Glass House

by Brian Alexander

  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?”

  TEN

  Turn It Around, or Turn It Up?

  May 2015

  Joe Hoch looked up at the TV hanging over the Pink Cricket bar to watch a pundit on CNN. “Hell, I wanna be one of these people yakkin’ on TV,” he said. “Yak, yak, yak. Make a shitload of money for yakkin’ on TV and not saying a damn thing.”

  Ben Martin sat on the stool next to Joe’s, the beads of sweat rolling off his glass of white wine. Paul Hoch, a retired Anchor Hocking Plant 1 employee, stood behind the bar. Wide suspenders stretched over a white T-shirt, itself stretched over an enormous belly, to hold up a pair of jeans. They were three old men in one of Lancaster’s oldest taverns.

  Joe had just been reminiscing about working for Dr. Fox, a founder of Lancaster Glass. Hochs had painted homes in Lancaster for at least sixty years, and Joe himself had probably been in half the houses in town. He liked sitting at the kitchen table over a beer with a homeowner after a day’s work, he said. They could be rich, but that never mattered much. Joe said he learned a lot around kitchen tables. Dr. Fox, for instance: Sometimes the multimillionaire gave Joe advice, like how to invest money. One of the things Dr. Fox always told him was to “stay involved in the community.”

  Ben Martin looked at Joe through his round tortoiseshell glasses and nodded his head. Back when he’d headed up the international division for Anchor Hocking, he lived in Europe, where he was able to indulge his passion for art. He owned scores, maybe hundreds—he wasn’t sure—of French and American paintings, from late-nineteenth-century Impressionism to twentieth-century abstraction. Small sculptures, books, and copies of the New York Times crowded his living room. He was an aesthete and a liberal, though he didn’t broadcast his philosophy around Lancaster.

  Joe finished off his Miller Lite and said he had to get going. He had a couple of acres to mow. It had been a wet spring so far, and the grass was growing so fast people couldn’t keep up. Joe figured he had about another two hours of daylight.

  “Okay, buddy,” Martin said, and he meant it.

  * * *

  Joe Boyer couldn’t be sure if he first felt the heat or saw the fire on Shop 1-2, about three feet away, but by the time he’d turned around, an angry-looking blaze had swarmed it. Rivulets of flame flowed upward on the pipes and columns risin
g from the machinery. With plenty of fuel and a clear path, the fire raced toward the roof of Plant 1. It was early evening. Boyer had just reached into his press machine—Shop 1-1—to change a bolt. So this particular fire took him by surprise, but he wasn’t surprised there was a fire in general.

  During normal operation, a burst of acetylene gas combusted to deposit a lubricating layer of fine carbon soot onto the interior of a mold. This allowed for the smooth removal of hot, newly formed ware, much like a fried egg slides out of a Teflon skillet. There was always a little carbon overspray. Over time, the machines became coated with flammable carbon, grease, and dust—but they hadn’t been shut down for a thorough cleaning in a long time. So much goo clung to the machines that, with enough heat buildup and any stray spark, they could ignite. Boyer knew a shop could go up at any moment, and now one had.

  As a floor operator, Boyer was assigned to open a series of valves to release water in case of a fire. He ran to the valve that controlled a sprinkler above the Shop 1-2 machine—but by that time the flames had climbed beyond the sprinkler and were on their way to the clamshell, the giant, pincers-like structures on Plant 1’s roof that provided exhaust and ventilation. He rushed to another set of valves.

  He managed to open some, extinguishing part of the fire, but others wouldn’t budge. “There was three of us on one of these valves, and we couldn’t turn it,” he said. The fire raced horizontally, across the top of the clamshell high above his head. As he and his shift supervisor and a mechanic struggled with the valve, a high-pressure spray of water shot from the pipe joints: a bad leak that drenched him “like one of those submarine movies.” Finally, they managed to twist the valve open, but it was too late. A finger of the fire had found refuge in a ventilator. Lancaster firefighters had to haul hoses up into the clamshell to extinguish the flames. It was about 8:30 before they declared the emergency over.