Then I really looked.

And there it was. In his open suitcase. Mumbo Jumbo. As ugly and shitty and creepy as ever. I felt spooked the way I'd used to.

And abruptly realized. "No. You don't mean… You're the one who stole it?"

He just grinned.

"But I thought it was Coach Hayes. I thought…"

He shook his head. "No, me."

My stomach felt hollow. I don't remember what we talked about after that. To tell you the truth, the conversation was kind of awkward. I finished my beer and went home. And Joey returned to Hollywood.

But this is what I think. The other night, my son and I were watching a movie on television. David Copperfield. I never watch that kind of stuff, but my son had a book report due, and he hadn't read the book, so he was cheating, sort of, watching the movie. And I was helping him.

At the end, after David Copperfield becomes a success and all his friends have turned out losers, there's a part in this movie where you hear what he's thinking. "It isn't enough to have the luck," he says. "Or the talent. You've got to have the character."

Maybe so. But I keep thinking about Mumbo Jumbo and how, when I didn't touch the statue, I got my arm broken in the game. That was a turning point. If I'd stayed on the team and kept my grades up, could I have gone to Yale like Joey? Could I have been a winner too?

I keep thinking about Coach Hayes and his winning streak. Was that streak caused by the statue? I can't believe it.

But…

I remember Joey – the movie star – pointing at the statue he stole from the glass case in the school's front lobby. In his senior year. And everything kept getting better for him after that.

Then I think about myself. I love my kids and my wife.

But I felt so tired tonight when I got home from work… The bills… My son needs braces on his teeth, and…

Maybe Joey understood. Maybe David Copperfield was wrong.

Maybe it doesn't take talent. Or character.

Maybe all it takes is Mumbo Jumbo.

The Road to Damascus

In my introduction to this collection, I told you about Philip Klass and the influence he had on my fiction. I also mentioned a second writer who made a difference. In fact, if not for him, I would never have become a writer at all. Stirling Silliphant.

A little background. Earlier, I explained that my father died in World War II and that my mother, unable to work and simultaneously look after me, put me in an orphanage when I was around four. Part of me wonders if the woman who finally came to get me was in fact the woman who had left me. But let's assume she was. Still unable to watch me at home while earning a living, she arranged for me to live on a Mennonite farm. There, my confusion about where I belonged intensified. Seasons passed. Every Friday, I was put on a bus into town where my mother waited for me at the terminal. Every Sunday, I got on a bus to go back to the farm. When a child boarding on a different farm was killed by a car as he walked along the highway, my mother decided to keep me with her.

By now, she had remarried – to give me a father, she later said. But I was desperate for the affection of a male authority figure, and her new husband wasn't prepared to fill the role. He looked visibly uncomfortable if I called him "Father." In the years that followed, I thought of him as a stranger. The marriage itself wasn't a success. My mother and my stepfather argued so much that my memories of my youth are mostly about fear. Many nights, the arguments were so loud that I worried about my safety. Imitating scenes in movies, I stuffed pillows under my blankets in my bed, making them look as if I slept there. Then I crawled under my bed and dozed fitfully in what I hoped was a protected space.

We lived above a bar and later a hamburger joint. There wasn't enough money for a television or a phone. For entertainment on a Saturday night, I listened to Gunsmoke and Tarzan on the radio while watching drunks fight in the alley below me. On one occasion, my mother went out to use the pay phone in the alley, only to have a stray bullet shatter the booth's glass.

But as I grew older, I discovered movies. In those days, theatres were palaces, and audiences didn't jabber endlessly. To earn the money to see a film, I would set up pins in bowling alleys. Or if I couldn't get the work, I would stand at a crowded bus stop and pretend that I'd lost my bus fare. Someone was always kind enough to give me the fifteen cents, which I immediately spent getting into a movie theater.

And there I sat, hour after hour, in the silvery darkness, watching film after film (they had double features in those days), sometimes staying to see the movies twice. It didn't matter to me what kind of movies they were, although I confess I wasn't crazy about the ones with a lot of kissing. What did matter was that I was distracted from reality.

In retrospect, it seems logical that I would have wanted to become a storyteller, to distract others from their reality. But at the time, I was too confused to know what I wanted. I ran with a street gang. I treated grade school as an interruption of my spare time. High school was a little better. Our finances improved. We moved to a small house in the suburbs. The family arguments were less. Still, by the time I entered grade eleven, I was going nowhere.

That fall of 1960, with little interest in anything except pool halls and eight hours of television a day, I found myself (like a minor-league Saul on his way to Damascus) struck by a bolt of light that changed my life. Even now, I can be specific about the time and date – 8:30 p.m., Friday, October 7. The light was from my television and the first episode of a series called Route 66.

The show was about two young men who, in Jack Kerouac fashion, drove a Corvette across the United States in search of America and themselves. One of them was Tod, a rich kid from New York whose father had recently died, leaving such massive debts that, when the creditors finished, the only thing left was Tod's sports car. His partner, Buz, was a tough street kid from Hell's Kitchen, who had worked for Tod's father on the New York docks and had become friends with Tod. Because Route 66 was then the principal highway across the United States, its name was perfect as a title for the series. And because the series was as much about America as it was about Tod and Buz, the producers decided to film each episode on the locations that the characters were supposed to be visiting, although many were far from Route 66: Boston, Philadelphia, Biloxi, Santa Fe, Oregon City…

The first episode, "Black November," involved a small Southern town haunted by a grisly secret from years earlier – the ax murder of a German prisoner-of-war and the minister who tried to protect him. I'd never seen a story like it, not merely the mystery, suspense, and action (a scene involving a power saw remains vivid in my mind) but the appeal of the characters and the reality conveyed by the writing. I discovered that I was waiting eagerly for Friday night to come around again – and the next Friday night – and the next. There was something about the way the characters talked, the emotions they expressed, the values they believed in, that affected me deeply and woke my mind.

For the first time in my life, I began to study credits. Who on earth was responsible for this wonderful experience? One episode would be about shrimp boats in the Gulf of Mexico, with a plot that paralleled Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. Another would be about street gangs in Los Angeles, with poetical dialogue amid the squalor. Still another would be about cropdusting in Phoenix, with tragic overtones of Greek myth. Back then, I didn't know anything about Sartre or existentialism or the philosophy of the Beat generation. But even if I couldn't put a name to what I was experiencing, it made me feel emotionally and intellectually alive. Martin Milner and George Maharis were the stars. Still, despite their considerable acting talents, I felt uncharacteristically attracted to the minds behind the scenes, to the creative forces that invented the dramatic situations and put the words (sometimes spellbinding speeches that lasted five minutes) in the actors' mouths. Herbert B. Leonard was the producer. Sam Manners was the production chief. Okay. But still… Then I realized that one other name appeared prominently in the credits of almost every episode. Stirling Silliphant. Writer. My, my. A new thought.