Lawrence Block - Step by Step

And he talked about his emphysema. He didn’t say it was going to kill him, but he really didn’t have to. “You know,” he said, “when you’re working with the kind of chemicals we use in my branch of dentistry, well, you’re breathing in fumes for hours on end. I think that’s probably what caused it.” He sucked on the oxygen tube. “Though I suppose all those Luckies may have been a factor.”

Gee, ya think?

It was an unsettling experience, to say the least. At another period in my life I’d have walked out of there and immediately lit up a cigarette, but I’d quit them a little over a year earlier. So what I did was go have a drink. There’s always something.

They would have taken me back at Parker Pharmacy, but I really didn’t like Bob, the pharmacist, and I think I felt constrained by the fact that my dad had lined up the job for me. So I went to Day’s Drugs, at North Park and Hertel, about as far from my house in one direction as Parker had been in the other. I’d heard that their delivery boy had gone off to college, and I applied for the job.

It paid seventy-five cents an hour, which was a nickel more than I’d been making at Parker. The nickel was beside the point, but I was quick to mention it to my folks. “And,” I said, “I’ll be making five cents more an hour.”

My boss was a fellow named Frank Stein, whom everyone who ever worked for him inevitably referred to as Frank N. Stein, though there was nothing about him suggestive of either the scientist or his creation. He and his wife, both of them short and stout, were the entire staff of their small store, along with whatever high school kid was working for them that year. I was on my bike a lot in Frank’s service, because I not only had to deliver prescriptions; a lot of the time, I had to go out and fill them first.

The store wasn’t much more than a hole in the wall, and the backroom stock was limited. Consequently Frank often got a prescription calling for something he didn’t have in house. “Sure, we’ve got that,” he’d say, and then he’d call around to other drugstores until he found somebody who did in fact have the item in question. I’d go there and pick it up, and he’d put his own label on it, and I’d go out and deliver it.

It was also my job to sell cigarettes. They were a loss leader for us, so we did a big business in them, and I remember what they cost — $1.93 a carton for regular-size cigarettes, like Camels and Luckies and Old Gold, and $1.95 a carton for king-size. (That extra two cents a carton never caused me to wonder at the time, but now it strikes me as incomprehensible. What minuscule increment could the wholesaler have charged that led us to price Pall Mall a fifth of a cent a pack higher than Lucky Strike?)

I sold cigarettes, many of them to customers who came to us for their smokes and for nothing else. And I stole cigarettes, too, though our selection was less vast and I was pretty much limited to the common brands. I didn’t sell condoms, you had to go ask for those at the prescription counter, and once in a while somebody paused at my cash register with a puzzled expression on his face, and I’d just point him toward the back. But I did steal a condom, and it remained unopened in my wallet forever. It said right on the wrapper that its sole purpose was to prevent the transmission of venereal disease, and I’d have to say it worked.

At the end of the school year, I introduced my friend Symmie Jacobson to Frank; Symmie was a year behind me, and glad to take over my job. I walked off with my last pack of free cigarettes, and shortly thereafter I graduated from Bennett. Remarkably enough, I was one of the officers of my senior class.

It was far and away the least significant office, and the only one that wasn’t largely a popularity contest. The post was Class Poet, and there was a competition for it. You submitted a poem, and a panel of three English teachers read the entries without knowing whose they were. I submitted two entries, one in declamatory blank verse (Four years have passed since first we called you Home...) and the other something more impressionistic, written in a free verse that owed a lot to American Imagist poets of the early twentieth century, like Alfred Kreymborg, whom I admired greatly.

The blank verse epic won, and was printed in the school yearbook. I may have had to read it on stage at Class Day, but maybe not. I can’t remember.

“The free verse poem was everybody’s second choice,” Miss Jepson confided. “Of course I knew right away it was yours. I knew they were both yours.”

The night I graduated I got drunk for the first time in my life. I found my way home and went to bed, and when the bed started spinning I leaned over the side of it and vomited. Then I passed out and slept like a lamb. The next day my mother told me she hoped I’d learned something from the experience.

Yeah, right.

I spent the summer as a counselor-in-training at Camp Lakeland. I didn’t walk much at Camp Lakeland, and I certainly didn’t run, but I saw something there that I never forgot. One of our campers was a fellow named Barry who was really too old for camp, but they took him out of a need to do something for him. He was, I gather, kind of disturbed, and when I heard his story I figured he had plenty to be disturbed about. His family were European refugees, but they’d managed to stay out of the camps. They hid from the Germans in the woods, and subsisted on roots and berries, and somehow lived to tell the tale. Most of them, anyway.

Barry was about as well socialized as a wolverine. Every now and then he’d run away from camp, just take off down the highway and disappear. I suppose he went back to Buffalo. That was one interesting thing he would do, but another far more interesting thing he did was run. He was this big lanky kid, tall for his fifteen years, and he’d go out to a field and just lope around it for fucking hours on end. When he got thirsty he’d tear a leaf from a tree and chew on it. Then he’d spit it out. And throughout it all he’d keep on running along.

Damnedest thing I ever saw.

If I had to, I figured, I could probably live on roots and berries. My Boy Scout experience had taught me how to recognize edible wild plants. I could do that, at least for a while, if I had to.

But the running? Not a chance, not if my life depended on it.

When camp was over I went home. A couple of weeks later my dad drove me to Yellow Springs, Ohio, where I was to begin my freshman year at Antioch College.

ionly applied to two colleges, Cornell and Antioch. Both my parents attended Cornell — that’s where Arthur Block from New York City met and married Lenore Nathan from Buffalo — and so did my two uncles, Hi and Jerry Nathan. I’d been there several times for football games, and I knew the words to all of the college songs. (I still do; learn that sort of thing young enough and it’s yours for life.)

In the ordinary course of things that’s where I’d have gone, whatever I wanted to study. They even had a veterinary medicine school, in case that old ambition should return. All those relatives would have helped induce the college to find a place for me, but I wouldn’t need their aid. I had the grades, and the smarts. All I had to do was send in my application and I’d be set for four years in Ithaca, far above Cayuga’s waters.

Instead I went to Antioch, where the only song was an unofficial one that went like so: