Lawrence Block - Step by Step

I’ve mentioned the wanderjahr that took me to Florida and a reunion with my old scoutmaster. It would have been in December of 1975 that I tracked down Doc Marshall, and it was the following February by the time I got to Los Angeles. I lived there for six months at the Magic Hotel in Hollywood, and my kids flew out and spent the last month with me at the hotel. Then we piled into the Chevy Impala I’d bought when the Ford wagon died, and we spent a wonderful month seeing something of the country on the way back to New York.

I thought I’d turn around and drive right back to California, but instead I went to visit a friend in South Carolina, and stayed there long enough to finish the book I was working on. I called it Burglars Can’t Be Choosers, and it turned out to be the first of a long series about a light-fingered fellow named Bernie Rhodenbarr. I returned to New York, and I came very close to taking a room at Scudder’s hotel, but instead I wound up signing a lease on that little apartment on Bleecker Street.

I’d stopped smoking in September of 1974. I had stopped many times over the years, but this time it took. I never did go back to it.

And, after several months on Bleecker Street, during which I put in some long hours at the Village Corner and the Kettle of Fish, I stopped drinking.

I’M SURE THAT had a great deal to do with the running, although I never made the connection at the time. There couldn’t have been more than a couple of weeks between my last drink and my first shuffling steps around the park, but when I was trying to work out the chronology the other day, I had trouble determining whether I was still drinking when I started running. Until then, I’d never thought of one thing as having led to the other.

But of course it did. All of a sudden I had all this nervous energy and nothing to do with it. I didn’t think in those terms, not at all. I just had the thought one day, out of the blue, that I’d like to try running around the block. I didn’t go to the park, just ran up Sullivan to West Third Street, turned left, went to MacDougal, turned left again... and so on. Running for as long as I could, then gasping as I walked, then running. Somewhere along the way I gave up on the running altogether and walked the rest of the way home.

I did this in street clothes — jeans, a long-sleeved sport shirt, a pair of leather dress shoes. God knows what I looked like. People probably thought I’d stolen something, or perhaps killed someone, and was trying to escape. But they left me alone. It was New York, after all, and why interfere?

After a day or two of this I picked up the phone and called my friend Philip Friedman. I’d met Philip through our mutual agent, and he seemed like an interesting guy, but the one extraordinary thing I knew about him was that he was a runner. He lived on the Upper West Side, and ran every day around the reservoir in Central Park. And he’d actually run a marathon. He was from Yonkers originally, and he’d run the Yonkers Marathon, and that impressed me.

(It would have impressed me even more if I’d known anything more about the event than its name. The Yonkers race is one of the country’s more difficult marathons, generally blessed with wilting heat and humidity, and boasting a couple of positively oedipal hills. I’ve never participated myself, and with any luck at all I never will.)

I told him I’d started running, and I wasn’t sure if I knew how to do it. He said there wasn’t all that much to it, aside from remembering to alternate feet. Did I have running shoes? I said I didn’t, and he recommended I go to a store that specialized in athletic footwear and let them sell me something.

I found the right sort of store and came home with a pair of shoes by Pony. I remember that they were blue and yellow, and the most comfortable things I ever put on my feet. I went out and circled Washington Square a couple of times, and when I came home I took off my new shoes and noticed that they had a couple of broken threads in the stitching.

So I went back to the shoe store, and they pointed out that the shoes were now used, they showed the effects of a few laps around the park, and they couldn’t take them back. And I threw a fit, and to get rid of me they let me exchange them for a pair of Adidas.

That’s a good brand, but the shoes I took home were singularly unsuitable. They were running flats, and offered about as much cushioning and support as a pair of paper slippers. They were also a little too small overall, and a whole lot too small in the toe box. It was months before it dawned on me that they were the wrong style of shoe and the wrong size, and that they consequently were so damned uncomfortable to wear. I just thought it was a matter of having to get used to them, and I wore the silly shoes for months, ran all over the place in them, and never failed to luxuriate in the feeling of sheer relief that came over me every time I took them off.

But I didn’t let them stop me. I got out every day for my five laps around Washington Square Park. When I went out of town for a couple of weeks in the summer, I found places to run — in parks, on highways, wherever I could get in a half hour to an hour of alternating feet. I never allowed myself to miss a day, because I had the feeling that once I did I’d give it up forever.

I must have missed days when it poured, or when there was ice underfoot. And I remember a snowy day around Christmas when I was sane enough to stay indoors, but nuts enough to lace up my Adidas and run in place in my living room.

I was a runner.

It astonished me that I could do this. It’s not as though I’d ever spent any time thinking of running as something I might do if I ever got around to it. I can’t say I thought much about running at all — for myself or for other people. I knew there were people who ran, I would see them out there doing it, but I also knew there were people who belonged to something called the Polar Bear Club, whose members went out to Coney Island in the middle of the winter and charged like lemmings into the freezing surf. There was no end of people who did no end of stupid things, and what did any of that have to do with me?

I remember standing on Bleecker Street one afternoon, a few doors from my apartment, when someone went tearing past me, running for his life, while someone else — a shopkeeper? — stood on the sidewalk shouting for him to stop. I realized that it was within my power to chase this fellow, that I could quite possibly run him down. After all, I was a conditioned runner. He’d gone by at a good clip, but how long could he keep it up? I could lope along for a half hour, and by then he’d pull up gasping.

Of course I didn’t run after the son of a bitch. I mean, suppose I caught him. Then what? But the realization that chasing him was something of which I was physically capable was remarkably empowering in and of itself. A couple of months ago I couldn’t have done it, and now I could, and that struck me as pretty amazing.

I suppose there were physical benefits. This was 1977, which was just about the time when the media were overflowing with the purported benefits of getting out there and jogging. If you put in half an hour three times a week, you were presumably guaranteed immunity from no end of unfortunate conditions, heart attacks foremost among them. Doctors with impressive credentials were going so far as to state that anyone who ran marathons (or, as someone phrased it, anyone who lived a marathoner’s lifestyle) never had to worry about coronary artery disease. He might not quite manage to live forever, but when he did die, it wouldn’t be a heart attack that killed him.

This sort of hyperbolic ranting lost some steam when Jim Fixx, a fine runner and a very prominent writer about running, did in fact suffer a myocardial infarction and die in early middle age. It was clear he had a genetic predisposition to coronary artery disease; he’d lost close male relatives to it. He’d lasted longer than the others, and one could argue (and several did) that running had in fact extended his lifespan.