A Writer Prepares, page 19
Loretta and I had signed a lease for the Central Park West apartment, but we were still living at 110 West 69th Street when the telephone woke us in the middle of the night. It was my mother, calling to tell us my father had been rushed to the hospital. A couple of hours later here was another phone call, this from Moe Cheplove, a close friend of my parents and our family physician.
Game over.
We went home for the funeral, then returned to New York to move into our new apartment. Life went on, as it does, and we awaited the birth of our first child.
It’s almost hard to remember that at the time a child’s sex remained unknown until birth, and so we’d picked out names to cover both contingencies, Andrew Jonathan and Amy Jo. Boy or girl, the monogram would memorialize my father, Arthur Jerome Block.
Amy turned up on schedule. She was about a year old when we moved to the house in Tonawanda.
The reason for the move seems so clear to me now. I had not been there when my father died. That was an error, a sin of omission on my part, and I could best rectify it by returning.
I don’t need to delve more deeply into this, and you don’t need to read it. Sometime in the spring of 1962 we made our move.
• • •
I figured I could write there as well as anywhere else. I’d grown up knowing that New York was where you went if you wanted to be a writer, and I’d acted accordingly, but I’d written as effectively in Buffalo and in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and wherever I lived I could be represented as effectively (or ineffectively) by the Scott Meredith agency.
The house on Ebling had three bedrooms, and I took one for an office; eventually I shifted operations to an alcove in the finished basement, where I was less aware of ringing phones and household conversations. (And, after we’d been living there for perhaps a year, I took an office a few blocks away, in a small commercial building. I seem always to have had the impulse to get away to sequester myself with my work, and during our last months at 444 Central Park West, I’d taken a hotel room to work in—back once again at the Hotel Rio on West 47th Street.)
I was very productive in Tonawanda. I wrote a book a month for Bill Hamling, I wrote short stories and made my first sales to Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, and I wrote, as the good Doctor Morse, more fictional non-fiction for Monarch, and for Lancer Books as well.
It was, as Robert Silverberg has spoken of his own early years, good hackwork.
Bob and I have had somewhat parallel careers, he in science fiction and I in crime, although it wasn’t until fairly recently that we actually met and became friends. But I was certainly well aware of him, and knew that he was writing and selling close to a quarter of a million words a month—three books, that is to say, and the equivalent of a book’s worth of magazine fiction.
I was never as systematic or as organized, nor did I get as much written and published. But years down the line, when each of us had long outgrown the world of Bill Hamling and Harry Shorten, and had in fact achieved Grand Master recognition in our respective genres, it was Bob’s example that helped move me to acknowledge that early work.
He was quite candid, very much up-front about his beginnings. “It was good hackwork,” he declared, and didn’t deny authorship of the various works of Don Elliott and Loren Beauchamp and L. T. Woodward, M.D.
Now, of course, I’ve moved about as far from denial as one can. I’ve not only acknowledged and embraced that pseudonymous early work, but I’ve done everything I can to foist it anew upon the reading public. I’ve changed my label for the work from sex novels (which we all called them) and soft-core pornography (which everybody else called them) to classic midcentury erotica—which I may well be alone in calling them, but that’s my story and I’m sticking with it.
• • •
If anyone had suggested at the time that those early efforts might still find readers sixty years later, I’d have thought he was out of his mind. I certainly didn’t expect or even hope that they might have a long life. I wanted them to earn immediate income for me—royalties were never a possibility, but they brought me a better living than I could have earned otherwise, and that was as much as I asked of them.
I also saw them as a way to grow and improve as a writer. They were on-the-job training, and this is not something I only realized after the fact. I saw it that way at the time. I was serving an apprenticeship, although I was not apprenticed to any particular master.
I think it’s probably useful to remember how very young I was. In the spring of 1962, when Loretta and Amy and I moved from New York back to Buffalo, I was not yet twenty-four years old.
I remember—vividly—a thought I had a little later, on June 24, 1963. That was the day I turned twenty-five, and I recall looking at myself in the bathroom mirror and saying (perhaps out loud, perhaps in silence), “Well, I guess the boy wonder bit is over.”
And that’s really what it was. Like Samuel Johnson’s observation of a woman’s preaching, which he so memorably likened to a dog’s walking on its hind legs, one really shouldn’t ask if it were done well or not; the wonder was that it was done at all.
“Can you believe it? It’s Larry Block, Lenore and Artie’s son, and he’s writing books and they’re being published and he’s actually making a living that way. Isn’t that remarkable?”
Remarkable.
• • •
Back in Buffalo, it was rather more remarkable than it had been in New York, where I’d had a batch of writers as friends and acquaintances. Other friends were doing other things in the arts, painting or playing music or singing, and if they were not yet successful they were on a path that could be expected to lead to success.
But I’d moved away from all that, and while the hours I put in at my desk, tapping away at my typewriter, were the part of my quotidian life that most defined me, the people with whom I spent time in Buffalo inhabited a vastly different universe.
We made some friends. Before we left New York, a visit to Buffalo and an evening spent with Ron and Doris Benice sparked an interest in coin collecting. Ron had been a friend and classmate of mine at Bennett High, and Doris had been a friend and classmate and sorority sister of Loretta’s, and while I don’t recall that we were to see that much of them socially, that one evening made an impact.
When I got back to our apartment on Central Park West, I took to going to the bank and coming home with rolls of coins, which I searched for dates and mint marks that matched spaces I hadn’t yet filled in my Whitman Coin Folders. I embraced this hobby as I embraced so many pastimes, becoming quite obsessed with it. I subscribed to two newspapers, Coin World and Numismatic News, and by the time we moved back to Buffalo and into the house on Ebling Avenue, I was an ardent numismatist.
I’d collected stamps as a boy, and indeed while a high school student had purchased some from Ron Benice, who had briefly set himself up as a teenage stamp dealer. But now he was collecting coins, and so indeed was I.
When I was much younger, perhaps ten or twelve years old, my father had given me a handful of old coins he’d accumulated over the years—a few Indian Head pennies, a Barber dime, coins that had predated his own birth in 1908. One, I remember, was a Liberty Seated Dime issued in 1891, the last year coins of that design were produced. My specimen was good enough to grade somewhere between Extremely Fine and Almost Uncirculated, and while it was only worth a couple of dollars, having it led me to specialize in that particular series of coins. I collected other US coins as well, but Liberty Seated Dimes became my particular area of interest. I bought a Library of Coins album in which to house them, and I set about buying such examples as I encountered and could afford.
I didn’t know anybody in New York who collected coins. But in Buffalo I found out about a coin club that met once a week, and I began going to it and found some fellows whose company was enjoyable enough.
Coins were not my only pastime. Not long after we settled in at 48 Ebling Avenue, I went to a pet shop and came home with an aquarium. I’d kept tropical fish in my parents’ house on Starin Avenue, and it wasn’t long before I had several tanks set up, with interesting and attractive fish in them. I was as passionate an aquarist as I was a numismatist, learning everything I could about the subject. Was there a magazine to which I subscribed? I don’t recall that there was, but I remember a large and abundantly illustrated book, Exotic Aquarium Fishes, by a gentleman named William T. Innes; I read every word of it so many times I must have very nearly committed it to memory.
I’m pretty sure it was the fish that led to my friendship with Richie Brownstein. But it may have been the coins. I know he was an enthusiastic aquarist, and it seems to me he had a passing interest in coins as well. (Neither of these interests began to approach the scope and intensity of his interest in birds. More than anything else, he was always a passionate ornithologist.)
I don’t suppose it matters what supplied the initial spark of the friendship. Richie was, by any imaginable standard, a character. I largely lost touch with him when we moved in mid-1964 from Buffalo to Racine, Wisconsin, and fifteen years later someone shot him dead in his mother’s living room, and I’ve never written about him. I think it’s time I did.
Richie was two years older than I, the son of a prominent and successful Buffalo attorney. He’d graduated from Bennett, and he’d been destined to go through the University of Buffalo and UB Law School, but somehow that didn’t happen. I believe he did earn a bachelor’s degree and somehow didn’t get anywhere in law school, but I’m not sure just when it was that his education stopped, and there’s no one to ask. When I knew him, the presumption was that he’d eventually return to law school long enough to get through it.
Did he do any work during the two years of our friendship? I don’t believe he did. I think his father cut him a check every month, and supplied whatever was needed. Richie was married—to Marilyn Applebaum, who had been one year behind me at Bennett. They had two girls, Robin and Dina, and lived in a rented house a ten-minute drive from us.
Richie was a hustler. He was a good bridge player, a better-than-good gin rummy player, and it would have suited him to spend much of his life downtown at the Montefiore Club, say, playing cards for hours on end and making sure he won more often than he lost.
A lifelong friend of mine, Jerry Carp, once told me a story about Richie, who had somehow managed to inveigle Jerry into a pushup contest, with a cash bet as to who could do the most pushups. Richie was short and slight, and not at all athletic, and while he may have had a kind of wiry muscularity, it certainly didn’t show. As I recall, he’d had a bout of rheumatic fever in childhood, and as a result had never participated in sports. Jerry was a natural athlete, a star tennis player at Bennett, and an obvious clear favorite in any athletic competition with Richie.
I don’t know how Richie managed to set Jerry up, but I can imagine. And he’d have known it was a set-up, because he’d have done enough pushups in private to be confident of his ability to win the day. The only thing he failed to do was keep Jerry from realizing after the fact that he’d been suckered; in an ideal con game, the mark never does know the score.
From then on, Jerry never liked or respected Richie. But I’m not sure that’s something Richie would have cared about.
He hustled me once, but in a very small way. One night he and I were at loose ends, and he came over to my house and suggested we play gun rummy. I grew up knowing the game, although I can’t say I cared for it much, and I let him coax me into playing, and that we make it interesting by playing for money. The stakes we set were very small, and we played, and at one point I noticed that Richie had been jotting something down on a pad, and I asked him what it was.
“Oh, it’s nothing,” he said, clearly embarrassed, and he tore off the top sheet and crumpled it up and stuffed it in his pocket. “Just notes to myself,” he said. “Nothing important.”
And we went on, but the thing was I’d managed to read the note he’d written to himself. Win slow, it said.
One might call that an interesting tell. The dollar or two he took from me that night—we didn’t play for long, or raise the stakes—was a small price to pay to learn who the fellow was.
Now I might have taken it personally, or simply been judgmental, and let go of my friendship (if that’s what it was) with Richie. But I enjoyed his company, and while I wouldn’t want to play cards with him again, or trust the little weasel any farther than I could throw him, I kind of liked him.
One time the two of us took a trip, driving east on the Thruway to a coin show in Cobleskill, New York. We went first to Saratoga Springs, where a horse named Su Mac Lad, a trotter, was running in some presumably important race. (And I just Googled Su Mac Lad, and I’ll be damned if I didn’t remember the animal’s name, and even spell it correctly. It is just astonishing what sticks in one mind, especially in view of all that doesn’t.)
Richie bet a few dollars on Su Mac Lad, but the horse was the favorite, and Richie had dragged us there not for the opportunity to win a couple of bucks but because he wanted to watch this great horse compete. We did, and he won. Then we went on to Cobleskill, in Schoharie County, where I suppose I bought some coins, though I can’t remember any of that.
I may have introduced Richie to Les Zeller, my closest numismatic friend then and for many years thereafter. Les lived nearby in Troy—well, in Watervliet, actually—and when he was about 35 he began an affair with an eleven-year-old girl. The two conducted a monogamous relationship that lasted seven years, and I never had a judgment on that, either.
But back to Richie. I don’t remember a great deal about that weekend, except that one night he and I both participated in a poker game held in another numismatist’s motel room. And all I remember about that is that the room was too smoky for me to stay in the game. At the time I smoked upwards of two packs a day of unfiltered cigarettes—Camels, generally, but sometimes Luckies, and occasionally English Ovals. And even so I couldn’t stay in that room.
Another odd thing to remember.
But the most memorable incident of the trip came early on, when we were racing east on the Thruway. We’d taken Richie’s car, and he was driving. “Steer for me,” he said abruptly, and took his hands off the steering wheel and began removing his jacket, which he’d evidently found uncomfortably warm. He got the jacket off, he turned around and placed it in the backseat, all without letting up on the gas pedal. He seemed unutterably confident in my ability to reach over and take hold of the wheel and keep us from running off the road or into someone.
And indeed within not too many seconds he was facing forward and once again gripping the steering wheel. We stayed on the road. We didn’t hit anybody, nor did anybody hit us.
Jesus.
There were a couple of other times when the business of driving didn’t have one hundred percent of his attention. At least once he caught sight of a bird and was interested enough to respond by picking up the pair of binoculars he kept at hand and driving with one hand while he used the other to hold the binoculars to his eyes. He kept the car going forward at high speed even as he gave all of his attention to the creature flying off somewhere ahead of us. “A yellow-bellied sapsucker,” he then said with satisfaction (or whatever fucking species it may have been). Binoculars down, both hands on wheel, and on we went.
Jesus.
• • •
Through Richie I met another fellow, his next door neighbor, Earl Dworkin. Earl and his wife Ellie also had two daughters, Joy and Leslie; they later would have a son, John. Earl was a sales rep, selling books to college bookstores, while he put himself through graduate school in clinical psychology at the University of Buffalo.
And the story of how he got into the field strikes me as worth telling. He’d gone to college—Cornell, I think it was—and had been keeping company with Ellie, and the relationship was getting more serious than he wanted, so he decided to extricate himself from it while getting his military obligation out of the way.
So Earl went down and enlisted, and Ellie discovered she was pregnant, and the next thing he knew he was (a) married and (b) in the service for the next two years.
That’s probably a good enough story by itself, but it got better. Right after basic training, the base psychiatrist wherever Earl was stationed spotted him as a bright and personable and perceptive young fellow, and recruited him for special duty as his assistant. Earl’s duty would consist of screening every GI who showed up for a psychiatric consultation. Almost every case, the doctor told him, would fall into one of three categories: “I miss my mom,” “I want to kill my sergeant,” and “I can’t stand guys looking at me in the shower.” There were certain appropriate responses in each category, and Earl could furnish them; if this didn’t do the trick, he could pass them on to the shrink.
Earl learned the responses, and practiced with his boss, and soon sat down at the desk they’d given him and waited for his first client. Guy walked in, sat down, looked around furtively, frowned, and was clearly unhappy. Earl asked him to state the nature of his problem, and waited to find out whether it was Mom or Sarge or the guys in the shower that would turn out to be the cause of his misery.
Guy motioned him in close, dropped his voice. “Part of my head is missing,” he said.
Bingo! His very first consultation, and there he was sitting across the desk from a man in the grip of a full-blown psychotic delusion.
“I’ll be right back,” Earl told him, and he went and got hold of the shrink, and the poor bastard with part of his head missing was out of there on a Section Eight—and Earl was hooked. From that point on, most of the servicemen on the other side of his desk were basic Mom / Sarge / Shower cases, and he found he was pretty good at sorting them out and dispensing emotional Band-Aids and aspirin; moreover, he realized he’d discovered his métier, and knew what he wanted to do with his life.
