The Seventh Step by Bill Sands

Author:Bill Sands
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: G&D Media
Published: 2019-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

Sometime in mid-September the bound, dust-jacketed first copy of My Shadow Ran Fast reached us. Pony and I went out of our heads.

All day and far into the night we rode around showing the book to everyone who had helped us. The Hollands and the Thompsons, of course, as well as every merchant who had been patient about our bills, every sponsor who had helped a man out of Lansing. To just about everybody we knew, to be honest.

I was about to know a great many more people. The publishers wanted me to go on a nationwide promotion tour.

When they agreed to pay my expenses, I took off. Cleveland was first. In the next sixty days I made more than two hundred separate appearances. On two occasions I made more than ten appearances a day. I appeared on national television, local television, local radio, and national radio. I was interviewed by newspapers and magazines, spoke at luncheons and dinners. In Los Angeles I did twenty-three different shows in two days. It was as rough as anything I’ve ever gone through.

But the roughness wasn’t the problem. The problem was that Pony and I had been living for months on the promise of the book royalties. And now the time we’d eagerly awaited had come—and the money wasn’t coming in. Sure the book was selling. But not enough. At this rate there would be only a few thousand to spread among my creditors. I was disappointed and heartbroken.

Yes, I was doing the work I wanted to be doing. I was spreading the word about the Seventh Step, and using every bit of this chance to do it. But how was I to make a living for my family if my book didn’t sell?

There was one more trip scheduled. To Chicago. When it was over, I promised myself, I would have to seriously consider the insurance job—still miraculously open. If I took the job, I would do what I could about the Seventh Step in my spare time. I would not, could not, quit the program, but we had to eat.

My rationale for being able to take a job now was one man—Ezra Kingsley. All the time I was on the road he had written me two or three times a week.

I got the letters out and reread passages I had marked.

The inmate in today’s prison feels cut off from the large forces that determine his future. This leads to apathy and indifference; but we are finding a way, Bill, to peel off the layers of hardened artificialities that separate him from his real self. We have found a way to show these cons that a thinking and feeling man is never a helpless man.

On juvenile delinquency, he said,

Few juveniles start out on an evening with any intent to steal. The idea usually comes up after some youngster has met a friend and they have been somewhere together. Most youngsters don’t want to steal and neither boy would do so by himself. But neither do they want to be called chicken so they go ahead and break into some place.

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