CH01 - No Score

by Lawrence Block

  “I live upstairs of Bruno’s Barbershop. On the next block.”

  “I know where it is.”

  “There’s no door to my room. It got broken and I had to take it off, but there’s nobody else in the place at night so it doesn’t matter if there’s a door or not.”

  “How did the door get broken?”

  “A guy kicked it in. If you don’t mind about there not being a door—”

  “Well, it wouldn’t matter if we’re the only ones in the building, would it?”

  “No.”

  “So,” she said.

  I took hold of her hand. It felt much smaller in mine than you would have expected. We walked to the corner, turned, went to my place, and climbed the stairs. I put a light on and apologized for the mess. She said it didn’t matter. She said it looked romantic, with the slanting roof and the exposed rafters. “Like a garret,” she said. “You’ll be a great but unknown artist dying of tuberculosis and I’ll be your mistress and model, and you’ll get drunk and cough and spit blood and beat me.”

  I kissed her. She kissed in the same fresh open way she talked, holding nothing back. We stood there kissing for a long time.

  Then she took her sweatshirt off and turned around so that I could unhook her bra for her. She kicked off her sandals and stepped out of her dungarees and threw all her clothes in the corner. She stood watching eagerly as I got my clothes off and tossed them after hers. She put out her hand and touched me, and we floated down onto the bed like falling leaves.

  “Oh, wow,” she said. She burrowed close to me, her head tucked under my arm. “That was—”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Like unbelievable.”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s never been this good for me before.” She rolled over on her back and folded her hands together just below her breasts. I looked at her. She said, “I wish they were bigger.”

  “They’re beautiful.”

  “Tiny.”

  “So?”

  “So I can never be an actress in Italian movies.”

  “I can’t play basketball.”

  “Huh?”

  “Nothing important.”

  She sat up, looked down at me. “That’s the cutest thing,” she said.

  “I’m sort of attached to it.”

  “So am I, but in another way. It’s so beautiful. Do you think it would get all embarrassed if I gave it a kiss?”

  “There’s only one way to find out.”

  She curled into a ball and nestled her head in my lap. Her hair was clean and silky all over my legs.

  “Close your eyes,” she said.

  I closed them, but then I cheated and opened them again. It was so beautiful to watch her. She had her eyes shut and her face glowed with contentment. She looked like a baby nursing.

  She stopped to say, “What a funny taste!”

  “That’s you.”

  “It is? I guess it must be. Funny.”

  She came up for air again to say, “It must like me. Look how big it got.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I really groove on sucking you. Is that terribly perverted of me?”

  “Only of you don’t do anything else.”

  “What else should I do?”

  I stretched her out on her back and showed her.

  Later on she was dozing lightly. I put my hand on her arm and her eyes opened.

  “I don’t want to scare you or anything, Hallie, but did I hurt you before?”

  “I don’t think so. Why?”

  “Well, look.” I pointed to the stain. “That must have come from one of us, and I wouldn’t say anything, but if I did hurt you or anything—”

  “Oh,” she said.

  “I just thought—”

  “I guess I bled a little. I didn’t realize.”

  “Is that common? I mean, oh, do you usually?”

  She turned away. “Well, see—”

  “What?”

  “I should have told you, I guess. But we had such a good thing going and I didn’t want anything to get in the way.” Her eyes met mine. “I’m a virgin. I mean I was. Until just now. Chip? What’s so funny?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Then why are you laughing?”

  “It’s not important.” I put my hands on her. “Look, when do you have to get up in the morning? What I’m getting at is how much longer can you stay?”

  “I should have been asleep hours ago.”

  “Oh.”

  “But there’s time, Chip, if that’s what you meant. In fact, you don’t even have to hurry. There’s plenty of time, actually.”

  Epilogue

  I ALREADY TOLD you that I like epilogues, and knowing what happened to the characters after the story ended. Actually there isn’t too much I can put in this particular epilogue because not that much time has passed since then. And the only character I know what happened to is me, and I’m still in the same room over the same barbershop. I’ve got a new door, but otherwise things are about the same.

  But I figured this is probably the only book I’ll ever write, so when else am I ever going to get a chance to write an epilogue?

  Hallie went home, and the next morning she left for college. She said she would drop a card with her address on it, and if I was ever in Wisconsin I could look her up. I haven’t gotten the card yet.

  Mr. Bruno replaced my door. I guess I already told you about that, though. And he didn’t exactly ask about the bullet hole in his ceiling. “You a gooda boy,” he said at one point, as if willing himself to believe it. “You donta shoot anybody, and anybody donta shoota you.” He seemed vaguely frightened of me after that.

  The car wash closed for the winter. This happened almost immediately, and when they told me, I had the crazy feeling that they were closing the car wash because Hallie had gone to college. In a way it was sort of like that. More people get their cars washed in the summer than in the winter anyway, and this is especially true in this particular city, where there are all sorts of people up for the summer from New York City. So when the summer is over and college kids go back to school and summer people go back to the city, there’s not enough business to support the car wash. I was out of a job, but since it wasn’t one with an Outstanding Opportunity For Advancement, I wasn’t what you might call shattered.

  Then I happened to get to talking with Mr. Burger. I was lying around my room, reading a book and wondering where I would go next, and what would I do when I got there, when old Bruno came tearing up the stairs to tell me that one of his customers had a flat tire. “You change it, he givea you money,” he said.

  I changed it and he gavea me a dollar. The car was a Lincoln Continental Mark HI. Not that it’s any more work changing the tire on an expensive car, but if it had been, say, a beatup ’51 Ford, then I might not have been exactly staggered by getting a lousy dollar for changing it. I still don’t think I would have been overwhelmed, though.

  “Gee,” I said, “thanks very much. Now I can go get a hamburger and maybe some french fries. Man, I can hardly wait.”

  “Sounds as though you haven’t eaten in a long time,” Mr. Burger said.

  He missed the point, but I went along with it. “I’m out of work,” I said, “but through no fault of my own. The position was temporary and the work seasonal.”

  “The car wash,” he said, snapping his fingers. “You were the kid who wiped the windows on the passenger’s side.”

  “I remember your car now. You brought it in every Friday night.”

  “As soon as I got up from the city. That’s right.” He offered me a cigarette. I took it even though I don’t smoke, and told him that if it was all right with him I would save it and smoke it later, after my meal. He gave me a funny look, then said sure, he didn’t care, and lit his own cigarette. “So you’re out of work,” he said. “Tough break, all right. I wish I could help you out, but I’m afraid I’m not in the car wash business myself.”

  “What business are you in?
”

  “Publishing.”

  “What type?”

  “Books,” he said warily. “What makes you ask?”

  “No reason.”

  “Because I haven’t got anything for a person without experience.”

  “Oh, I’ve got experience,” I said. “I’ve got more experience than you would believe, even if it won’t do me any good. I’ve done more things in the past nine or ten months—”

  “I can imagine. When I was your age—” He shook his head. “What did I give you, a buck? Why don’t you hang on to it and I’ll buy you that hamburger you were drooling over and we’ll talk.”

  “About what?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe we can do each other some good.”

  So Mr. Burger worked up a contract for my book and gave me money for living expenses and bought me a typewriter and got me a beautiful blond secretary.

  Not really.

  What he did, really, was listen to me, talk about where I’d been and what I’d done, and nod every now and then, and smoke a lot of cigarettes, and wonder why I wouldn’t smoke one but kept saving them for later. And he told me, when I was all done, that I had a hell of a story to tell and that it was the kind of story he’d like to bring to the attention of the reading public.

  “You be sure you put all the sex in,” he said. “What you have to do is hook the reader’s attention and rivet his eyes to the page right from the start, and then you make him laugh and cry by tugging at his heartstrings, but if you want to sell books, you’d better make sure you write something that’ll give the son of a bitch a hard-on.”

  And he said he would take a chance on me.

  “I’m a gambling man,” he said. “I’m willing to take a risk. Now I’ll tell you what I’ll do. It won’t take you long to write this all up, but you’ll need something to live on in the meantime. You got a typewriter?” I didn’t. “Well, you got to have a typewriter and money to live on. I figure you ought to be able to get a decent typewriter for twenty dollars. And living expenses—suppose I give you fifty bucks total, and you’ll see how it goes.”

  I finally found a typewriter for thirty-five dollars. Not a very good typewriter, but since I can’t type with more than two fingers, I suppose a good typewriter would be wasted on me. That left me with fifteen dollars, plus the dollar for changing the flat tire, plus the few dollars I had set aside.

  Now Mr. Burger is supposed to read this, if he remembers who I am. And if he likes it he can publish it, and then I’ll get some money, I guess. I don’t know exactly how it works but I must get something. I’ve been killing myself writing all this, though I suppose it doesn’t show when you read it. I don’t suppose it’s very good, either. And I probably put in either too much sex or not enough, and I don’t even know which. And I’m sure I told you too many things you didn’t want to know and skipped things you would have wanted to hear more about, but I never did this before.

  And that’s the whole point, actually, now that I think about it. The first time is the hardest. There are probably other morals, too, but as sure as I like epilogues, I hate it when the author steps in at the end of the book and tells you what it was all about. Either you find it out for yourself or it’s not worth knowing about. So I’ll just say goodbye and thanks for reading this, and I’m sorry it wasn’t better than it was.

  A New Afterword

  By The Author

  No Score is the first of four novels featuring Chip Harrison, and they all bore the lead character’s byline when they first appeared as paperbacks from Gold Medal Books. The working title of No Score was The Lecher in the Rye, which sums it up well enough; it’s a picaresque account of a young man’s desperate attempt to become sexually experienced.

  Gold Medal did very well with the book, and a couple of years later I wrote a sequel. And, because I liked the voice, I wanted to write a third book, but how many times could one lad lose his virginity? So in the third book I put him to work for a private detective, and books three and four are mysteries and could be called Nero Wolfe pastiches.

  In 1984 The Countryman Press reprinted No Score and Chip Harrison Scores Again in a double volume and asked the ideal person to write an afterword:

  Some Afterthoughts

  by Hilton Crofield

  I don’t know why they asked me to write this. Somebody’s original brilliant idea was for me to write an introduction to the new edition of No Score and Chip Harrison Scores Again, and I said OK. Don’t ask me why. Then somebody else got the bright idea of calling the double volume Introducing Chip Harrison, which meant that I would be saddled with the job of introducing Introducing Chip Harrison, and I said that, if you really want to know, I’d rather go into the bathroom and squeeze a pimple. So they said OK, we’ll make it an afterword, and I said OK again. Don’t ask me why. It’s not as if I was getting paid for this.

  Chip Harrison needs no introduction, and I don’t suppose he needs an afterword either, so you can stop reading right now . . . If you’re still with me, I just want to tell you that these are my kind of books. Chip Harrison is a sort of a lecher on the wry side. More than that, when you finish the book you want to call him up and talk about it.

  Listen, I’ve got a tip for you. Don’t do it. Years ago I wrote a book and dais how sometimes I wanted to call the author in the middle of the night, and this guy named Ottinger had his name down as author and so many weird kids called him up in the middle of the night that the poor guy lost it. He went up to Maine or Vermont and quit writing and only leaves his house once a year. He always sees his shadow, and it’s always six more weeks of winter.

  I wouldn’t want that to happen to Chip Harrison. I’ve already read the rest of the books, and I know that Chip went to work for Leo Haig and takes care of tropical fish when he’s not helping Haig solve crimes. If you haven’t read those books, go out and get them right now instead of wasting your time reading this crap I have to write.

  Anyway, I like old Chip. I think Phoebe would like him, too. And I hope you liked him, but if you didn’t, well, tough. What do you expect me to do about it, anyway?

  Oh, yeah. The business about the name. Lawrence Block is now listed as the author of the Chip Harrison books. They had Chip’s name as author originally, but now they’re supposed to be by this Lawrence Block. Same as my book is supposed to be by old Ottinger.

  Well, I don’t have to believe that if I don’t want to. And neither do you. (Hilton Crofield, “Some Afterthoughts,” afterword to Introducing Chip Harrison, by Lawrence Block, The Countrymen Press, 1984)

  That’s what Hilton Crofield has to say, and I wouldn’t attempt to improve on it. If you’ve enjoyed No Score, you’ll very likely have a good time with Chip Harrison Scores Again, and may then wend your way through Make Out with Murder and The Topless Tulip Caper. If you didn’t much care for No Score, well, you probably won’t like the others, either. But I don’t want to talk you out of anything. Best to buy them anyway, just to be on the safe side.

  —Lawrence Block

  Greenwich Village

  Lawrence Block (lawbloc@gmail.com) welcomes your email responses; he reads them all, and replies when he can.

  «——THE END——»