Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2025 by The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, People, LitHub, Debutiful, and CrimeReads
For readers of Jonathan Franzen and Nathan Hill comes a haymaker of an American novel about a missing teenage boy, cases of fluid and mistaken identity, and the transformative power of boxing.
Austin, Texas: It’s the summer of 1998, and there’s a new face on the scene at Terry Tucker’s Boxing Gym. Sixteen-year-old Nathaniel Rothstein has never felt comfortable in his own skin, but under the tutelage of a swaggering, Haitian-born ex-fighter named David Dalice, he begins to come into his own. Even the boy’s slightly stoned uncle, Bob Alexander, who is supposed to be watching him for the summer, notices the change. Nathaniel is happier, more confident—tanner, even. Then one night he vanishes, leaving little trace behind.
Across the city, Charles Rex, now going simply by “X,” has been undergoing a teenage transformation of his own, trolling the phone sex hotline that his mother works, seeking an outlet for everything that feels wrong about his body, looking for intimacy and acceptance in a culture that denies him both. As a surprising and unlikely romance blooms, X feels, for a moment, like he might have found the safety he’s been searching for. But it's never that simple.
More than a decade later, Nathaniel’s uncle Bob receives a shocking tip, propelling him to open his own investigation into his nephew’s disappearance. The resulting search involves gymgoers past and present, including a down-on-his-luck twin and his opportunistic brother; a rookie cop determined to prove herself; and Alexis Cepeda, a promising lightweight, who crossed the US-Mexico border when he was only fourteen, carrying with him a license bearing the wrong name and face.
Bobbing and weaving across the ever-shifting canvas of a changing country, The Slip is an audacious, daring look at sex and race in America that builds to an unforgettable collision in the center of the ring.
Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2025 by The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, People, LitHub, Debutiful, and CrimeReads
For readers of Jonathan Franzen and Nathan Hill comes a haymaker of an American novel about a missing teenage boy, cases of fluid and mistaken identity, and the transformative power of boxing.
Austin, Texas: It’s the summer of 1998, and there’s a new face on the scene at Terry Tucker’s Boxing Gym. Sixteen-year-old Nathaniel Rothstein has never felt comfortable in his own skin, but under the tutelage of a swaggering, Haitian-born ex-fighter named David Dalice, he begins to come into his own. Even the boy’s slightly stoned uncle, Bob Alexander, who is supposed to be watching him for the summer, notices the change. Nathaniel is happier, more confident—tanner, even. Then one night he vanishes, leaving little trace behind.
Across the city, Charles Rex, now going simply by “X,” has been undergoing a teenage transformation of his own, trolling the phone sex hotline that his mother works, seeking an outlet for everything that feels wrong about his body, looking for intimacy and acceptance in a culture that denies him both. As a surprising and unlikely romance blooms, X feels, for a moment, like he might have found the safety he’s been searching for. But it's never that simple.
More than a decade later, Nathaniel’s uncle Bob receives a shocking tip, propelling him to open his own investigation into his nephew’s disappearance. The resulting search involves gymgoers past and present, including a down-on-his-luck twin and his opportunistic brother; a rookie cop determined to prove herself; and Alexis Cepeda, a promising lightweight, who crossed the US-Mexico border when he was only fourteen, carrying with him a license bearing the wrong name and face.
Bobbing and weaving across the ever-shifting canvas of a changing country, The Slip is an audacious, daring look at sex and race in America that builds to an unforgettable collision in the center of the ring.
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Overview
This is a layered mystery that bridges the timelines of two youths grappling with identity and belonging. One youth’s disappearance echoes through the struggles of another in a world that’s not quite ready to understand.
Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2025 by The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, People, LitHub, Debutiful, and CrimeReads
For readers of Jonathan Franzen and Nathan Hill comes a haymaker of an American novel about a missing teenage boy, cases of fluid and mistaken identity, and the transformative power of boxing.
Austin, Texas: It’s the summer of 1998, and there’s a new face on the scene at Terry Tucker’s Boxing Gym. Sixteen-year-old Nathaniel Rothstein has never felt comfortable in his own skin, but under the tutelage of a swaggering, Haitian-born ex-fighter named David Dalice, he begins to come into his own. Even the boy’s slightly stoned uncle, Bob Alexander, who is supposed to be watching him for the summer, notices the change. Nathaniel is happier, more confident—tanner, even. Then one night he vanishes, leaving little trace behind.
Across the city, Charles Rex, now going simply by “X,” has been undergoing a teenage transformation of his own, trolling the phone sex hotline that his mother works, seeking an outlet for everything that feels wrong about his body, looking for intimacy and acceptance in a culture that denies him both. As a surprising and unlikely romance blooms, X feels, for a moment, like he might have found the safety he’s been searching for. But it's never that simple.
More than a decade later, Nathaniel’s uncle Bob receives a shocking tip, propelling him to open his own investigation into his nephew’s disappearance. The resulting search involves gymgoers past and present, including a down-on-his-luck twin and his opportunistic brother; a rookie cop determined to prove herself; and Alexis Cepeda, a promising lightweight, who crossed the US-Mexico border when he was only fourteen, carrying with him a license bearing the wrong name and face.
Bobbing and weaving across the ever-shifting canvas of a changing country, The Slip is an audacious, daring look at sex and race in America that builds to an unforgettable collision in the center of the ring.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781668030707 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Simon & Schuster |
| Publication date: | 06/03/2025 |
| Pages: | 496 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.60(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
1. Tomato Can LET ME TELL YOU something,” said David Dalice, twenty-seven years in Texas from “the baddest shanty in all of Haiti” and Director of Hospitality at the Shoal Creek Rehabilitation Center. “To get to your woman’s heart, you get down between those legs, stick your tongue in deep deep deep, and get as close to that pulsing organ as you possibly can.”
David offered this lesson as he led his newest trainee on morning rounds. It was a standard part of the How to Please Your Woman seminar he’d been presenting to his teenage male underlings for decades. The year was 1998, the city Austin, the floor Assisted Living. The trainee was Nathaniel Rothstein, and this was his first day on the job.
The job, a volunteer position, was to assist David in making Shoal Creek—a “luxury eldercare community,” according to the brochure—feel like home to its residents. As Director of Hospitality, David was responsible for the happiness of all of them—from the still-with-it here on the first floor, to the losing-it on the second, to the lost-it on top—and walking these long halls was the bread-and-butter of his every day. He’d remind passersby of the 10 a.m. calisthenics class in the multipurpose room, poke his head into the games parlor to visit with the ladies playing bridge. (“Arthritis acting up? On a young thing like you? Madam, you don’t look a day over nineteen!”)
David had worked at Shoal Creek since immigrating to the Texas capital back when he was twenty. Now forty-seven, he’d become, over the years, a star in this place, and he strode the floral-carpeted corridors with the low-key bonhomie of a man sure of his position.
“And hello to Dr. Abruzzi!” David said as a stout and whiskered woman walkered past. Dr. Gloria Abruzzi was David’s favorite resident: a retired psychologist whose sharp tongue belied her increasingly foggy memory.
“A most beautiful purple on that shirt,” David told her now.
“Matches my varicose veins,” said Dr. Abruzzi, winking at David, then grimacing as she passed his newest charge.
Nathaniel Rothstein raised a hand, then stuffed it back into the pocket of his oversized Patriots hoodie. He was the sort of pudgy, sullen sluggard who slunk into Shoal Creek each June from the torpid swamp that was the high school volunteer pool: baby face smattered in freckles, with a puff of coarse brown hair and a blank expression that suggested he might be filled with a simmering rage, or else nothing at all.
Since arriving at Shoal Creek at sunup, the boy had been almost silent, lagging a few paces behind David like an adolescent Igor, nodding slightly whenever advice was offered, but otherwise uninterested to the point of near invisibility. Few of the residents seemed to notice him.
Only during David’s sexual digressions did Nathaniel show signs of life, glancing up from his grubby Vans to examine his new mentor. David was soft and strong, like a snowman in scrubs. He wore a thin mustache, parted in the center, and often sported the sort of authoritative grin that would’ve gone well with a crown and scepter. Each time he caught Nathaniel looking at him, he looked back, and the speed with which Nathaniel then turned away made David Dalice feel powerful as the sun.
“Comrade, I’m signing you up for community service,” the boy’s uncle, Bob Alexander, had told David three weeks prior. This was at Terry Tucker’s Boxing Gym, where David’s Saturday morning workouts had evolved, in middle age, from exercise with a side of gossip to the other way around. Bob was among his favorite conversationalists, a fifty-eight-year-old history professor and David’s most consistent source of weed.
Bob had explained the situation as they collapsed into two worn barber’s chairs along Old-Timers’ Row after their workout. He needed to find a volunteer gig for his sixteen-year-old nephew, who’d be spending the summer with the Alexanders as a favor to Bob’s younger sister “back east.” Days before, Nathaniel—“a schlemiel of the first order”—had gotten into a fight with “some lemon” at school. “Big deal, right? High school stuff. Except...” Here Bob leaned into David. “My guy snaps. Breaks the other kid’s jaw! Police and everything.”
“Your sister didn’t think, ‘Man, this boy can defend himself’”
“My sister’s tired,” said Bob. “Single mother, raising some gloomy kid? And now he’s suspended for the rest of the year? She wanted them to toss him into juvie for a couple days! Scare him straight. I said, ‘Linda, he’s a white kid from Newton, Massachusetts...’”
David let out a guttural laugh. “If I was a white boy from that rich place, you know the first thing I’d do?”
“If you were smart, rob a bank.” Bob pulled a dime bag from the pocket of his tiny tennis shorts, tossed it David’s way. “I told her, ‘Linda, they’ll do it all right, but only after they find your body!’”
David had assured Bob Alexander they’d be fine. He’d worked at Shoal Creek close to three decades, and for many of those years had taken under his wing a summer volunteer. Usually these were wayward high school boys who the other department heads didn’t want to deal with: the crater-faced grandsons of wealthy donors, the burger-breathed spawn of longtime trustees.
Indeed, David had learned long ago that among the various do-gooders who populated the place, he derived the most pleasure from the ones who did the least good. The rosy gerontology majors who speed-walked onto the scene straight from College Station? It was never any fun with those competent souls, their small, tasteful gold crucifixes and toothy grins making David feel each of his forty-seven years. Stoners, slackers, cultural Wiccans: these were his people.
David snapped his neck, indicating Nathaniel should follow. He usually saved his most lurid commentary for the locked Special Care Unit—best to keep it clean around the sentient—but this was not a man who countered silence with more of the same.
“Tell me this,” said David, in a voice so low only the boy could hear. “When was the last time you think I ate some pussy?”
Nathaniel winced in disgust. “How should I know?”
David let a heavy silence fall between them. In these situations, David knew, patience was key, and it didn’t take long for the boy to surrender.
“Last week?” said Nathaniel.
David let out a high-pitched Oh! “You think that low of me? Last week? Last night I ate the finest, wettest pussy on all of Highway 290.” Then, at normal volume: “And a good morning to you, Mrs. King!”
At the service elevator, David pressed the up arrow, then gave the boy a friendly elbow. “She called herself Juanita Boggs.” The elevator dinged. “Juanita Boggs of Elgin, Texas.”
“Cool,” said Nathaniel, trying to sound indifferent.
“And how about you?” David asked, after they were both inside. They stared straight ahead as the doors closed in front of them. “When did this young stallion last lick the sweetness?”
Eight hours later, David pulled into the gravel lot outside Terry Tucker’s Boxing Gym.
He’d been coming to the gym since it opened, to little fanfare, in 1984. In the time since, he’d watched it become an Austin institution: pros and amateurs jab-jab-jabbing alongside clean-cut Dell executives and retired hippies, a jumble of humanity all sweating it out as one.
This was not his usual gym-ing hour. In recent years, David had fallen in with an irascible assemblage of men in their late-thirties and forties (plus Bob Alexander) who gathered early in the mornings, though David’s work schedule allowed him to join only on Saturdays. These were a chatty band of boomers, but for David all white and all dads, but for David all men for whom sartorial and hygienic considerations no longer factored into their pre-gym preparation. Who cared if the thick band of Stan Hart’s jockstrap was somehow always visible over the waist of his shorts, or if Lee Gorbinski, the runner of the bunch, wore smelly athletic shirts with globular stains at chest level from where he’d Vaselined his nipples? Not Stan Hart, not Lee Gorbinski. David suspected Bob, holder of an endowed chair in American history at the state’s flagship university, rolled in each Saturday without having so much as brushed his teeth.
David scanned the lot for Terry’s truck, considered driving away. It had been years since David visited the gym on a weekday afternoon, when the real fighters outnumbered the laity, and while he craved the relief a workout would provide, he knew he’d probably be the heaviest and oldest guy training.
He would’ve preferred his normal after-work routine: a trip to Central Market, Dutch oven simmering and a cool glass of pinot gris at the ready by the time his wife stepped through the door. But Ramona Stew, chief nursing officer at Brackenridge Hospital, had a dinner meeting, which meant that if David—who was prone to introspection but tried hard not to be—went home, he’d be left alone to consider what he’d made of his forty-seven years on this planet.
How was it that a man who’d climbed the ranks at Shoal Creek, from orderly to chief orderly, social services to activities, all the way to administration, a man who now lived among the UT professoriate in leafy Hyde Park, how was it that this man found himself, summer after summer, regaling sulky skater boys and teenage Dungeon Masters with stories of invented sex partners, when he still had an actual sex partner with whom he had actual sex?
They’d been married nearly thirty years, David and Ramona. Despite his creaky knees and her lousy back, he even still licked the sweetness on occasion, though he wouldn’t phrase it that way in front of his wife, for Ramona was the sort of earthy Austin woman who felt strongly that if you’re too squeamish to call a body part by its proper name you probably shouldn’t stick your tongue in it, either.
What would Ramona say if she ever learned about her husband’s “lessons”? He’d continued with them all that morning, into the afternoon. Had Nathaniel ever taken two women at once? Taken three? Did he wash himself properly ahead of the act? “Before you fill the cavity,” the teacher had told his pupil, “you always clean the drill.”
David got out of the car.
Time to punch it out, he told himself. Every now and then, David managed to truly let go at the boxing gym, to get so lost in a workout he could channel another version of himself—a better version. Nothing like smacking the shit out of a heavy bag to get your head on straight. The problem he’d created for himself was, objectively, a silly one, but David knew that like a scrape resulting in sepsis, silly could turn serious if left untreated.
In the shower before his shift that morning, David had vowed, once and for all, to forsake the filthy talk. He’d made this commitment before, but always, till then, in the gloom of the just-after: no easier time to swear off drinking than once he’d emptied the bottle. Today—Monday, June 1—was supposed to be different. 1998 was different. That winter, only a month after the Drudge Report published the name Monica Lewinsky for the first time, a sexual harassment allegation had led to the ouster of a custodian at Shoal Creek.
Now text-heavy posters outlining the Federal Sexual Harassment Policy adorned the walls of the staff locker room, and HR had instituted a mandatory half-day training on the subject for all employees. If any summer was the summer for Professor Dalice to go on sabbatical, it was this one, especially since his latest student was the nephew of an actual friend. David knew he needed to, and he intended to, right up until the moment he saw that dumpy boy.
“Dalice,” grunted Terry Tucker from behind the desk in his small front office. Terry was sorting crumpled cash into piles, didn’t look up as he spoke.
“Terry Tucker motherfucker,” sang David. “How’s business?”
“Be better if you ever paid.” Terry was a small and muscular white guy with a brown goatee and, at the moment, rectangular readers halfway down his nose. His first real job had been working under David, who was three years older, as an assistant housekeeper at Shoal Creek. In the quarter century since, the men had maintained an uneasy friendship. David had seen what Terry had been like as a young man—talk about a lemon—and his unlikely rise both annoyed and fascinated David, Terry the canker sore he could never stop licking.
“You like my new fencing?” said Terry.
David had noticed it as soon as he’d parked: two metal bike racks that Terry had installed in front of the open garage doors that faced the gravel lot, his latest innovation to force all patrons to enter through his office. “I like to make my debtors look me in the eye,” said Terry, still sorting. “Don’t forget to sign in.”
David looked down at the sign-in sheet affixed to a clipboard on the edge of the desk. “Sure thing, boss,” he said, and, ignoring Terry, went down the step that led into the gym proper.
4 p.m. on a weekday: no errant jockstrap waistbands here. The current inhabitants of Terry Tucker’s were mostly Black and Mexican, big guys in track pants and slim guys in A-shirts, guys who slung over their shoulders not the tidy athletic bags popular among the just-for-fun crowd but the heavy duffels of actual athletes.
David lowered himself onto the bench across from the ring, setting his own tidy gym bag next to him. Soon the after-work crowd would start to accumulate. For now, there was still room to spread out, the heavy bags unoccupied. Gloves came last for the real fighters. Most worked jobs that started early—construction, UPS—and now they were at the beginning of their gym routines, Terry Tucker’s just starting to come to life. A buzz-cut blond dude—fat biceps, tank top already dirty with sweat—sent a speed bag ricocheting between the drum and his sideways fists. On the apron of the canvas, a wiry Black woman sat entranced—headphones on, long legs dangling—returning to her body after what, David assumed, had been a long day. He’d been there before.
In the ring, Felix Barrowman, twenty-four, pummeled an invisible opponent, letting out a pa! pa! pa! each time he unleashed a combination. Felix was a sinewy Black guy, a “green-eyed Casanova” in the estimation of Ramona, and the most promising fighter Terry Tucker’s Boxing Gym had ever seen.
“Looking like a future middleweight champion of the world!” called David as the fight clock beeped, signaling the end of the round. “Sak pase?” David could never resist testing Felix with the Creole greeting he’d taught the boxer.
“Na-boo-lay,” said Felix, breathing heavy but grinning, his accent wholly American. The year before, Felix had knocked out a Brazilian up-and-comer on HBO’s Boxing After Dark, and in the process had turned himself into the one who was up-and-coming. Word was if Felix played his cards right, he could set himself and Terry up for a chance at a title.
“Get me four, five more KOs, Tuck thinks I got a shot,” said Felix.
“That is what I like to hear,” said David. From his bag, he took out his neatly coiled hand wraps, unfurled them.
The fight clock beeped, sending Felix back to the center of the canvas. David began to slowly wrap his hands. He had to give Terry credit: the man was a savvy operator. Terry’s amateurs frequently made it deep into Texas State Golden Gloves, and each year one or two turned pro. None had the earning potential of Felix, but that didn’t matter. The bulk of Terry’s earnings came from monthly membership fees, and the presence of these “real” boxers, who by and large looked one way, gave the gym a legitimacy that attracted the much larger pool of hobbyists—the Bob Alexander set—who by and large looked another.
It was the same reason these nonfighters thrilled at the lack of air-conditioning, why they took pleasure in the mostly harmless riffraff who lurked around the edges of the place.
A couple years before, the Statesman had run a story on the gym, “Not Your Trendy, High-Priced Fitness Club: Everyone Welcome at Terry Tucker’s,” and it was true: everyone was welcome. Octavio Gonzalez had twice been deported, twice found his way back. The first time Josue Mendoza showed up at the gym he was living out of his car. At least a half dozen of Terry’s guys had, at one point or another, done time.
It was real, this place, in a way the big box gyms weren’t. And though many of the nonfighters were drawn to Terry Tucker’s, at least in part, out of that weird, white-collar obsession with “authenticity,” it was this crossing of worlds that also gave the gym its magic. David had to admit it appealed to him, too.
Alone in the thicket of heavy bags, David swung his arms in a half-hearted shoulder stretch, regarded his world-weary competitor. At Terry Tucker’s, duct tape cured everything—a permanent Band-Aid for any rip or tear—and the gym owner had taken his love of the stuff to an extreme on David’s favored heavy bag, now mummified from head to toe.
David got into fight position. A few Christmases ago, Ramona had gotten him a pair of black Everlast gloves that Velcroed at the wrists to replace his battered lace-ups. They still looked new. David pushed the bag to make it swing. He jabbed softly, jabbed again.
This was the silliest part of David’s silly problem: none of his stories were true. He didn’t even want them to be true. Never unfaithful or much tempted was David Dalice, yet get him alone with a concupiscent Trekkie and he’d launch into the most prick-tingling of sexual soliloquies without so much as bothering to remove his wedding band. Worse still, he liked it, liked the thrill of dangling the bait and reeling in his charges.
David had a well-established timeline: each summer, a new volunteer began work the first week of June, and each summer, by Independence Day, David would have him in his thrall, so much so that even the most sheepish of his subordinates wouldn’t dare so much as smile at the hemp-scented, devil-stick-wielding temptress who invariably worked at their favored Spencer Gifts location without first consulting the Magical Pussy Whisperer of Shoal Creek Rehab.
His sheltered white underlings had such particular notions of Black sexuality that David as Don Juan wasn’t exactly a difficult sell. “Is it true what they say about Black guys down there?” more than one acolyte had asked him over the years, always in the chummy, conspiratorial tone that meant August had arrived. Here his answers were so off the wall that no person who’d seen a penis, let alone possessed one, could’ve possibly taken David Dalice at his word.
Nevertheless, Wayne Devereaux, summer volunteer class of 1989, still believed his old boss was a Guinness World Record holder in this regard, and would even, on a golf outing to Palm Springs as a sales associate for IBM, claim he saw it once: an uncut phallus so colossal that, like the fingernails featured in those same record books, it had begun to coil. (“And this new DB2 Universal Database...” he’d add, setting up to hit the drive. “Trust me boys: it’s gonna make your schlongs just as hard.”)
Why did David do this? There was little in his history to suggest it was a good idea. After all, there were few demographic groups who needed, for their own survival, to master the social mores of an exotic culture more quickly than six-foot-three, two-hundred-pound Haitian men in suburban Texas nursing homes circa 1970. That was the year he started at Shoal Creek, the year he turned twenty. To the residents then, he was less David than Black Goliath, his brawny body not yet softened into a more palatable pudge, his short Afro a sign of... well, who knew exactly, but nothing good.
Change or die, the saying goes, and the Shoal Creek citizenry of the first Nixon administration had chosen the latter. This was where Austin’s moneyed liberals hid their most embarrassing relations: Red Scared grand-thises and sodomy-fixated great-thats and slobbering uncles who’d lost control of their tongues but not their checkbooks, lest they miss their monthly three dollars to the John Birch Society. Yes, this was where the good folk of Austin stowed away those doddering olds, and at a discount, too, for what was then called Shoal Creek Home for the Aged was the most budget of extended-care facilities: dank and fetid, the common room a semicircle of the semiconscious, each as static as the fuzz emanating from the broken TV they huddled around.
It hadn’t occurred to him then that he’d be there long. He was like a lot of twenty-year-olds: living his life as if it weren’t his life, as if life were something that would start at some later date. Monsieur Sans Souci his father called him, Mr. Carefree. David had been born into Haiti’s sliver of a middle class, to civil servants, both small and bookish. The family joke had always been that he’d been mixed up with someone else’s child at birth, leaving Rose and Samuel Dalice with an easygoing jock who would grow to tower over them.
He didn’t lack ambition. David imagined a big future for himself—in business, maybe, even law—but he was young. What was wrong with a year spent lifting weights, taking a class or two to “get back into it” before committing to a career? “Bonne idée” was his father’s take, which translated loosely into “I’ve heard about a scholarship for Caribbean students at a Black college in Texas and will be covertly applying on your behalf.”
It was a bad match from the start. He found sleepy Austin eerily staid compared with the go-go-go of his old neighborhood. Years later, he’d see The Wizard of Oz and think back to his early time stateside as much the opposite, a denizen of bustling Emerald City blown away to live out his days with farm folk in black and white.
He felt especially out of sorts in the dorm. David was mortified to spend his first night stuck on the toilet in the communal bathroom, his gut not yet acclimated to cafeteria chicken à la king.
His English was passable, but not good enough for what was expected of him. His class-clown persona didn’t jibe with his classmates’ studiousness, for these were young people raised with that twice-as-good ethos, who knew what it would take to succeed Black in Texas and intended to make it happen. At home he could rein in his more impish tendencies, but here his self-consciousness got the better of him: he’d come late to class and couldn’t sit still once he got there.
David had another problem, too. His scholarship covered only tuition and housing. Mr. Carefree needed a job.
“I always say you haven’t lived till you’ve scraped the gunk off another man’s pecker,” Shoal Creek’s grizzled chief orderly told him as he showed David how to prepare a patient for a bed bath on his first day. He tossed David a washcloth, made for the door. “So live, kid. Live.”
It wasn’t sexy, but unlike English Comp I, it felt possible. A month in Texas and a building’s worth of almost-dead Texans was something of a relief.
David kept his head down in the beginning, barely spoke a word for a week. It didn’t matter. On his first Tuesday, a man accused him of stealing his wife’s Galmor rose gold wristwatch, despite the fact that it had been buried with her fourteen years prior. An unhappy couple, married six decades and each bent on outlasting the other, both privately inquired about David’s spell-casting abilities. And then there was the poor United Daughter of the Confederacy, who arose on Christmas 1965 to find she’d forgotten who she was but would see David ambling down the hall five years later and suddenly remember. Otherwise in a permanent hypnagogic state, she’d dissolve into what can only be described as a Psycho-style screaming fit whenever she saw him, until the danger passed and she could return to her forgetful slumber.
For some, it was too much, and each year a handful of Black employees—spit on or cussed at or called “mammy” or “alligator bait” one time too many—would walk off the job. But David Dalice had an advantage in dealing with the dying of Shoal Creek: they weren’t his people. At least that’s what he told himself. Not my people, not my country. Who cared what they called him? This was acting, more or less. And so, he learned to act the part: to smile broadly, to laugh jollily, to let the people know he came in peace.
Was David Dalice good at this? Oh, was he good. (It felt good to be good.) When he entered a resident’s room, he knocked three times, announced himself, and once inside, spoke with his palms extended, as if he were dealing with an anxious pet. He remembered names, birthdays. Put people at ease.
An accomplished flirt, he started dating Ramona, then a nurse, not to mention a white woman ten years his senior. Later, they’d tell people that after David flunked out his second semester, they had to marry or else he’d be sent home. They weren’t exactly forced into it. Ramona was a nurse’s nurse, the sort of plainspoken DIYer whose flinty competence (and, alas, heterosexuality) meant she always assumed she’d die alone. Here she’d finally met a man who appreciated her droll candor. As for David, alone with Ramona he could let down the mask. He vented about schoolwork, about politics back home. Being with an older woman turned him on.
As the snarling bigotry of one dying generation gave way to more cloying forms of white supremacy, David’s stock only rose. By ’73, he was chief orderly. By ’75, employee of the year. His annual performance reviews were glowing. A breath of fresh air! (1977) David, you’re unshakable! (1979) “You asking if I’m Haitian?” he’d tell residents skittish about HIV in the mid-1980s. “Don’t worry, young lady: I’m just a Cuban with a tan.”
If, at times, he wanted to pick up cranky Hank Foster and shake him, throw fussy Mrs. Bowers’s wig down the laundry chute, if he’d fought with Ramona or was just in a bad mood, the residents would never know, because at Shoal Creek he wasn’t David Dalice but “David Dalice,” happy warrior. And as the years passed, as “David” became as indispensable to the people there as the grab bars in the showers, he spent so much time in character that David David revealed himself not in days or in hours but in moments: a goodbye kiss as his wife went off to a meeting, a few whales on the heavy bag after a dumb day at work.
Now when items went “missing” at Shoal Creek, residents came to David for help. They proffered baked goods on his birthday, introduced him proudly to their visiting kids. He was Director of Hospitality. An American success story. And yet...
What was David—real David—really?
Despite his ascendance to administration, he knew he was little more than a glorified activities director. The new title had come after ElderPlus Inc. took over in ’88, turning humble Shoal Creek Home for the Aged into high-end Shoal Creek Rehabilitation Center (“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity,” was Ramona’s/George Orwell’s take). New faux-marble flooring in the lobby; new “studio spaces” for yoga and art; same $26,000 a year.
Not peanuts, but his was not the salary that had moved them from a rickety apartment on West Sixth to a condo in Clarksville to the three-bedroom bungalow they now called home.
It’s not like Ramona kept him there. Ramona Stew, 1998: skin like a rattlesnake from all those summers topless at Barton Springs and bottomless at Hippie Hollow, butt-length hair now a regal white in the style of a wizard. She’d moved to public hospital work years before, had long thought her “overqualified, underappreciated, hot-as-hell husband” was too good to be “stuck on some Carnival cruise down the River Styx.”
What even Ramona didn’t know was that five months earlier, at the start of the spring ’98 term, David had enrolled in night classes at Austin Community College. He was a people person, she always said. Why not try for a degree in social work? Become a therapist?
A therapist. It sounded modest enough to be possible: he could do it in five, six years if he buckled down. There was respectability in therapy, some money, even. Real conversations with real people. Besides, his old academic woes seemed so distant all this time later. “You’ll reduce to part-time,” Ramona suggested. “We have the money.”
Still, he had his doubts, so off to poker night, he told Ramona. Off to poker night with the menfolk and if all went well, surprise!, guess where I really was, my Wizardess?
It was a surprise all right. This time around, he was fifteen years older than his next-youngest classmate. He felt enormous, cartoonishly so, and couldn’t face forward but had to angle sideways, the manufacturers of individual classroom desks apparently unversed in the bellies of middle-aged men. Worse, though he knew a pronoun was different from a noun, when the instructor, who looked fresh out of college herself, asked him for a definition, he felt himself lapsing into garrulous “David” mode, unable somehow to say in his own voice that he just wasn’t sure.
“I believe the answer is ‘A thing’” he tried with a too-big grin.
If she’d said, “That’s a noun, not a pronoun,” or given the correct answer, he might’ve stayed, but instead the instructor offered a dramatic wince and snapped her fingers. “So close!” she’d said, as one might address a first grader. “So close!” she’d said, in a way that made David know he wasn’t close at all.
Why couldn’t he have just done what every other man did when they realized they hadn’t become the person they had set out to be? Watch too much porn or start running marathons, marinate steak while downing a vodka tonic, pour another and ruminate over the grill?
That might’ve been David Dalice’s fate, if not for one thing... That gang of gofers, that wretched rafter of turkeys. Why did they obsess him so, those sorry white boys, one assigned to him each summer, whose lives, he’d learned over three decades, never turned out quite as he imagined?
Consider the case of Wayne Devereaux, the Guinness Book true believer. At seventeen he’d arrived at Shoal Creek tanned and towheaded, in seemingly excellent health, but tasked with so much as wheeling a resident from one end of a corridor to another and he took on the bearing of the chronically fatigued, maundering down the hall like the dazed survivor of a terrorist attack.
Yet somehow this same Wayne Devereaux, 2.4 GPA, a cool 1120 on the SAT, would go on to Texas A&M University, on to the business school there, and then to IBM.
It wasn’t just Wayne, either. Over the years, it seemed all of David’s laziest disciples had scaled heights staggeringly disproportionate to their own nonexistent ambitions. The most vacuous went on to found an ad agency. The biggest drunk was in oil and gas. Last summer’s tutee, now a freshman at Dartmouth, would in time become a senior executive at National Instruments, but not before gaining notoriety in Hanover for his frequent (and admittedly epic) contributions to a website called RateMyPoop. “You taught me how to #2,” he’d written to David in an email, with a link to his most-lauded specimen.
Some men in David’s position might’ve tried to live vicariously through their overprivileged toadies—trading Hustlers in the men’s room, smoking up together in the woods behind the staff lot. But David had no interest in such foolishness. Real power was making them live vicariously through him.
No booze or cars or real women need apply. Only stories of three-ways in Fredericksburg and gang bangs in Pflugerville, of spit-roasting Miss Abilene 1987 with—who could possibly believe this?—Mr. T.
And who could blame him, really?
How many marriages might’ve been saved, how many midlife nipple piercings or ill-advised hair bleachings avoided, if only all men had an everlasting coterie of horny teenage boys hanging on their every word?
And so, summer after summer, day after day, he’d taught his silly lessons, for David Dalice was an addict, and those children, those profound mediocrities who would one day rule the world, those children were his drugs.
At Terry Tucker’s Boxing Gym, the after-work influx had begun. Now other sounds subsumed the staccato smack of the speed bag, the pa! pa! pa!s Felix Barrowman let loose in the ring. The rowdy salaams of bros reunited, the slightly unhinged chatter of the deskbound finally unleashed. In the weight room, civilians commandeered the ancient machines the boxers never bothered with, setting off the ventilator hum of Terry’s Reagan-era StairMaster, the tumble-dry drone from the dusty blades of the air bike.
The boxers did not mind these intrusions. They fed off the manic energy of the newcomers, knew that even if they’d been feeling lethargic all afternoon, they were the hot shots now, and they responded accordingly, nothing more invigorating than being watched.
They smacked harder, pa!-ed louder, and David did, too, his slow and steady rotation around the bag gaining steam. Jabs and crosses yielded to more intricate combinations, the final thirty seconds of each round a nonstop barrage.
Terry was up now, too, politicking. He buzzed about, welcoming passing gymgoers with jabs to their guts or bits of clipped instruction. The boxers he called Barrowman, Chavez, Dupree. For the paying customers he had nicknames: “That the Smile from Kyle? Get in here, man.” “Protect your face, A-List. Those teeth don’t look cheap!”
David could always hear, in Terry’s glad-handing, a little too much of his own Shoal Creek self: how he used pet names to cozy up to the nurses (“Miss Down-to-Business,” “The Minx of Managua”), and curried favor with the male residents by trading sobriquets of the Grand Poohbah variety (“There’s the Boss Man!” “Hiya, Chief!”).
It bothered David, this kind-of similarity between them, bothered him like all of their other kind-of similarities. The nicknames, the fact that Terry had his own pack of followers, even more loyal to him than the summer volunteers were to David. While some of the pros had their own people, Terry trained all the amateurs himself, and David had seen how those young men revered him. He wasn’t a father figure exactly (to Terry’s displeasure, most of them already had fathers, which meant that if they ever turned pro, they already had managers, too), but a trusted uncle for sure.
They called Terry “Coach” and brought their girlfriends over to his place in Bryker Woods to watch pay-per-view fights and swim in the pool, Terry’s wife, Elise, always ready with aluminum trays of tortillas and taco fixings. The regulars at the gym were regulars at Terry’s fight-watching parties, too, and though David often liked to tell Ramona he was “thinking about skipping this one,” he always ended up deep in one of Terry’s leather recliners, wishing he hadn’t gone for that third Corona, hadn’t praised Elise’s seven-layer dip with quite such zeal.
Whenever Terry passed David now, he didn’t acknowledge him, and this only made David throw with more ferocity. Hook to the head! Hook to the body! One-two! One-two! One-two!
When was the last time he’d gone this hard?
The trouble with this place, thought David, as more and more patrons poured into the gym, was that nobody remembered anything.
Austin’s population had doubled every twenty-five years since the Civil War, each generation bemoaning the changing city as if their particular cohort played no part in the change. In the popular imagination, the most Austin of Austinites were those coriaceous old hippies who seemed to have sprung from the sun-scorched Texas soil like weeds; David had spent enough years among the CNAs and orderlies of Shoal Creek to know many Black families had been around generations longer.
David’s T-shirt was now thick with sweat. The heavy bags hung from chains affixed to the ceiling, and when David looked up he could see they were all jangling. Around him, fraternity boys and those boys’ future selves—insurance brokers, engineers, CPAs—swung wildly. Next to David, two middle-aged women in long T-shirts from vacations past worked opposite ends of a bag, all four of their sneakered feet facing it dead-on. Were David in the mood, he would’ve shown the men how power came not from their arms but their legs, would’ve corrected the ladies’ stances. But David wasn’t in the mood.
To the assembled, he was just another body at Terry Tucker’s Boxing Gym, his own role in Terry’s history unknown to them. How many of these people were even in Austin in 1973, when Terry, then nineteen, began working under David at Shoal Creek? He’d been a grungy creature, Terry had, more acne than flesh, with Muppetish brown hair and an aroma so ripe it came off him in plumes, the skunky scent of a pothead Pig-Pen.
Of the many unlikely trajectories of David’s disciples, it was Terry’s whose rubbed him rawest, for it seemed to David that in a parallel universe, his ex-minion’s journey—from village dumbass to Austin institution—might’ve, could’ve, been his own. Terry Tucker motherfucker: the successful owner of a boxing gym? The same boxing gym where David now spent his Saturday mornings, mostly gossiping with Bob Alexander, for a membership fee, which he did sometimes pay, of twenty-five dollars a month?
It had started as a joke, the whole boxing thing, during David’s third year on the job. Early that fall, a fight manager named Lemuel Pugh became a temporary resident at Shoal Creek, sentenced to a month of bed rest for breaking his hip. No one quite like Lem Pugh back in Port-au-Prince: dainty as a kinglet, with a voice like sand in the eyes and the stringy hair of a geriatric Jesus. (“We’ve returned to that Peyton Place three times since my last movement,” were the first words he ever spoke to David, referring, David had to assume, to the television, its picture spinning like a slot machine, “so how ’bout a bit more prune juice in the sippy?”)
Back then, Lem was the state’s premier manager of tomato cans: “has-beens, coulda-beens, and never-would-bes,” Lem liked to call them, whose sole purpose was to provide young fighters of actual promise with easy wins to pad their records. A few of Lem’s tomato cans—called such because dropped ones leaked red—were well-past-their-prime heavyweights. Others were untrained Samsons whose ambitions outweighed—or, depending on the man, perfectly aligned with—their abilities. In the end, the only real requirement was a willingness to get in the ring.
It didn’t take Lem long to realize he’d hit pay dirt with the staff at Shoal Creek: a bevy of big boys in need of extra cash. Big boys and puny Terry, who Lem would later sign to fight a woman in an ill-advised riff on the Battle of the Sexes.
It was ludicrous from the start, this cadre of orderlies and nursing assistants re-inventing themselves as professional boxers. Even before small, white Terry arrived on the scene, they were a sight, a gaggle of titanic Black men from Baytown and Barbados, Port Arthur and Port-au-Prince, whose glee at the sheer absurdity of the situation—getting paid? for this?—propelled them out of bed at 4:15 each morning and into the dank recesses of the Town Lake YMCA, a circus of strongmen with not a minute of fight experience among them:
Step right up to witness “One-Eyed” Ralph from Loss Prevention—eye patch covering his left socket, eyeball still intact somewhere in the high grasses of Tân An—test his dexterity while sparring with the speed bag!
See Ernest “Zaftig” Wilks, only five years away from gastric band surgery, attempt to drag a truck tire connected to a chain around the Y parking lot without going into cardiac arrest!
Even David, the strongest of the lot, had trouble finding rhythm with the double-end bag, and at least once each session had to stop to redo his hand wraps, having not wound them tight enough to begin with.
And yet—and to David this was the most curious part, and the most exhilarating—the other gymgoers seemed blind to their incompetence, accepted without question that the Shoal Creek gang of tomato cans was indeed the real deal. How credulous, these white men! Were they so focused on girth, on hue, that they couldn’t see these tenderfoots had no earthly idea what they were doing?
In the locker room, buff UT kids asked after the men’s records (“We undefeated,” deadpanned Ernest Wilks) while stout gym rats, furry as actual rats, trolled for tips on training (“Y’all just watch and learn,” said One-Eyed Ralph). “Is it true,” implored a gnomish graybeard, naked as the Lorax, “that before a fight you boys abstain?” (“Abstain?” gasped David in mock horror. “Before a fight I require extra relations!” he said, to a whistle from the man and the hoots of the Shoal Creekers).
Lem threw Terry into the mix a few weeks into their training, after hearing that the state’s winningest female pugilist, Holly Hendrix, was looking to fight a man. Women’s boxing was still seen as a novelty act in ’73. That September, Billie Jean King had trounced Bobby Riggs on the tennis court, earning the respect of skeptics. Holly hoped to follow suit.
The trouble was that no one wanted to get in the ring with her. To her male counterparts, many of them Black and Mexican, beating the shit out of a twenty-two-year-old white woman seemed like a poor career choice. Losing to her might’ve been worse. A tomato can was needed, preferably one who wasn’t strong enough to get a lucky shot off or accidentally instigate a race riot. Shoal Creek’s assistant housekeeper fit the bill.
The insertion of Terry into this strange enterprise only added to the others’ burgeoning sense of legitimacy, for now there was a boxer definitively worse than they were. On Terry’s first day of training, they stood in a half-moon observing him as he rain-danced around the double-end bag, his fists and feet moving in concert with neither the target nor each other. “Keep those arms up!” huffed Ernest. “Aim for the bag,” scoffed One-Eyed Ralph. Maybe we are boxers, thought David.
They were careful to keep it light, to make clear to each other, and to themselves, that they were in on the joke and not its punch line. And so, when Lemuel Pugh suggested David adopt the fight name “RastaMasta”—a nod to the island he apparently thought his new fighter was from—David didn’t say, “I’ve told you, man, I’m Haitian,” didn’t chuck him out the window (as Ramona had advised), but rather leaned in full bore, and entered the ring at the Austin Coliseum for his professional debut wearing the Jamaican flag as a cape, the others, even Terry, following behind in tricolor tams and bright dashikis. David lost in two rounds but didn’t disgrace himself: taken down by a liver shot, he’d had the good sense to stay there.
“Not my country, baby!” he’d crowed after his first payday. This was at Happy Szechuan #2, where he’d taken Ramona for lunch the following afternoon. She’d spent the morning applying warm compresses to his swollen left eyelid and was in no mood to celebrate, but David had insisted, knowing that nothing warmed his wife’s heart like strip-mall Chinese. “The best seat in the house for the pride of Kingston and his queen!” he’d told the teenage host, a shaggy-haired fount of indifference, clasping the boy’s palm and slipping him a dollar. From their booth, Ramona eyed a fat tilapia floating at the top of the fish tank. “Listen, Joe Frazier,” she’d said, twirling lo mein, “when this ends in chronic traumatic encephalopathy, don’t come crying to me.” David signaled for the lad. “Hey, bwoy,” he called, making a bad attempt at Jamaican patois, “yuh got some sugga for this tea?” David hissed with laughter as Ramona rolled her eyes.
Yes, it was all a big joke, this boxing thing, but they kept at it. David partook in hastily arranged matches in San Angelo and Leon Springs. That December, he made it to the ninth round of a Saturday night bout in Alvarado against a hometown boy with prospects, David’s near-upset upsetting enough to the natives to receive below-the-fold front-page coverage in the local paper. The next February in Double Bayou, Ernest Wilks fought all the way to a split decision. Even Terry showed vague signs of improvement, and by the spring was able to skip rope for three rounds straight, could slip and slide and pivot.
For, joke or no joke, there was no pretend training, no pretending in the ring. And as the men of Shoal Creek turned their fists sideways and found rhythm with the speed bags, as they learned to make the heavy bags swing, they felt inside themselves, despite themselves, the tug of possibility, and every smack of glove to bag, of fist to face, began to sound a little like What if?
Of course, it ended badly, as most jokes do. Terry lost his Battle of the Sexes, and the publicity from that debacle wasn’t good for Lemuel Pugh. He closed up shop for a while, went to gambol through the forest on his sore hip with the hooch-brewing Pughs of Deep East Texas. “Good riddance,” said Ramona. At the time, David had reluctantly agreed. He’d badly twisted an ankle in Smithville the month before. Best not to let this dumb joke go too far.
All these years later, it should’ve been a silly story to tell at cookouts or on double dates. The seventies, man! What the hell, right? Yet somehow Terry—Terry!—had taken this loopy episode from that muzzy era and turned it into something real. A career as a trainer? The owner of a gym?
How did he do it? How did any of them? Through hard work, maybe, some late-blooming ingenuity. But David couldn’t ignore the bits and pieces he picked up each summer, which his trainees dropped as casually as cats shed fur: how one had a trust fund and another came from a long line of oilmen, how last year’s helper would be the fifth in his family to go Dartmouth green.
Once, on a jog, David had asked Bob Alexander how Terry had the money to start the gym in the first place. “A small business loan,” Bob had told him. “And if you’re wondering what kind of fool banker would’ve given that hophead any money, let me teach you a favored term of the undeserved...” And here Bob stopped running and raised his bushy eyebrows: “Family friend.”
In the years since receiving that lucky loan, Terry had garnered a fair amount of attention, in David’s view, for the owner of a modest gym. In addition to the story in the Statesman about how everyone was welcome at Terry Tucker’s, the gym had been featured in Ring magazine and even once in a Sports Illustrated sidebar, and was a perennial subject of documentary shorts made by undergraduate film students at UT.
David himself had been interviewed a couple times about Terry. To David’s irritation, no matter how hard he tried otherwise, he always ended up going the full “David” in these conversations—jokey and jolly—fearful he’d come across as embittered if he didn’t.
It wasn’t as if Terry’s triumphs were even that grand. The youngest child of a renowned military scholar, he’d chosen getting high over higher ed, got his act together only after taking up the sweet science. Tragically unskilled at the start, he would’ve fizzled if he’d only boxed a year or two, as David had, but he had the means—and was deluded enough—to stick with it.
In ’76, he turned pro, amassing a three-year record of two wins and nine losses, before realizing he was always up against the ropes because he was meant to be behind them, as a trainer.
Since then, Terry had remade himself into a local celebrity of sorts, his teenage foibles, rather than hindering his future success, an essential part of his origin story, the stoned-out-of-my-gourd expressionlessness of his youth graduated into a face of wry imperturbability.
At forty-seven years of age, David knew there were worthier things to preoccupy himself with than the success of Terry Tucker. David wasn’t exactly living on the streets himself. He knew, too, that this was a one-way rivalry, that Terry probably wasn’t spending a lot of time dwelling on their shared history or thinking much about his former boss at all.
But David had never been able to shake his mild sense of aggrievement at his once-dopey ex-disciple’s ascent, just as, in the time since that Statesman story had been published, he hadn’t been able to shake the final line, a quote from Terry: “I always tell the new kids: if it’s possible for me, it’s possible for anybody. Anybody.”
Now Terry Tucker’s had reached its sweaty, raucous peak.
Gymgoers skipped rope in the single traffic lane of the filled gravel lot, sending pebbles pinging into wheel wells, bumpers. In the weight room, patrons lay on blue mats tossing medicine balls to their standing partners, sneakers braced on knees spandexed or bare, while a trio of skinny guys pivoted around overturned truck tires, punching in near unison. From the bench press, a muscled white boy let loose with ostentatious groans.
The wall thermometer in the main room read 81 degrees. Here, every bag slapped, swayed, quavered. The ring was awash in shadowboxers fighting air, pumping themselves up with encouragements muttered through mouthguards, the sweat-drenched patients in a psych ward for the super-fit.
David had been at it nine rounds, ten. Some ridiculous number. Even when he’d first started coming, thirty pounds lighter, he almost never went this long. He’d feel it tomorrow.
But he didn’t feel it now. On those rare days like today, when he stuffed his resentments and his jealousies and his regrets into his gloves and raised his fists to his face, he forgot his iffy knees and added girth. He forgot his forty-seven-year-old self altogether.
Tomorrow, David will continue with his lessons. Ask him now and he’ll say he’s done. He’ll believe it, too, but come morning, he’ll launch in as soon as he punches in. An addiction to something preposterous is still an addiction, difficult to shake. But David knows he didn’t come to the boxing gym to escape all that. Not really.
The fight clock issues its final warning, thirty seconds left in David’s final round. Now it isn’t about what he’s throwing or how he’s throwing it. The goal is keep going keep going don’t stop. And as he does this he becomes, for as long as he’s punching, that other version of himself.
In this moment, David is no longer the Director of Hospitality at Shoal Creek Rehabilitation. He is David the future lawyer, the one-day businessman, the someday therapist. David the maybe-not-a-tomato-can, who takes it nine rounds in Alvarado and wakes the next morning bruised but ready for more.
In this moment, he is David the fighter, who knows—who knew way back in 1973, back when he threw his first punch—that his true strength doesn’t live in his arms or his legs, his thighs, his feet, not in any one part but in his whole self, who understands the secret hunger that makes his body move.
Around him, the denizens of Terry Tucker’s Boxing Gym go at it as he goes at it. Fifteen seconds, ten seconds. They hear what he hears. The machine-gun fire of wrapped wrists against speed bag, the squeak of fight shoes pivoting on canvas, leather against leather, against flesh. They release themselves from themselves.
What if?