Lawrence Block - No Score

But not to anything much more dynamic than a movie, as it happens.

I drank a second soft drink, but this time I made it an Uncola, probably because I was brainwashed by Solly telling me Coke would ruin my teeth. It probably would, but the Uncola probably would, too.

Because I was beginning to come to the conclusion that everything was a con.

Which is a hell of a conclusion to come to, for Pete’s sake, especially when you happen to be descended from a long line of con men. Well, two of them anyway. And when you’ve decided to become a success along legitimate lines and to work hard and save your money and marry the boss’s daughter and do all the other things right, too.

Why go through all that if some smooth-talking little rat could come along and stand on your stoop and twist his cap in his hands and wind up costing you a couple of hundred dollars to kill termites that weren’t there to begin with, and that wouldn’t hurt your house a whole lot even if they were? (Because this may be something you never thought of, in which case I’m going to be saving you a lot of money over the years, because the first thing we all learned is that maybe ninety-nine houses out of a hundred have some termites, and those houses will go on standing for a couple of hundred years without anybody doing anything about those termites. See, it takes a long time for a termite to eat a house. It even takes a long time for a lot of termites to eat a house. But you take the average idiot and show him a termite eating his house, and he figures that in another week there won’t be anything left but the foundation.

(And while I’m on the subject, the second thing we all learned was that you couldn’t in a million years sell an extermination job to somebody with a brick house. Flick said you can’t sell them fire proofing, either, and Flick would know; he’s sold everything at one time or another, and if that includes his mother and his sister I wouldn’t be surprised. But people who have brick houses seem to think the brick is what holds the house together, so—

(You know, I have the feeling that I might be telling you more about termites than you really want to know. Maybe all of this will get cut out before the book gets printed, or maybe the book won’t ever get printed, which would mean rough sledding for one Chip Harrison, but either way I’m going to cool it at this point with all this inside information about the termite business. That’s a firm promise.

(In fact, I’m going to cool it on that forgettable evening, as far as that goes, because it wasn’t the kind of evening you would want to read about. I rapped a little with Lester when he came in, and I let Jimmy Joe tell me the plot of the movie he and Keegan saw. And I made up a lie about having a girl in my room and banging her while they were at the movie, and Jimmy Joe made up a lie about picking up a girl after the movie. We were both lying and knew it, but it broke the monotony in a small way. And outside of having a couple more soft drinks and reading an Indianapolis newspaper — which made the Chicago Tribune seem like the Daily Worker, or close to it — that was all there was to that evening, so there’s no point wasting everybody’s time with it.

(It was the night after that one that might interest you, when Solly brought the redhead back to the motel and organized a gang bang. I have to admit it was more interesting than Cokes and Uncolas. And it did more damage than any termites I ever saw.)

During the day i had been working the same area where I’d made a sale the day before. Up until then the television weatherman had been saying it was unseasonably cool for mid-July, which meant it was reasonably comfortable. But that day it decided to get seasonable again.

I’m writing this on a cold damp rotten morning. My radiator is some slumlord’s idea of decoration, completely nonfunctional. But I can get warm just remembering that day. I didn’t make a sale. No one did. No one expected to. I think I worked as long as anyone, and I was back in my air-conditioned room by three-thirty. Flickinger didn’t even put in a token gripe. Pointless. We could have sold air conditioners or dry ice or Japanese fans, but that was about the extent of it. It was so hot we didn’t even talk about how hot it was, if that makes sense.

I skipped dinner and stretched out on my bed in my shorts and let the air conditioner blow on me. I woke up shivering, figure that one out, when Lester banged on my door. I let him in and he flopped in a chair and waited for his breath to come back. He had gone out for dinner and walked through all that heat, and looking at him made me glad I stayed around the room instead.

We talked about this and that, one thing and the other, and ultimately reached Topic A. I launched into a long story that was kind of loosely based on something that happened with Aileen, except that in this version of the story we didn’t worry about being faithful to Gregor, who was a Cuban refugee dentist in the latest version. I don’t know if Lester believed it or not. I don’t think he cared enough to worry whether it was true or not. When you sit around swapping sex stories to keep from dying of boredom, nobody really gives a shit if they’re true or not. Just so they’re sufficiently interesting and/or horny to keep you awake.

“You know something?” he demanded, when I had carried Carmelita and myself to the heights of rapture. “When all is said and done, no woman really knows how to give head.”

I made a noncommittal noise.

“You agree with me, Chip?”

I said something that sounded like Rowrbazzle. Because it was one of those questions like Have you stopped beating your meat? Whatever you said, you came off either more ignorant or more informed than you might want to.

Lester talked for a while, sort of saying but not saying that he was afraid he got more of a kick out of the queers than he wanted to, and hinting that if he did have a woman available on a steady basis he might miss the Greyhound Terminal set, water on the knee and all. I just made grunting sounds, which was all the situation called for. One thing I’ve noticed is that when you want to talk something out and get it right in your mind, all you really want the other person to do is be there with his mouth shut. It’s a way of talking to yourself without feeling a little flaky about it.

He dropped the subject when Jimmy Joe came in unannounced and stuck his head in front of the air conditioner.

“Hey,” he wanted to know, “am I interrupting anything?”

“We were talking about sex,” Lester said.

“That’s the trouble. Everybody talks about it and nobody does anything about it.” And he sat down on the carpet and joined the party.

Bit by bit they all filtered in. Keegan first, and then Flickinger himself, standing at the door with a stupid look on his face and a bottle of gin in each hand. He came in and said he felt like company, and why didn’t we all join him in a drink? No one could think of a reason not to. We drank gin on the rocks out of water tumblers. Keegan smacked his lips, wrinkled his nose, frowned, and said he wanted a little less vermouth next time around.

That reminded Flick of a story. I knew it would, because I had heard the story twice before, the two times I got drunk with him. Every last one of us had heard that goddamned story but nobody wanted to ruin his evening by saying anything about it.

You know, somewhere in this world Flickinger must have a drinking buddy who has the same kind of memory as Flick does. And I can just imagine the two of them sitting up night after night, lapping up the sauce and telling each other the exact same stories every single night. And each time Flick would think he was telling the story for the first time, and each time the other juicehead would think he was hearing it for the first time, and the two of them would go on and on, repeating like a decimal until the world came to an end.