The Burglar in the Closet - By Lawrence Block Page 0,11
at all that education and training stretching out in front of them, four years of med school and two years internship and then a residency, and when you’re a kid a few years looks like a lifetime. Your perspective on time changes when you get to be our age, but by then it’s too late, right?”
I guess we were about the same age, getting a little closer to forty than thirty but not quite close enough to panic about it. He was a big guy, taller than me, maybe six-two or six-three. His hair was a medium brown with red highlights, and he wore it fairly short in a deliberately tousled fashion. He had an open honest face, long and narrow, marked by warm brown eyes and a long down-curving nose and sprinkled with freckles. A year or two back he’d grown a mustache of the macho variety sported by male models in men’s cologne ads. It was redder than his hair and didn’t look quite bad enough for me to counsel him to shave it off, but I sort of wished he would. Beneath the mustache was a full mouth overflowing with the nicest teeth you could possibly imagine.
“Anyway, here you’ve got a load of dentists who secretly wish they were doctors. Some of them don’t even keep it a secret. And you’ve got others who went into dentistry because, hell, a man has to go into something unless he wants to go on welfare, and it looked like a decent deal, set your own hours, a steady buck, no boss over you, some prestige, and all the rest of it. I was one of this group, Bern, but in my case something wonderful happened. Know what it was?”
“Urg?”
“I fell in love with my work. Yep, that’s what happened. One thing I recognized right off the bat is dentistry’s about solving problems. Now they’re not problems of life and death, and I’ll tell you, that’s fine with me. I sure as hell don’t want patients dying on me. The doctors are welcome to all that drama. I’d rather deal with smaller life questions, like Can This Tooth Be Saved? But a man comes in here, or a woman, and I look around and take X-rays, and there’s a problem and we deal with it then and there.”
No urg this time. He was rattling along too well to need encouragement from me.
“I’m just so damn lucky I wound up in this line of work, Bern. I remember my best friend and I were trying to decide what we wanted to do with our lives. I picked dental school and he went into pharmacy school. His educational route looked easier and his potential income was certainly much higher. You own your own store, you branch out and open other stores, hell, you’re a businessman, you can make a ton. For a little while there I wondered if maybe I shouldn’t have taken the road he took. But just for a little while. Jesus, can you picture me standing behind a counter selling Kotex and laxatives? I couldn’t be a businessman, Bern. I’d be rotten at it. Hey, open a little wider, huh? Perfect, beautiful. I’d be rotten at it and I’d go out of my bird with boredom. I read somewhere that pharmacists get more action than any other occupational group. Some study out of California. I wonder if it’s true or not? What woman would want to ball a druggist, anyway?”
He went on with this line of thought and my mind drifted off a ways. I was a captive audience if there ever was one, and I had to sit there and take it but I didn’t, by God, have to pay attention.
And then he was saying, “So I sure as hell wouldn’t want to be a pharmacist, and I swear I wouldn’t want to be anything but what I am. Satisfied Sam, huh? True, though.”
“Urg.”
“But I’m normal, Bernie. I have fantasies just like everybody else in this world. I try to think what I’d be if dentistry just didn’t happen to be an option for me. Just asking myself the hypothetical question, like. And because it’s hypothetical and I know it’s hypothetical, why, I can feel free to indulge myself. I can pick something that would call for someone a lot more adventurous than I actually know myself to be.”
“Urg.”
“I try to have fantasies of being a professional athlete, for instance. I play a lot of squash and a