The Hard Way on Purpose (13 page)

The moment was beautiful, a complete triumph of a truth well-known in Dayton and Akron and all these other places: we are the ones who always try too hard. That's how we rise and that's how we fall. And there isn't much difference between the two.

*  *  *

I was riding in my friend Jim's car, eighteen years old, going nowhere. He was driving with one hand and punching his other fist against the ceiling to the beat of “Precious,” the first track on the first Pretenders album, two chords set against a heavy backbeat with an odd time signature that all led up to Chrissie Hynde's epic, sultry, post-guitar-lead vocal breakdown that, as far as I was concerned, was equal to any Robert Plant squeeze-my-lemon invocation and also was the first time I had ever heard a grown woman say the word
fuck
. It was thrilling.

After an unhinged squall of lead guitar, the rhythm section dropped into a driving, primal drumbeat, the bass continuing underneath, as Hynde, sounding earnestly, ambitiously jaded, riffed on about feeling
ethereal
, and having her eye on an
imperial
and something about Howard the Duck and Mr. Stress, an impressionistic scat that rose to a steel-tongued testimony: “But not me baby, I'm too precious . . . Fuck off!”

Let the mad punching begin.

So Jim rammed his fist rhythmically against the ceiling, and the other three of us all soon followed because what else are you gonna do? Four of us in a Pontiac on a late-spring afternoon with six Mickey's big mouths between us and a two-quarter-time pulse buzzing from the blown speakers, punching the ceiling as hard as we possibly could. It doesn't hurt under those conditions. Testosterone in high doses produces in the human male a temporary imperviousness not just to pain but sensitivity to every human feeling except lust (which is of course indelible). We punched away, feeling it, until, one by one, we stopped to listen to that climax:

But not me, baby, I'm too precious . . . Fuck off!

And then began punching again.

After a while, it did start to hurt. When the song ended, in the tape hiss before the next track, “The Phone Call,” began, I ventured: “Why are we doing this?”

Jim turned around in the driver's seat and looked at me, wild euphoria mixing with vague disappointment and judgment. “Because this is what we
do
.”

So, for the time being at least, I had no real context for this song, whose lyrics were explicitly about the place where we'd grown up, with lines about “moving to the Cleveland heat” and direct references to streets we knew—East Fifty-Fifth and Euclid Avenue and the Shoreway, so when Chrissie Hynde sang “duet duet duet do it on the pavement,” I knew exactly which pavement she meant, which, for me anyway, made for a peculiar, tangibly harsh specificity in an otherwise uncertain sexual fantasy. I had seen those streets and their scattered gravel and ground glass. Doing it on that pavement would be very uncomfortable.

But I wondered most about another line.

I had the album at home on vinyl, and at first, joined by Ralph in clandestine congress, with the volume set low enough that we didn't think our parents could hear, we repeatedly moved the needle back over the previous few grooves, to hear her say it again: “not me baby, I'm too precious . . . fuck off!” The imprecision of the needle drop, however, meant that most of the time I also heard the previous phrase: “Howard the Duck and Mr. Stress both stayed, trapped in a world that they never made.” I knew Howard the Duck was some sort of druggy comic-book character from Cleveland; copies of those comics were passed around high school along with Harvey Pekar's
American Splendor
, and they'd begun to replace Sgt. Rock and Batman. Howard the Duck comics were like rumors of cocaine, part of some subculture that I knew existed but only in theory. And I knew from
Scene
, the local music paper, which I picked up every Thursday at the record store up at the strip plaza, that Mr. Stress was the name of a popular Cleveland blues band.

Trapped in a world that they never made.

This song was a story about where I lived. But I couldn't put it all together, and before I ever had a chance, Chrissie Hynde spit the expletive again and I moved the needle once more. Repetition, more than anything else, is the curse of adolescence—you do everything over and over and you never feel that you've gotten it right and then something new comes along and further confounds you and you never have a chance to get back to the original conundrum.

But the most important thing was something we did know for sure: Chrissie Hynde was
from here
. That meant something. She was a rock star. She was famous. And she was from here. To us, that was proof that we were from
somewhere
. Sometimes we would drive by a house we had been told was her parents' house, where they still lived, where we imagined maybe she had lived. Which meant this woman whose voice had captivated us existed, for our purposes, in two specific places:

1. Inside the red leather jacket and matching high-heeled boots on the cover of Sire Records #6083-2 . . .

and

2. There in the rustic, contemporary bungalow on Olentangy Drive, a short distance from our own homes.

The song ended on Jim's tape deck and I stopped punching because my knuckles were hurting, but Jim kept going, looking back at us wild-eyed, and I wasn't sure if I was wrong for not wanting to join him or he was wrong for continuing. So I punched with all my might, but only against the gauze that draped from the steel, faking it.

*  *  *

By the time the Bank was established as the center of Akron's music scene, all of those artists—Devo and the Waitresses and Chrissie Hynde and Lux Interior and the rest—were
from
here. None of them had stayed. They'd all gone off—to London and New York and LA—and so, like the empty factories, they left the impression of something that had been profoundly here and now was profoundly gone, and so recently gone that their energy field remained. There was a mood, a tension, that lingered.

What happened amid the whole “Akron sound,” “new Liverpool” hype was a feeding frenzy, with record-label talent scouts flying in from all directions, combing through the clubs and the local 45s in the record-shop bins, mining for gold. So by the time I arrived at the Bank, a highly unusual culture had been established. Almost every significant original rock band remaining in Akron had either (a) been signed to a major label and somehow failed to make it any further; (b) not gotten signed and therefore carried an unusual burden of rejection for what would otherwise be a normal state of affairs for a local band; or (c) formed with the delusion that celebrity and commercial success were not only possible, but probable.

Everyone who has ever formed a rock band believed at some level that he was going to become famous. Few ever did it in a context so psychologically complex as early-1980s Akron, Ohio, a place that had always believed it was bigger than maybe it really was.

This put me, and just about anyone else of my generation with an interest in music and art and celebrity, in an interesting position. Although all of this prime activity had begun in the traditional model of the DIY underground, and all of this had happened recently and literally within the same footsteps I traveled every day, I only knew about it through the mass media, which is to say from above and afar.

The first time I heard of Devo was when they played on
Saturday Night Live
. I found out afterward they were from my hometown. I saw the Waitresses on MTV before I ever saw them play in a club. This created a strange disconnect, and a strange relationship to the idea of associating more closely with someone famous because he or she came from the same place as we did. In theory, I should have felt no more kinship to the Pretenders than I felt to, say, Dexys Midnight Runners. But that wasn't the case. And it wasn't the case because Chrissie Hynde's parents lived around the corner from my cousin. Which is obviously meaningless, except I put a great deal of meaning into that correspondence. Somehow, in my mushy and convoluted logic, because I could identify the mailbox of the parents of a young woman who played in a rock band in London that I saw in music videos in my living room on national cable television, I wasn't nobody.

The other, and perhaps most important, aspect of this was that I was significantly aware of having Just Missed Something Important. Just a few years before, these clubs and stages had been vital and exciting. Robert Christgau, the rock critic for the
Village Voice
, had come to Akron and lived here for a week, reporting a lengthy, thorough, deeply insightful, and thrilling story about the significance and range of Akron's rock scene. Not Cleveland, even though it was the perceived cultural center of our region (sometimes called the Paris of the Rust Belt), but Akron. Because it was special. I knew this had just happened, and so I was achingly aware of its absence. I had just missed something musically, culturally, artistically important, just as I had just missed the importance of Akron industrially. What does it mean to be eighteen years old, to begin defining yourself as a particular individual, in a particular place,
of
that particular place, when that place has just lost its own identity?

It means you begin to define yourself in a void. It means you learn how to listen for echoes. It means you begin looking at empty bank buildings as opportunity.

*  *  *

The Generics are opening for the Wombats. The Wombats have signed with Bomp Records. This is huge. We know Bomp Records. That's the label name on the back of the Stiv Bators solo record, the one he made with the guitar player he stole from the Dead Boys, whom the Dead Boys stole from Hammer Damage. John Puglia and I talk about these things as though we know these people and their gossip. As though we have taken a side in the Hammer Damage / Dead Boys controversy. We talk about how the Wombats are leaving on tour the next day as though they had shared this information with us in the dressing room, which is rumored to be accessible via a secret trapdoor from the bank vault.

We have never actually seen the Wombats.

The Wombats take the stage. Either the one guitar player is unnaturally tall or the other guitar player is unnaturally short, or (probably) a combination of both, but juxtaposed they look like mutant versions of Bomp Record Recording Artists the Wombats, or however we had imagined them, which I suppose is something overly romanticized, like Joe Perry in a band with Link Wray. Which they are not. They look like two wrong pieces that got stuck together. The one guitar is buzzing so badly that everyone is yelling at the little guy and trying to find him a better cord. The lead microphone is not working properly, but neither is the backup mic, so the singer takes them both and clamps them together in some misguided equation of sonic math, which fails.

I have no idea this is terrible. These are the Wombats and they have a record contract and they are going on tour.

*  *  *

The Bank was dying. I didn't know that then. I didn't have any sense of where these things came from and where they went and how tentative they always are, these places of minor personal legend. Ball fields, dance halls, banking institutions—they are all born dying and their moment of being alive is just that—a moment.

*  *  *

Ralph and I went one final time that winter before the Bank closed. We set out in one of those Ohio snowfalls that feels as if it were wrapping you up in itself for transport to another dimension, thick and deep and utterly transforming. The snow piled high even on the overhead wires and on the sidearms of light poles and draped itself into curved scallops over the heads of the elemental brick buildings that lined Main Street downtown. We had left home late, ten o'clock or so, and the snow had stopped falling by then, so that when we parked and got out of the car to cross the street to the club, a dense silence muted the scene.

Akron was approaching the depth of its despair, close enough that its desperation felt alive, almost vibrant. This did not strike me as a paradox. It suggested possibility, adventure, a rough draft of legend. Many of the buildings downtown were abandoned. We'd heard that someone had broken into the Hony Wayne and happened into a room where a mattress was covered with blood and had done what seemed the only thing to do in a situation that was settling across all of us then: nothing. Because in a situation like that, the right thing doesn't exist.

Ralph and I went into the Bank, and it was warm inside, and yellow-gray, and we stayed and watched and listened and drank until closing. When we left and walked back outside and stepped from the sidewalk, we saw only one set of tire tracks in the snow: our own, from hours before, leading to where we'd parked the car. We followed them back home.