One Night Stands & Lost weekends - By Lawrence Block Page 0,1
what you remember.)
Laurence Janifer, a friend of mine who liked the story far more than it could possibly have deserved, brought it to the attention of Judith Merril, known as the “little mother of science fiction,” who chose it for her very prestigious best-of-the-year collection. Go figure.
The planet on which the story takes place is called Althea in a nod to the Richard Lovelace poem “To Althea from Prison,” which begins, “Stone walls do not a prison make.” I accordingly called the story “Make a Prison,” although that’s not a very good title, is it? If I had wanted a good title, all I had to do was move on to the poem’s second line: “Nor iron bars a cage.” Now that’s a title. And, since I get to decide these things, that’s the title it’s going to have from now on, starting right here in this volume: “Nor Iron Bars a Cage.” The rest of the story’s not much, Larry Janifer and Judy Merril notwithstanding, but that’s a damn nice title.
Lawrence Block
New York
2008
One Night Stands
Introduction
IF MEMORY SERVES…
IN 1956, FROM THE BEGINNING OF AUGUST through the end of October, I lived in Greenwich Village and worked in the mail room at Pines Publications. I was a student at Antioch College, in Yellow Springs, Ohio, which sounds like a hell of a commute, but that’s not how it worked. At Antioch students spent two terms a year studying on campus and two terms working at jobs the school arranged for them, presumably designed to give them hands-on experience in their intended vocational area. Like a majority of students, I had spent my entire freshman year on campus. Now, at the onset of my second year, I was ready to begin my first co-op job. I knew I wanted to be a writer, so I went through the school’s list and picked a job at a publishing house.
Pines published a paperback line, Popular Library, a batch of comic books, and a couple dozen magazines, including some of the last remaining pulps in existence. (Ranch Romances, I recall, was one of them. It was what the title would lead you to believe.) I worked five days a week from nine to five, shunting interoffice mail from one desk to another, and doing whatever else they told me to do. My weekly salary was forty bucks, and every Friday I got a pay envelope with $34 in it.
I lived in the Village, at 54 Barrow Street, where I shared a one-bedroom apartment with two other Antioch co-ops. My share of the monthly rent was $30, so I guess it fit the traditional guideline of a week’s pay. I know I never had any money, but I never missed any meals, either, and God knows it was an exciting place to be and an exciting time to be there. (I was eighteen, and on my own, so I suppose any place would have been exciting, but at the time I thought the Village was the best place in the world. Now, all these years later, I haven’t changed my mind about that.)
I didn’t do much writing during those months. I’d realized three years earlier that writing was what I wanted to do, and every now and then I actually wrote something. Poems, mostly, and story fragments. I sent things to magazines and they sent them back. At Antioch, I taped the rejection slips on the wall over my desk, like the heads of animals I’d slain. Sort of.
One weekend afternoon, I sat down at the kitchen table on Barrow Street and wrote “You Can’t Lose.” It was pretty much the way it appears here, but it didn’t end. It just sort of trailed off. I showed it to a couple of friends. I probably showed it to a girlfriend, in the hope that it would get me laid, and it probably didn’t work. Then I forgot about it, and at the end of October I went back to campus.
Where at some point I remembered the story and dug it out and sent it to a magazine called Manhunt. All I knew about Manhunt was that most of the stories in Evan Hunter’s collection The Jungle Kids had first appeared in its pages. I’d admired those stories, and it struck me that a magazine that would publish them might like my story. So I sent it off, and it stayed there for a while, and then back it came.