They turned off the lights at Foundation Dinners, the little charity on West Fifth Avenue that fed all comers at outdoor picnic tables, the food prepared in its overworked kitchen. Fifteen yards across Fifth and half a block down, Lloyd Romine, his girlfriend, and whoever happened to have dropped in watched TV and got high. One block behind Lloyd’s house and halfway down Garfield, Michele Ritchlin and her teaching staff of one closed up the West After School Center after the last parent/guardian picked up the last child. Directly through the West School playground and across Pierce Avenue, Sam Solomon, Bob Ginnan, EveryWare general counsel Erika Schoenberger, vice president of sales and marketing Colin Walker, and new vice president of operations Anthony Reisig pored over numbers.
They were only partway through a fourteen-hour day preparing the bankruptcy filing of EveryWare Global. Coordinating with the partners at Monomoy, with two law firms—Kirkland & Ellis, and Pachulski Stang Ziehl & Jones—and with Jefferies, the investment bankers, they planned to blitz the Delaware federal bankruptcy court with a prepackaged plan they hoped would sail through with no delays and not many questions.
The filings hit the court on April 7. On the afternoon of April 9, Ross M. Kwasteniet, from Kirkland & Ellis, rose to address Judge Laurie Selber Silverstein.
So, Your Honor, I’ll spend a few minutes on how we got here. In 2013, the company engaged in an aggressive strategy of international expansion that, frankly, fell flat. We built inventories that we expected to sell overseas and that simply didn’t sell. We also embarked on a supply chain consolidation effort that went poorly and that resulted in key outages of key products and the company started losing customers. This led to a financial and liquidity crisis and led to potential covenant violations. The company simply had a situation where we had a lot of unsold inventory and we were running low on cash. This resulted in the board deciding to make a change in management. We brought in a new CEO [Solomon], and we also brought in the Alvarez & Marsal firm to help turn things around at the business level.
At the very least, Kwasteniet was admitting to the court that the combined brains of John Sheppard, as CEO, and the Monomoy partners—to whom EveryWare had been paying millions for advice—were lousy business operators.
A former EveryWare executive agreed with that assessment. “These guys were financial engineers, not operators,” he told me. “They don’t know how to run businesses. They think they do, but they don’t.” Monomoy, he argued, was too interested in “foisting financial engineering” on the two companies to operate them.
As embarrassing as poor management may have been, though, it was a far better excuse than the alternative theory: EveryWare’s debt was so deep by design—allowing Monomoy to strip the company of cash—that EveryWare couldn’t move.
In order to reward itself with all that money, Monomoy was forced to engage in stomach-churning corporate maneuvering. In the space of just a few months, Monomoy bought Oneida, rid itself of Anchor CEO Eichhorn, merged two companies—Anchor and Oneida—executed a merger with the Clinton SPAC, and took the company public.
“That’s too much change very rapidly,” the former executive said. “We would all think to ourselves, ‘We need to tap the brake pedal here.’ But Monomoy always had the pedal to the metal.”
As damning as these interpretations of the events leading to the bankruptcy may have been, they were innocent when compared with the one suggested by other EveryWare insiders. “There was communication between Kerri and Peters about what Peters knew about the numbers and the real state of the company and filing fake information,” a source recalled, referring to EveryWare general counsel Kerri Cardenas Love and CFO Bernard Peters. Cardenas Love, the source alleged, believed that Peters, under pressure from Monomoy, knowingly released phony results and estimates in order to make EveryWare seem healthier than it was before the September 2013 secondary stock offering that allowed Monomoy to begin cashing in its shares. Alarmed, Cardenas Love purportedly confronted Peters. “Kerri said, ‘You guys figure this out, or I’m going to the SEC.’” Peters asserted that “he could make the numbers say anything he wanted them to say,” the source alleged.
Cardenas Love was fired in October 2013, three weeks after the secondary offering. She wrote a whistleblower letter to the SEC and followed up with a lawsuit of her own. On April 1, 2014, EveryWare settled out of court by paying her almost $1 million in damages, back salary, and legal expenses.
The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers bought stock at the time of the secondary offering. When the stock price collapsed shortly afterwards, the IBEW mounted a class action lawsuit that accused CEO Sheppard, CFO Peters, Monomoy, Clinton Group, and the stock sale underwriters of an illegal stock “pump-and-dump” scheme, “in which the Monomoy Defendants refinanced, merged and took their privately owned and thinly capitalized company public, while stripping it of the cash necessary for it to operate.” The IBEW further alleged that
Monomoy accomplished this by developing a wholly baseless set of 2013 operating projections—revenues of $457 million and [EBITDA] of $61.1 million—which it continued to tout and reaffirm until the weeks following the Secondary Offering, while EveryWare’s operations sharply deteriorated as a result of the Company’s inadequate capital and its inability or unwillingness to pay its suppliers. To convince EveryWare’s creditors, ROI, and the merged company’s public shareholders to fund this scheme, the Monomoy Defendants, Sheppard and Peters made a number of material false and misleading statements and misleading omissions.
According to the suit, “when an information technology manager tasked with investigating Ms. Love retrieved incriminating electronic files—which he was required to report to CFO Peters, the subject of Ms. Love’s charges—the technology manager, too, was fired.”
The suit further alleged that, “by July 2013, the Company was unable to pay its vendors and was on track to run out of money by the end of the year.” At that point, EveryWare “engaged in accounting manipulations that misstated EveryWare’s inventories. Even after taking out all of EveryWare’s capital, causing the Company to become deeply insolvent and threatening the livelihood of thousands of EveryWare employees, the Monomoy Defendants had additional plans for extracting wealth from EveryWare,” the suit charged. “Specifically, the Monomoy Defendants retained over 15 million shares of EveryWare which they needed to sell before investors realized that the Company was essentially worthless.”
Based on statements from confidential witnesses (CW), the plaintiffs also alleged that Monomoy’s cost cuts damaged the ability of the company to function: “CW3 observed that, in May 2013, EveryWare cut back on the bonuses it paid her staff and also radically reduced her staff from 8 to 2. CW3 explained that Monomoy tried to ‘squeez[e] every nickel’ out of the Company and was not making any investment in the Company’s future success.”
Solomon was named as a defendant when the suit was first filed, but he was later dropped when it was amended because he hadn’t been there for most of the time in question. He couldn’t be sure if “there was real fire with all that smoke” or if the suspicious series of events were the consequences of a stressed company that was poorly run.
“All I can tell you is the great sense I take away, from talking to some who were around at the time, was that because you’re trying to pump the stock and sell shares, and Monomoy is trying to figure out their secondary offering, you just don’t want any noise.” Bad news makes noise. He compared the secondary offering to selling a house. People caulk leaks in the upstairs bathroom rather than repairing them because they’ve got a showing in the morning.
“If you just look at the facts, you’re trying to move the stock, and you can see from the quarterly forecast and earnings reports there’s pressure on the top line. Ultimately, you reported 51 [million dollars of EBITDA in the October 2013 announcement]. That’s a far cry from the 60 that you’ve guided.” The reality that, as Solomon believed, the truer figure was actually $28 million “is a pretty shitty story. So that’s not a great story to be selling stock on. So the question is, ‘Who knows what when?’”
He believed Monomoy played “a game” in the second half of 2013 by running “the shit out of the factories” to put the production in inventories and account for the inventory as working capital that would goose EBITDA. In other words, the inventories were not what the company “expected to sell overseas and that simply didn’t sell,” as Kwasteniet described to the judge. They were a gimmick to caulk the upstairs bathroom so investors couldn’t see the leaks.
As of June 2016, the question of whether any of these moves were illegal remained unsettled. After months of filings and counterfilings, the IBEW suit was eventually dismissed on the grounds that some charges were too vague, confidential informants may not have had complete knowledge of the company’s true financial picture, the defendants’ state of mind may not have been to commit a deliberate fraud, and, as Solomon suggested, there were other possible interpretations of events and actions that could excuse the defendants. The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers appealed the dismissal.
The SEC confirmed that “a law enforcement proceeding is pending or prospective,” citing it as a basis to deny my appeal for information about the EveryWare Global investigation under the Freedom of Information Act. While cautioning that any such proceeding did not imply violations of law, the SEC wrote that “the documents you seek come within categories whose disclosure would generally interfere with enforcement proceedings.”
* * *
Whatever tricks had been played in the past didn’t concern Solomon as much as what he could do about the future. He was confident bankruptcy would release EveryWare from its chains, and it mostly did. The prepackaged plan wiped out nearly $250 million in debt. In return, the lenders acquired 96 percent of the company. Monomoy and Clinton were left with about 4 percent. Monomoy, of course, was still far ahead on its investment. The $20 million it reinvested in EveryWare during the 2014 shutdown was a small price to pay to be able to walk away with its other millions. Clinton, on the other hand, took a beating. (I also tried, again over a period of months, to interview Clinton and De Perio. When I finally reached De Perio, he said, “I don’t get what’s in it for us. What’s the upside for talking about a deal that didn’t go so well?”)
Though it was “prepackaged”—meaning that the creditors and debtors agreed to a plan in advance of filing, making the proceedings streamlined—the proceedings themselves were costly. Kwasteniet, for example, billed $1,030 per hour for his time. He was one of twelve Kirkland & Ellis partners to work on the case; the top rate was $1,235 per hour. The rate at the second law firm representing EveryWare, Pachulski Stang, topped out at $1,025, for Laura Davis Jones. (It was Jones’s second turn at bat for Anchor Hocking in an eight-year period. She’d led the Global Home Products bankruptcy case.) Jefferies, the investment bank, and Alvarez & Marsal, the consultants, also billed out enormous sums. Jefferies’s fees were capped at $2.5 million. In the ninety days before the company filed for bankruptcy, EveryWare paid A&M $1,129,070. Before it was over, the bankruptcy would cost roughly $21 million, all the profit EveryWare expected to make in 2015.
Solomon, who’d never led a company going into bankruptcy, was amazed at how the superstructure of the American bankruptcy process operated—and how much money there was to be made from it.
“I think it’s an egregious expense, and it’s ridiculous,” he said. “But that’s the magic.” If you wanted to make a quarter of a billion dollars in debt disappear, you had to pay The System. “And not only the amount of money, but the rate at which it went out! Unimaginable. I remember saying to one of the consultants, ‘Hey, listen. You guys seem to know what you’re doing. This is clearly not your first rodeo. Why do I have to buy a new saddle? Can’t you use the saddle from the last rodeo?’”
As it happened, the U.S. trustee for the case, charged with protecting the rights of the creditors, strongly objected to parts of the prepackaged plan, arguing that it amounted to a hit-and-run over smaller creditors, allotted too much money to pay the professionals, and let Monomoy and Clinton off the hook for any part they played in wrecking the company. In return for its cooperation, Monomoy had demanded the same kind of release from responsibility that it imposed on Anchor Hocking for Monomoy’s advice and services.
The exculpation and release provisions in the original prepackaged plan released Monomoy, Clinton, and the lenders “conclusively, absolutely, unconditionally, irrevocably, and forever” from any claim arising out of the dividend recaps, the sale of assets like the DC, or any other action the parties took, even if such actions included “fraudulent or preferential transfer or conveyance, tort, contract, breach of fiduciary duty, violation of state or federal laws, including securities laws, negligence, gross negligence.” The plan did allow a cause of action for willful misconduct, but then gave the parties an out by allowing them to say they had taken such actions on advice of their attorneys and so were not at fault. “All someone has to say is, ‘My attorney told me to do it,’” the trustee argued.
Monomoy hoped to further inoculate itself by having the court find, in its acceptance of the prepackaged plan, that the exculpation was made “in exchange for the good and valuable consideration provided by the Released Parties” (i.e., Monomoy and the others), was “a good faith settlement and compromise of the Claims released by the Third-Party Release,” was “in the best interests of the Debtors and all holders of Claims and Interests,” and, finally, was “fair, equitable, and reasonable.”
In the end, some compromises were made in the plan to accommodate the trustee’s objections regarding smaller creditors, but the Monomoy partners got most of the free pass they wanted for their past actions.
Solomon, Schoenberger, Reisig, and Walker received something, too. As an inducement to stay on and run the business under the direction of a new board appointed by the lenders, they were promised, in addition to their salaries, 10 percent of the company when the time came for the lenders to sell. If, for example, EveryWare were to be purchased for $300 million—a figure mentioned several times as a fair estimate once it was back on its feet—they’d split $30 million, $7.5 million apiece.
In its confidential “pitchbook,” the sales document PE firms use to convince potential limited partners to hand over millions of dollars to establish new funds, Monomoy bragged about its high return rate—“3.1x”—on Anchor/Oneida/EveryWare, declaring the investment a big success, evidence of its business acumen. From the standpoint of a private equity firm, it was a success. Like a lucky old lady hitting a slot in Reno, Monomoy put a little money in and pulled a wagonload of money out. The MCP funds got rich, and so did the Monomoy partners. In 2014, for example, even as EveryWare imploded, Daniel Collin took $250,000 in board director compensation for his few days of meetings. It was deals like the EveryWare episode that enabled Presser to own a multi-million-dollar co-op apartment in the Kenilworth building, touted as “the best location on Central Park West.”
The ultimate fates of Anchor Hocking, Oneida, the people who worked for them, and the communities in which they lived were irrelevant. It wasn’t about making the product; it was about making money appear, the logical conclusion of the Friedman doctrine.
Monomoy sent what was left of Lancaster’s once-grand, 110-year-old employer into bankruptcy court while it made off with millions and the employees walked their wages and benefits backwards in time. Lancaster’s social contract had been smashed into mean little shards by the slow-motion terrorism of pirate capitalism.
* * *
While the bankruptcy was being finalized, Lloyd went shopping. Shopping had become one of Lloyd’s favorite pastimes, as though he’d made it his mission to keep River Valley Mall open. He almost never walked out of the mall without purchasing something, whether he needed it or not. “I ain’t never had nice things,” he explained to me.
The Kentucky Fried Chicken Christmas Dinner was Lloyd Romine’s Rosebud. He was ten, maybe, in 1987. His mother had remarried, to a fellow who sometimes worked construction during the day and always drank at night. She was employed at a small auto parts fabrication plant on the outskirts of Lancaster and didn’t make much money. The family survived okay, though—until she broke one of her legs in a work accident. It was a bad break; she couldn’t return to her job. What money there was dried up or trickled down his stepfather’s throat.
She tried. She wanted her Lloyd and his older half-brother to have the kind of life other kids in Lancaster had, and Lloyd loved her for that intention, but somehow she just couldn’t manage to fulfill it. On the Christmas when she picked up a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken, Lloyd wanted to cry.
Lloyd attended East School, near Mark Kraft’s house, during most of his boyhood. But then his mother and stepfather moved out to the country, and he started high school in one of the county schools, Fairfield Union. He dropped out in his sophomore year.
Lloyd and his older half-brother fought a lot—with Lloyd on the receiving end. One day, he and his half-brother got into another fight. Lloyd picked up a two-by-four with a nail sticking out of it and shouted, “If you don’t stop beatin’ on me, I’m gonna hit you with this!” The threat didn’t work, so Lloyd smacked the nail into his half-brother’s thigh and ran as fast as he could over to his uncle’s house, with his stepfather following close behind. The uncle confronted the stepfather. There was a lot of yelling, and a fist or two. Lloyd didn’t stick around to see the rest. He started running again.
Lloyd ran and walked and jogged for miles through woods and fields, all the way into town. He never lived full-time at home again. He fended for himself mostly. He slept on the floors of friends. He broke into cars to sleep in them and steal the loose change out of the ashtrays. About the third car he broke into happened to belong to Sheriff Jim Peck—an unfortunate choice that proved to be a pretty accurate early indicator of the course of Lloyd’s criminal career.
When younger men on Lancaster’s streets ran into Lloyd, they’d shout, “Hey, Unc!”—partly out of deference to Lloyd’s age and partly out of respect for his jail experience. Uncle Lloyd had an awful lot of experience.
Drugs were never a discrete part of Lloyd’s life; they blended in as naturally as stealing, working at Lancaster Glass, beating up a guy who tried to cheat him, applying for a job at Anchor Hocking, falling in love, selling vacuum cleaners, fathering a child. His gig as the door thug of a trap house wasn’t really any different from any other line of work for him.
The job involved standing just inside the front door and looking through the peephole at who might be coming up the steps to buy some dope or weed or meth. Lloyd would slide a mask down over his face, open the door, pat down the customer, and maybe ask a few questions. If the customer turned out to be a cop, and Lloyd couldn’t run fast enough, he would have to become the sacrificial lamb to protect whoever worked in back. If the customer was there to steal drugs or money, Lloyd would have to be the enforcer.
So Lloyd didn’t hesitate back in January when Jason called him and suggested working together. He saw an opportunity to become a partner and finally make some real money.
When Jason dialed the number the Cheese supplied and arranged to drive north up 33, he was skittish, because he wasn’t sure how the deal would go down or who he’d find at the address. They could be cartel dudes, crazy fuckers who might cut off people’s heads or break your arms or some shit. Having Lloyd with him eased his mind. Lloyd never seemed afraid of anything.
In the Columbus suburb of Whitehall, they found a street called Country Club and pulled up to a house. The neighborhood was part of a 1950s subdivision of once-tidy ranch-style homes that had frayed over the past two decades. The greenish house where Jason and Lloyd parked had been foreclosed on during the housing collapse. Now it was a rental.
While stalling for a few moments, they watched a guy walk out. Then they walked in.
The encounter was nothing like a cartel meet-up in a movie—there were no scowling faces, no scary dudes with dark shades. A friendly-seeming Mexican woman greeted Jason, and the conversation turned cordial right away, as if Lloyd and Jason had popped over from next door to borrow a cup of sugar. They didn’t have to leave any money or anything. Just as the Cheese promised, the Mexicans were happy to front the dope, and just as the Cheese said, the Mexicans were willing to give them serious weight—about ten ounces, maybe fifteen. Lloyd wasn’t sure, but anyway it was a shit ton of dope—283 grams if it was ten ounces, or, put another way, 566 doses at a hefty half a gram per hit, which was enough to supply an addict like Carly for almost five months. All Jason had to do was promise to bring back $1,000 per ounce, a price so cheap it left lots of room for them to impose the Lancaster tax and keep the margin. They’d discovered the Sam’s Club of heroin connects.
They walked out of the house, returned to the car, and looked back at the front door just in time to watch another guy walk in. That place was like a fuckin’ drive-through beer store.
Jason supplied a couple of other people in Lancaster, too, who would sell, keep a little for themselves—both cash and dope—and pay off Jason, who, in turn, paid off the Mexicans what he owed, then picked up another load: ten ounces, sometimes five. Jason drove the round-trip once a week.
Lloyd joined him only one more time. On that trip, the Mexican woman asked Jason if he could get rid of some ice—the pure crystal form of meth. She had so much ice, she was offering clearance sale prices, $700 per ounce. An ounce used to cost about two grand, but she was overloaded with ice. She was practically giving the shit away, begging Jason to take some. Jason didn’t know much about ice, so he asked Lloyd if he could sell it. “Hell, yeah,” Lloyd said.
Jason gave Lloyd half of it. Some confusion arose about how much money Lloyd was supposed to return to Jason after selling the ice. Jason thought Lloyd fucked up the deal.
Incidents like that cooled the partnership a little. Jessica didn’t help, either. She and Jason had resumed their relationship, and by April she seemed to have taken over the operation. That was how Lloyd saw it. He could feel himself being nudged out, and was a little resentful, but he didn’t see much point in making a big deal out of his diminished role. Besides, he’d already supplemented the dope he was getting from Jason with moon rocks from his own Columbus connect, some white dude.
Moon rocks were supposed to be almost pure MDMA, or Molly. They were manufactured on an industrial scale, often in Mexican or Chinese labs, another blessing of globalization. But some moon rocks were cut with meth. Some moon rocks seemed to be only meth. Lloyd didn’t really know what the hell they were. The white guy in Columbus described them as “like meth on steroids or some shit.” When Lloyd took them, he’d stay awake for two days, so spun out his forty-year-old body would feel “real tore up.”
Lloyd and Jason still called each other “brother,” but their trust was conditional. Jason thought Lloyd might screw up at any time, and Lloyd regarded Jason as slippery: He’d say one thing, then another, so you could never tell what was true.
Lloyd lived by a motto of his own creation: “You can trust your enemies more than your friends, because your enemies need to do what they say they’ll do.” By that he meant that he didn’t beat up his friends, so they lost their fear of him. His enemies, though, understood Lloyd had no reason at all to restrain himself for their sake. Bashing a guy was a form of public relations, a powerful message meant to influence concentric circles of others. Lloyd didn’t have to be particularly angry to do it—it was business—though once his blood was up, he could be so implacable that he thanked God he never carried a gun.
Between the moon rocks and Jason’s dope, Lloyd made more money than he’d ever earned in his life: more than four grand a month, an amount he’d never imagined. So two or three days every week, he’d drive out to River Valley and buy new sneakers—the good kind, like Nikes, not the off-brand ones—or new shirts, pants, and dress-up shoes. He bought for himself. He bought for his girlfriend. He bought for the improvised family of eight or nine people who wandered in and out of the gray-box house across the street from Plant 1.
Lloyd barely knew most of them. Some were homeless, some used the house to crash. There was a guy who often brought a kid with him (Lloyd wasn’t sure of that guy’s name, and the guy used a nickname for the kid), and a couple of girls, and his girlfriend’s brother, and people who knew people who knew Lloyd. He was accommodating. Lloyd used at least a gram of dope a day, but even so, he tried to stay only one-fourth as high as everybody else, because he had to be the responsible provider. He supplied most of the food for the household. He paid the rent and the cable bill. He gave away drugs, and when he did, his facsimile family professed their love for him, which gave him a contact high even better than dope. But he never got one without the other.
* * *
Joe Strummer’s choked voice shouted “Know your rights!” against the walls of the studio above the garage. Brian, his buddy Bayat, Bayat’s girlfriend, Victoria, and I were listening to the Clash’s Combat Rock. It was cold outside, and so it was cold in the studio—more like a late November night, not a late April one. Brian wore a blue hoodie over his T-shirt and a stocking cap with USAF embroidered across the front, a token from Renee. He could talk about her with more ease now. The cap didn’t have any significant meaning; it was just a cap. Wearing the cap, and with his round face and blond hair and horn-rims, he looked a bit like Ralphie, the boy from the nostalgic A Christmas Story movie, though he got steamed when anybody said so.
Maybe it was just Strummer, but I started to wonder if Brian was an unlikely-looking revolutionary, part of a vanguard camouflaged by a pattern that appeared as laziness, slackerdom, or fecklessness but that just might be the bravery of refusal—refusal to pretend, any more than was absolutely necessary to survive, that the country in which he lived was anything like the country he saw advertised. If he was a revolutionary, he was a semiconscious and conflicted one. Brian had worked since he graduated from high school. He resented people who didn’t work. But working made him part of The System he hated.
He’d slept late that day, Sunday, because he’d spent Saturday night partying down in Athens with Mike and some of their friends—something he could do more of now that he wasn’t working shifts at Anchor. He still missed Plant 1, though. Summer was coming, he pointed out: the time when the hot end broils. Maybe summer would help him miss it a little less.
Brian liked going down to Athens, because the cops there were a little more tolerant than Lancaster’s. You had to totally wreck a bar to get yourself arrested in Athens. Lancaster cops spent their time hassling skaters, prospecting for weed smokers, and handing out traffic tickets to young people—just to feel their authority—while the town was being hollowed out by much bigger problems. “I hate cops,” Brian said.
This was not an opinion unique to Brian or erstwhile skate punks. Other people under thirty used exactly the same words. Older people tended to revere the police. Dave Bailey, the chief, announced his retirement at the beginning of the month after serving as a Lancaster cop for thirty-three years, seven of them as chief. Many in Lancaster’s establishment told me how much they respected and admired Bailey, and when he and I spoke, I could understand why. He loved the place. But he was worn out, he said, and had decided to take a job as an investigator with the Ohio State Board of Optometry. That sounded so sedate, I wondered how long he’d keep it.
By the end of the month, Lancaster would have a new police chief, Don McDaniel. McDaniel, a former marine, and a cop for twenty-seven years, was a native Lancastrian. He was named acting chief, but nobody doubted he’d be appointed permanently as soon as the city had made a show of scouting out all possible candidates.
Brian Kuhn, a CPA who also worked as the city’s safety director, had his eye on another job. He wanted to be mayor. Major Crimes Unit chief Eric Brown, meanwhile, was thinking hard about a move of his own. Nobody in town except his wife knew that, since about the time the MCU busted Mark Kraft and Carly Bowman, he’d been considering, and was being considered for, a state-level post coordinating units like the one he led in Lancaster. The new job would be a promotion—more money, more prestige—but that wasn’t why he was interested. Though younger than Bailey, Brown was worn out, too.
Just a week and a half before, he and the MCU had raided another meth house, a few dozen yards from John and Wendy Oatney’s place on the south side. Four adults and three toddlers were inside at the time. Another child had left for school. Brown found five small meth pots and a few grams of finished drug. Longtime neighbors stood outside their houses and watched. Some of them thanked Brown. The neighbors all used to know one another, they said, but that had changed in recent years.
Brown hoped he’d never have to walk into another ruin of a house to find small children with dirty mouths and saggy diapers sitting on a filthy floor as their parents cooked meth, or any more Carly Bowmans. If he did, at least they probably wouldn’t be in the town where he grew up and played football and married his wife. They’d be in some other town, one of those towns that had it worse than Lancaster. There were plenty of them.
I’d been away for a little while, so I asked Brian what news I’d missed. Somebody shot up a house the other night, he said. Just drove by, down south of Main Street, in a poor section not far from the old Elmwood Cemetery, where gravestones dating from the 1800s sit cockeyed in the ground, and fired at a house on Walnut. In Lancaster, dude.
He nodded at the window of the studio to indicate Main Street. There sat Workingman’s Friend. Workingman’s Friend! Ha! How fucked up is that? An abandoned gas station with peeling paint and weeds growing up out of the concrete islands and broken windows—some of them broken by Brian long ago, back when he was a “professional vandal,” which he wasn’t, much. He just thought that was a funny way to describe being a lost-boy skate punk in Lancaster. Anyway, nobody in the city had done anything about the derelict station. The powers that be just let it corrode on the town’s main street.
Shit like that was why he didn’t even consider the notion that city leaders—formal and de facto—had a clue. They were corrupt, all of them. This was supposed to be a good year for Lancaster? Bullshit.
Oh, and by the way, if he felt like it, he could stand on the platform at the top of the stairs by the studio’s door and watch heroin change hands over by Leo’s Bier Haus.
“Everything changes,” Bayat said. They’d been friends since childhood, though Bayat lived in Akron now, where he worked as a physical trainer.
Victoria said, “When I come here, it’s like I’m going into the middle of nowhere.” She was born in Mexico and raised in Brazil, the daughter of a pharmaceutical company executive. She was a cosmopolitan who, despite living in Akron, where she worked as a teacher, and despite wearing the same uniform of jeans as Bayat and Brian, retained the schooled, elegant bearing of a cosmopolitan. Bayat and Brian were not cosmopolitans. They were Lancastrians, and though they didn’t disagree with Victoria, they defensively raised their chins. It was one thing for them to trash-talk the town, but another for an outsider to do so.
We’d just been talking about art. Brian showed off a new work, a graphic of the word CONSUME. He’d buried a little phrase in the picture: TROLL JUSTIN BIEBER.
The piece reminded me of Jenny Holzer, who became famous by making art out of phrases like “Alienation produces eccentrics or revolutionaries.” To back up Brian’s and Bayat’s residual town pride, I told them how her little brother Fritz and I used to pull crayfish out of creeks, and how her father owned a Ford dealership on Broad Street, where the library now stands. Victoria googled Holzer on her phone, to verify that I wasn’t making up such a fantastic story, and said, “Wow, it’s such a small world.”
Brian and Bayat had been talking about a possible summer trip to Lake Erie, where they’d do some fishing for walleye. Brian said maybe he could live up there. He wouldn’t necessarily have to hunt deer—he could fish and grow his own apples.
Just the other day, another guy in the Drew warehouse told him he must be depressed. Brian couldn’t be sure if he was or wasn’t, but having someplace to go, even if only in his head, provided a refuge and a defense against accepting the status quo. He hated the status quo. A lot of kids had been defeated by the status quo.
“You got these kids who don’t know how to identify who they want to be, or could be, or should be,” he said, with obvious empathy born of personal experience. Brian had struggled his whole life with that question. He said he’d been a naughty boy right from the first grade. “I was like, ‘I need permission to go the bathroom?’” he said, his voice dripping with incredulity. At lunchtime, he’d skate and lose track of the hour and wind up far away from where he was supposed to be. “I was a bad kid,” he said, overstating the case. Brian wasn’t a bad kid. He was a different kid, who couldn’t pay attention and kept asking questions nobody seemed able to answer about why the real world he saw in the early 2000s was so different from the one school tried to impose on him. He’d concluded that “school’s not for smart kids,” a kernel of truth inside an excuse wrapped up as a brag: comfort for a refusenik.
“It’s like they fall through the cracks, right?” he continued. “Maybe they never even got into trouble. And I feel like they look at media and stuff that makes you look cool.” The world ran on marketing, he said. “I’m gonna have Beats headphones, and I’m gonna love ’em!” Brian shouted. Bayat laughed because it was so true.
“Like these same kids in Lancaster, they get in this mind-set…” Brian interrupted himself to give advice to imaginary kids: “‘Like, man, you could do so much better, even if you weren’t, like, rich. You don’t have to be a bad person, you know?’ But they walk around with their head down and I feel like you get all these other people—horrible people—we idolize, and that bugs the shit out of me. Like when people are praising athletes, or politicians. And they’re probably bad people, people that have these privileges. Man, it’s like the fucked-up thing is other kids don’t think they have them. They think, ‘Oh, I do drugs, that’s how it is. I’m a drug addict.’ They got that attitude, man. People I know die of drug overdoses. They don’t even recognize me on the street.”
When Brian drove by Community Action on his way to Drew Shoe, he’d see people walking along the berm of the road to and from the offices and temporary housing units. They all looked the same: poor, demoralized, aimless. Part of him resented their presence. He’d bought into the idea that “they ain’t even from around here,” but part of him recognized himself. “I’m almost in the same shoes as those people.”
Was that what engendered his escape fantasies? Maybe it was lots of things. For sure, something had to be rotten somewhere, and nobody in power at any level seemed willing to root out whatever that rotten thing was. They were as cynical as it was possible to be about Lancaster’s forced optimism. “Small business?” he said. “We don’t need small businesses. We need fuckin’ billionaires” to open a big factory.
Another small business had just closed. In 1954, Sherb Johnson opened Johnson’s Shoes on Main Street, across from the old Mithoff Building that Brad Hutchinson was trying to revive. Until the 1970s, there were six shoe stores on one downtown block. The mall killed off those that were left in the 1980s, except for Johnson’s. Now Sherb’s son, who had worked in the store since the 1960s, had announced the closing.
Anyway, whatever had happened to Lancaster had happened everywhere else, too. They just noticed it more in town because Brian and Bayat had grown up there, and it was still Brian’s home. Victoria pointed out that Akron was messed up, too. Every day, she taught kids who suffered from starved schools in starved communities.
Brian was moving, but not far. He’d begun packing up a few things in the studio to transport them out to Colfax, a country crossroads east of Lancaster on Route 22. Aaron Shonk had found a small rental out there, next door to a gas station and pizza shop, and they’d decided to be roomies. Even splitting the rent, it was going to be a financial stretch for Brian, given his lower pay at Drew, but he looked forward to getting out of his folks’ house. They were good about trying to treat him like a grown man, but living with his mom and dad felt weird at his age. The little house—more like a shack, really—didn’t have a refrigerator or a stove, but Brian had mini versions of both in storage in the old garage under the studio, so they’d use those. There was a little upstairs alcove where Brian could set up his drums.
Brian cued up a video on his GoPro. Fat, tall marijuana plants, happy under bright lights, filled the frame. Bayat said, “Looks like Meigs County Gold,” referring to Meigs, a county southeast of Lancaster, down on the Ohio River, that was known for poor people and white rural gangsters who grew weed in the woods. This grow belonged to an old pal of Brian’s over on the west side. Brian had distanced himself from the guy, not because he grew weed—Brian was cool with that—but because the dude sold a bunch of other kinds of drugs, too, and to kids. What an asshole. Nothing annoyed Brian more than irresponsible adults.
Brian was pretty libertarian about drugs. He and Mike thought heroin “was fucking retarded,” but when Brian was younger he’d tried most everything washing through Lancaster, including Oxys, back when they were cheap. When he began to see some of his friends get sucked up into the life—and especially when he felt himself craving a drug—he backed away. He wanted to be his own man, not to belong to drugs. Extricating himself was hard, because he had to leave some friends behind. So he felt qualified to say that drugs weren’t really Lancaster’s problem. That was one of the questions nobody seemed able to answer for him, or was even interested in asking. “Everybody’s all like, ‘We gotta stop the drugs.’ But why isn’t anybody asking why a sixteen-year-old girl is sticking a fucking needle in her arm in the first place?”