Step by Step

1

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.

That was the first weekend in February, and I spent the next three weeks back in New York, doing precious little to prepare for New Orleans. In 2006 they held the race the first weekend in February, before rather than after Mardi Gras, and it had been the scene of my greatest triumph in the sport. I’d completed the race in 5:17, the best time I’d ever recorded at that distance. (I’d gone faster back in 1981, when I’d done five marathons, but in three of them I ran part of the way. I did walk the 1981 Jersey Shore Marathon in 4:53, but I was forty-three at the time, and I was sixty-six when I resumed racewalking in 2005. That 5:17 in New Orleans was my best time since then.)

Not only did I post a personal record time, but I actually won something. New Orleans is one of a handful of marathons with a judged racewalking division, and in due course I received a plaque for having been the second male racewalker. I’d done the same a month earlier in Mobile, but my triumph was somewhat dimmed by the fact that there were only two of us. In New Orleans I was second of seven or eight, and the young Floridian who took top honors only nosed me out by forty-two minutes.

But that was then, and this was now, and that 5:17 looked out of reach. Especially if it rained. And especially if that foot pain I’d encountered in Huntington Beach — and had twinges of during my infrequent training sessions — should happen to return.

THE WEATHER WAS ALL right on Saturday. The day’s highlight was a meeting with Glen Mizer, whom I knew only from his posts on the Walking Site message board. At my suggestion he and Carol had booked a room at Fairchild House, where Lynne and I always stay; it’s on Prytania Street in the Lower Garden District, and marathoners pass it twice, at fifteen and twenty-four miles. Glen came up to our apartment Saturday afternoon and the two of us hit it off immediately. I didn’t have a tape recorder running, but later I would post my best recollection of our conversation on the message board:

“Oh, I’m so out of shape it’ll take a miracle to get me to the starting line. I haven’t been out walking since my last race.”

“You’re ahead of me, fellow. I didn’t even walk in my last race. Some old boys picked me up and carried me across the finish line.”

“I did get out for a few minutes yesterday, but I had to use a cane.”

“I had me one of them aluminum walkers.”

“I was gonna use one this morning, but I lost my balance trying to get up out of the wheelchair.”

“That chair of yours hand-propelled or motorized?”

Glen’s also a racewalker, and younger and faster than I. Lately, however, he’d found himself forced by some sort of indeterminate injury to alternate walking with intervals of slow jogging — “slogging,” he termed it. Thus he would have to compete as a runner, rather than enter the racewalking category. This news did not break my heart.

We talked about the weather, too. The forecast had changed from rain all day Sunday to rain starting Saturday night and ending an hour or so into the race. We agreed that we’d be out there rain or shine — I suppose Glen’s mother had tipped him off, too, that he wouldn’t melt — but that shine was better. And we left it at that.

Lynne and I went out for dinner to a pizza joint a block away on St. Charles Avenue. I had a bowl of pasta as a sop to tradition. I don’t know that anybody pays a whole lot of attention to carbo-loading these days, and I’m not sure it makes any sense for someone cruising at racewalking pace, but everybody just knows you’re supposed to eat pasta before a marathon. And it’s not as though it amounts to a great sacrifice. It’s pasta, after all, not spiders. What’s not to like?

Though if someone proved, or even strongly suggested, that a marathoner’s performance would improve if he ate spiders the night before a race, well, you can bet there’d be a whole lot of arachnids swimming in marinara sauce...

It rained a little during the night, but not heavily, and it had stopped well before dawn. I got up early, ate an energy bar for breakfast, got dressed, and pinned on my two number bibs. (Racewalkers were issued an extra bib to wear on one’s back, so that the judges could tell at a glance who was a walker.) Glen was waiting out front and Lynne drove the two of us to the Superdome, where the race would start and finish.

When it did, Glen slogged off and disappeared into the distance. I took it easy, cruising along at a gentle warm-up pace, and for the first three miles or so everything was fine.

Then my foot started to hurt — the right foot, in the same spot that had bothered me in California. It was nowhere near that bad, it was pain I could live with and in fact walk with, but I’d have been happier without it. I knew immediately what I’d pretty much assumed anyway — that my time last year, 5:17, was way out of reach. But that was okay, and I could still get through the race and finish in decent time.

The race course is west, through the French Quarter and out to City Park, where we turned around and followed the same route back to the Superdome. At that point, the race would be over for the half-marathoners, and half over for the rest of us. Around mile 8 or 9, I decided getting through 26 miles was going to be more than I could stand. I decided what I ought to do was go through the half marathon finish at the 13.1-mile point and call it a day.

Now thoughts of this sort are frequent for me. There’s often a point in the course of a race when I decide the hell with it, and the phrase I’m too old for this shit echoes like an old song. The thing is, see, that I never give in to it — or at least I never have. Back in my early forties, when I sometimes raced forty times a year, I never once quit short of the finish line. That record is more a testament to determination than to good sense, as there were a couple of races I would have been well advised to abandon, but so far I’ve always hung in there to the finish line.

(Twenty-four-hour races are a little different, and I’ll get to them later.)

Still, just as thoughts of suicide will get a person through a bad night, so will thoughts of dropping out keep a fellow on his feet. I told myself I’d quit at the halfway point, and when it came time for the half-marathoners to zig left and cross their finish line, I zagged to the right instead along with the rest of the full marathoners.

The course would now head up through the Garden District and on to Audubon Park, where it would make a circuit of the park before heading right back to the Superdome. Prytania Street was the route’s main artery, and Fairchild House was right there on our route, at the fifteen-mile mark and again around twenty-four miles. I’d have to get back to Fairchild House even if I dropped out, so I decided to keep going at least until I got there.

That’s what I’d do. Hang in until I got to Fairchild House, and then go to our room and lie down, and skip the Anchorage Marathon in late June, and never do another of these damned things for the rest of my life.

Lynne was waiting out front at Fairchild House. I told her I was hurting but said I thought I’d stay with it a while more, as it wasn’t getting any worse. So I kept going on Prytania, and I took the little out-and-back detour on Napoleon Avenue, and I was back on Prytania at approximately 17.5 miles, when the little toe on my right foot sent out a spasm of pain unlike anything I’d ever experienced. It hadn’t really been bothering me enough to mention, its soreness was minor compared to the ache in the ball of the foot, but now, with no warning, it felt as though a tank had run over it. It was indescribable (although that doesn’t seem to have stopped me from trying) and it flared up anew every time I took a step.

All of a sudden I couldn’t do better than a slow and rather pathetic limp. I just stood there for a minute or two, trying to figure out what to do next. If this had happened half an hour earlier, when I was at Fairchild House, the answer would have been obvious. I’d have stopped there and then, no question. But now I was two miles past Fairchild House, and both my choices involved walking; I could walk back or walk on.

And there was the chance that the pain would vanish as abruptly as it had appeared. So I limped on to give it the opportunity.

Didn’t happen. I was limping along when Glen showed up; he’d already reached the turnaround in Audubon Park and was on his way back, and feeling pretty lousy himself; he’d had some sort of sports drink that his stomach wasn’t happy with. He asked me what I was going to do, and said later that, if I’d said I was going to quit, he’d have accompanied me to Fairchild House and quit himself. But for some reason I said I’d push on for a little while, and I did.

It took me an hour to cover the next two miles. What kept me going was the thought of how I’d feel if I started back before reaching the turnaround, only to have the pain recede. I’d really have found that infuriating. So I kept on limping, and tried to ignore the people who asked me if I was okay (No, idiot, if I were okay I’d be walking right) and the helpful soul who wanted to know if I needed electrolyte replacement tablets (Thanks, but what would they possibly do for my toe?). By the time I reached Audubon Park and swung into the 1.5-mile loop around it, I figured out my situation. I was in too much pain to go on and too stupid to stop.

And that became my mantra. I can’t go on, I told myself. I’m too stupid to quit, I replied. I can’t go on. I’m too stupid to quit. Can’t go on. Too stupid to quit...

During the park loop, my foot pain lost intensity to the point where I could walk without limping, but still couldn’t manage more than a leisurely pace. That picked up a little by the time I was out of the park and up to the twenty-one-mile marker, and it was then that I realized I was probably going to be able to finish the race. The only question was whether I could reach the finish line before the seven-hour mark, when they were scheduled to shut it down. I didn’t care if it took me every minute of seven hours, didn’t care if I was the last person across the line, but I really wanted to finish.

And the pain backed off. I honestly don’t know how that happened. Barring the intervention of a Higher Power, and I have trouble envisioning one with nothing better to do than enable an aging athlete to persist in his folly, the best I can come up with is this: the protesting nerves decided I clearly wasn’t getting the message, so why bother sending it? The fool’s best interests would be served by stopping, they realized, but he really is too dumb to quit, just as he’s been muttering to himself. So why waste our time on him?

The anthropomorphism aside, I’m not sure this isn’t how it works. Pain, like everything else, exists for a purpose, and the purpose in this instance was to alert the organism to the fact that he’d done damage to a portion of himself. The message had been delivered, and with a vengeance; the message had been ignored; there was accordingly no need to go on sending it, and the transmission ceased.

I tried this theory on a friend, and he shook his head and lectured me on endorphins. My brain started producing endorphins, he told me, and they were better than morphine at drowning pain. Well, okay, but what prompted the brain to send out this tidal wave of endorphins? Exercise? I’d been exercising for hours, and that was what had earned me the pain in the first place. I still like my theory, and there’s room to stick endorphins into it. The mind, realizing that its message was being ignored, ordered up a big batch of endorphins as a mechanism for canceling the message. There!

With the pain gone, I could pick up my pace. I was racewalking at cruising speed by the time I reached Fairchild House, and the last two miles saw me moving at my regular racewalking pace, such as it is. I was going flat out when the finish line came into view, and I sailed across it with a net time of 6:34:25. That was an hour and seventeen minutes longer than the same course took me a year ago, and my slowest marathon ever by a good half hour, and yet it felt like my greatest triumph.

“I honestly don’t know what the hell kept me going,” I posted in my race report, “outside of a deplorable stubborn streak, but whatever it was I’m grateful for it.”

They hung a medal around my neck after I crossed the finish line, and at the top of the stadium ramp there was still plenty of food and drink left. More to the point, there was Lynne, who’d headed for the Superdome after I’d passed her at the twenty-four-mile point. She drove us back to Fairchild House, and in no time at all I was in a chair with my feet up.

It took me a while, though, to take my socks off, because I was afraid of what I would find. I was still surprisingly free of pain, but enough blood had leaked through the sock to assure me that I hadn’t imagined the whole thing. I did peel the sock off, finally, and the toe didn’t look good, but it didn’t look that bad, either, and it was impossible to guess why it had hurt as severely as it had.

I put a bandage on it and got on with my life. We ate in that night, Lynne went out and came home with a pizza, but the next day I was on my feet and walking around, and the day after that, Tuesday, Lynne drove herself to the airport, turned in our rental car, and flew home. And I set myself up at the desk, switched on my laptop, and started work on the new book.

It went well. Wednesday or Thursday I walked a block to the gym on St. Charles Avenue and joined for a month, and for the rest of my stay I got there a couple of times a week to put in an hour or so on the treadmill, along with a brief workout with weights. The weather was good throughout, cool early on and a good deal warmer toward the end, and I could have walked on the median strip of St. Charles, where the trolleys used to run before Katrina put them temporarily hors de combat. But that struck me as more of an adventure than I wanted. The treadmill was enough.

I’d allowed five weeks for the book, and was done in just over three. (As I said, it went well.) I stayed out the week, took one day for a walk around the French Quarter and another for a stroll up Magazine Street, then took another long walk up Prytania Street to see a movie at a neighborhood theater. I walked a two-mile stretch of the marathon route, and it was like seeing it for the first time. I’d traversed it twice in this year’s marathon and twice a year earlier, and at the time I thought I was well aware of my surroundings, but I never really pay attention to anything but the race. (I don’t wear my glasses when I race or train, I only need them for seeing.) It’s an attractive street, is Prytania, and I was happy to get a good look at its splendid live oak trees and stately homes.

I paid about as much to change my ticket as it had cost me in the first place, and flew home to New York a week early. Lynne read the new book — Hit and Run, my fourth book about a hit man named Keller — and pronounced it terrific, and my agent and editor agreed. Revisions were minimal, and took about an hour. The book was done, and I didn’t have another race until the Anchorage Marathon June 21, and I could walk it or cancel it, as I preferred.

Everything was wonderful. This book, I had decided, would be the last one for which I would contract in advance. From this point on I would simply write books when I wanted to, and submit them for publication after they were complete. Thus I would never be in a position of owing a book to anyone, and that was as close to official retirement as I figured I ever needed to be.

A couple of times a week I put on my sneakers and went out to walk alongside the Hudson. In the past few years they’ve given the waterfront a makeover, and it’s become a wonderful place to train. So I’d go out for an hour or two, and then I’d come home. And read something, or sit in front of the television set.

It was toward the end of March when I came home, and there were a couple of ultramarathon events on the horizon. Earlier I’d been considering the Corn Belt twenty-four-hour, in Iowa, which is held at a quarter-mile track — every four or six hours, I forget which, all the entrants who’d been going counterclockwise switched to clockwise, just to keep the event from becoming boring.

(Actually that’s not the purpose. I think it’s so that you don’t wind up with one leg shorter than the other. And for all that most people I know are gobsmacked by the prospect of the boredom they’re sure would accompany such an event, I don’t think boredom would enter into the equation for me. If I managed to traverse Prytania Street four times without seeing the magnificent houses that line it, how much difference does the scenery make to me? There are people who have run a hundred miles on a treadmill — not over time but in one straight shot — and that doesn’t sound boring, either. It sounds very goddamn demanding, but it doesn’t sound boring.)

Corn Belt takes place the first weekend in May, and I’d thought about it earlier, but never seriously considered it after New Orleans. But a month after Corn Belt was the FANS twenty-four-hour race in Minnesota. (That’s an acronym, and rolls rather more trippingly off the tongue than the Family Advocate Network System, for which the annual race raises funds.) FANS had seemed to have possibilities. I thought about it, and decided I didn’t want to put myself through that kind of an ordeal. I stuck to an easy walk two or three times a week, and watched some TV and read some books, and slid all too comfortably into depression.

I have friends who are subject to clinical depression, and I don’t suffer from anything anywhere near that scale. They can’t get out of bed, they can’t think of anything but killing themselves, and the only thing that keeps them from following through is lack of energy. My malaise is worlds lighter than that, so much so that I almost hesitate to use the word, but there’s no getting around it. Depression is what it is.

So, depressed, I went through the motions of being alive. It was all I could do to check the two message boards for walkers to which I subscribe; I looked in only every few days, and posting anything was out of the question. When I did force myself to go out and walk, my mind was all over the place, thinking about entering the FANS race, then thinking about canceling Anchorage.

Around the end of April, my friend Andy Cable posted a report of his first multiday race, a six-day Sri Chinmoy event held in Queens. (Sri Chinmoy was a spiritual leader who inspired his acolytes to rather extraordinary athletic feats, primarily in endurance races; his organization sponsors such events throughout the world.)

If I hadn’t been depressed I probably would have gone out there to see how Andy was doing. It’s only a subway ride away, but the way I felt it might as well have been in Mongolia. (And I’ve been to Mongolia, and I didn’t have a good time.) Andy hung in there for all six days, and logged a total of 235 miles, and posted a race report consisting chiefly of his explanation of why he’d done so poorly, and what he’d learned from the experience. Six days walking around a one-mile loop in the park! Six days! 235 miles! That’s nine marathons in six days. And he was apologizing for his performance? Sheesh...

By the time I read Andy’s report, I’d already made a decision of my own. On the 26th of April, I printed out the entry blank and mailed off a check to the people running the FANS race in Minnesota.

I had five weeks to prepare myself to walk for twenty-four hours. I didn’t know if that was enough time, nor did I have any reason to believe my feet would be up to the challenge. They’d given me trouble at Huntington Beach, and they’d put me through hell in New Orleans.

What I did know, as I was quick to explain to Lynne, was quite simply this: Given the choice, I’d rather be hospitalized for exhaustion than depression.

And it worked.

I signed up one day and went out for a walk the following afternoon. I was out for an hour. I walked two hours the next day, an hour the day after that, then three hours a day later.

Somewhere in the course of those first several days, I stopped being depressed.

Endorphins, no doubt. Exercise, everyone will tell you, induces the brain to produce endorphins, and they in turn engender a feeling of well-being. This is all too frequently described as a “runner’s high,” and for all the running and walking I’ve done over the years, and all the feeling of well-being it may have engendered, I’ve never experienced anything I’d call a high.

But perhaps the folks who use the term neglected to spend their youth ingesting mood-altering chemicals. What do they know about getting high?

Never mind. What’s noteworthy here, it seems to me, is not that endorphins were the agent of my ascent from depression, but that essentially the same exercise that produced them had failed to do so in the weeks since I’d returned from New Orleans. I’d been walking several times a week for an hour or two, with nothing to show for it but a deepening suntan and a sweaty headband. Now, all of a sudden, the same exercise on the same course was turning me into Little Endorphin Annie.

It wasn’t just the walking. That seemed clear to me. It was the fact that signing up for the race had given my walking in particular and my life in general the illusion of purpose. I was not out there walking to feel better, or walking to stay in shape, or walking to stifle my inner couch potato. I was walking with the noble goal of preparing myself to — to what, exactly?

Why, to walk innumerable 2.4-mile laps around a blameless lake in Minnesota.

And could I do it? Did I have enough time to get in enough training? And would my feet hold up?

Unanswerable questions, all of them. At worst, I figured, I could train sufficiently to cover 26.2 miles around Lake Nokomis. That’s the length of a marathon, and if I did that much I could add Minnesota to my marathon life list. I told myself I’d be satisfied with that, but I knew I wouldn’t. I’d been in three twenty-four-hour races since July of 2005, and in each one I’d improved, albeit very slightly, on my previous performance. The most recent race was at Wakefield, Massachusetts, in July 2006, and I’d managed 66.3 miles. So what I wanted in Minnesota was to break that record. And I wanted to break it resoundingly. It would be nice to walk my age and hit sixty-eight miles. It would be even nicer to go seventy.

It would also probably be impossible, but right now that didn’t really matter. I was walking, and walking for a reason, and I’ll be damned if I didn’t feel genuinely good about it.

2

I’ve been a walker all my life.

Well, wait a minute. That’s not entirely true. Before I was a walker I was a crawler, and before that I just sort of lay there like a lump.

Or so I’ve been told, but I can’t say I remember any of that. My conscious childhood memories are all of a time when I’d already learned to walk. I don’t even recall the learning process — getting up, falling down, getting up again, falling down again. I don’t have any trouble believing it happened, but I can’t remember it.

But I can specifically remember crawling, come to think of it. It was after I’d learned to walk, long after, and I think I must have been four years old. I couldn’t have been more than that, because we were still living on Buffalo’s Parkside Avenue, and I was not yet five when we moved a couple of blocks to Starin Avenue. And I couldn’t have been less than that, either, because I crawled across the living room floor to look at the newspaper. So I was old enough to read, or at least to make out a fair number of words.

So I’d been walking for quite some time, and I was sitting on the floor doing God knows what, and I wanted to look at the paper, and I was about to stand up and walk over there. And then the thought came to me that I didn’t have to do that, that I could just stay down there where I was and crawl. I remember thinking that would be fun, and I remember doing it, but I can’t remember if it was fun or not. My guess is that it was.

I don’t believe I’ve crawled since, except perhaps metaphorically. But I’m sure I could if I had to.

I’m sorry I can’t remember learning to walk. Because it was a miracle.

Oh, not a personal miracle — although, given my own innate clumsiness, it might well have been a marginally greater achievement for me than for the average incipient toddler. No, I’ve come to believe that learning to walk is a remarkable accomplishment for the entire human species, and not so much a miracle of evolution as a triumph of the will.

Nobody’s born knowing how to do it. Grazing animals are on their feet and walking from the moment their mothers drop them; they have to be, or they won’t keep up with the herd. But human infants are born as helpless as hamsters, and walking is something they have to learn.

Or teach themselves, one might say. You can’t read the manual, and, except by example, it’s not something your parents can teach you. You crawl for a while, and then you stand up, and then you fall down. And you stand up and fall down again, and then the time comes when you stand up and take a few steps before falling down.

And so on.

And here’s what makes it a miracle: Every child, but for the severely handicapped, does all this and does it successfully. Some are early walkers, some are late walkers. Some fall a little and some fall a lot. But, sooner or later, everybody walks.

Nobody gets discouraged. Nobody gives up. Everybody stays with the program. And all this with no reward promised or punishment threatened, no hope of heaven or fear of hell, no carrot and no stick. Fall, rise, fall, rise, fall, rise — and walk.

Amazing.

Imagine, if you will, an adult in similar circumstances. Imagine the thoughts running through the adult mind:

The hell with this. What’s the point in getting up when I’m only going to fall back down again? If I keep this up I’m only going to hurt myself. And look like all kinds of a damn fool while I’m at it.

What was so bad about crawling? I was pretty good at it. I got around just fine. Why would God give us hands and knees if he didn’t expect us to get from place to place on them?

Who says everybody’s meant to walk? It works for some people, but that doesn’t mean it works for everybody. You need balance, for one thing, and you need good foot-eye coordination, and some of us aren’t gifted in those departments.

I hate falling down. Makes me feel like a failure. Why reinforce that feeling by repeating the process?

It’s hopeless.

What’s the point, anyway? I mean, it’s not as if there’s any place I really have to get to. What’s so bad about right here?

Screw it. If crawling’s not good enough for them, they can pick me up and carry me. Because I’ve had it.

I quit.

But that never happens. I couldn’t begin to guess what goes through a kid’s mind when he’s learning to walk, but I don’t think the possibility of giving up ever enters into the equation. Sooner or later he learns. And, once he learns, he never forgets. Why, it’s like riding a bicycle.

And there’s the rub.

I couldn’t learn to ride a bicycle.

Let us be clear about this. Being unable to ride a bicycle is very nearly as incapacitating for a boy as being unable to walk. In Buffalo, where I grew up, you rode your bike everywhere. You rode it to school, you rode it to play, you rode it everywhere except for those few places so far away that you needed a bus or a streetcar, or a parent to drive you.

When I was a little kid I had a tricycle, and I could ride that just fine. Nobody ever had to learn to ride a tricycle. You put your feet on the pedals and turned them, and how hard was that? No balancing act was required, because the thing wasn’t going to tip over. You’d have to work some to make it tip over.

So I was fine on a tricycle. Then when I was seven or eight, around the time when a lot of other kids were getting their first two-wheelers, I got a four-wheeler, a weird contraption that ran on arm power; you gripped the handlebars, pulling them toward you and pushing them back, and the thing rolled forward at a pretty decent pace. I’ve never seen another one of these creatures, never knew another kid who owned one, but in recent years I’ve seen pictures of something that looks a lot like what I had, and it seems to be called an Irish Mail.

I wonder whatever happened to mine. I suppose I outgrew it, and I suppose my folks gave it away, and I suppose it’s long since been reduced to rust. And I’m not likely to turn all Citizen Kane about it, either, but I remember it fondly. And I probably rode it longer than I should have, because I couldn’t learn to ride my goddamn bike.

It was an orange and black Schwinn, if I remember correctly, and it was a one-speed machine, because that’s all that existed at the time. This was 1948, and bikes didn’t have gears, or if they did nobody I knew was aware of it. They didn’t have handbrakes, either; you braked the thing by reversing the direction of the pedals. They were, I suppose, pretty primitive compared to what kids pedal around on nowadays, and nothing you’d want to take to the Tour de France, but, all things considered, they worked just fine.

For everybody else.

I don’t remember getting the bike. It was a major present, certainly, and I would think it must have been given to me on a major occasion, probably a birthday. I was born in June, and that’s a logical month to give a kid a bicycle. Buffalo’s winters aren’t quite as bad as you think, but they’re a long way from bike-riding weather, and a Christmas bike would be a deeply frustrating present. “Here you are, sonny. It’s all yours, and sometime in April you’ll be able to ride it.” Wonderful.

It was my father’s job to teach me to ride the thing, and we went out to the sidewalk in front of our house. I mounted the bike, he took hold of the handlebars, and he trotted alongside as I pedaled and built up momentum. Then he let go, and I fell down.

Repeatedly.

For our purposes here, I rather wish I could remember the whole process in more detail. On the other hand, it’s probably not such a bad thing that my recollection has blurred a good deal over the years. They say that childhood memories return much more sharply in later life, and maybe this one will, but if it doesn’t, well, that’s okay with me. Because it was not a happy time.

As it is, I don’t know if my dad and I devoted one day or a full week to the process. A man who lived across the street — Joe Rosenberg, who ultimately became my stepfather — told me how it had broken his heart to watch me and my father, going back and forth on the sidewalk, all to no avail. That would suggest that we tried this more than once, but my memory has collapsed the ordeal to a single day, one which concluded with the two of us returning to the house, bowed in mutual recognition that the entire enterprise was impossible, and that we were best advised to abandon it forever.

And so we did. The bike went in the garage, where it assumed the function of the Elephant in the Living Room That Nobody Talks About. Ours was a wonderful family, and I’ve always felt myself to have been sublimely gifted with splendid loving parents, but this is not to say that our living room lacked a fair number of unacknowledged elephants.

If, if, if.

If they’d had training wheels in 1948, it might have been a different story. Maybe they did, and we just didn’t know about them.

With training wheels, I wouldn’t have taken a spill every time I failed to keep my balance. And I wouldn’t have needed my father to run along holding on to the handlebars, and run himself out of breath and patience while he was at it. With training wheels I could have taken the bike out by myself, and maybe I would have stayed with it, and eventually maybe I would have gotten the hang of it.

It might have been different, too, if the bike had been the right size for me. My parents were never cheap, but they and the rest of the country had recently emerged from the Great Depression, and it would be fair to say that they were frugal. They bought me a good bike, but they bought it a couple of sizes too large, so that I wouldn’t grow out of it too rapidly.

That made a certain amount of sense with clothes; you could always take a tuck in a sleeve or hem a pants leg, letting out the garment as the wearer grew into it. But you can’t take a tuck in a bicycle, and mine was indisputably too large for me. It was in fact just the right size four and a half years later, when I hauled it out of the garage and taught myself how to ride.

But we’ll get to that.

Oh, dear. Another thing that might have made a difference, a substantial difference, is if my father had been a good teacher. He was a wonderful man, a very dear and loving man, but a good teacher he emphatically was not.

I’m sure it frustrated him that I didn’t just hop on the bike and ride it, as he very possibly did in his youth. As an adult, his sole athletic activity was golf, and that infrequently, but he was a reasonably good golfer with a fine natural swing, and I suspect he was good at other sports, if not devoted to them.

I don’t know that he was disappointed in his profoundly nonathletic son, but I do know my inability to ride that bike made him impatient to end the attempt. I wasn’t learning, and that meant I wasn’t capable of learning, and wasn’t it simpler and more humane all around to cut our losses and stow the bike in the garage?

Years later, when he taught me to play golf, it went okay. I was lousy at that, too, but I could swing the club and hit the ball and walk to where it lay and hit it again. There was no falling down involved, no test of his patience. I don’t know how many times I went out and played golf with my father — eight or ten, probably, a dozen at the most — but we always had a good time of it.

He taught me to drive, too, and that didn’t go wonderfully. But we both stayed with it, and I passed my test and got my license. I learned a lot more about driving when we took road trips. He was a good highway driver, careful but not timid, and I paid attention and learned.

He was a sweet and loving man, my father was. An attorney himself, he was unequivocally supportive of my decision to become a writer, and disproportionately pleased by my early scholastic and professional triumphs. He was thirty when I was born, and he died the day before his fifty-second birthday. Now, writing about him, I’m already seventeen years older than he was when he died.

And that feels strange. How old was he when he tried to make a cyclist of me? Forty? Two of my three daughters are older than that. His death came four months before the eldest was born.

And it wasn’t his fault that I couldn’t ride a bike, nor was it the bike’s fault. It was, let us be very clear about this, entirely my own.

See, i failed to do what every crawling baby manages to do, which is to keep on trying until you get it right. My father made it easy for me to do this, regarding a temporary failure as permanent; he made it clear that it was all right for me to be unable to ride, and saw it as preferable to continuing frustration for both of us.

And I was happy to accept failure, even eager to embrace it. Part of this, I know, is attributable to the fact that I was an extremely tractable child — which would come as a shock to anyone who has known me only as an adult. I tended almost invariably to accept my parents’ view of what was best for me. I took piano lessons for seven or eight years because my mother, an accomplished pianist, thought I ought to; I had no feeling for the instrument, or for music in general, and I was never at all good at it or got the slightest enjoyment from it, but neither did I beg to give it up, or resent that I was stuck with it. She thought it would be good for me, and I figured she was probably right, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.

Beyond that, agreeing that I was hopeless as a bicyclist meant I could stop trying. An unpleasant and frustrating activity could cease. The fact that I would spend years walking while others rode, the fact that I’d be for all those years the one kid in the neighborhood who couldn’t ride a bike, was not something I needed to think about.

All I really had to do was keep at it. All I had to do was get back on the bike every time I fell off. Sooner or later I’d stop falling off, and then I’d be riding. I’d somehow known that years earlier, when I taught myself to walk. But somewhere along the way I’d managed to forget.

So the bicycle went into the garage, and stayed there. I didn’t pay any attention to it, and before long I pretty much forgot it was there.

Before i close the garage door, there’s another story I’d like to tell you about my father. It’s one of which I was entirely unaware until very recently.

When I was eleven years old, I was skipped from the fifth to the seventh grade. My fifth-grade teacher, Mildred Goldfus, was a great believer in hurrying along her brighter pupils; one of three fifth-grade teachers at PS 66, she had in the past been assigned the smarter kids, taught them intensively, and dispatched them all directly to seventh grade at the term’s end.

The school’s policy had long since changed, but Mrs. Goldfus was still partial to bright kids, and she saw two such paragons in me and my friend Dick Lederman. Accordingly she summoned both sets of parents and proposed that we skip sixth grade. Dick’s had the good sense to say no. Mine said yes, and in September I entered the seventh grade, where all my new classmates were a year older than I and not sure what to make of this kid who’d been dropped into their midst.

They all rode bikes, too, but that was nothing new. So did my classmates in fifth grade.

Keeping up with the classwork was no problem. I may have been a dud as an athlete, but nobody ever said I was stupid. And a seventh grade classmate, Jack Dorfman, extended an invitation; he captained a football team, known variously as “Jack’s Team” or “The Wellington Tigers.” (The Dorfmans lived on Wellington Road.) Would I like to join the team?

I said I would, and learned I’d need a helmet and a set of shoulder pads, which my parents dutifully obtained for me. (They did not, I’m pleased to report, buy them a few sizes too large, so I could grow into them.)

And I played. We played tackle football, with the games very capably and quite impartially refereed by Jack’s dad, Phil. I was a lineman, and must have played in three or four games. I think that’s as many as we played. I didn’t particularly know what I was doing, but I endeavored to get in the way of the opposing team’s players when we were running the ball, and move in the direction of the ball carrier when we were on defense.

Three games, maybe four. I wish there had been more of them, and I was sorry when the season ended.

Jack was the president of our grammar school class, and a standout athlete at Bennett High School, where he quarterbacked the football team and played shortstop on the baseball team. After graduation he got a major-league tryout, and an offer to join the Chicago Cubs farm system. He went instead to the pharmacy school at the University of Buffalo; his father owned a drugstore, and Jack would thus be qualified to go into the family business. Because everybody knew you couldn’t expect to make a decent living playing baseball.

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.

3

i couldn’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.

It must have been the following year, when I was in seventh grade, that I started taking long solo walks around the city.

I don’t remember the impetus behind them. You would think my inability to ride a bike must have had something to do with it, and perhaps it did, but not on a conscious level. Looking back, I think I can recall a desire to gain knowledge of the city I lived in, and to do so in the most basic way — not by reading books about it, not by acquiring information, but by walking its streets.

Then, too, I got a sense of accomplishment out of those walks. I would walk four or five or six miles at a clip, and then I would get on a bus or trolley and come home. I’d go to my room and unfold my Buffalo street map and look at all the ground I’d covered.

Once or twice my friend David Krantz joined me, and I may have had other companions. We followed a routine I’d established on my own — we stopped at drugstore soda fountains and asked for a glass of water, and we hit every gas station along the way to collect road maps. Service stations gave them away free at the time, if you can believe it, and it was challenging to see what ones you could get. Just about every station had New York and Pennsylvania and Ohio, but, strange as it may seem, not too many gas stations in Buffalo felt the need to stock road maps of Oregon. Go figure.

Where did I go? Well, not to Oregon, and not even to Pennsylvania. I’d pick some big street, big enough to be on a bus line, and stay on it. I remember I walked all the way out Fillmore to Broadway, and I walked the length of Main Street to Shelton Square. I’m not sure I knew anything more about Buffalo at the end of one of these excursions, but I’d had a couple of hours of good exercise and I certainly felt as though I’d accomplished something.

One day I must have told one of my new seventh-grade classmates about my activities, and the next thing I knew we had a hiking club, with six or eight members. Come Saturday, we met at the school and set out. I don’t remember what route we took, but I remember that there were enough of us so that soda jerks and gas pump jockeys regarded us less as an eccentric diversion than as a pack of vermin. We wound up walking to Phil Dorfman’s drugstore at East Ferry and Wohlers, where instead of free glasses of water everybody got a soda or a milkshake.

That part was okay, but the walk itself really wasn’t the same. And the general consensus seemed to be that this was sort of fun, but it would be even better if we did it on our bikes.

And that, as you may imagine, was the end of that.

We hiked once a week at Scout Haven. That’s the Boy Scout camp where I spent six weeks every summer for three years. I loved it there, although even then I was aware of the essential strangeness of the experience. Because the camp I went to was a camp within a camp. It was Hopi Village, and it was the Jewish part of Scout Haven.

The whole camp was divided into little subcamps with Indian names, and different troops would come to the different villages, generally for two weeks at a stretch. But Hopi Village was different. Boys from all of the Jewish scout troops attended, and you could come for two or four or six weeks, depending on what your parents could afford. (It cost my parents $20 a week. I knew kids who went to fancy camps in Canada, and their parents paid around $800 for the season. We got a hell of a bargain, but, to keep things in perspective, the gentile kids in the main camp only paid $12 a week.)

We had our own activities and ran our own program. We swam in Crystal Lake, the same as everybody else, and the main camp’s lifeguards made sure we didn’t drown, but aside from that we were as isolated as if we’d been in a medieval ghetto. And it goes without saying that we had our own meals in our own separate mess hall.

That, of course, was the justification for this merry little experiment in apartheid. We had to have our own mess hall because of the dietary restrictions that have made being a Jew such a fucking pleasure over the centuries. No pork, no shellfish — but that’s the least of it. No milk and meat at the same meal, and, to play the game properly, you need two sets of dishes. There are, I understand, families who have two kitchens, not because you absolutely have to, but because it makes things simpler.

Hey, if you want to make things simpler...

We were Reform Jews. It’s been said (well, by me, actually) that Reform Judaism is sort of like Unitarianism but with better food. The movement arose in Germany in the nineteenth century with the aim of bringing the religion in tune with the times — and, I shouldn’t wonder, of facilitating the assimilation of Jews into mainstream German society.

There were no rules for Reform Judaism. Each synagogue worked things out for itself, and so did each family. There was, however, a general disposition to do away with the dietary laws en bloc, and they certainly didn’t apply under our roof.

The story was told of my great-grandmother (she was my maternal grandfather’s mother) and the kosher chicken. While she didn’t keep a kosher home (although I suspect she may have early on) she did continue to patronize a kosher butcher, taking it for granted that the kosher meat was simply better. After my grandfather married, and when he’d saved up a few dollars, he bought a two-family house on Hertel near Shoshone. He moved his wife and kids into the lower flat and gave the upper to his two unmarried sisters, my aunts Sal and Nettie, and their mother.

One day my great-grandmother came home with a chicken from the kosher butcher. And my grandmother, her daughter-in-law, was in the kitchen preparing to cook a chicken herself. My great-grandmother went in to observe. She looked at the chicken, plump and perfectly plucked, and she took her own kosher bird from its wrapping and considered it. It was a scrawny bird, its color was nothing great, and there were still bits of pinfeathers in it.

“That chicken of yours,” she said to my grandmother. “It’s not kosher?”

“No,” said my grandmother. “It’s not.”

“Hmmm,” said my great-grandmother, looking back and forth, from one bird to the other. And she never bought another kosher chicken for the rest of her life.

I never knew my great-grandmother, who died when I was nine months old, so I can’t say what sort of cook she was. But my mother and grandmother were superb, and neither felt constrained by the dietary laws.

We ate a fair amount of ham at home, and no end of bacon. We ate, of course, the many choicer parts of the cow that some curious Talmudic interpretation has proscribed. We rarely had shellfish at home, because my father didn’t care for it, but my mother and sister and I ate shrimp and crab and clams at restaurants. There was, I realized many years later, only one forbidden food we never had, and that was anything at all with the name “pork” attached to it.

Now ham is pork, and bacon is pork, and no one in our family was dim enough to think otherwise. But you could buy it and cook it and eat it without ever encountering that particular four-letter word.

And so no one in the family ever had a pork chop or pork sausage or crown roast of pork or indeed any form of schweinefleisch that called itself pork. On my own, away from the family table, I continued the practice without realizing it. It never occurred to me to order a pork chop. There was something inexplicably distasteful about it. Far more civilized, surely, to have a bacon cheeseburger, or a ham steak.

It was some years before it dawned on me that we’d been the unwitting observers of an unwritten dietary law, and a linguistic one at that. I thought of asking my mother why we never had pork on the table, but I kept forgetting, and then she was gone, and that became one more question I’d never be able to ask.

A few years ago I was on a book tour for The Burglar on the Prowl, and when I got to Des Moines I spent the night at the governor’s residence, Terrace Hill, at the invitation of Christie Vilsack, the governor’s wife. In the morning she cooked my breakfast. (This sort of thing would make book tours bearable, but don’t get the wrong idea; nothing remotely like it ever came my way before or since.)

Breakfast included ham, which she obtained from a local pig farmer who raised his swine organically. It was, I realized, the best ham I’d tasted in years; it was the first ham that was a match for what my Jewish mother used to put on the table on Starin Avenue.

I kept a blog during that book tour that brought me to Terrace Hill — something else I’d never done before, and rather doubt I’ll do again. And after my breakfast with Mrs. Vilsack I mused in my blog on the ham I’d eaten, and the ham I had on Starin Avenue, and our family’s sole and singular taboo.

I learned we weren’t the only ones. “It was exactly the same at our house!” a woman emailed me. “Ham yes, bacon yes, pork no. I always wondered why.”

Why? Because Jews don’t eat pork, that’s why. I thought everybody knew that.

I’ve no idea what percentage of the kids at Hopi Village came from kosher homes. Enough, surely, to warrant a kosher kitchen, and a separate mess hall, and, ultimately, a wholly separate camping experience, in which we shared the lakefront and the hiking paths with the rest of the Scouts, and nothing else.

Looking back, it seems so antithetical to the whole notion of Scouting. Why were there Jewish troops in the first place? Why weren’t Boy Scout troops established by neighborhood instead of by religious affiliation?

Well, they were, sort of. But they were generally centered in neighborhood churches, because those institutions had the space available. And... well, never mind. We had our little ghetto, our camp within a camp, and barely knew the others were there. And they hated us, and it’s hard to blame them.

Eventually matters came to a head. The consortium of Jewish troops pulled out of Scout Haven, bought a tract of land, and established their own camp. But that was years after I’d outgrown the Boy Scouts. The camp I remember is Scout Haven, and I had a good time there, and once a week I got to go on a hike.

Every Friday every Hopi Village camper picked one or two partners, and we all filled our canteens, tied our shoes, and made sure we had a couple of dollars in our pockets. Then we set off for one of several nearby towns.

Scout Haven was south of Buffalo, and its mailing address was the town of Arcade. Arcade was a popular destination for us, because it boasted a restaurant where you could get good short-order food. EAT HERE OR WE BOTH STARVE, proclaimed the sign over the door, and I thought that was as brilliant a marketing device as I’d ever encountered, though I suspect the people who actually lived in Arcade got pretty tired of it.

Arcade was seven miles away. It took a couple of hours to get there, depending on whether or not you saw any reason to hurry. Eating and loitering took another hour or so, and then we’d walk back. That pretty much did it for the day. The counselors and camp staff got a day to relax, and we got some pleasant exercise, plus a chance to get away from the herd and go off in pairs and trios.

As an alternative to Arcade, we could walk instead to Freedom or Sandusky. One was five miles distant, the other a little closer. Sandusky was on the way to Arcade, as it happened, and there was a store there, catering to the local farm folk; you could buy a Coke or a candy bar, and one time I came back with a straw farmer’s hat that set me back half a dollar. I don’t remember what they had in Freedom, though it couldn’t have been much, and it’s possible I never went there.

The roads were two-lane blacktop or gravel, the traffic light. We’d been taught to walk on the left, facing traffic, so that we could see cars coming and move onto the shoulder. Nobody ever got hit by a car, and as far as I know nobody ever got into any real trouble, except for Larry Biltekoff, a camper a few years my senior, who earned his twenty-first merit badge, the one that would qualify him as an Eagle Scout, and celebrated the accomplishment by going into one of the nearby towns and losing his virginity.

God knows how he managed this. He couldn’t have taken his prize by force or he’d have been thrown in jail, and it would have to be easier to find a rich man in heaven than a working girl in Arcade. So he must have gotten lucky with some eager amateur.

For this he was quietly disciplined — no one would come out and say for what — and at the camp’s closing ceremony he was denied his Good Indian award. (You stood one at a time before a council of elders, with your fellow campers in a great circle around you. The elders asked you if you accepted the Good Indian; in other words, did you feel you’d been a good camper? If you said no, that was the end of the matter. You resumed your place in the circle. If you said yes, then it became their turn to say yea or nay. If the answer was yea, someone accomplished at arts and crafts painted the profile of an Indian on your webbed Boy Scout belt. If not, not. I think the whole deal was more for the benefit of the counselors than the rest of us. It was their only chance to say a hearty Fuck You to the worst of us.)

Larry Biltekoff, who’d been given to understand what was coming, said nay himself, and there the matter rested. So Larry got laid but didn’t get his Good Indian, and I don’t know anybody who wouldn’t have cheerfully traded places with him. All the same, I don’t think they should have withheld it from him. I think they should have given him a special merit badge, for resourcefulness.

Not every Friday, but every once in a while, the Hike Day options included a cross-country trek to Lime Lake. This was undertaken not in twos and threes but in a body of fifteen or twenty boys led by one or more counselors. (We didn’t use that term, incidentally; besides campers, there were junior and senior officers, JO’s and SO’s. Older campers moved up to JO when they were deemed ready for the responsibility, and I suppose they got the summer for free. SO’s were paid counselors, but almost all of them had come up through the ranks.)

Our destination was a lakeside resort, and you got there by going over hill and dale some twelve miles. After a couple of hours eating and swimming and going on the rides, everybody reassembled for the walk back to camp. The Lime Lake contingent left right after breakfast and tried to make it back before the mess hall stopped serving dinner. It made for a good day’s outing, and called for a certain amount of stamina, as the distance was not that far short of a full marathon, and some of the hills were imposing.

We also did some overnight camping, and that involved hiking, since that’s how you got to where you were going to camp. The usual destination was Council Hill, and about a dozen of us would go at a time, climbing the hill, spreading our sleeping bags on the ground, building a fire, and cooking meals only a hungry boy would willingly put in his mouth.

Hopi Village was itself divided during each two-week period into six or seven smaller villages, each consisting of three four-person tents under the aegis of a village leader in the person of a JO. (Each tent had a tent leader as well. I was never in the military, but aspects of camp life would have helped prepare me for it.) Sooner or later, each village had its turn to hike up Council Hill, cook out, sleep under the stars, and return to camp the next morning, no doubt the better for the experience.

I did this a few times, and I always enjoyed it well enough, but there wasn’t all that much walking involved, and nothing terribly interesting ever happened. Except for the time that my good friend David Krantz, an occasional companion on my walks around Buffalo, insisted on laying out his sleeping bag on the slope above the campfire.

David was an exceedingly bright fellow; he taught himself math as a hobby, and wound up acing the final examinations in every math course offered at Bennett High, all in his freshman year; by the time he graduated from high school he’d gotten through differential and integral calculus. (I remember the terms; I have not the faintest idea what they mean.) He went on to Yale, picked up his doctorate at Penn in physiological psychology, taught for years at Michigan, did research at Bell Labs, and has of late headed the statistics department at Columbia. David, let me tell you, is no dumbbell.

And he explained why we were mistaken, and why his sleeping bag would be perfectly safe. Because he’d positioned it perpendicular to the fire, not crosswise, and thus gravity would not enter into the picture, and he’d be fine. The way he explained it, we all felt like idiots for not having realized as much. Of course! Perpendicular! What were we thinking?

Then around two in the morning everybody woke up, because David’s sleeping bag was on fire. Just the end of it that had been closest to the fire to begin with, and it was merely smoldering. He got out of it before it had a chance to roast his feet.

The only other noteworthy Council Hill incident that I can recall was one for which I wasn’t present. It was another village’s turn, and shortly after they came down from the hill next morning, one of their number packed his trunk and was sent home.

Word got around quickly. One of the seniors in charge had caught him giving a blow job to another camper. This got him booted, as the blower, while as far as I know the blowee escaped any disciplinary action whatsoever. (Someone may have told him to wipe that smile off his face.)

It’s interesting now to note that I was never too clear on what they were talking about, nor was I the only ignoramus around. I remember a couple of boys speculating as to just what a blow job might be. There is, I must say, nothing self-evident in the term. You have to wonder who thought to call it that in the first place, and how it ever caught on. The term, I mean.

I could tell you the names of both boys, but you’re not going to hear them from me. While it now strikes me as manifestly unfair that one of them got punished and the other did not, I can assure you that no one questioned it at the time. Obviously, one would have to be a pervert to perform the act, while anyone might have the ill fortune to be its recipient.

Ah, well. I lost track entirely of the boy who was sent home; he went to a different school, belonged to a different troop, and I never saw or heard of him again. I ran into the other fellow from time to time, and he was a nice enough guy in the limited contact I had with him. Nothing queer about him. But I do remember hearing that his idea of a quiet afternoon at home generally involved jerking off his dog.

4

the summer after my sophomore year at Bennett, when I’d just turned fifteen, there was an international Boy Scout jamboree at the Irvine ranch, in Santa Ana, California. The Buffalo Area Boy Scout Council did something uncharacteristically wonderful; they put together a month-long trip, which would begin with a ride on a private train across Canada and down the Pacific coast, then pause for a weeklong encampment at the jamboree, then back on the train for a ride across the American heartland to Buffalo.

My parents thought it was a wonderful opportunity, and the whole package cost all of $350, including all meals. My good friend Larry Levy signed on as well, and the two of us buddied up for the trip. Our conveyance was a Canadian troop train, with bunk beds, and it was comfortable enough. The first day out we all had to learn “O Canada” and for the next couple of weeks we sang it often, and with commendable enthusiasm.

At Banff in Alberta everybody got a day at leisure, presumably to explore Jasper National Park. Larry had somehow learned that there was a terrific golf course there, and decided we should play. So we found the place, and realized that we couldn’t really afford it. With a little subtle coaxing from the club pro, we came up with a plan. We would pay one greens fee, rent a single set of clubs, and once we were out of sight of the first tee we could each play a ball.

I can still remember two things about the day — the beauty of that golf course, brilliantly green in its Canadian Rockies setting, and the nightmare of our golf game. Larry was a better golfer than I, but that’s faint praise indeed, and the two of us made a dog’s breakfast of the whole business. We’d bought two three-packs of golf balls, and by the sixth hole we’d knocked five of them to where God himself would have had trouble finding them. We took turns swatting the last ball, and somehow made it last through the remaining three holes (a half round, we figured, was plenty). It was with a certain amount of relief that we got back on the train.

We got to Seattle on a Friday, and some resident genius decided that this was an opportunity for the Jewish kids to attend Sabbath services at a local synagogue. There were seven or eight of us, and I don’t think any of our number felt a great need for spiritual succor, but nobody asked us and off we went.

I mention this not because any aspect of the services made an enduring impression upon me, but because of something I did afterward that I still find remarkable. There was some sort of reception for the congregation, and there was a very pretty girl in attendance, and I announced to somebody — Larry, probably — that I was going to introduce myself. “Oh, sure you will,” was the response, or words to that effect.

I was in my Boy Scout uniform, of course, and must have looked like an idiot, but something empowered me, and I strode across the room and presented myself in front of this vision. “You look like someone I’d like to meet,” I said, and we began talking, and when we all went back to the train, I had her name and address on a slip of paper in my wallet.

Karen Hochfeld.

I wrote to her from Buffalo, and she answered me, and our correspondence went on for a year or two. Her father was a doctor, I remember that much, and she was a pretty accomplished golfer. Somewhere along the way one of us left a letter forever unanswered, and that was the end of that.

I wonder whatever became of her. I’ve often wondered, over the years, but even in this Age of Google I haven’t turned up a trace of her. Women’s names change with marriage, and that makes them harder to track down. She must have been a year younger than I, maybe two, so she’d have been born in 1939–40.

If you’re out there, Karen, I’d love to hear from you...

But wasn’t I the lad? “You look like someone I’d like to meet.” Where did all that self-assurance come from? Somehow I don’t think it was the uniform. Whatever brought it about, it had never happened before.

Or since.

We continued on down the coast, saw the redwoods, and wound up in tents in Orange County. My friend Larry had the special pleasure at the jamboree of falling in with a detachment of Puerto Rican scouts. He’d been studying Spanish at school, and was able to speak with them.

This impressed me profoundly. At Bennett you could be a language major or a science major, and for no particular reason I’d chosen science. I had taken two years of Latin, which I’d continue, and in the fall I was scheduled to study chemistry, with physics on tap for my senior year.

I came home from the jamboree with other ideas, switched to a language major, and took first-year Spanish along with third-year Latin. I never did study chemistry or physics.

Spanish came easily to me. It’s not a difficult language, and two years of Latin did a lot to pave the way. I had two years of Spanish when I went off to college, and would have studied it there, but I didn’t have the chance. The professor who’d taught it for a couple of years was up for tenure the year before I got to Antioch, and didn’t get it, and left — and that was the end of Spanish at Antioch.

At the Jamboree, except for those of us who were practicing our Spanish, what you mostly did was swap things. Kids from all over the country, all over the world, brought indigenous crap along and exchanged it for somebody else’s indigenous crap. Some kids managed to trade uniforms with foreign scouts, which gave them a terrific souvenir, but left them without anything to wear to meetings. There was a particular shoulder patch that was much esteemed, for reasons I cannot begin to recall and very likely couldn’t fathom at the time. I managed to get a bullwhip, which I thought I’d be able to trade for the patch, but I couldn’t. It’s hard now to imagine any sort of shoulder patch a sane person would prefer over a bullwhip, but that’s by the way. I brought the bullwhip home, but don’t ask me what happened to it. It disappeared, but then the patch probably wouldn’t have lasted, either.

The really dumb thing I did was send a postcard to Murray Davis’s girlfriend.

Murray was in Troop Seven, along with me and Larry Levy, and lived in Kenmore, and for a couple of years he’d been going steady with a girl named Leslie, whose last name was also Davis. They were crazy about each other. And for some reason I thought it would be really comical to write a postcard saying something along the lines of “I know you’ve been screwing other guys and I’m really mad,” sign Murray’s name to it, and send it to her.

I have no idea what made me think this was a good idea.

Next thing I knew, the postcard was written and stamped and in the mailbox. And I pretty much forgot about it.

The Jamboree ended after a week, and we packed up and boarded our train for a quick return to Buffalo. The only thing I remember from the trip home was looking out the window as we passed through Kansas and seeing an enormous blood-orange full moon a few degrees off the horizon. Funny what sticks in the mind. A few years later I would write a poem about it, describing the moon as “stroking desperate tides in the liquid land.” It’s probably a good thing I turned my attention to paperback novels, where all that desperate stroking could be put to good use.

Back home, I told my parents I wanted to study Spanish, and they thought that was fine. I unpacked, and everything went into the washing machine. Except for the bullwhip. I don’t know where that went.

And then one evening Gene Davis came over. He was Murray’s father, and he was really boiling, and he wanted to talk to my parents. He may have wanted to talk to me as well, I’m fairly sure he did, but he never got the chance. I was sent upstairs, and stayed in my room with the door closed.

He must have been downstairs for the better part of an hour. How did I spend that time? I have no idea. Picked up a book, most likely, and thought as little as possible about what was going on downstairs.

Then he was gone, and my mother came to my room. “That was Mr. Davis,” he said unnecessarily. “Murray’s father. He had a nasty postcard that someone had sent to Leslie Davis with Murray’s name signed to it. He was very upset, especially because the mailman and anybody else at the post office could have read it.”

“Oh,” I said.

“He was certain you were the one who wrote it. We looked at it and told him it couldn’t possibly have been you. For one thing, it wasn’t your handwriting. And we knew you would never have done anything like that.”

“Oh,” I said.

“I don’t think he believed us,” she said, “but he gave up and left. What I can’t understand is how you could be so stupid as to write something like that on a postcard. What were you thinking?”

Good question. I didn’t have an answer, nor did she wait around for one. Nor did any of us ever say a word about the matter again. For a day or so it was one more elephant in the living room, and then it lumbered off and secreted itself in a far corner of the garage, where that poor old bike of mine had spent so many years.

5

in fiction, events have antecedents. Significant developments don’t just happen out of the blue. Something happens, and because of it something else happens, and then something monumental occurs.

I’m not sure that’s truly the way the world works. Sometimes it seems to me that things do happen out of the blue. Perhaps there is a gathering of forces, like the seismic activity that produces a volcanic eruption, but there are no meters sensitive enough to register those vibrations.

This is a long and overly dramatic preamble to a simple statement of fact: To wit, in the spring of 1953, a couple of months before I would turn fifteen, I got my bike out of the garage and took it down the driveway to the sidewalk, where, within an hour or so, I learned to ride it.

I cannot recall a single prefatory thought. I was in the garage, I took note of the bicycle, I had the impulse to try to ride it, and, once I’d moved enough debris out of the way to get to it, that’s precisely what I did. Just like that, and just a little less than five years after my parents had given it to me.

Because God is, after all, the Supreme Ironist, I’d managed to wait until the ability to ride a bike no longer made much difference in my life. I was in my second year at Bennett, and no one rode bikes to high school. One walked to Hertel and took the Number Twenty-three streetcar, which stopped right in front of the high school. Or, more often than not, one walked over to Dick Lederman’s house and his father gave us both a ride in his new Cadillac. (It was always a new Cadillac, because Israel Lederman traded his car annually. He loved those cars, and I didn’t blame him a bit.)

After school, one walked home.

Or, in rare instances, drove. I was getting on for fifteen, and my classmates were on average a year older than I, so the ones who’d had their sixteenth birthdays were already learning how to drive their fathers’ cars. Girls in my class, dating boys a year or two older, were riding around in cars all the time.

And I was learning to ride a bicycle.

Here’s something as puzzling as the fact that I did it without thinking about it beforehand: I didn’t really think about it much after the fact, either. I’d just accomplished something without much effort, and how could it have failed to strike me that I might as easily have done so years ago? You’d think, wouldn’t you, that I’d have smacked myself in the forehead and said some cyclist’s version of, “Gee, I could have had a V-8!”

And I could have, surely I could have, years before I did, back when it would have made a considerable difference in my life. True, the bike was no longer too big for me, was if anything a little small for me, and when balance became problematic I could extend my feet and use the pavement to support myself and the bike. True, I was bigger and stronger and not quite so ungainly. Still, how hard would it have been for me to do this two years earlier? Or three? Or four?

Well, hell, I’m not going to brood about it now. But I’m surprised I didn’t brood about it then.

The bike, or more precisely my new ability to ride it, got me my first actual job. I’d always been an enterprising child, ringing the neighbors’ doorbells and offering my services at whatever chore was in season. I shoveled walks and driveways, raked leaves, mowed lawns. I went around with a wagon and purchased beer and pop bottles for half the deposit. (I’ll bet if I’d proposed to haul them away for free, most of my neighbors would have found that acceptable. But I offered to pay for them, and nobody ever once told me to keep my money.)

Funny what comes to mind. I can still remember a big bottle that once held Coleman’s Ginger Ale. It was worth five cents — or would have been, if I’d ever managed to find a store that would take it back. The lesson it taught me was worth more than the two and a half cents I was out. I learned, not for the last time, that nothing is ever quite as profitable as you think it’s going to be.

But now I had a bike, and I could leave my wagon in the garage. And, almost immediately, I had a job, handing out catalogs for the Fuller Brush Man.

His name was Mr. Speier, and he was a European refugee who was grabbing his chunk of the American Dream by selling brushes door to door. His territory when I went to work for him was in Tonawanda, a couple of miles north of my house. That would have taken a while to walk, but I had a bike, and a whole new world had thus opened itself to me.

I would ride my bike to Tonawanda and meet Mr. Speier at some predetermined intersection, and he would give me a stack of catalogs and tell me where to go and what bells to ring. I would walk up one side of a block and down the next, ringing the bells, and telling each housewife who came to the door that I had a catalog for her, and when my employer visited in a couple of days he’d pick up the catalog and give her a free gift.

Just about everybody took the catalog. I don’t recall anyone slamming the door and telling me to go to hell. Nor did I encounter anyone a youth of today might characterize as a MILF. In years to come I would write scenes in which a young man went door to door — conducting fake termite inspections, in one novel — and the fellows in my fiction always had remarkable sexual adventures. It pains me to admit it, but nothing like that ever happened to me in Tonawanda.

But maybe I should have given it a little more time. I can’t be positive of this, but it seems to me I only worked for Mr. Speier for a single week.

It really wasn’t much of a job. I was paid two cents for every catalog I distributed, and I could only leave a catalog if someone was there to accept it. Then I noted the house number on a sheet of paper, secure in the knowledge that I was another two cents to the good. The next day I would meet Mr. Speier and hand over the sheet, and he would count up the numbers, make sure the count matched the number of catalogs he’d given me, pay me what I’d earned, and give me another batch of catalogs for distribution.

First time out I’d tried to make my route more efficient by going back and forth across the street to save steps. But he didn’t like that because he wanted the numbers in order for later on, when he would go up one side of the block and down the other. So from then on I did it his way.

It was tedious beyond description, but it wasn’t terribly difficult. The problem was that I couldn’t make any money at it. He’d give me thirty or thirty-five catalogs, and if I got rid of them all I’d make is sixty or seventy cents, and for this I had to peddle my bike a couple of miles in each direction.

Now sixty cents for an afternoon’s work may not sound like a lot of money nowadays, but let me tell you something — it wasn’t a lot of money back then, either. Hell, I did better than that in the pop bottle business.

And if it rained, the day was a washout. One day it was fair weather in Buffalo, but raining by the time I got to Tonawanda, so I got to ride all the way out there and turn around and go home. I didn’t pass Go, and I didn’t collect sixty cents.

So one week was enough.

That fall I got a real job. It paid seventy cents an hour, minimum wage at the time, and as much as a kid could expect to earn in a part-time job. I worked at Parker Pharmacy, owned by Mr. Pearlstein, an acquaintance of my father’s. I did various stockboy chores, and when there was a prescription to be delivered, I hopped on my bike and delivered it. Sometimes a delivery meant a tip, but you might be surprised to learn that more often than not it didn’t. The tips, when they came, were a nickel or a dime. One man gave me a quarter once and I still remember it.

More often than not, I spent the tip money on candy bars. I never wasted any money on cigarettes. I was a confirmed smoker, I’d started swiping butts from my parents’ ashtrays two years earlier, but like every other kid I knew who ever worked at a drugstore, I stole cigarettes. I tried every brand we carried, brands nobody ever heard of. Virginia Rounds. Wings. Phantoms, which were one and a half times the length of a Pall Mall, and furnished with a cellophane tip. Murad, Helmar, Piedmont. Did anybody ever buy the damn things? Or were they just there for kids to steal?

I worked after school, and Saturday mornings, and I made ten or twelve dollars a week. I never could have got the job without the bicycle.

And by now it was a different bicycle. I don’t know when that happened, but I guess that orange and black Schwinn must have been a rusty mess when I hauled it out of the garage, and a little small for me in the bargain. It seems to me that by the time I was passing out catalogs for Mr. Speier, and certainly by the time I was delivering prescriptions for Mr. Pearlstein, the old Schwinn had morphed into something else, with hand brakes and gears as well. That’s what I rode around the streets of North Buffalo, obeying traffic laws, waiting for traffic lights to change, and even signaling my intention to turn left or right. You’d have thought I was behind the wheel of the family Chevy.

While there were, alas, no eager MILF’s — Milves? — meeting me at their doors wearing a negligee and a smile, there was nevertheless a loss of innocence that came with the job. I wasn’t a kid who noticed a lot, but some things were hard to miss.

Like the day when Bob, the pharmacist and store manager, took a prescription over the phone and sent me to the shelves for a bottle of Cepacol, an over-the-counter cough remedy. I brought it to him and he soaked off the label, typed out and slapped on a prescription label, raised the price from sixty-nine cents to ten dollars and change, and sent me off on my bicycle to deliver it.

That was an eye-opener. And my eyes stayed open wide enough to take notice at the first of the month, when the outgoing mail held eight or ten small envelopes, all addressed to neighborhood physicians. Even I could work out what that was all about.

6

it was during my junior year in high school that it dawned on me that I wanted to be a writer. I’d had various careers in mind over the years, without really developing anything close to a passion for any of them. When I was four or five years old I wanted to be a garbageman, until my mother told me they got chapped hands. Later I liked the idea of veterinary medicine, probably because I liked animals. My father would have liked for me to become a physician, he thought they had good lives while performing a useful service, and I entertained the idea but couldn’t really see myself pursuing it. I might have been inclined toward law, I had the right sort of mind for it, but my father was an attorney who practiced infrequently over the years. He’d soured on the profession, and actively dissuaded me from entering it.

In third-year English, an early assignment led to my writing a paper on my career choices, from garbageman on. I had fun with it and took a light tone, and ended with something to the effect that, on reviewing what I’d written, one thing at least was clear: I could never become a writer.

At the bottom, Miss May Jepson wrote: “I’m not so sure about that!”

And the die was cast. Before the moment I read her comment, I had never had a single conscious thought of becoming a writer. I had a frame of reference for it, I had lately begun reading grown-up fiction (one hesitates to call it adult fiction, as that has somehow come to mean something else) and was making my way through the giants of American realism — Steinbeck, Hemingway, James T. Farrell, Thomas Wolfe, etc. I enjoyed the books and greatly admired the men who wrote them, but the notion that I might seek to do likewise never entered my mind.

Once it did, I never seriously entertained the idea of doing anything else.

I went on writing compositions for English class, and I suppose I showed off some therein. I wrote poems, too, and showed them to Miss Jepson, and basked in the praise I received. (The poem about the moon over Kansas was not among them. I wrote that, desperate tides and all, in my sophomore year at Antioch.)

I was going to be a writer, and that’s what I told anyone who asked. “Oh, you’ll be a journalist,” they said. “Oh, you’ll work on a newspaper.”

No. I was going to be a writer.

In June i didn’t go off to writing camp, as I suppose a similarly inclined teenager might do nowadays. What I did was get on a Greyhound bus, and forty-eight hours later I got off in South Florida. In Dania, specifically, where Doc Marshall picked me up and drove me to Juniors Lodge.

Dr. Marshall A. Marshall, né Marshall Gubinsky, was an extraordinary man. He’d been the scoutmaster of Troop Seven from the time I joined, until he and his wife and kids departed for Florida two years before I got on that bus. Doc was a dentist who specialized in making and fitting false teeth, and he’d fallen in love with Florida and wanted to live there, but the state dentists’ association had established strict rules to protect themselves from carpetbaggers, and Doc couldn’t practice his profession.

So he bought some land and decided to build a camp for kids. He did the construction himself, with some help from his wife, Ada, and the kids, Bonnie and Mike, building a serviceable dormitory out of concrete block.

He’d never done anything like this before, but the man had a penchant for tackling new tasks and figuring out how to perform them competently. He’d been in scouting as a boy, but hadn’t gotten all that far with it; when he was appointed scoutmaster, he decided he ought to set a good example, and he went through the laborious process of earning the requisite merit badges and becoming an Eagle Scout. If you apply yourself, I think you can probably learn more in this process than in four years of college, and Doc went to each task with the enthusiasm of an amateur and the precision of a pro. And, because he didn’t want to be a hotshot, he stopped at the requisite twenty-one merit badges — but he never stopped trying new things and developing new skills.

I’d come down to be his camp counselor. There was a young woman as well, a swimmer with Olympic dreams; she was a couple of years older than I, and in charge when we took the kids swimming. The camp wasn’t much, just a summer-long babysitting service for parents who couldn’t wait to get rid of their kids, and not without reason. They were, pound for pound, as hopeless a lot of spoiled whining little bastards as I’d ever had to put up with.

I don’t remember what the hell we did to amuse them day after day, but the days passed and nobody went home, so I guess we all got through it okay. (They may well have reciprocated their parents’ feelings — once again, not without reason.) But as far as I was concerned, the day began when the rotten little snots went to sleep.

That’s when Doc and Ada and I sat around the kitchen table and smoked cigarettes and talked. Their Irish setter, Copper, would generally join us. Copper was the smartest and best-behaved dog I’d ever met, and as a result I came to think highly of the breed. (Years later I had one of my own, Maxine by name, not that the dizzy bitch answered to it or to anything else. She was as stupid as an oyster and as tractable as a cyclone.) We’d smoke and talk and smoke and talk and smoke some more. I don’t remember what we talked about, and what difference did it make? I was in heaven.

It was a wonderful summer. I had one day off, and took a bus to Miami, where I went to the movies and saw Gone With the Wind. On the bus back to camp, a driver gently reprimanded me for taking a seat in the rear. That was for colored, he told me. They got plenty of ignorant Yankees in that part of the state, so I guess he had to do that a lot.

Some years later I heard of or read about a fellow in a similar situation, who’d lowered his head at the driver’s admonition and murmured significantly that his father was white. The driver left him alone. Later, as he was getting off the bus, the guy called over his shoulder, “I forgot to tell you — my mother was white, too!”

I never would have thought of that, and even if I had I’d never have done it. What I did was change my seat.

Hiking wasn’t part of the agenda at Juniors Lodge. At home, I don’t think many of those kids ever walked farther than the distance from the television set to the dinner table, and summers in Florida were too hot even if they were up for it. I don’t remember working up a sweat myself, aside from the sweat one worked up just by being there, but somehow in the six or eight weeks I worked there I must have lost twenty pounds, maybe more.

I was always a fat kid — not the morbidly obese sort one sees nowadays, but what clothing salesmen called husky. I took my huskiness as a given and didn’t pay much attention to it, and when my parents and sister drove down to collect me — there’d be no return trip on the Greyhound, thank God — a miracle had occurred. I was no longer husky.

The four of us spent a week living it up at a Miami Beach motel, then drove home. I went off to my senior year at Bennett, and got another drugstore job.

Back in Buffalo, I tried corresponding with Doc and Ada. Oddly, I still remember the mailing address: Box 507, Hollywood, Florida. I sent a couple of letters there and never heard back. They were both far too busy for correspondence.

Then I did get a letter from them, and it was some sort of form letter, soliciting families and businesses to hold events at Juniors Lodge. (If it was a lousy name for a kids’ camp, it was an even worse name for a catering hall.) They’d put me on their mailing list, and I resented this.

A few years later there was an obituary in the Buffalo Evening News. Ada had died of lung cancer. She couldn’t have been fifty when she died. I thought about writing a letter, but I always think about writing letters on such occasions, and hardly ever get around to it. Nor did I this time.

Then, twenty-one years after my summer at Juniors Lodge, I looked for Doc and I found him. I was on a curious ramble; I’d given up my apartment in New York, moved in with a woman in Buffalo, moved out a few days later when she came to her senses, and found myself with all my possessions in the back of a treacherous Ford station wagon. I decided to drive around and see where I wound up.

H. L. Mencken wrote somewhere that the Lord had seized the United States by the state of Maine and lifted, so that everything loose wound up in Southern California. That’s what I was and that’s what I did, but it took me four or five months to get there, and on my way I passed through the town of Dania and thought of Doc.

So I went looking for him, and amazingly enough I found him. I reached his dental office — evidently if you lived in Florida long enough they had to let you be a dentist again — and the woman I spoke to told me Doc had retired because of illness. I found out where he lived and went to see him.

He had emphysema, and walked around sucking oxygen out of a tube. He knew me, and remembered me as clearly as I remembered him. And he brought me up to date on his life since I’d known him. He’d had two marriages after Ada’s death, each one worse than the last. He’d gone back to dentistry and managed to build a practice. He told me about his kids, but if what he said registered at all I’ve long since forgotten it.

And he told me what a struggle he’d had in Buffalo with the Beth Zion establishment, who hadn’t wanted an East Side boy, a Russian Jew like Marshall Gubinsky, leading their Boy Scout troop. And he’d had his troubles with some of our parents, as well — not mine, he had nothing but good to say about my folks, but several others.

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.

7

i only 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:

Well, you get the idea.

I’d never heard of Antioch, but then I’d never heard of any colleges except the ones that fielded a football team. My parents learned about it from Ruth and Jimmy Gitlitz. Jimmy, a lawyer in Binghamton, was my dad’s closest friend from Cornell, and the Gitlitzes knew about Antioch because the son of friends of theirs — I believe the family name was Singer — had gone there and liked the place. So had another Jewish boy from Binghamton, Rod Serling, who went on to be the host and creator of the TV show The Twilight Zone.

The salient fact about Antioch was that it had a work-study program — not so that students could earn money, as it was a rare student indeed who finished a co-op job with more money than he’d had when he started it — but to provide Antiochians with practical experience in their chosen field, and indeed to help them toward an informed vocational choice. Students spent half the year at jobs the college found for them and the other half in classrooms (except for freshmen, who had the option of spending the entire year on campus, as about half of each entering class chose to do).

The other significant fact about Antioch, although I never knew it until I got there, was that it tended to draw nonconformists. Maybe that’s why my parents thought I’d be happy there. They were sold on the work-study program, but part of their enthusiasm may have stemmed from the notion that this might be a place where I’d actually fit in, and feel at home.

I applied to both schools and was accepted right away at each. I’m sure we would have been eligible for some sort of financial aid package, my dad wasn’t making much money, but he was unwilling to fill out the requisite forms, so we never applied for scholarships. I did take the New York State Regents exam, and scored high enough to qualify for $600 a year toward tuition at any school in the state; additionally, my placement was close enough to the top to earn me an additional $200 annually as a specific Cornell scholarship.

Eight hundred dollars a year was substantial. Antioch, not an inexpensive institution, charged an annual unit fee of $1400, which covered room and board as well as tuition. It represented a certain financial sacrifice for my parents to send me to Antioch, and God knows I’d have gone off to Cornell willingly enough, but there was never any question. “You’d rather go to Antioch, wouldn’t you?” Well, uh, yeah, I guess. “Then that’s where you’re going. It’s the right place for you.”

It’s an interesting time to be writing about Antioch, as the school has been much in the news lately. The board of trustees has announced that the school will not reopen for at least four years, because applications for admission are insufficient to allow the school to function. How closing for four years will increase applications is something no one has managed to explain, and it looks as though the old school is going out of business.

I think my parents were right, I think it was indeed the right place for me, though I sometimes wonder what course my life might have taken if I’d gone to Cornell instead. (Such speculation, I should point out, has precious little to do with Antioch or Cornell, and more with my state of mind at the moment. A couple of years ago I was at Avery Fisher Hall for a concert of the New York Philharmonic. From our seats I had a good view of Philip Myers, the principal French horn player, and I had the following extraordinary thought: Maybe I should have studied the French horn, maybe that would have made all the difference.)

I spent three of the next four years at Antioch. I spent all of my first year in Yellow Springs. In the summer I went off to New York for three months in the mailroom at Pines Publications. I shared an apartment on Barrow Street in Greenwich Village, not five minutes from where I live now. I went back to school for a semester, then took a job my father got for me at the Erie County Comptroller’s Office — the idea was I could live at home and save money, but anything I put aside I spent on a weekend trip to New York. In the spring I returned for the second semester of my sophomore year, and come summer I again passed up the school’s job offerings, worked briefly in restaurants on Cape Cod, and then went to New York, where I was lucky enough to land an editorial position at the Scott Meredith literary agency.

It was the best possible opportunity for someone who wanted to be a writer, and I dropped out of school to keep it. I’d already placed a story with a crime fiction magazine, and I wrote and sold many more stories during the year I worked there; more to the point, I learned a tremendous amount about writing, and about the business of being a writer.

A year was enough, and at the end of it I quit the agency — though I remained a client — and went back to Antioch for a third year. But it was the farm, and I’d seen Paree. I’d caught on with a paperback publisher and was able to write novels and get paid for them, and that made it very hard for me to assign a very high priority to classes in the eighteenth-century English novel.

The drinking and dope-smoking may have had something to do with it, too.

I withdrew after a month or two, then rescinded my withdrawal under emotional blackmail from my parents. I stayed in Yellow Springs for the rest of that academic year, spending my work period on campus as the editor of the college paper, and in the summer of 1959 I went to New York to devote my next job period to writing books. I was living in the Hotel Rio, on West Forty-seventh Street, and that’s where I was when I got a letter from the Student Personnel Committee. They had concluded, they wrote, that I would be happier elsewhere. It was the sort of expulsion notice one could probably talk one’s way out of, with only the occasional mouthful of crow, but I found nothing in their words to argue with. I agreed with them entirely, I would indeed be happier elsewhere, and I’ve been elsewhere ever since.

Antioch was a hotbed of a number of things, but athletic activity was not among them. There was no intercollegiate competition, in football or anything else, and thus few occasions for the singing of “A Is for the A in Dear Old Antioch.” In my first semester, my freshman dorm fielded a team to play two-handed tag football against other dorms, and in the appropriate semesters we did the same with basketball and football.

Every spring there was an event held called the Beer Ball Game, a baseball contest in which the pitcher drank a beer before delivering the ball, the batter drank a beer before running to first base, the infielder drank a beer before throwing to first, and so on. I suppose most schools have an event of this sort, and I suppose few of them get beyond the first inning. Ours never did.

My alma mater has a distinguished alumni roster for a college with an average total enrollment of a thousand. We’ve turned out leaders in public service and the arts, and for years produced a wildly disproportionate number of Woodrow Wilson scholars. But as far as I know we’ve never graduated a future Olympian, and it’s not hard to understand why.

My walking at Antioch was just a way to get from one place to another. It was a small campus in a small town, and there was no place one couldn’t walk to in ten or fifteen minutes at the most. Still, when I returned for my final year, the first thing I did was buy a car. It was a deep blue 195 °Chevrolet coupe, and it had a lot of things wrong with it, but I was uncommonly fond of it. I named it Pamela, for Samuel Richardson’s epistolary novel, which was assigned reading in my eighteenth-century novel class. I never actually read the book, but naming my car after it seemed the next best thing.

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.