Lawrence Block - Step by Step

At the Jamboree, except for those of us who were practicing our Spanish, what you mostly did was swap things. Kids from all over the country, all over the world, brought indigenous crap along and exchanged it for somebody else’s indigenous crap. Some kids managed to trade uniforms with foreign scouts, which gave them a terrific souvenir, but left them without anything to wear to meetings. There was a particular shoulder patch that was much esteemed, for reasons I cannot begin to recall and very likely couldn’t fathom at the time. I managed to get a bullwhip, which I thought I’d be able to trade for the patch, but I couldn’t. It’s hard now to imagine any sort of shoulder patch a sane person would prefer over a bullwhip, but that’s by the way. I brought the bullwhip home, but don’t ask me what happened to it. It disappeared, but then the patch probably wouldn’t have lasted, either.

The really dumb thing I did was send a postcard to Murray Davis’s girlfriend.

Murray was in Troop Seven, along with me and Larry Levy, and lived in Kenmore, and for a couple of years he’d been going steady with a girl named Leslie, whose last name was also Davis. They were crazy about each other. And for some reason I thought it would be really comical to write a postcard saying something along the lines of “I know you’ve been screwing other guys and I’m really mad,” sign Murray’s name to it, and send it to her.

I have no idea what made me think this was a good idea.

Next thing I knew, the postcard was written and stamped and in the mailbox. And I pretty much forgot about it.

The Jamboree ended after a week, and we packed up and boarded our train for a quick return to Buffalo. The only thing I remember from the trip home was looking out the window as we passed through Kansas and seeing an enormous blood-orange full moon a few degrees off the horizon. Funny what sticks in the mind. A few years later I would write a poem about it, describing the moon as “stroking desperate tides in the liquid land.” It’s probably a good thing I turned my attention to paperback novels, where all that desperate stroking could be put to good use.

Back home, I told my parents I wanted to study Spanish, and they thought that was fine. I unpacked, and everything went into the washing machine. Except for the bullwhip. I don’t know where that went.

And then one evening Gene Davis came over. He was Murray’s father, and he was really boiling, and he wanted to talk to my parents. He may have wanted to talk to me as well, I’m fairly sure he did, but he never got the chance. I was sent upstairs, and stayed in my room with the door closed.

He must have been downstairs for the better part of an hour. How did I spend that time? I have no idea. Picked up a book, most likely, and thought as little as possible about what was going on downstairs.

Then he was gone, and my mother came to my room. “That was Mr. Davis,” he said unnecessarily. “Murray’s father. He had a nasty postcard that someone had sent to Leslie Davis with Murray’s name signed to it. He was very upset, especially because the mailman and anybody else at the post office could have read it.”

“Oh,” I said.

“He was certain you were the one who wrote it. We looked at it and told him it couldn’t possibly have been you. For one thing, it wasn’t your handwriting. And we knew you would never have done anything like that.”

“Oh,” I said.

“I don’t think he believed us,” she said, “but he gave up and left. What I can’t understand is how you could be so stupid as to write something like that on a postcard. What were you thinking?”

Good question. I didn’t have an answer, nor did she wait around for one. Nor did any of us ever say a word about the matter again. For a day or so it was one more elephant in the living room, and then it lumbered off and secreted itself in a far corner of the garage, where that poor old bike of mine had spent so many years.

in fiction, events have antecedents. Significant developments don’t just happen out of the blue. Something happens, and because of it something else happens, and then something monumental occurs.

I’m not sure that’s truly the way the world works. Sometimes it seems to me that things do happen out of the blue. Perhaps there is a gathering of forces, like the seismic activity that produces a volcanic eruption, but there are no meters sensitive enough to register those vibrations.

This is a long and overly dramatic preamble to a simple statement of fact: To wit, in the spring of 1953, a couple of months before I would turn fifteen, I got my bike out of the garage and took it down the driveway to the sidewalk, where, within an hour or so, I learned to ride it.

I cannot recall a single prefatory thought. I was in the garage, I took note of the bicycle, I had the impulse to try to ride it, and, once I’d moved enough debris out of the way to get to it, that’s precisely what I did. Just like that, and just a little less than five years after my parents had given it to me.

Because God is, after all, the Supreme Ironist, I’d managed to wait until the ability to ride a bike no longer made much difference in my life. I was in my second year at Bennett, and no one rode bikes to high school. One walked to Hertel and took the Number Twenty-three streetcar, which stopped right in front of the high school. Or, more often than not, one walked over to Dick Lederman’s house and his father gave us both a ride in his new Cadillac. (It was always a new Cadillac, because Israel Lederman traded his car annually. He loved those cars, and I didn’t blame him a bit.)

After school, one walked home.

Or, in rare instances, drove. I was getting on for fifteen, and my classmates were on average a year older than I, so the ones who’d had their sixteenth birthdays were already learning how to drive their fathers’ cars. Girls in my class, dating boys a year or two older, were riding around in cars all the time.

And I was learning to ride a bicycle.

Here’s something as puzzling as the fact that I did it without thinking about it beforehand: I didn’t really think about it much after the fact, either. I’d just accomplished something without much effort, and how could it have failed to strike me that I might as easily have done so years ago? You’d think, wouldn’t you, that I’d have smacked myself in the forehead and said some cyclist’s version of, “Gee, I could have had a V-8!”

And I could have, surely I could have, years before I did, back when it would have made a considerable difference in my life. True, the bike was no longer too big for me, was if anything a little small for me, and when balance became problematic I could extend my feet and use the pavement to support myself and the bike. True, I was bigger and stronger and not quite so ungainly. Still, how hard would it have been for me to do this two years earlier? Or three? Or four?

Well, hell, I’m not going to brood about it now. But I’m surprised I didn’t brood about it then.

The bike, or more precisely my new ability to ride it, got me my first actual job. I’d always been an enterprising child, ringing the neighbors’ doorbells and offering my services at whatever chore was in season. I shoveled walks and driveways, raked leaves, mowed lawns. I went around with a wagon and purchased beer and pop bottles for half the deposit. (I’ll bet if I’d proposed to haul them away for free, most of my neighbors would have found that acceptable. But I offered to pay for them, and nobody ever once told me to keep my money.)

Funny what comes to mind. I can still remember a big bottle that once held Coleman’s Ginger Ale. It was worth five cents — or would have been, if I’d ever managed to find a store that would take it back. The lesson it taught me was worth more than the two and a half cents I was out. I learned, not for the last time, that nothing is ever quite as profitable as you think it’s going to be.