The Hustle (12 page)

I don't last very long at Lakeside after our team disbands. In the eighth and ninth grades, I start to become more popular, getting invited to parties and asked to dance by the “cool” girls at school dances. But I seem to be getting more arrogant and obnoxious in the process. The book-reading dork who entered the school in fifth grade is getting eclipsed. Halfway into my freshman year I tell my parents I want to take a “year off.” They agree to let me go with the stipulation that I'll return for junior year. I never do.

So I enroll at public school in the suburbs north of Seattle and discover its particular quirks: the electronic bell noise that sounds at the end of every period; pledging allegiance to the flag; home economics classes; cheerleaders; acid-washed jeans; auto shop; military recruiters at school; and guys who actually join the army. At times over the next few years, I miss the sense of superiority I derived from attending an elite private school. Mostly, though, I feel relieved.

Despite playing nearly every day and working out in special shoes designed to increase your vertical leap—they have a platform under the ball of the foot that keeps your heel off the ground, which is supposed to strengthen your calf muscles—I am cut from the basketball team in tenth grade. I've had the bad luck of transferring out of Lakeside into a public high school with one of the best basketball programs in the state.

The only sport I have any talent for is football, where pure effort can substitute somewhat for a lack in athletic ability. At five-foot-ten and 185 pounds, I find that I can take down players bigger than myself simply by making them think I'm more unhinged. Our head coach catches on to this trait. In my senior year, he begins to use me in an “inspirational” drill meant to fire up our lackluster team, having me line up against a six-foot-five, 260-pound teammate who will go on to receive a scholarship to play defensive line at the University of Georgia.

In the drill, my teammate carries the ball through one of three alleys demarcated by tackling dummies. My job is to stop him. The only way to do it is to lower my head and lunge at his knees. Once, I make the mistake of tackling him high, my helmet meeting his chest. We fall over, my behemoth teammate pushing me backward as he topples. I grab on like one of those stuffed animals with suction cups on its hands and feet that people stick to their car windows. He pancakes me, expelling every last bit of oxygen from my lungs. As I shakily climb to my feet, our coach applauds: “Did you see that, men? Now that's heart!”

I especially seek the approval of Coach Stubbs, our linebacker coach, a squat man, totally bald except for a fringe around his head. In his spare time he's a volunteer firefighter, and he often wears the jacket from his department. He communicates in grunts and seldom gives praise. It's as if he's studied football movies and decided to embody the Platonic ideal of the taciturn, tough coach. The only time he ever compliments me comes at the end of my senior season, when he says, “You really found your manhood this year.”

A desire for that kind of approbation leads me to play football at the small college I attend in Los Angeles. It's a terrible mistake. I quickly realize that running around in the sun and smog is not fun. I don't like many of my teammates, either. Midway into the season, a few of them break into the dorm room of a guy who has written an article in the student newspaper mocking macho behavior on campus—it is clearly aimed at certain elements of the football team—and piss on his stereo. In the locker room, they laugh about how they had gotten the “faggot.” Another football player has some teammates hide out on his balcony and spy through the sliding glass door while he has sex with his girlfriend. It's like James Naismith's nightmare: The lessons we're learning on the field about aggression and knocking the crap out of people are crossing over into life off of it.

The following spring, Coach Stubbs, who also was the head coach of the baseball team at my high school, hangs himself in the team's equipment shed. He is thirty-five. There is no note or explanation.

The suicide is an utter shock. I become more unsettled when I read the account in the newspaper. Our head coach calls Coach Stubbs a “mystery guy.” “I don't know a thing about his family,” he says. “I don't know a thing about his personal life.” It strikes me that I had relied on these men for guidance, but they knew nothing about each other, much less about me. I realize I've been looking for meaning in an area—and from men—that can't supply it. I know I will never play football again. As when Coach McClain ended his sports career twenty years earlier, it is, for me, the start of a transition will leave me knocking about for a new identity for years to come.

That August, as I'm home after my freshman year in college, I pick up the
Seattle Times
off my parents' doorstep. The news splashed across the top half of the front page tells of the hastening decline of the Soviet Union. My eye scans down. In bottom left corner a headline reads,
WHAT WENT WRONG?
TYRELL JOHNSON WAS YOUNG, BLACK, MALE—AND MURDERED
.

I sit down and try to comprehend what I'm reading: “On a brilliant, hot summer day recently, [Tyrell] Johnson was buried.… His body had been found, wrapped in a bedspread, in a wooden ditch in Rainier Valley.”

Tyrell had been shot in the back of the head. Both of his legs had been dismembered. They were not found with the body.

The newspaper illustrates the article with a photo of Tyrell in our old yellow uniform. He's down on one knee, the number 24 on his chest, a grin running across his face. The rest of us have been cropped out.

Instead of fading out on a black-and-white photo of the 1952 Indiana state champions, my version of
Hoosiers
ended with Coach Dale swinging from the rafters and Jimmy Chitwood hacked up in a ditch.

…

Just as every individual on our team was going through his own changes, Seattle was transforming in ways that would eventually affect all of us. These shifts began to gain speed in 1986, the same time we were out on the court together.

Toward the end of March that year, one of my Lakeside classmates brags in the locker room after gym class about how his dad had gotten in on the initial public offering of Microsoft stock. On its first day, the shares shot from $21 to nearly $28. “You could only get a good price on it if you had a connection,” my always-annoying classmate announces to the rest of us as we change out of our gym clothes. “My dad's broker got him some because he's such a good client. It's too late to buy it now, though,” he assures us.

Standing there in my underwear, all I know about Microsoft is that the founders had gone to our school and that the company has something to do with computers. Its sudden stock-market success seems like a total fluke—this is Seattle, after all. For decades, the local economy has fluctuated with the fortunes of Boeing, which employs tens of thousands of people, and creates related jobs for tens of thousands more. Everyone knows that when things go bad in the airplane business, the whole region takes a dive.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the city had something of a civic inferiority complex. It seemed like a great place to live—clean, polite, near the water and the mountains—but the national media always treated Seattle like a charming backwater full of loggers and rain-loving eccentrics. Underneath it all, there was a nagging doubt—if we're so great, shouldn't someone else recognize it?

By the end of the 1980s, that begins to change. Unbeknownst to the average person living there, Seattle has developed what a marketing consultant would call an “aesthetic.” Microsoft, a software giant that will create thousands of millionaires through its stock options, drives the economic side. The company also draws other tech start-ups to open in its shadow, just as Boeing had once done with firms that manufactured parts for its airplanes.

Other changes are incubating. In 1987, a businessman named Howard Shultz buys a local chain of eleven coffee shops, Starbucks, with the intention of building a national empire of espresso bars. In the late 1980s, REI (Recreational Equipment, Inc.), a Seattle outdoor clothing and equipment store founded in 1938, begins to open several new locations across the country every year, playing up its Northwest roots in its advertising. In 1988, Kurt Cobain, an angst-ridden musician from a logging town a hundred miles southwest of Seattle, forms a new band and soon signs a deal with an independent Seattle record label named Sub Pop. Nirvana will be promoted with several more of the label's bands, which mix and match portions of Black Sabbath, punk rock, alienation, and masculine bravado with Northwest clothing style. All of these things—the coffee, the outdoor fixation, the music scene—simmer for years before springing into national attention in the early 1990s. Suddenly the life of an “average” Seattleite—if you go by the media depictions, a white guy who grabs a cup of Starbucks on the way to hike on Mount Rainier on Saturday morning, and then comes back to drink microbrews and catch a Mudhoney show that night—becomes cool. In October 1993, Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder—face distorted in an anguished howl—makes the cover of
Time
magazine with the headline,
ALL THE RAGE: ANGRY YOUNG ROCKERS LIKE PEARL JAM GIVE VOICE TO THE PASSIONS AND FEARS OF A GENERATION
. That signals the high point of grunge's prominence; Kurt Cobain's suicide the following year marks its end.

The music, though, is only one aspect of a fundamental change. Seattle has long been a city with a large number of college graduates. In the 1990s, though, the percentage of adult Seattle residents holding bachelor's degrees will jump from 38 percent to an astonishing 47 percent, 8 points higher than Washington, D.C., and nearly 11 points higher than Boston (the national average of adults with a bachelor's degree for the country's one hundred largest cities in 2000 was 24 percent). While median household income rises 6.5 percent, to $45,700, rents go up 10 percent and home prices almost 35 percent. This is driven, in large part, by the proliferation of tech work. According to one estimate, the number of technology-related jobs in the Puget Sound area—which includes Seattle and the eastern suburbs that house Microsoft—shoots up between 1995 and 2000 from 93,400 to 146,200.

Seattle's next national cover boy, after Eddie Vedder, turns out to be East Coast journalist Michael Kinsley, who moves west to launch the Internet magazine
Slate
for Microsoft. Kinsley fronts
Newsweek
in May 1996, looking goofy in yellow raingear (Seattle natives never carry umbrellas or wear rain slickers—the proper protection is a brightly colored Gore-Tex jacket). The headline reads,
SWIMMING TO SEATTLE: EVERYBODY ELSE IS MOVING THERE. SHOULD YOU
?

Newsweek
hails Seattle as a leader of the “postindustrial” economy and highlights, among other things, the locals' love of gourmet food such as lavender-fried quail, the breathtaking politeness (drivers actually stop at yellow lights!), the tech jobs, the mountains, and work habits so relaxed that even lawyers take it easy. In
Newsweek
's description, the city becomes a spiritual Yukon for New Age seekers, drifters, slackers, and fortune hunters, drawing “rootless youths seeking alienation beneath Seattle's brooding skies” and “middle-aged strivers betting that Microsoft can create one more millionaire.” According to the magazine, “Even those constrained to spend the 21st century in some less-favored city will inevitably feel the tug of Seattle's gloom.”

You could be forgiven for envisioning some kind of a white, upper-middle-class paradise where the only problems were deciding what software company to work for and—as anyone who watches
Frasier
, which debuted in 1993, could tell you—how many shots of espresso you want in your
macchiato
. The magazine notes that Seattle elected a black mayor in 1989—the genial Norm Rice—and that the city “is generally progressive on racial matters.”

In 1998, the comedian Dave Chappelle summed up the popular image of race in Seattle on an episode of HBO's
The Larry Sanders Show
, in which Chappelle, playing himself, meets with a writer and some television network executives about a possible show. The writer wants to set it in Seattle. After the comedian objects, the show is relocated to Baltimore. As Chappelle tells the writer, “That whole Seattle thing? I don't think I ever met a brother from Seattle in my life. I don't know if that's the place where we would really, really live.”

…

After 1990, I observe most of the changes taking place in Seattle from a distance. At about age twelve, I became convinced that the city was incredibly dull and real life was elsewhere. I go to college in Los Angeles, which, at least until I arrive, seems very glamorous.

As graduation nears and my classmates work to line up jobs with consulting firms or slots in law school, I have no idea what I want to do. I end up driving back to Seattle, where I take the same job I had through college—installing washers and dryers in laundry rooms for my dad's company. That summer, my parents begin a separation that eventually leads to divorce. I live with several musicians in a ramshackle house just north of the Central Area and begin to write articles for local newspapers. Mostly, though, I operate at half power, struggling to get out of bed most days. My interest in sports has evaporated—I don't want to watch or play them.