Foxcatcher
William H. Hallahan
1
Brewer arrived at Sweetmeadow late that night inside a Department of Corrections van. He wore handcuffs chained to a waist-belt and leg irons.
A sleeting rain was falling and several times the van slid sidewise coming down the access road.
Someone had taped a large paper shamrock on the inside of the van door. Crudely cut from a piece of orange construction paper, it carried the lettered legend TO ALL YOU POTATO HEADS. HAPPY PADDY’S DAY FROM BELFAST.
The prison guard opened the rear van door. He stared curiously at the orange-paper shamrock, then guffawed at the joke and tore it off the door. He beckoned to Brewer with a crooked finger.
Brewer stepped down and hobbled into a bare room built into the stone prison wall. He was left standing there while the van driver, his associate, and three guards went over a packet of documents. There was a discussion, some shaking of heads, and final agreement. One of the guards signed several papers.
The van driver unlocked the leather belt from Brewer’s waist, unlocked the chained cuffs from his wrists, then unlocked the leg irons. He handed them to his associate, who carried them clanking to the doorway. He threw them noisily into the back of the van. The two men rode off into the sleeting night.
One of the guards slammed the outside door. He turned the key, then pivoted around. Brewer was now locked inside Sweet-meadow Prison, facing three expressionless guards.
They ordered him to strip. Into a large cardboard carton he dropped his camel’s hair coat, his charcoal flannel suit, his wing-tip slip-ons, his tie, his shirt, socks, shorts. Personal possessions—wallet, keys, watch, pencil, loose change—went into a crumpled manila envelope.
A male nurse in green prison pants arrived, breathing heavily and bearing a white enamel pan laden with medical paraphernalia. He exhaled the odor of whiskey as he examined Brewer. He checked blood pressure and body temperature and looked for signs of hernia, piles, sore throat, bad teeth, dental prosthetic devices, gonorrhea, syphilis chancre, crabs, skin sores. With a stethoscope he listened for lung congestion and monitored heartbeat. He recorded an oral medical history, noted various scars, wrote none under tattoos, and finally gave Brewer four shots. Everyone watched him ineptly take blood from Brewer’s arm.
Another prisoner cut Brewer’s hair. He whispered questions as he clipped. They were almost the same questions the guards read off to him from a printed form.
Another prisoner stood Brewer up against a board with height marked off in feet and inches and took his photograph.
“When you’re old and gray, you can look at your ID and see what a handsome dog you were,” he said, peeling the skin off the film. “Fat lot of good it’ll do you.”
The guards sent him to the shower. Afterward, without a towel, he stood bare, wet, and shivering, waiting while sleet rattled on the window directly over his head. The box with all his clothing and the envelope with his personal property had been taken away while he showered.
He was led, still bare, still wet, still shivering, down a corridor to a large room with a broad long counter. Two prisoners watched him with basilisk eyes. The beating sleet was particularly loud in this room.
The guard pushed him forward with a finger, and the issuing of dunnage began. He was given a mattress cover to hold open, and into it the two prisoners threw his clothing allowance. The guard checked off the little squares on an inventory sheet as the items sailed through the air into the mattress cover.
T-shirts, shorts, shirts, green prison pants, socks, shaving and toilet articles, towels, stencil kit with his name and number, pillow cases, more mattress covers, a white wool blanket, watch cap, wool knit gloves, short wool jacket. One Bible. No belt.
A prisoner with white hair and downcast eyes fitted Brewer for his shoes.
“Make sure they fit. You’re going to be wearing them a long time.”
The guard pushed the clothing inventory sheet over the counter with a ballpoint pen.
“Sign there.” The pen bore the legend QUALITY REPAIRS, NELSON’S GARAGE. “You now owe the State of New York two hundred thirty-seven dollars and sixty-four cents.”
“How am I going to pay that?”
“They’ll get it out of you,” said one of the prisoners. “Don’t you worry.”
They all watched him dress in prison clothes.
The shots had made his arms ache. He felt light-headed and feverish. The mattress cover and its contents were unwieldy as he was led out of the rooms in the wall and into the dark prison yard. The door was shut firmly behind him.
Single file, a guard in front and a guard behind, he was led across the cobblestoned yard through stinging sleet that crunched under their shoe soles, around puddles and into a main building. Once they were inside, the rear guard shut the door behind them with a bang and locked it.
Odors from the prisoners’ mess hung in the air, the blended reminders of ten thousand bad meals. He was led along a corridor under widely spaced lights and up a flight of steel and concrete stairs through a doorway. That door was banged shut and locked behind them. The noise echoed in the huge interior. Another long corridor, several turnings; down a flight of stairs and through another doorway went the three of them. The door was slammed shut and locked behind them. That made four. He was passing cells now, following a long line of overhead lights.
Arms were draped through the bars. Fingers grasped the uprights. Eyes from within followed him.
“Say hey, man.”
“OK, Brewer.”
“Asshole.”
“Hullo, darling. What’s your cell number?”
They turned left into another corridor, up a short flight of steel steps. The guard in the lead paused and unlocked a barred door. He nodded his head at the cell.
“In.”
Brewer entered. And turned. And dropped the bulging mattress cover. The cell door swung shut firmly and the key turned in the lock.
The footsteps of the two guards receded down the corridor; then a door shut and a lock clicked. More footsteps, barely audible. A distant door faintly banged. A distant lock clicked.
He was alone with the silence.
Brewer was confronted with it now: After all those months of legal maneuvering, he was truly in the penitentiary. He was in a cell locked in a cell block locked inside a large prison building inside thirty-foot walls. There were five locked steel doors between him and freedom. He sat down on the cot, clasped his hands between his thighs, and drew in a shuddering breath. It had really happened at last.
Even as he sat, shivering with cold, the sweat began. It soaked his head, ran down his face and neck. It soaked his shirt and his trousers, ran down into his new socks and shoes. He rocked back and forth. Back and forth. As though consoling a child. Someone began to croon. Then voices called to him.
“Hey, Brewer. Hang tight, babe. Piece of cake.”
“Piece of cake, babe.”
“You’re going to make it, man.”
He surprised himself. He’d never rocked himself like this before. Never sweated like this before. He kept rocking.
Someone was crooning to him.
“Easy man,” someone called. “Easy does it. Don’t come apart. Hang tight.”
The crooning, he realized, was coming from himself. As he rocked, as he sweated, he was crooning—moaning—rhythmically.
“Shit, man,” called a voice with disgust. “If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.”
“Don’t listen to him, Brewer. Hang tight.”
“Hang tight, man, or haul your ass out of here, while you still have the will. Hey, hear me? Brewer? Hey, Brewer. Listen to the man. Come to the door, Brewer. Here. You watching? Here it comes.”
It wa
s a belt with a large buckle. It leaped out of the darkness and hit the gray-painted deck in front of his cell. There it lay in a twisted coil.
“Help yourself, Brewer. That’s your ticket out of here. The midnight express.”
He stared at the belt. And it seemed to be staring back at him. There were many eyes watching it. They waited to see his hand reach through the bars and take it up. The midnight express.
The belt lay there, malevolent, lethal, eager.
Through the night it confronted him while silent men watched. A number of times he heard the metal slide of a peephole click in the corridor door. The guards were also watching him. Rainwater dribbled somewhere outside. After a while he heard snoring.
Dawn was a dirty affair. He discovered that, set in the wall opposite his cell door, high up, was a window. It gradually grew from a black square to a dark-gray square, then to grim gray daylight. The sleet had turned to wind-whipped wet snow that was attacking the window like something struggling inside an aquarium.
March 17. A snowy Saint Patrick’s Day: the day Brewer began asking himself questions he’d never faced before.
Just after dawn, a guard entered.
“You’ll go to breakfast early, Brewer. When some of these hopheads find out what business you were in they might give you a rough welcome.”
He picked up the belt and carried it away.
Prisoner #B23424309 had begun the first day of a nine-year sentence.
2
Bobby McCall’s father admonished him all through childhood: “Never let life hand you the broken hockey stick.” So he should have been ready when, in the summer of 1968, life tried to do just that.
On June 3 of that year, Bobby McCall began his first day of a summer job in the chambers of Judge Lewis Lewbo, Philadelphia Municipal Court. McCall was twenty-one, with a newly minted B.A. from Haverford College and a letter of admission to the University of Pennsylvania Law School, commencing in the autumn.
“Do one thing better than anyone else,” his father had always urged him, “and the world’s your oyster.” That one thing, Bobby intended, would be the law.
At ten that morning he was summoned from the judge’s chambers for an urgent phone call. “It’s your uncle,” the bailiff said, holding the door open for him. He took the call at the desk of the judge’s secretary.
“Bobby,” said his uncle Andrew. “I have terrible news for you, son. Your father just had a heart attack.”
“Heart attack? Is he okay?”
“He just slipped away. He was opening his mail in his office and—and his heart stopped. I’m afraid we’ve lost him, Bobby.”
Johnny McCall had been a professional financial adviser and portfolio manager. He had made many men wealthy, had made many wealthy men wealthier, and had impoverished very few. He had done one thing better than anyone else, and the world had truly been his oyster.
When the auditors arrived they found the accounts of every one of his clients in perfect condition, humming like little money factories even with the master’s hand withdrawn.
They also found John McCall’s own affairs in absolute chaos. His life insurance policies had lapsed from neglect. His medical insurance had been canceled—the letter announcing this was found in a file unopened, along with a number of uncashed checks, some two years old. Client billing was haphazard and his accounts receivable were staggeringly high; some clients hadn’t received a bill in nearly a year; most of these accounts were never collected. His personal checkbook hadn’t been balanced in six months. Tax forms had been neglected, urgent notes from his accountant ignored. His will, years out of date, listed assets he no longer held. With a fortune in uncollected receivables on one side of the ledger, on the other he owed everyone money.
His tax affairs were in a terrible muddle, and the IRS chose to get nasty. The Pennsylvania State Tax Collector joined in. New Jersey filed a claim.
John McCall had lived a comfortable life in a lovely old stone house on a wide lawn that overlooked Saint Andrew’s Country Club on Philadelphia’s Main Line. He spent his summers in a light-filled beach house on a dune above the surf at Harvey Cedars, his winters with the yachting crowd in the Virgin Islands, while interspersed were many European vacations. His favorite expression was “I’m having a hell of a good time and I love it.” On the day he died he had just turned forty-eight.
His wife, Mary Elizabeth née Carpenter, relict, was left destitute. Even though her own brother, Andrew Carpenter, a noted Main Line estate attorney, handled the probate himself—at no fee—everything went: house, yacht, beach home, even the car. Andrew Carpenter later told Bobby that his father had let various governmental bodies grab more than $900,000 unnecessarily by neglecting his affairs. “If he’d given himself one tenth of the attention he’d given to any of his clients he could easily have been worth more than ten million.”
At twenty-one, Bobby McCall found himself without funds for law school and with a mother to support—a woman who had never worked a day in her life.
From the graveside, Bobby led his mother away by the elbow. He was grief-stricken and bewildered. His mother—who’d built her life around her darling Jack—was inconsolable.
Bobby overheard a man who stood beside a silver Rolls-Royce say to another: “Smartest man with a buck I ever met. We’re not likely to find another like him.”
“Not in our lifetimes,” said the other. “Too bad he couldn’t have left his brain as part of his estate.”
The alteration was shocking. At one moment Bobby McCall was a rich man’s son, observing the wealthiest and most powerful men pass through his father’s front door—U.S. senators, judges, famous sports figures, show business people, all bearing bushel baskets of money, begging his father to help them.
The next moment the magnificent house was gone, his mother’s celebrated greenhouse stripped of its plants and aquariums, the lovely household furnishings dispersed, the cook and the housemaid released, his mother smuggling a priceless antique clock and a bombé chest of drawers into a cousin’s garage late at night.
He and his mother spent four days going up and down Montgomery Avenue from one apartment building to another. His mother didn’t understand that she couldn’t afford an expensive apartment—her first choice was a suite with four bedrooms and maid service.
Eventually, with much sighing and with a childish petulance Bobby had never seen before, she permitted herself to be moved into a two-bedroom apartment in Ardmore. She had no idea how to cook.
Uncle Andrew—with all the diligence and concern of an elder brother—managed to scrape together an estate, including Social Security and a small pension, of some $12,000 a year for her. The night he came to tell her this, he took her hand and, with the apoplectic hue under his eyes of a sick man, looked directly at her.
“Now, Bess, you’re going to have to take hold. I’m in pretty bad shape and I won’t be around much longer to watch over you. You simply have to understand that there’s no more money anywhere except this pittance. Now you have to show the world what a Carpenter is made of, lass—that’s what Father would have said. What you’ve got to do is get a job. So there’s an end to the tears. It’s up and about for you.”
Mrs. McCall expected her brother to take care of things as her husband had. She tried to decide what job she wanted him to get for her.
Uncle Andrew said to Bobby: “It’s no use complaining, Bobby; the lost fortune is lost forever. You have to keep your eye on your own career now. And that’s law school. I think I can help you there. I’ve got some connections with the faculty. But you’re going to need a year or so to regroup before you start law school. You have to build up some capital for taking care of yourself in law school—even if I can swing some tuition money your way. You see what I’m saying? I have a connection in Washington through Senator Merson. I can get you an appointment in the Department of Commerce. Good salary. And a year from now, your mother should be on her feet and you can come back and start law school with some v
ery pertinent experience under your belt. What do you say?”
What could he say? He accepted.
Two weeks before Bobby left for Washington, his uncle’s heart stopped. In his will, Andrew Carpenter left to his “beloved Bess” a stipend of some $10,000 a year. With careful management she could now live without working.
But careful was not in her vocabulary. She’d not taken any of the jobs Andrew found for her. Instead she’d run up bills everywhere. She’d had two bitter quarrels with her brother over money just before he died. Bobby could now see that his mother was a terribly spoiled woman who would not make any concessions to the facts.
“Never surrender,” she said to her son. “Take what you want from the world. If you haven’t got the money to pay for it, someone else must pay for you. Remember your father’s words: Don’t let them give you the broken hockey stick.”
At Uncle Andrew’s funeral she had her first quarrel with her son. She wanted him to reopen his father’s office and start up the business again. She wanted him to restore her to her previous condition. She not only wanted to be wealthy again, she wanted to recover the self-same Main Line home and greenhouse filled with plants and aquariums, and the summer home in Harvey Cedars and the yacht in the Virgin islands and the car—every last jot and tittle. He could get it for her, she said.
He not only could not, he would not. He refused emphatically.
In late August, on a dripping hot day, he went to Thirtieth Street Station to take the Metroliner to Washington. His mother accompanied him to the station elegantly, in a chauffeured limousine rented just for the occasion. “Wherever you go, go in style,” she said, tapping his wrist with a forefinger.
That’s what made men stare at her, he decided. She was a beautiful woman—but it was the way she carried herself that made the world gaze. And admire. And desire. She radiated invincibility. Majesty.
“Good luck to you, my son,” she said as she kissed him. Then she shook her head. “You’ve taken the broken hockey stick, Bobby. You’re a lumping fool.”
Foxcatcher Page 1