Lawrence Block - Step by Step

I went on writing compositions for English class, and I suppose I showed off some therein. I wrote poems, too, and showed them to Miss Jepson, and basked in the praise I received. (The poem about the moon over Kansas was not among them. I wrote that, desperate tides and all, in my sophomore year at Antioch.)

I was going to be a writer, and that’s what I told anyone who asked. “Oh, you’ll be a journalist,” they said. “Oh, you’ll work on a newspaper.”

No. I was going to be a writer .

In June i didn’t go off to writing camp, as I suppose a similarly inclined teenager might do nowadays. What I did was get on a Greyhound bus, and forty-eight hours later I got off in South Florida. In Dania, specifically, where Doc Marshall picked me up and drove me to Juniors Lodge.

Dr. Marshall A. Marshall, né Marshall Gubinsky, was an extraordinary man. He’d been the scoutmaster of Troop Seven from the time I joined, until he and his wife and kids departed for Florida two years before I got on that bus. Doc was a dentist who specialized in making and fitting false teeth, and he’d fallen in love with Florida and wanted to live there, but the state dentists’ association had established strict rules to protect themselves from carpetbaggers, and Doc couldn’t practice his profession.

So he bought some land and decided to build a camp for kids. He did the construction himself, with some help from his wife, Ada, and the kids, Bonnie and Mike, building a serviceable dormitory out of concrete block.

He’d never done anything like this before, but the man had a penchant for tackling new tasks and figuring out how to perform them competently. He’d been in scouting as a boy, but hadn’t gotten all that far with it; when he was appointed scoutmaster, he decided he ought to set a good example, and he went through the laborious process of earning the requisite merit badges and becoming an Eagle Scout. If you apply yourself, I think you can probably learn more in this process than in four years of college, and Doc went to each task with the enthusiasm of an amateur and the precision of a pro. And, because he didn’t want to be a hotshot, he stopped at the requisite twenty-one merit badges — but he never stopped trying new things and developing new skills.

I’d come down to be his camp counselor. There was a young woman as well, a swimmer with Olympic dreams; she was a couple of years older than I, and in charge when we took the kids swimming. The camp wasn’t much, just a summer-long babysitting service for parents who couldn’t wait to get rid of their kids, and not without reason. They were, pound for pound, as hopeless a lot of spoiled whining little bastards as I’d ever had to put up with.

I don’t remember what the hell we did to amuse them day after day, but the days passed and nobody went home, so I guess we all got through it okay. (They may well have reciprocated their parents’ feelings — once again, not without reason.) But as far as I was concerned, the day began when the rotten little snots went to sleep.

That’s when Doc and Ada and I sat around the kitchen table and smoked cigarettes and talked. Their Irish setter, Copper, would generally join us. Copper was the smartest and best-behaved dog I’d ever met, and as a result I came to think highly of the breed. (Years later I had one of my own, Maxine by name, not that the dizzy bitch answered to it or to anything else. She was as stupid as an oyster and as tractable as a cyclone.) We’d smoke and talk and smoke and talk and smoke some more. I don’t remember what we talked about, and what difference did it make? I was in heaven.

It was a wonderful summer. I had one day off, and took a bus to Miami, where I went to the movies and saw Gone With the Wind . On the bus back to camp, a driver gently reprimanded me for taking a seat in the rear. That was for colored, he told me. They got plenty of ignorant Yankees in that part of the state, so I guess he had to do that a lot.

Some years later I heard of or read about a fellow in a similar situation, who’d lowered his head at the driver’s admonition and murmured significantly that his father was white. The driver left him alone. Later, as he was getting off the bus, the guy called over his shoulder, “I forgot to tell you — my mother was white, too!”

I never would have thought of that, and even if I had I’d never have done it. What I did was change my seat.

Hiking wasn’t part of the agenda at Juniors Lodge. At home, I don’t think many of those kids ever walked farther than the distance from the television set to the dinner table, and summers in Florida were too hot even if they were up for it. I don’t remember working up a sweat myself, aside from the sweat one worked up just by being there, but somehow in the six or eight weeks I worked there I must have lost twenty pounds, maybe more.

I was always a fat kid — not the morbidly obese sort one sees nowadays, but what clothing salesmen called husky . I took my huskiness as a given and didn’t pay much attention to it, and when my parents and sister drove down to collect me — there’d be no return trip on the Greyhound, thank God — a miracle had occurred. I was no longer husky.

The four of us spent a week living it up at a Miami Beach motel, then drove home. I went off to my senior year at Bennett, and got another drugstore job.

Back in Buffalo, I tried corresponding with Doc and Ada. Oddly, I still remember the mailing address: Box 507, Hollywood, Florida. I sent a couple of letters there and never heard back. They were both far too busy for correspondence.

Then I did get a letter from them, and it was some sort of form letter, soliciting families and businesses to hold events at Juniors Lodge. (If it was a lousy name for a kids’ camp, it was an even worse name for a catering hall.) They’d put me on their mailing list, and I resented this.

A few years later there was an obituary in the Buffalo Evening News . Ada had died of lung cancer. She couldn’t have been fifty when she died. I thought about writing a letter, but I always think about writing letters on such occasions, and hardly ever get around to it. Nor did I this time.

Then, twenty-one years after my summer at Juniors Lodge, I looked for Doc and I found him. I was on a curious ramble; I’d given up my apartment in New York, moved in with a woman in Buffalo, moved out a few days later when she came to her senses, and found myself with all my possessions in the back of a treacherous Ford station wagon. I decided to drive around and see where I wound up.

H. L. Mencken wrote somewhere that the Lord had seized the United States by the state of Maine and lifted, so that everything loose wound up in Southern California. That’s what I was and that’s what I did, but it took me four or five months to get there, and on my way I passed through the town of Dania and thought of Doc.

So I went looking for him, and amazingly enough I found him. I reached his dental office — evidently if you lived in Florida long enough they had to let you be a dentist again — and the woman I spoke to told me Doc had retired because of illness. I found out where he lived and went to see him.

He had emphysema, and walked around sucking oxygen out of a tube. He knew me, and remembered me as clearly as I remembered him. And he brought me up to date on his life since I’d known him. He’d had two marriages after Ada’s death, each one worse than the last. He’d gone back to dentistry and managed to build a practice. He told me about his kids, but if what he said registered at all I’ve long since forgotten it.

And he told me what a struggle he’d had in Buffalo with the Beth Zion establishment, who hadn’t wanted an East Side boy, a Russian Jew like Marshall Gubinsky, leading their Boy Scout troop. And he’d had his troubles with some of our parents, as well — not mine, he had nothing but good to say about my folks, but several others.