Lawrence Block: Chip Harrison Scores Again

So that’s who I am. Not the seventeen-year- old virgin who was there for the start of No Score, but an eighteen-year-old virgin-once- removed. A Virgo, with Gemini rising and Moon in Leo, if you pay attention to things like that. Sort of tall and sort of thin and sort of ordinary-looking, and walking full speed through the slush to the Port Authority Bus Terminal.

The port authority bus terminal is a well-lighted and spacious modern building, and if you walk through it quickly in the daytime it just looks like a bank or an airport. But at night it’s depressing. All bus stations are. It’s the people. Half of them are only there because they don’t have enough money to fly or take a train, and the other half are there because it’s reasonably warm and the benches are reasonably comfortable and you can steal a nap there and other people will think maybe you’re waiting for a bus, and will leave you alone. Sooner or later, though, some uniformed old fart will ask you for a ticket, and when you don’t have one they tell you to go away.

I didn’t have any trouble cashing the ticket. I was in line behind a fat woman whose luggage was a matched set of shopping bags. She wanted to go someplace in Missouri, and she and the clerk had a hell of a job working out the details. This gave me time to figure out various reasons why I was cashing the ticket, but when my turn came I just pushed the ticket through the window and asked for cash. The clerk looked at it as if he suspected I was part of a gang of counterfeiters specializing in old bus tickets. But it passed.

You know, if it hadn’t, I really would have been irritated. I mean, the ticket would at least have gotten me Mary Beth.

Instead it got me thirty-seven dollars and eighty-three cents. I went to one of the benches and sat down and counted the money over and over again. Then I put different amounts in different pockets. I was somehow more conscious of pickpockets than ever before. It occurred to me that I could have kept the wallet, and if I had then I’d now have something to put the money in.

Thirty-seven dollars and eighty-three cents. I sat there with different portions of the money in different pockets for a long time, thinking of one thing and another. Then I went to the john. The free stall was in use so I had to use one of the pay toilets, but the attendant wasn’t there so I crawled under it. (Under the door. Not under the toilet.)

There should be a law against pay toilets.

I did some more thinking, in addition to doing what I had gone there to do, and I bought a comb for a quarter and combed my hair. The comb lost a couple teeth in the process. It was really shoddy compared to the one I’d thrown away.

Then I went back to the ticket window. “Bordentown, South Carolina,” I said. “One way.”

The clerk started hunting for the Bordentown tickets, then did an elaborate double take. “You were just here a minute ago,” he said.

“Well, maybe fifteen minutes.”

“You cashed in a ticket. A Bordentown ticket.”

“I know.”

“And now you want to buy it back?”

“That was a Boston-to-Bordentown ticket,” I said. “What I want is a New York-to-Bordentown ticket”

“Whyntcha just trade it in the first place and save me the aggravation?”

“I didn’t realize that I wanted to go to Bordentown.”

“What are you, a wise guy?”

“Can’t I just buy a ticket?”

“You people. I don’t know. Think everybody’s got all the time in the world.”

The fare from New York to Bordentown was thirty-three dollars and four cents, and I had to go through various pockets until I got that sum together. While I did this, he talked to himself. He wouldn’t tell me when the next bus left. I had to use one of the house phones and call Information. They told me there was a bus leaving in two and a half hours. It made express stops from New York to Raleigh, then made local stops all the way to Miami. It would put me in Bordentown in a little over forty hours.

The only thing I knew about Bordentown was that it was in South Carolina, and that somebody named Mary Beth Hawkins probably lived there once. And that I evidently wanted to go there.

I had four dollars and seventy-nine cents left. That was a lot less than thirty-three dollars and four cents, but it was a lot more than a quarter, so I was ahead of the game and playing on the house’s money.

I was also starving. I found a lunch counter in the building and had two hamburgers and an order of french fries and three cups of coffee. It certainly wasn’t a macrobiotic meal. It wasn’t even very good, but that didn’t seem to matter. I ate everything but the napkin.

Why Bordentown?

That’s a good question. I don’t know if I can find an answer that’s as good as the question.

See, what happened was that I sat, first on the bench and then on the toilet, and I thought about the money and tried to think of something to do with it. And none of the things that involved staying in New York seemed like very good ideas, and I came to the conclusion that I had bombed out in New York and it was time to go somewhere else. Nothing against the city. Any city or town is as good as or as bad as what you’re doing and the people you’re doing it with. And for one reason or another I had never quite managed to get it together in New York. There were some good times in among the bad times, and I was glad I had come, but it was time to split.

(I have this tendency to go someplace else whenever I don’t like where I am. I never really had a home that I can remember. When I was with my parents we would stay at a different expensive hotel in a different city every couple of months, and when I was at school it was a different boarding school every year, and the pattern hasn’t changed since. Sometimes I think it’s weakness of character to pick up and run whenever things turn sour. But why stay where you don’t want to be? For Pete’s sake, there’s a whole world out there. I suppose there are things to be said for settling down and sinking roots, but someone else will have to say them.)

The thing is, it’s not enough to have someplace to go away from. You also need someplace to go away to. And I didn’t have one. There were places I had already been, but I couldn’t see any point in going back to any of them. Chicago was vaguely possible, I had had reasonably good times there, but I thought about that wind coming off Lake Michigan and schussing through the Loop and imagined what that wind would be like in January, and that ruled out Chicago. Besides, it was too big, it would be too much like what I was leaving.

There was a girl named Hallie with whom I had traded virginities on the very best night of my life. She was in college in Wisconsin. I had sent her a postcard before coming to New York, and since then I had written her three or four stupid letters but never mailed any of them, maybe because I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to say to her. I decided that it would be nice to see Hallie again, and then I decided it would be even nicer to see Hallie when I was a little clearer on how I felt about her and what I wanted to do about it. It would also be nicer if I could see her with clean clothes on me and money in my pocket and a little firmer sense of direction.

And then it came to me.

Bordentown.

Maybe you’ve noticed that when you’ve gone without sleep and food for a long time, and without really talking to anybody, you start to get messages from God. That’s a little less crazy than it sounds. What happens is that a lot of minor things start taking on tremendous significance, and you start reading vital messages into them.

Like the whole bit with the wallet. And what was in the wallet — a picture of Mary Beth Hawkins and a bus ticket. And the first person I met after that was also named Mary Beth, which may be less remarkable in the cold light of dispassionate analysis but which seemed extraordinary at the time. The way all these things seemed to add up was that it was meant for me to get that bus ticket. It was destiny. And for me to cash in the ticket and spend the money was spitting in destiny’s face. Obviously the thing to do with that ticket was to use it and go where it went.