by Vincent, Bev
His tarot card is the Sailor, drowning, with no one to cast him a line.
Though Roland estimates his age to be about nine,6 he is actually eleven. He’s small for his age, with sun-bleached blond hair and blue eyes. People don’t only underestimate his age; until he cut his hair, he was often mistaken for a girl. Calvin Tower tells him he looks like an only child, which he is. He is clean and well mannered, comely, sensitive. He has a hard time making friends his own age. He doesn’t shy away from the girls who notice him; he talks to them with unknowing professionalism and puzzles them away. People bewilder him.
Jake’s upbringing—like Roland’s—was left to a court of cooks, nannies, tutors and teachers. His parents don’t hate him, but they seem to have overlooked him. His father, Elmer R. Chambers,7 is a ruthless and successful TV network executive, the master of “The Kill,” the fine art of putting strong programming against a rival’s weaker schedule. He’s a gunslinger of sorts, a Big Coffin Hunter in TV land.
The private school Jake attends in New York City is, according to his father, the best in the country for a boy his age. Jake won admission based on his academic record and intelligence, not because of his father’s money and influence.
His mother, who is scrawny in a sexy way, drinks prodigiously and cheats on her husband, as did Gabrielle Deschain. She leaves taxi fare for Jake to go to school each day, but he pockets the money and walks if it isn’t raining.
The family cook, Greta Shaw, is the strongest parental figure he has in New York. She makes his lunch and nicknames him ’Bama, from a Crimson Tide chant. While his parents go off on their respective adventures, she stays with him. By the age of four, Jake has already fantasized that Greta would become his mother if his parents died in a plane crash.
His bedroom is decorated like that of any young boy living in 1977. He has posters of Stevie Wonder and the Jackson Five on his walls, and a microscope. He likes geography, and bowls in the afternoon. He subconsciously resents professional people, and avoids bowling alleys that use equipment manufactured by companies in which his father owns stock. His career aspirations include bowling on the pro tour.
He’s prone to claustrophobia. Eddie jokes that if he had stayed in New York, he would probably have had his own child psychiatrist, working on his unresolved conflicts and his parent issues and perhaps being prescribed a drug like Ritalin.
His sensitivity in New York translates into a special awareness in Mid-World that Roland calls the touch. His talent is stronger than that of Roland’s old friend and fellow gunslinger Alain Johns. After he sees the rose in the vacant lot, his talent increases. He can lift thoughts from the top of Roland’s mind without trying hard, and could defeat the gunslinger in a battle of the minds, even with Roland trying his hardest to defend himself. The strength of his touch might have made him a fine Breaker. Jake is scrupulous about his talent, though. He believes that reading people’s minds is as wrong as watching them undress through binoculars.
Jake’s second death comes at the hands of the man who will become his surrogate father. The boy is sensitive enough even at that early stage of their relationship to know in advance that Roland will betray him for his quest. Several times he calls on Roland to turn aside or leave him behind, but he’s only a boy and has no one to watch out for him in Mid-World.
Ka wants him so badly that it found a way around death to put him back at Roland’s side. Roland kills Jack Mort, thereby preventing Jake’s first death. This sets up a mental conflict in both the gunslinger and the boy. They each remember both previous timelines, the one in which Jake dies and the one in which he doesn’t.
Once he returns to Mid-World, the mental echo vanishes and he grows to trust Roland and love him as a father. In Lud, when Gasher threatens the ka-tet with a hand grenade, Jake willingly goes with him to defuse the situation, trusting that Roland won’t let him down again. By the time they are reunited after searching for Susannah in 1999, Jake fully accepts Roland as his surrogate father, certainly more of a father than Elmer Chambers ever was.
From the moment he meets Oy, the billy-bumbler is his constant companion, and Jake’s touch connection with Oy increases during his time in Mid-World. At times he believes he can read the creature’s mind, and at one point the two actually switch minds temporarily.
In Mid-World, Jake shoulders adult responsibility when he’s younger than Roland was when the gunslinger took his test of manhood. Officially an apprentice, he’s as deadly a shot as the others. When he isn’t called on to be a gunslinger, though, he’s still only a child. He makes grown-up excuses to spend time with Benny Slightman in the Calla, seemingly ashamed to want to do boyish things. “This was the part that had been despoiled by the door-keeper in Dutch Hill, by Gasher, by the Tick-Tock Man and by Roland himself.”
At times, he is vaguely jealous of Mordred for being Roland’s blood offspring. He’s not beyond getting angry with Roland when he discovers that the gunslinger has been keeping secrets from the group. He understands, though, that to defy Roland would be more serious than adolescent rebellion. Roland is his dinh, and a serious act of defiance would mean he’d have to face Roland in a test of manhood that he would surely fail.
He’s resourceful enough to keep his own secrets when he trails Ben Slightman and Andy to the Dogan near the Calla. Realizing that he has to betray his friendship with Benny by telling what he’s seen, he understands a little better what Roland had to do in the mountains. “Jake had thought there could be no worse betrayal than that. Now he wasn’t so sure.”
Jake is enraged when the Wolves kill Benny, and he becomes a killing machine at the sight of his dead friend. “It should have been his fucking father,” Jake cries. He shoots Wolves in much the same way Roland shot down the population of Tull.
Jake’s touch is integral to helping the Manni reopen the UNFOUND doorway, giving the ka-tet access to Earth after Susannah and Mia vanish. He, Oy and Father Callahan arrive in the middle of a busy New York street, and he is nearly struck by a taxi. Angry at the near miss, Jake pulls his Ruger on the impressively tall taxi driver, displaying a temper that he certainly would have had to manage as an adult, given the chance. More counseling, on top of his parent issues.
He’s fully prepared to die trying to save Susannah. He takes Roland’s place as the leader of the team when he and Callahan prepare to invade the Dixie Pig, laying out the general plan of attack while leaving room for improvisation, should unforeseen circumstances arise.
He sometimes chides himself for having stolen his father’s gun and doesn’t always like the person he becomes when he wears it. Though he has “guts a yard,” Jake never loses the humanity gunslingers so often abandon. He is tempted to kill Jochabim, the washer boy in the Dixie Pig’s kitchen, but he pauses. He knows that Roland would not have hesitated and suspects Eddie and Susannah wouldn’t have, either. “I love them, but I hope I die before it gets me so bad it stops making any difference if the ones against me deserve [to die] or not.”
Jake is devastated when Eddie is shot during the liberation of Blue Heaven. The members of the ka-tet had sensed something was going to happen and the sensation—ka-shume—reminded Jake of how he felt before Roland let him fall beneath the mountains. During the hours that follow, Jake doesn’t know how to react since he’s never had to face the death of a loved one before.
He knows his limitations. When Roland needs someone to drive the truck in Maine, he doesn’t bluff his way into doing something beyond his capabilities.
Roland doesn’t plan for Jake to die a third time when they rescue Stephen King from the wayward minivan. If ka demands a sacrifice, the gunslinger intends it be him who dies. His body fails him, though, and Jake takes his place, a gunslinger to the end, acting on instinct. He seizes King and shields him with his own body. He urges Roland to attend to King rather than him, since it is King they came to save. “This is dying—I know what it is because I’ve done it before,” he tells Roland, who is trying to convince himself Jake’s inju
ries are slight.
Jake dies while Roland is attending to King, but not before he passes important instructions to Oy and to Irene Tassenbaum. Roland once told him, “You needn’t die happy but you must die satisfied, for you have lived your life from beginning to end and ka is always served.” With Oy at his side, Roland buries Jake in a shallow grave at the side of the road and asks Irene to plant wild roses nearby. “This is Jake, you gods, who lived well and died as ka would have it. Each man owes a death.8 This is Jake. Give him peace.”
Death is not the end for Jake, though. Susannah encounters him in another New York, where he is Jake Toren, younger brother to Eddie. Both of them have been dreaming of a woman named Susannah who will join them in Central Park, where they begin their new lives together.
Eddie Dean (Edward Cantor9 Dean)
The first is young, dark-haired. He stands on the brink of robbery and murder. A demon has infested him. The name of the demon is HEROIN. [DT1]
When Roland first encounters Eddie Dean aboard a flight from the Bahamas to New York, a pound of cocaine strapped under each arm, the young man is nearing bottom. He’s smuggling the drugs to finance his heroin habit and that of his older brother, Henry.
He has black hair, hazel, almost green eyes and long fingers. In a movie, some “hot young star” like Tom Cruise, Emilio Estevez or Rob Lowe10 would play him. He grew up in the projects, and his street accent becomes more pronounced when he’s angry, as if he were speaking through his nose instead of his mouth.
Eddie is the first member to join Roland’s ka-tet, and the first to leave it. He was born in February 1964, which would make him twenty-three in 1987.11 He lives in a two-bedroom apartment with his brother in Co-Op City, which, in Eddie’s reality, is in Brooklyn instead of the Bronx. Both of his parents are dead, but when his mother was still alive she frequently reminded Eddie that he was responsible for his older brother’s lack of opportunity in life. Henry believes this, too, but perhaps only because his mother said it so often.
A drunk driver killed Henry and Eddie’s sister12 while she was watching a game of hopscotch on the sidewalk when Eddie was two and she was six. Since their mother worked during the day, Henry—eight years older than Eddie—was given the responsibility of making sure nothing similar happened to his brother.
His tarot card is the Prisoner, a name Roland often calls him during their early days. The card depicts a young man with a whip-wielding baboon on his back whose disturbingly human fingers are buried so deeply in the man’s neck that their tips disappear in flesh. The face of the ridden man seems to writhe in wordless terror.
The baboon represents his addiction, but it also represents his brother, Henry, who pulled Eddie down into the muck of drugs and laziness with him. Eddie became a convenient excuse for his brother’s failures in life. Henry couldn’t play school sports, not because he was scrawny and uncoordinated but because he had to look after Eddie. His grades were too low to earn scholarships, not because he wasn’t smart but because he spent so much time keeping Eddie safe. Without a scholarship, Henry couldn’t go to college and was sent to Vietnam, coming back minus a knee and hooked on morphine, none of which was his fault.
Believing his mother and brother sacrificed everything so he could be happy robbed Eddie of what little self-esteem he’d been able to develop. “As for me, I don’t matter much,” thirteen-year-old Eddie tells Jake in a dream when instructing the boy on how to find the doorway to Mid-World. “I’m supposed to guide you, that’s all.” [DT3]
Henry is responsible for Eddie’s descent into a life of crime. Stealing comic books escalates into grand theft auto when Henry steals a car and drives into Manhattan. Scared and crying, Eddie lies about seeing a cop and convinces Henry to abandon the car. Henry runs off at first, but comes back for Eddie. He explains their late return home by telling their mother he’d been teaching Eddie to play basketball. Didn’t Eddie have the best big brother in the world?
When Henry does teach Eddie basketball, Eddie quickly becomes better than his brother, as he is with most things, in spite of being much younger. He hides his superiority because if he shows Henry up, Henry would punch him hard on the arm, supposedly as a joke but actually as a warning. Eddie also hides his skill because he adores his big brother. His decision to not excel past his brother is a severe limitation, because Henry isn’t much good at anything.13
During a conversation about who they’d like to have at their side if they got into a brawl, Henry surprises everyone by saying that he’d want Eddie, “Because when Eddie’s in that fuckin zone, he could talk the devil into setting himself on fire.”
Eddie catches his brother snorting heroin after he returns from Vietnam, shortly after their mother died. Following a huge fight, Henry threatens to leave, then guilts Eddie into begging him to stay. After all, Henry was injured in the war and got hooked on pain meds because he’d had to look after Eddie after school.
Before long, Eddie is snorting heroin, too. Eddie manages his habit better than his brother, of course. Their positions reverse and Eddie must look after his brother. Henry’s addiction worsens, leading to shooting up, another confrontation, another guilt trip resulting in Eddie’s needle habit and ultimately his trip to the Bahamas. Once Henry started shooting, Eddie knew his brother wouldn’t survive six months without him—he’d end up in jail or a psych ward.
Eddie lingers under his brother’s shadow even after Henry dies. “All you have to do to hurt him is to say his brother’s name. It’s like poking an open sore with a stick.” [DT2] He protects his brother’s memory to Roland, telling the gunslinger that though Henry was always scared, he always came back. Roland believes it would have been better for Eddie if Henry hadn’t come back. “People like Henry always came back because they knew how to use trust. It was the only thing Henry did know how to use. First they changed trust into need, then they changed need into a drug and once that was done they pushed it.”
Roland sees deep steel in Eddie from the very first. He proved his mettle in the Bahamas when he stood up to the man who wanted to stiff him in the drugs-for-cash transaction. He impresses the gunslinger by entering the gun battle with Balazar’s men naked. A compliment from Roland makes him feel like king of the world. He learns quickly, naturally and easily. His facility with the gun reminds him of stories of reincarnation, an intuition possibly due to the cyclical nature of Roland’s existence. He’s lived through these experiences countless times with Roland and may have some recollection of skills he learned on previous iterations.
What stops Eddie from killing himself while going cold turkey after Roland draws him to Mid-World is the fact that Roland is deathly ill and needs him. When Odetta is brought through, confused and afraid, Roland thinks, “His brother is dead but he has someone else to take care of so Eddie will be all right now.” Eddie falls in love with her and the integrated person who becomes Susannah Dean. He hasn’t had a girlfriend since he started using heroin.
“I think I started loving you because you were everything Roland took me away from—in New York, I mean—but it’s a lot more than that now, because I don’t want to go back anymore.” No matter how much Susannah might love him, he’s sure he would always love her more. He sees it as his job to make it as good as possible as long as he can. He doesn’t believe ka is a friend to him and Susannah and that it will end badly between them. He tells her, “It’s good to make someone glad. I didn’t use to know that.”
Roland recognizes him as Cuthbert’s twin, saying he’s sure Eddie will die talking, as Bert did.14 Eddie surpasses Cuthbert in many ways. Roland reflects, “If I underestimate him . . . I’m apt to come away with a bloody paw. And if I let him down, or do something that looks to him like a double-cross, he’ll probably try to kill me.” [DT3]
For all his strength and skill as a gunslinger, Eddie’s dominant characteristic is the speed at which he runs his mouth. Roland, who thinks of Eddie as ka’s fool, sometimes feels like shaking him until his nose bleeds and his teeth f
all out. He possesses Cuthbert’s annoying sense of the ridiculous, which enables him to defeat Blaine the Mono with his unique weapon of illogic. Arguing comes as naturally to him as breathing. He is sometimes weak and self-centered, but possessed of reservoirs of courage and heart and occasionally has deep flashes of intuition.
Never really maturing past the man-boy stage, he is analogous to Horst Buchholz’s character in The Magnificent Seven. Roland thinks that no one can laugh as fully as Eddie Dean when amused. The Eddie Dean Special is something funny and stinging at the same time. Roland often uses his loquaciousness to advantage by having Eddie act as his mouthpiece.
Eddie respects Roland’s skills and talents but understands the addiction that drives the gunslinger as only another addict could. Eventually, he comes to think of Roland as his father but he hates it when Roland relies on ka, calling it “ka-ka.” Even so, Roland’s quest becomes his own. If Roland were to die on their journey, Eddie would continue with the others, for having dreamt of the Tower and the field of roses, the compulsion to reach the Tower claims him, too.
Eddie shoulders more responsibility as time goes by. He deals with Andolini in Tower’s storage room like a hardcase, and he negotiates with Tower, although with less finesse than Roland. He is patient with the Calla-folken but not with anyone who seems likely to cross him.
Pimli Prentiss, the headmaster of Algul Siento, shoots Eddie in the head in the aftermath of the assault on Blue Heaven. He lingers for fourteen hours, mortally injured but unwilling to let go. At the end, he tells Susannah to wait for him, tells Jake and Oy to protect Roland and tells Roland that this new life was better. His final words to Roland are “Thank you, father.”
In 1987, in another world, Eddie Cantor Dean becomes Eddie Toren from White Plains. For months he’s been dreaming of Susannah, whom he loves already, although he doesn’t understand how or why this can possibly be. Voices told him and his younger brother, Jake, to meet her in Central Park when she comes through from End-World. He extends his hand to her, a familiar, well-loved hand, in the hopes that now ka will be on their side.
