Step by Step Read online

  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 no
w 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 shrim
p 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.