Lawrence Block - Step by Step

While the book as a collection of ill-chosen words has essentially vanished without a trace, it lives on in legend. As an experiment in literary collaboration, Lust Fuck was an abject failure. But its anecdotal value was more than adequate compensation for all concerned. I don’t know how many times I told the tale over the years, and so did Don, and so did Hal.

But none of us got anywhere near as much mileage out of the story as another fellow. He, like Henry, worked as an agent for Scott Meredith. He too was a frequent player at our weekly poker sessions. And, although none of us knew it at the time, he was supplementing his agent’s salary by writing pseudonymous books for Hamling. (He may have kept this last fact a secret to avoid the appearance of conflict of interest.)

I won’t embarrass him by telling you his name. He’s a fine fellow, an able literary agent, and on balance certainly one of the world’s good guys.

And, I have to say, a superb raconteur. He tells the story of Lust Fuck in great detail and with great enthusiasm. In his version, he was one of our number at Mel Fox’s house in Queens, an avid participant at the poker table downstairs, an able hack upstairs at the typewriter.

But, see, he wasn’t there. He couldn’t have been, for Christ’s sake. We didn’t even know at the time that the sonofabitch was a writer.

Did he simply figure it made a better story if he put himself into it? Or, as one theory about OJ holds, had he told the story his way so many times that he came to believe it himself? I don’t know and I don’t care. I know he wasn’t there. He may or may not know he wasn’t there. At this stage — indeed, at any stage — what earthly difference does it make?

Ah, well.

I’ve had to make a particular effort to avoid overusing such phrases as If I remember correctly and To the best of my recollection and As I recall . The reader can take them to be an unvoiced preamble to every incident I recount.

So: Everything that follows is the truth, as far as I can tell.

There’s one other thing I ought to tell you, although you’d probably figure it out for yourself in short order.

This book is self-indulgent.

It seems to me that comes with the territory. How could a memoir be other than an exercise in self-indulgence? One writes it sustained by the assumption that a record of one’s own experiences and observations will be of interest to other people. This assumption often proves to be unwarranted, which may explain why such a high percentage of memoirs are self-published, or not published at all.

For my part, I found that the only way I could manage to write this book was to let it be every bit as self-indulgent as it wanted to be. It is, to be sure, a record of my experiences as a walker; if the book itself were a walker, it would be an ambler and a rambler, not terribly intent on racing to the finish line, and inclined to turn off on any path that looks inviting.

Remembering, I’ve discovered, is curious work. The memory is a house in which there are many mansions; enter into one of them, and a hidden door can spring open, luring you into a portion of the past you haven’t visited in years. But there it is, and you slip inside, and another door opens...

The forecast was rain all day Sunday.

Marathons are like football games. Weather’s not enough to cause their cancellation, unless it’s pretty dramatic. A hurricane will do it, but this was February of 2007, the weekend after Mardi Gras, and hurricane season was months away. So it would rain, and we would do what marathoners do when it rains. We’d get wet.

I don’t mind getting wet. When I was a boy my mother assured me I wouldn’t melt, and so far she’s been right about that. Though a year earlier I’d found myself wondering.

That was in Houston, on the last weekend of February 2006, where I participated in a twenty-four-hour race around a two-mile asphalt loop in Bear Creek Park. The race got under way at seven in the morning, and within an hour or so it started raining, and it didn’t entirely quit for eight hours or so. Sometimes it was a drizzle and sometimes it was a downpour, but the rain coming down was the least of it; what drove us all mad was the rain after it had fallen. The course didn’t drain properly, and great sections of our path were ankle-deep in water. It slowed me down and shortened my stride and messed up my feet and did nothing good for my disposition, let me tell you. More to the point, it led me to retire from the race after eighteen hours or so, with 64.25 miles to my credit. That was enough to top my one previous twenty-four-hour race, but only by a mile. I don’t know how far I might have gone in Houston on a dry surface, but I’m fairly sure I’d have managed a few more circuits of the course.

So I really wasn’t looking forward to rain at the New Orleans race. But I’d show up rain or shine. I wouldn’t melt.

My wife, Lynne, and I flew down to New Orleans on Friday.

(Note, if you will, the commas before and after her name. The sentence would flow better without them, but they’re there for a reason. They indicate that Lynne’s my only wife. I referred earlier to my daughter Amy, and was able to do so without the bracketing commas, because she’s one of three daughters. If I had only one daughter, I’d have to use the commas. If I didn’t use them for Lynne, you’d have every right to suspect me of bigamy. Now this is one of those linguistic niceties like, say, the subjunctive, that seem designed chiefly to make people who are aware of it feel good about themselves. I’d love to leave out those commas, but I don’t want you thinking I’ve got more than one wife. One’s plenty.)

Lynne doesn’t usually accompany me to marathons — she has a life, even if I don’t — but New Orleans is her birthplace and remains very dear to her heart. We’d come down for the Mardi Gras Marathon the previous year, and planned a repeat, but with one signal difference; on Tuesday she’d return to New York, while I’d stay put for a month and get a book written. It was a book I’d gotten absolutely nowhere with for over a year, and I was dreading it, but nowhere near as much as I was dreading the marathon.

Three weeks earlier I’d walked the Pacific Shoreline Marathon, in Huntington Beach, California. It was held on a beautiful seaside course, and the weather was splendid, and I was just cruising along, not pushing the pace, until somewhere around the sixteen-mile point I got a sharp pain in the ball of my foot. It was bad enough so that I might have stopped but for the fact that this was an out-and-back course and the only way to get back to my hotel was to keep walking. The pain was really quite intense, but I was able to walk through it and maintain my pace, and then after four or five miles like that it just went away. I never knew why it vanished, but then again I never knew why it appeared in the first place. I finished the race, got my medal, ate eight or ten oranges and anything else I could find, and went to my room to shower and put my feet up.

And they weren’t in such great shape. My right foot, the one that had given me trouble during the race, had nothing wrong with it where I’d had the pain, not as far as I could determine. But the little toe had taken a beating, and the outer layer of skin on it slipped off like a glove, taking the nail with it. It didn’t hurt all that much, and I was confident I could get along without that layer of skin, and without the nail as well.

Still, I’d had the thing for sixty-eight years...

A couple of days later I made a guest appearance on The Late Late Show . All I wanted to talk about was walking, but Craig Ferguson kept dragging the conversation back to my books. He wanted to know what I was working on, and of course I wasn’t working on anything.