Lawrence Block: No Score

“I should have been asleep hours ago.”

“Oh.”

“But there’s time, Chip, if that’s what you meant. In fact, you don’t even have to hurry. There’s plenty of time, actually.”

I already told you that i like epilogues, and knowing what happened to the characters after the story ended. Actually there isn’t too much I can put in this particular epilogue because not that much time has passed since then. And the only character I know what happened to is me, and I’m still in the same room over the same barbershop. I’ve got a new door, but otherwise things are about the same.

But I figured this is probably the only book I’ll ever write, so when else am I ever going to get a chance to write an epilogue?

Hallie went home, and the next morning she left for college. She said she would drop a card with her address on it, and if I was ever in Wisconsin I could look her up. I haven’t gotten the card yet.

Mr. Bruno replaced my door. I guess I already told you about that, though. And he didn’t exactly ask about the bullet hole in his ceiling. “You a gooda boy,” he said at one point, as if willing himself to believe it. “You donta shoot anybody, and anybody donta shoota you.” He seemed vaguely frightened of me after that.

The car wash closed for the winter. This happened almost immediately, and when they told me, I had the crazy feeling that they were closing the car wash because Hallie had gone to college. In a way it was sort of like that. More people get their cars washed in the summer than in the winter anyway, and this is especially true in this particular city, where there are all sorts of people up for the summer from New York City. So when the summer is over and college kids go back to school and summer people go back to the city, there’s not enough business to support the car wash. I was out of a job, but since it wasn’t one with an Outstanding Opportunity For Advancement, I wasn’t what you might call shattered.

Then I happened to get to talking with Mr. Burger. I was lying around my room, reading a book and wondering where I would go next, and what would I do when I got there, when old Bruno came tearing up the stairs to tell me that one of his customers had a flat tire. “You change it, he givea you money,” he said.

I changed it and he gavea me a dollar. The car was a Lincoln Continental Mark HI. Not that it’s any more work changing the tire on an expensive car, but if it had been, say, a beatup ’51 Ford, then I might not have been exactly staggered by getting a lousy dollar for changing it. I still don’t think I would have been overwhelmed, though.

“Gee,” I said, “thanks very much. Now I can go get a hamburger and maybe some french fries. Man, I can hardly wait.”

“Sounds as though you haven’t eaten in a long time,” Mr. Burger said.

He missed the point, but I went along with it. “I’m out of work,” I said, “but through no fault of my own. The position was temporary and the work seasonal.”

“The car wash,” he said, snapping his fingers. “You were the kid who wiped the windows on the passenger’s side.”

“I remember your car now. You brought it in every Friday night.”

“As soon as I got up from the city. That’s right.” He offered me a cigarette. I took it even though I don’t smoke, and told him that if it was all right with him I would save it and smoke it later, after my meal. He gave me a funny look, then said sure, he didn’t care, and lit his own cigarette. “So you’re out of work,” he said. “Tough break, all right. I wish I could help you out, but I’m afraid I’m not in the car wash business myself.”

“What business are you in?”

“Publishing.”

“What type?”

“Books,” he said warily. “What makes you ask?”

“No reason.”

“Because I haven’t got anything for a person without experience.”

“Oh, I’ve got experience,” I said. “I’ve got more experience than you would believe, even if it won’t do me any good. I’ve done more things in the past nine or ten months—”

“I can imagine. When I was your age—” He shook his head. “What did I give you, a buck? Why don’t you hang on to it and I’ll buy you that hamburger you were drooling over and we’ll talk.”

“About what?”

“I don’t know. Maybe we can do each other some good.”

So Mr. Burger worked up a contract for my book and gave me money for living expenses and bought me a typewriter and got me a beautiful blond secretary.

Not really.

What he did, really, was listen to me, talk about where I’d been and what I’d done, and nod every now and then, and smoke a lot of cigarettes, and wonder why I wouldn’t smoke one but kept saving them for later. And he told me, when I was all done, that I had a hell of a story to tell and that it was the kind of story he’d like to bring to the attention of the reading public.

“You be sure you put all the sex in,” he said. “What you have to do is hook the reader’s attention and rivet his eyes to the page right from the start, and then you make him laugh and cry by tugging at his heartstrings, but if you want to sell books, you’d better make sure you write something that’ll give the son of a bitch a hard-on.”

And he said he would take a chance on me.

“I’m a gambling man,” he said. “I’m willing to take a risk. Now I’ll tell you what I’ll do. It won’t take you long to write this all up, but you’ll need something to live on in the meantime. You got a typewriter?” I didn’t. “Well, you got to have a typewriter and money to live on. I figure you ought to be able to get a decent typewriter for twenty dollars. And living expenses — suppose I give you fifty bucks total, and you’ll see how it goes.”

I finally found a typewriter for thirty-five dollars. Not a very good typewriter, but since I can’t type with more than two fingers, I suppose a good typewriter would be wasted on me. That left me with fifteen dollars, plus the dollar for changing the flat tire, plus the few dollars I had set aside.

Now Mr. Burger is supposed to read this, if he remembers who I am. And if he likes it he can publish it, and then I’ll get some money, I guess. I don’t know exactly how it works but I must get something. I’ve been killing myself writing all this, though I suppose it doesn’t show when you read it. I don’t suppose it’s very good, either. And I probably put in either too much sex or not enough, and I don’t even know which. And I’m sure I told you too many things you didn’t want to know and skipped things you would have wanted to hear more about, but I never did this before.

And that’s the whole point, actually, now that I think about it. The first time is the hardest. There are probably other morals, too, but as sure as I like epilogues, I hate it when the author steps in at the end of the book and tells you what it was all about. Either you find it out for yourself or it’s not worth knowing about. So I’ll just say goodbye and thanks for reading this, and I’m sorry it wasn’t better than it was.