Jack's Black Book

by Jack Gantos

  I got the Underwood for a great price at a yard sale. I had been riding my bike down the street when I saw it. I pulled into the driveway of a very tidy house. Everything the lady had for sale—old photographs, pottery, kitchen utensils, and books—was marked with a little orange price tag neatly stuck to it.

  “Does this still work?” I asked the lady, and pointed to the machine.

  She looked at me and adjusted the black orchid she had pinned onto her hair. “Try it,” she said with a sniff, then puckered her nose up as if she smelled something bad.

  There was a sheet of paper in the roller and some non-writers who had only played with the typewriter had typed out a lot of misspelled nonsense. But someone had written, MOST PEOPLE ARE NOT FIT TO RUN THEIR OWN LIVES. That statement was so true it stunned me. In one sentence it summed up exactly how I felt about the world. Excellent writing, I decided. I had to read it twice so I could memorize it. Well, I’m not one of those unfit people, I thought as I rolled the paper up to a clean section. I’m taking charge of my life. This is the summer where I leave the kid Jack behind and leapfrog over high school to become Jack the man. Jack the famous writer. Otherwise, I thought gloomily, I’ll have to go back to Sunrise Junior Prison Camp for eighth grade.

  I spread my fingers over the keys and pounded out my name and title. JACK HENRY, WRITER. The mechanical sound of the clattering keys snapping forward to hammer the paper was a thousand times better to me than any piano music. The typewriter action was smooth beneath my fingers, and I could tell that the machine liked me. I took roll call, tapping out all the letters, numbers, and punctuation marks in a crisp line, shoulder to shoulder, across the page. They were all there, my troops, and I knew if I could position each one of them in the perfect order I would create something awesome, like when you start one of those ten-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzles. First, you find the four corners, then you link together the straight-edged border pieces, and after that you work like a fiend until you’ve assembled something as monumental as the entire Battle of Gettysburg. I figured a whole book was written in pretty much the same way, piece by piece.

  I rubbed my fingertips on the keys, warming them up, and then I bit down on my lip and typed out my favorite writer’s motto: A WRITER’S JOB IS TO TURN HIS WORST EXPERIENCES INTO MONEY. I had read it in the latest issue of a writers’ magazine at the drugstore, and thought it was by far one of the most important statements ever written. A lot of small things had gone belly-up for me, but I didn’t bother writing about my measly problems. I was waiting to write about something really big and bad. Something hugely disastrous, and so disgusting someone would want to pay money to read it. But so far, nothing good and juicy had come my way. Still, I wasn’t panicked. The summer had just begun and there was plenty of time for pain and sorrow and tragedy.

  I typed a silly poem I had memorized in first grade. BILLY BUILT A GUILLOTINE, TRIED IT ON HIS SISTER JEAN. SAID MOTHER WHEN SHE BROUGHT THE MOP, THESE MESSY GAMES HAVE GOT TO STOP. The keys didn’t stick and the ribbon was still full of black ink. The last writer didn’t get much work done. I figured he probably had a cushy life without a problem in the world to write about. My heart started to pick up speed. In an instant I knew that if I owned this typewriter I could turn my worst experiences into money. I had to have it. Without it, I was like Samson without his hair—a loser.

  “So what do you think, young man?” the yard-sale lady asked me.

  “It’s okay,” I called back to her, lifting my hands from the keys and looking uninterested as I checked my fingertips for dirt. “How much?”

  She cleared her throat so loudly the birds in the trees flew away. “I believe the tag clearly reads ten dollars,” she replied, and sniffed again in my direction. “Do you smell something foul?” she asked.

  It was the curse of BeauBeau. No matter how many showers I took, I still smelled like rotting dog.

  “Just mothballs,” I said, and curled the corner of my lip up at an open hatbox filled with faded bras and panties she was trying to sell.

  It was Sunday afternoon. Her yard sale was almost over. She wouldn’t want to drag the typewriter back into the garage, and there was no way I would pay ten bucks for anything, not even to ransom Pete from deranged kidnappers.

  “Two bucks,” I shot back, and tugged a Baggie with forty nickels from my pants pocket. I shook it up and down so that the jangle of the coins might entice her.

  Her eyes bugged out. “Two dollars?”

  “Okay,” I said calmly. “One dollar.”

  Her voice went up an octave, and she got all huffy. “Why don’t you just steal it?” she screeched. “Just grab it and run.”

  I disliked people who didn’t know the proper way to bargain. Especially yard-sale people who thought every piece of cruddy junk they owned belonged in a museum. She should have said seven dollars. I’d reply three. She’d say six. I’d say four and we’d agree on five. This is the universal approach to agreeing on a price.

  “I don’t want to steal it,” I said to her. “I’m willing to give you fifty cents for it.”

  She flipped. “Take it!” she shouted, and began to pitch a hissy fit. ‘Just take it for free, if you’re so cheap! But I never want to see you again!”

  Free was a pretty good price, so I snapped the case shut, put it in my bike basket, and took off before she realized she was raving and saying things she didn’t mean. Perhaps someday she’d find out she had done a good deed by helping a young writer start his career. Maybe then she’d crack a smile. Maybe not.

  Once I had the typewriter, I needed some free time to write without someone looking over my shoulder and telling me to wash the car, cut the grass, run down to the 7-Eleven for milk, or help move furniture around the house as if it was giant pieces in a board game. Then at dinner that night, like a wish come true, my parents announced they were going to take a ten-day summer vacation without us.

  “Your dad and I just need a little break from the daily grind,” Mom explained, as gently as possible, since we were the grind.

  I glanced at Dad. His lips were sealed, but I could read his mind: You kids are driving me nuts.

  I beamed him my own mental message: Ditto to you, too. You can leave tonight. Take off for the whole summer. I’ll become a famous writer and by the time you return you’ll have to speak to my book agent before you can speak to me. You’ll have to offer me a contract before I’ll take out the trash, or cut the grass, or ever lift a finger again.

  “We’ve rented a cottage on the Gulf shore. If anything goes wrong we can come right back. We hope you don’t mind,” Mom continued, as if reading a script.

  “But nothing will go wrong,” Dad predicted, and arched an eyebrow so high I thought it was going to pole-vault off his face. “Am I right?”

  “You are right,” we all replied in unison. No event would be disastrous enough that we couldn’t survive it on our own. The house could be sucked down into a sinkhole, we could be victims of a chain-saw massacre, the baby could be carried away by an alligator, and we still wouldn’t call him.

  Mom put Betsy in charge of Eric, and me in charge of Pete, which meant I owned him. This was going to be great, I thought. But there was a catch.

  “Jack,” Dad said, as he tapped his cigarette ashes onto his dinner plate. “What is your summer job? I don’t want you just sitting around twiddling your thumbs out on the front porch. There are a lot of older boys in the neighborhood, and since you aren’t too swift, they could easily lead you astray.”

  He caught me by surprise. Still, I knew I didn’t want to make money by mowing lawns, or washing cars, or being a professional dog-walker like some of the other kids.

  “I’m going to write,” I said. “Be a writer.”

  He smirked. “Are you back on that again? Well, they say simpleminded people are really hardheaded,” he said, then whistled off a little steam.

  Mom gave him the look, and he lightened up a bit.

  “Okay, while we’re away you can play at
writing. But when we come back, if you haven’t made any money at it, then I’m going to sneak you in to work at the concrete warehouse. You can keep rats from eating holes in the bags. We had a cat, but the rats ganged up and killed it. You’ll just have to lie about your age, but that’s no big deal. You’re smart enough to do that.”

  “You bet,” I said. But I didn’t mean it. I was scared to death of rats, but this was one fear I wouldn’t have to face. I had a foolproof way to make quick money from writing. I got the idea from watching television. I was flipping through the channels when, suddenly, I saw it. There was a documentary on Mexico and it showed professional letter writers all lined up on chairs with desks and portable typewriters in a town square. People who had never learned to write would come to them and for a price would dictate letters. The writers would add fancy details, and dress the letters up with lots of adjectives. They made love letters more sexy, sad letters more tragic, and totally humdrum lives worth reading about.

  I figured I could do something just like it on Fort Lauderdale beach. I had already gone down to the Salvation Army and bought a stack of old postcards for cheap. At the post office, I tried to bargain for stamps, but the postal clerk just laughed at me. I had to pay full price. But when I did all the math in my head, I calculated that, if I charged a dollar a postcard, I would make over seventy cents on each one sold. There were thousands of tourists on Fort Lauderdale beach and I figured I could write about a hundred postcards in eight hours, one every five minutes. That’d add up to better pay than any junior rat exterminator’s. And it would give me perfect writing balance. Cheerful postcard writer by day, and tragedy-writing novelist by night.

  The next morning we helped my parents load up the car.

  “Remember,” Dad grunted, as he pushed a suitcase toward the back of the trunk, “when I return, I want to see some cold hard cash. If you are going to sit on your butt all day pecking at a typewriter, you better have something to show for it, or you’ll be killing rats.”

  “Don’t worry,” I replied, and handed him another suitcase. “The way my life is going, I’ll have plenty to write about.”

  “Any moron with two brain cells to rub together can write,” he said. “The problem is, getting people to read the stuff.”

  “I know,” I replied. “You won’t even read what I give you.” That was a mistake.

  “Well, that proves my point,” he insisted, then lowered the trunk lid. “Your own father can’t stand your writing.”

  Mom gave him the look again, then whispered in my ear as I kissed her goodbye. “Take care of Pete. He’s been acting a bit unusual.”

  He is unusual, I thought to myself. So he’s his normal self. “Okay,” I replied. “Have a great time and don’t worry about a thing.”

  The moment Mom closed her door, Dad tore out of the driveway and sped down the street as though he had just robbed a bank. I guess they did need a break from us.

  Betsy snuck up behind me and clamped her hands around my neck. “Have you ever read the book 1984?”

  “No,” I squeaked.

  “At the end,” she said, “the main character is captured and his enemies strap a three-sided cage to his face. Then they fill it with starving rats that chew their way into his brain.”

  “What do you want from me?” I gasped.

  “You take care of Pete,” she said. “Show up every night for dinner, do everything I say, and I’ll keep rats from using your eye sockets as doorways to your brain.”

  “Okay,” I croaked. “You’re the boss.” I went limp and she let me drop to the ground.

  Two

  My first day out I was sitting under a palm tree like some wasted survivor on a desert island with the typewriter on my lap. Above me I had thumb tacked a big sign: POSTCARDS WRITTEN AND MAILED. ONE DOLLAR

  Business was slow. In fact, I hadn’t scored a customer all day. I hadn’t even seen a mirage of a customer, and I was in a bad mood. Every time I looked up to make sure my sign hadn’t blown away, the sun scorched my face and I thought of rats turning my brain into Swiss cheese. I had to make some money before Dad returned.

  Pete was sitting next to me. He was so sluggish he looked like a snake propped up on a stick. “Give me a dollar,” he moaned, and stuck out his hand. “I want to buy a Slim Jim.”

  He was like BeauBeau, only with a slightly larger brain. “No way,” I snapped back. “Buy it yourself.”

  “You own me so you have to take care of me,” he whined, as if it were a law.

  “I own you so you have to work for me,” I replied. “Now it is time for you to get your rear in gear. Because if I end up killing rats for a living, you’ll be the first rat I kill.”

  “I just want to buy a Slim Jim, then take a swim, then fall asleep under a picnic table.” He pouted.

  “Wrong,” I replied. “You will do none of those things. You will put your mind to a moneymaking task.”

  He groaned. His head drooped over to one side.

  “Let me explain the number-one lesson of life,” I said. “See those people all over the beach?”

  “Yeah,” he replied. “So what?”

  “Well, millions of years ago the beach was covered with fish with feet.”

  “I don’t get it,” he said.

  “Let me spell it out,” I labored, and tapped him on the head. “Once upon a time we were all just single-celled dots in a pool of slimy water. Then we were fish. Then we were fish with feet. Then we were people. And now our next step is to make money. And if you can make lots of money while doing what you love to do, then it automatically means you are a genius. We didn’t go from single-celled slime to people just so we could eat Slim Jims and sleep under a table.”

  He looked at his feet, then squinted up at me. “That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard,” he said. “No wonder everyone thinks you’re an idiot.”

  I almost slugged him, but it wasn’t in my best interest. “Let me spell it out even more,” I said. “If fish didn’t decide they wanted to walk, we wouldn’t be here today.”

  “You’ve been out in the sun too long,” he cracked.

  I was losing patience. “We’re growing up,” I said.

  “No kidding,” he sputtered. “Nobody grows down.”

  “I don’t mean that.” I sighed. “I mean it’s time to make something of ourselves. Take the next step. Make some bucks.”

  Pete’s eyes glazed over. If I were a book, he was ready to close me.

  “The point is all about you and me. Look at it this way. Some fish were dumb. They walked in the wrong direction and died. But the smart ones kept walking from one puddle to the next. The same for us. You and I are—”

  “Going from puddle to puddle.”

  “There you go again,” I moaned. “Missing the—”

  “I have an idea,” he said abruptly.

  “That’s it!” I said, encouraging him. “Evolve. Be something. Turn your idea into money.”

  “Dad says, It takes money to make money,’” he said, and held his hand out again. “I need to go home and get Dad’s old Polaroid. Then I’ll need ten dollars to get started.”

  “Started on what?” I asked. “What?”

  “It’s a surprise,” he replied coyly.

  “Well, if I’m gonna bankroll your lazy butt,” I stressed, “everything you earn belongs to me.”

  “I’ll save you from rats eating your face off,” he said, and made a bucktoothed rat face.

  That got me. I gave him the ten.

  He jammed it into the pocket of his cutoffs, then began to half flop and half crawl across the sand like a fish with feet. After he had gone about ten yards he turned to grin at me. “When I come back, I’ll have evolved,” he said.

  “Yeah. You’ll be a newt,” I muttered under my breath.

  As soon as Pete left I opened my black book and began to wonder what awful things I could write about. I looked around the beach. I knew that beneath the normal surface of society lay hidden the twisted underb
elly of life. That’s the good stuff I wanted to write about, but everything looked pretty normal from where I was sitting. The lifeguard stood in his orange tower. The tourists were spread out on hotel towels, and after baking under the sun all morning they looked like neon-pink hors d’oeuvres on crackers. The palm readers were setting up their striped tents, and the ice-cream vendors were working the crowd. Nothing looked suspiciously abnormal. I stared at the blank pages of my book and thought, Don’t panic, you’ve always been a magnet for weirdness. Sit tight, it will come your way.

  Suddenly a bald guy with a swollen belly and a gold chain around his neck so thick you could anchor a ship on it slogged a path through the sand and stood in front of me. He had on so much suntan lotion he glowed like a freshly glazed donut.

  “I want ten cards, dated the next ten days. On each one I want you to make up an excuse why I can’t return to prison on time. And make it believable. You know, like my mother died and I have to attend her funeral. Or they’re throwing me a parade for pulling kids out of a burning building. Stuff like that. I’m on a furlough and I have to send them to my parole officer. Fil pick ’em up after lunch.”

  He pulled a folded ten-dollar bill from the little mesh pocket inside the waistband of his stretchy tiger-print swimsuit.

  I held out my hand, and he dropped it in. The bill was damp. I’ll sterilize this later, I thought to myself as I smiled up at him.

  “Make ’em good,” he warned me. “You have a nice typewriter. I’d hate to see something bad happen to it.”