Akronites Autonomous
Joan Vollmer married the eccentric and homosexual heir of an adding machine fortune. His name was William Burroughs. Aside from her association with the accomplishments of her husband, Joan is best remembered for the tragicomic senselessness of her untimely death when she stood at the wrong end of an apple, on the wrong side of a gun, while her husband played the part of William Tell in what turned out to be a fatally unconvincing reenactment when he shot her in the head instead of the apple sitting on it. She died. She got shot by her husband. He went on to write some books that were about being high or trying to get high all the time.
Joan Vollmer, if acknowledged at all by scholars of post-World War II American Literature, was placed in the distasteful category – “Beat Women.” Her contribution to American literature was to get shot and die, thus inspiring her husband and murderer to atone for her death through a lifetime of heroin-fogged writing. Lucia’s mother had admired Joan’s devious pragmatism to marry a junky homosexual for money, which was why, when pregnant with Lucia, she’d considered Joan as a namesake. Lucia’s mother admired Joan’s combination of bravery and fatalism, faith and recklessness that lead to such a sordid demise. But Lucia’s mother never cared much for Burroughs’ work. Sure, she recognized his importance as a counter-cultural figurehead, but thought his writing was only important in the context of burgeoning drug culture and post-war disillusionment. Joan was killed by that hack.
Lucia’s father, like her mother, came of age in the height of American counter-culture. During the many rocky spells through the marriage, he had drunken fantasies of playing the same game of William Tell with his wife, ending with the same fatal outcome, which was why he didn’t think Joan Vollmer a suitable namesake for his daughter. Although he claimed to have read Naked Lunch, he thought William Burroughs was the guy who said, “Tune in, turn on, drop out.”
Zelda Fitzgerald was another woman fated to marry a writer, F. Scott Fitzgerald, die a senseless death, and leave a legacy burdened with the martyrdom of being his muse. During her prime years, she was renowned as a beautiful charmer and socialite in the now fabled New York and Paris of the Jazz Age. She’d also written her own book about taking ballet lessons in France. Later, her husband had her committed to an insane asylum in North Carolina. Some scholars argue all the good parts in her book were written by her husband, while others argue all the good parts of her book were edited out by her husband. She died in the asylum when a fire started in the kitchen, shot up the laundry chute and burnt down the building. Her book was published posthumously.
Lucia’s father claimed to have read some of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s work, but really all he knew about the author’s bibliography was inferred from the 1974 film adaptation of The Great Gatsby. At his wife’s suggestion, Lucia’s father had considered Zelda Fitzgerald for his daughter’s namesake because he’d heard Zelda was the first flapper, and also he’d always had a thing for Mia Farrow and the subtly glamorous way she dominated the screen, not just in the 1974 film adaptation of The Great Gatsby, but in any role Farrow played.
Sometimes Lucia’s father confused the plotlines of Tender is the Night, by Fitzgerald, with Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises.
Lucia’s mother had always liked the name Zelda, on the merit of its phonics and the exotic idiosyncrasy that the name started a Z. She’d considered her as a namesake for Lucia at first because, while an undergraduate, a copy of Save Me the Waltz had circulated as a subversive cult book amongst her circle of friends. Not even taking into account Zelda’s infamous grace and style, Lucia’s mother empathized with Zelda who was driven crazy by her husband, and then put in the nut house by that same husband. Ultimately, she dismissed the name because, even as a college student, Lucia’s mother thought Zelda’s novel was mediocre, and key portions had been reportedly been rewritten to appease Zelda’s husband and had possibly been rewritten by him. What kind of pushover would let that happen to her novel?
Lucia’s father didn’t read much, but he drank a lot, and pretended to be well-versed in contemporary classic novels written by notorious alcoholics. He wasn’t Irish, but his last name was Irish-sounding, and because of this uniquely American desire to invent a cultural heritage, he tried to stake his claim in the boozy tragedy of literary dandies the caliber of Burroughs, Joyce, and Fitzgerald.
Lucia’s mother had once been a starry-eyed graduate student in Kent State’s MA Program for Literature and Composition. Somewhere in that phase, she also spent six months in Europe too. Simply explained as, “It seemed like a good idea at the time,” she abandoned her independence, education, and self-actualization for the less noble, but more popular goal of getting hitched and squeezing out some babies before that biological clock ticked down. Once Lucia started kindergarten, her mother landed a job as a high school English instructor at Our Lady of the Elms in Akron. Some semesters she taught poetry appreciation at Akron U, and claimed the night classes for bored housewives and eccentric retirees saved her marriage.
Lucia’s father had inherited from his father a small machine parts shop. He’d built it into a profitable endeavor, not so much out of visionary business acumen, but because he never got along that great with his wife. After the birth of two daughters, he felt like the odd man out, in self-imposed exile of creating contacts and pounding pavement. A lot of weekday afternoons passed in a haze of three cocktail lunches.
He did business with an endangered species of blue-collar millionaires, conservative men, but also brash and vulgar men. Businessmen who would admitted to being big fish in a little pond, but embellished their bigness, and were in denial about how small the pond actually was, and how rapidly it was shrinking.
After he’d celebrated his fortieth birthday, he’d made more money than he ever thought himself capable of earning. In private moments of doubt and melancholy, he wondered if the prosperity was a mistake, an accident. The fates could snatch it all away at any time, leaving his wife and two daughters in poverty as punishment for his free-market malfeasance.
Augusta Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace, was the only legitimate child of the philandering father and notable Romantic Poet, Lord Byron. Ada’s lifelong predilections for music and math spilled over to her involvement with early analytical machines. An aristocrat of the Victorian era, she was a pioneer of writing algorithms, prototypical steam punk and handmaiden to the computer age. The United States Department of Defense created a programming language named in her honor.
Lucia Joyce was fluent in four languages, romantically involved with Samuel Beckett, an early practitioner in modern dance, and an inspiration and muse to her father, the legendary author James Joyce. She’d once lit a fire on the living room floor. She’d once thrown a chair at her dad’s birthday party. Half of her life, she was confined in a mental institution. Samuel Beckett sometimes visited her. A large backlog of letters she’d written to her family are unaccounted for. Joyce scholars and archivists suspect her writings may have been destroyed.
Aw, but what’s in a name?
*
Always ahead of the curve, whether she knows it or not, Lucia Lovelace O’Malley gets to the party early, and the internal violence of puberty taints her subconscious with hard-earned knowledge on the intricate and humiliating ultimatums it takes for boys and girls to thrive together. All shins and shoulder blades pinned together with elbows and ankles, she cuts the figure of a wobbly filly. Uninhibited and unaware, she sure as hell doesn’t look and move like no 14-year-old. Her body will prove hazardous through her formative years, but for now it’s hardwired with cynicism that distinguishes Lucia as, what her teachers describe “sweet and intelligent,” but in the same breath criticize as “intense, distant,” and even worse, “entitled.”
Shifting identities and cultural tropes that teenagers cycle through so rapidly is less pronounced for Lucia. After reading Franny and Zooey in the eighth grade, Lucia decides that when she grows up she wants to be a charming and unfulfilled college drop-out just like Frances Glass. Lucia is consistent with this kittenish bookworm look (cardigans, corduroys, blouses, flannels, all bought at Village Thrift). Her beatnik mock-intelligentsia is spiked by periods of teen angst that coincide with Lucia’s discovery of Straight Edge punk, Margret Atwood, the Riot Girl Movement and Sylvia Plath.
Lucia has just finished her clarinet lesson and waits outside in front of Lentien’s Music for her dad to come pick her up. He’s late, and Lucia doesn’t notice just how late until the bearded guy who sells pianos pokes his head out the door and says, “We’re closing soon, sweetie. Is someone coming to get you?”
Lucia answers yes. The piano salesman asks if she wants him to wait with her. Lucia answers no, she’s sure her dad is on his way and will arrive shortly. That’s enough to convince the piano salesman, who rattles the door closed and locked, and flips around the open sign. Lucia sets her clarinet case beside her ankle. The window displays behind her go dark.
Lucia’s notion of pop idols to emulate is Ian McKay, of a band called Minor Threat; Morrissey, of a band called The Smiths. Both front men are paradoxically scandalized for leaving the sex and drugs part out of their rock n’ roll. Lucia finds no allure in substance abuse or sexual experimentation. She thinks both are a cliché attempt at risk, tired gimmicks of teenage rebellion. That mindset will prove to be short-lived.
North Main Street is quiet on the Tuesday night. Lone cars pass in either direction. A chill daubs mist around traffic lights and lampposts. What happens next is so peculiar that Lucia can’t process the strangeness while it plays out before her.
Upon hearing a straining sound like heavy machinery, trying to run on stripped and rusted gears, Lucia looks up the road and sees a car. The way its headlight beams move isn’t quite right, and even from a distance she can tell the car, advancing in laborious spurts, may be having engine trouble. As it nears, the straining sound reverberates like a dozen rusty chainsaws fired up at once. White flashes pop from the rear with each fit of acceleration. Lucia is puzzled because something is wrong with that car and she wonders why the driver won’t stop.
In a mad spurt, with the backend wagging silver sparks, the car closes the final gap. Lucia recognizes it as her father’s work car, a Kidney bean-colored Buick, which makes an abrupt cut to the curb and stops at an angle with the front tires on the sidewalk, a dozen yards from where Lucia stands. She picks up her clarinet case and approaches the car.
All its windows are rolled down. Her father has both hands on the steering wheel, but his head hangs tilted from his limp neck. A tendril of drool has grown down the corner of his mouth, and his eyelids are slitted like he’s about to doze off or is trying hard to stay awake. Grinding, unlike any Lucia has heard from any car, crackles under the hood. One of the rear tires isn’t there, or rather, it’s a bubbling swath of rubber bunched up and emitting smoke from the wheel well. The hubcap is gone too, and the wheel is alternately chipped and sharpened along its circumference.
“Dad?”
He doesn’t stir. Indicator lights ping in the console. Lucia reaches in and places her hand on his shoulder. “Dad?” She gives him two or three gentle shakes. His mouth moves, but it’s hard to tell if he is trying to say something or is chewing on his tongue. Lucia sets her clarinet case on the sidewalk.
“Dad? I think you were driving on a flat tire.”
Yet, I began to sense that something foul was afoot even at Marlowe. Other assigned readings included an interview with Alice Munro that suggested women could be writers as long as they were mothers too. Stories that glamorized power, revenge, sexism and imperialism: “Shooting an Elephant,” “To Build a Fire,” “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” “The Cask of Amontillado.” There was an agenda in their instruction. I feared maybe the Catholic higher education was more aggressive and domineering than I had anticipated. Maybe to lampoon Alcoholics Anonymous as I was doing in my work-in-progress, Akronites Autonomous, maybe to suggest fantasy could serve as an allegory for domestic terrorism as I did in my Integrative Essay, maybe by writing the things I had written and interpreting the reading like I had put a big bullseye on my back. The established order was threatened by my voice. I pulled back the curtain of their secret means of communication.
Across the street from the Comfort Hotel was a construction site, the crews in the early stages of building a new grocery store. A street sweeper went up and down the length of road, from the work zone to the hotel parking lot entrance and back. All day long. On top of that, a pick-up truck towing a white trailer had been parked behind the building. Another pick-up truck with a capped and covered bed was parked in front. An old ambulance was parked behind The Galaxy Restaurant. The parking lot was filled with potential surveillance crews.
Inside the hotel, the lobby floor was black and dark brown streaked tile. Salt liberally applied to the walks out front got tracked in all over the floor, leaving white crusty residue anywhere someone stepped. During the winter months, I spent three hours, if not more out of my shift, just mopping the slush and salt.
I was mopping the floor when my cell phone rang in my pocket. The call was from Marlowe, more specifically, Marlowe’s Administrative Assistant. I had contacted her a day prior to discuss my unease at events surrounding the program and to see if there was any explanation for the undercurrents of fear rippling all around me.
I shoved the mop and mop bucket off to the side as I pulled out my phone. “Hello,” I answered.
“Yes, hello,” said the Administrative Assistant.
“Hey, it’s great to hear from you.” I cut down the side hallway. “Give me just a second. I got to get somewhere I can talk.” And in through the laundry and out the service doors by the dumpster. “Okay, how have you been?” The street sweeper roared past me. The white hitch trailer was parked behind the hotel. “Wait, I’m sorry. Wait just a second.” The street sweeper roared past me again. I made another dash to my car, sat in the driver’s seat and slammed the door.
It was gray out. Clouds covered the sky. The air was as cold and wet as it could get without snowflakes. I was certain my call was being monitored. The street sweeper roared past yet again. The street sweeper driver was the one keeping eyes on me. In the white hitch trailer was the surveillance team monitoring the call. “Yeah, I’m sorry about that. It’s good to hear from you.”
“So, what’s up?”
“I don’t know how to approach this without sounding like a kook,” I said. “But it’s about my Integrative Essay.”
“Sure,” she said over the line. “Of course, what about it? You passed, didn’t you?”
“I just, I don’t know.” How could I explain without further indicting myself to an institution that was maybe in on it too? I had to let her know we were being listened to. “Have you ever seen the HBO television series, The Wire?”
“No.” She was willing to indulge me. “But I have plenty of friends who have, so I know enough about it.”
“Well look, I’m not trying to be Jimmy McNulty from The Wire.”
“Okay. Is there some aspect of your Integrative Essay in particular you’d like to talk about?”
“I’ll admit it was kind of a culture shock for me at Marlowe. The Catholic environment and what have you. I just wanted to make sure there wasn’t anything in the essay that was too controversial or dangerous.”
“You’re fine. Trust me.”
Her reassurances weren’t reassuring. If anything, they only made more clear how deep the conspiracy went. I didn’t have the will or know-how to escape from it.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“Well, thank you, my dear – and I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to call you ‘my dear’ to be patronizing. I meant it as a term of endearment.”
“I know, I understand.”
“While I have you on the phone. I guess, again, it’s just kind of a culture shock from me at Marlowe, which I took to be a conservative school.”
“It’s okay. Sometimes I feel like I have the same problem.”
“Did you read the essay?”
“No.”
The street sweeper roared past again.
“Are you sure I didn’t take it too far with the content? Specifically, about the last paragraph.”
“You’re fine, believe me.”
“I’m just saying, I read Harper’s. I read The Kenyon Review.”
“Okay, you’re fine. I’m hanging up now.”
The street sweeper roared past again as I headed back into the hotel. As soon as I got out of the car, a guy walked out of the truck connected to the hitch trailer. He followed me in through the back door. I tried to ignore him.
Back in the lobby, I resumed my mopping. The guy from the truck asked where he could find a map of the Medina County area. The phone rang. Eyes and ears were everywhere. Big windowless vans. Hitch trailers. Capped pick-up trucks. The hotel was crawling with shadowy reconnaissance. Akron was crawling with shadowy reconnaissance.
The only solace I found from my phone call with the Administrative Assistant was this: my phone had been hacked. Not only were my phone calls being listened in on, but the speaker had been reversed. I was carrying a live hot microphone. My suspicion wasn’t that far-fetched. Google searches and e-mails brought up related ads on Facebook pages. Key words and phrases like “bomb,” and “reclusive clergy member once renowned for legislation reforming civil disobedience,” and “an abandoned storage shed in an economically depressed neighborhood neglected by law enforcement,” had made me a person of interest.
I was far from paranoid. In fact, I was euphoric. After work, I had to drop off my packet of hard copy writing to send off to the Mentor. While I drove to the UPS store, a song by a band called The Postal Service played.
I got back to my place – the coach house – after I had stopped at the end of the driveway to pick up the mail. I parked my car in the garage. Chipped shards of snowflakes fell and the oppressive clouds were thick. I walked down the curving driveway to my parents’ house to drop off the mail on the island in their kitchen.
As soon as the door closed behind me in my parents’ house, I knew something was off. One of those mysterious chills you get when your skin goes all goosepimply. A sixth sense that kicks in when you’re certain something is amiss. That eerie, haunted feeling of being in a once crowded space after the crowds have left. I got that feeling when I walked into my parents’ house to drop off the mail.
“Hello,” I called out to no one. No one answered.
The spinner chairs at the big window had been turned at different angles than I last remembered them. The door to the upstairs half-bath was closed, when I remembered it’d been open. A piece of split firewood on the patio had been removed from the rack and set on its side on the ground. Someone had gone through the house. Their ransacking was immaculate and neat, but they’d left tell-tale signs that’d they’d been there. Just enough to unnerve me and let me know they were watching. I stood in the empty house looking out the big windows into the woods that stretched down to the reservoir.
My cell phone in my pocket rang from an unidentified caller. I answered it. “Hello.” My heart thumped.
“Hello,” an automated voice came over the line. “You’re eligible for a free credit check. To continue on to one of our service – ”
I hung up. It was a trap. I left my parents’ house and half-walked, half-ran up the drive back to my place. Their house was no longer safe.
I couldn’t listen to 91.3, The Summit. It was clear that radio station was just upsetting me. So I changed it to 88.9, The Alternation. The song “Down by the Water,” by a band called The Decemberists, played. That was it! I had put all the pieces of the puzzle together and now was my final clue. Down by the water, my location was obviously pin-pointed from the time I had answered my cell phone in my parents’ house. They knew I was listening to the radio through the microphone, so even when I switched stations, a song would come on communicating a message to me. This was someone reaching out to help. “Down by the Water.”
I grabbed my plastic cup, made in Akron, Ohio, emblazoned with the Marlowe seal. I left my phone in my place, so no one would be able to track me. Then I left my place via the stairs of the balcony and crossed the driveway and entered the woods. The trees were bare and their bark damp. Their boughs quivered in the slight wind. My footsteps crunched on the dead frozen leaves. I trudged through the woods all the way down to the banks of the reservoir.
The water’s surface cut up in little clips and chops. I still felt eyes on me, across the water from the other bank. Someone could still be watching me and I wouldn’t even know they were there. Well, then, so be it.
I put the plastic cup, made in Akron, Ohio, emblazoned with the Marlowe seal, on a stump. If someone wanted to leave me a direct message, something to make sense out of all the madness, they could leave it there in the cup. I rushed to get back to my place before I missed anymore potentially instructive songs on the radio.
*
The next day at work, as I walked in through the hotel’s front automatic door, I saw another sign. On either side of the door were trash bins. The bins were about waist high, their sides sheets of pebbly stones. On top was a lid with a circle cut in the center. Along the rim of the lid, someone had made a little snowman. Three snowballs. The bottom snowball the size of a grapefruit, the top snowball the size of a golf ball and the middle snowball the size of a tennis ball. He even had little twiggy arms. At the sight of it, my heart quickened.
Later that afternoon, when I’d gotten out of work, I walked through the woods again down to the banks of the reservoir. My Marlowe cup sat undisturbed. No new messages. I made my own little snowman and left him standing beside the cup. It was a Friday. The weekend got strange.
Wait-wait, Don’t Tell Me is a weekly quiz show that airs on National Public Radio. The host, Peter Segal, is a good-natured and affable guy with a chipper and resonant voice. The show features a panel of three rotating guest panelists, usually comedians, sometimes news anchors or other cultural figures and personalities. They’re quizzed by the host, Peter Segal, about recent events. The show also features a call-in portion, where listeners can call in for a chance to take the quizzes along with the panelists.
I was cleaning my place, sweeping the particle board floor, washing the dishes, doing laundry. I was playing a CD. I had the CD player set at a pretty loud volume. I was listening to an album by a band called The Love Letter Band. The lyrics to the opening track go like this: “I sent a letter to your house / no one was home / the lights were out / I threw my radio away / thrust my trembling fists into the sky.” I had my iPhone, its mouthpiece aimed towards the speakers of my CD player, set on the coffee table.
I thought I was being very mischievous and playing a trick. If the shadowy, unseen forces of intelligence gathering wanted to listen in on my every move, then I’d give them something to listen to. The lyrics to the last song on the album go like this: “Thank you for listening to my songs. You can go now, go fall in love or something. Just don’t get stuck here like I am.” The words are spoken by a robotic voice, reciting over mechanical synthesizer drones and strident dissonant noises.
I turned the CD off. I switched on National Public Radio, which was airing an episode of Wait-wait, Don’t Tell Me. Peter Segal was quizzing a listener who had called in. The answer to the quiz question was Taylor Swift. The listener who had called in answered the question. “Tyler Swift?”
“Close enough, we’ll take it. The answer was Taylor Swift.”
Then Peter Segal told an amusing story from the headlines about a guy who threw his phone in the air. “That’s right,” Peter Segal said over their airwaves. “He took his phone and threw it in the air.”
I turned my radio off. Then I turned it on again, only I switched stations. I switched to the other National Public Radio affiliate out of Cleveland, 90.3. They were airing the themed news magazine program, This American Life. The theme for that day was: amateurs. I turned my radio off. No sooner had I done so than the bulb dangling from the kitchen light snapped off. Someone had cut off my power. I turned the light back on.
Someone was trying to send me a message again. I had hit a nerve by playing the Love Letter Band. Everything was a code. All the songs on the radio were codes. They lyrics all had double meanings. They had subliminal messages. I had tapped into it. I had decoded it. There were never any coincides at all.
Now I knew how to communicate back and forth with the double meanings and subliminal messages from National Public Radio news reports. It was nothing new. The CIA and KGB had been documented as using news and radio transmissions to carry secret messages. That’s why National Public Radio, The Summit, and The Alternation were all commercial free, because they were underwritten by the CIA.
Just like Radio Free Europe.
But now I knew I had tapped into something larger. I was tumbling down the rabbit hole. Ohio was a battle ground state. It was an election year. There was a lot at stake with Syria, North Korea, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Argentina, Yemen — take your pick, I guess. Whoever was next elected had the potential to either pull us back from, or deliver us right into, World War III. Troops for the right and left were mobilizing, but it went far beyond campaigns and stump speeches. It was a war for hearts and minds. It was a war that manipulated culture and art.
The next day, as I walked through the automatic doors at work, I craned my neck to look to the waist high garbage can to my left. The little snowman was still there, only he had been altered. He was missing his little twig arms. His twig arms had been removed. What did it mean? It meant whoever I was onto was on to me too.
There had to be actual humans, warm bodies behind all the mischief and mayhem that had fallen into my life. I was hyper-vigilant at work.
*
The prosperous Brookerman family was infamous as a Christian family with far-right values. They were also known to allow their politics to carry over into their business. For instance, there were rumors that State Representative Jim Renacci, a Republican, firmly in the camp against gay marriage, abortion – you know the drill – was running as governor. His staff stayed in our hotel when they weren’t in Washington D.C.
And the classes held every month for conceal and carry firearms permits.
And the fundraiser for mobile sonogram trailers. Their purpose to set up outside of Planned Parenthoods, show pregnant women sonograms of their babies in hopes of preventing abortions; to curb any reproductive rights.
The church, the conceal and carry classes, the mobile sonogram fundraiser all regularly met in the Brookerman’s Comfort Hotel.
Evangelicalism.
The right to bear arms.
Pro-life.
All three were staple agendas in the political right’s toolbox.
Yes. The Brookermans were successful, the Brookermans were indeed prosperous, but the Brookermans were also indeed Christians and weird Christians at that. Their business dealings and dealings with the church only betrayed them as increasingly conservative and far right. Might one even go as far as to say warmongers?
The Brookermans had set up their own compound. It was a fortress, a barracks, disguised as two hotels and a restaurant. They owned a fucking General Motors dealership. American made. What’s in the best interest of General Motors is in the best interest of America. The Brookermans were banking on a political pendulum swing to the right this upcoming election season. They were banking on a nation with a more conservative climate. I had to watch my step around the hotel. I was deep inside enemy territory.
First it was Marlowe, then it was The Comfort Hotel. My school and my workplace. The two major institutions in my life were seductively creating a new world order of American totalitarianism and Martial law, and it all hinged upon the elaborate stage-dressing of mundanities of my everyday life. I was living in a battle ground state, preparing for the calm before the war.
Please bear with me. It gets even weirder. One of the luggage carts was missing from the front vestibule. It was later in the afternoon of my shift, and by that time most of the guests had checked out. I took the elevator to the fifth floor, walked the length of the hall and took the stairs down to the fourth floor; and then zig-zagged down the building looking for the other luggage cart. I found it, parked in a wall recess in front of the doors to one of the suites. Placed in the center of the cart was a No Smoking sign.
Whoever was onto me knew that I was on to them, and they were just playing with me now.