That happened two years after his mom died of cancer. He was living by himself. He’d never met his dad — his parents had been engaged at one point, but his dad drank and bet on sports and left before Schwartz was born. When the woman from Children and Family Services came by a month after his mom’s funeral, he’d told the woman he was about to turn eighteen. The woman’s paperwork clearly said otherwise, but he was already six feet tall, weighed a hundred eighty pounds, and had little trouble buying cigarettes and sometimes even beer. “Come on,” he’d said as he stood in the apartment doorway, arms folded across his chest, the dog yapping behind him. “Do I look like I’m fourteen?” Baffled, the woman left, and though it wouldn’t have taken much investigation to prove him a liar, she never returned.
His aunt Diane’s family lived nearby, and Schwartz went there often for dinner. In retrospect it seemed strange that Diane let him live alone like that, but then again she and her husband had three little kids and a too-small apartment, and it wasn’t only strangers who equated Schwartz’s size with maturity. His mom had socked away a little money, which paid the rent.
His school — on Chicago’s South Side, near the Carr Heights projects — had metal detectors at every entrance and armed guards in the halls. The rooms had no windows, and the bolted-down desks could barely contain Schwartz’s massive frame. Even though he was white, his teachers eyed him warily; they seemed intent on averting some vague but imminent disaster. AVERT DISASTER, in fact, would have been a perfect school motto — the purpose of the place, as far as Schwartz could tell, was to keep three thousand would-be maniacs sedated by boredom until a succession of birthdays transformed them into adults. Schwartz couldn’t stand it, and the bank account was running low. In November of his sophomore year, as soon as football season ended, he stopped going to class. He got a job at a foundry — he was six-two by then, same as now, and people were more likely to ask his bench press than his age. He worked second shift, learned to drive a forklift, lugged tons of alloys from one end of the shop floor to the other. When his probationary period ended he was making $13.50 an hour, plus overtime. Some nights he drank cheap beer or Mickey’s till dawn by himself. Other nights he took girls he’d gone to school with to seafood restaurants that overlooked Lake Michigan. When he woke early enough he went to the library and read the financial news — he thought that once he’d saved a few grand he might switch to third shift and trade stocks online during the day.
No one from the school commented on his absence until the following August, when football season rolled around. A gentle drizzle dampened the pavement as he left work and headed for his car — an expansive, rust-eaten Buick without a rear bumper, which he’d bought with his first few paychecks. Work covered him with sweat and metallic soot. He climbed into the Buick and dug under the seat for a beer. It was Thursday, just shy of the weekend. He pulled out a warm, linty can. As he cracked it, one of the assistant coaches of his high school team rapped on the passenger’s-side window. Schwartz leaned over and unlocked the door. The coach wedged himself into the seat and asked Schwartz what the hell he was doing. Didn’t he think he should quit acting like a goddamn spic and get his ass back in school?
Schwartz was looking at the pouch of the coach’s sweatshirt, which sagged with the sharp weight of what was obviously a gun. He sat up tall behind the steering wheel and eyed the coach steadily. “That place is a prison,” he said.
“And this isn’t?” The coach chuckled and jerked a thumb toward the long low foundry building. He was one of the varsity assistants; Schwartz, who’d captained the JV the year before, couldn’t even remember his name.
“This is just a shithole,” Schwartz said. “Not a prison.”
The coach shrugged. The gun-form rose and fell on his gut. “Have it your way,” he said. “But this shithole doesn’t have a football team.” He climbed out of the car and was gone. Schwartz finished his beer as his crappy wipers slashed through the beading rain.
The next day, he went to school and then to practice. He hadn’t been afraid of the gun. But the gun as a gesture impressed him. It seemed to indicate, if not love, at least the possibility of such a thing. The coach hadn’t left him alone; hadn’t assumed that he knew what he was doing. Instead he bothered to get in Schwartz’s face, to tell him exactly what he thought of him, in the most forceful way he knew how. Nobody else — relatives, teachers, friends — had ever done such a thing for Schwartz, before or since. He’d vowed to do it for other people.
But lately he’d been lying, even to Henry. Especially to Henry, since Henry kept asking. Zipped tightly into the inside pocket of Schwartz’s backpack were five torn envelopes he’d already received from law schools. Each contained a letter that began with a terrible phrase: We regret to inform you. . . We cannot at this time. . . Unfortunately, our applicant pool . . .
Schwartz turned on the hallway light and held up the envelope, but it was made of quality paper, the fibers thickly woven, and he couldn’t see a thing. Maybe a quality envelope meant good news; maybe they sent thin translucent ones to the losers who didn’t get in. He rested it on his palm, gauged its weight, though he’d heard that the thick/thin envelope test was mostly bullshit. He tapped it against his palm to see if he could sense the shifting of a reply postcard — I, Mike Schwartz, humbly accept your kind offer. Impossible to tell.
This envelope contained his final hope. If you wanted to use a trite analogy, he was oh for five, and now, with two down in the ninth, he had one last chance to redeem himself. Yale had the most competitive admissions in the country, but the other schools he’d applied to were nearly as exclusive, and his thesis adviser was an honored alumna. Schwartz, at all other times in his life, did not believe in fate, but maybe fate was on his side. Maybe those five rejections were a ruse to ratchet up the suspense.
At any rate, it was absurd to stand here wondering. The decision had been made weeks ago by a bunch of deans; it could not be changed. Open the envelope, you putz, Schwartz thought. See what’s inside, react, get back to work.
He slid a fingernail under a corner of the glue, but that was as far as he could force himself to go. He sat down against the wall, let the letter fall between his thighs. The cartilage in his knees was torn to shreds, the result of too many hours behind home plate, too many sets of squats with too much weight, the bar bowed over his shoulders like a comma. The muscles in his back clenched and pulsed in painful, unpredictable rhythms. He unclasped his backpack, fished for his bottle of Vicoprofen, tossed three in his mouth. He tried to avoid Vikes while thesis-writing, but tonight was a special occasion. The whirlpool was what he needed; a good soak would soothe him and give him strength. He stepped back onto the elevator and pressed B2, the letter clenched between his teeth.
There was a brand-new whirlpool on the second floor, for which Schwartz had raised the funds, but still he preferred this one, a battered iron contraption in the subbasement beside the locker room. It was pitch-black down there, but his feet led him straight to his locker. As he twisted his combination lock in its casing, right left right, he could sense a gentle depression, like the hollow of a girl’s neck, each time he reached the right number. He pulled a towel down from the top shelf — it smelled almost clean — and lowered himself to the splintered bench behind him. He laid the letter at his right hand. The cold-water pipes dripped; the hot-water pipes reeked of singed grime. He bent down slowly, like an old man, to remove his pants and boots and socks. The concrete floors, which sloped gently to grated drains, felt slick beneath his bare feet from dozens of coats of paint.
Locker rooms, in Schwartz’s experience, were always underground, like bunkers and bomb shelters. This was less a structural necessity than a symbolic one. The locker room protected you when you were most vulnerable: just before a game, and just after. (And halfway through, if the game was football.) Before the game, you took off the uniform you wore to face the world and you put on the one you wore to face your opponent. In between, you were naked in every way. After the game ended, you
