Manufacturing started to bleed from Jamestown in the 1950s; from the 1960s to the early 1980s it was in full hemorrhage, and it’s still in slow decline. But unlike in Buffalo, where one shutdown at Bethlehem Steel alone cut loose 7,300 workers, here people left the plant gates quietly, a few hundred at a time, until 5,000 to 8,000 industrial jobs and perhaps the same number in support industries and services had disappeared. To consider the numbers now is staggering: job loss in the magnitude of anywhere from a tenth to a third of the population. Of course, it happened over time. There was other work—service work, part-time work, work out of town. Not all the manufacturers closed. And there were malls that went up in the suburbs, chain restaurants that moved in, a new civic arena downtown, the nursing homes, Walmart, Kmart and all the other marts that duplicate strip malls on the edge of every unlucky town in the country. People soldiered on, and, in the same way that a lifetime of days looking in a mirror makes aging tolerable, they barely noticed as the town fell apart around them. Perhaps for the same reason, they barely noticed the young subcontractors from Brooklyn who started coming to town in the early 1990s to work in the drug trade then expanding along Route 17 from New York to Jamestown and from there on to Buffalo and Canada. Their children took note, though, well before Williams came on the job.
Today in the legal economy, unemployment is 5.2 percent, but as Sam Teresi, who heads development at city hall, put it: “We’re following the national trend. While the figures are looking pretty good, it takes two and three members of the family now to equal the old wage of one. And every big company is using temp agencies. If that’s frustrating for a teenager, it’s also frustrating for a forty-year-old head of household who has no health insurance and a family to take care of. At this point we’ve weathered the storm—essentially we’ve bottomed out. Now we’re looking at how to sustain real, incremental growth. Manufacturing has to be a major leg in the economic stool, but we’re realistic. Jamestown is not going to become the oasis in the industrial desert that is America.”
Teresi conceptualizes the integrated pieces of a new economy as vividly as he juggles metaphors. But he also knows that if “good jobs at good wages” ever were enough to ensure the good life, they aren’t anymore. A generation of deindustrialization did more than remake the landscape and reduce the living standards of places like Jamestown, where the median family income is about $26,000 and almost a quarter of families with children under eighteen are poor. It made insecurity—always a feature of working-class life—the central experience. After twenty-six years of a citywide experiment in “labor–management cooperation,” there is no sign that the working class has any more power or any more pride. For too many of those without enough, there’s not enough of anything: not enough time, not enough confidence, not enough culture, not enough choices, not enough love.
On the last weekend before Christmas it seemed I had the downtown to myself. Two fine-jewelry stores, a camera shop, a florist doubling as a confectioner and one or two other merchants displayed holiday lights and brimming determination. But all the action was at the D&K Store, where people clothed in weariness waited to pick through bins—89¢, 99¢, $1.99, $14.99 tops—of sequins and wood blocks, pipe cleaners, tube socks, flannel shirts, pocket screwdriver sets, ceramic figurines: the flotsam and jetsam of the retail trade for the working poor. “We gotta get your daddy something now,” a wan young woman said, pulling along two pasty tykes and searching the aisles for anything that might say, I’m special.
Do you love me, baby?
Can you feel me, baby? I been away a long time.
Is it still me, baby—the one on your mind?
I drove away from downtown with Puff Daddy’s No Way Out playing in the car at full volume. On Tania’s suggestion, the album had become my soundtrack for seeing Jamestown.
Can I touch you, baby? Is that all right with you?
Can I love you, baby? What we’re about to do
could make the whole earth move, I’ll tell you my first move.
Climb up in it slow. I ain’t tryin’ to hurt you.
Can you feel me, baby? Should I keep it right there?
Is it still me, baby? Take off your nightwear …
At the health department they say nothing links the girls who tested positive besides Williams—no common social or medical profile. Dr. Neal Rzepkowski, a family physician who treats a lot of them, told me most of his patients had a prior history of sexually transmitted disease or had engaged in anal sex; otherwise, there is no “type.”
In the first flush of the crisis officials said there was a very definite type: girls who traded sex for drugs. This persisted in the public mind even after the sheriff asserted that “in no way” was that the case; too many girls had started turning up talking about love. I was meeting mostly girls who had moved in the same circles as Williams: some, like Tania, who’d never had sex with him but knew those who had; others who had; one who was positive. Although I’ve been told there were girls from “well-off, solid families” who’d had sex with Williams as a tryst with danger, the young women I was meeting were all working-class and precarious. I drove along imagining the rapper’s lyrics as a kind of baseline unifying the fragments of life history I’d heard:
You’re seventeen and you left home years ago. Your mother bugged you or was tougher than you thought your father would be, or she just threw you out. And you love her but she never had time—or maybe she had time but not as much as you wanted. You “wanted it all.” But she couldn’t help it really ’cause there were other kids and she had to work all the time; or she could help it, but she spent all her time with her boyfriend and then got on you about yours! Or she paid too much attention, or there was too much fighting, or she was always sick, or you got pregnant, or you couldn’t take another day of your father harping on everything you’d done wrong, or … or … too many reasons you’d rather not talk about. So, you’re living with relatives, friends’ families or kids alone and in the same boat as you. You’re working midnight to eight to pay the rent and utilities, to pay for food and clothes. You’re trying to go to school, but it’s hard to stay awake and it’s a drag to be hassled as if you’re a child. You’re sick and you need an excuse. The excuse is supposed to come from your mother, but you don’t live at home. The teacher says, “Well, get one from whoever you live with.” So you get it from your girlfriend; she’s who you live with! But the teacher thinks you’re being smart, so you get in-school suspension. You don’t mind that so much ’cause at least they leave you alone to do your work or think. And you’re with all the other kids who are always in detention, the “bad kids,” the ones “who are just looking for a place to fit in—they’ll accept anyone.” You actually tried to be a prep once, ’cause it’s not like you’re poor or nothing, but you had to dress a certain way, walk a certain way, talk a certain way—it was too much. And you dreamed of being a cheerleader but you were too fat, or you were a cheerleader but with everything else you were trying to keep together it was too much. And you have average grades or below-average grades, but it’s been clear for a while that no one expects much from you, and anyway school’s a bore so you drop out. You hear little kids counting the days till they can drop out too, asking, “Can I drop out as soon as I turn sixteen, or do I have to wait until the end of the year?” Anyway, you hang out with your friends. There’s not much to do unless you swim or play basketball, but you won’t go to the Boys and Girls Club ’cause “that’s for really grubby poor kids, these little kids who just piss in the pool and turn it yellow,” and you don’t like the Y ’cause that’s where the preps go and “they have