CH01 - No Score

by Lawrence Block

  I’m afraid you don’t entirely understand,” he said. “I don’t see how we could conscientiously let you remain here until graduation, Harrison. You see—”

  “But it’s February.”

  “Yes.”

  “Almost March.”

  “Errmphhh.”

  “I mean, this is my last semester before graduation. I would be graduating in June.”

  “Actually, you owe us tuition, room, and board since September, Harrison.”

  “I’ll pay sooner or later. I’d go to work after graduation and I could pay—”

  He was shaking his head, which in his case called for more than the usual amount of effort. I watched him do this. I felt, oh, very strange. Weird. I mean, thinking about all of this now, in what you might call historical perspective, I get all sorts of vibrations that I didn’t get then. Like what an utter shit, pardon the expression, the Head was. And like that.

  But at the time, I was having my whole little world turned not only upside down but inside out, and I was like numb. I didn’t know how I felt about any of this because I didn’t feel. I couldn’t. There was no time to react because everything was too busy going on.

  The Head stopped shaking and spoke again. “No, no, no,” it—he—said. “No, I think not. No, I’m afraid we’ll simply have to write off the money, chalk it up to experience. If there were mitigating circumstances, but no, no, no, I don’t think so. Your grades are not bad, but neither are they exceptionally good. Coach Lipscot tells me your performance on the basketball court is generally disappointing. And, of course, the social stigma, you must understand. Murder and suicide and confidence swindling, no, no, no, I think not, Harrison, I think not.”

  I was shaking when I left his office. I don’t think I was ticked off or scared or any particular thing, but I was shaking. Everything happening at once. I went back to the dorm. My roommate was lying in his bunk, reading a sex magazine, and when I walked in he went through his little act of trying to pretend that (a) he was only interested from the standpoint of a future psychologist and (b) he had been holding the magazine in both hands. I don’t suppose the guy beat off more than average. It was his attitude that bothered me. (As a matter of fact, an obnoxious attitude in this area isn’t exactly rare. Either they’re like Haskell, going to great lengths to pretend that they don’t even have genitals, let alone touch them, or else they go to the other extreme and want to talk about it, or discuss methods, or do it right out in the open. Or worse. Either way I find it pretty disgusting. I think it should be a private thing, like religion or squeezing blackheads.)

  Anyway, the sight of old Haskell draping the sex book to hide his erection was enough to turn me off to the idea of talking with him, which hadn’t been that outstanding an idea to begin with, I don’t guess. He started babbling about something or other, and I wondered what he would say if I told him everything, and I decided it wasn’t worth finding out. I turned away from him and went over to my dresser and started pulling out drawers. I thought I was trying to decide what to take and what to leave, but I guess I was looking for something without knowing what it was, something that would make everything go together in some, oh, meaningful way. If anything like that existed, it certainly wasn’t in my drawers or closet. As a matter of fact, the more I looked the more I realized that there was nothing around that I particularly wanted to see again. It was just too much trouble to decide which stuff to put in a suitcase and which stuff to leave behind. It was easier to leave everything.

  It was especially easy to leave old Haskell. I didn’t even say goodbye. I mean, why do it? I thought about borrowing a few bucks from him—he always had plenty of money; everybody at Upper Valley always had money. The Head would just shake himself and say that he had expected me to borrow money before I left, and like father like son, and all of that.

  So I didn’t. Not from Haskell and not from anybody else, and the crazy thing is that if I had just gone and told people what was happening, not even getting specific about it but just that I was broke and with nowhere to turn and all, I could have collected a bundle. Not by borrowing, but as outright gifts, or on a pay-me-when-you-can basis. Because while the guys at Upper Valley were something less than princes, they were not a bad bunch. And if I was not Mr. Popularity, I wasn’t anybody they despised, either. They were okay, and I got along with everybody. And, more than anything else, see, these guys were all at Upper Valley for a reason. They were all there because (a) they had money and (b) there was something less than wonderful about them, or else they would have gone to a better school. Either they were slow learners or marginal alcoholics or their family background had a bad smell to it or something of the sort. They had plenty of money and they knew how important money was and just what the limits to it were, and all of this added up to a gentle and wry kind of sympathy and all.

  So they might even have taken up a collection for me, and it might even have come to enough so that I could have stayed at that crappy school until I graduated from it. At least it would have been enough to let me leave the school on a bus or train or something.

  But I was, well, proud. And in no mood to explain anything to anybody, or take anything from anybody. In fact I couldn’t even talk to anybody, although I had this need. I actually spent close to two hours just walking around the campus, trying to think who I could talk to. I couldn’t work up any enthusiasm for talking to any of the guys or any of the teachers. I would have little conversations with some of them in my own mind, and it helped me get some of my own thoughts straightened out, but each time I came to the decision that I would just as soon talk to these people in my mind and not in the flesh. And I certainly didn’t want to talk to the basketball coach. I did have an imaginary conversation with him. It didn’t get too far, but it featured him explaining to me how, if I only drove more fiercely on those lay-ups and worked harder for those rebounds, if I could only be counted on to drop a sufficient percentage of foul shots, then my academic career might still be promising. “You’ve got the height and the reach, Chip, kid,” he said, in the privacy of my mind. “Not enough to interest the college scouts. A year or two and the rest of them’ll catch up with you. But on a prep school level—well, you had your chance, boy. This was the place for you and I gave you every opportunity, but you just didn’t give me everything, boy; you just let me and the team down. A winner never quits, Chip, kid, and a quitter never wins.”

  I sat under a tree and looked through my wallet. I had a snapshot of my folks, and another more formal picture of my mother. I looked at these for a little while. I also had seven one-dollar bills in the bill compartment of the wallet, and forty-six cents in the change compartment. In the secret compartment I had a folded twenty-dollar bill and a lubricated Trojan with a receptacle tip. The two were related; I had planned, at some unspecified future date, to hitchhike to the city fifty miles away where, it was said, prostitutes plied their hoary trade. The twenty-dollar bill was to hire one, and the Trojan was to make sure that any scars left by the experience would be psychological in type. And the secret compartment, by the way, was not all that much of a secret. I had been carrying that stupid rubber for so long that you could see its elliptical outline through the wallet.

  (I guess it worked, though. Not the secret compartment. The Trojan. In all the time I had it there, I never once caught a disease.)

  I got up from under the tree and put the wallet back in my pocket. I had $27.46 and an old rubber. I had no place to go to and no one to turn to and I couldn’t even stay where I was.

  I went back to my room. Haskell, thank God, was not there. I think he was probably having dinner. It was about that time, and I could have gone over and had something myself, but I didn’t even consider it. I got under the shower and washed myself a few times, and I got dressed in all clean clothes, and I brushed my teeth and combed my hair and made polishing motions at my shoes. I put things like my comb and toothbrush and a bar of soap in my pockets. I thought about packing a change of socks and
underwear, but I didn’t. I wanted to have my hands free. The phrase walking away empty-handed came to me, and it seemed proper to do this, and in a literal sense.

  On the highway, neatly groomed and clean cut, I stood with my thumb in the air. A few cars came and went, as cars will do, and then a big Lincoln slowed down, and I got that good expectant feeling, and I straightened up a little and put a fresh, boyish smile on my face.

  The car slowed a little more, and the driver looked at me, and stepped down hard on the gas pedal and roared off into the distance.

  All I could think of was a joke. You probably know it. I guess it’s the oldest joke in the world.

  There was this guy who joined the paratroops, and after all the training it was time for him to make his first actual jump from a plane. Not off one of the towers but out of an actual plane in flight. And the flight instructor or jump instructor or whatever they call it, the guy in charge, went through the procedure with him. “When you jump, you count to ten. Then you pull the ripcord to open the chute. In the event that the chute does not open, pull the emergency cord to open the parachute. The chute will open and you will coast gently down to the ground. There a truck will pick you up and take you back to the base.”

  So the guy jumped, and he pulled the ripcord, and nothing happened, and he pulled the other cord, and nothing happened. And he said to himself, “I’ll bet that fucking truck won’t be there either.”

  Oldest joke in the world.

  And I just fell out. I broke up completely. I rolled around at the side of the road, laughing harder than I ever laughed in my life. “That fucking truck,” I said, and roared with laughter. “That fucking truck.”

  I never did cry. I don’t know why, but I never did. And if I didn’t that day, I don’t suppose I ever will.

  The car that picked me up, long after the laughter was over and done with, was a big Pontiac convertible with deep vinyl seats and power everything. The driver was about forty or forty-five, very pale and indoors looking. He said he was a salesman and that he sold industrial bathroom fixtures. My first reaction was to wonder what an industrial bathroom was, and after I figured it out without asking him, I got a mental picture of an endless row of urinals stretching as far as the eye could see, with an endless row of workers in denim overalls, stepping up to the urinals, setting down their lunchboxes, and urinating industriously.

  And it struck me that I had done this myself maybe a million times, except for the lunchbox and the overalls but in all those times it hadn’t occurred to me that there were people who made a living going around selling urinals, or that other people made their living buying them. I had just never really given much thought to the way people made their livings. But now, as an orphan with twenty-seven dollars and change, the whole subject of work seemed more significant.

  I found about a thousand questions to ask him. About the different models of industrial bathroom fixtures, and the colors they came in, and how you got into that kind of business, and, oh, everything that came to me. Now and then I would see him giving me funny little looks, as if he maybe thought I was putting him on by pretending to be interested in such a ridiculous subject. But I guess it was easier for him to believe that I was interested than to accept the fact that his work was all that boring, so he told me a lot more about his field than anyone in or out of it would really care to know. And he got a kick out of it, I guess, maybe because no one else thought he was so interesting. His wife, he told me at one point, didn’t give a whoop in hell about his life’s work. In fact, he said, she seemed ashamed of it, as though there was something dirty about sinks and toilets and urinals, when, in point of fact, the world would be infinitely filthier without them.

  I wasn’t faking a thing. I was really interested at the time. Honestly.

  He picked me up in western Pennsylvania, where the school was. We took the Pennsylvania Turnpike west. It turned into the Ohio Turnpike, and we went about halfway through Ohio before he had to turn off. He left me on the pike. I had said I was going to Chicago, and while I didn’t have a great reason to go there, I was stuck with the story.

  Before he left me off, he stopped for gas and bought me a meal at the restaurant. He went to the john, and when he got back to the table, he was all excited and took me back to the john to show me all the plumbing fixtures and explain various things about them. We got some very funny looks from the others, let me tell you.

  Through Ohio and Indiana and Illinois I talked to a lot of different people and had a total of six more rides. The conversations were something like the one I’d had with the salesman. I won’t bore you with what the various drivers did for a living or where they picked me up and dropped me off, or the makes of the cars and appearance of the drivers. To tell you the truth, I don’t remember it all that clearly. They tend to run together in my mind. Anyway, none of it was that sensational.

  I got to Chicago a little before noon. My last driver dropped me north of town near the lake, and I spent almost an hour trying to hitch a ride back toward the center of the city. I suppose it must have been a whole lot less than an hour. In that wind, though, it seemed like forever. Finally a cop car came along and a uniformed cop stuck his head out and said something about hitchhiking. I didn’t catch the words, but it didn’t take an IQ up around the genius level to get the message, which was that hitchhiking was frowned upon. If he hadn’t told me this, I might still be there, frozen solid, with my thumb out.

  Now, though, it occurred to me to take a bus, which cost me a quarter and which was the first expenditure I’d had since I left school.

  Sitting on that bus, all I could think of was the damned quarter. I mean, after all, I had gone something like twelve hundred miles and eaten three times and all I was out so far was a quarter. You’d think I would be thrilled, for Pete’s sake. But I kept thinking that my $27.46 was now down to $27.21. And that I could afford to take the bus a hundred and eight more times, and then I’d have twenty-one cents left, which would buy me two cups of coffee and a gumball. The point being that I had no money coming in, so any going out was something to worry about.

  I kept planning to ask the driver to let me out when we got to the center of town, but I couldn’t think of a way to do this without sounding like a hopeless hick, and for some stupid reason I didn’t want to. So I just kept looking around and waiting. I had been to Chicago before with my parents but couldn’t remember much about it. Except that we went shopping at Marshall Field’s and stayed, I think, at the Palmer House—though when I went to take a look at it, I didn’t notice anything familiar about it. I guess I must have been eight or ten at the time.

  Anyway, I recognized the Loop when we first hit it, and when we got to State Street, I remembered that it was the main drag, or else I just recognized it from the song. The street signs have State Street and under it That Great Street. When I noticed this I was tremendously pleased. A point of recognition, as if the street sign was some old school buddy or something. Later, after I had walked all over the damned street, I began to realize how incredibly simple it was of them to put something like that on the dippy street signs. If everybody who goes to Chicago could just see one of those signs once, that would be fine. But to just have them there always, so that even the people who live there have to look at them—

  I got off the bus at State Street and started walking around. I mostly stayed right there on That Great Street because it was a nice familiar name and if I left it I was afraid I might never find it again. I walked up and down and looked in store windows at things I didn’t need and couldn’t buy anyway. I kept seeing things that for no reason at all I suddenly wanted. A combination nail clipper and pocket knife, for example, which I needed like the Venus de Milo needs gloves. And although a guy had bought me breakfast just a couple of hours before, I kept getting these dumb yens for food. I couldn’t pass any place that sold anything edible without starting to drool. I stood in front of a restaurant where the cheapest dish on the menu was over four dollars, and I ac
tually stood there reading the whole menu as if I could go in there and dive into a steak. I mean, even if I was fool enough to waste the money, I wasn’t dressed for the place.

  Eventually I got annoyed and bought a candy bar just to kill my appetite. They had the nerve to charge six cents for a stinking nickel candy bar. $27.15.

  Two hours later I was stretched out on a bed in a room in the Eagle Hotel ($3.50 a night), reading the want-ad section of the Chicago Tribune (free, out of a trash can). I used a yellow chewed-up pencil stub (found at the curb) to mark the ads that looked promising.

  There were jobs all over the place. Just looking at those listings, you wouldn’t believe there was anyone in the country who wasn’t working. The only problem was that none of the advertisers wanted to hire a seventeen-year-old kid with three and a half years of high school, no experience whatsoever, and not an awful lot of ability, either.

  Not that they seemed to care too much about ability. The main thing seemed to be experience. I would say that ninety-eight ads out of a hundred wanted to hire people with experience, and what they were really hot to hire was someone who was already doing a much more important job at higher pay in the same field. I didn’t blame them, but how could anybody get experience if you had to have it to get a job?

  Another thing you had to have was an education. Judging by the ads, if the job was one where you might come up once a week against a two syllable word, they wouldn’t touch you unless you had a college degree, and they wouldn’t be happy about it unless you had a master’s. For less intellectual jobs, like picking ticks off horses, they were willing to settle for you if you had a high school diploma.

  It was very goddamned discouraging, let me tell you. I folded the paper and put it down and sat up on the bed—$3.50 a night doesn’t buy you much of a bed, incidentally—and said, aloud, “I’ll bet that fucking truck won’t be there, either.”