Read Online The Boy Detective by Roger Rosenblatt - Free Book Online

is “infinitely stranger” than fiction, how could one ever solve its mysteries?
    In any case—and frankly, you can get a fine old headache trying to work out “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon,” the very title of which suggests that Stevens intended to give us a headache—the poem is happy. I was the world in which I walked. And though I moved through the loneliest air, hardly was I lonely. Not less was I myself. I was more myself. My boy detective. My self-created self. Happy. Fairly happy. In case you were wondering.
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    I LIKE LIVING my life without telling anyone, as if whatever I did during the course of a day—get the car an oil change, shop for coconut ice cream, sit in Starbucks with my grande bold coffee and yellow legal pad—was between me and me and no one else. I would not say that what I do is none of your business. That’s not what I mean. Everybody’s business is everybody’s business once in a while. What I mean is that doing things like taking a walk in the city at night without telling anyone makes the thing being done a modest gift to myself. We live most of our lives this way, do we not? Unnoticed and unannounced. And who would I tell anyway? Do you really care if I buy coconut ice cream, or if one winter evening I leave my classroom and roam about New York in search of my inconsequential life? Would you love me more or less if I told you?
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    T ELL US ABOUT yourself, anyway.
    Not much to tell.
    Tell us anyway.
    Look, Lieutenant, I try to cooperate with the police as much as possible. But I don’t see—
    Just a few basic facts.
    Okay, a few. I play the piano by ear, jazz and pop mainly. Too lazy to learn to read music. I type with two fingers—one, really, the index finger on my right hand. The left index I use for capital letters. I swim with my head completely submerged, not turning it from side to side to breathe, as one is supposed to do. I play tennis by the seat of my pants, running around my backhand to convert it to a forehand. I bank by guessing my balance, keeping whatever I can remember about checks I’ve written in my head.
    You don’t!
    I do.
    Do you get the balance right?
    Not even close. In fact, I’ve never learned to do anything properly except drive a car, which I did by taking lessons from the AAA after failing the road test twice because I was trying to imagine what the rules of the road might be.
    What about writing?
    I write by ear, too. Oh yes. One other thing I’ve learned to do correctly is kayaking. I took lessons in kayaking. That’s about it, Lieutenant. Are we done?
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    I NSTEAD OF ALL those facts, how about some feeling? Feeling is first, says E. E. Cummings, after all. How I wish I could capture for you that intake of breath on a cloudy Saturday morning, when I had left the gloom of my home behind me, emerged from under the green awning into the leaden air, saluted Carroll the doorman, and started out on my day’s adventure. The gashes of sunlight. The poem of the city—every person of every shape, style of dress, and color moving through the stanzas of the streets, each dreaming, in one dream or another, of love or money. A tremendous crime story lay before me, I was certain, a mystery so tangled, monstrous, so full of misleading coincidences, cross-purposes, blind alleys, and the darkest intents, that only the greatest sleuth in the world was capable of seeing into it.
    That man there, at the perfume counter in Woolworth’s. Wasn’t he the one I had spotted two weeks earlier, coming out of the White Castle, wearing a yellow-and-blue plaid scarf and a long black cashmere coat, his hands stuffed hard in the pockets? Only two weeks ago, his hair was blond, not red, and he wore it longer, and his pants weren’t creased, and he didn’t walk with a limp. But it was the same fellow. I could tell by the ears. As every PI knows, you can change your appearance nearly completely, but