The building itself was monstrous. A low-slung brick structure, perhaps originally red, turned grimy black with age, it filled two city blocks. The building and the yard lay behind high wire fencing, with a guard station and everything. When I turned off 103rd Street and pulled in, a man in some kind of uniform demanded to see my pass. I told him I had an appointment with Patrick Grobian; the man phoned into the cavern and confirmed that I was expected. Parking lay straight ahead, I couldn’t miss it.
Straight ahead meant something different to the guard than it did to me. After I’d jolted around two sides of the building, I finally came on the parking area. It looked like the lot to a run-down used-car dealer, with hundreds of beaters parked every which way among the ruts. I found a spot that I hoped was out of the way enough that no one would sideswipe my Mustang.
When I opened the door, I looked with dismay at the ground. The warehouse entrance lay several hundred yards away and I was going to have to pick my way through rain-filled potholes in my good shoes. I knelt on the driver’s seat and leaned over to paw through the papers and towels in back. Finally, I dug up a pair of flip-flops I’d used at the beach last summer and wiggled my stocking feet around the little toe bars. It made for a slow and embarrassing waddle across the yard to the entrance, but at least I reached it with only my stockings and trouser cuffs spackled in mud. I slipped on my pumps and stuck the muddy flip-flops into a plastic bag before shoving them into my briefcase.
High doors opened onto a consumer nightmare. Shelves stacked with every imaginable product stretched as far as I could see. Directly in front of me dangled brooms, hundreds of them, push brooms, straw brooms, brooms with plastic handles, with wood handles, brooms that swiveled. Next to them were thousands of shovels, ready for every Chicagoan who wanted to clear their walks in the winter ahead. On my right cartons labeled “ice-melt” were stacked halfway to a ceiling that yawned thirty feet overhead.
I started forward, and backed up again as a forklift truck rattled toward me at high speed, its front-loader high with cartons of ice-melt. It stopped on the far side of the shovels; a woman in overalls and a bright red vest began slitting the boxes before they were even off the loader. She pulled smaller boxes of ice-melt out and added them to the mound already there.
Another forklift pulled up in front of me. A man in an identical red vest started loading brooms onto it, checking them against a computer printout.
When I stepped forward again, trying to decide on a route through the shelves, a guard moved to intercept me. A large black woman wearing a vest with safety reflectors, she also had a hard hat labeled “Be Smart, By-Smart,” and a belt that seemed to hold everything the complete law officer needed—including a stun gun. Above the racket of the conveyor belts and the trucks, she demanded my business.
Once again, I explained who I was and why I was there. The guard took a cell phone from her belt to call for approval. When she had it, she gave me a badge and directions to Patrick Grobian’s office: down Aisle 116S, left at 267W, all the way to the end, where I’d find all of the company offices, toilets, canteen, and so on.
It was then that I saw big red numbers that labeled the entrance to each row. These were so large that I’d missed them at first. I’d also missed a series of conveyor belts high above the aisles; they had chutes that lowered stacks of goods to various loading depots. Signs proclaiming “No Smoking Anywhere, Anytime” were plastered prominently on the walls and shelves, along with exhortations to “Make the Workplace a Safe Place.”
We were facing Aisle 122S, so I turned left at the shovels and walked down six aisles, passing a mountain of microwaves, followed by a forest of artificial Christmas trees. When I reached Aisle 116, I moved into Christmas decorations: avalanches of bells, lights, napkins, plastic angels, orange-faced Madonnas holding ice-white baby Jesuses.
Between the mountains of things stretching endlessly away, the conveyor belts ratcheting overhead, and the forklifts rolling around me, I began to feel dizzy. There were people in this warehouse, but they seemed to exist only as extensions of the machines. I clutched a shelf to steady myself. I couldn’t show up at Patrick Grobian’s office looking woozy: I wanted his support for Bertha Palmer’s basketball team. I needed to be upbeat and professional.
Three weeks ago, when I met the assistant principal who oversaw Bertha Palmer’s after-school programs, I knew I was going to have to find Mary Ann’s replacement myself if I didn’t want to stick around the high school for the rest of my life. Natalie Gault was in her early forties, short, stocky, and very aware of her authority. She was swamped in a flood of paperwork. Girls’ basketball ranked in her consciousness somewhere below upgrading the coffeemaker in the faculty lounge.
“I’m only filling in for Mary Ann until the end of the year,” I warned her when she thanked me for taking over at short notice. “I won’t have time to come down here once the playing season starts in January. I can keep the girls conditioned until then, but I’m not a trained coach, and that’s what they need.”