Step by Step

by Lawrence Block

  “Oh,” I said.

  “I don’t think he believed us,” she said, “but he gave up and left. What I can’t understand is how you could be so stupid as to write something like that on a postcard. What were you thinking?”

  Good question. I didn’t have an answer, nor did she wait around for one. Nor did any of us ever say a word about the matter again. For a day or so it was one more elephant in the living room, and then it lumbered off and secreted itself in a far corner of the garage, where that poor old bike of mine had spent so many years.

  5

  IN FICTION, EVENTS HAVE ANTECEDENTS. Significant developments don’t just happen out of the blue. Something happens, and because of it something else happens, and then something monumental occurs.

  I’m not sure that’s truly the way the world works. Sometimes it seems to me that things do happen out of the blue. Perhaps there is a gathering of forces, like the seismic activity that produces a volcanic eruption, but there are no meters sensitive enough to register those vibrations.

  This is a long and overly dramatic preamble to a simple statement of fact: To wit, in the spring of 1953, a couple of months before I would turn fifteen, I got my bike out of the garage and took it down the driveway to the sidewalk, where, within an hour or so, I learned to ride it.

  I cannot recall a single prefatory thought. I was in the garage, I took note of the bicycle, I had the impulse to try to ride it, and, once I’d moved enough debris out of the way to get to it, that’s precisely what I did. Just like that, and just a little less than five years after my parents had given it to me.

  Because God is, after all, the Supreme Ironist, I’d managed to wait until the ability to ride a bike no longer made much difference in my life. I was in my second year at Bennett, and no one rode bikes to high school. One walked to Hertel and took the Number Twenty-three streetcar, which stopped right in front of the high school. Or, more often than not, one walked over to Dick Lederman’s house and his father gave us both a ride in his new Cadillac. (It was always a new Cadillac, because Israel Lederman traded his car annually. He loved those cars, and I didn’t blame him a bit.)

  After school, one walked home.

  Or, in rare instances, drove. I was getting on for fifteen, and my classmates were on average a year older than I, so the ones who’d had their sixteenth birthdays were already learning how to drive their fathers’ cars. Girls in my class, dating boys a year or two older, were riding around in cars all the time.

  And I was learning to ride a bicycle.

  HERE’S SOMETHING as puzzling as the fact that I did it without thinking about it beforehand: I didn’t really think about it much after the fact, either. I’d just accomplished something without much effort, and how could it have failed to strike me that I might as easily have done so years ago? You’d think, wouldn’t you, that I’d have smacked myself in the forehead and said some cyclist’s version of, “Gee, I could have had a V-8!”

  And I could have, surely I could have, years before I did, back when it would have made a considerable difference in my life. True, the bike was no longer too big for me, was if anything a little small for me, and when balance became problematic I could extend my feet and use the pavement to support myself and the bike. True, I was bigger and stronger and not quite so ungainly. Still, how hard would it have been for me to do this two years earlier? Or three? Or four?

  Well, hell, I’m not going to brood about it now. But I’m surprised I didn’t brood about it then.

  THE BIKE, OR MORE precisely my new ability to ride it, got me my first actual job. I’d always been an enterprising child, ringing the neighbors’ doorbells and offering my services at whatever chore was in season. I shoveled walks and driveways, raked leaves, mowed lawns. I went around with a wagon and purchased beer and pop bottles for half the deposit. (I’ll bet if I’d proposed to haul them away for free, most of my neighbors would have found that acceptable. But I offered to pay for them, and nobody ever once told me to keep my money.)

  Funny what comes to mind. I can still remember a big bottle that once held Coleman’s Ginger Ale. It was worth five cents—or would have been, if I’d ever managed to find a store that would take it back. The lesson it taught me was worth more than the two and a half cents I was out. I learned, not for the last time, that nothing is ever quite as profitable as you think it’s going to be.

  But now I had a bike, and I could leave my wagon in the garage. And, almost immediately, I had a job, handing out catalogs for the Fuller Brush Man.

  His name was Mr. Speier, and he was a European refugee who was grabbing his chunk of the American Dream by selling brushes door to door. His territory when I went to work for him was in Tonawanda, a couple of miles north of my house. That would have taken a while to walk, but I had a bike, and a whole new world had thus opened itself to me.

  I would ride my bike to Tonawanda and meet Mr. Speier at some predetermined intersection, and he would give me a stack of catalogs and tell me where to go and what bells to ring. I would walk up one side of a block and down the next, ringing the bells, and telling each housewife who came to the door that I had a catalog for her, and when my employer visited in a couple of days he’d pick up the catalog and give her a free gift.

  Just about everybody took the catalog. I don’t recall anyone slamming the door and telling me to go to hell. Nor did I encounter anyone a youth of today might characterize as a MILF. In years to come I would write scenes in which a young man went door to door—conducting fake termite inspections, in one novel—and the fellows in my fiction always had remarkable sexual adventures. It pains me to admit it, but nothing like that ever happened to me in Tonawanda.

  But maybe I should have given it a little more time. I can’t be positive of this, but it seems to me I only worked for Mr. Speier for a single week.

  It really wasn’t much of a job. I was paid two cents for every catalog I distributed, and I could only leave a catalog if someone was there to accept it. Then I noted the house number on a sheet of paper, secure in the knowledge that I was another two cents to the good. The next day I would meet Mr. Speier and hand over the sheet, and he would count up the numbers, make sure the count matched the number of catalogs he’d given me, pay me what I’d earned, and give me another batch of catalogs for distribution.

  First time out I’d tried to make my route more efficient by going back and forth across the street to save steps. But he didn’t like that because he wanted the numbers in order for later on, when he would go up one side of the block and down the other. So from then on I did it his way.

  It was tedious beyond description, but it wasn’t terribly difficult. The problem was that I couldn’t make any money at it. He’d give me thirty or thirty-five catalogs, and if I got rid of them all I’d make is sixty or seventy cents, and for this I had to peddle my bike a couple of miles in each direction.

  Now sixty cents for an afternoon’s work may not sound like a lot of money nowadays, but let me tell you something—it wasn’t a lot of money back then, either. Hell, I did better than that in the pop bottle business.

  And if it rained, the day was a washout. One day it was fair weather in Buffalo, but raining by the time I got to Tonawanda, so I got to ride all the way out there and turn around and go home. I didn’t pass Go, and I didn’t collect sixty cents.

  So one week was enough.

  THAT FALL I got a real job. It paid seventy cents an hour, minimum wage at the time, and as much as a kid could expect to earn in a part-time job. I worked at Parker Pharmacy, owned by Mr. Pearlstein, an acquaintance of my father’s. I did various stockboy chores, and when there was a prescription to be delivered, I hopped on my bike and delivered it. Sometimes a delivery meant a tip, but you might be surprised to learn that more often than not it didn’t. The tips, when they came, were a nickel or a dime. One man gave me a quarter once and I still remember it.

  More often than not, I spent the tip money on candy bars. I never wasted any money on cigarettes.
I was a confirmed smoker, I’d started swiping butts from my parents’ ashtrays two years earlier, but like every other kid I knew who ever worked at a drugstore, I stole cigarettes. I tried every brand we carried, brands nobody ever heard of. Virginia Rounds. Wings. Phantoms, which were one and a half times the length of a Pall Mall, and furnished with a cellophane tip. Murad, Helmar, Piedmont. Did anybody ever buy the damn things? Or were they just there for kids to steal?

  I worked after school, and Saturday mornings, and I made ten or twelve dollars a week. I never could have got the job without the bicycle.

  And by now it was a different bicycle. I don’t know when that happened, but I guess that orange and black Schwinn must have been a rusty mess when I hauled it out of the garage, and a little small for me in the bargain. It seems to me that by the time I was passing out catalogs for Mr. Speier, and certainly by the time I was delivering prescriptions for Mr. Pearlstein, the old Schwinn had morphed into something else, with hand brakes and gears as well. That’s what I rode around the streets of North Buffalo, obeying traffic laws, waiting for traffic lights to change, and even signaling my intention to turn left or right. You’d have thought I was behind the wheel of the family Chevy.

  While there were, alas, no eager MILF’s—Milves?—meeting me at their doors wearing a negligee and a smile, there was nevertheless a loss of innocence that came with the job. I wasn’t a kid who noticed a lot, but some things were hard to miss.

  Like the day when Bob, the pharmacist and store manager, took a prescription over the phone and sent me to the shelves for a bottle of Cepacol, an over-the-counter cough remedy. I brought it to him and he soaked off the label, typed out and slapped on a prescription label, raised the price from sixty-nine cents to ten dollars and change, and sent me off on my bicycle to deliver it.

  That was an eye-opener. And my eyes stayed open wide enough to take notice at the first of the month, when the outgoing mail held eight or ten small envelopes, all addressed to neighborhood physicians. Even I could work out what that was all about.

  6

  IT WAS DURING MY JUNIOR YEAR in high school that it dawned on me that I wanted to be a writer. I’d had various careers in mind over the years, without really developing anything close to a passion for any of them. When I was four or five years old I wanted to be a garbageman, until my mother told me they got chapped hands. Later I liked the idea of veterinary medicine, probably because I liked animals. My father would have liked for me to become a physician, he thought they had good lives while performing a useful service, and I entertained the idea but couldn’t really see myself pursuing it. I might have been inclined toward law, I had the right sort of mind for it, but my father was an attorney who practiced infrequently over the years. He’d soured on the profession, and actively dissuaded me from entering it.

  In third-year English, an early assignment led to my writing a paper on my career choices, from garbageman on. I had fun with it and took a light tone, and ended with something to the effect that, on reviewing what I’d written, one thing at least was clear: I could never become a writer.

  At the bottom, Miss May Jepson wrote: “I’m not so sure about that!”

  And the die was cast. Before the moment I read her comment, I had never had a single conscious thought of becoming a writer. I had a frame of reference for it, I had lately begun reading grown-up fiction (one hesitates to call it adult fiction, as that has somehow come to mean something else) and was making my way through the giants of American realism—Steinbeck, Hemingway, James T. Farrell, Thomas Wolfe, etc. I enjoyed the books and greatly admired the men who wrote them, but the notion that I might seek to do likewise never entered my mind.

  Once it did, I never seriously entertained the idea of doing anything else.

  I went on writing compositions for English class, and I suppose I showed off some therein. I wrote poems, too, and showed them to Miss Jepson, and basked in the praise I received. (The poem about the moon over Kansas was not among them. I wrote that, desperate tides and all, in my sophomore year at Antioch.)

  I was going to be a writer, and that’s what I told anyone who asked. “Oh, you’ll be a journalist,” they said. “Oh, you’ll work on a newspaper.”

  No. I was going to be a writer.

  IN JUNE I DIDN’T go off to writing camp, as I suppose a similarly inclined teenager might do nowadays. What I did was get on a Greyhound bus, and forty-eight hours later I got off in South Florida. In Dania, specifically, where Doc Marshall picked me up and drove me to Juniors Lodge.

  Dr. Marshall A. Marshall, né Marshall Gubinsky, was an extraordinary man. He’d been the scoutmaster of Troop Seven from the time I joined, until he and his wife and kids departed for Florida two years before I got on that bus. Doc was a dentist who specialized in making and fitting false teeth, and he’d fallen in love with Florida and wanted to live there, but the state dentists’ association had established strict rules to protect themselves from carpetbaggers, and Doc couldn’t practice his profession.

  So he bought some land and decided to build a camp for kids. He did the construction himself, with some help from his wife, Ada, and the kids, Bonnie and Mike, building a serviceable dormitory out of concrete block.

  He’d never done anything like this before, but the man had a penchant for tackling new tasks and figuring out how to perform them competently. He’d been in scouting as a boy, but hadn’t gotten all that far with it; when he was appointed scoutmaster, he decided he ought to set a good example, and he went through the laborious process of earning the requisite merit badges and becoming an Eagle Scout. If you apply yourself, I think you can probably learn more in this process than in four years of college, and Doc went to each task with the enthusiasm of an amateur and the precision of a pro. And, because he didn’t want to be a hotshot, he stopped at the requisite twenty-one merit badges—but he never stopped trying new things and developing new skills.

  I’d come down to be his camp counselor. There was a young woman as well, a swimmer with Olympic dreams; she was a couple of years older than I, and in charge when we took the kids swimming. The camp wasn’t much, just a summer-long babysitting service for parents who couldn’t wait to get rid of their kids, and not without reason. They were, pound for pound, as hopeless a lot of spoiled whining little bastards as I’d ever had to put up with.

  I don’t remember what the hell we did to amuse them day after day, but the days passed and nobody went home, so I guess we all got through it okay. (They may well have reciprocated their parents’ feelings—once again, not without reason.) But as far as I was concerned, the day began when the rotten little snots went to sleep.

  That’s when Doc and Ada and I sat around the kitchen table and smoked cigarettes and talked. Their Irish setter, Copper, would generally join us. Copper was the smartest and best-behaved dog I’d ever met, and as a result I came to think highly of the breed. (Years later I had one of my own, Maxine by name, not that the dizzy bitch answered to it or to anything else. She was as stupid as an oyster and as tractable as a cyclone.) We’d smoke and talk and smoke and talk and smoke some more. I don’t remember what we talked about, and what difference did it make? I was in heaven.

  It was a wonderful summer. I had one day off, and took a bus to Miami, where I went to the movies and saw Gone With the Wind. On the bus back to camp, a driver gently reprimanded me for taking a seat in the rear. That was for colored, he told me. They got plenty of ignorant Yankees in that part of the state, so I guess he had to do that a lot.

  Some years later I heard of or read about a fellow in a similar situation, who’d lowered his head at the driver’s admonition and murmured significantly that his father was white. The driver left him alone. Later, as he was getting off the bus, the guy called over his shoulder, “I forgot to tell you—my mother was white, too!”

  I never would have thought of that, and even if I had I’d never have done it. What I did was change my seat.

  HIKING WASN’T PART of the agenda at Juni
ors Lodge. At home, I don’t think many of those kids ever walked farther than the distance from the television set to the dinner table, and summers in Florida were too hot even if they were up for it. I don’t remember working up a sweat myself, aside from the sweat one worked up just by being there, but somehow in the six or eight weeks I worked there I must have lost twenty pounds, maybe more.

  I was always a fat kid—not the morbidly obese sort one sees nowadays, but what clothing salesmen called husky. I took my huskiness as a given and didn’t pay much attention to it, and when my parents and sister drove down to collect me—there’d be no return trip on the Greyhound, thank God—a miracle had occurred. I was no longer husky.

  THE FOUR of us spent a week living it up at a Miami Beach motel, then drove home. I went off to my senior year at Bennett, and got another drugstore job.

  Back in Buffalo, I tried corresponding with Doc and Ada. Oddly, I still remember the mailing address: Box 507, Hollywood, Florida. I sent a couple of letters there and never heard back. They were both far too busy for correspondence.

  Then I did get a letter from them, and it was some sort of form letter, soliciting families and businesses to hold events at Juniors Lodge. (If it was a lousy name for a kids’ camp, it was an even worse name for a catering hall.) They’d put me on their mailing list, and I resented this.

  A few years later there was an obituary in the Buffalo Evening News. Ada had died of lung cancer. She couldn’t have been fifty when she died. I thought about writing a letter, but I always think about writing letters on such occasions, and hardly ever get around to it. Nor did I this time.

  Then, twenty-one years after my summer at Juniors Lodge, I looked for Doc and I found him. I was on a curious ramble; I’d given up my apartment in New York, moved in with a woman in Buffalo, moved out a few days later when she came to her senses, and found myself with all my possessions in the back of a treacherous Ford station wagon. I decided to drive around and see where I wound up.