Lawrence Block - Step by Step

David was an exceedingly bright fellow; he taught himself math as a hobby, and wound up acing the final examinations in every math course offered at Bennett High, all in his freshman year; by the time he graduated from high school he’d gotten through differential and integral calculus. (I remember the terms; I have not the faintest idea what they mean.) He went on to Yale, picked up his doctorate at Penn in physiological psychology, taught for years at Michigan, did research at Bell Labs, and has of late headed the statistics department at Columbia. David, let me tell you, is no dumbbell.

And he explained why we were mistaken, and why his sleeping bag would be perfectly safe. Because he’d positioned it perpendicular to the fire, not crosswise, and thus gravity would not enter into the picture, and he’d be fine. The way he explained it, we all felt like idiots for not having realized as much. Of course! Perpendicular! What were we thinking?

Then around two in the morning everybody woke up, because David’s sleeping bag was on fire. Just the end of it that had been closest to the fire to begin with, and it was merely smoldering. He got out of it before it had a chance to roast his feet.

The only other noteworthy Council Hill incident that I can recall was one for which I wasn’t present. It was another village’s turn, and shortly after they came down from the hill next morning, one of their number packed his trunk and was sent home.

Word got around quickly. One of the seniors in charge had caught him giving a blow job to another camper. This got him booted, as the blower, while as far as I know the blowee escaped any disciplinary action whatsoever. (Someone may have told him to wipe that smile off his face.)

It’s interesting now to note that I was never too clear on what they were talking about, nor was I the only ignoramus around. I remember a couple of boys speculating as to just what a blow job might be. There is, I must say, nothing self-evident in the term. You have to wonder who thought to call it that in the first place, and how it ever caught on. The term, I mean.

I could tell you the names of both boys, but you’re not going to hear them from me. While it now strikes me as manifestly unfair that one of them got punished and the other did not, I can assure you that no one questioned it at the time. Obviously, one would have to be a pervert to perform the act, while anyone might have the ill fortune to be its recipient.

Ah, well. I lost track entirely of the boy who was sent home; he went to a different school, belonged to a different troop, and I never saw or heard of him again. I ran into the other fellow from time to time, and he was a nice enough guy in the limited contact I had with him. Nothing queer about him. But I do remember hearing that his idea of a quiet afternoon at home generally involved jerking off his dog.

the summer after my sophomore year at Bennett, when I’d just turned fifteen, there was an international Boy Scout jamboree at the Irvine ranch, in Santa Ana, California. The Buffalo Area Boy Scout Council did something uncharacteristically wonderful; they put together a month-long trip, which would begin with a ride on a private train across Canada and down the Pacific coast, then pause for a weeklong encampment at the jamboree, then back on the train for a ride across the American heartland to Buffalo.

My parents thought it was a wonderful opportunity, and the whole package cost all of $350, including all meals. My good friend Larry Levy signed on as well, and the two of us buddied up for the trip. Our conveyance was a Canadian troop train, with bunk beds, and it was comfortable enough. The first day out we all had to learn “O Canada” and for the next couple of weeks we sang it often, and with commendable enthusiasm.

At Banff in Alberta everybody got a day at leisure, presumably to explore Jasper National Park. Larry had somehow learned that there was a terrific golf course there, and decided we should play. So we found the place, and realized that we couldn’t really afford it. With a little subtle coaxing from the club pro, we came up with a plan. We would pay one greens fee, rent a single set of clubs, and once we were out of sight of the first tee we could each play a ball.

I can still remember two things about the day — the beauty of that golf course, brilliantly green in its Canadian Rockies setting, and the nightmare of our golf game. Larry was a better golfer than I, but that’s faint praise indeed, and the two of us made a dog’s breakfast of the whole business. We’d bought two three-packs of golf balls, and by the sixth hole we’d knocked five of them to where God himself would have had trouble finding them. We took turns swatting the last ball, and somehow made it last through the remaining three holes (a half round, we figured, was plenty). It was with a certain amount of relief that we got back on the train.

We got to Seattle on a Friday, and some resident genius decided that this was an opportunity for the Jewish kids to attend Sabbath services at a local synagogue. There were seven or eight of us, and I don’t think any of our number felt a great need for spiritual succor, but nobody asked us and off we went.

I mention this not because any aspect of the services made an enduring impression upon me, but because of something I did afterward that I still find remarkable. There was some sort of reception for the congregation, and there was a very pretty girl in attendance, and I announced to somebody — Larry, probably — that I was going to introduce myself. “Oh, sure you will,” was the response, or words to that effect.

I was in my Boy Scout uniform, of course, and must have looked like an idiot, but something empowered me, and I strode across the room and presented myself in front of this vision. “You look like someone I’d like to meet,” I said, and we began talking, and when we all went back to the train, I had her name and address on a slip of paper in my wallet.

Karen Hochfeld.

I wrote to her from Buffalo, and she answered me, and our correspondence went on for a year or two. Her father was a doctor, I remember that much, and she was a pretty accomplished golfer. Somewhere along the way one of us left a letter forever unanswered, and that was the end of that.

I wonder whatever became of her. I’ve often wondered, over the years, but even in this Age of Google I haven’t turned up a trace of her. Women’s names change with marriage, and that makes them harder to track down. She must have been a year younger than I, maybe two, so she’d have been born in 1939–40.

If you’re out there, Karen, I’d love to hear from you...

But wasn’t I the lad? “You look like someone I’d like to meet.” Where did all that self-assurance come from? Somehow I don’t think it was the uniform. Whatever brought it about, it had never happened before.

Or since.

We continued on down the coast, saw the redwoods, and wound up in tents in Orange County. My friend Larry had the special pleasure at the jamboree of falling in with a detachment of Puerto Rican scouts. He’d been studying Spanish at school, and was able to speak with them.

This impressed me profoundly. At Bennett you could be a language major or a science major, and for no particular reason I’d chosen science. I had taken two years of Latin, which I’d continue, and in the fall I was scheduled to study chemistry, with physics on tap for my senior year.

I came home from the jamboree with other ideas, switched to a language major, and took first-year Spanish along with third-year Latin. I never did study chemistry or physics.

Spanish came easily to me. It’s not a difficult language, and two years of Latin did a lot to pave the way. I had two years of Spanish when I went off to college, and would have studied it there, but I didn’t have the chance. The professor who’d taught it for a couple of years was up for tenure the year before I got to Antioch, and didn’t get it, and left — and that was the end of Spanish at Antioch.