CH02 - Chip Harrison Scores Again

by Lawrence Block

  And then I got it. The poor kid, I realized, had never really had any sex life to speak of outside of prostitution. So naturally that was her frame of reference. Here she wanted to ball me for the sheer unadulterated pleasure of it, but her mind was so conditioned by the life she led that she had to act with me in much the same way as she acted with her paying customers. It was weird, and sort of disheartening in a way, but there was also something sort of sweet and pathetic about it.

  She has never known love, I told myself. But I shall change her. I shall fulfill her.

  “Well, now,” she said. “And what have we here?”

  That must have been a rhetorical question, because what she had there was something she came into contact with quite frequently in her profession, and where we had it was in her hand. She had opened my fly and taken me firmly in hand, and she was stroking me rhythmically. Her wrist did everything; the rest of her arm stayed motionless.

  “You come with me,” she said. “We’ll just wash you up first.”

  We stood at the bathroom sink and washed me up. The editorial we was bugging me a little. Nurses talk like that—”How are we feeling this morning?”—but I never figured whores did, too. Anyway, she soaped me up and rinsed me off, and it was sort of pleasant and unpleasant both at once, pleasant in that it felt good, and unpleasant in that it sort of implied that I was fundamentally too dirty to deal with otherwise. But then I thought of some of the things she had in mind, and some of the things she had done with other people, and I decided I was just as glad that she tended to wash this portion of a person beforehand, and also, to tell the truth, just as pleased that she didn’t believe in mouth-to- mouth kissing.

  When she was done she filled a glass with hot water and carried it into the bedroom.

  “For the Waterloo,” she explained. “You’re gonna love this.”

  “Uh.”

  “Don’t you want to take off your clothes, Chip?”

  “Uh, sure,” I said, and started undressing. I was feeling unbelievably dizzy and stupid, and it wasn’t just the excitement. That was a part of it. But another part was the feeling that none of this was really happening. It all I seemed so thoroughly unreal. I took off all my clothes and looked up and she was just standing there, with her clothes on.

  “Your clothes,” I said.

  “Huh?”

  “Why don’t you, uh, get undressed?”

  “You want me to?”

  “Well, sure.”

  She shrugged. A very strange girl, I decided. Maybe it wasn’t just that she hadn’t had any real sex life outside of prostitution. Maybe she was equally inexperienced in prostitution. Maybe she just read about the Waterloo in a book or something.

  I stood there watching while she got undressed. She didn’t make the process particularly seductive, just shucked off her clothes and draped them over a chair. Her body was skimpy everywhere but the breasts, which were on the large size. I haven’t described her too much because I have trouble picturing her now in my mind. She was sort of mousy, really, hair somewhere between blond and brown. I suppose she was around my age, although she seemed older, maybe because she was more at home in this scene than I was.

  She left on her stockings and garter belt. I asked her if she didn’t want to take them off and get comfortable, and she gave me an impatient look. “Most men like ’em on,” she said. “Don’t you think they look pretty?”

  I thought they looked like something out of those whip-and-chain movies, but I said sure, they were pretty.

  “Because it’s wasting time, you know, taking ’em off, putting ’em on.”

  “Then leave them on,” I said, and she nodded, and I reached out for her and drew her in close. I went to kiss her again, out of habit, but she turned away automatically and I didn’t press the point. I sort of felt like apologizing but couldn’t think of an intelligent way to do that, so I kept my mouth shut and let my fingers do the walking. I felt various parts of her, and she did a little deep breathing and such, but nothing that really assured me I was driving her out of her skull.

  “Let me,” she said, disengaging herself. “You just lay down, Chip, and let me do you up.”

  I got on the bed. She reached for the glass of water, then stopped with it halfway to her lips. “You tell me if it’s too hot,” she said.

  Then she took a mouthful of water and bent over me.

  It was really very nice. She just did it for a second or so, then pulled away and looked at me. I was waiting for her to ask me whatever the hell it was she was going to ask me, and then I realized that she wasn’t going to ask me anything because she couldn’t because she had her mouth full of hot water.

  “It’s not too hot,” I said. “It’s just right.”

  She nodded and started doing it again. And, as before, it was really very nice indeed. It was strange, too, because I felt totally unconnected with the whole process. I decided that it was a great technique, and it was really great that she knew these great techniques, but that it would be infinitely better when I taught her how to put some love into the whole process. Or at least to make it obvious to me that she was enjoying what she was doing.

  Then she stopped again.

  “Believe me, it’s not too hot,” I said, and started to push her head back in place. But her head wouldn’t push. She leaned over and spat the water out onto the linoleum.

  “The ticket,” she said.

  “Huh?”

  She looked impatient again. “The bus ticket, man. You better give it to me now. I want to make sure it’s still good.”

  “The bus ticket?”

  She sat up and stared at me. “Shit, the bus ticket,” she said. “What’s the matter with you? You got to give it to me and I got to make sure I can cash it before we do any more. All I need is—”

  “Cash the bus ticket?”

  “Take it over to Port Authority and cash it,” she said. “I told you you didn’t need money. Just the ticket is all. If it’s good I’ll get twenty-thirty dollars out of that ticket.”

  I suppose you saw it coming all along, but I’m not going to apologize for my stupidity. After all, it was my fantasy that we were acting out.

  The Waterloo, I thought. I had already had the hot water part, and now I was getting the cold water. Buckets of it, all over all my enthusiasm for little old Mary Beth.

  “Hey! Where you goin’?”

  I was putting on my clothes. Not too quickly, not too slowly. Very mechanically, actually. Tucking the shirt into the pants, getting my socks right-side out and then putting them on, then the shoes—

  “You crazy?”

  “I have to go,” I said.

  “Go? Where to?”

  “The bus station,” I said. “I have to cash the ticket.”

  “Shit, I said I would cash it. Just hand it on over here.”

  “Fuck you,” I said.

  “Are you out of your mind?”

  I turned toward her, and I guess I must have wanted to kill her, or at least I looked as though I wanted to kill her, because her face drained of color and she backed off fast. I turned away from her again and went to the door.

  The whore with the heart of gold. You didn’t need money. All you needed was a negotiable bus ticket.

  I almost went crazy unlocking all those locks. She never said a word, which was lucky for her. I’m normally about as nonviolent as it’s possible to get, but I wasn’t feeling very normal just then. Nothing makes you hate a person quite so much as being made an absolute asshole out of.

  The last lock cleared just as I was about to give up and kick the door down.

  It was as cold as ever out there, but I walked three blocks before I even noticed it.

  Two thoughts kept me from running around and screaming. One was that, if and when I calmed down, I was certain to see the humor in the situation. I didn’t see any humor in it now, but I knew I would sooner or later.

  The other comforting thought, and it was the more comforting of the two, wa
s that I had that bus ticket in my pocket. And I could cash it in.

  TWO

  THIS IS SORT of a problem.

  See, I was going to open the book by saying who I am and my background and all the rest of it and get that out of the way right at the start. But the thing is that I wrote one book before this. It was called No Score, and it just came out last month. Gold Medal published it. No Score, by Chip Harrison. That wasn’t what I wanted to call it, but forget what I wanted to call it because they changed it. I think No Score is a pretty good title, catchy, and probably a lot better than what I had in mind.

  The point is that some of you already read No Score and some of you didn’t, and if you did read it maybe you still remember it and maybe you don’t. I remember it very clearly, but that’s different.

  See, if you read No Score, I don’t want to bore you by feeding you all that stuff here and there throughout this book. If you didn’t read it, I want to tell you as much as you have to know about it, but at the same time I don’t want to spoil it for you in case you by some chance enjoy this book and want to read No Score later on. Of course the best thing would be if you ran out right now and got a copy of No Score and read it first and then came back to this book, but obviously not everybody can do that. If they happen to be reading this on a plane, for instance.

  So what I think I’ll do is put down some of it right here and now to tell you as much as you have to know about me, and possibly more than you want to know, as far as that goes. If you did read No Score, you can skip ahead right now to the next chapter, because none of this will be news to you.

  My name is Chip Harrison. I guess you know that. My legal name was originally Leigh Harvey Harrison, but Chip was my nickname from early childhood, and my parents decided in November of 1963 that it might be sensible to forget my legal name and concentrate on Chip, Leigh Harvey being a liability in the name market at that point in time.

  Of course, that was so many assassinations ago I don’t suppose it matters any more.

  No Score opened when I was seventeen and in my last semester at Upper Valley Prep School. I found out then that my parents had been confidence swindlers, and they were about to go to prison, and they committed suicide. I wasn’t allowed to finish school, partly because of the scandal and partly because there was no money to pay my bills and I wasn’t a good enough basketball player to make a difference, although I was fairly tall for my age.

  So I went out to seek my fortune. I went to Chicago and got a job passing out slingers for a sidewalk photographer, and not quite sleeping with his wife, and then I went down through Illinois and Indiana with a termite inspection crew, and almost went to jail for statutory rape, which would have been really weird because (a) I was underage myself and (b) I didn’t get to do anything. Then I wound up picking berries and apples across Ohio and New York, and almost got shot by a jealous husband, which also would have been ironic because (a) it wasn’t his wife and (b) I didn’t get to do anything.

  In a way, not getting to do anything was what No Score was all about. That did work itself out, though, with a surprise touchdown in the final minutes of play. And then I happened to meet Mr. Knox Burger, and he bought me a hamburger because I helped him change a tire on his car, and I got to talking about my experiences and he suggested writing a book. He even gave me fifty dollars so that I could buy a typewriter and live on Maine sardines and day-old bread while I wrote the book. That book turned out to be No Score, and when it was done I took it to New York, and in September of 1970 it finally came out. I got some money when I finished the book but not as much as I thought and it didn’t last long. It lasted until December, actually, at which time I had twenty-five cents left.

  (I don’t want to get hung up in time sequences, but let me get the chronology of this down for you. I started writing No Score in September of 1969 and finished it about a month later. From October to December of 1969 I was living in New York in the East Village, partly with the girl I mentioned who had just had a baby, and partly here and partly there, and partly at the sort of crash pad where they had all the brown rice and burned chairs in the bathtub. That’s when the action in this book starts, in December of 1969. Then in September of 1970 No Score was finally published—I don’t know why those things take so long, really—and it is now October of 1970 and I am sitting here writing this book, which you are reading. God knows when it will be when you get to read it. 1984, probably. In fact it may be close to then by the time I finish this chapter, because it’s really very difficult trying to get all this together.

  (Actually it may not come out at all, because Mr. Burger doesn’t even work there any more. He left, probably because of the nervous strain of editing No Score. There’s a Mr. Walter Fultz there now, and he gave me about the same advice Mr. Burger did. Keep it moving, he said. Keep it warm and sensitive and perceptive and lively, and most of all—make sure there’s sex in it.

  (I don’t know how well it’s moving. Not too well in this chapter because of all the boring recapitulation. I really hope most of you already read No Score and were able to skip all of this crap. But I promise the pace will pick up in the next chapter. It would almost have to.

  (And I also promise that there will be plenty of sex in it. There really can’t help being plenty of sex in it. That’s why I decided to start this book in December instead of picking up where No Score left off. There were those three months when nothing happened, so I decided to skip them and start right when things started to happen.)

  So that’s who I am. Not the seventeen-year- old virgin who was there for the start of No Score, but an eighteen-year-old virgin-once- removed. A Virgo, with Gemini rising and Moon in Leo, if you pay attention to things like that. Sort of tall and sort of thin and sort of ordinary-looking, and walking full speed through the slush to the Port Authority Bus Terminal.

  THREE

  THE Port Authority Bus Terminal is a well-lighted and spacious modern building, and if you walk through it quickly in the daytime it just looks like a bank or an airport. But at night it’s depressing. All bus stations are. It’s the people. Half of them are only there because they don’t have enough money to fly or take a train, and the other half are there because it’s reasonably warm and the benches are reasonably comfortable and you can steal a nap there and other people will think maybe you’re waiting for a bus, and will leave you alone. Sooner or later, though, some uniformed old fart will ask you for a ticket, and when you don’t have one they tell you to go away.

  I didn’t have any trouble cashing the ticket. I was in line behind a fat woman whose luggage was a matched set of shopping bags. She wanted to go someplace in Missouri, and she and the clerk had a hell of a job working out the details. This gave me time to figure out various reasons why I was cashing the ticket, but when my turn came I just pushed the ticket through the window and asked for cash. The clerk looked at it as if he suspected I was part of a gang of counterfeiters specializing in old bus tickets. But it passed.

  You know, if it hadn’t, I really would have been irritated. I mean, the ticket would at least have gotten me Mary Beth.

  Instead it got me thirty-seven dollars and eighty-three cents. I went to one of the benches and sat down and counted the money over and over again. Then I put different amounts in different pockets. I was somehow more conscious of pickpockets than ever before. It occurred to me that I could have kept the wallet, and if I had then I’d now have something to put the money in.

  Thirty-seven dollars and eighty-three cents. I sat there with different portions of the money in different pockets for a long time, thinking of one thing and another. Then I went to the john. The free stall was in use so I had to use one of the pay toilets, but the attendant wasn’t there so I crawled under it. (Under the door. Not under the toilet.)

  There should be a law against pay toilets.

  I did some more thinking, in addition to doing what I had gone there to do, and I bought a comb for a quarter and combed my hair. The comb lost a couple te
eth in the process. It was really shoddy compared to the one I’d thrown away.

  Then I went back to the ticket window. “Bordentown, South Carolina,” I said. “One way.”

  The clerk started hunting for the Bordentown tickets, then did an elaborate double take. “You were just here a minute ago,” he said.

  “Well, maybe fifteen minutes.”

  “You cashed in a ticket. A Bordentown ticket.”

  “I know.”

  “And now you want to buy it back?”

  “That was a Boston-to-Bordentown ticket,” I said. “What I want is a New York-to-Bordentown ticket”

  “Whyntcha just trade it in the first place and save me the aggravation?”

  “I didn’t realize that I wanted to go to Bordentown.”

  “What are you, a wise guy?”

  “Can’t I just buy a ticket?”

  “You people. I don’t know. Think everybody’s got all the time in the world.”

  The fare from New York to Bordentown was thirty-three dollars and four cents, and I had to go through various pockets until I got that sum together. While I did this, he talked to himself. He wouldn’t tell me when the next bus left. I had to use one of the house phones and call Information. They told me there was a bus leaving in two and a half hours. It made express stops from New York to Raleigh, then made local stops all the way to Miami. It would put me in Bordentown in a little over forty hours.

  The only thing I knew about Bordentown was that it was in South Carolina, and that somebody named Mary Beth Hawkins probably lived there once. And that I evidently wanted to go there.

  I had four dollars and seventy-nine cents left. That was a lot less than thirty-three dollars and four cents, but it was a lot more than a quarter, so I was ahead of the game and playing on the house’s money.

  I was also starving. I found a lunch counter in the building and had two hamburgers and an order of french fries and three cups of coffee. It certainly wasn’t a macrobiotic meal. It wasn’t even very good, but that didn’t seem to matter. I ate everything but the napkin.