Lawrence Block - Step by Step

Different times...

Now let’s jump ahead half a century, to my fiftieth high school reunion in 2005. Jack Dorfman, looking not that different from his Wellington Tiger days, came up to me. “I’m going to tell you a story I’ll bet you don’t know,” he said. “Do you remember that football team we had at 66, played pickup games with other teams?”

I said I did.

“Well,” he said, “did you know your father called me? He must have looked up the number in the phone book and he called me at home. ‘Jack,’ he said, ‘I want you to do me a favor. When you play your games, don’t leave Larry sitting on the bench. Make sure he gets a chance to play. Will you do that for me?’

“‘Sure,’ I told him. ‘I’ll put him right in the middle of the line, Mr. Block. He may get himself killed out there, but he’ll play.’ ‘And Jack, please don’t tell him we had this conversation.’ And I never did until now. I’ll bet you never heard that story, did you?”

No, of course I’d never heard it.

I would have been mortified. I’d have considered his action inappropriate (as it probably was) and deeply embarrassing. But now, fifty years after graduation, fifty-five years after my brief career as a Wellington Tiger, all I could think of was how sweet and loving my father had been.

My sister, Betsy, was five years younger than I; it was shortly before her birth in May of 1943 that we moved from the lower flat on Parkside to the one-family house on Starin. A year or so after I got my bike, when she was six or seven, she got a bike of her own for her birthday.

(She probably asked for it. I’m sure I’d have gotten a bike earlier than I did, if I’d asked for it. I generally got what I asked for, but, see, I hardly ever asked for anything. God, I was a strange kid.)

My father took Betsy and her bike out to the sidewalk, and she got on and he ran along, holding the handlebars, and within an hour or two she was riding as one born to it.

Now if that happened in a novel, the older brother would almost have to develop a lifelong resentment, but if I entertained any negative feeling toward Betsy, I never got wind of it. Why resent her for being able to do something that everybody else I knew could do?

I didn’t resent her for a new ability, nor did I let it spur me into another attempt at cycling. That would have to wait several years — until a point in life when being able to ride a bicycle was no longer terribly important.

icouldn’t ride a bike, but I could damn well walk.

It couldn’t have been much more than a year after the bike debacle when I first demonstrated an atypical propensity for walking. I don’t remember the month or year it happened, but I’m pretty sure it was on a Monday afternoon. That’s when the school excused certain students a half hour early for religious instruction.

That meant catechism class for Catholic students, and Hebrew school for Jews. (I can’t be sure of this, but I think the Protestants stayed in their seats and studied finance and duck hunting.) At Temple Beth Zion, the Reform synagogue to which my family belonged, boys attended Hebrew school once a week during the two years prior to their bar mitzvahs. (Girls were left out of this; nobody had a bat mitzvah, and I can only hope the Jewish girls learned something about finance and duck hunting.)

Most of my Jewish schoolmates attended Temple Emanuel, a short walk from the school. But a few of us made the weekly trip together to Beth Zion. It was four or five miles away, on Delaware Avenue between North and Allen. We would take the bus, and generally somebody’s parent would show up to drive us home.

So one Monday afternoon I met up with my friends Rett Goldberg and Jerry Carp, and we discovered that our total resources came to ten cents. We needed a nickel apiece for bus fare, and we were five cents short.

It seems so obvious now that all we had to do was get on that fucking bus. If the bus driver wouldn’t let himself be persuaded to overlook our shortfall, surely some obliging adult would drop a nickel in the fare box, if only to shut us up and get the bus moving. But of course that never occurred to us. We had ten cents, we needed fifteen cents, and that meant that we were, in the vernacular, screwed.

Of course two of us could have gone to Hebrew school while the third said the hell with it and went home, but that didn’t occur to anybody, either, and would have been rejected out of hand it if had. All for one and one for all, right? Didn’t that go without saying?

At somebody’s suggestion, we invested half our cash to call home to ask what to do. We got no answer at my house, which gave us our nickel back, and reached the cleaning woman at Jerry’s house. She was sympathetic, but didn’t offer much in the way of advice. Now we had one nickel, and both Rett’s parents worked, so even we could figure out that there wasn’t much point in calling his house.

So we decided to walk.

See, we couldn’t go home, because my mother was going to turn up in front of Beth Zion at five o’clock sharp to drive us home. What was she going to think if nobody was there to meet her? What was she going to do?

I’m not sure which of us suggested walking, but I strongly suspect it was my idea. Whoever thought of it, we all agreed it was our best bet. So we walked, and on the way I believe we got rid of that last nickel. It seems to me we stopped at Van Slyke’s drugstore to buy a candy bar and split it three ways. Energy for the journey. It would be nice to report that it was a Three Musketeers bar, which certainly would have been easy to share equitably, but I’m confident it wasn’t.

We were certainly in no danger of getting lost on the way. The temple was the center of our social life, and we wound up there a couple of times a week. There was Sunday school, there was Hebrew school, there were Cub Scout pack meetings and, later, Boy Scout troop meetings. Saturday evening was, God help us, dancing class. Whether we got there by bus or by car pool, we damn well knew the route.

It was, as I said, four or five miles, and if I were in Buffalo now I could clock it, but four or five miles strikes me as close enough for memoir. The school was at Parkside and Tacoma, and we’d have walked on Parkside to Amherst, west on Amherst to Nottingham, then cut over Nottingham to Delaware Avenue. Then we’d have turned left and headed downtown on Delaware, one of the city’s main arteries, winding its way through Delaware Park and past Forest Lawn Cemetery before straightening out and continuing all the way to City Hall.

When we drove past Forest Lawn, we used to hold our breath. Someone had once confided that it was bad luck to breathe while passing a cemetery, so none of us ever did, though I don’t think fear of some unnamed horror really entered into it. It was something to do. Holding your breath wasn’t much of a challenge for the half-minute it might take in a car or bus, but it was clearly out of the question on foot. We gave it a shot, of course, and reeled around gasping for breath in due course, and laughed and joked about it. And walked on.

The whole trip generally took ten or fifteen minutes in a car, a little longer in heavy traffic. It’s a walk I haven’t taken since, but I can’t imagine it would take me much more than an hour at race pace, perhaps half again as long if I took it easy. I’m not sure exactly how long it took the three of us, because I’m not sure just when we started out, but I know when we got there. At five o’clock, no more than two or three minutes before my mother pulled up at the curb. So I guess it took us something like two hours to walk it, and those are two hours I remember fondly. I don’t recall them in great detail, but I know they made more of an impression than anything that ever happened in Hebrew school.