Glass House

by Brian Alexander

  Libbey phoned to investigate buying Oneida. It wasn’t interested in Anchor Hocking.

  Arc, the international glassware company that had absorbed Durand, Anchor Hocking’s old French rival, called David Weinstein, the new board chairman, to talk about a deal. Arc told Weinstein it wanted to close down Lancaster.

  Two small private equity outfits, California-based Aurora Resurgence and Manhattan-based Staple Street Capital, expressed interest in making an acquisition. Before starting Staple Street, its founders had worked at the Carlyle Group and Cerberus, as had two of the three members of Staple Street’s executive board. One of those executive board members, William Kennard, former U.S. ambassador to the European Union, had once been chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. His role at Staple Street was to “focus on the communications and media sectors.”

  Diamond Capital Partners, a mergers-and-acquisitions advisory firm, called Pierce Avenue on behalf of “qualified buyers.” The buyers were looking to acquire businesses like EveryWare’s.

  The most serious inquiry came from U.S. Glass, a shell company formed by Wayzata Investment Partners, the group that had sold Anchor Glass to Ardagh in 2012. The strategy, a Wayzata rep said, would be to “pull apart assets” by either retaining or shutting down the glass plants in Lancaster and Monaca and selling off Oneida.

  Solomon didn’t like any of these potential deals—not yet. “Why would you blow it up?” he said. “That’s stupid. And if you wanted to sell off all the pieces, then you should have just stayed in bankruptcy longer, reduced your expenses more, and sold off the pieces then. So, to me, if you sell it off in the next eighteen months, then we screwed up two months ago” in bankruptcy. But it wasn’t up to him. It was up to the board.

  Lancaster and its workforce had no idea that any of these options were being considered, or even that a board meeting was about to occur. The town knew the company had emerged from bankruptcy and that Solomon predicted better times—and that was it. Everyone assumed that the now private EveryWare had returned to a sort of status quo.

  On August 6, the board met alone with Solomon for twenty minutes in the Anchor Hocking showroom on Pierce Avenue. Surrounded by cake plates and covers, bar glasses, mixing bowls, and canisters, Solomon began giving an overview of what the members would hear in the management presentations.

  He didn’t get far before the board hectored about safety. At one point, Solomon said, “We’re not interested in being lectured.” The general meeting didn’t go much better, from Solomon’s point of view. “It was a shitty meeting,” he said. “You’ve got a bunch of turnaround guys trying to run their turnaround playbooks on a company that has already turned—a bunch of people not prepared to listen.”

  To his frustration, much of the effort expended throughout July to prepare the pages of charts, graphs, justifications, and plans proved fruitless. Safety consultants would be hired at a cost of several hundred thousand dollars. “That would have been enough to restore the benefits and salaries we denied employees. But we’re gonna make ’em safe!” Solomon said with wounded sarcasm. The process would be disruptive. Solomon wouldn’t travel to smooth relations with out-of-town suppliers and customers still angry over the service lapses and missed payments of the past year. There’d be extra work for everybody. And the union members would see the consultants and wonder how much money the company was paying for them. In a meeting between management and the unions in July, union leaders had been upset over the company’s decision to fix potholes in the parking lot, arguing that whatever cash had gone into blacktop ought to have gone to them instead.

  * * *

  “You know the way the world works?” Brian asked. It’s like that old Warner Bros. cartoon with Ralph the wolf and Sam the sheepdog. All day long, Ralph tried to eat the sheep, and all day long, Sam beat the crap out of Ralph. The sheep were clueless. They just stood around, mindlessly eating grass. And then the work whistle blew, and Sam and Ralph punched out and walked off for a beer: best pals, two sides of the same system.

  He put on a new Flaming Lips album—in vinyl form, of course—and continued folding his laundry. The comment Aaron had made a while back about smartphones and not having anything to hide? Well, that had stuck in his head. How could Aaron be so naive? Brian took no assurance from anything any government official, any politician, any businessman said. Promises of privacy protection were empty. “Dude, that’s like the government pointing a gun at your head and saying, ‘That’s cool, because we’re not gonna pull the trigger. Don’t worry, dude. Yeah, we’ve got a gun pointed at you, but it’s okay, we won’t shoot.’”

  The summer was almost over, and Brian used the calendar as another excuse for self-recrimination. He’d wasted most of it. He’d moved some stuff around inside the studio on Main Street but hadn’t made any art at all. He and I ought to drive up to Columbus, he suggested. A gallery crawl was coming up. He’d like to see what people were making up there. Maybe he’d take in a little inspiration.

  Whenever he was over on the west side and drove by Plant 1’s machine shop, he missed working there all over again. Then he’d hear about some guy smashing a digit or getting burned and he’d be glad he wasn’t there. Work at Drew wasn’t going well. He liked the company fine, and they liked him fine, and he’d received another small raise, but his pay was barely keeping him afloat. The rent in Colfax hacked him off, too. Aaron was cool, but Brian was thinking of moving back in with his mom and dad. He’d committed to stay a year, and he wouldn’t leave Aaron in a lurch, but he’d just about made up his mind to go when his year was up. As misanthropic as Brian could be, the isolation was even starting to get to him. When he wasn’t driving down to Athens to party with Mike, he spent most days working, coming home, and jamming on his drums, lost in his own beat.

  * * *

  The mother stood up in the courtroom gallery to address Judge Trimmer. Her hoodie slumped off one shoulder. Her jeans were loose, her T-shirt untucked. None of that mattered. She was too drained from weeping and worry. “I love my son dearly, but I don’t think he’s ready to be out,” she told Trimmer. Her son sat at the defense table next to his court-appointed lawyer. He looked humbled and hurt.

  He’d been sent to prison for making meth, gotten out, tried a treatment program at the Recovery Center, worked some construction jobs, used again, and run from the cops—who’d found weed, but could have found cocaine or heroin if they’d stopped him at a different time. He’d been using those, too. He glanced at his mother, the woman who had just said she’d rather have him go to jail than come home, and then up at Trimmer. “I don’t want to die from using,” he said.

  Trimmer let a few moments of silence pass. “Getting addicted is the most selfish thing a person can do with his life,” he scolded. “Look at your momma! You put her through hell.”

  Trimmer returned to the mother. Was there anything she would like to add? “I should want him home,” she said, starting to cry. “But I just can’t. This town is horrible.” She sat down and rocked herself back and forth on the gallery bench.

  With his mother closing the door on him, the young man, twenty-one years old, told Trimmer that perhaps he could move to the homeless shelter at Community Action, the place Kellie Ailes ran. He didn’t want to go back to jail. For the moment, though, that was exactly where he was going: back to county, across Main Street from the courthouse.

  He passed Jason Roach walking in the other direction. Dressed in jail scrubs, his hands and feet shackled, Jason shuffled across Main Street, then down the courthouse’s second-floor hallway, sounding like Jacob Marley on Christmas Eve.

  He was escorted by Deputy Mike Myers. I said hello to Myers as he and Jason walked down the hall and asked how he was doing. “Living the dream,” Myers said. “Another day in paradise.” He’d been cutting hay on a farm all weekend and now suffered from a stuffy head. Myers knew Jason from Jason’s past stints in county. Myers was friendly with many people he escorted to court. He’d lost track of the
number of old school pals in chains he’d perp-walked.

  Trimmer had seen Jason before, and he wasn’t pleased to see him again now. “Every time I get out,” he told Trimmer, “I get out to nothin’. I got to get into some kind of program.”

  Jason’s plea was moot. The arraignment had barely begun when the DA and the defense attorney asked to meet with Trimmer in his chambers. There was an issue to discuss. As it would turn out, the defense had raised a question about the legality of the MCU’s placement of the GPS device on Jason’s SUV, and of the traffic stop on Memorial Drive.

  While the two sides haggled in Trimmer’s chambers, Jason fretted out loud to Deputy Myers. There was a plea deal on the table, and if he didn’t take it, prosecutors were threatening to go harder on Jessica. “I’m not gonna let her go to prison,” Jason said. “Nothing comes easy, man,” Myers said. “Nothing in this life comes easy.”

  The meeting in the chambers was inconclusive. There were complications. More negotiation would be required. Jason shuffled back across Main Street, his chains clanking in the road.

  Now that he was in jail, uncertain of his ultimate penalty but certain he was going to prison, Jason could only sit and wonder what his post-prison future would look like—where he would go, how he would live. A couple of guys in county asked him to cut their hair. “I have a real passion for hairstyling,” he said. Maybe once he got out, he could open his own shop. Minutes later, he said, “When I get out of prison, I will do what I have to do to survive.” If he had to go back to dealing, and go hard, he would. “I felt like I was on top of the world” when he was bringing all that dope down from Columbus, he said. “I could buy for my wife, my kids—anything I wanted.” Then he talked about earning a high school equivalency diploma in prison, returning to Lancaster, raising his family in the shadow of Mount Pleasant. He wasn’t going to work at any McDonald’s or Wendy’s. That was for damn sure.

  * * *

  With the festival over and the summer coming to a close, the talk out at the country club bar turned to winter plans, the presidential election, and the stock market. As on most Fridays, a core group of friends gathered for drinks and dinner, including Leonard Gorsuch, the developer; a prominent attorney and his wife; a couple of small-business owners; and a few women whose husbands were once part of the group but had passed away. Other couples and individuals straggled in, too. Tina, the woman who worked three jobs—the hospital and two bartending gigs—flitted in and out. She was on duty. Jeannette, a woman who believed the tonic part of a gin and tonic was more like a suggestion than a requirement, tended the bar.

  The place still felt empty, but the club had managed to survive by hosting public events, like a couple of golf tournaments and, now that The Lodge downtown had closed up, Rotary meetings. A book on the club’s one-hundred-year history sat at the edge of the bar, and, leafing through it, you could see crowds of fancy-dressed attendees at the Governor’s Ball, an annual formal no longer held; smiling couples with outrageously graphic golf pants and skirts, posing before tee-off at Scotch Foursome events; and swim meets packed with parents and kid swimmers.

  Older people talked about their children and their grandchildren, bragged over their children’s business successes. Somewhat younger people bragged over their children just starting their senior year of high school, or entering college. None of them seemed to have any expectation that these children would ever be coming back to Lancaster to live.

  The older crowd looked past Lancaster, mostly. A few were still active civically—a board member of the West After School Program was there, as were Cameo League members—and more donated money to local causes. They still loved the town. But Lancaster had become a place they resided in, often part-time, but no longer fully inhabited, any more than they inhabited Marco Island, Florida, in the winter. They vacationed in Europe. They played golf in Scottsdale. They had plugged themselves into the global economy.

  Jeannette handed a drink to the attorney. He turned back to Gorsuch and said, “I’m mostly in cash right now,” referring to his investment allocations. They debated whether or not the market was overvalued, and what effect the election would have on it.

  Hillary Clinton, of course, would be a disaster. Their governor, John Kasich, had formally announced his run at the presidency the month before and was still the preferred candidate. Kasich was conservative enough, and he was a former Lehman Brothers executive. The fact that Lehman’s collapse had helped precipitate the Great Recession didn’t besmirch Kasich in their eyes. He’d be good for them.

  A younger group, less wealthy than Gorsuch’s crowd, talked up Trump. He’d announced his presidential bid in June by declaring, “The American Dream is dead,” and blaming politicians of every stripe for killing it. They didn’t mention any particular policy they liked, aside from Trump’s promise to destroy Obamacare and his hatred of Mexican immigrants—“They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists”—which they cited approvingly.

  They gave the impression of being afraid more than angry. In Lancaster, or at least among these few people on one night at the country club, Trump was the candidate for people who feared—even hated—an aggrieved working class and the poor. They were afraid they’d never live the life Gorsuch lived. Sending their kids to college, and paying for it, was going to be a sacrifice. It wasn’t supposed to be that way. And now they were surrounded by actual poor people, fellow townsmen-turned-strangers, who were dragging their town down around them.

  * * *

  School had just started, and about half the West School kids in the after-school program who’d gone to the center on Garfield Avenue every afternoon had been shifted out of West School and into one of the brand-new ones. They were both excited and uneasy. Some of them wound up at Tarhe Trails Elementary, a new school named for Chief Tarhe of the Wyandots. It was located in a tract-house subdivision on Lancaster’s northwest border. There, they mixed with children from higher-income families—Columbus commuters, many of them. That was a deliberate strategy on the part of administrators to create a more diverse income stew.

  A few families from both ends of the spectrum objected. Wealthier parents fretted about bad influences emanating from the west-side kids. West-side parents feared their kids would face snobbery. They also didn’t like the distance from the neighborhood. The west side was troubled, but it was their home.

  The budget crisis that resulted from the denial of its grant applications divided the board of the West After School Program for the first time since its founding. Some members wanted to fire the grant writer Ritchlin had hired; others didn’t. Ritchlin was trying to figure out where the grant applications had gone wrong. Was the district not poor enough? Not racially diverse enough? Not urban enough? Urban school programs received more grants. Ritchlin believed politics weighted the decision-making because urban areas had more representation in the state legislature, and so more clout with state education officials. She felt Lancaster and other small towns were being forgotten—again.

  She was frustrated, and uncertain just how to proceed. There’d be cutbacks, for sure. The board had squirreled away some emergency funds in past years. They could rent out part of the center’s building. A few thousand here and a few thousand there would get them through 2015. What would happen after that was anybody’s guess.

  * * *

  Solomon had had three weeks to nurse the wounds inflicted at the board meeting. He didn’t like it any better, but he’d moved on to management mode. At a meeting with union leaders to explain the coming changes, he’d listened to their gripes. Up to this point, the gripes had been mundane: What about the Popsicles they were supposed to receive on hot summer days? What about the boot allotment new hires were supposed to be paid so they could buy high-quality, steel-toe work boots? What about the dress code at the DC? But then Solomon announced that a paste-mold machine—an H-28—was going to go. T
hey zeroed in on the news like bird dogs. Would it mean job losses?

  Solomon explained that the company didn’t plan to eliminate all drinkware, just some of it. If they stopped making it entirely, “Walmart goes away, Target goes away.” But the strategy now was going to focus on heavy glass, like baking dishes. That could mean eliminating a burn-off, the machine that put the rims on glasses. “That’s my local!” one man said.

  Jobs were secure, Solomon reassured him, but they might change. H-28 operators might have to become press operators. In fact, Anchor Hocking was looking to hire replacements for workers who’d left or been fired.

  Workforce stability had been a major headache for Reisig. The turnover, especially at the cold end, the sluer, was high. People failed drug tests. Managers had recently caught a guy injecting heroin in a bathroom. But most people quit because the pay was low, the work was hard, and the benefits were lousy.

  “You can get a 401(k) at McDonald’s,” one worker said. “Getting money out of them young people—they want the dollars, because there is no company contribution.” Skilled workers, like millwrights, didn’t want to work there.

  A woman spoke up to say that she’d heard bank employees were getting 401(k)s—it was unclear what bank she referred to—so shouldn’t they be getting their 401(k)s back? Weren’t they bank employees now? Didn’t the banks own them?

  The pathos of the question escaped even the woman who’d asked it. Anchor Hocking workers once enjoyed company-paid defined pension plans with no required employee contribution. Thousands of Lancastrians lived secure retirement lives, with opportunities to contribute to the town and to their own families, thanks to those pensions. Then the pensions turned into 401(k)s. Then the company reduced its contribution. Then it stopped making any contribution at all. Now she asked for just that little bit back, and if she were to get it, she’d deem that progress.