Campus Tramp

by Lawrence Block

  The summer before my senior year, we visited the campus on the way home from a Florida vacation. I seem to recall a student showing us around, pointing out buildings like a hunting dog pointing out game birds. Did it make an impression? Not that I recall. My parents thought I should apply there, so I did. They thought I should apply to Cornell as well, so I did that, too. I was a pretty suggestible kid, and inclined to do as I was told.

  All of that changed, but never mind.

  I was accepted at both schools, and I learned I’d get a nice scholarship to Cornell, having scored high on the New York State scholarship exam. My folks sent me to Antioch anyway and not without financial sacrifice. They really thought it would be good for me, and, looking back, I guess it was.

  I spent the whole of my freshman year on campus in Yellow Springs, as did a substantial percentage of entering students. I had known for a couple of years that I was going to become a writer, and I wrote some poems and short stories. I submitted them to magazines with no real hope of success and regarded the inevitable rejection slips as badges of honor and ample compensation for my efforts. I displayed them with some pride on my dorm room wall.

  The school year ran through June, and come August I was in New York, living in Greenwich Village and working in the mail room at Pines Publications, a diverse publisher of paperbacks and magazines. I returned to Antioch for the fall semester, spent the winter job period working in Buffalo at the Erie County Comptroller’s Office, went back to Antioch for the spring term, and then arranged that my next job would be my Own Plans. I went home, bought an aging Buick, and drove it to Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where I intended to get a subsistence job and write stories. I’d almost sold a story that I’d written while living in the Village, and figured I could rewrite it and sell it, and write other things and sell them, too.

  I got a room in an attic and wrote a batch of stories, but the Cape didn’t work out too well, and I wound up in New York. I went to an employment agency, took a blind test, and landed a job as an editor at a literary agency. Every day I would read a batch of stories submitted, with fees, by what the world had not yet learned to call wannabes. It was my task to write them lengthy letters assuring them that they were supremely talented (they were not), that it was the plot structure of their stories that was at fault (that was the least of it), and that we would welcome further submissions from them, with further fees. (That last, I must say, was the truth.)

  It was purely wonderful experience, the best possible training for a writer, and I could see right away that this was not a job I wanted to abandon at the end of a three-month Antioch job period. Besides, I’d sold the story I revised on the Cape, and had every reason to assume I’d sell more, now that I was working for a literary agent. So I dropped out of Antioch and kept the job.

  If it was too good to give up after three months, it wasn’t so great that I wanted to hang on to it for more than a year. I resigned at the end of the spring of 1958, went back to Buffalo, wrote a sensitive lesbian novel in a couple of weeks, sent it to my agent, and went off to Mexico with my buddy Steve Schwerner. We came back sooner than we’d planned, and, on the strength of that lesbian novel, I got an assignment from my agent to do a book for Midwood Tower, a new firm under the aegis of one Harry Shorten, devoted to the publication of sexy paperbacks.

  I wrote a book called Carla, and it was catnip to Harry Shorten. There was one scene in which the titular heroine (and that’s the right adjective, trust me) has it off with a gas pump jockey in the service station’s grease pit, and Harry thought that scene was the cat’s pajamas. It blew him away, so to speak, and he wanted more.

  Meanwhile, I’d made arrangements to return to Antioch, where I’d spend the fall quarter taking classes, the winter quarter editing the school newspaper, and the spring back in class again.

  Well, here’s the question: How are you gonna keep ’em down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree? All I wanted to do, really, was write books and stories. And I’d sold upwards of a dozen stories to the crime fiction magazines, and some articles to men’s magazines, and a little of this and a little of that elsewhere. Harry Shorten wanted more books from me, and the first house that got a look at that lesbian novel, Fawcett Crest, wanted to publish it. So I could write books and stories and actually get paid for them, or I could read Henry Fielding and Tobias Smollett and write papers on the Eighteenth Century English Novel.

  Well, what do you think happened?

  I got through the year, but don’t ask me how. I did try to drop out during the fall but was persuaded to change my mind. I edited the Antioch Record winter quarter, and that went okay, but during the two academic terms I did not exactly cover myself with glory.

  Then summer came, and I couldn’t find a co-op job that I liked, and I don’t suppose I looked very hard for one. I arranged to go on my Own Plans again and moved to New York, where I took a room at the Hotel Rio on West Forty-Seventh Street and began writing books.

  The first was Campus Tramp.

  You were probably wondering if I’d ever get to it, and so was I. But here we are, in July of 1959, and there I was, in my room at the Rio, typing furiously. By this time I’d written and sold four books—Strange Are the Ways of Love, published by Crest Books under the name of Lesley Evans, and three novels published by Midwood under the name Sheldon Lord, Carla (which I wrote in Buffalo) and two books I knocked off during that year at Antioch, A Strange Kind of Love and Born to be Bad.

  Now my agent informed me that a new publisher, Bill Hamling, was starting a company to be called Nightstand Books, and that I’d been chosen to write for them. Midwood had been paying me six hundred dollars a book, and Hamling would pay seven hundred fifty dollars.

  I decided a college novel might be just the ticket. I’d been trying to figure out what to try for Fawcett/Crest—after all, they had paid me two thousand dollars for that lesbian novel. But on some level I didn’t really believe I was good enough to write for that good a house, and that self-doubt kept me from trying. I’d been thinking my second book for Crest might be set on a campus, and when Nightstand came along I took that idea and aimed it at them.

  I wrote Campus Tramp in a couple of weeks.

  The only college with which I was familiar was Antioch, so it was an easy decision to set the book there—or at its fictional equivalent, which I called Clifton. And, to amuse myself and any other Antiochian who might read the thing, I gave every character in the book the name of an actual Antioch dormitory as a surname. Since most of the dorms were named after people, guaranteeing them the immortality of, say, Lewis J. Bennett, it wasn’t a stretch to fasten their names to human beings, albeit fictional ones. While I was at it, I named the buildings on Clifton’s campus after some Antioch people.

  I finished the book, walked a block and a half to Fifth Avenue, and turned in the manuscript to my agent, who dutifully sent it to Hamling, who thought it was just fine, even if it didn’t have anybody screwing in a grease pit. I was invited to pick a new pen name and chose Andrew Shaw. Mr. Shaw now had an assignment to produce regularly for Nightstand, even as Mr. Lord was still very much in demand at Midwood. The only place that didn’t want me, it turned out, was Antioch.

  It was not long after I turned in Campus Tramp and started another writing project that a letter from Antioch’s Student Personnel Committee reached me at the Rio, informing me that a review of my performance the preceding year left them with the sense that I might be happier elsewhere.

  I thought that was damned perceptive of them. I would indeed be happier elsewhere, no question about it, and wasn’t it considerate of them to point that out to me? I’d already tried to drop out once and had been talked out of it by my parents, but now I had the perfect excuse. I’d been, as the British say, sent down. (It sounds much nicer than expelled, doesn’t it?) And, having been sent down, I could stay down. I was free.

  I think—and thought at the time—that I could have talked my way back in. The tone of the letter suggested as
much. But why would I want to do that? I had books to write.

  And then a curious thing happened. Campus Tramp was published, and word got around Yellow Springs that it was my revenge on the school, that I’d savaged the place as a way of getting even.

  Getting even for what, for God’s sake? For expelling me? That was the nicest thing anyone had ever done for me. For schooling me for several years? I can’t think where I might have more enjoyably or profitably spent those particular years. I had no quarrel with the place, and if it was anything vis-‡-vis Antioch, the book was a wink and a nod, a veritable homage.

  Besides, when I wrote it I still fully expected to return to Yellow Springs in the fall. I had a year to go, and then I was scheduled to graduate. I didn’t much want to go back, but I’d planned to do it anyway, so I certainly didn’t think of myself as burning any bridges with Campus Tramp.

  Go figure.

  Over the years, the story of Linda Shepard became a part of campus folklore. I’ve heard of copies commanding unlikely prices at Senior Sales. A young woman I know—she’s since become a Facebook friend—has been known to give dramatic readings at alumni gatherings.

  Nightstand reissued the book a few times over the years, in one instance doing the curious task of un-Bowdlerizing it—some poor schnook of an editor went through it and added dirty words, in recognition of looser standards in the industry. Consider this schlepper whenever you start to think you have the worst job in the world.

  I never thought Campus Tramp would be around in the present century, and never thought I’d want to allow it to happen—or to put my own name on it. But when Creeping Hemlock Press proposed a handsome new edition, how could I say no?

  After all, I wrote it. And I’m never going to have my name on a high school, or a bridge, or even a public toilet, so I have to take my Lewis J. Bennett–style immortality where I find it. Remarkably, I find I’m out-and-out delighted that it’s now available as an ebook. An old friend from—yes, Bennett High—recently emailed me to say he’d read and enjoyed Campus Tramp, and somehow found elements to praise therein. And praise, like immortality, I’ll take where I find it. Why not?

  —Lawrence Block

  Greenwich Village

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

  A BIOGRAPHY OF LAWRENCE BLOCK

  Lawrence Block (b. 1938) is the recipient of a Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America and an internationally renowned bestselling author. His prolific career spans over one hundred books, including four bestselling series as well as dozens of short stories, articles, and books on writing. He has won four Edgar and Shamus Awards, two Falcon Awards from the Maltese Falcon Society of Japan, the Nero and Philip Marlowe Awards, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Private Eye Writers of America, and the Cartier Diamond Dagger from the Crime Writers Association of the United Kingdom. In France, he has been awarded the title Grand Maitre du Roman Noir and has twice received the Societe 813 trophy.

  Born in Buffalo, New York, Block attended Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Leaving school before graduation, he moved to New York City, a locale that features prominently in most of his works. His earliest published writing appeared in the 1950s, frequently under pseudonyms, and many of these novels are now considered classics of the pulp fiction genre. During his early writing years, Block also worked in the mailroom of a publishing house and reviewed the submission slush pile for a literary agency. He has cited the latter experience as a valuable lesson for a beginning writer.

  Block’s first short story, “You Can’t Lose,” was published in 1957 in Manhunt, the first of dozens of short stories and articles that he would publish over the years in publications including American Heritage, Redbook, Playboy, Cosmopolitan, GQ, and the New York Times. His short fiction has been featured and reprinted in over eleven collections including Enough Rope (2002), which is comprised of eighty-four of his short stories.

  In 1966, Block introduced the insomniac protagonist Evan Tanner in the novel The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep. Block’s diverse heroes also include the urbane and witty bookseller—and thief-on-the-side—Bernie Rhodenbarr; the gritty recovering alcoholic and private investigator Matthew Scudder; and Chip Harrison, the comical assistant to a private investigator with a Nero Wolfe fixation who appears in No Score, Chip Harrison Scores Again, Make Out with Murder, and The Topless Tulip Caper. Block has also written several short stories and novels featuring Keller, a professional hit man. Block’s work is praised for his richly imagined and varied characters and frequent use of humor.

  A father of three daughters, Block lives in New York City with his second wife, Lynne. When he isn’t touring or attending mystery conventions, he and Lynne are frequent travelers, as members of the Travelers’ Century Club for nearly a decade now, and have visited about 150 countries.

  A four-year-old Block in 1942.

  Block during the summer of 1944, with his baby sister, Betsy.

  Block’s 1955 yearbook picture from Bennett High School in Buffalo, New York.

  Block in 1983, in a cap and leather jacket. Block says that he “later lost the cap, and some son of a bitch stole the jacket. Don’t even ask about the hair.”

  Block with his eldest daughter, Amy, at her wedding in October 1984.

  Seen here around 1990, Block works in his office on New York’s West 13th Street with, he says, “a bad haircut, an ugly shirt, and a few extra pounds.”

  Block at a bookstore appearance in support of A Walk Among the Tombstones, his tenth Matthew Scudder novel, on Veterans Day, 1992.

  Block and his wife, Lynne.

  Block and Lynne on vacation “someplace exotic.”

  Block race walking in an international marathon in Niagara Falls in 2005. He got the John Deere cap at the John Deere Museum in Grand Detour, Illinois, and still has it today.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  copyright © 1959 by Lawrence Block

  cover design by Elizabeth Connor

  ISBN: 978-1-4532-0953-0

  This edition published in 2010 by Open Road Integrated Media

  180 Varick Street

  New York, NY 10014

  www.openroadmedia.com