Lawrence Block - Step by Step

A certain number of semesters of physical education were a requirement for graduation at Antioch. All you had to do was attend, there were no examinations, not even a grade of Pass or Fail. The initial course, which everybody took first semester, was general, and all I remember was that I took it, and that it was held in the gym. I must have attended it just enough to get credit for it.

The second half of the year you could take something specific, and Paul Grillo, my freshman hall advisor, suggested the two of us sign up for golf. The school didn’t have a functioning course; what had once been a golf course was now just a stretch of the campus, where courting couples were apt to be strewn hither and yon in seasonable weather. They still called the area the golf course, but anyone who actually wanted to hit a ball with a stick had to go to a nearby course, which I think may have been in Xenia.

Paul and I would go there, and we’d dutifully tee off, and each of us would hit his ball as many times as we had to in order to get it into the woods. There, out of sight of everyone but the squirrels, we’d stretch out and smoke cigarettes and tell each other stories. Then at the appropriate time we’d find our way back to the clubhouse, turn in our rented clubs, and get on the bus to go back to campus.

That was as much phys ed as I had at Antioch, and I’m afraid it was neither physical nor educational. I’d have needed a few more semesters in order to graduate, and eventually I might have found myself in the awkward position of a few legendary Antiochians, who’d completed all of their course work while neglecting the physical education requirement. The poor bastards would have to come back for another term, during which they’d load up on phys ed and nothing else. That might well have been my lot, but I was spared all that when they expelled me.

I took some interesting courses at Antioch, both English and history. I cut a lot of classes and gave a lot of assignments short shrift, but I picked up a thing or two in spite of myself. My experience in Nolan Miller’s writing workshop probably equipped me to land the job at Scott Meredith.

And, of course, I learned more outside the classroom than inside. Met some unusual people, formed some enduring friendships. Fell in and out of love, and occasionally in and out of bed. And I smoked a lot, primarily tobacco, and I drank a lot. Beer, wine, whiskey. Hey, whatever you’ve got will be fine...

And most of that continued for the better part of twenty years after I said goodbye to Yellow Springs in 1959. I spent a lot of those post-Antioch years in New York, so I did a fair amount of walking, because that’s how one gets around in our city. But I never made a conscious effort to walk fast, or to cover great distances. I didn’t racewalk, or even know what racewalking was.

And, God help us, I certainly didn’t run.

it was the spring of 1977, and i was living in a second-floor rear tenement apartment on Bleecker at Sullivan Street. I walked up Sullivan two blocks to Washington Square Park, stood on the sidewalk alongside the park facing east, and began to run.

I proceeded counterclockwise around the little park. It’s not microscopic, the circumference comes to just about five-eighths of a mile. (In other words, a kilometer, but I wasn’t thinking in metric terms. Later, when I ran races measured in kilometers, the word would have more meaning to me.)

I couldn’t run the whole way around. I ran as far as I could, until I had to walk and catch my breath. I walked until I felt I could run again, and ran until I had to walk again, and so on. I circled the park five times, which I figured came to three miles. Then I walked home, and took a shower that no one could have called premature.

I did this every morning.

My running wasn’t much more than a shuffle, and I’m not sure I even called it running. I may have used the term jogging, which was getting a lot of use at the time. I wouldn’t use it now. There is, it seems to me, something both patronizing and trivializing about the term. If you’re jogging, you’re taking it easy. You’re plugging away at it to keep in shape. It’s good exercise, it’ll help you keep your weight down, and if what they say is true, it’ll work wonders for your cardiovascular system.

But it’s not exactly athletic, is it?

Dr. George Sheehan, a distinguished runner, writer, and physician, was once asked the difference between a jogger and a runner. A race number, he replied.

Whatever it was, I did it every day. It wasn’t like learning to ride a bike, or even like learning to walk in the first place, because there was no falling down involved. I ran until I had to walk, walked until I was able to run.

The day came when I ran all the way around the park, a full five-eighths of a mile, before I had to walk.

And there was another day, not too long afterward, when I was able to run for the whole three miles. Five laps, three miles, running all the way.

Who’d have thought it?

In a word, nobody.

For almost thirty-nine years, if you saw me running you knew I had a bus to catch — and that I’d probably miss it. I was born overweight and out of breath, and by the time I slimmed down some I’d been smoking cigarettes for several years.

Back in seventh and eighth grades, they had a citywide running competition. At PS 66, the gym teacher, Mr. Geoghan, stood there with a stop watch and had us run the length of the playground. He timed us in the seventy-five-yard dash, and I wasn’t the very slowest in my class, but I came close.

(Remember Jack Dorfman? Captain of the renowned Wellington Tigers? Quarterback and star shortstop at Bennett High? In both seventh and eighth grades, Jack won the seventy-five-yard dash almost without effort. Then he went on each time to the district semifinals, which he also won. From there he went to the citywide finals, and three black kids sailed past him like he was standing still.)

My freshman year in high school, my friend Ronnie Benice announced that he and another fellow, Ron Feldman, were going to try out for the cross-country team. I didn’t even know what that was. “Come on along,” he suggested. He explained what cross-country was, and I thought he was out of his mind. Run? Over hill and dale? Me? You’re kidding, right?

Both Rons ran cross-country in the fall and track in the spring. I spoke with Ron Feldman at a reunion a couple of years ago, and he said he still ran on a regular basis. Ron Benice is living in Florida, but I haven’t been in touch with him in twenty-five years, so I have no idea if he’s still running.

And then, twenty-two years after high school graduation, I was running around Washington Square Park. How the hell did that come to pass?

It was in 1959 that I was sent down from Antioch. (That’s how the British would say it, and it sounds so much nicer than “expelled.”) I’d spent the next eighteen years getting married, siring daughters, writing books, moving around — back to Buffalo, out to Wisconsin, then to New Jersey. To say I drank my way into marriage isn’t much of an exaggeration, and it’s none at all to say I drank my way out of it. My first wife and I separated in 1973, and I moved to a studio apartment on West Fifty-eighth Street. A year later, when I began chronicling the fictional adventures of Matthew Scudder, his hotel room was just around the block from me. How’s that for coincidence?

He spent twenty years or so in that hotel room, but I was out of my apartment in two years. I moved back to Buffalo again, and that didn’t work, and I got the feeling I’d be better off without a fixed address, on the principle that a moving target is harder to hit.