Step by Step

by Lawrence Block

  WELL, I DIDN’T start training for a Centurion event. I figured I had plenty of time before I hit sixty. But you’d think, wouldn’t you, that my performance in the Jersey Shore race would have had me racing more than ever in the months that followed.

  That’s not what happened. I did fit in a ten-mile race in Central Park later that month, and racewalked it, but in 1982 I didn’t enter a single race until the middle of June. I managed two races in July, three in August, and three in October, racewalking all of them—and I didn’t participate in a single race after that for over twenty years.

  It’s funny, really, the way things happen, and the way they don’t. I’d done five marathons in the course of a year, and had ended on a high note, and I certainly expected to do as many marathons in 1982, if not more.

  One thing I did, not long after the first of the year, was move from Washington Heights to Greenpoint. The apartment I found, a fourth-floor railroad flat, was on Manhattan Avenue, just a little ways past the midpoint of the New York City Marathon. I’d taken note of Greenpoint while running through it, and was impressed enough to choose it for the secret residence of Matthew Scudder’s client in Eight Million Ways to Die, and that’s where I looked when I decided to get a place of my own.

  I liked living in Greenpoint. It’s become very trendy since then, though it doesn’t look all that different. While I was living there, I found the dated feel of the neighborhood very appealing. It was situated, I told friends, in a different time zone from the rest of the city. “When it’s eight-thirty in Manhattan,” I explained, “it’s 1948 in Greenpoint.”

  It was an easy place to live, and it should have been a good place to train. McCarren Park was five or ten minutes from my apartment, and the oval asphalt path was ideal for racewalking.

  Or it would have been, if it weren’t for the goddam kids.

  There was a high school on Bedford Avenue across from the park, where a few hundred of Brooklyn’s finest young men were presumably engaged in studying auto or aviation mechanics. I could see where a knowledge of auto mechanics would come in handy when the little bastards went into business as car thieves and chop shop bandits, but the airplane portion of the curriculum struck me as impractical.

  Evidently it struck some of them the same way, because a substantial portion of the student body spent much of their time outdoors, in or around the park. And they seemed to believe—not, I grant you, without some justification—that a middle-aged man racewalking was as funny a sight as you could see this side of the Cartoon Network.

  I was sustained by the notion that, if you ignore people who are jeering at you, sooner or later they’ll stop. They, on the other hand, had figured out that if you make sport of some poor bastard long enough, sooner or later he’ll give up and go home—and the longer he lasts, the more amusement he’ll provide.

  I’ll tell you, it took a lot of the joy out of my training.

  STILL, I COULD have managed. If it had been important to me, I could have found a way to get the miles in.

  I joined the Greenpoint YMCA, just a block or two from my apartment, and went there a couple of times a week to work out with weights. I stopped using the sauna when some of the junior members discovered the lasting impact they could achieve by pissing on the hot rocks. It was enough to keep a person out of the sauna—and, before too long, out of the Y altogether.

  They may have had a treadmill at the Y. I don’t recall one, and at the time cardiovascular equipment was by no means standard in neighborhood gyms. If they’d had one I doubt I’d have used it. Running and racewalking, as far as I was concerned, were things you did outside.

  If you did them at all.

  And it was becoming increasingly easy not to bother. The conventional wisdom held that running was addictive, but it seemed to me that not running was a good deal more addictive. It was an easy habit to acquire, and a hard one to break.

  And so it wasn’t until June that I finally entered a race, and in October the 8K Halloween race was my ninth and last of the year. I walked all nine races, and my record book shows that I averaged eleven-minute miles. There were three four-mile events, a couple of 10Ks, and one half marathon. (There was also a six-mile race held right in Greenpoint, and my time of 1:04:03 would be more impressive but for the fact that the course measurement was off by a substantial distance.)

  There was a five-mile race in Central Park on October 17; they called it a Computer Run, because they used the occasion to test the computerized scoring system that would be in use a week later at the NYC Marathon. I never even tried to register for the marathon, never even considered it, and I’m sure I wouldn’t have had the training base for it. A week later was the Halloween 8K, and my time was a little over two minutes slower than the previous year, so a year of light training hadn’t cost me all that much. I could still do this.

  But I didn’t, not for more than twenty-two years.

  13

  IN JULY OF 1982, I started spending time with a woman I’d met the previous fall, shortly after my return from California. We’d become friendly, but we were both involved with other people at the time; by July we had both found our way out of those relationships, and discovered one another.

  One thing that was clear to both of us was that we were not interested in a relationship. Yeah, right. The following February we became engaged—engaged!—and in October of 1983 we were married, and we’ve been remarkably happy ever since.

  It’s tempting to make the case that I’d taken up running (and eventually walking) out of discontent with my circumstances. Any dimestore Freud could nod sagely at my odyssey in the summer of ’81, stroke his beard, and pontificate: Ah, so. And what were you running away from, eh? And then, he’d point out, once Lynne and I began keeping company, I no longer had to run away from anything, and so I stopped.

  Well, maybe. It’s hard to argue the point, but it seems to me there were other factors operating.

  One was a matter of overload. I’d done far too much running and walking in 1981—forty races, for God’s sake, and five of them full marathons. I was tired of it, mentally and emotionally, certainly, and very likely physically as well.

  Just as important, I had a lot more demands on my time. Besides my writing workload, which picked up around then, I developed an interactive writing seminar, and for a couple of years Lynne and I were in the seminar business, flying around the country every weekend. (We called the seminar Write For Your Life, and what a mistake that turned out to be; a surprising number of venues thought it had something to do, pro or con, with abortion, and didn’t want to have anything to do with us.) The seminar was enormously satisfying in every respect but financially—I think the return on our time amounted to something like fifty cents an hour—and we put a lot of time and effort into it for about three years.

  Meanwhile, in the summer of 1985, we gave up our apartment in New York and moved to Florida. We bought a house right on the Gulf, and the first day I took a walk on the beach, heading north. The next day I did the same thing but headed in the opposite direction. The day after that I stayed home.

  A couple of times during our Florida years I tried running on the beach. (Racewalking on the sand didn’t really work.) But it was too hot, and I was out of shape, and it didn’t take me long to abandon the enterprise. Running, or walking, or whatever you wanted to call it, seemed to be something I had embraced for a while, and something with which I was finished. Once in a while I would wear a race T-shirt and remember what I’d done to earn it. Now and then I would recall, in contemplation or conversation, that I had in fact run marathons, that I’d done five of them in the course of a single year. When I reported this to acquaintances, they seemed impressed; I was impressed as well, and a little wistful. All of that was a part of the past now, as impossible to recapture as any of the rest of it, and all of it, as the song had it, Gone, alas, like my youth, too soon.

  I WAS SITTING in the living room of our house in Fort Myers Beach when, out of nowhere, I envisi
oned a man walking eastward across America. As he walked, other people joined him.

  It was the summer of 1987. We had been living in Florida for almost two years. I’d been writing regularly during that time—a book version of Write For Your Life, a film novelization that never got published because the publisher hadn’t cleared the rights sufficiently, a collaborative nonfiction venture that didn’t quite work out. I managed a couple of short stories, and I’d written the opening chapters of a couple of novels that were fated never to have second chapters, and it was past time for me to sit down and get a new novel written, and I couldn’t think what to write.

  On an impulse, I’d contrived to book myself into a writers’ colony for the month of July. I’d never stayed at a colony before, but I’d read about them, and understood they provided room and board and a sort of communal solitude presumably conducive to creative effort. For years I’d been in the habit of going off somewhere when I was having trouble getting something written, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts struck me as a happier choice than a Motel 6 on the outskirts of Abilene, so I applied and was accepted. I didn’t know what I’d do when I got there, but I figured it couldn’t be less than I was doing at home in Florida.

  Maybe I’d write a book about Bernie Rhodenbarr. I’d written five lighthearted books about the light-fingered fellow, and I really wanted to write a sixth, but the couple of attempts I’d made in that direction had gone nowhere. I liked the notion of a story about baseball cards—somebody could collect them, and Bernie could steal them—and I’d bought a couple of books and read up on the subject, but that didn’t mean I was ready to write the book, or even that there was a book to be written.

  All that might come together, I decided, by the time I was settled in at VCCA. I’d be there for four weeks, and that ought to be time to get something started, if not finished. And that was all I needed, really—a good start on a book. If I managed that much, I could get the rest done back home in Florida.

  Then, perhaps two weeks before I was to get started in Virginia, I got this vision of a guy walking across the country.

  Over the next few days more and more of the story came to me. The fellow who started the whole thing was a bartender in Oregon, I decided—or realized, or whatever it was. And another character was a woman who was losing her eyesight. And she had a young son. And—

  Bits and pieces. And, along with these folks, I sensed that there was another story line running alongside, involving a serial killer who was roaming the Midwest and murdering women. I couldn’t imagine what he had to do with this other story, or how the two plotlines might intersect, or if they even belonged on the same library shelf, let alone in the same book. But I sensed that what was happening to me was a rather extraordinary case of literary ferment, unlike anything in my prior experience, and the last thing I wanted to do was get in its way.

  It was also very much evident that the book I was going to write was to be a very complicated affair, a large multiple-viewpoint novel, with a few dozen characters and a great body of incident. It would need considerable advance plotting, probably an elaborate outline, and it would be a long time before I’d be ready to write it. More than two weeks, certainly—which meant I’d better think of something else to work on at VCCA.

  By the time I got in my car for the drive north, I realized I didn’t have any choice. There was only one book in my mind, and it wasn’t going to go away. I didn’t think I could actually start writing it, but maybe I could do some of the preliminary work on it, cobble up some sort of an outline that would serve me when I got back to Florida. Toward that end I took along a Rand McNally road atlas; it would help me with the geographical research, and might also keep me from getting irretrievably lost en route to Virginia.

  I took two days to drive there, with a stop in Knoxville to attend a custom-made knife show. (I bought a nice little folding knife. I wonder whatever happened to it. Maybe it’s in the pocket of my Jersey Shore Marathon jacket.) On arrival at VCCA, I found my way to my dormitory room, and from there to my studio in the barn complex a quarter-mile away. I set up my typewriter, placed the road atlas to one side of it and a stack of blank paper to the other, and went to the dining room for dinner.

  Come morning, I went to my studio, sat down at the typewriter, and wrote twenty pages. And I did the same thing every morning for twenty-three days, by which time I had completed a 460-page manuscript. I spent a day editing it, and another day getting it photocopied at Sweet Briar College, and then I got in the car and went home.

  WRITERS SOMETIMES say that a particular piece of work wrote itself, although in my experience nothing ever does. From a distance, though, Random Walk would seem to come close. An idea had come to me, apparently from out of nowhere, and two weeks later I’d sat down and begun writing, and three weeks and two days after that I was done. If the damn thing hadn’t written itself, then who, pray tell, was responsible for it?

  Well, I guess that would be me. I was the one tapping the typewriter keys, and I was the one getting to my studio early each morning and emerging ten or twelve or fifteen hours later.

  Nor was it a simple matter of taking down celestial dictation. I’ve read about people who’ve “channeled” books, and for whom the writing process consisted of little more than transcribing the sentences that unreeled in their brains. (If Mozart is to be believed—and God knows he’s always been reliable in the past—composition was rather like this for him. “There’s nothing to it,” he’s supposed to have said. “All I do is write down the music I hear in my head.”)

  I’m not sure what channeling amounts to, for Mozart or for the woman who produced A Course in Miracles; I don’t know whether the actual source at such times is within or outside oneself. I’ll allow that my own experience had something in common with channeling, in that the initial idea came from no apparent source, and that ideas continued to come to me throughout the writing process, so that I was never at a loss for what turn in the narrative ought to happen next.

  And that was no small gift. E. L. Doctorow has likened the process of writing a novel to driving at night—you can see only so far as the headlights reach, but you can get clear across the country that way. My characters, led by that bartender from Roseburg, Oregon, were walking by day, not driving by night, but each morning I went to my studio knowing just enough about their journey to carry them along for one more day.

  I didn’t have an outline, of course, because I could never really see more than a day’s work into the book’s future. What I did have was my road atlas, and there wasn’t a day that I didn’t spend a substantial amount of time poring over it, working out the walkers’ route, determining what turns they would take and where they would stop. My serial killer, meanwhile, was driving all around the Midwest doing his evil deeds, and I was tracing his route in the atlas as well. Much of the book’s action was unfolding in places I had never been, but that didn’t bother me. I wasn’t entirely sure what I was writing, but I knew it wasn’t a travel book.

  IF ONE WERe to attribute such things as will to inanimate objects, one could say that Random Walk had shown an overwhelming desire to be written. It had virtually insisted on it.

  Alas, it proved a good deal less eager to be read.

  My regular publisher, William Morrow, was willing to bring out the book, but only if I cut it severely and reshaped it beyond recognition. I didn’t even consider complying, and my agent sent the book to two other publishers, both of whom wanted to do it. We went with Tor, and I made one small change to make the editor happy, adding a crystal that gets handed around among the walkers. (I’m not convinced it was a good idea, but I can’t see that it hurt anything.)

  Then the book was published, whereupon it promptly vanished without a trace. No one knew what to make of it, and the line on the cover—“A New Novel for a New Age”—couldn’t have helped a whole lot. Nor did the cover art, which made the thing look like science fiction. Reviews tended to be negative, to the extent that the
book got reviewed at all. Few copies found their way onto bookstore shelves, and fewer still found their way off those shelves.

  A year or so after its hardcover publication, Random Walk had a second life in paperback—and that didn’t work, either. This time the cover managed to make the book look like some epic novel of the westward migration. Somehow prospective purchasers managed to find it within themselves to pick up something else instead.

  It’s tempting to blame the publishers, and God knows I did at the time, but I don’t know that anyone could have made Random Walk work commercially. The experience of writing it had been extraordinary, and I was happy enough with the way the book had turned out, and if its destiny was to vanish without a trace, well, I wasn’t a twenty-two-year-old with a first book. I had written a lot of books, and many of them had vanished without a trace, and so what?

  Well, not entirely without a trace.

  One way or another, some copies must have found their way into readers’ hands. And over the years I heard from some of those readers.

  “You know,” someone would say at a book signing, “I’ve read just about everything you’ve written, the light books and the dark ones, and I’ve pretty much liked all of them, but there was one book of yours I picked up a while back that I couldn’t make head or tail out of, and I can’t figure out what you were getting at or why you wrote it in the first place, and—”

  And I’d know right away he was talking about Random Walk.

  Or I might hear something along these lines: “I’ve read all your books, and I like them all, but there was one book of yours that I’ve read seventeen times, and I swear it changed the way I look at the world, and my life just hasn’t been the same since, and every year I read it again and get something else out of it, and—”