Slip

by Lucas Schaefer

Genres: Literary Fiction; Sports

Synopsis

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.

Release date: June 3, 2025

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Print pages: 496

Sample

1. Tomato Can

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