The Lock Artist

Seven

Michigan

1996 to 1999

There was an antique store a few blocks down from the liquor store. They had a few old locks there, and the old man who owned the place seemed to already know about me, so I didn’t have to break him in with the whole pantomime routine. I found the locks, some with keys, some without, took them all to the counter, and the owner looked them over and charged me five dollars total.

I took the locks apart and put them back together again. I practiced using my makeshift tools to open them. I had four picks now, and two tension bars, all of them just thin strips of metal I had filed down into different sizes, all of them stuck into rubber erasers that I could use as handles. I was learning by trial and error, and it didn’t take me long to figure out it was all a matter of touch. How much tension you put on the lock, and how you lift each tumbler, one by one, until the whole thing turns free.

I got damned good at it. I really did. That was my summer. Me and a pile of rusty old scrap metal.

Then the day came. The Wednesday after Labor Day. They were just about to start fixing up the high school around then, so you’re going to have to trust me to paint the right picture here. Start with a main building that hadn’t been touched in forty or fifty years. Tired gray bricks, windows that were too few and too small. Surround the whole thing with concrete and fencing and tall light poles. Then spread a dozen trailers all over the place, as if dropped at random. Those were the temporary classrooms to handle the overflow of students.

Or let me put it another way. The day I came to this prison I’m sitting in right now, the day I stepped out of the Corrections Department van and took my place in line at the processing center-I was ready for it. I was ready because I had been through something pretty similar once before. The way it looked that day, the soul-crushing grayness of the place. Above everything else, the way my stomach turned inside out at the thought of spending so much time there, unable to leave.

Yeah, I’d been there. All on that Wednesday after Labor Day, when I stepped off the bus and took my place as a member of the incoming freshman class at Milford High School.

The first thing I noticed was the noise. After those five years at the institute, to suddenly find myself surrounded by over two thousand kids with healthy, normal voices. That main hallway was as loud as a jet engine, everyone talking and shouting on that first day of school, some of the boys chasing each other, pushing each other into the lockers, aiming sharp-knuckled punches at each other’s shoulders. I felt like I was walking into an insane asylum.

There were a lot of other new freshmen, of course. Most of them probably looked as overwhelmed as I was, and probably didn’t say much more than I did, either. Even so, it didn’t take long for me to stand out. Every class I was in, the teacher would make a big deal about introducing me and telling everyone else about my “unique circumstances.” The “challenge” I was bravely facing. Everybody welcome Mike, eh? Just don’t expect him to say thank you in return. Ha ha.

I’m not sure how I got through that first day. It’s all a blur now, looking back on it. I didn’t eat lunch, I remember that much. I kept walking through the hallways, eventually finding myself back at my locker. I felt utterly lost and alone as I stood there, just spinning the dial on my locker, over and over.

The next morning, as I was getting ready to go back to that school again, I admit it… I started thinking about suicide. I rode on the bus in my own little cocoon of silence among the roar of the other kids.

The next day, when I got home I actually started looking around to see if I could find any pills. Uncle Lito had his own bathroom. I usually didn’t have any reason to go in there, but that evening, while he was minding the store, I took inventory of his medicine cabinet. There was aspirin and cough syrup and hangover medicine and jock-itch cream and a thousand other things, but nothing strong enough to do what I had in mind.

I wasn’t driving yet, but still, I thought maybe I could take his car, get up some speed, and then aim right for a tree. Or hell, for those concrete embankments under the railroad bridge. Talk about a proven death trap. My biggest worry about that was that I wouldn’t get the car going fast enough, or that I’d hit something else first and end up just wounded and fucked up and in huge trouble but still very much alive.

What a cheerful turn my little story has taken here, I know, but this was pretty much a running theme for that whole first semester at the high school. Nobody talked to me. I mean nobody. As that first semester went on, it got colder, and darker. I was getting up at six in the morning, in total darkness, to catch the bus at six forty to get to school by seven fifteen, not just going to this place I hated so much, but doing it before the sun even started thinking about coming up.

It makes my heart ache, just thinking back on that time in my life. How lonely I was. How out of place I felt every single minute of every day.

When I went back to school for the second semester, there were new classrooms to find, a new set of kids to get used to me sitting in the back of the room, never making a sound. And right off the bat, a new class for me. Freshman art, or, excuse me, Art Foundations. The teacher was a man named Mr. Martie. He was younger than most of the other teachers in the school. He had a beard and permanently red eyes, and he spent most of that first class mumbling to himself about the size, shape, and color of his headache.

“Let’s not get too excited on the first day, eh?” He walked among the art tables, ripping off sheets of drawing paper from a large pad. When he came to me, he ripped off a sheet and I got maybe eighty percent of it, most of one corner still on the pad. “Just draw something today. I don’t care what.”

He passed by me, not giving me a second look. Not pausing to single me out like most of the other teachers did. So he had that going for him already. With any luck, this would be one class where I could really disappear into the wallpaper.

He went back to his desk and tilted his head back. “I would murder for a cigarette right now,” he said, his eyes closed.

There was a small basket of art supplies on each table. Mine had a few broken pieces of charcoal-looking crayon things and a couple of pencils. I took out one of the pencils and stared at the blank piece of paper. Three square corners of nothing, and one jagged edge.

“You’ve got to give us a subject,” a girl in the front row said, apparently with the authority to speak for all of us. “We don’t know what to draw.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Mr. Martie said. “Draw a landscape.”

“A landscape?”

Mr. Martie looked up at the girl. There was a lifetime of regret in his face, that the years spent studying art would lead him to be here in this classroom on this January morning, the windows still dark, sunrise a half hour away. “Yes,” he said. “A landscape. A place, you know? Draw a place. Draw your favorite place in the world.”

“In my last school, the art teacher always gave us something specific to draw. Something that we could see, right in front of us. We never just drew from memory.”

He let out a sigh, got to his feet and went to a cupboard, and pulled out the first two things he put his hands on. A gray cylinder, about one foot high, and a gray wedge about the same height. He went to the empty table at the front of the room and put the cylinder down, then the wedge down right next to it.

“For those of you who wish to do a still life…” He sat back down and closed his eyes again. “The rest of you are on your own.”

The girl in the front row raised her hand again, but he wasn’t about to make the same mistake and notice her this time. Finally, she just gave up and started drawing, presumably tackling the challenge of the cylinder next to the wedge.

Meanwhile, the kid sitting next to me had already started on drawing a house. It was a rectangle with smaller rectangles inside, windows and doors. Then he drew a chimney on top with a curl of smoke coming out.

I picked up a pencil and thought about what to draw. I had this fascinating still life up there I could try. But no, instead I started sketching in the railroad bridge in the center of town. I imagined myself standing on the other side of it, away from the liquor store. From there I’d see the restaurant, the big sign, THE FLAME in block letters, 24 HOURS just below that in smaller letters. More details coming to me as I pictured it in my mind. The flashing lights on the bridge embankments, the door to the liquor store barely visible through the archway. The iron bars on the front window.

This certainly didn’t qualify as my favorite place in the world, as my fine teacher had suggested, but it felt so familiar to me. It felt more like home than anywhere else, this one particular bend in the road with a beaten-down liquor store waiting on the other side of a beaten-down railroad bridge. I started to shade in some of the darker areas, the way the bridge would cast a shadow on the door to the restaurant. The newspaper boxes lined up outside. It needed some trash now, some random cans and bottles rattling around in the parking lot. It needed dirt and dust and stains and misery. I didn’t think I could ever capture the whole thing, if I spent the rest of my day here, using up every pencil in the basket.

Then, in my reverie, lost in the picture and not aware of what was going on around me… Mr. Martie had stood up. He had asked everyone in the class not to commit any actual felonies while he stepped out of the room for a moment. It didn’t register until later, until after he had passed behind me on his way out the door. Then he reappeared behind me. He was looking over my shoulder now as I struggled to make my drawing look just like the picture in my head. It took me a moment to realize that he was standing there.

He didn’t say anything. He put one hand on my shoulder and gently moved me away so he could get a better look at the drawing.

So began the only good and decent chapter in my life.

Two and a half years, that’s how long it lasted. It’s funny how your life can turn on one thing like that. One talent that you don’t even know you’ve been given.

By the end of the week my schedule had been rearranged. Instead of going to that first period freshman class, I was doing a double period of Advanced Independent Study in Art in the afternoon, right after lunch. It became an oasis in the day for me. The one chance all day I had to stop holding my breath.

I even made a friend. Yes, an actual, living human friend. His name was Griffin King. He was one of the other twelve students in the advanced art class. I was the only freshman, and he was the only sophomore. He had long hair, and he acted like he didn’t care much about anything in this world except being an artist one day. It was a tough way to think in Milford, Michigan, believe me. On my second day in the class, he came over and sat next to me. He looked at the drawing I was working on. It was one of my first attempts at a portrait. My Uncle Lito. Griffin kept watching me struggle with it until I finally stopped.

“Not bad,” he said. “Have you done a lot of this?”

I shook my head.

“Who’s the model? Did he sit for this?”

I shook my head.

“What, you’re doing it from memory?”

I nodded.

“That is freaky, man.”

He bent down to look more closely.

“Still, it’s kind of flat,” he said. “You need more shading to bring out the features.”

I looked up at him.

“I’m just saying. I mean, I know it’s not easy.”

I put my pencil down.

“How’s this school treating you, anyway?”

I looked at him again, lifting both hands as if to say, do you not know anything about me?

“I know you can’t talk,” he said. “I think that’s totally cool, by the way.”

What?

“I’m serious. I talk way too much. I wish I could just… stop. Like you.”

I shook my head. I looked up at the clock to see how much time we had left until the class was over.

“I’m Griffin, by the way.” He extended his right hand. I shook it.

“How do you say hello, anyway?”

I looked at him.

“I mean, you must know sign language, right? How do you say hello?”

I slowly raised my right hand and waved at him.

“Ah, okay. Yeah, that makes sense.”

I put my hand down.

“How do you say, ‘I hate this town and everything in it. And I wish everyone would just die’?”

I had never been that good with the sign language, remember, but it all started to come back to me as I taught him a few signs every day. Eventually, a few of the signs became his favorites. He’d flash them at me when we were in the hallway, like they were our secret code. Grabbing the thumb and waving for “incompetent.” The double twist to the nose for “boring.” If a particular girl was walking by, the hand pulled away from the mouth for “hot.” Or his own invention, both hands pulled away, meaning “double hot,” I guess.

We ate lunch together every day, then we went to our art class. Me and my friend. You have to understand what this meant to me. It was something I’d never had before. Between hanging out with Griffin and the art I was trying to do-hell, it was almost like I had a real life now. Everyone in the school started treating me a little differently, too. I mean, it wasn’t like I was suddenly a sports star or anything. Kids who were good at art or music were way down on the totem pole, but at least I was on the totem pole now. I wasn’t just the Miracle Boy anymore, the mute kid with the mysterious trauma in his past. Now I was just the quiet kid who could draw.

Like I said, this was such a rare time in my life. In a way, I don’t even want to keep going with my story. Just stop it right there, let you think, yeah, this kid turned out all right. He had a rough start, he found something to do with his life. Everything worked out okay.

Of course, that wouldn’t be the truth. Not by a long shot.

Fast-forward to my junior year. Griffin’s senior year. I was sixteen and a half then. My hair was such an unruly mess I had to finally prune it back just enough to see where I was going. I could tell that the girls in school were looking at me differently now. I was allegedly a decent-looking guy, although at the time it would have been news to me. But hell, if you add in the mysteriousness factor, I guess I could see how I’d be worth a look, at least. I even thought about the possibility of going out on a date. There was this new girl in our art class. Nadine. She was blond and pretty and was apparently on the tennis team. Not like the other girls in art class at all. She’d give me a shy smile whenever I saw her in the hallway.

“She wants you, dude.” Griffin’s voice in my ear one day. “Go ask her out. I mean, hell, I’ll do it for you. I’ll be your messenger.”

I had a car now. Uncle Lito’s old two-toned Grand Marquis. We could have gone and seen a movie or something. It was just… I don’t know, the thought of sitting there in a restaurant before the movie. Or driving her home afterward. I’d listen to her, of course. I’d listen to whatever she’d have to say. Then what? She couldn’t talk forever. Nobody can, not even an American high school girl. When the silence finally came, what would I do? Start writing her notes?

So maybe I wasn’t ready for that scene yet. Still, I hadn’t ruled it out. Nadine wasn’t going anywhere. In the meantime, a few people were actually saying hello to me when I walked past them in the hallway. They were showing my artwork in the big display case at the front of the school now. I was still doing a lot of pencil and charcoal then. Griffin had a big painting out there, too, with his outrageous splashes of color. I wasn’t sure what I’d do the next year, when I was a senior and Griffin was long gone to art school, but I wasn’t worried about that yet.

We ended up in gym class that semester. Of all the places in the world for my whole life to start turning… it was that very first day, when we were opening the padlocks on our little gym lockers. I couldn’t help noticing that if I pulled down while I was spinning, the dial seemed to catch in twelve different spots, and one of those spots just so happened to be the last number in the combination. Was it my imagination or did that spot feel a little different from the other eleven?

When I went home that night, I was still spinning the dial on that padlock in my mind and thinking about what was going on inside. By then I had already gone about as far as I could go with key locks. I mean, I was pretty sure I could open just about anything. But this was a new challenge that made me remember why I had been so drawn to locks in the first place. As I worked the dial one direction, then the other, I could feel how it made the separate cams turn underneath it. It made me wonder how hard it would be to open the damned thing if I didn’t know the combination.

So I went back to that same old antique store, I bought a few combination locks, and I took them apart. That’s how I learned.

It was that same semester. In November, the week of the big game against Lakeland. You see, Lakeland was the newer high school in the district, a few miles to the east. Milford was usually pretty good at football, and they’d been dominating the big game ever since Lakeland got built. I suppose because we still had our shabby old dump of a school, it must have felt pretty good to kick Lakeland’s ass in anything. That had changed the year before, when Lakeland finally won for the first time ever. Because the varsity players usually only played for two years, that meant that the Milford seniors had just one more chance.

Our best player was a senior man named Brian Hauser, a.k.a. “the House.” We didn’t exactly move in the same social circles, Brian and I, but even I could see that he was bouncing off the walls in school that week, getting himself psyched up for the last game of his high school career. Griffin and I were still getting through our semester of gym, and our class happened to be last period, so by the time we were getting dressed, the football players were usually getting ready for practice. That always got Griffin going, hearing the whole team making a racket on the other side of the locker room. He’d always have a running commentary for me on what the football players were saying, how sophisticated their conversation was, how much sensitivity they showed to the opposite sex, and so on. He kept his voice down, because he didn’t actually want to end up stuffed in a locker. But today, we could really hear the football team going at it. Brian Hauser, in particular, was making a hell of a racket and banging on his locker like a madman.

“Motherfucking son of a bitch! Stupid whorebag fagbiscuit!”

Then more voices from his teammates.

“Fagbiscuit! What the hell is a fagbiscuit?”

“That’s a new one, House.”

“I know what a fagbiscuit is-”

“No, man. Don’t even go there. I don’t want to know what a fagbiscuit is.”

“When I think they can’t get any wittier,” Griffin said to me, “they surpass even their own high standards.”

There was more banging, followed by laughter. I don’t know what possessed Griffin to go check it out at that point, but he went around to the end of the row of lockers, still buttoning his shirt. I followed him.

As soon as we both peeked around the corner, we saw Brian slamming his fist on the locker. There was already a fair dent in it. The rest of the team was almost dressed, but Brian was still in his street clothes.

“What’s the problem?” one of his teammates asked him. “Did you forget the combination?”

“It’s three whole numbers,” someone else said. “I can see how that would be a challenge.”

“Yeah, fuck all of you,” Brian said. “I didn’t forget the combination. It’s a new lock, all right?”

“Did you check the little sticker on the back? That’s how you learn it the first time.”

Someone else reached for the lock to verify exactly that, but Brian knocked his hand away.

“It’s not there, genius. I left it at home, all right? I bought a new lock because the old one was a piece of shit. I had the combination in my head this morning, but now I’m just… Fuck.”

“What are you gonna do, get a hacksaw?”

“Why don’t you call your mother? Maybe she can find the piece of paper with the combination.”

“There was a seventeen in it,” Brian said. “God damn it. Then it was… Wait.”

“Think, man. Think.”

“Will you guys shut the fuck up? I can’t concentrate.”

Now, I knew that Griffin would do some crazy things now and then, but I had no idea he’d actually step around the corner and walk right into the middle of the football team. What was going through his head, I couldn’t possibly imagine… until he opened his mouth and dragged me right into it.

“Hey, Brian,” he said. “You need some help?”

Brian Hauser was about six-four, and he had to weigh at least 250 pounds. They didn’t call him “the House” for nothing. He was a little soft around the edges, one of those fat kids who manage to sprout up and become athletic for a few years, before losing the battle for good by the time they’re thirty.

“What do you want?”

“My associate here can open your lock, if you’d like,” Griffin said.

“Your associate?”

As you can probably guess… yes, once I had opened up those padlocks from the antique store and saw how they worked, I had to show off to somebody. So I had grabbed Griffin’s lock one day and opened it for him. It had taken me about two minutes.

That was obviously a mistake. Which, as I stood there and watched him offer my lock-opening skills to Brian Hauser, I was about to pay for.

“Come on over,” Griffin said to me. “Show him how it’s done.”

The whole football team was looking at me now. I didn’t think I had much choice. I looked at Griffin and put an imaginary gun to my head, then pulled the trigger.

“Don’t be shy,” he said. “We’re all buddies here.”

He was showing them up, I thought. He was making fun of them and they didn’t even know it.

“What the fuck are you gonna do?” Brian said. “Try all thousand combinations?”

Actually sixty-four thousand, I thought, but who’s counting? I went to his locker and grabbed his lock. I pulled down and spun the dial past the fakes and felt for the real sticking point.

I won’t drag you through the whole thing, but here’s the basic idea. The combination to my gym lock happened to be 30-12-26, and the combinations to those two locks I bought at the antique store were 16-28-20 and 23-33-15. Notice how all of the numbers are either even or odd, first of all. Then notice how the first and last numbers are in the same “family,” and that the middle number is in the opposing family. By that I mean that 0, 4, 8, 12, 16, 20, et cetera are one family, while 2, 6, 10, 14, 18, et cetera are the other family. Once you get the touch for finding the real last number out of the twelve “sticking points,” you can work backward from there, trying all of the combinations that start with a number in the same family, then a number in the other family, and then the final number. You can even learn to “super set” all of the second numbers once you know how that second cam can be bumped four numbers at a time without having to start the whole thing over. With a little practice, you can go grab most any combination lock from the junk drawer and have it open in a matter of minutes.

Got that?

So on Brian’s lock, I could tell that the last number of the combination was 23. So far so good. Clear the cams, spin to 3, and start on the super sets.

“Somebody get a hacksaw,” Brian said. “He’s gonna be here all day.”

“Give him a chance,” one of his teammates said. “Maybe he has ESP or something.”

“What the hell are you talking about? That wouldn’t be ESP.”

Everybody shut up, I thought. Go away and leave me alone for a few minutes. I worked it back to 9, then to 23, then to 13-23, then 17-23, working my way up the dial, bumping that second cam, feeling it move just the right amount and then staying smooth on the reverse to make sure I didn’t jar it out of position.

Wham! Brian slammed his fist on the locker next to me. “Are you seriously going to open this lock? Is that what you’re telling me?”

“He’s not telling you anything,” Griffin said. “In case you hadn’t noticed…”

“Yeah, okay. I get it. He’s a fucking mute.”

I looked up at him for one second, then went back to the lock. I started the second set, hoping to God that the second number wasn’t all the way up the dial. Hoping to God that I could do it at all. What the hell was Griffin thinking, anyway? Why the hell did I have to do this in front of everybody?

7 next. I went 7-13-23, then turned back to keep the set going.

I heard a door open.

“Shit, it’s Coach!”

Mr. Bailey, the football coach, came into the room. “What’s going on in here?” he said. “Brian, why aren’t you dressed?”

I dialed 7-17-23.

The lock opened.

“What are you doing, young man?” Coach Bailey said to me. “Are you his personal servant now? He can’t even open up his own locker?”

He was holding a playbook in one hand. I made a writing motion to him. He took a blank page from the book and handed it to me. Then he fished a pen out of his pocket. I wrote 7-17-23 on the paper and gave it to Brian. Then I gave the coach his pen back. Nobody else had said a word yet.

“Everybody outside while Mr. Hauser gets himself dressed,” Coach Bailey said. “Have you forgotten what week this is?”

That’s how it began. I remember it so well because I can trace so much of what would happen next right back to those few minutes. If I had had any idea…

But no, I hadn’t learned that lesson yet. I hadn’t learned that some talents cannot be forgiven.

Ever.