Lawrence Block - Step by Step

But now I had a bike, and I could leave my wagon in the garage. And, almost immediately, I had a job, handing out catalogs for the Fuller Brush Man.

His name was Mr. Speier, and he was a European refugee who was grabbing his chunk of the American Dream by selling brushes door to door. His territory when I went to work for him was in Tonawanda, a couple of miles north of my house. That would have taken a while to walk, but I had a bike, and a whole new world had thus opened itself to me.

I would ride my bike to Tonawanda and meet Mr. Speier at some predetermined intersection, and he would give me a stack of catalogs and tell me where to go and what bells to ring. I would walk up one side of a block and down the next, ringing the bells, and telling each housewife who came to the door that I had a catalog for her, and when my employer visited in a couple of days he’d pick up the catalog and give her a free gift.

Just about everybody took the catalog. I don’t recall anyone slamming the door and telling me to go to hell. Nor did I encounter anyone a youth of today might characterize as a MILF. In years to come I would write scenes in which a young man went door to door — conducting fake termite inspections, in one novel — and the fellows in my fiction always had remarkable sexual adventures. It pains me to admit it, but nothing like that ever happened to me in Tonawanda.

But maybe I should have given it a little more time. I can’t be positive of this, but it seems to me I only worked for Mr. Speier for a single week.

It really wasn’t much of a job. I was paid two cents for every catalog I distributed, and I could only leave a catalog if someone was there to accept it. Then I noted the house number on a sheet of paper, secure in the knowledge that I was another two cents to the good. The next day I would meet Mr. Speier and hand over the sheet, and he would count up the numbers, make sure the count matched the number of catalogs he’d given me, pay me what I’d earned, and give me another batch of catalogs for distribution.

First time out I’d tried to make my route more efficient by going back and forth across the street to save steps. But he didn’t like that because he wanted the numbers in order for later on, when he would go up one side of the block and down the other. So from then on I did it his way.

It was tedious beyond description, but it wasn’t terribly difficult. The problem was that I couldn’t make any money at it. He’d give me thirty or thirty-five catalogs, and if I got rid of them all I’d make is sixty or seventy cents, and for this I had to peddle my bike a couple of miles in each direction.

Now sixty cents for an afternoon’s work may not sound like a lot of money nowadays, but let me tell you something — it wasn’t a lot of money back then, either. Hell, I did better than that in the pop bottle business.

And if it rained, the day was a washout. One day it was fair weather in Buffalo, but raining by the time I got to Tonawanda, so I got to ride all the way out there and turn around and go home. I didn’t pass Go, and I didn’t collect sixty cents.

So one week was enough.

That fall I got a real job. It paid seventy cents an hour, minimum wage at the time, and as much as a kid could expect to earn in a part-time job. I worked at Parker Pharmacy, owned by Mr. Pearlstein, an acquaintance of my father’s. I did various stockboy chores, and when there was a prescription to be delivered, I hopped on my bike and delivered it. Sometimes a delivery meant a tip, but you might be surprised to learn that more often than not it didn’t. The tips, when they came, were a nickel or a dime. One man gave me a quarter once and I still remember it.

More often than not, I spent the tip money on candy bars. I never wasted any money on cigarettes. I was a confirmed smoker, I’d started swiping butts from my parents’ ashtrays two years earlier, but like every other kid I knew who ever worked at a drugstore, I stole cigarettes. I tried every brand we carried, brands nobody ever heard of. Virginia Rounds. Wings. Phantoms, which were one and a half times the length of a Pall Mall, and furnished with a cellophane tip. Murad, Helmar, Piedmont. Did anybody ever buy the damn things? Or were they just there for kids to steal?

I worked after school, and Saturday mornings, and I made ten or twelve dollars a week. I never could have got the job without the bicycle.

And by now it was a different bicycle. I don’t know when that happened, but I guess that orange and black Schwinn must have been a rusty mess when I hauled it out of the garage, and a little small for me in the bargain. It seems to me that by the time I was passing out catalogs for Mr. Speier, and certainly by the time I was delivering prescriptions for Mr. Pearlstein, the old Schwinn had morphed into something else, with hand brakes and gears as well. That’s what I rode around the streets of North Buffalo, obeying traffic laws, waiting for traffic lights to change, and even signaling my intention to turn left or right. You’d have thought I was behind the wheel of the family Chevy.

While there were, alas, no eager MILF’s — Milves? — meeting me at their doors wearing a negligee and a smile, there was nevertheless a loss of innocence that came with the job. I wasn’t a kid who noticed a lot, but some things were hard to miss.

Like the day when Bob, the pharmacist and store manager, took a prescription over the phone and sent me to the shelves for a bottle of Cepacol, an over-the-counter cough remedy. I brought it to him and he soaked off the label, typed out and slapped on a prescription label, raised the price from sixty-nine cents to ten dollars and change, and sent me off on my bicycle to deliver it.

That was an eye-opener. And my eyes stayed open wide enough to take notice at the first of the month, when the outgoing mail held eight or ten small envelopes, all addressed to neighborhood physicians. Even I could work out what that was all about.

it was during my junior year in high school that it dawned on me that I wanted to be a writer. I’d had various careers in mind over the years, without really developing anything close to a passion for any of them. When I was four or five years old I wanted to be a garbageman, until my mother told me they got chapped hands. Later I liked the idea of veterinary medicine, probably because I liked animals. My father would have liked for me to become a physician, he thought they had good lives while performing a useful service, and I entertained the idea but couldn’t really see myself pursuing it. I might have been inclined toward law, I had the right sort of mind for it, but my father was an attorney who practiced infrequently over the years. He’d soured on the profession, and actively dissuaded me from entering it.

In third-year English, an early assignment led to my writing a paper on my career choices, from garbageman on. I had fun with it and took a light tone, and ended with something to the effect that, on reviewing what I’d written, one thing at least was clear: I could never become a writer.

At the bottom, Miss May Jepson wrote: “ I’m not so sure about that! ”

And the die was cast. Before the moment I read her comment, I had never had a single conscious thought of becoming a writer. I had a frame of reference for it, I had lately begun reading grown-up fiction (one hesitates to call it adult fiction, as that has somehow come to mean something else) and was making my way through the giants of American realism — Steinbeck, Hemingway, James T. Farrell, Thomas Wolfe, etc. I enjoyed the books and greatly admired the men who wrote them, but the notion that I might seek to do likewise never entered my mind.

Once it did, I never seriously entertained the idea of doing anything else.