson believed his background was the bigger obstacle. “Most of ’em know that I come from a very rough family,” Brad said. “My father worked for the city, at the water department, so most of them know of my history.”
Brad Hutchinson’s family lived on Van Buren Avenue, two blocks behind the northeast side of Plant 1. As a little boy, he liked the west side. Kids rode bikes for fun, and once in a while some boy would give another boy a bloody lip. That’s what passed for “rough” in those days.
A lot changed in the 1980s. The Hutchinsons moved to a newer, low-income tract development built not far away from Van Buren by Leonard Gorsuch, Jennifer Walters’s father. Carl Icahn made trouble, Plant 2 closed, the 1986 strike turned violent, Newell took over. Fewer west-side men worked.
His mother didn’t start abusing diet pills because of any of those Lancaster convulsions: She was swallowing them by the fistful when Brad was six or seven. But by the early 1990s, the tremors of those events had helped loosen the strings that tied a culture of sociable work and responsibility to future aspirations, creating in its place a subculture of immediate, if temporary, pleasure. Drug trafficking joined drinking. Hutchinson’s mother succumbed, and his father supported his wife’s habit by selling and buying. More than once, Hutchinson watched police raid his home.
When the Oxy found its way into Lancaster, his mother turned to it, working her way up to eight or ten pills a day. She moved on to “cancer patches,” fentanyl patches prescribed to cancer patients to dull their pain. His mother would cut them up for quicker release, placing the pieces under her tongue. Fentanyl is vastly more powerful than heroin. She overdosed, but quick action by his father saved her life. Then one night when his father was out playing cards, his mother used another patch under her tongue. She died on the kitchen floor. She was fifty-nine.
Drugs and the crime associated with them became an extended-family affair. In addition to his own siblings, his cousins had records. Yet Brad Hutchinson escaped. At first, he said he simply decided to avoid the mistakes of his family, taking their trauma as a life lesson on what not to do. That’s why he couldn’t understand what was wrong with so many younger people around town. They didn’t want to work, at least not work hard, like he did. They smoked marijuana and injected dope. They got themselves tatted up, even on their faces, which was like saying, “I will always be unemployed.” And the babies. All those young women pushing charity-store strollers around town, playing mix-and-match paternity. They had no discipline, no drive. They made bad choices. When he was little, west-side men “didn’t mind doing an eight-or ten-hour day in a 150-degree factory. That was their life. That’s what they done.”
Hutchinson, on the other hand, had ambition. After his high school graduation, he became a carpenter. By nineteen he owned his own small contracting company. In 1999, he founded Company Wrench, now a heavy-equipment sales and rental business with ten locations east of the Mississippi.
“We have a great life at forty-one years old,” he said. “I don’t think anybody could have a better life than I have. For my age, to do what I’ve done, coming from where I’ve come from? To me, I’m like the biggest man in the world.”
He wasn’t boasting. He meant that in comparison with what he’d expected out of life, he felt like a king—inviting contrast to Lloyd Romine, who was just one year younger than Hutchinson. But as it happened, Hutchinson had one advantage Lloyd never did.
When he was about twelve, the parents of a friend, aware of Hutchinson’s plight, took him into their home. “They essentially raised me all my teenage years. I give no credit to my mom and dad whatsoever. But as far as being able to do what I do, going to work every day and living like a normal human being? I give all that credit to Sean’s parents, Rita and Russ Miller.” Russ worked for Diamond Power as a millwright. He also taught plumbing classes at a county technical school. Russ showed Hutchinson, and his own son, how to work with their hands, how to demand excellence of oneself—the rewards of discipline. Hutchinson owed his success in no small part to the fact that Russ Miller had a good job.
* * *
Eric Brown was friendly with Brad Hutchinson, though it could be said that Brown was friendly with lots of people—his mother-in-law’s generation of local do-gooders, old football pals, attorneys and judges, people he’d helped over the years, a longtime friend at Anchor Hocking who was convinced the company wouldn’t last long. Over the preceding months, I’d watched him walk into the Ale House 1890, and the Cherry Street Pub, and every time, people shot their arms up in the air to greet him from across the room. They shook his hand. They slapped him on the back.
That experience wasn’t unique to Brown—this was Lancaster, where you had to work to avoid people you knew. But a lot of Lancastrians watched Brown grow up, or they grew up with him. They watched him play on the high school offensive line, and they cheered when he made All-Ohio. When pummelings from the 350-pound linemen of Division I college ball, along with homesickness, drove him back to Lancaster, he pinned a badge to his chest, belted a gun around his waist, and became a nineteen-year-old county deputy. He’d worked in local law enforcement ever since, for thirty-two years. During that time he drove people home who were too drunk to drive themselves, sparing them a DUI. He rescued their cats and dogs. He caught burglars who tried to rob their businesses. Once in a while, he knocked their heads. He worked undercover drug investigations, sometimes by himself, with no backup, when local police were just beginning to figure out how to conduct them. Too often, he sat in their living rooms, looked them in the eyes, and laid the news out in black-and-white: “Your kid is gonna die if something doesn’t change.”
And he was married to a Hajost, so even if he’d wanted to avoid socializing beyond the duties of his job, he couldn’t. That’s why his announcement to Lancaster that he was leaving the Major Crimes Unit to become deputy director of Ohio’s HIDTA—the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area program—was so painful, for him and for the town.
The new job came with a big raise over his MCU salary, and he considered it an honor. His gut told him it was the right move at the right time. Maybe he should have left even earlier. For sure he was burned out. The MCU needed some new leadership with new ideas. But Lancaster was his town and his responsibility. The MCU’s charge was to act within both Fairfield and Hocking counties, and all the cities and villages in them, but he always tried to pay more attention to Lancaster. Now he felt like he was abandoning it. “I feel a lot of guilt,” he told me.
He believed he could do some good on a bigger stage by helping to coordinate squads like the MCU all over the state and by attracting federal funding. But he’d be out of the field now, and the old football star in him, the adrenaline addict, couldn’t help but feel that he’d be watching the action from the sidelines.
He rehashed a number of arguments in his head to shoo away the guilt. For example, he told himself that even though his job wasn’t finished in Lancaster, it never would be. That’s why he hated the term “drug war.”
“It’s not a fucking war!” he told me on one of the few occasions when he seemed to lose his temper. “We protect each other. We protect our community, our kids, families. We gotta keep it at bay, we can’t just let it roll.” A war, he argued, had winners and losers. But there were no winners or losers in his world. The best you could do was try to control the rot.
Brown understood that much of what plagued Lancaster was far out of the town’s control. Too much of the local leadership was incompetent, or just overmatched. The world beyond Lancaster was big and merciless, but local officials had spent so many years being snugged into Lancaster’s cozy society, and trying to re-create the town of their youths, they’d blinded themselves.
They kept thinking the world was a place of goodwill, where people would do the right thing. But it was all about the money. There was money to be made by the CTC, the transition center old Sheriff Peck created that brought felons into John and Wendy Oatney’s neighborhood. Peck knew where the money was—newly released convicts were a growth industry—so he went after it. But hadn’t the city ever heard of zoning regulations?
Why hadn’t the state done anything about the car-title-loan shops and payday lenders that prey on people down on their luck? “We should have statutes,” he argued.
There was no mystery to why Lancaster was pocked with car-title and short-term loan storefronts. The industry spent heavily to finance the campaigns of favored politicians. Lancaster’s congressman, Steve Stivers, received $80,700 during the 2013–14 election cycle, making him one of the top recipients of short-term-loan industry money in the U.S. Congress. The Ohio Consumer Lenders Association, the lobby group that represented the largest Ohio title-loan lenders, gave generously to John Kasich and the Ohio House Republican Organizational Committee Building Fund.
I spent two hours watching an Advance America storefront, an outlet of one of the largest such lenders in the country, now owned by the Mexican firm Grupo Elektra. The outlet was near the hospital. One person after another, often dressed in medical scrubs, filed into the store.
I decided to ask about a car-title loan on the used Buick I’d bought. A young woman named Sarah tried, with little clarity, to explain the terms.
“It’s a sixty-day loan. Your first payment would be due within thirty days. And, um, we can refinance anytime. Once you refinance, it saves you on your CSO fees and your—”
“What’s a CSO fee?”
“Your interest and stuff. Rates. Stuff that you save 5 percent each time that you refinance. It’s not very much, but it’s 5 percent, but it helps. After the sixty days, you—your big lump sum would be actually due, um, you know, but you can refinance and it would take it down to um, let’s see … I gotta have that little cheat-sheet thing.… You’ll be renewing your loan—you get charged the same, but your principal is going down 5 percent rather than—or 10 percent rather than 5 percent—in sixty days. That makes sense. It’s really hard to explain.”
In order to help clarify the terms, I asked Sarah what most people do. “I have some people that refinance three times a week or three times a month. I have some that refinance every thirty days, and I got some that refinance on sixty days.” A lot of her customers, she said, took out smaller loans, under $500, because they didn’t have checking accounts. They used the money to pay bills.
I asked her if she’d let me take the “little cheat-sheet thing,” which listed the payment schedule and interest rates, with me. Sarah said company policy forbade it. But after a lot of confused back-and-forthing, I finally figured out that, on a $1,000 loan, I would owe service-fee payments of $255 per month. None of that amount would be applied to the $1,000 principal. But not to worry, Sarah said, because I could refinance for another fee, rolling over the balance (now $1,255). She encouraged me to keep rolling it over, providing the incentive of a 5 percent reduction in principal each time I did so. The interest rate worked out to be about 300 percent. If I’d wanted a simpler $107.50 payday loan, the interest would have been 636.99 percent—at a time when a thirty-year mortgage was going for about 3.8 percent, and banks could borrow money from the Federal Reserve almost for free.
This was the sort of loan that helped put Wendy Oatney in a deep hole of debt, the kind of loan Loving Lending was trying to combat—against the efforts of the very politicians for whom most people in Lancaster voted.
Private equity and mainstream American banks helped finance outfits like Advance America. According to a report by Reinvestment Partners, a North Carolina–based financial justice advocacy organization, before being purchased by Grupo Elektra, Advance America was supported by a credit line of $300 million provided by Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and U.S. Bank, among others. The money the banks lent, which cost the banks almost nothing, helped enable Advance America to charge poor people 300 percent interest.
Advance America did not supply the loan. It was what’s called a credit service organization, or CSO. The actual loan would come from NCP Finance, based in Dayton. NCP described itself as “the premier CSO lender in the country.” NCP helped make Ohio one of the biggest markets for predatory lending in the United States. A report by the Center for Responsible Lending documented that five states accounted for half of the loan fees—amounting to $3.95 billion—charged by American high-interest car-title and payday lenders. Ohio was one of the five, accounting for $318,256,497 in fees, an amount that does not include interest payments.
NCP and its founders were also generous contributors to Dave Yost, Ohio’s auditor, Stivers, and Kasich.
Brown mentioned the pawnshop in the middle of downtown, where Hickle’s department store used to be. “That really burns me,” he said. The people who owned it didn’t live there. Out-of-towners and self-interested locals like Peck had fed on the bones of Lancaster. All local officials could do was argue about parking on Main Street or where to build a new jail or applaud a restaurant opening while they prayed for the tourists who were never coming.
The drug dealers were the ones with vision. They knew they lived in a global, rootless, gadget-coveting, atomized, every-man-for-himself world in which money trumped all other considerations. Mexican and African American dealers “used to be like oil and water. They never mixed. But money solved that.” There was a time when black dealers in the Midwest, like Carly’s connect, never touched heroin. “But they knew there was money to be made, and the best way to make that money was to fix those bridges, so they did.” The Mexicans lost money on dope. Between Afghanistan and Mexico, heroin was now so plentiful they used it as a loss leader while they sometimes forced small-timers like Jason to sell higher-margin ice, a drug that used to be exclusive to blacks and whites. And local whites—who called blacks “porch monkeys” and “niggers” when they were in Lancaster—were happy to drive up to Columbus to help them traffic drugs. The moon rocks Lloyd was using and selling, and a new tide of fentanyl the MCU was beginning to find around town, were often made (like Drew’s shoes, from Guangdong Province) in China.
The social contract, whatever that once meant, “was gone,” Brown said.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Corporate America is what happened,” he answered.
* * *
The fire on Shop 1-2 represented bad news for Solomon, beyond the obvious. The good news was that the Delaware bankruptcy judge approved the prepackaged plan on May 22. The company would again turn private. Monomoy and Clinton would become insignificant shareholders. The lenders would appoint a board of directors. He believed the company would come out of bankruptcy as a restructured business. With the changes he’d implemented in the last half of 2014, and now without the massive debt, he could shift his focus. In the motto-speak he often used, he said, “We’ve turned it around, now let’s turn it up.”
But the fire was an untimely reminder of Plant 1’s decrepit condition. It was possible that a new board would be a “turnaround” board that would want to step back and rebuild incrementally, starting with safety. More expensive consultants might be hired. Solomon regarded safety as an “apple pie” issue—nobody ever said they were anti-safety. But safety could also be used as an excuse to avoid undertaking initiatives that could build the business. He wanted to sprint. Now that a fire had broken out, Solomon was concerned a new board might want to walk.
Swink didn’t have the least idea that the company he worked for was coming out of bankruptcy. He said he’d never heard of Monomoy. He knew about fire, though. As he and Aaron Shonk sat on the floor of Brian’s studio, killing time by playing an old-school video game, he held up his right hand so I could see the scar on the meat just behind the knuckles. He’d been branded by his machine. He’d also had a fire erupt.
Just the other day, he saw a guy break his pinkie finger on a press. In a moment of distraction, the victim stuck his finger under a plunger, and the hydraulic power crushed it.
Memorial Day weekend was coming up, so I’d invited Brian to drive over to the west side for chicken-wing night at Old Bill Bailey’s. I expected a crowd: I’d been told Bailey’s wings were the best in town. But when we arrived, only five other people sat at the bar. We ordered a couple of basket-loads of wings, with sauce enough for us to bathe in. The beer cost $2, unless you asked for something fancy. There was no piano, and hadn’t been, since Benny Smith sold the place. A jukebox blasted rock ’n’ roll from the 1980s into the near-empty space. A woman who looked sixty, but was probably forty, stood in front of the jukebox. She wore too-big jeans and an old T-shirt. With the arms and legs of dried sassafras twigs and the hips of a skinny eight-year-boy, she swayed by herself to a slow beat only she could hear.
“Tweaker,” Brian said.
Overhead, a flat-screen TV mounted on a wall displayed a constant stream of keno games beamed in from the Ohio Lottery. Patrons could gamble away what money they didn’t drink. The state of Ohio took in $298 million from keno in 2014, most of it from the pockets of people downing two-buck beer in places like Old Bill Bailey’s. The money supported the state’s schools so taxes wouldn’t have to. The state’s politicians didn’t regard gambling as a tax. Nobody forced you to gamble.
As we drove back through the east side, Brian lit a cigarette. He steered the F-150 through a Kroger parking lot, and I pointed out a dry cleaner that used to be a Burger Chef franchise where I so profoundly flunked lunch-hour French-frying that I was encouraged to surrender my fry basket. Brian didn’t know it was once a fast food joint. He never ate fast food. He believed people in Ohio, by which he meant Lancaster, were so fat because they were addicted to it. He took a deep drag, blew the smoke from his lungs out the driver’s-side window, and said, “That shit’ll kill ya.”