Step by Step

by Lawrence Block

  H. L. Mencken wrote somewhere that the Lord had seized the United States by the state of Maine and lifted, so that everything loose wound up in Southern California. That’s what I was and that’s what I did, but it took me four or five months to get there, and on my way I passed through the town of Dania and thought of Doc.

  So I went looking for him, and amazingly enough I found him. I reached his dental office—evidently if you lived in Florida long enough they had to let you be a dentist again—and the woman I spoke to told me Doc had retired because of illness. I found out where he lived and went to see him.

  He had emphysema, and walked around sucking oxygen out of a tube. He knew me, and remembered me as clearly as I remembered him. And he brought me up to date on his life since I’d known him. He’d had two marriages after Ada’s death, each one worse than the last. He’d gone back to dentistry and managed to build a practice. He told me about his kids, but if what he said registered at all I’ve long since forgotten it.

  And he told me what a struggle he’d had in Buffalo with the Beth Zion establishment, who hadn’t wanted an East Side boy, a Russian Jew like Marshall Gubinsky, leading their Boy Scout troop. And he’d had his troubles with some of our parents, as well—not mine, he had nothing but good to say about my folks, but several others.

  And he talked about his emphysema. He didn’t say it was going to kill him, but he really didn’t have to. “You know,” he said, “when you’re working with the kind of chemicals we use in my branch of dentistry, well, you’re breathing in fumes for hours on end. I think that’s probably what caused it.” He sucked on the oxygen tube. “Though I suppose all those Luckies may have been a factor.”

  Gee, ya think?

  It was an unsettling experience, to say the least. At another period in my life I’d have walked out of there and immediately lit up a cigarette, but I’d quit them a little over a year earlier. So what I did was go have a drink. There’s always something.

  THEY WOULD HAVE taken me back at Parker Pharmacy, but I really didn’t like Bob, the pharmacist, and I think I felt constrained by the fact that my dad had lined up the job for me. So I went to Day’s Drugs, at North Park and Hertel, about as far from my house in one direction as Parker had been in the other. I’d heard that their delivery boy had gone off to college, and I applied for the job.

  It paid seventy-five cents an hour, which was a nickel more than I’d been making at Parker. The nickel was beside the point, but I was quick to mention it to my folks. “And,” I said, “I’ll be making five cents more an hour.”

  My boss was a fellow named Frank Stein, whom everyone who ever worked for him inevitably referred to as Frank N. Stein, though there was nothing about him suggestive of either the scientist or his creation. He and his wife, both of them short and stout, were the entire staff of their small store, along with whatever high school kid was working for them that year. I was on my bike a lot in Frank’s service, because I not only had to deliver prescriptions; a lot of the time, I had to go out and fill them first.

  The store wasn’t much more than a hole in the wall, and the backroom stock was limited. Consequently Frank often got a prescription calling for something he didn’t have in house. “Sure, we’ve got that,” he’d say, and then he’d call around to other drugstores until he found somebody who did in fact have the item in question. I’d go there and pick it up, and he’d put his own label on it, and I’d go out and deliver it.

  It was also my job to sell cigarettes. They were a loss leader for us, so we did a big business in them, and I remember what they cost—$1.93 a carton for regular-size cigarettes, like Camels and Luckies and Old Gold, and $1.95 a carton for king-size. (That extra two cents a carton never caused me to wonder at the time, but now it strikes me as incomprehensible. What minuscule increment could the wholesaler have charged that led us to price Pall Mall a fifth of a cent a pack higher than Lucky Strike?)

  I sold cigarettes, many of them to customers who came to us for their smokes and for nothing else. And I stole cigarettes, too, though our selection was less vast and I was pretty much limited to the common brands. I didn’t sell condoms, you had to go ask for those at the prescription counter, and once in a while somebody paused at my cash register with a puzzled expression on his face, and I’d just point him toward the back. But I did steal a condom, and it remained unopened in my wallet forever. It said right on the wrapper that its sole purpose was to prevent the transmission of venereal disease, and I’d have to say it worked.

  At the end of the school year, I introduced my friend Symmie Jacobson to Frank; Symmie was a year behind me, and glad to take over my job. I walked off with my last pack of free cigarettes, and shortly thereafter I graduated from Bennett. Remarkably enough, I was one of the officers of my senior class.

  It was far and away the least significant office, and the only one that wasn’t largely a popularity contest. The post was Class Poet, and there was a competition for it. You submitted a poem, and a panel of three English teachers read the entries without knowing whose they were. I submitted two entries, one in declamatory blank verse (Four years have passed since first we called you Home…) and the other something more impressionistic, written in a free verse that owed a lot to American Imagist poets of the early twentieth century, like Alfred Kreymborg, whom I admired greatly.

  The blank verse epic won, and was printed in the school yearbook. I may have had to read it on stage at Class Day, but maybe not. I can’t remember.

  “The free verse poem was everybody’s second choice,” Miss Jepson confided. “Of course I knew right away it was yours. I knew they were both yours.”

  THE NIGHT I graduated I got drunk for the first time in my life. I found my way home and went to bed, and when the bed started spinning I leaned over the side of it and vomited. Then I passed out and slept like a lamb. The next day my mother told me she hoped I’d learned something from the experience.

  Yeah, right.

  I spent the summer as a counselor-in-training at Camp Lakeland. I didn’t walk much at Camp Lakeland, and I certainly didn’t run, but I saw something there that I never forgot. One of our campers was a fellow named Barry who was really too old for camp, but they took him out of a need to do something for him. He was, I gather, kind of disturbed, and when I heard his story I figured he had plenty to be disturbed about. His family were European refugees, but they’d managed to stay out of the camps. They hid from the Germans in the woods, and subsisted on roots and berries, and somehow lived to tell the tale. Most of them, anyway.

  Barry was about as well socialized as a wolverine. Every now and then he’d run away from camp, just take off down the highway and disappear. I suppose he went back to Buffalo. That was one interesting thing he would do, but another far more interesting thing he did was run. He was this big lanky kid, tall for his fifteen years, and he’d go out to a field and just lope around it for fucking hours on end. When he got thirsty he’d tear a leaf from a tree and chew on it. Then he’d spit it out. And throughout it all he’d keep on running along.

  Damnedest thing I ever saw.

  If I had to, I figured, I could probably live on roots and berries. My Boy Scout experience had taught me how to recognize edible wild plants. I could do that, at least for a while, if I had to.

  But the running? Not a chance, not if my life depended on it.

  WHEN CAMP WAS over I went home. A couple of weeks later my dad drove me to Yellow Springs, Ohio, where I was to begin my freshman year at Antioch College.

  7

  I ONLY APPLIED TO TWO COLLEGES, CORNELL AND ANTIOCH. Both my parents attended Cornell—that’s where Arthur Block from New York City met and married Lenore Nathan from Buffalo—and so did my two uncles, Hi and Jerry Nathan. I’d been there several times for football games, and I knew the words to all of the college songs. (I still do; learn that sort of thing young enough and it’s yours for life.)

  In the ordinary course of things that’s where I’d have gone, whatever I wanted to
study. They even had a veterinary medicine school, in case that old ambition should return. All those relatives would have helped induce the college to find a place for me, but I wouldn’t need their aid. I had the grades, and the smarts. All I had to do was send in my application and I’d be set for four years in Ithaca, far above Cayuga’s waters.

  Far above Cayuga’s waters

  With its waves of blue

  Stands our noble alma mater

  Glorious to view—

  Lift the chorus, speed it onward,

  Loud her praises tell

  Hail to thee, our alma mater

  Hail all hail Cornell

  Instead I went to Antioch, where the only song was an unofficial one that went like so:

  A is for the A in dear old Antioch

  N is for the N in dear old Antioch

  T is for the T in dear old Antioch

  I is for the I…

  Well, you get the idea.

  I’d never heard of Antioch, but then I’d never heard of any colleges except the ones that fielded a football team. My parents learned about it from Ruth and Jimmy Gitlitz. Jimmy, a lawyer in Binghamton, was my dad’s closest friend from Cornell, and the Gitlitzes knew about Antioch because the son of friends of theirs—I believe the family name was Singer—had gone there and liked the place. So had another Jewish boy from Binghamton, Rod Serling, who went on to be the host and creator of the TV show The Twilight Zone.

  The salient fact about Antioch was that it had a work-study program—not so that students could earn money, as it was a rare student indeed who finished a co-op job with more money than he’d had when he started it—but to provide Antiochians with practical experience in their chosen field, and indeed to help them toward an informed vocational choice. Students spent half the year at jobs the college found for them and the other half in classrooms (except for freshmen, who had the option of spending the entire year on campus, as about half of each entering class chose to do).

  The other significant fact about Antioch, although I never knew it until I got there, was that it tended to draw nonconformists. Maybe that’s why my parents thought I’d be happy there. They were sold on the work-study program, but part of their enthusiasm may have stemmed from the notion that this might be a place where I’d actually fit in, and feel at home.

  I applied to both schools and was accepted right away at each. I’m sure we would have been eligible for some sort of financial aid package, my dad wasn’t making much money, but he was unwilling to fill out the requisite forms, so we never applied for scholarships. I did take the New York State Regents exam, and scored high enough to qualify for $600 a year toward tuition at any school in the state; additionally, my placement was close enough to the top to earn me an additional $200 annually as a specific Cornell scholarship.

  Eight hundred dollars a year was substantial. Antioch, not an inexpensive institution, charged an annual unit fee of $1400, which covered room and board as well as tuition. It represented a certain financial sacrifice for my parents to send me to Antioch, and God knows I’d have gone off to Cornell willingly enough, but there was never any question. “You’d rather go to Antioch, wouldn’t you?” Well, uh, yeah, I guess. “Then that’s where you’re going. It’s the right place for you.”

  IT’S AN INTERESTING time to be writing about Antioch, as the school has been much in the news lately. The board of trustees has announced that the school will not reopen for at least four years, because applications for admission are insufficient to allow the school to function. How closing for four years will increase applications is something no one has managed to explain, and it looks as though the old school is going out of business.

  I think my parents were right, I think it was indeed the right place for me, though I sometimes wonder what course my life might have taken if I’d gone to Cornell instead. (Such speculation, I should point out, has precious little to do with Antioch or Cornell, and more with my state of mind at the moment. A couple of years ago I was at Avery Fisher Hall for a concert of the New York Philharmonic. From our seats I had a good view of Philip Myers, the principal French horn player, and I had the following extraordinary thought: Maybe I should have studied the French horn, maybe that would have made all the difference.)

  I spent three of the next four years at Antioch. I spent all of my first year in Yellow Springs. In the summer I went off to New York for three months in the mailroom at Pines Publications. I shared an apartment on Barrow Street in Greenwich Village, not five minutes from where I live now. I went back to school for a semester, then took a job my father got for me at the Erie County Comptroller’s Office—the idea was I could live at home and save money, but anything I put aside I spent on a weekend trip to New York. In the spring I returned for the second semester of my sophomore year, and come summer I again passed up the school’s job offerings, worked briefly in restaurants on Cape Cod, and then went to New York, where I was lucky enough to land an editorial position at the Scott Meredith literary agency.

  It was the best possible opportunity for someone who wanted to be a writer, and I dropped out of school to keep it. I’d already placed a story with a crime fiction magazine, and I wrote and sold many more stories during the year I worked there; more to the point, I learned a tremendous amount about writing, and about the business of being a writer.

  A year was enough, and at the end of it I quit the agency—though I remained a client—and went back to Antioch for a third year. But it was the farm, and I’d seen Paree. I’d caught on with a paperback publisher and was able to write novels and get paid for them, and that made it very hard for me to assign a very high priority to classes in the eighteenth-century English novel.

  The drinking and dope-smoking may have had something to do with it, too.

  I withdrew after a month or two, then rescinded my withdrawal under emotional blackmail from my parents. I stayed in Yellow Springs for the rest of that academic year, spending my work period on campus as the editor of the college paper, and in the summer of 1959 I went to New York to devote my next job period to writing books. I was living in the Hotel Rio, on West Forty-seventh Street, and that’s where I was when I got a letter from the Student Personnel Committee. They had concluded, they wrote, that I would be happier elsewhere. It was the sort of expulsion notice one could probably talk one’s way out of, with only the occasional mouthful of crow, but I found nothing in their words to argue with. I agreed with them entirely, I would indeed be happier elsewhere, and I’ve been elsewhere ever since.

  ANTIOCH WAS A hotbed of a number of things, but athletic activity was not among them. There was no intercollegiate competition, in football or anything else, and thus few occasions for the singing of “A Is for the A in Dear Old Antioch.” In my first semester, my freshman dorm fielded a team to play two-handed tag football against other dorms, and in the appropriate semesters we did the same with basketball and football.

  Every spring there was an event held called the Beer Ball Game, a baseball contest in which the pitcher drank a beer before delivering the ball, the batter drank a beer before running to first base, the infielder drank a beer before throwing to first, and so on. I suppose most schools have an event of this sort, and I suppose few of them get beyond the first inning. Ours never did.

  My alma mater has a distinguished alumni roster for a college with an average total enrollment of a thousand. We’ve turned out leaders in public service and the arts, and for years produced a wildly disproportionate number of Woodrow Wilson scholars. But as far as I know we’ve never graduated a future Olympian, and it’s not hard to understand why.

  MY WALKING at Antioch was just a way to get from one place to another. It was a small campus in a small town, and there was no place one couldn’t walk to in ten or fifteen minutes at the most. Still, when I returned for my final year, the first thing I did was buy a car. It was a deep blue 1950 Chevrolet coupe, and it had a lot of things wrong with it, but I was uncommonly fond of it. I named it Pamela, for Samu
el Richardson’s epistolary novel, which was assigned reading in my eighteenth-century novel class. I never actually read the book, but naming my car after it seemed the next best thing.

  A certain number of semesters of physical education were a requirement for graduation at Antioch. All you had to do was attend, there were no examinations, not even a grade of Pass or Fail. The initial course, which everybody took first semester, was general, and all I remember was that I took it, and that it was held in the gym. I must have attended it just enough to get credit for it.

  The second half of the year you could take something specific, and Paul Grillo, my freshman hall advisor, suggested the two of us sign up for golf. The school didn’t have a functioning course; what had once been a golf course was now just a stretch of the campus, where courting couples were apt to be strewn hither and yon in seasonable weather. They still called the area the golf course, but anyone who actually wanted to hit a ball with a stick had to go to a nearby course, which I think may have been in Xenia.

  Paul and I would go there, and we’d dutifully tee off, and each of us would hit his ball as many times as we had to in order to get it into the woods. There, out of sight of everyone but the squirrels, we’d stretch out and smoke cigarettes and tell each other stories. Then at the appropriate time we’d find our way back to the clubhouse, turn in our rented clubs, and get on the bus to go back to campus.