The Deep Whatsis (18 page)

It’s still raining
as I drive west in the Range Rover. I left the city via the Holland Tunnel and picked up Interstate 80 in New Jersey off the turnpike, and that’s when the rain started, in drizzly fits at first and then the sky was reduced to a smudge and the water came in long wailing bursts from all sides. The interstate’s a more-or-less straight shot all the way to Chicago from here. Just past the Water Gap, in a town I see is called Bartonsville, PA, I stop for gas and check in with my device; no messages. My original thought was to drive all the way to Chicago in one very long day and night but the weather is slowing me down so around 6 PM I am still in central Ohio; soon I will be coming up on the Youngstown exit. My father had finally unloaded our childhood home a few years ago after he lost his shirt in the crash and moved to Florida. I decide it was only fitting, since I was going that way anyway, that I spend the night
in the vicinity of where I grew up. And why push it? I had told my new employers at Draftfcb, where I will soon be one of two Executive Creative Directors on the Walmart account, that I wouldn’t start until next week, so arriving a day later won’t really make any difference to anyone. I’ve actually been to Chicago only once, not counting the times I’ve changed planes at O’Hare; I found it a charming if somewhat sleepy town. Draft is badly in need of a reboot and they had been bugging my headhunter Lynette for some time; after some wrangling I accepted the offer, promising to myself that this would be my last gig in the ad biz.

I pull off and get a room at the Quality Inn & Suites, it’s only $59.99 a night. Not far down the access road is an Olive Garden Restaurant and I have a chef’s salad, which was really nothing more than rolled up luncheon meats and four kinds of grated cheese in a creamy cheese-based dressing; I think if I looked hard I’d find some irradiated lettuce in there somewhere. I’m looking forward to getting to the Windy City and the interim corporate apartment they’ve got waiting for me in the River North section of town. After dinner I decide to drive around; Youngstown was a bustling working-class city not that long ago, a tree-lined paradise ringed with factories that made shoes and steel and, as I was intimately aware, the solenoids that went inside automobile fuel pumps. But this was back when we built things that people needed and used, things that had weight, things whose purpose was not just the enabling of fantasies, like Day-Glo NASCAR beer koozies, and those are made in Guangdong Province anyway (tagline:
WE MAKE REALITY THE MENTAL IDEAS YOU DO NOT KNOW YOU DREAM OF BUT NEED FROM THE SADNESS
).

It’s still light and instead of going into Youngstown I find myself driving west along Route 62, which when I was a child was a country road but now is lined with golf courses and hastily constructed strip malls featuring ninety-nine and ninety-eight-cent stores. Canfield is a small Ohio town that quickly became a suburb; the influx of southern blacks to Youngstown in the 1950s, because of the prevalence of factory jobs, created the need for a de facto whites-only enclave, and this is it. I remember the feeder streets well enough to find our subdivision, which is called Forest Green Estates and had been carved, ironically, from what had indeed been a forest but now the landscape has been rendered almost entirely devoid of natural vegetation. Each of the streets is named after a kind of tree or shrub, some of which even existed at one time in the area; our street was called Briarwood Lane. I turn right onto Bentwillow then left on Timber and then right on Briarwood and drive slowly because I can’t remember exactly what the number was. Was it 84412 or was it 48812? Or something else entirely? I get to the end of Briarwood, where it meets Chaucer (is that a tree? who knew?), and realize I have the numbers wrong and I must have driven past the place. I turn around (the RR’s turning radius is impressive) and head back, going slower this time, and then I recognize a house, or part of a house, the Mannings’ house, our former next-door neighbors. I say part of a house because it wasn’t really the Mannings’ house anymore, it was the Mannings’ house transformed on steroids, as two massive,
oatmeal wings had been added to each side, and in the middle a vaulted ceiling had been grafted onto what once was the main part of the house, the whole concoction looking like an absurd half-finished mistake, something out of a graphic novel about the dystopian future. A sign on the lawn said the mutant home was for sale, and the chain and padlock on the front door indicated the bank had gotten involved and foreclosed on the whole atrocity midstream. To the left of the Mannings’s ex-house there was an empty, muddy lot, actually an enormous muddy hole in the middle of an empty, muddy lot, and the hole was filled with brown, oily water. It wasn’t square as it would have been if they were building a new home; the hole was kidney-shaped and long like a swimming pool, a swimming pool that was never finished, never filled in at last with cement, water, and joy. As I’m thinking this I look up and down the street, trying to picture my father there dealing with our dog, Race, on the day he was hit, and I realize that this empty hole is in fact where our house had stood, right there above that stagnant water. Our house was gone. Whoever it was who had bought the Mannings’ place had bought ours, too, and had torn it down to make room for a pool, and then they had given up on the pool, and the renovation, if not a host of other dreams.

As it gets dark I decide to drive into Youngstown proper, as I haven’t been back here since my father left, and see what else has changed. By the time I snake my way north and east through the bad neighborhoods and into the center of town, it’s getting dark and I’m a little uncomfortable driving this kind of a car around here; although, getting carjacked by some tweaker
on my way to a new job would be kind of poetic. As a kid we rarely came to town, apart from the occasional visit to my father’s plant, which was several miles to the east, and it’s like I’m seeing it for the first time. I cruise along Federal Street, which is the main drag, and nothing is open; I can’t tell if this is a part of Youngstown on the way up or on the way down. I find a bar, a tavern on a corner, called the Brick House, and I park and go in. There’s a handful of drunks and some other unsavory characters in there, an interesting cross between potheads and unemployed steelworkers, and a jukebox is alternating between old Slim Shady, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and Toby Keith.

I sit at the bar and order a Coke and within minutes a man with a boil on his forehead and an ass so big he needs two barstools is talking to me, asking me where I’m from; I tell him I grew up around here and am just back for a visit. For a couple of hours he doesn’t stop going on, despite the fact I give him absolutely no signals that I am interested in his monologue whatsoever; but the fact that I’m buying his double vodkas is possibly motivating the performance, so I have only myself to blame. He is absolutely convinced of everything he tells me in the way that people who have never been anywhere outside the place where they grew up are convinced they know everything about everything. He is certain, for example, that an airplane never flew into the Pentagon, as certain as he is that the best Vietnamese food to be had anywhere outside of Hanoi, anywhere in the world, can be enjoyed right here in Youngstown, and that’s because there were so many Vietnam vets (of which he is one) who survived the war and came back to town with their
young Viet brides, and those girls, most of them quite attractive, they brought their entire families here with them to escape the goddam Communists, and many of the cousins opened up businesses, especially stores and restaurants, and they would open chop suey houses because that’s what people around here thought of when they thought of gook food, chop suey and General Tso’s Chicken and so on, but then this one family opened a bona fide Vietnamese establishment, very authentic, for the other Vietnamese people who were here, for their own community, it didn’t even have a sign, but pretty soon it caught on, and got written up in the paper, and was hugely popular, and that family did well, and pretty soon all the other Vietnamese chop suey houses became real Vietnamese kitchens, too, that’s how it happened, believe it or not. He also tells me, while on the inexhaustible subject of Y-town and its peoples, that the city could have been saved not long ago because there was going to be a blimp factory built just north of here, only the Socialists vetoed it, and that sealed the sad fate of their once-great region. This I also believe to be the truth, I tell him. His name is Frank, Frank Geshko or Leshko, he says finally, shaking my hand, and says it’s the small gifts that we bestow on strangers that determine who we really are in the end, and I agree, saying isn’t that the deep something or other we’ve all been yearning for? and he laughs as if he knows what I’m talking about and slaps me on the back. So I decide to tell him my own story: that in reality I work in advertising but was fired and that I’m driving by myself to Chicago to start my new life, which will most likely be a lot like my old life but who knows. He nods, sensing there’s more
to the tale, and so I tell him the whole sad story of a girl named Sabine, Sabi I called her, from the beginning, and how amazing she was, now that I think about it, and when I get to the part about the paranoia and the panic attacks and the shrink in the mental ward in Santa Monica asking me about my family, Frank stops me and asks why it was, when I saw the earlier psychiatrist, the fake one, that I told a crazy lie about my mom dying in a car crash? And then I just tell him, this Frank, this all-American male, I tell him all of it, the story of that summer when I was thirteen and we were living just up the road in a house that’s a hole now, and how she had been diagnosed as manic-depressive, my mother, and how I remember some of the things she would do, and how my father couldn’t understand her or where she was coming from, not that he tried, and they didn’t have the medications in those days that they have today, and how she attempted to do it three times, or I should say two times, because on the third try she succeeded, and how I came upon her slumped in the corner of the upstairs guest bathroom, and how I noticed that she had tried to clean the blood off the (imported) Grigio Luna tile floor with a (monogrammed, imported) powder blue St. Etienne queen-size bath towel, tossing the by-then wine-dark fabric under the sink. Why had she tried to clean the floor of her blood? Did she in her last breath regret what she had done? Or only that she had made such a mess in doing it? Did she surmise that I would find her there and thought that, somehow, the impact would be less if the floor were clean(er)? Frank doesn’t answer, he just stares at me and then breaks out laughing, hacking up gobs of phlegm and
cat hair and chicken bones and god knows what else, saying he thinks I’m bullshitting him, and rather than put a damper on the night or confess to him that I’ve never told anyone that story, not quite like that, I just go, yeah Frank, my man, you’re right dude, I’m a bullshitter, no sense trying to pull one off on the likes of you. He laughs and slams me on the back again like we’re brothers in shame and struggle, and gets up and waddles off to take a piss; that’s when I leave.

Before getting on the expressway
the next morning I drive from the hotel back down to Federal Street to check it out in the daylight. I dig my digital Leica S2 out of my suitcase and cruise the streets photographing the empty storefronts and abandoned churches and boarded-up houses and small manufacturing plants near the railroad tracks. At one prominent corner I come upon a tremendous old theater, the Warner, which obviously hasn’t been open for business in decades; I park in front and look around. From the sight of the jimmied-back plywood four-by-eights on the front doors I can tell there are people living in here. I had, after all, seen a number of what looked like former mental patients dragging themselves along these streets, shaggy white hair and beards, talking to themselves not unlike people with ear bobs on their Androids, and I assumed that at least some of that population might be living in the Warner. I go in carefully with my camera hidden in my jacket, and as I walk through the place I have to stop and listen
for signs of life because the crackling of old linoleum and glass under my own feet gives me away.

In one corner of the lobby there’s a door open to the basement but I’m afraid to go down there for fear of who I might wake up. I head up some wide curving stairs instead. I go through a leather-covered double door, and from the balcony of the theater I look down at the big old stage. Behind it there’s a torn screen, stained from years of cigarette smoke, vomit, who knows what, most likely this was a porn theater in its latter days. Behind the blotchy screen are enormous red-velvet curtains that are ripped and water-stained at the bottom. Before showing adult movies it must have been some kind of legitimate culture palace, and I can imagine the place filled on a Saturday evening in the 1940s with the solid, kindly citizens of an American workingman’s utopia, a place where, for the first and last time in human history, a good heart and a strong back would bring a man a reasonable amount of comfort and self-esteem during his short happy life; today, this man’s grandchildren are thrice divorced and in rehab or jail. I keep going up the marble stairs covered in ripped and stained carpeting and finally get to a door. I don’t know where the door leads but there’s a table leg holding it open an inch or two and daylight is streaming in. I push open the door and I’m on the roof of the theater with views out across the great state of Ohio. I go to the parapet wall and look out. The sun is coming up to the east but I am turned the other way, west, toward the Great Plains and my new life ahead of me; who knows what it will entail. And then I see some
kind of mist drifting in from the horizon, blurring the edges of everything, the roofs of the two flats below and the big-box stores farther out, with their empty parking lots, flat gray trapezoidal abstractions getting more and more out of focus, like a dust storm or a cloud of toxic gas covering everything, and then I realize it’s not any of those things, it’s me, it’s my eyes doing it, it’s my tears. I let them come.