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 g
oing 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.
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