Lawrence Block: No Score

But first, by God, I was going to ball her.

I played with her with both hands. I played with her, absolutely delighted with the way she was built and the way she felt and the effect it was all having on her. And she lay there, hips rolling so nicely, so sweetly, so gracefully, and she kept her eyes closed and her hands at her sides, and the words flowed in a stream.

“Oh Chip, it’s so good, it’s so good, I like it, I love it, it’s so good. I’m so hot, I like it, I love it, Chip, it’s so good—”

I fingered her with one hand and attacked my own clothes with the other. To do this properly probably takes great skill and coordination, like rubbing your tummy while you pat your head. I tugged on my belt to unhook it and I pulled so hard I very nearly strangled myself at the waist. But I did get my pants down, and wriggled until they were off, and my shorts as well. I had kicked off my shoes some time ago. I never did get my socks off. I might have taken the trouble, but while I was getting the shorts off my other hand slipped a little, and without really planning it that way I discovered Francine’s clitoris.

(I hadn’t planned on mentioning that. After all, it’s pretty clinical, and maybe not in the best of taste to come right out and talk about something like a clitoris. Not that there’s anything wrong with a clitoris, for Pete’s sake. But that there might be something wrong with mentioning it. But the thing of it is, I had known about this part of a girl from my reading, and knew of the great importance of it, but had somehow not gotten around to looking for it, being so preoccupied with other goodies. But now just by accident I had found it, and a good thing it was.)

“Oh, wow! Oh, God, yes! Oh, Jesus Christ, do it! Oh, do it forever!”

I got on top of her. I kept touching her, and I got on top of her, and I thought that this was it, this was really it. I was still seventeen and in a second I would stop being a virgin, which was a damned good thing, because if you were old enough to fight for your country you were certainly old enough to have sex, and with a sexual revolution going on, the idea of an eighteen-year-old male virgin was pretty ridiculous, and here I was, getting ready not to be one anymore, and here Francine was, all wet and open and ready, and I loved her, by God, and I would love her forever, and wasn’t I the lucky son of a gun?

I said, “I love you, Francine.”

“Do it!”

“I love you.”

“God, God, stick it in!”

And it occurred to me, albeit briefly, that this might be a kind of graphic thing for a girl to say, and maybe not in the best of taste, but then I decided that it was all to the good, that Francine was, after all, carried away in the throes of passion, and that it was a fine sign that a girl like Francine, so demure on the outside, could be so carried away by passion, and then I stopped thinking entirely, and readied myself for the move that would change my life once and forever, and stabbed blindly ahead, and missed, and took aim again, and—

And paused, because it seemed that a herd of elephants was stampeding up the staircase and down the hall, and voices were shouting, and Francine was roaring at me, begging me to do it, to stick it in, and I lay there, paralyzed, and the door to my room exploded inward, and a man the size of a mountain charged inside. He had a hand the size of a leg of lamb, and in that hand he had a gun the size of a cannon.

“You son of a bitch!” he bellowed.

And pointed the gun at me, and pulled the trigger.

I suppose you’re wondering just who I am, anyway, and how I got myself into this particular mess. At least I hope you’re wondering something along those lines, because if you’re not, it means that you aren’t interested, which in turn would mean that I have failed to hook your interest and rivet your attention in the preceding pages. And if I fail to get high marks in hooking and riveting, I probably won’t be able to sell this book when I’m done writing it, and then I don’t know what I’ll do. For the past two weeks I’ve been living in a room about the size of a midget’s foot locker and eating Maine sardines and stale bread. The sardines are seventeen cents a can and the bread is free, but even if they were both free they would not be all that much of a bargain, because a sardine sandwich, even when you haven’t had one in a while, is not exactly a dish to set before a king, and when the sardines are the cheapest ones available and the bread is stale and the menu never changes, well, I’m not fussy about food, but I can think of things I’d rather have.

I’m sorry. I’m getting completely off the track. The point is that the last chapter was supposed to hook and rivet you. And now that I’ve got your attention (if I haven’t lost it already by wandering off the subject), I really ought to tell you who I am and how all this happened.

My name is Chip Harrison. It wasn’t always, although I was always called Chip, as what you might call a nickname, because when I was a little tyke my first word was something that sounded like Tsib. (God only knows what I was trying to say. Mama, probably.) Anyway, Tsib wasn’t anybody’s idea of a terrific name for a kid, but Chip was pretty good, as in Chip Off The Old Block. So I got called that a lot.

Then in late 1963 I started getting called that exclusively, and my actual name began not being entered on school records and things like that. Because my name, you see, was a combination of family names. Leigh, which was my mother’s maiden name, and Harvey, which was my father’s mother’s maiden name. So that my name started out as Leigh Harvey Harrison, and ever since late 1963 people named Leigh Harvey Anything have been very willing to be called something else.

“The sheerest coincidence,” my father told my mother. “The sheerest possible coincidence. But when there are enough people in the world, coincidences have to happen now and again. I went to school with a Jewish lad named Adolph Gittler. His parents named him this in all innocence, you know, never dreaming — well, the point is clear. The boy changed his name to Arnold Gidding. Didn’t do him all that much good. The teachers called him Arnold, but we all called him Adolph. Or Der Fuehrer. Or Sieg Heil.”

“Boys are so cruel,” my mother said.

“Leigh Harvey,” my father said. “A perfectly sound name turned frightful overnight. We’ll change it to Chip. That’s what everyone calls him anyway. Chances are no one really knows his full name. When he gets older, why, if he wants something more distinguished, he can select it himself.”

If I ever do, I suppose I will.

I wasted all of yesterday writing out the story of my childhood, and where I was born and where we lived while I was growing up and the schools I went to and things like that, and I used up a whole lot of time and paper, and I just got through tearing it all up. Because in the first place I can’t imagine anyone being very interested in all of that, since there was nothing the least bit unusual or attention-grabbing about it. And in the second place I’m not one of these people who can practically remember emerging from the womb. I have partial recall, and it’s vague at best.

So why don’t I just say that I came of rich but dishonest parents, and went to a couple of different private boarding schools, until that one jarring day when my father shot my mother in the back of the head and shot himself in the front of the head and made me, in the wink of an eye, an orphan.

I was playing basketball when I learned this. I’m fairly tall, which always leads people to think that I ought to be good at basketball, until they come to the realization that my lack of coordination offsets my height, since I’m not Gulliver or anything, just fairly tall for my age. This particular coach hadn’t caught on yet, it being my first year at this particular prep school, so I was out there on the court missing lay-ups and muffing rebounds when some kid came down with a note asking me to report to the Head’s office.