Lawrence Block: Chip Harrison Scores Again

I suppose you saw it coming all along, but I’m not going to apologize for my stupidity. After all, it was my fantasy that we were acting out.

The Waterloo, I thought. I had already had the hot water part, and now I was getting the cold water. Buckets of it, all over all my enthusiasm for little old Mary Beth.

“Hey! Where you goin’?”

I was putting on my clothes. Not too quickly, not too slowly. Very mechanically, actually. Tucking the shirt into the pants, getting my socks right-side out and then putting them on, then the shoes—

“You crazy?”

“I have to go,” I said.

“Go? Where to?”

“The bus station,” I said. “I have to cash the ticket.”

“Shit, I said I would cash it. Just hand it on over here.”

“Fuck you,” I said.

“Are you out of your mind ?”

I turned toward her, and I guess I must have wanted to kill her, or at least I looked as though I wanted to kill her, because her face drained of color and she backed off fast. I turned away from her again and went to the door.

The whore with the heart of gold. You didn’t need money. All you needed was a negotiable bus ticket.

I almost went crazy unlocking all those locks. She never said a word, which was lucky for her. I’m normally about as nonviolent as it’s possible to get, but I wasn’t feeling very normal just then. Nothing makes you hate a person quite so much as being made an absolute asshole out of.

The last lock cleared just as I was about to give up and kick the door down.

It was as cold as ever out there, but I walked three blocks before I even noticed it.

Two thoughts kept me from running around and screaming. One was that, if and when I calmed down, I was certain to see the humor in the situation. I didn’t see any humor in it now, but I knew I would sooner or later.

The other comforting thought, and it was the more comforting of the two, was that I had that bus ticket in my pocket. And I could cash it in.

This is sort of a problem.

See, I was going to open the book by saying who I am and my background and all the rest of it and get that out of the way right at the start. But the thing is that I wrote one book before this. It was called No Score, and it just came out last month. Gold Medal published it. No Score, by Chip Harrison. That wasn’t what I wanted to call it, but forget what I wanted to call it because they changed it. I think No Score is a pretty good title, catchy, and probably a lot better than what I had in mind.

The point is that some of you already read No Score and some of you didn’t, and if you did read it maybe you still remember it and maybe you don’t. I remember it very clearly, but that’s different.

See, if you read No Score , I don’t want to bore you by feeding you all that stuff here and there throughout this book. If you didn’t read it, I want to tell you as much as you have to know about it, but at the same time I don’t want to spoil it for you in case you by some chance enjoy this book and want to read No Score later on. Of course the best thing would be if you ran out right now and got a copy of No Score and read it first and then came back to this book, but obviously not everybody can do that. If they happen to be reading this on a plane, for instance.

So what I think I’ll do is put down some of it right here and now to tell you as much as you have to know about me, and possibly more than you want to know, as far as that goes. If you did read No Score, you can skip ahead right now to the next chapter, because none of this will be news to you.

My name is Chip Harrison. I guess you know that. My legal name was originally Leigh Harvey Harrison, but Chip was my nickname from early childhood, and my parents decided in November of 1963 that it might be sensible to forget my legal name and concentrate on Chip, Leigh Harvey being a liability in the name market at that point in time.

Of course, that was so many assassinations ago I don’t suppose it matters any more.

No Score opened when I was seventeen and in my last semester at Upper Valley Prep School. I found out then that my parents had been confidence swindlers, and they were about to go to prison, and they committed suicide. I wasn’t allowed to finish school, partly because of the scandal and partly because there was no money to pay my bills and I wasn’t a good enough basketball player to make a difference, although I was fairly tall for my age.

So I went out to seek my fortune. I went to Chicago and got a job passing out slingers for a sidewalk photographer, and not quite sleeping with his wife, and then I went down through Illinois and Indiana with a termite inspection crew, and almost went to jail for statutory rape, which would have been really weird because (a) I was underage myself and (b) I didn’t get to do anything. Then I wound up picking berries and apples across Ohio and New York, and almost got shot by a jealous husband, which also would have been ironic because (a) it wasn’t his wife and (b) I didn’t get to do anything.

In a way, not getting to do anything was what No Score was all about. That did work itself out, though, with a surprise touchdown in the final minutes of play. And then I happened to meet Mr. Knox Burger, and he bought me a hamburger because I helped him change a tire on his car, and I got to talking about my experiences and he suggested writing a book. He even gave me fifty dollars so that I could buy a typewriter and live on Maine sardines and day-old bread while I wrote the book. That book turned out to be No Score , and when it was done I took it to New York, and in September of 1970 it finally came out. I got some money when I finished the book but not as much as I thought and it didn’t last long. It lasted until December, actually, at which time I had twenty-five cents left.

(I don’t want to get hung up in time sequences, but let me get the chronology of this down for you. I started writing No Score in September of 1969 and finished it about a month later. From October to December of 1969 I was living in New York in the East Village, partly with the girl I mentioned who had just had a baby, and partly here and partly there, and partly at the sort of crash pad where they had all the brown rice and burned chairs in the bathtub. That’s when the action in this book starts, in December of 1969. Then in September of 1970 No Score was finally published — I don’t know why those things take so long, really — and it is now October of 1970 and I am sitting here writing this book, which you are reading. God knows when it will be when you get to read it. 1984, probably. In fact it may be close to then by the time I finish this chapter, because it’s really very difficult trying to get all this together.

(Actually it may not come out at all, because Mr. Burger doesn’t even work there any more. He left, probably because of the nervous strain of editing No Score. There’s a Mr. Walter Fultz there now, and he gave me about the same advice Mr. Burger did. Keep it moving, he said. Keep it warm and sensitive and perceptive and lively, and most of all — make sure there’s sex in it.

(I don’t know how well it’s moving. Not too well in this chapter because of all the boring recapitulation. I really hope most of you already read No Score and were able to skip all of this crap. But I promise the pace will pick up in the next chapter. It would almost have to.

(And I also promise that there will be plenty of sex in it. There really can’t help being plenty of sex in it. That’s why I decided to start this book in December instead of picking up where No Score left off. There were those three months when nothing happened, so I decided to skip them and start right when things started to happen.)