CH01 - No Score

by Lawrence Block

  This time it didn’t break me up in the slightest. I went back to the paper and kept finding the two percent of the ads that I almost qualified for. Things like passing out handbills on the street, sweeping the floor in a grocery store, jobs that were either temporary or part-time and that didn’t pay all that well anyway.

  When I was done, I stretched out on the bed and closed my eyes. The hotel must have been made out of secondhand egg cartons. You could hear absolutely everything, Whenever a toilet flushed anywhere in the building, it was like being next to Niagara Falls. Sometimes I could hear conversations, either two people talking together just low enough so that I could make out every fifth word, or else some drunk shouting at the top of his lungs. I don’t know which was worse.

  But lying there I realized what I was going to do.

  I was going to Succeed.

  Of course you can’t just succeed. You have to succeed at something, and I wasn’t quite sure what that something might be yet. But the impression I got from the men I hitchhiked with was that one job wasn’t all that different from any other. Once you got past the slave level and actually got somewhere in business, the idea was to take something and sell it to someone else. And it didn’t really make very much difference whether the thing you were selling was advertising space or snake oil or industrial bathroom fixtures. The object, whatever it was, was to wind up with more money than you started out with.

  I sat up in bed. I thought of my father and mother, and the life they had led, and where it in turn had led them. I would arrange my life differently. I would be honest and hardworking and stable. I would take as my own personal day-to-day objective the same goal that made all those hitchhikers the same—to finish each day with more money than I’d started the day with. If I had to pass out handbills or sweep floors or pick ticks off horses, I would do it for the time being, and I would make damn well sure that each day’s work brought me at least as much as I needed for my meals and rent.

  And meanwhile I would find some job that had some kind of real Opportunity For Advancement. That was a phrase that appeared in a great many ads, and they couldn’t all be playing games. I’d find a job with an Opportunity For Advancement, and I would work long hours and apply myself and go to night school to get that high school diploma and then go on to take night courses at college and put myself through college, and work my way up the corporate ladder in the good old American way, using hard work and pluck and luck and good old common sense and elbow grease to make my way to the top.

  And there would be women every step of the way.

  My brain spun at the thought. Of course there would be women, I realized. The cheap-but-vital women in whose rough arms I would learn the rudiments of love. The secretaries and career girls with whom I would share idle moments of brief but intense pleasure. And, when I found her, the Right Girl who would share my hopes and dreams, and with whom I would climb the long ladder rung by rung and hand in hand, until together we would enjoy the fruits of success crowned by True Love.

  I thought of the joys of True Love, and glowed at the thought. And then I thought of the Untrue Love that would come first, with the career girls and secretaries and cheap-but-vital women, and I began to be moved by these thoughts. The thoughts became quite vivid, as a matter of fact, and quite moving.

  But then someone in a room down the hall was seized by a coughing and spitting fit, and that ruined the mood completely.

  I burrowed under the covers. A cockroach scooted out from beneath the radiator, which had begun clanking. It seemed to be giving off a whole lot more noise than heat. The radiator, that is. Not the cockroach. Well, maybe the cockroach too, for all I knew. Or cared.

  I settled my head on the pillow, such as it was. If there were more than thirty-five feathers in that pillow, they must have been very small ones. The man with tuberculosis (my diagnosis) did his number again.

  I fell asleep. Which should give you an idea how tired I was.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE MAN WAS mostly shoulders. He wasn’t really big, I was taller than he was, but he had these wide shoulders and no neck at all, and he was wearing a sinister short-brimmed hat and a black suit, and he looked like a Chicago gangster. Maybe he was nothing more desperate than a Chicago mutual funds salesman, but I don’t really think so. I think he was a Chicago gangster. If not, he’s in the wrong line of work.

  In which case I know exactly how he feels.

  He came toward me, and I picked up the rhythm of his walk and got my timing into gear. When he was just the right distance away, I took the pasteboard slip from the top of the stack and thrust it at him. If it had been a knife, and a couple of inches longer, it would have pierced his left lung.

  But it was just a piece of paper and it never touched him. And amazingly enough he never touched it, either. He just kept right on walking and went past me as if I were invisible. I turned to look after him.

  “Stay awake, Chip!”

  I spun around. Gregor clicked the shutter, and I opened my hand and let the piece of pasteboard float to the ground. My gangster friend had missed his golden opportunity, all spelled out in smudged black letters on a yellow card, and saying:

  HELLO THERE!

  Your candid photo has just been taken by Gregor the Pavement Photographer! Your picture will be ready within twenty-four hours! Bring or mail this card with the some of one ($1.00) dollar to Gregor the Pavement Photographer, 1104 Halstead! Find out what you look like to others! See yourself as the world sees you!

  It was a pretty tacky little slinger, no question about it. And even if you dropped the excess exclamation points and spelled sum right and printed the message in unsmudged ink on a less gaudy stock, it would still be nothing that most people would want to carry with them forever. That few of them were so moved was readily seen by a glance at the pavement to my rear, where any number of the yellow cards presently reposed.

  In plain English, there were little yellow slingers all over the place, some of them crumpled, others just plain dropped. Most people dropped them without even finding out what they were, but almost all of them did take the cards when I shoved them at them. The gangster was rare. The average person has trouble not taking anything you hand him. It’s a reflex, I suppose. I don’t know whether the gangster had lousy reflexes or tremendous cool, or whether he was so tied up in his own little world that he hadn’t even seen me. Nor did I have time to worry about this, because I had to pass the next card to the next person, who would in due course add it to Chicago’s littering problem.

  The gangster came by around a quarter after four, and there wasn’t another memorable person for the rest of the day. This was my sixth day working for Gregor, and by now a person had to be pretty remarkable in order for me to take any real notice of him. Every day I would see tens of thousands of people, and I would poke yellow slips at thousands of people, and I would poke yellow slips at thousands of them. At first it was such a constant parade of new faces and bodies that I started getting a headache from it. But then it straightened out and smoothed out and the pedestrians lost their individuality. They were just part of the crowd, and I found myself tuning them out the way you tune out anything that’s always there. I no longer really noticed the traffic noises, and I no longer smelled the smell of State Street, and in the same kind of way I no longer noticed the swarm of people. Every once in a while one of them would manage to be more than just another shadow in the crowd. The gangster type, and an occasional cripple, and particularly attractive girls, for example.

  A few minutes after six, Gregor said, “Oh, the hell with it, keed, let’s call it a day.” He folded up his tripod and put his camera in the case. We walked to 1104 Halstead Street, where Co-op Photography was located. Co-op Photography was a name to put on the door, actually. Inside the door there was a large room jammed with desks and three smaller rooms, two of them darkrooms and one of them a slapdash studio with lights and a couple of backdrops. For ten dollars a month Gregor got the use of a desk, tw
o hours a day of darkroom time, and use of the studio by arrangement. There was also a switchboard and a girl who functioned as a sort of collective receptionist, but it cost an extra five dollars a month to receive calls there, and Gregor figured it wasn’t worth it. So we walked past the girl without asking if anyone had called, and Gregor put some things in the desk, and took some other things out of it, one of them being a bottle of peach-flavored brandy.

  “Jesus sonofabitching Christ,” he said, reflectively. Gregor was a short dark mixture of various Balkan strains that didn’t go together all that well. His eyes were sunken and his cheeks hollow. He had the heaviest beard of anyone I ever met. When he swore I always had the feeling I was hearing wrong, because he never sounded mad or aggravated or anything. He would say various obscene things in the tone of voice you would use to say, “I’m going down to the store for a new tube of toothpaste” or “I wonder how the White Sox did today.” It took a whole lot of getting used to.

  He uncapped the bottle and took a drink and asked me if I wanted one. I said it sounded like a good idea. He gave me the bottle and I took a drink. The first time he had done this I wanted to wipe the neck of the bottle or something, but then I decided that anybody who stood out in the middle of State Street all day the way I had done was already exposed to every germ known to modern man, and besides there was something vaguely insulting about insinuating that Gregor was diseased or something.

  I don’t know what good peach-flavored brandy tastes like, or even if there is any such thing, for Pete’s sake. This was very cheap stuff. If you’ve never had it, you’ve got the right idea. I think you could duplicate the taste by mixing equal parts of the sweet syrup from canned peaches and Zippo lighter fluid, but if you mixed it that way it would probably cost you more than Gregor paid for it.

  He took another drink himself and put the cap on the bottle and the bottle in the drawer. Another photographer, an old man who wore suspenders all the time, believe it or not, came over and asked how it had gone.

  “How should it go?” Gregor demanded. “You take the pictures and you see what happens.” He pawed through a handful of letters on the desktop, held one of them to the light, and squinted suspiciously at it. “So either there’s a dollar in it or there isn’t,” he said thoughtfully. “And what difference does it make?”

  You may have gathered that he didn’t have the greatest moneymaking operation in the world. Good gathering. Gregor, from what I had seen, was a pretty fair photographer, but one look around that office told you that pretty fair photographers were in less demand than, say, pretty fair aerospace engineers. (Whatever they are: I don’t understand the term, but the Tribune’s classified pages are filled with people who want to hire them.)

  Gregor’s business was straightforward enough. He stood there on State Street, taking pictures of people walking by, and as they passed I gave them a numbered slip, and theoretically they sent in the slip with a dollar, and theoretically the number on the slip enabled Gregor to find the right negative and print it and send the print to the customer.

  “I don’t always get the right picture to the right person,” he had confided once. “Especially before I started using a kid. I would do the shooting and the card passing all by myself, and I would get the numbers a little off synch, and then I’d get some jerk writing in from Denver to tell me that he got the wrong picture, and I should either send him the right one or send his dollar back. So how am I supposed to straighten it out? Some of the jerks write back three, four times for a lousy dollar. Think how many times I must make a mistake and they don’t write at all. Sometimes I wonder if anybody ever gets the right picture. But what do they want it for in the first place, huh, keed? Answer me that. I have this way of making a buck and I am damned if I can tell you why anybody at all ever sends for the Jesus sonofabitching Christ photographs.”

  Tonight his mood was less reflective. He seemed annoyed at the volume of late mail, and he cursed pleasantly as he slit the flaps of the envelopes and shook out the dollar bills. There were a couple of checks, and one clown had sent a dollar in stamps, and another hadn’t enclosed any payment at all.

  He put away the orders he would fill tomorrow and added the money to his wallet. “The one with the stamps,” he said, “should sit on a hot stove waiting for his picture to come, the son of a bitch. Let’s see, keed, eleven-thirty to five-thirty is six hours at a buck and a half is what? Nine bucks?”

  “Eleven to six. Seven hours.”

  “Ten bucks?”

  “Ten-fifty.”

  He counted out ten singles. He didn’t have any change, he said. I had change, I said. So he discovered two quarters in his pocket and gave them to me.

  “You’re the only one making any money,” he told me. “Don’t spend it all on the same girl, huh?”

  I laughed politely and counted the bills again, and counted the money in my wallet. “Hey, that’s great,” I said.

  “You’re in Rockefeller’s class now?”

  “Not quite, but at least I can pay my rent by the end of the week.”

  “Whattaya been doing?”

  “Paying a day at a time. It’s three-fifty a day, but the weekly rate is only twenty-one bucks, so I’ll be getting one day a week free.”

  “Jesus. You’re paying twenty-one bucks a week for a place to sleep?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Keed, that’s wrong. Where you staying, the Ritz?”

  “As a matter of fact it’s a real dump. But at the price—”

  “You’re paying way too much, Chip.”

  “It’s the cheapest hotel in Chicago. Or at least in the downtown area. I looked all over.”

  “Hotels!” He waved a great sigh and shook his head. “Hotels are for a night, two nights, a weekend maybe. Hotels aren’t to live. Who the hell can afford it? Twenty-one bucks a week and you don’t even get any meals or anything, is that right? Son of a bitch, you know what I pay? Eighty-five a month, and that’s two rooms and a kitchen and a bathroom. You got a private bath in that hotel of yours?”

  “No.”

  “I pay the same as you for Aileen and myself, an apartment instead of a room. That’s what it costs you to live in that hotel of yours.” He scratched his head. “Tell you the truth, I don’t see how you can live. What did I pay you today, eleven dollars?”

  “Ten and a half.”

  “Whatever it was. So three and a half from that for the room leaves seven, and figure a buck and a half each for breakfast and lunch is three from seven leaves four, and a decent dinner if you eat it out has to cost you two and a half bucks at the bottom, leaves you what? A dollar and a half? You can just about go to the movies.” He shook his head again. “On top of which there’s no work when it rains and no work when I got a big darkroom schedule. I don’t know what I’ve paid you altogether over the past couple of weeks, but it can’t come to all that much.”

  It didn’t. I had worked six days out of the past nine, and my total earnings were $57.75. But then my expenses weren’t as high as he had figured them. My breakfast was seventy cents and my dinner ranged from a dollar to a dollar eighty. My lunch was generally a candy bar, and I had found a place where they only charged a nickel for a nickel bar. And sometimes I had a cup of coffee next door to the hotel before I went to sleep.

  So actually I was saving money. I had hit Chicago two weeks before with $27.46 in my pocket, and I had earned $57.75 from Gregor and another twenty dollars and change on other jobs I had picked up a day at a time, and my current balance stood at just over $36.

  At this rate, though, it was going to take me an awfully long time to become what you would call wealthy. Also I was due for some capital expenditures, if you want to call it that. Like washing my underwear and socks at night meant I had to put it on slightly damp in the mornings, which wasn’t all that much fun. And it might be nice having another pair of pants and another shirt, not to mention the fact that the State Street sidewalks were having a bad effect on my shoes.
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  “Chip keed, I got an idea.”

  I looked at him.

  “Suppose you could pay the same twenty-one bucks a week, or for the sake of convenience call it twenty, meaning you’re saving a dollar right off the top, and you get a place to sleep and it’s a clean place and all, and you share the bathroom with two people instead of three hundred, and on top of everything else, you get home cooked breakfasts and dinners included. How’s that sound?”

  “Where is the place? Madrid?”

  “Right here in beautiful Chicago. Just three blocks from here.” One of the sunken eyes closed very slowly in what I had grown to recognize as a wink. “C’mon, keed, let’s get our asses in gear. I gotta tell Aileen she’s running a boardinghouse.”

  I was a little uncertain about this. I mean, it sounded great, and if anything it sounded too great. The only question was whether I wanted to get that tied up with Gregor. My job was doing menial labor for a failure, and that didn’t quite fit in with my goal of a position with Opportunity For Advancement. Not that I figured Gregor would want to evict me if I went to work for somebody else. I was bright enough to realize that my room and board would just about pay the rent on his place, and I’m sure I wasn’t the first of us to come to this realization. But I didn’t know whether I wanted to be around him off the job as well as on it, and I didn’t know if I wanted to be what amounted to a part of his family, sharing two rooms and a bath with him and Aileen.

  Then I met Aileen.

  I moved in that night. There wasn’t all that much involved in moving in, since I didn’t even have to go back to the hotel. The nice thing about not owning anything is that you don’t have to go back for it. So when I say that I moved in, all it really amounts to is that I went to Gregor’s apartment and met Aileen and had dinner and stayed the night.

  It was a million miles away from the Eagle Hotel, believe me. Dinner was spaghetti and meatballs, and while it didn’t fit the homemade label Gregor had hung on it—the spaghetti was out of a box and the sauce out of a can—it was still far better than the blue-plate special in a diner on Madison. And afterward we sat around in the living room and watched television and talked a little, and before they turned in Aileen made some more coffee (instant coffee) and brought out some A & P brand jelly doughnuts, and afterward she gave me a sheet and a pillow and a pillowcase and they went to their room and left me the couch.