Voices from the Rust Belt

by Anne Trubek

  The first time I walked in, even before my eyes adjusted to the dark, the soundtrack to Cruising seemed to echo in my soul and I feared for my life. Sketchy lumberjack? This place was something from Silence of the Lambs. But I breathed, sat down, and ordered the finest craft beer on tap … Bud Light. As the bartender slid it across to me, I worked frantically on my cover story and a good excuse to run on home: I had narcoleptic children who were being left all alone at home with a box of matches. My baked Alaska needed to set. I was having an aneurysm.

  It took me a while to get my sea legs and be able to discern the overall décor. The interior was dark; mahogany veneer on the walls and two fluorescent light bulbs somehow made it darker. The corners were invisible and the ceiling receded away into some sort of netherworld of grime and asbestos tiles. The floors were plastic linoleum that may once have been green, but now were brownish black and covered in mauve, teal, and puce rugs bought more or less new, but on sale as factory seconds in 1974. There was a pool table with threadbare felt, and a bar of black-painted plywood edged in cracked cushioned pleather. It was splitting in most places and covered in duct tape where the foam insulation wasn’t already poking out. The metal-framed bar stools matched, and on the far side was a small dance floor with spotty mirrors and a portable sound system purchased along with the rugs and at the same percentage discount. Nobody danced.

  There was also a large rear-projection television, one that was very posh in 1983 but that since the mid-nineties had only a ten-inch-square area in the upper right corner still functioning. Over time, like a shrinking universe, it just got smaller and smaller. Later I learned that at some point it stopped working altogether and was positioned out in front of the bar on the sidewalk for months until the fire marshal threatened a violation.

  III

  I can’t say that I was ever a regular, but “semi-regular” just doesn’t have the same ring. I never could figure out why I went, and each time I said that trip would be my last. Back at home and scrubbing in the shower with steel wool, I’d lament life and wonder whether an itchy monk’s habit and a cloistered cell were in my future. Nights would be lonely, no doubt, but there would be gardening, calligraphy lessons, and barrels of craft beer. Invariably, though, a few days later I’d go back into the Lounge, sit down, and get a decent buzz and three hours’ entertainment that, including tip, finished out at about $10.50.

  I also learned these things about the bar and about life in general:

  Happy hour really neither stopped nor started. Well drinks seemed never to be more or less than $3 and pints of beer were always $2.50, the particular variety rotated by whatever was closest to the expiration date. Well drinks were almost all the same, differing only by color. Good tippers might actually get Coke in a Jack’n’Coke, but sometimes the glass came back just a touch yellower than the Schweppes tonic water.

  Each night had a theme: Half-Price Monday, Go-Go Dancer Tuesday, DJ Flash Wednesday, College Night Thursday. Nothing really changed on these nights, though; I heard stories about and saw a picture of DJ Flash, but I never saw him in person. In the picture he was wearing hot pants, cheap shoes, and a three-day beard. College Night Thursday might promise something new, but I don’t know that I ever saw anybody under thirty who wasn’t being paid to be there or was only there long enough to deliver a crate of booze.

  I got to know the regulars pretty well; they were typically the only other people in the place. There was a sixty-something white businessman who called himself Jim and had one whiskey sour before going home to his wife and children. There was a black guy who used to be in the military and rode a motorcycle; he had excellent taste in music, even though the jukebox in the corner didn’t work and so we could only hum or talk about our favorite cuts from Exile on Main Street. There was a haggard drag queen in a red wig and cotton skirt who never bothered to shave. And of course there was Gary every day after four. Together we solved many of the world’s problems, and let the others go without comment. The drag queen tied back her hair and stopped pitching her voice; she had a lovely bass and I bet could sing a mean ballad. Jim complained about his wife; she wanted to renovate the kitchen and he wondered if he could do it without going downtown for the permits. Gary was lonely and never quite asked me on a date, but inched his stool closer and closer, getting within arm’s reach by the end of the night. Somebody would buy me a beer. I’d buy somebody a 7-and-7. Nobody ever went home with anybody else, and nobody ever really talked about dates. We were all just there, in the dark and house music, wondering what “Go-Go Dancer Tuesday” was ever meant to be.

  IV

  The world lost the Golden Lion Lounge in late 2011. Whether it was due to lack of customers, failure to pay taxes, or the zoning board finally realizing the place ought to be condemned, I can’t say. I also can’t say I was really saddened by the news; I had moved from Cinti and it had been at least a year before that since I’d been back to the bar.

  Instead, the image of Cinti that came to mind was Martha, dozy and pensive on her perch, the last of billions of passenger pigeons that died at the Cinti Zoo in 1914. Nobody much cared about the pigeons when they were alive; they were ubiquitous, harmless, and not particularly good looking. Apparently you could walk right up to a group of them and clobber them all over the head before any one of them would realize something was amiss. But when they were gone, the world suddenly seemed an emptier place. Keep your hawks and falcons and cardinals; I guess people realized that sometimes the world needs a big, ugly bird that never really bothered anybody.

  Of course there are and were other gay bars in Cinti. There is a nice, clean, glitzy one across the river where all the college kids and fancy people go; at least one piece of Dolce & Gabbana is required for admission. And if your cologne isn’t Gaultier Le Male, it had at least better be one of its seasonal variations. There was also that post-industrial wasteland down by the old train station; new and decorated in steel and concrete and metal. There was a lot of leather there and the phrase “$3 well drink” might as well have been spoken in Farsi; you’d be looking at six bucks for a Coors Light.

  Jim and Gary would never go to these places. Neither would I, for that matter. And the drag queen would have to do a lot of waxing beforehand if she tried. Without Golden Lions, I saw us all instead in varying types of lounge chairs, alone in our living rooms, mixing a tumbler and pretending we hadn’t actually bought (and were then playing) a solo album by Annie Lennox. When it was there, we never really loved it and just showed up for a few hours; but now, with it gone, we looked around and weighed our other choices.

  While those other bars might have nicer décor, more variation, and better names, they also market the one true thing Golden Lions lacked: attitude. Each has a theme; you have to be somebody to go in there, whether it be a good-looking blonde in a tank top or a daddy vying for first prize in this week’s Peter Marino–look-alike contest. And even then they all end up looking the same. Nobody really cared at Golden Lions: if you showed up on a Tuesday in a suit, great. Wednesday, if you came in a flower-checked muumuu, not an eyebrow would be raised. And nobody would send out a team of bloodhounds if you didn’t show up on Thursday. It was College Night, after all, and so anticipation of fresh meat would be high.

  Instead, it was just nice to have a place that was as untrendy in 1978 as it was in 2008, a place as dark and dismal on a Monday as it was on a Saturday, and where a pint of flat beer would always, always be $2.50.

  RYAN SCHNURR

  Family Bones

  MY GREAT-GRANDFATHER WAS NEARLY SIXTY years old when he dug a basement in his backyard and built part of a house on top of it. When I say dug a basement I mean he walked out his back door one day with a shovel and started digging. By the time I came around the project was long finished, and there was a garden between the house and the shed that he tended with great care. My great-grandparents lived in that house for fifty-seven years; it is the closest thing my family has to a homeplace.

  This place I’m
talking about is on East Wilson Street in Oxford, Indiana. Three houses in on the right. The house is white, with a nice big porch on the front and flowers hanging in a pot on the corner. I don’t know if the flowers are still there, though. Grandpa’s big green desk with the magnifying glass hanging over top is in the spare bedroom to the right, and the kitchen smells like those small, round sausage patties and maple syrup. The upstairs attic is big and hot; Grandpa’s journals line the shelves in one corner, and there’s a foggy window that looks down through the bathroom vent from up there. Family legend has it that Dan Patch was born pretty much in the backyard. (For a long time I thought Dan Patch was a politician; it turns out he was a record-breaking racehorse at the turn of the twentieth century.) There’s an agro plant across the street, or at least there was. Last time I was at the house I didn’t even recognize the place: the eaves were falling down on one corner of the porch, and the backyard was a tangled mass of weeds and long grasses.

  What’s funny is I can tell you how to get there, but even if you follow my directions to the letter we might not end up in the same place.

  “Grandpa always took good care of the place,” my mom told me last time I mentioned the house to her. It means more to her than it does to me, I think; she lived there some as a kid, and my grandparents loved her. She has a photo of them in front of the side porch of the house. It’s bright out, in the picture, and they’re squinting pretty heavily. My mom told me that this picture was taken when we went to help them pack up their stuff to move to an assisted-living facility in Fort Wayne, two and half hours northeast of their home.

  Ralph and Maxine Swim are actually our great-grandparents, but my siblings and I have always just called them Grandma and Grandpa. Grandpa kept a daily journal for most of his life, written in pencil in your basic college-ruled notebooks. I can remember him sitting in his chair at night, recording the weather patterns and the day’s events as well as notes on the books he was reading. For a long time I thought that these had been sold off in the move to Fort Wayne. They’ve been stored away for most of my adult life. Somewhere. Nobody’s sure exactly where. In a storage facility, maybe, or some boxes in the back of a garage—family bones rotting in an unmarked grave.

  * * *

  The thing about being ambiguously white in America is that you’re simultaneously everything and nothing. Our legacy is forward; we hit the eastern seaboard running and never looked back. It’s about mobility. It’s about freedom. It’s about progress and futures and 401(k)s. Growing up in the suburbs, you don’t learn how to look backward to find strength: you don’t have to know your history to make it. I don’t remember when I first realized this; it just sort of surfaced in the process of trying to find my roots and discovering I didn’t recognize the tree. I am not talking about immediate family. I am talking about history. I am talking about knowing where you come from, and the strength of generations.

  I am a child of colonizers whose roots, I have long believed, run shallow across the face of the continent. My culture, as a function of its tendency toward domination, is largely invisible. I don’t carry on any traditions; I know little of my heritage. The closest thing I have is a childhood steeped in the evangelical church, my dad’s small furniture business, and the hole my grandfather dug behind this house in Oxford, Indiana.

  * * *

  I was thirteen years old when my great-grandfather died—old enough to miss him, but not yet old enough to know why.

  Ralph Davis Swim, to use the name on his obituary, worked for the United States Postal Service most of his life, minus a short stint in the army, first running the mail trains through St. Louis, Chicago, and Detroit, then at the post office in nearby Lafayette. At his funeral, my grandma (his daughter) told me that he saw the St. Louis Arch go up day by day as he rode the rails in and out of the city. My mom told me she remembers him sitting in his office memorizing the maps of these cities, and that he could pretty well draw them out from memory. Apparently he was the one who would sort the mail by street for drop-off.

  I know a few other things about my great-grandfather: I know that he put the same amount of change in his pocket every morning. I know that he labeled everything with small typewritten notes on strips of paper. I know that he was fascinated by engineering—when they started building wind farms in Oxford he would go out and watch them, peppering the builders with questions and suggestions. He is the only person I’ve ever known who actually used a handkerchief, and he loved to work with his hands, building little sets of drawers and child-size chairs for my brother and sisters and me. (One of these sets of drawers sits in the hallway of my apartment now.) There’s a video clip in the family archives of Grandpa raking leaves at my parents’ house. He was always raking leaves or doing dishes or something like that at everybody’s houses. I am helping him, in the clip, though since I am about four years old I am mainly just spreading the leaves around.

  * * *

  “This will be a history of Ralph and Maxine Swim.” Written by Ralph.

  The document was tucked away in the back of a binder: seven sheets, one-sided, stapled together. It’s handwritten in my grandpa’s distinctive cursive scrawl; I’ve seen it a hundred times, on pieces of paper taped inside handmade cubbies and inscribed on the inside cover of books. The pages are photocopies of photocopies of (probably) photocopies. There’s no date, but context clues tell me he wrote it some time after he retired (1981) and before they moved out of the house (1998). It is a short document, considering the fact that it encompasses something like seventy-five years, but it’s obvious that this isn’t meant to be comprehensive. It’s a short rundown of facts, names, and dates, with just a bit of commentary.

  Sometime in September, 1939, Ralph [STRIKETHROUGH] we started working on a farm two miles south of Covington Indiana. A house was furnished to them [STRIKETHROUGH] us and that was their [STRIKETHROUGH] our first home.

  It’s written in a mix of third and first person, though he went through and corrected dozens of pronouns after the fact in an attempt to create a uniform voice. He glosses over large sections, and goes into meticulous detail on others—there’s a particularly specific section giving an account of every car they ever owned—with shorthand names for places like “the Scott House” and “Old MacDonald’s Farm.” He recounts their first few years together, in which they bounced around from job to job, place to place, struggling to put down roots. Somewhere in there they had their first daughter, Delores, whom I know better as Grandma Dee.

  The writing is simple, with little embellishment, but its simplicity brings with it occasional, devastating clarity—lines that sneak up on you and smack you in the back of the knees. One such passage is on the third page, around 1943:

  It was while we were living in the Scott house that I was drafted into the army. We considered the fact that I might not come back from the war. So we shopped for a house so Maxine and Delores would have a home.

  I read this section repeatedly, nine or ten times at first, unable to move past it. We considered the fact that I might not come back from the war. What a line to write—no, what a line to live. I wonder if he ever realized what grew out of such an experience—the home they purchased was the homeplace I know: 603 East Wilson Street, Oxford, Indiana. Here is when they put down my roots.

  * * *

  I can’t prove it, really, but I think my grandparents sort of gave up once they moved to the assisted-living facility. Separated from the community they had lived in for decades, their church, home, and friends, there was a sort of deep and abiding grayness. The move to a nursing home is a symbolic one and my grandpa, especially, didn’t like what it was saying; people kept telling him that at eighty-something he was too old to take care of his house anymore, but I don’t think he ever believed them. The assisted-living facility was called Golden Years, and I always felt like that was some sort of joke.

  This was also about the time that they discovered frozen dinners and packaged snacks. Or rather, the time that they decided
that it was okay to start using them. When I was a little kid they took great delight in having us over and gathering the family around the table for home-cooked meals, often with ingredients from their garden. But at Golden Years they would just step into the pint-size kitchen and pop in a toaster pastry or a Stouffer’s pot pie. I can’t blame them for it, of course. I’m just observing.

  A few years after my grandpa died, I started going to high school a mile down the street from Golden Years. After school I would walk over and eat microwavable pot pies with my grandma, and she would tell me stories. Simple ones. Small ones. Ones about my mom; ones about grandpa; ones about the neighbors. Including obscure details yet skipping over huge sections. Like reading Grandpa’s family history. On the rare occasion that I can get over myself long enough to consider my blessings, I think a lot about those afternoons.

  After I went to college, Grandma moved to a more intensive assisted-living facility. I would travel home to see her, and she would be sitting in her chair by the window, watching the hummingbirds feed. (Grandma always had hummingbird feeders around, and they let her put one outside her window at the new place. I think when she looked out there and let her mind wander she could almost believe she was back in Oxford.) I was there when she died, with my mom and dad and a few other family members.

  The peculiar thing about people who are dying of old age is that they stop looking like themselves quite a while before the actual event. It’s a different period for everybody—I think my grandpa started about a year before, and my grandma maybe three.

  My mom was sitting on the bed when Grandma died. She leaned in and kissed her on the cheek. I heard a faint whisper: “Thank you for loving me.” You could tell that Grandma’s breaths were getting longer and more laborious, and the world felt like it was slowly getting darker.