Farewell Tour

Maple City Dispatch: stories from the former “Fence Capital of the World,” Adrian, MI

by Nathaniel Berry

Standby overpriced fake dive just far enough from the University that Columbia kids can drink in whatever version of real Manhattan exists in their hearts. It started here, with Gauraa in September, 2018, back when she was already a regular and nobody she sat with paid full-price. Four crowded years ago. Impossible distance.

Back at 1020 with Loren and Jemimah for the farewell tour. Loren and I are leaving New York, trying hitting all the spots we used to love like we’re never to return, and circling back to 1020 by process of elimination. $7.00 drafts of swill. Crowded on a Thursday night with Jemimah’s workshop friends.

Natty’s the managing editor of the magazine I write for, Jemimah tells somebody.

Check us out, I say. If we seem like a good fit, we’d love to read some of your work.

Yeah, man, I’ll check it out.

Jemimah’s got a friend whose mom and dad were born in Adrian. It’s a tiny town, I try and explain, when she asks me what the big deal is. Her friend’s parents are Budlongs and McKenzies, names you recognize from street signs and not from anyone who still lives there.

I actually write a column about Adrian. That self-promotion talk they tell you about.

What made you decide to write about Adrian? I always take that question to mean Who do you think any of this is for? but before I try and answer someone interrupts with the Rocky-Voice thing.

Back in Adrian, I met my Aunt and Uncle at Farver’s, a bar they carved out of a closet at the Croswell Opera House. Farver’s scalped the chef who used to work at one of the vague, upscale restaurants in Blissfield or Chelsea or something, but there’s no kitchen at Farver’s so everything has to be made offsite. They do pop-ups and Maggie sells her cookies there.

Jere was at the bar. She’s been Artistic Director of the Croswell for the past decade or so, a job that seems to be mostly fundraising, in which she’s raised them an inarguable amount of money. This is how the main theater, which has been continuously operating for more than a hundred and fifty years, came to be named after some donor in the 2010s, and why everything has a new coat of gray paint. This is also how the coat room came to be Farver’s, a full-time establishment that skillfully replaced the plywood bar the interns used to drag up to the second-floor lobby and stock with watered down, mid-grade liquor.

What have you been up to? Jere said.

I’ve been in New York. The last of my No Contact AWP business cards makes its way into her hands before I remember how I made fun of the Croswell’s terrible new electric sign a few issues back. She and I were never buddies or anything, but hating the changes still feels like betrayal.

Our two-year anniversary issue comes out in May.

I don’t ask to go in and see the theater. I used to be an intern at the Croswell—carpenter and stagehand—and I still have nightmares where I have to get something onto the stage in a hurry, or need to relay some urgent message from Katie Metz, the stage manager, to Ashley Nowak, the leading lady. In the version of the Croswell that’s been operating in my head for twelve years, the corridors are always moving; I stumble blindly onto the stage and wreck something beautiful, the audience screams.

I know things have a right to change when you turn your back on them. Twelve years ago, when I worked at the Croswell, Jere was gunning to paint over the wall backstage where everyone signed their names. Future Broadway stars and local talent and toe-dippers who never saw the business end of a Source Four ever again; bold signatures in Sharpie and delicate ones in BiC. She always wanted it to look more professional backstage, I never understood why. I don’t wish to go back there and see if all those people were blotted out in service to some donor-facing image. 

I timidly asked her about the loading dock, and the old wooden platform below its big iron doors. This platform is a place I try to visit as often as I can, because I built one just like it when I was an intern, filling my thermos with Johnnie Walker Red and replacing what I took with water.

Summer, 2010. $4.00 an hour. Great on a resume. Twelve years ago. Impossibly close.

Our technical director was drunk again and we had to send him home before he’d try to bully us into cutting our fingers off. We had to build an ADA-compliant wheelchair ramp to the backdoor of the theater in twenty-four hours, or a show wouldn’t be able to run. It was pouring and the power-drills were arcing and steaming. We had to wrap them in plastic bags to keep them from shorting out. To keep the drills from melting the bags, we rested them in coolers with ice from Chaloner’s. We worked all day through an August thunderstorm. The ramp went up: fifty feet long, terminating in a six-by-six platform, three feet off the ground, level with the mouth of the loading dock.

After the show closed, we carefully disassembled the ramp, saving the planks for the outfield wall in Damn Yankees. But we left the platform sitting by the loading doors. Back before the platform, you had to pull the truck up over the curb and then jump over the three-foot gap jump between the back of the truck and the mouth of the dock. By this platform were our summer dreams of rolling heavy things and using furniture dollies made gloriously manifest.

Oh, it’s still there, still the same one, Jere told me, confident. We don’t really replace anything around here.

Every time I’m back home, I visit old haunts like it’s the last time I’ll ever be there. Last time I was in Adrian, I filled my car with empty cardboard boxes for me and Loren to pack our New York things into. I went out to my platform behind the Croswell late at night. It was still back there, and the world seemed to slow on its axis as the heat of the day baked off the parking lot and up into the hazy night.

Ahead is the road to New York, the packing and the movers, the farewells and the long drive to wherever’s next, and then I will leave the city without a trace. I have left, and will continue to leave Adrian, with a six-by-six platform just outside the Croswell.

You leave your work behind you, you hope that it will last, you never really get to know who or what it’s for.