A couple Brian knew walked into the Cherry Street Pub and sat on the barstools next to him. “Hey, man,” Brian said. They talked for a minute about a house out in a county village the couple was thinking of buying and fixing up. Russ, the bartender, placed a short glass of whiskey in front of Brian, then greeted another customer by name.
The backbar behind Russ, a giant floor-to-ceiling wooden structure with a mirror in the middle and half-pillars on either end, was crowded with bottles and knickknacks that would seem thematically disconnected if you weren’t from Lancaster. It had functioned as a backbar since the 1920s, when it began its life in a nearby tavern. There was a time when glassworkers walking home several miles from the old Black Cat or Lancaster Lens would stop in that tavern for a rest and a rye. One night, a man with a bellyful of booze continued his journey in a blizzard so fierce he became lost in the snow, only to serendipitously wind up back at the tavern, where he spent the night sleeping it off on the bar. Maybe it happened. Maybe it didn’t. No matter. The spirit was true. After the tavern closed, the backbar was stored in a barn. Then a man named Johnny Johnson opened his eponymously named restaurant—a diner, really—in the building now occupied by the Cherry Street Pub. Johnson rescued the backbar by installing it in his new place. Now Brian, glassman turned warehouseman, sipped his whiskey and looked at the same enormous hunk of oak.
Kevin “Max” McGee posed, tough-chinned and squinty-eyed in a three-inch-high cutout picture mounted on a wooden stand. He stood guard over the booze in his green-and-white (Go Irish!) 1973 William V. Fisher Catholic High School football uniform. McGee had been friends with Cherry Street owner Billy Smith since they were kids. They’d been part of an east-side Fifth Avenue troop that used to shoot hoops up against each other’s garages, drink a little beer, make a little trouble.
The old JOHNSON’S neon sign shone over a row of booths. Black-and-white photos of Lancaster scenes and people, and a carved portrait of Sherman, reminded everybody what a long history they all shared. A picture of McGee’s dad in his World War II infantry uniform hung by a corner. He had installed a phone system for Anchor Hocking in the 1960s. An old Anchor Hocking logo sign—an antique, two-armed anchor overlaid by an ornate serif-font “H”—occupied a center space on the back wall.
* * *
Over on Pierce Avenue, Sean Gumbs, three months into his sojourn as temporary CEO, had finished his listening tour and his quick study of the American glass industry. He was now convinced that EveryWare—that is, Anchor Hocking and, to a lesser degree, Oneida—shouldn’t be in the shape it was in. These were viable businesses, and always had been.
But only now were the debt-to-equity owners seeing what Gumbs, and Solomon before him, saw. They had turned $250 million of debt into equity during the bankruptcy in May and now were just “getting a sense of it,” Gumbs said. “Then, in the next breath, it’s, ‘Well, what’s the potential of what I have?’ I think the current equity holders—and the largest equity holders are on the board—they got it. There is potential in this business.”
Gumbs—short, slight, in glasses and a pile vest over an open-collar shirt—was a twenty-first-century wandering samurai of capitalism. Smartphones and Ivy-covered degrees were his weapons. “I have a particular set of skills,” he told me.
“Like Liam Neeson?” I offered, laughing. “As in Taken? The movies?”
“I literally don’t watch movies,” he said flatly before picking up where he left off. “So I think that those skill sets can be applied in lots of places.”
He had applied them in many companies in many industries, but his work was never about the product or the company or the place. It was about the game. Through intense focus on the game, he’d mastered it. That’s why he earned the kinds of fees outfits like FTI and A&M charged. Everything he’d learned over the past three months convinced him that Anchor Hocking had survived decades of blows for a reason. Despite the depredations, Plant 1 and Monaca kept rising from the mat because “if people could have figured out a way to do this overseas in a cost-effective way, they would have done it. It’s not necessarily like other forms of manufacturing in the U.S. that have gone away.”
There was no lack of interest in exploiting low-cost foreign labor. Libbey, for example, owned manufacturing plants in Monterrey, Mexico, and Langfang, China. Libbey used a $40.9 million low-interest loan from the China Construction Bank to build the new Langfang factory, which produced tableware both for the Chinese domestic market and for export outside of China. By one estimate, there were four hundred glass furnaces in Asia. As little as the Anchor Plant 1 employees were paid, there were people around the world willing to do similar work for much less. As a result, margins on the kinds of glass Anchor Hocking made were still falling as producers raced each other to the bottom.
The power of American big-box retailers like Walmart exacerbated the situation. The American flag on Anchor Hocking packaging was nice, but Americans wanted cheap stuff—and the harder they shopped for the cheapest stuff, the more they helped drive down the wages of people who made stuff. And the lower those wages dropped, the more a desire for cheap morphed into the self-fulfilling necessity of cheap.
Even so, Gumbs couldn’t be shaken from his belief that EveryWare, led by Anchor Hocking, could book profits and grow its value. That didn’t mean the equity owners wouldn’t sell it. They would. Anchor Hocking had been in play since Carl Icahn greenmailed it, and it would continue to be in play. But the board seemed convinced that investing some capital in repairs, safety, and a small amount of new technology was the smart way to grow back to at least a $250 million valuation, and maybe a little more. Spending, improving customer and supplier relationships, and making better margins on sales would take a while. So owners of the majority of the stake were likely to hold on for at least a year. Of course, if U.S. Glass or Arc, for example, were to back a truck packed with $300 million up to the door on Pierce Avenue, they’d sell. But Gumbs believed that selling out now would be a losing move.
He sounded a lot like Solomon. But Solomon had a bias toward growing through acquisition. Now, nobody talked about acquisitions, or a billion-dollar future. The goal was to get the place cleaned up, make it profitable, then sell.
Solomon had lost the safety argument. Now Gumbs was charged by the board with making safety a top priority. Gumbs said the board obsessed over safety because keeping workers safe was the right thing to do. But its desire to move faster on safety than it perceived Solomon to have been moving may also have been motivated by a desire to sell—few investors want to buy a hazardous plant. In the three months since Gumbs had arrived, the safety consultants Solomon had hoped to avoid hiring had held employee training sessions.
Swink sat through one of them, but he mostly tuned out. The way he saw it, the whole plant was a safety hazard. Everybody knew that. So there wasn’t any point in talking about all sorts of scientific procedures to create a safety culture. He just wanted to get back to work, to operating his press.
The company had installed a fire alarm just above Swink’s machine. With his ear protection on, he couldn’t hear the alarm. But it also strobed, so at least he could see it. He wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do if he saw the flashing light, but now he’d know something was on fire that wasn’t supposed to be.
As much as they bitched about the hazards, safety was not the top priority for the workers. Joe Boyer, for instance, was still nursing his knees. They creaked like two rusty gate hinges. Especially the right knee. It zinged him with every step he took. When he was a teenager, he’d gone night-fishing by the Hocking River. While pumping up a Coleman lantern, he slipped and ripped something in there. He didn’t know what, exactly. After a while, the knee seemed to heal up and it didn’t bother him for years. Then, at the end of last summer, he’d spent part of a shift working up on a machine. He stepped off it, kept supervising his shops, went home. In the middle of the night, his throbbing knee woke him up. “It just give out on me,” he said.
On his days off, he liked to spend a few hours out in his garage working on his blue ’71 Plymouth Barracuda. He’d raced the car at amateur tracks around central Ohio, but gave it up a few years ago because he never seemed to have time. Like a lot of Plant 1 workers, Boyer was often “forced”—held over after a shift to work another two or three hours of overtime because the plant was shorthanded. He was exhausted all the time. When he wasn’t working, he wanted to sleep. He didn’t even have time to keep his yard in shape, to say nothing of the ’Cuda. But he so missed working on it, he took the opportunity during the 2014 shutdown to pull off the cover and turn wrenches. He’d put a 430-cubic-inch engine under the hood and a bottle of nitrous oxide in the back. After his knee flared up, he couldn’t spend more than an hour at a time in the garage. He had to save himself for the plant. Also, his back was killing him.
Boyer thought about seeing a doctor for the knees, but because of the high deductible on the company health insurance, he already owed too much in medical bills. He’d been in the hospital for the gastric reflux check. His premiums for the company health insurance were rising, too, because the company had just raised them. He figured it took about $254 per paycheck, about $500 a month, or about one week’s worth of take-home wages to pay his share of the monthly payment. He marveled that the young rookies Anchor was trying to hire could afford the premiums at all on the wages they made. Some didn’t. They opted out of the company plan and paid the penalty under the Affordable Care Act for not having health insurance.
Boyer took a Vicodin for the knees and it helped a little, but he hated swallowing those damn things. They were dangerous. He’d seen too many guys in Plant 1 on Vicodin or Percocet or OxyContin practically sleepwalking through a shift. Boyer took aspirin instead, but they were pretty worthless. He worked in pain all through the autumn and into the winter.
The knees were a little better now. He finally did call a doctor, who suggested he try some NSAID cream on his back. And as his back started feeling better, the knees improved, so he figured they were connected somehow. One of these days, he’d go see a specialist. But he couldn’t afford it yet.
On October 13, the day Sam Solomon was fired, the unions filed a grievance with the National Labor Relations Board accusing EveryWare of “unilaterally implement[ing] new health insurance benefits for bargaining unit employees without bargaining in good faith with the Union as the parties never agreed to the changes nor reached impasse.” The grievance was only the most recent in a long string of complaints to the NLRB that had accelerated during Monomoy’s ownership.
The new health insurance costs mixed with the still-raw anger over the 2014 concessions in a fermenting pool of grudges that drowned any safety concerns. Morale was as low as it had ever been. Some employees had stopped caring. “You’d have to be a fuckin’ idiot to get fired over there,” Swink said.
As Boyer suggested, drug use in the plant was common. Some guys, misjudging Swink—a solid six-foot-tall rock ’n’ roller with steel gauges in his earlobes, a steel spike through his bottom lip, a wispy beard on his chin, and an Iron Cross inked in the crook between his left thumb and forefinger—would invite him to snort Percs or Oxys behind the machines. He always refused. His own father drank himself to death, and he hated most drugs.
“I actually think we’ll strike this year,” Chris Nagle said. “Unless we get something substantial back, with the insurance costs and everything goin’ on, I think we will go on the street.”
He’d sent that message to Gumbs. “He thinks we can’t do anything,” Nagle said of Gumbs’s reply. “I said, ‘Okay, contract comes, don’t bring a knife to a gunfight.’” Nagle hadn’t seen such a mean mood in decades. “He’s got the people pissed off now to where they don’t care. They can’t afford the insurance and to live, too, so you might as well strike, you know? They don’t have any money comin’ in anyway.”
He’d told Solomon, and now he’d told Gumbs, that union members were having to choose between health care and feeding their children. They had to tell their kids they couldn’t play school sports because the public schools now charged fees to kids who wanted to play a sport.
The small equipment changes inside the plant—the removal of an H-28, some new mold-design gear, the upcoming tank rebuild—were all well and good, but workers made connections between that investment and their own wages and benefits. “Our 6 percent is payin’ for that equipment,” Nagle said, referring to the concessions from 2014. The factory men understood better than anybody the need to upgrade the plant, but any upgrades weren’t going to put food on the table. The company’s decision to pay for a new roof on the Pierce Avenue offices didn’t help the mood, either. The roof didn’t cost all that much, but, like the parking lot pothole repair, the symbolism grated. “We’re still telling our kids they can’t eat today, but you’re getting a new roof on the building to keep the accounting people dry,” Nagle said.
New hires made $12 per hour, about a hundredth of the hourly fee charged by the law firm partners who represented EveryWare during the bankruptcy. Such workers made $96 per day, or $480 per forty-hour week, or about $2,000 per month. They made more if they were forced, or worked holiday shifts, but that money wasn’t guaranteed. After deductions, health insurance premiums, and union dues, Nagle estimated that some workers took home under $10,000 per year if they bought into the health insurance plan. That’s why many didn’t.
Sure, Nagle argued, you could say, as many in Lancaster did, that having any job is better than having no job at all. “But you can’t afford to work there, because you can’t afford the company insurance.”
Though it was only January, and the contract didn’t expire until October, Nagle was already telling his members to borrow $10,000 out of their own 401(k)s and set it aside to help them ride out a strike. Like Dale Lamb before him, Nagle knew that nobody really won a strike. “But some days you gotta put your foot in the sand and say, ‘We’ve had enough.’ And that’s what I tell Sean.” There was so much simmering antagonism in the plant that some workers felt like they had nothing to lose. “The company thinks they are making us weaker,” Nagle said, “but they’re making us stronger. If we do strike, it will put the dead in this corporation.”
Gumbs hadn’t made it through Penn and Harvard and the balls-out world of high finance without being perceptive. He knew he had a problem. Just before Thanksgiving, the company had handed out $15 Walmart gift cards. In the old days, the company used to pull a big semi full of frozen turkeys up to the plant and hand them to workers at the end of pre-Thanksgiving shifts, but nothing like that had happened for a long time—and not at all during the tenures of many employees. Some scoffed at the $15 card as a lame attempt to make nice. Others, like Joe Boyer, viewed it as an overture.
Now Gumbs and Erika Schoenberger were compiling a service-award list in another play to boost morale. Anchor Hocking used to give out service awards at milestone anniversaries—ten years, twenty, twenty-five, on and on—and then print the employees’ names and photos in AnchorScope, the newsletter that went to everybody’s mailbox every three months. Like the turkeys, the awards hadn’t been given out in years.
As he looked over the list, Gumbs could barely believe what he was seeing. Between Anchor Hocking and Oneida, EveryWare Global had about three hundred employees who’d worked for one or the other of the two companies for at least twenty years. Anchor Hocking had about half a dozen employees who’d worked for the company for at least fifty years.
“The dedication of those people, and what they’ve gone through,” Gumbs marveled. “I mean, two decades for me is … staying in place is a structure I have…” Gumbs was at a loss for how to describe it.
* * *
While Gumbs and Schoenberger were working out service-award lists on Pierce Avenue, Mark Kraft was attending yet another group meeting. This one, however, was different.
Mark had spent the year since his arrest kidding himself. For Mark, being a junkie was like an identity he possessed. He may have begun to hate it, but it was his. When Eric Brown and the MCU broke through his door, he said, “it was taken away from me. I resented that.” So, once the dope sickness passed, he kept trying to act as if he was in control of his own destiny.
Sucking a Perc 30 up his nose, swallowing Xanaxes, shooting up in June and again in September—he tried to tell himself they were his decisions. After all, he wasn’t always high. He’d gone weeks without using. He went to work. He returned to his parents’ house, where he’d been living since his bust. Sure, he’d call himself a junkie, but then he’d say, “Don’t worry,” or, “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” whenever anybody suggested his obsessive MobilePatrol scanning, his continuing flirtation with the drama of Lancaster’s drug culture, or his use might hint at self-deception.
He’d walk out of a meeting with his probation officer and think, “I should get high,” and then he’d think, “How fucked up is that?” And then he’d try to forget about using—but life sort of sucked without dope. Even the week in jail couldn’t stop him from shooting up just days after his release.
In late October, Mark ran into Nick, his addict buddy, and Nick’s girlfriend at Walmart. Nick was pretty spun out. His girlfriend was a wreck, wraith-thin, with scabs on her face. She’d been cute once. She hadn’t been much into drugs before she hooked up with Nick. Mark was so concerned for her that he spoke to his parents, who knew the girl’s family, for advice.
Not long after, in November, Nick asked if he could spend a few days in the King Street house. Mark, who was still living with his parents, had allowed Nick to stay there once before. That was a clear violation of Mark’s probation—“Yes, I’m a dumbass,” he’d said at the time. But Mark agreed again, because he was worried about what Nick and his girl might be doing if he left them on the streets—and not at all, he insisted, because Nick was sure to bring dope.
On November 13, the MCU rushed the door again and found a crack pipe and gear for shooting dope. When the police took Nick to jail, he wrote out a statement saying that Mark had supplied the equipment and sold him drugs.
Mark stared at Nick’s handwriting, dumbfounded. He denied supplying drugs to Nick, and he denied knowing anything about the gear. But it was his house, after all, so on November 17 he was booked back into jail. On that day, he failed a drug test. Mark insisted he hadn’t used, didn’t piss dirty, had been clean since September. The probation officer, though, declared that Mark “tested positive for Morphine and after he was given several chances to admit to the usage, the Defendant did admit to using Heroin.”
Really, the date he used, when he tested positive, why he tested positive, whether he’d used or not—none of that mattered. What mattered was that even as Mark called himself a junkie, felt shame and regret, wanted so badly to be free—not just from dope but from himself and his world—that he fantasized about killing himself, he could not admit that he was not at all the chill dude in the hipster fedora that he pretended to be. He was an addict with a yoke around his neck, and it was killing him.
After a few days in the jail on Main Street, Mark was transferred to the jail annex on BIS Road. There, he got high four days straight. “You can buy dope. It’s fucking everywhere. On day twelve, I still had no bond, so I said ‘Fuck it’ and bought some Suboxone. I’m not gonna lie. I did get high.”
Mark claimed that people threw cans of tobacco dip with pills hidden inside over the fence. Trustees would collect the cans and sell the pills for $160 per pill, $80 for a half, $40 for a quarter. “It’s quite a system,” Mark said. “There was people selling Percs in there, fucking needles in there. How the fuck do they do that? I don’t know. I wasn’t using anybody’s dirty needles.”
The last day of his incarceration, December 3, “Somebody in our pod bought some really good cocaine. So I do this fat line of cocaine, and instantly I get this call to go to court. I think I’m going in front of a judge, but I was getting out on bond. I was trippin’ a little bit. The amount of drugs going through that jail is insane. I was completely appalled.”
When he checked back on his house on King Street, he found a note clipped to his porch mailbox. Any more trouble, any more drugs, the note threatened, and Mark would one day drive up to the curb and find the house gone. Just gone. “Somebody threatened to burn my fucking house down!” he said. “Fuckers!”
With some persuading from his lawyer and his father, Mark decided to attend an in-patient drug rehab center in northern Ohio. He was motivated more by fear of the reinstatement of his original felony charge than by recognition that he could not control his addiction. He hoped that if he showed an earnest effort, Judge Berens would maintain the ILC. As a sign of his sincerity, he paid the insurance deductible himself.
Mark checked in January 11, almost one year to the day since his original arrest. Ten days into his stay, he began to see the reality of his life. He felt depressed, afraid he’d always be known as a junkie. If that was so, he thought, his life was over.
The next day, Mark sounded more optimistic. He admitted that, while he’d been calling himself a junkie and used the word “addict,” he was just now realizing how fucked up he was. He felt better physically. “I want you to see me in a good place,” he said.
He hated to say it, because he didn’t like cops—and, in a different way from Brian, he hated The System—but Eric Brown and the MCU team might have saved his life. “I was forced to get sober because of the arrest. I did a lot of meetings and tried to stay sober best I could, but I always had this or that fuckup.”
He was afraid of Lancaster, though. Even though he was over a hundred miles away, Lancaster remained as close as his smartphone screen. “Five days ago, I got a text saying, ‘Hey, I got a fuckin’ script of Xanies,’” Mark said, referring to Xanax. “Facebook, texting me, I’m still in this loop of what’s going on down there. I try to get away from it, and it’s still right there. I am scared to go back to Lancaster, man. I realize now that I’ve been up here, that’s all I know. What I was doing this last year, this whole sober thing, I feel like I want it more now, and if I don’t change people, places, things, it’ll blow up in my face.”
Mark had been home from rehab for two days when he ran into a kid, Dakota, and Dakota’s pregnant girlfriend in the parking lot of a doctor’s office. “Hey, you still fuck around?” Dakota asked. “No,” Mark answered. “I got some really good weed,” Dakota said.
The next day was warm for late January, so Mark went to Rising Park with his little sister. He said hello to a girl he knew, who asked, “What have you been up to?” Mark told her he’d just returned from rehab. After a little small talk, she said, “Can you get me some Percs or anything?” “What the fuck’s the matter with you?” he asked.
He’d finally admitted the truth. “I didn’t think I was an addict. I might have called myself a junkie.” Now, though, he said, the truth had given him willpower. “I kept fuckin’ up, and now I realize that, if it’s in front of me, I am powerless to it. So the key is not to have it in front of me.”
Mark had been sent home with Suboxone. Whereas he once got high on Suboxone, he now hated having to take it. He remained with his parents. His mother counted the pills every day to be sure Mark wasn’t selling any. In the past, he would have rebelled at the scrutiny, but now he accepted it.
Like his dope, he both loved and hated Lancaster. The generations of his family, all the interconnections with people—he’d never have that again if he left it for good. Lancaster was a community, for better or worse—and, as weird as it sounded, as hard as it was to believe, it was his community, too. There was no other place on earth where that statement could ever be true the way it was true about Lancaster.
* * *
Meanwhile, Lloyd was adjusting to prison, again. Though he didn’t like it, he said he was glad to be there, glad to be sentenced to four years. Not that it was fair that he got four and Jason only two, but he tried not to think about that part. He figured it would take at least that long before he was ready to come back to Lancaster. “I want to get real disgusted with myself,” he said. There were plenty of drugs for sale on the inside, but so far he’d avoided them. He hadn’t heard from his family or had any visitors except me. He’d put some pounds on his frame and had been working out. His arms were beefier than they’d been the day he was sentenced. Some of his teeth were missing. He hadn’t sat in a dentist’s chair since childhood, maybe, but now the prison dentist was pulling the worst ivories one by one and fitting him for dentures. He was taking some GED courses and had enrolled in a community college prison program. He thought he’d like to become a drug counselor. Learning was hard for him, he said, because he hadn’t used his brain in twenty years.
From the control of prison, Lloyd could envision plans and a future, but he knew better than anybody else could how such dreams fall apart. He’d had them before. He would return to town, of course: Where else was he going to go? But nobody was going to stand in line to hire Lloyd. And Lancaster cops would be waiting for him. He hoped they wouldn’t hassle him too bad.
Lloyd stuttered and paused, his eyes glistening, when he spoke about Lancaster’s police, but not because he feared them. A Lancaster cop named Randy Bartow had done Lloyd a favor once. It was one of the few times in his life anybody had.
One day, Lloyd had walked out of the county courthouse, looking agitated and angry after appearing on some charge or other. Bartow, who was entering the building, stopped him and said, “Hey Lloyd, what’s wrong?” Lloyd explained that his girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend was keeping the girlfriend’s belongings in his house and preventing her from moving them out. Lloyd was headed over there right then to confront the dude. Bartow, knowing Lloyd and knowing there’d be a beatdown, told Lloyd to sit on the bench outside the courthouse. “Give me a little time,” Bartow said. Bartow drove away, and about twenty minutes later returned with the girlfriend’s stuff. In 2012, Bartow’s own girlfriend’s ex-husband broke into her house and shot her and Bartow dead, then killed himself. “He was a good cop,” Lloyd said.
While Lloyd and Jason were in state prison and Mark was in rehab, Jessica Cantrell sat in county jail. She’d turned herself in on November 17, the same day Mark was booked. She’d had time to think during her two months on the run, and her subsequent two months in jail. “I love him to death,” she said of Jason. “He tries, but he keeps lying about stuff. He’s really brought me down. Look at me now.”
For sure she would have to move away from Lancaster. Nobody in town would give you a job if you’d been in her kind of trouble. Maybe she would go back to Louisiana. She could be a nurse.
Jason learned about Jessica through the grapevine that connects Lancaster to the state’s prisons—most Lancastrians would be surprised to know just how many of their fellow townsfolk shuttled back and forth between them. He wasn’t sure where he stood with her. He tried not to think too much about it. Like Lloyd, he enrolled in some prison education courses, though he didn’t have a future career in mind. Hairstyling was now out. Maybe he could buy “one of them food trucks that’s got, like, the grills and the coolers and stuff like that.” He’d also talk about the cleaning business, the landscaping business, maybe working for his brother-in-law hanging rain gutters. He could work under the table, not pay any taxes, still collect the disability payments he was receiving for his bad back. That’d be cool.
* * *
Lancaster itself was in turmoil. The past year had not proven to be the bright new start the town hoped it would be. The largest private employer went bankrupt, the drug plague showed no sign of abating, the festival director abruptly quit. But the year hadn’t been a disaster, either. Anchor Hocking’s “parent”—a term that still annoyed the people who hated to think of Anchor Hocking having a parent—had rebirthed it from bankruptcy with much less debt. New elementary schools had opened, and in the November election voters approved—by a narrow margin—the continuation of the levy to operate them. Lancastrians could reach into that mixed bag, pull something out, and justify either optimism or despair.
But then, on December 30, Bridget Kuhn, the newly elected mayor’s wife, was indicted on fifty criminal charges related to her embezzlement of more than $350,000 from clients of her bookkeeping business. She’d used the money to feed her gambling habit. Unbeknownst to most people in town, Bridget, a small-town bookkeeper married to a CPA, was regarded as a high roller by the Ohio Casino Control Commission.
Brian Kuhn had joined his wife on some of her casino excursions. And, back in May, Kuhn had informed the county Republican Party that he was having a little business trouble: a matter of discrepancies in payroll accounts managed by the firm he owned. The party hid the information from the public and let the election proceed. The out-of-town special prosecutor brought in to conduct the investigation into Bridget Kuhn refused to say whether or not Brian Kuhn was under suspicion as a party to her crimes.
As if the mayor’s troubles weren’t bad enough, all through January, the city council members continued their dysfunctional feuding. The new jail that had so agitated one council faction for over a year was now well under construction, but they refused to let the issue drop. The council president had tried to make council committee appointments to oversee the city’s departments, but other members objected. At a subsequent meeting, rebellious council members made their own committee assignments. So, as the new year began, Lancaster had a new mayor’s wife under indictment, a mayor under suspicion, and a city council mired in a petty, childish spat. All this was printed in newspapers and carried by TV stations statewide. Once again, the amateurish shenanigans and outright criminality of Lancaster’s own pols had made the town a regional laughingstock.
* * *
In the coming months, Mark would stay sober. But Berens would reinstate his felony and enter a conviction with a fine and a suspended year in state prison. If Mark slipped again, he’d join Lloyd and Jason. Mark was angry about the felony, upset that even as the black-and-blue scars on his arms faded, the felony would remain. He struggled to adopt a Zen attitude about it, and hoped that someday there’d be a way to erase the conviction, and his past.
Carly would be picked up for a probation violation. Mark would feel sad for her. By then, he’d be nearly weaned off Suboxone and looking forward to a trip with his grandfather. He’d have to always be alert, but as time passed, he would come to believe that he’d left heroin behind for good.
Not much would change for John and Wendy Oatney. Between John’s learning disability and his menacing conviction, finding a job began to seem like an impossible dream. Having heard that there was work in Kentucky, he considered driving there and sleeping in his car until he could convince somebody to take him on, but he reconsidered and kept looking around Fairfield County. Eventually, he’d find work unloading trucks at a discount store for $8.50 an hour. Wendy would get a raise to $9.70 an hour. The police would return John’s gun.
The Lancaster Festival would name Ken Culver as the new executive director. Culver once worked as an Anchor Hocking PR man before the sale to Newell. He’d served as a city councilman and volunteered at the Glass Museum. Joe Piccolo had been right: Picking a local who understood Lancaster, and who would let Lancaster be Lancaster, would prove to be the better choice. The weather would be touch-and-go for the 2016 edition of the festival, but the skies would clear at critical moments, and a big crowd would pay to see the veteran country singer Vince Gill, who would happily perform with the orchestra.
Dave Benson would announce his retirement from the fair.
Ashley would call me to say she’d been evicted from the east-side house and that she’d “lost” the Bitchmobile. She’d tell a confusing story about an ex-boyfriend I’d met, who smoked crack in her bathroom and stole money from her. She stayed at the Relax Inn for a little while, but her monthly $600 of SSI money didn’t last, so she slept outside in an alley. She was on her way to another Ohio town, where, she said, she had a friend who might take her in.
The young girl from the trailer park, the one Ashley said was growing up too fast, would run away from home. She would leave a note for her mother.
Mayor Brian Kuhn would be indicted on two felony counts of failing to file state income tax returns. He would refuse to resign his office. His wife would plead guilty to theft and be sentenced to four years in state prison.
The city council members would continue to fight among themselves. Both sides would file dueling lawsuits, at an indeterminate cost to the city’s taxpayers.
Michele Ritchlin would create Homework Club, a scholarship system funded by local donors to supplement the diminished budget available to pay for kids whose families could not afford the after-school program. Thirty-six businesses and individuals would donate, including Nancy Frick and her husband, Paul. And in July 2016, Ritchlin would receive the call she’d hoped for: The program would receive two grants of $200,000 each—two of only twenty-six grants approved from 202 applications. The program’s target population, the state would decide, was poorer than it had thought. Ritchlin, who once described herself as an anti-tax, Ayn Rand libertarian, would laugh at the obvious contradiction and say that even in the face of new realities, her old beliefs died hard.
That was true of Lancaster as a whole. It had become a town that lived on federal and state government money. But many refused to acknowledge the connection, because, as Mark Kraft could tell them, denial was comforting. The system they believed in was not The System that actually prevailed. That past system had been destroyed, or driven to the brink of destruction, in part by buccaneering free-market finance and Friedmanism. Acknowledging that fact was as painful as a devout religionist losing faith, something cosmopolitan liberals refused to empathize with. Abandoning Lancaster’s old moderate conservative pragmatism to blame sin, laziness, scientists, immigrants, unions, and any number of other enemies of the American Way allowed the illusion that Forbes magazine had helped establish to remain a viable belief, one to be resurrected, not mourned.
Sam Solomon would stay sore about his dismissal. He would take his time finding his “new passion in life”—but until he found it, he would mentor and coach businesspeople. A biographical sketch for his appearance as a keynote speaker at a National Women Business Owners Corporation conference would say that he “recently completed a turnaround of EveryWare Global that required raising new capital, restructuring debt, reigniting the new product development engine and returning the company to profitability.”
The board of EveryWare Global would hire Patrick Lockwood-Taylor, a former Procter & Gamble executive, as CEO. Taylor, an Englishman who’d worked around the world on behalf of P&G brands, would tell me that the board was “compassionate and genuinely intrigued by what is possible. They agree on three things: the fantastic brands—iconic. Two, we have a duty to improve safety. And, three, they have committed to, and have invested capital into, the plant for improved efficiency and safety.”
The employees in Lancaster would take a skeptical view. Lockwood-Taylor had never been a CEO. He’d left a large multinational like P&G to become one at a small, unprofitable (Solomon’s bio notwithstanding) company. Maybe he was just punching his CEO ticket on his way to some bigger, fancier job. Or maybe he meant it when he said that he knew all about Milton Friedman’s doctrine of profits above all—community be damned—and rejected it.
In a series of three videos he made for company employees, he would acknowledge that tough union negotiations were still to come, but that all workers were “owners” of the company. Nobody bought that part. “Many of you remember the heyday of these great companies and brands,” he would say. “I want to get back to that feeling that we are the best in the industry and be proud of this company.” When the organization is prospering, he’d say, “the community is prospering. I want us to get back to that.” They would hope that was true. Lockwood-Taylor would not say that the board was entertaining offers to sell.
* * *
Why did they stay? That was the obvious question. Why didn’t they take Lora Manon’s advice and fly like the wind away from Lancaster? Some people had come down from Columbus to buy a cheaper house in a tract at the edge of town, so their presence wasn’t mysterious. Chris Cruit, Joe Boyer, Chris Nagle—they were easy to explain, too. They had a lot of years in Plant 1, and unless they wanted to try for a job in Toledo, at Libbey, there probably wasn’t another place in the country where their skills would transfer.
But why did Rebekah Krutsch stay? Rebekah was a waitress at Cherry Street Pub. Even now, she was skittering back and forth behind Brian, hustling to deliver food orders.
The past decade in Lancaster had been a bumpy ride. The home she and her ex-husband once owned fell into foreclosure during the Great Recession. The financial strain contributed to their divorce. She had four children, who lived with her on the west side near Plant 1. But Rebekah had a lot going for her, too. She was pretty, with a carved face and a mass of curly red hair. She had a college degree. She made art—wire constructions on painted canvases—which she sometimes sold for extra money. Waitressing was her second job. During the day, she worked for the Recovery Center as a drug education teacher in the local schools, a full-time position for which she estimated she took home about $24,000 per year. Her waitressing added another $1,000 per month, income that kept her off food stamps. The government-subsidized health insurance that so many criticized helped a lot. She knew she could probably find work making more money elsewhere, and she was more acutely aware of Lancaster’s ugly side than many others were. But when I asked why she didn’t move away, she looked at me with wide, pitying eyes and said, “This is my town”—as if my asking the question meant I’d been deprived of the quiet power of belonging to a place.
Lancaster people were good people. “There’s a lot of love and passion here,” she said. “You see it where we are sitting. I wait tables in it. I work in it every day in the schools. The teachers and staff love it. If they didn’t love it, they wouldn’t be there. Those junior highs, Ewing and Sherman, are falling apart. Literally falling apart. I walk into Sherman and Ewing when they reopen in the late summer and it’s stifling. But they love their schools. I’m not going anywhere. I like my town.”
She sounded like Gerry Stebelton, the lawyer and former state representative whose firm took over the old Anchor Hocking headquarters, and whose mother had spent decades in the Anchor sluer. He had something to show me, he’d said. So we walked into a corner office overlooking trees, the statue of Sherman, Main Street, Broad Street, and the big golden sandstone City Hall. One day, he told me, he’d stood right where we stood. As it happened, it was a day much like the day we spoke, with the sun illuminating City Hall under a blue sky. He was on the phone with somebody from New York, or maybe it was Chicago, and the next thing he knew he choked up, and an involuntary “My God!” came out of his mouth. The voice on the other end asked what had happened. “Nothing,” Stebelton said. “I’m just looking at the most beautiful sight in the world.”
Many Lancastrians felt the same way. But the festival’s hundreds of volunteers; the people who gave to Community Action, the Fairfield County Foundation, the United Way, Foundation Dinners, Maywood Mission, their churches; the ladies (and a few men) of the Cameo League and the Heritage Association; Loving Lending, which had helped John and Wendy Oatney; the tutors and board members of the West Side After School Program; and a lot of other bighearted, strong-willed people would be mocked by opinionistas like Kevin D. Williamson in a sneering screed published in March 2016 in National Review, a leading conservative journal:
The problem isn’t that Americans cannot sustain families, but that they do not wish to. If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy—which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog—you will come to an awful realization. It wasn’t Beijing. It wasn’t even Washington, as bad as Washington can be. It wasn’t immigrants from Mexico, excessive and problematic as our current immigration levels are. It wasn’t any of that. Nothing happened to them. There wasn’t some awful disaster. There wasn’t a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence—and the incomprehensible malice—of poor white America. So the gypsum business in Garbutt ain’t what it used to be. There is more to life in the 21st century than wallboard and cheap sentimentality about how the Man closed the factories down. The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.
For decades, politicians—Republicans and Democrats both—and pundits had all been spewing empty platitudes of praise for “the heartland,” “real America,” and “small-town values.” Then, with shameless hypocrisy, they supported the very policies that helped destroy thriving small towns.
Corporate elites said they needed free-trade agreements, so they got them. Manufacturers said they needed tax breaks and public-money incentives in order to keep their plants operating in the United States, so they got them. Banks and financiers needed looser regulations, so they got them. Employers said they needed weaker unions—or no unions at all—so they got them. Private equity firms said they needed carried interest and secrecy, so they got them. Everybody, including Lancastrians themselves, said they needed lower taxes, so they got them. What did Lancaster and a hundred other towns like it get? Job losses, slashed wages, poor civic leadership, social dysfunction, drugs.
Having helped wreck small towns, some conservatives were now telling the people in them to pack up and leave. The reality of “Real America” had become a “negative asset.”
The “vicious, selfish culture” didn’t come from small towns, or even from Hollywood or “the media.” It came from a thirty-five-year program of exploitation and value destruction in the service of “returns.” America had fetishized cash until it became synonymous with virtue.
“This is a success-driven culture, right?” Sam Solomon once said. “This is America, so we tend to really harp on winners. And as long as you are winning—skipping your stone across the pond—that’s what gets reported, and we quickly forget the losers.” Somebody who plodded along, slowly building, was forgotten. “That’s not interesting at all. So it’s a little bit of that culture that we’ve created. That’s what works in America.”
If you worked for $10, $12, $15 an hour, you were a loser, and you knew people thought of you as a loser. They didn’t want to see you, didn’t want to know you, didn’t want their children to play with your children. So they built bigger and bigger houses behind sturdier and sturdier gates. What’s more, your life would never be better. The path Dale Lamb had walked, and four generations of glassworkers before him had walked, had become a dead end.
People like Kevin Williamson, and some in Lancaster, too, preached the gospel of personal responsibility. A prominent local doctor expressed outrage after he’d tried to hire an unemployed job seeker to mow his lawn for $30. The man turned him down. This was proof, the doctor argued, that the underclass just wanted to lie around collecting welfare.
Thirty dollars, though, wasn’t a path to anywhere. But the attitude was part of the gospel, and who could argue with it? Of course people should act responsibly. They should do what’s best for themselves and the commonweal.
“Have you no morals, man?” Pickering asks Alfred Doolittle in Shaw’s Pygmalion. “Can’t afford them, Governor,” he responds. “Neither could you if you was as poor as me.”
The greater the income inequality, and the fewer decent-paying jobs there are for people with high school diplomas (or less), the greater the chances that a young woman won’t marry the father of her baby. Why would she? Middle-class morality may be a luxury she can’t afford. A young man with no job—or a job at Sonic making minimum wage—could very well turn out to be more of a burden than a help. What help would Ashley’s baby daddy be to Ashley? He lived in the same Dogpatch trailer park she lived in. But she might want a baby, or perhaps just not take care not to have a baby, because a child might be the one person in her life she could love who would love her back. And America esteems motherhood. Ashley might be a poor, school-dropout addict—the daughter of a poor, uneducated addict—but at least she could be a mother.
Brian Gossett understood. “These people, they’ve got nothing else, man. So instead of saying, ‘Well, I’ll be a worker at this place,’ or, ‘I’ll be that,’ it’s like, ‘Okay, I’m a heroin addict. And I have tattoos.’”
Even Judge David Trimmer, an adherent of a strict interpretation of the personal-responsibility gospel, had to acknowledge that having no job, or a lousy job, was not going to give a thirty-five-year-old man much purpose in life. So many times, people wandered through his courtroom like nomads. “I always tell them, ‘You’re like a leaf blowing from a tree. Which direction do you go? It depends on where the wind is going.’ That’s how most of them live their lives. I ask them, ‘What’s your purpose in life?’ And they say, ‘I don’t know.’ ‘You don’t even love yourself, do you?’ ‘No.’”
Trimmer and the doctor still believed in a world with an intact social contract. But the social contract was shattered long ago. They wanted Lancaster to uphold its end of a bargain that had been made obsolete by over three decades of greed.
Monomoy Capital Partners, Carl Icahn, Cerberus Capital Management, Newell, Wexford, Barington, Clinton—none of them bore any personal responsibility. A&M and $1,200-per-hour lawyers didn’t bear any personal responsibility. They didn’t get a lecture or a jail sentence: They got rich. The politicians—from both parties—who enabled their behavior and that of the payday- and car-title-loan vultures, and the voters of Lancaster who refused to invest in the future of their town as previous generations had done (even as they cheered Ohio State football coach Urban Meyer, who took $6.1 million per year in public money), didn’t bear any personal responsibility.
With the fracturing of the social contract, trust and social cohesion fractured, too. Even Brad Hutchinson, a man who had millions of reasons to believe in The System, had no faith in politicians or big business. “I think that most politicians, if not all politicians, are crooked as the day is long,” Hutchinson said. “They don’t have on their minds what’s best for the people.” Business leaders had no ethics, either. “There’s disconnect everywhere. On every level of society. Everybody’s out for number one. Take care of yourself. Zero respect for anybody else.”
So it wasn’t just the poor or the working class who felt disaffected, and it wasn’t just about money or income inequality. The whole culture had changed. Brian was from a middle-class family, but he didn’t believe in any institution or person in authority. He didn’t feel like he was part of anything bigger than himself. Aside from his mother and father, and his brother, Mike, he was alone.
Telling Lancaster to surrender and call U-Haul made it easy for America to ignore its Lancasters. Sure, there was a lot of talk about such places and the people in them, but few wanted to spend much time learning about how they’d been left behind by the financialization and digitalization of American life. Silicon Valley kept promising nirvana but delivering new ways to gossip, even while disconnecting people from each other and their real communities. Politicians soothed the blows of globalization with promises to retrain and educate, but none of that happened for Lancaster’s working class.
To so blithely dismiss the value of community was to pretend there was no loss. But there was, and the effects of that loss continued to ripple throughout the town.
Lancaster, as a place, would survive; it was too big to dry up like a Texas crossroads bypassed by the interstate. Maybe it would sell scones and coffee to visitors and one day complete a transformation, already well under way, into a Columbus bedroom community with organic delis and rehabilitated loft apartments in the old Essex Wire building. Or maybe it would slide into deeper dysfunction. For sure it could never go back, no matter how much some in town wanted to believe Lancaster could recapture at least the spirit of what it once was. Whatever its future, Lancaster would be a lonelier place than the one Nancy George had found.
When Anchor Hocking quality control supervisors tested the strength and shatter patterns of baking dishes, they used a tap-style punch and hammer. They placed the baking dish on a wooden block within the bounds of a walled frame, held the punch in the center of the dish, and hammered at it—gently at first, then with increasing power, hit after hit, until the dish fragmented into isosceles shards. If the glass had been melted, formed, and tempered just right, it would shatter along lines of stress. You can see the stress lines in an intact dish by holding it under polarized light. You can’t see them with the naked eye.
* * *
Brian took another sip of whiskey and explained his idea for the trees. The pair of them would be slightly abstract, with leaves big enough for writing on. As guests walked into Bayat and Victoria’s wedding ceremony, or maybe the reception, they’d use a gold marker to write their names on the leaves. Afterwards, Brian would have the trees framed and present them to Bayat and Victoria as keepsakes. He’d been working on the trees for a few days now, up in the studio. It was the first art he’d made in months. He lifted his glass and said he was excited about getting back to work creating something.
The studio was clean and organized, his drawing tables neater than they’d ever been. He’d also hung up a few pieces of art—a couple of prints of Renaissance paintings, and the December 31 issue of the Eagle-Gazette. That was the one with the big picture of Bridget Kuhn being arraigned in court. He’d turned the paper into an icon to remind him that he wasn’t crazy at all; his view of The System had been the right one all along.
He’d also been decorating at his parents’ house—repainting a room, buying a new mattress. In a few days, he’d be moved out of the Colfax place. Aaron was cool with his leaving. Brian had paid up for January so as not to leave Aaron with a full tab. Besides, Aaron had started spending a lot of his time up in Pickerington with his girlfriend and would probably be leaving Colfax, too.
Brian emptied out the Colfax freezer by taking the backstrap from the deer he took with the crossbow—he and Brant had had a successful hunt in November—and grilling it at Hilltop for some friends. The meat was delicious. Hilltop hadn’t changed. The rocks we’d collected in December 2014 lay where we’d dropped them. The hillbilly cabin was going to remain a dream, but his affection for Hilltop was undiminished. He liked taking naps in the woods and feeling a little disoriented when he woke to the sounds of the trees in the wind. He was never more comfortable with himself than when he was at Hilltop, on land where that early Gossett had made a home.
In December, Mike took a bus trip out to Colorado to snowboard with a busload of kids from school. Brian was a little envious, but proud of his brother. Soon Mike would graduate from Ohio University. Brian wished he’d figured out a way to get to college, too, and to finish, but “at least one of us made it,” he said. He knew now that Mike might move away from Lancaster and never go into the silkscreen T-shirt business, or the skateboard graphics business. “I can’t imagine what it’d be like to lose him,” Brian said.
He planned to stay at Drew. He still hadn’t signed up for the 401(k), but maybe there’d be some way he could make a career there. Anchor Hocking was still on his mind, though. “You know,” he said, “Anchor was the only job I’ve ever really been proud of.”
Brian took another sip, then spotted somebody staring into a phone. “I hate Facebook,” he said. “I have to be careful who hears me say that. Hating Facebook makes you an evil person.” He laughed. “Everybody is alone. Like, even these big houses: In them, you’re in the same house, but you’re still alone.”
Somewhere—he couldn’t remember exactly, but it was probably NPR, because he liked to listen to it on his way home from work—he’d heard about some experiment on rats where the dude put some rats in cages by themselves and other rats in this, like, park with a bunch of other rats. And then he gave all the rats plain water and something like dope or something, and the rats could drink whatever they wanted. The rats in the cages totally went for the dope. They’d take so much, they’d kill themselves. The rats who hung out with all the other rats in a park hardly took any drugs, because they weren’t lonely. Lancaster, he said, was like a cage. “We don’t have a population problem,” he said. “We have a consumption problem.”
People consumed to distract themselves. If it wasn’t dope, it was real estate, cars, cash, Facebook, politics, screens, religion, rote patriotism, stupid movies, dumbass music.
Brian mentioned Mike’s trip to Colorado again and said it might be nice to move out west someday. The fact was, though, that he still loved Lancaster. Hilltop was Lancaster. The old buildings were Lancaster. The generations of Gossetts were Lancaster. The picture of Bridget Kuhn on the studio’s wall proved he loved it enough to be offended, if not surprised.
A football game had been playing on the flat-screen TV above the bar, some postseason all-star game, most likely. Brian hadn’t been paying attention—he wasn’t much of a sports fan. But an odd tableau drew his eye: There was a cute girl in small red shorts jumping around with frenetic enthusiasm. She was backed by NFL cheerleaders wearing sexy uniforms and giant, almost insane smiles, their perfect rows of perfect white teeth frozen and miraculous. And around the girl and the cheerleaders, a group of gospel singers shook with fervor as they sang to empty seats. He stared for a few seconds and then said, “The United States of America, dude.”
We decided to stay for another drink. The food at Cherry Street was pretty good. Billy and Lorena seemed to know everybody who walked through the door, and you could almost always find somebody you knew to chat with under the pictures and signs and memorabilia. Besides, it was cold outside.