My dad always loved to tell the story about having a drink with Jerry O'Neil, the CEO and son of the founder of General Tire. Goodrich, and General-each had its world headquarters here, and each had scores of former workers who remembered shaking hands with the founders and figureheads. The major American tire companies-Goodyear, Firestone, B. But while his surname was also part of a national brand, Knight, the larger-than-life man who also walked among us, had died in 1981. Knight, had become the cornerstone of the powerful Knight Ridder newspaper chain. Knight and groomed through the twentieth century by his son John S. The daily newspaper, the Akron Beacon Journal, founded by Charles L. John and I were part of the first generation that didn't directly associate all of our defining local institutions with a corresponding local founding figure. We'd grown up in a no-man's-land between two eras: the first, one of microdefined parochialism, and the second, one of amorphous mass culture. Authenticity is something all young men crave, which is why we sometimes wear fedoras and restore cranky British motorcycles and listen to Frank Sinatra and why suspenders occasionally come back into fashion. John was getting married in a week, and the two of us wanted to go somewhere authentic, which notion was important to us-him studying art and me studying creative writing-even if we would never say such a thing publicly.
No strippers, no tequila shots, no wild night in Vegas with a bunch of friends. This was the bar where we chose to celebrate John Puglia's "bachelor party," such as it was. You don't really want goldfish swimming in open waters surrounded by people carrying glasses of alcohol, especially when you know that some of them will get the shakes before the night is through. This was unfortunate for many reasons, but mainly because the Taj Mahal was directly across the street from the Mayflower Hotel, which had once offered the finest lodgings in town, but now was a subsidized flophouse for drunks and crazies. Off to one end of the bar, displayed on a table, was a large model of the actual Taj Mahal, complete with a moat that was stocked with goldfish. He'd spent his life visiting ruins, which was good training for operating a tavern in downtown Akron, Ohio, as the eighties drained down. The old man's bar was called the Taj Mahal because one of the ancient brothers who owned the place was something of a world traveler and had decorated the interior with photographs of himself in European capitals and on African safari and shaking hands with Pygmies and whatnot. From David Giffels' brilliant new collection, The Hard Way On Purpose: Essays and Dispatches from the Rust Belt.
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