Sometime in 1994 a fire at the former Ohio Rubber Company on Ben Hur Avenue in Willoughby, Ohio destroyed the main office building, resulting in an estimated $2,000,000 in damage.
That would have been the year I was 12 going on 13, we lived in Oak Hill Village off of Lost Nation Road then.
"Burn the rest of the place down! Burn the rest of the place down!," he'd shout it out the moving car window every single time we drove by what remained of the charred factory. I never understood why'd we drive by it even, since it angered him so much.
He did it as a compulsion. As an act of surveillance. A way to ensure, just like any evil thing, that it did not come back. But for me? It eventually became mortifying, as I aged, because he'd actually yell it out the window, stick his entire head out of the window, wind blowing through his crazed locks, screaming over and over again - as a chant: "Burn the rest of the place down, burn the rest of the place down!" Headband like a hippie Rambo meets Ernest P. Worrell, with any single one of his multi-colored clip-on sun-glasses to his aviator style wire frame glasses, flipped up or down. It didn't matter of the traffic or the type of occupants in the cars driving by. Got so bad, for in my confused memory banks I recall this going on for a number of months and or years before I gained the courage to inquire if he had indeed started the fire himself, as his furious demands to the fates deemed it to perhaps most likely be that he did attempt to start this fire but was perhaps interrupted.
I know I was of an older age when this instance occurred, as it was a car full of boys older but closer to my age that I had been attracted to. So I would've asked the question closer to 1997. This second inquiry about him starting the arson...
When we stopped at the light off of Ben Hur Ave he turned to me in the passenger side seat, tilted his head, smiling in the most deranged manner, regarding sardonically why, why ever would I ask such a question. Immediately I mused to myself the same. I think I might have been 14 or 15. I don't remember anything after that.
I didn't even remember the exact year of the fire, I had to research The Willoughby Fire Department histories to find the year, without the month, it's even more difficult to place my age. But in 1994 I would have been 12 going on 13. I still would have been terrified of my father enough to not purposely want to offend or anger him, and I was unfortunately entering the phase of "mouthing off" without knowing yet what language would've been considered as such by him. Asking him after enduring what I'm recalling as months to years of him yelling out the window and embarrassing a budding 'tween or early adolescent if he had committed an act of arson in revenge...would've been misconstrued as "mouthy", even though it was an earnest question at that time. So the fact that it's blocked out...makes me believe he responded badly.
Because I know I had asked him twice about it actually. Now that I'm documenting this. I had asked him shortly after it had first happened and when him initially doing this could've been seen as quirky and "eccentric" (a word I had learned at a very young age due to my father supposedly being exactly just that), he denied it, openly stated that he wished he had however, yet seemed to have complete confirmation it was an act of arson, musing that the company had done it trying to cash in on the insurance and recap it losses. As everyone at the time believed they had just found mustard gas buried at the factory.
But this business of him yelling out the car window, in any kind of weather, rolling the window down, cranking the turn-style "...burn the rest of the place down..." it had continued, and continued...and continued. Any humor or empathy I had initially had had, eventually faded. Mainly because I never liked his yelling or public exploits for attention.
So the fact that I cannot recall the specific outcome of the second time I had asked in my early teen's about the 1994 Ohio Rubber fire, not past that response after his devilish grin, somewhat validates to me, that he probably hit me just for asking that question, as the last thing I remember about that moment, is being afraid and feeling helpless, as I was most often hit or beat as a passenger in a moving vehicle growing up.
While doing research on a separate yet related matter, I discovered this article. The scrap metal company might have stood vacant for 10 years, but in 2013, indeed, the "...rest of the place..." was finally burned down, 80% of the building if I recall correctly. It must've been an extra gleeful act had my father actually been the real arsonist of both the 1994 and 2013 fires as his brother was working for the Willoughby Fire Department - for both fires. My father was always the black sheep of his side of the family and in particular the butt of many jokes for his much more successful little fireman brother of whom he was so much more clever, smarter, and brilliant than--so setting Ohio Rubber on fire, twice, no matter if it was 19 years apart--would've served a man such as my father two purposes: revenge on his former employer and in a very real way, on his family's prodigal son.
Now how hold a grudge, a burning grudge at that, one that burns brightly for 20 years?--what could trigger that kind of empty wrath? He wasn't evil enough, or stupid enough, to pick up a gun and go postal. So what the fuck could've happened? People get laid off. They get pink slipped.
Daddy felt slighted by society. He always did. And once, he was a great man. He was brilliant. Fantastic. Genius. Artistic. Visionary. Philosopher. He was, in his youth, had a brief sparking moment of enchantment. It was like being around Steve Martin, or Bill Murray, I imagine. He was hilarious. Could make different voices and tell amazing stories and jokes and make you feel astonishment, in another world full of unlimited possibilities where all you possessed was your ability to figure shit out. He would charm everyone around him. You could ride the elephants in the room with my dad.
But he has this dark brutal brooding side, one that hacked chairs with an ax, one that would systematically go through the apartment and break every single framed picture--punching each frame one by one, shattering glass like rain...one you shoved the dresser against the door against to keep the fuck out of your fucking room to keep from wrecking your room or beating you. Right. One that left you in negative 15, 20 degree weather to teach you a lesson. For 15-30 mins. You can't even remember the details anymore because you don't talk to anybody about them because who the fuck would believe you and you don't want to remember anyways, the random flashbacks are enough - fuck you very much. Oh, and the night terrors, the general anxiety, the hyper-vigilance, the hyper-observance, the ability to know when a man sees you as truly nothing but hair, orbs, and orifices.
Anyfuckingways, Dad has had a ton of health problems (honestly, I have too) and I'm sure this would've contributed to his 20 year raging wrath against this geographical location because this particular Ohio Rubber was an EPA Superfund site as it was used to manufacture and store lewisite.
Lewisite is bad. Click the links.
Dad worked there for like 15 or 17 years, he was still scrubbing "rubber" out of his pores 3 years after he got laid off.
Please know that I am not accusing my father of setting either fire, I am just recanting strange realities of my life and memories that I am recently having. Strong, vivid ones. Realizations that only come with adulthood and Google. I've blocked so much out. But for whatever reason, things are starting to jog various memories and my adult mind is capable of making connections, the mind of a child never could. Never had I intended to make this blog so personal or expand it in the directions it's organically starting to go and will continue to grow.
I forgot about the fires. I was trying to find the date that the factory closed. I forgot about how he yelled and yelled for the building to burn like a goddamn lunatic. It's one thing when you're an adoring kid, annoyed 'tween, scared shitless teen, another to be pushing forty - and realize how truly unlikely it is for the same hated location by your father to burn down twice almost twenty years apart. A place he screamed at to finish 'burning down' for literally...fucking years?
Yeah, okay Dad, okay.
 |
| (Or bullshit.) |
My flaming inferno was lit with the matchsticks of my fingertips, when you told me to stop as a child.
But now I'll burn my own kind of rubber.
Comments
Post a Comment