by Stephen King
After Christmas vacation of our sophomore year, Dodie came back to school resplendent. The dowdy old black skirt had been replaced by a cranberry-colored one that stopped at her knees instead of halfway down her shins. The tatty knee-socks had been replaced by nylon stockings, which looked pretty good because she had finally shaved the luxuriant mat of black hair off her legs. The ancient sleeveless blouse had given way to a soft wool sweater. She’d even had a permanent. Dodie was a girl transformed, and you could see by her face that she knew it. I have no idea if she saved for those new clothes, if they were given to her for Christmas by her parents, or if she went through a hell of begging that finally bore dividends. It doesn’t matter, because mere clothes changed nothing. The teasing that day was worse than ever. Her peers had no intention of letting her out of the box they’d put her in; she was punished for even trying to break free. I had several classes with her, and was able to observe Dodie’s ruination at first hand. I saw her smile fade, saw the light in her eyes first dim and then go out. By the end of the day she was the girl she’d been before Christmas vacation—a dough-faced and freckle-cheeked wraith, scurrying through the halls with her eyes down and her books clasped to her chest.
She wore the new skirt and sweater the next day. And the next. And the next. When the school year ended she was still wearing them, although by then the weather was much too hot for wool and there were always beads of sweat at her temples and on her upper lip. The home permanent wasn’t repeated and the new clothes took on a matted, dispirited look, but the teasing had dropped back to its pre-Christmas levels and the taunting stopped entirely. Someone made a break for the fence and had to be knocked down, that was all. Once the escape was foiled and the entire company of prisoners was once more accounted for, life could go back to normal.
Both Sondra and Dodie were dead by the time I started writing Carrie. Sondra moved out of the trailer in Durham, out from beneath the agonal gaze of the dying savior, and into an apartment in Lisbon Falls. She must have worked somewhere close by, probably in one of the mills or shoe factories. She was epileptic and died during a seizure. She lived alone, so there was no one to help her when she went down with her head bent the wrong way. Dodie married a TV weatherman who gained something of a reputation in New England for his drawling downeast delivery. Following the birth of a child—I think it was their second—Dodie went into the cellar and put a .22 bullet in her abdomen. It was a lucky shot (or unlucky, depending on your point of view, I guess), hitting the portal vein and killing her. In town they said it was postpartum depression, how sad. Myself, I suspected high school hangover might have had something to do with it.
I never liked Carrie, that female version of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, but through Sondra and Dodie I came at last to understand her a little. I pitied her and I pitied her classmates as well, because I had been one of them once upon a time.
– 30 –
The manuscript of Carrie went off to Doubleday, where I had made a friend named William Thompson. I pretty much forgot about it and moved on with my life, which at that time consisted of teaching school, raising kids, loving my wife, getting drunk on Friday afternoons, and writing stories.
My free period that semester was five, right after lunch. I usually spent it in the teachers’ room, grading papers and wishing I could stretch out on the couch and take a nap—in the early afternoon I have all the energy of a boa constrictor that’s just swallowed a goat. The intercom came on and Colleen Sites in the office asked if I was there. I said I was, and she asked me to come to the office. I had a phone call. My wife.
The walk from the teachers’ room in the lower wing to the main office seemed long even with classes in session and the halls mostly empty. I hurried, not quite running, my heart beating hard. Tabby would have had to dress the kids in their boots and jackets to use the neighbors’ phone, and I could think of only two reasons she might have done so. Either Joe or Naomi had fallen off the stoop and broken a leg, or I had sold Carrie.
My wife, sounding out of breath but deliriously happy, read me a telegram. Bill Thompson (who would later go on to discover a Mississippi scribbler named John Grisham) had sent it after trying to call and discovering the Kings no longer had a phone. CONGRATULATIONS, it read. CARRIE OFFICIALLY A DOUBLEDAY BOOK. IS $2500 ADVANCE OKAY? THE FUTURE LIES AHEAD. LOVE, BILL.
Twenty-five hundred dollars was a very small advance, even for the early seventies, but I didn’t know that and had no literary agent to know it for me. Before it occurred to me that I might actually need an agent, I had generated well over three million dollars’ worth of income, a good deal of it for the publisher. (The standard Doubleday contract in those days was better than indentured servitude, but not much.) And my little high school horror novel marched toward publication with excruciating slowness. Although it was accepted in late March or early April of 1973, publication wasn’t slated until the spring of 1974. This wasn’t unusual. In those days Doubleday was an enormous fiction-mill churning out mysteries, romances, science fiction yarns, and Double D westerns at a rate of fifty or more a month, all of this in addition to a robust frontlist including books by heavy hitters like Leon Uris and Allen Drury. I was only one small fish in a very busy river.
Tabby asked if I could quit teaching. I told her no, not based on a twenty-five-hundred-dollar advance and only nebulous possibilities beyond that. If I’d been on my own, maybe (hell, probably). But with a wife and two kids? Not happening. I remember the two of us lying in bed that night, eating toast and talking until the small hours of the morning. Tabby asked me how much we’d make if Doubleday was able to sell paperback reprint rights to Carrie, and I said I didn’t know. I’d read that Mario Puzo had just scored a huge advance for paperback rights to The Godfather—four hundred thousand dollars according to the newspaper—but I didn’t believe Carrie would fetch anything near that, assuming it sold to paperback at all.
Tabby asked—rather timidly for my normally outspoken wife—if I thought the book would find a paperback publisher. I told her I thought the chances were pretty good, maybe seven or eight in ten. She asked how much it might bring. I said my best guess would be somewhere between ten and sixty thousand dollars.
“Sixty thousand dollars?” She sounded almost shocked. “Is that much even possible?”
I said it was—not likely, perhaps, but possible. I also reminded her that my contract specified a fifty-fifty paperback split, which meant that if Ballantine or Dell did pay sixty grand, we’d only get thirty. Tabby didn’t dignify this with a reply—she didn’t have to. Thirty thousand dollars was what I could expect to make in four years of teaching, even with annual salary increases thrown in. It was a lot of money. Probably just pie in the sky, but it was a night for dreaming.
– 31 –
Carrie inched along toward publication. We spent the advance on a new car (a standard shift which Tabby hated and reviled in her most colorful millworker’s language) and I signed a teaching contract for the 1973–1974 academic year. I was writing a new novel, a peculiar combination of Peyton Place and Dracula which I called Second Coming. We had moved to a ground-floor apartment back in Bangor, a real pit, but we were in town again, we had a car covered by an actual warranty, and we had a telephone.
To tell you the truth, Carrie had fallen off my radar screen almost completely. The kids were a handful, both the ones at school and the ones at home, and I had begun to worry about my mother. She was sixty-one, still working at Pineland Training Center and as funny as ever, but Dave said she didn’t feel very well a lot of the time. Her bedside table was covered with prescription painkillers, and he was afraid there might be something seriously wrong with her. “She’s always smoked like a chimney, you know,” Dave said. He was a great one to talk, since he smoked like a chimney himself (so did I, and how my wife hated the expense and the constant ashy dirt of it), but I knew what he meant. And although I didn’t live as close to her as Dave and didn’t see her as often, the last time I had seen her I cou
ld tell she had lost weight.
“What can we do?” I asked. Behind the question was all we knew of our mother, who “kept herself to herself,” as she liked to say. The result of that philosophy was a vast gray space where other families have histories; Dave and I knew almost nothing about our father or his family, and little enough about our own mother’s past, which included an incredible (to me, at least) eight dead brothers and sisters and her own failed ambition to become a concert pianist (she did play the organ on some of the NBC radio soaps and Sunday church shows during the war, she claimed).
“We can’t do anything,” Dave replied, “until she asks.”
One Sunday not long after that call, I got another one from Bill Thompson at Doubleday. I was alone in the apartment; Tabby had packed the kids off to her mother’s for a visit, and I was working on the new book, which I thought of as Vampires in Our Town.
“Are you sitting down?” Bill asked.
“No,” I said. Our phone hung on the kitchen wall, and I was standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room. “Do I need to?”
“You might,” he said. “The paperback rights to Carrie went to Signet Books for four hundred thousand dollars.”
When I was a little kid, Daddy Guy had once said to my mother: “Why don’t you shut that kid up, Ruth? When Stephen opens his mouth, all his guts fall out.” It was true then, has been true all my life, but on that Mother’s Day in May of 1973 I was completely speechless. I stood there in the doorway, casting the same shadow as always, but I couldn’t talk. Bill asked if I was still there, kind of laughing as he said it. He knew I was.
I hadn’t heard him right. Couldn’t have. The idea allowed me to find my voice again, at least. “Did you say it went for forty thousand dollars?”
“Four hundred thousand dollars,” he said. “Under the rules of the road”—meaning the contract I’d signed—”two hundred K of it’s yours. Congratulations, Steve.”
I was still standing in the doorway, looking across the living room toward our bedroom and the crib where Joe slept. Our place on Sanford Street rented for ninety dollars a month and this man I’d only met once face-to-face was telling me I’d just won the lottery. The strength ran out of my legs. I didn’t fall, exactly, but I kind of whooshed down to a sitting position there in the doorway.
“Are you sure?” I asked Bill.
He said he was. I asked him to say the number again, very slowly and very clearly, so I could be sure I hadn’t misunderstood. He said the number was a four followed by five zeros. “After that a decimal point and two more zeros,” he added.
We talked for another half an hour, but I don’t remember a single word of what we said. When the conversation was over, I tried to call Tabby at her mother’s. Her youngest sister, Marcella, said Tab had already left. I walked back and forth through the apartment in my stocking feet, exploding with good news and without an ear to hear it. I was shaking all over. At last I pulled on my shoes and walked downtown. The only store that was open on Bangor’s Main Street was LaVerdiere’s Drug. I suddenly felt that I had to buy Tabby a Mother’s Day present, something wild and extravagant. I tried, but here’s one of life’s true facts: there’s nothing really wild and extravagant for sale at LaVerdiere’s. I did the best I could. I got her a hair-dryer.
When I got back home she was in the kitchen, unpacking the baby bags and singing along with the radio. I gave her the hair-dryer. She looked at it as if she’d never seen one before. “What’s this for?” she asked.
I took her by the shoulders. I told her about the paperback sale. She didn’t appear to understand. I told her again. Tabby looked over my shoulder at our shitty little four-room apartment, just as I had, and began to cry.
– 32 –
I got drunk for the first time in 1966. This was on the senior class trip to Washington. We went on a bus, about forty kids and three chaperones (one of them was Old Cue-Ball, as a matter of fact), and spent the first night in New York, where the drinking age was then eighteen. Thanks to my bad ears and shitty tonsils, I was almost nineteen. Room to spare.
A bunch of us more adventurous boys found a package store around the corner from the hotel. I cast an eye over the shelves, aware that my spending money was far from a fortune. There was too much—too many bottles, too many brands, too many prices over ten dollars. Finally I gave up and asked the guy behind the counter (the same bald, bored-looking, gray-coated guy who has, I’m convinced, sold alcohol virgins their first bottle since the dawn of commerce) what was cheap. Without a word, he put a pint of Old Log Cabin whiskey down on the Winston mat beside the cash register. The sticker on the label said $1.95. The price was right.
I have a memory of being led onto the elevator later that night—or maybe it was early the next morning—by Peter Higgins (Old Cue-Ball’s son), Butch Michaud, Lenny Partridge, and John Chizmar. This memory is more like a scene from a TV show than a real memory. I seem to be outside of myself, watching the whole thing. There’s just enough of me left inside to know that I am globally, perhaps even galactically, fucked up.
The camera watches as we go up to the girls’ floor. The camera watches as I am propelled up and down the hall, a kind of rolling exhibit. An amusing one, it seems. The girls are in nighties, robes, curlers, cold cream. They are all laughing at me, but their laughter seems good-natured enough. The sound is muted, as if I am hearing them through cotton. I am trying to tell Carole Lemke that I love the way she wears her hair, and that she has the most beautiful blue eyes in the world. What comes out is something like “Uggin-wuggin-blue eyes, wuggin-ruggin-whole world.” Carole laughs and nods as if she understands completely. I am very happy. The world is seeing an asshole, no doubt, but he is a happy asshole, and everyone loves him. I spend several minutes trying to tell Gloria Moore that I’ve discovered The Secret Life of Dean Martin.
At some point after that I am in my bed. The bed holds still but the room starts to spin around it, faster and faster. It occurs to me that it’s spinning like the turntable of my Webcor phonograph, on which I used to play Fats Domino and now play Dylan and the Dave Clark Five. The room is the turntable, I am the spindle, and pretty soon the spindle is going to start tossing its platters.
I go away for a little bit. When I wake up, I’m on my knees in the bathroom of the double room I’m sharing with my friend Louis Purington. I have no idea how I got in there, but it’s good that I did because the toilet is full of bright yellow puke. Looks like Niblets, I think, and that’s all it takes to get me going again. Nothing comes up but whiskey-flavored strings of spit, but my head feels like it’s going to explode. I can’t walk. I crawl back to bed with my sweaty hair hanging in my eyes. I’ll feel better tomorrow, I think, and then I go away again.
In the morning my stomach has settled a little but my diaphragm is sore from vomiting and my head is throbbing like a mouthful of infected teeth. My eyes have turned into magnifying glasses; the hideously bright morning light coming in through the hotel windows is being concentrated by them and will soon set my brains on fire.
Participating in that day’s scheduled activities—a walk to Times Square, a boat ride to the Statue of Liberty, a climb to the top of the Empire State Building—is out of the question. Walking? Urk. Boats? Double urk. Elevators? Urk to the fourth power. Christ, I can hardly move. I make some sort of feeble excuse and spend most of the day in bed. By late afternoon I’m feeling a little better. I dress, creep down the hall to the elevator, and descend to the first floor. Eating is still impossible, but I believe I’m ready for a ginger ale, a cigarette, and a magazine. And who should I see in the lobby, sitting in a chair and reading a newspaper, but Mr. Earl Higgins, alias Old Cue-Ball. I pass him as silently as I can, but it’s no good. When I come back from the gift shop he’s sitting with his newspaper in his lap, looking at me. I feel my stomach drop. Here is more trouble with the principal, probably even worse than the trouble I got into over The Village Vomit. He calls me over and I discover something interest
ing: Mr. Higgins is actually an okay guy. He bounced me pretty hard over my joke newspaper, but perhaps Miss Margitan had insisted on that. And I’d just been sixteen, after all. On the day of my first hangover I’m going on nineteen, I’ve been accepted at the state university, and I have a mill job waiting for me when the class trip is over.
“I understand you were too sick to tour New York with the rest of the boys and girls,” Old Cue-Ball says. He eyes me up and down.
I say that’s right, I’d been sick.
“A shame for you to miss the fun,” Old Cue-Ball says. “Feeling better now?”
Yes, I was feeling better. Probably stomach flu, one of those twenty-four-hour bugs.
“I hope you won’t get that bug again,” he says. “At least not on this trip.” He looks at me for a moment longer, his eyes asking if we understand each other.
“I’m sure I won’t,” I say, meaning it. I know what drunk is like, now—a vague sense of roaring goodwill, a clearer sense that most of your consciousness is out of your body, hovering like a camera in a science fiction movie and filming everything, and then the sickness, the puking, the aching head. No, I won’t get that bug again, I tell myself, not on this trip, not ever. Once is enough, just to find out what it’s like. Only an idiot would make a second experiment, and only a lunatic—a masochistic lunatic—would make booze a regular part of his life.
