by Rocky Wood
The Evaluation
This is a part manuscript only. There are twelve single pages. The notation heading it in King’s handwriting reads “The Evaluation.”
In this America Under Siege tale a psychologist, Dr. Peter Judkins, prepared to evaluate Edgar Roos at the Crown County Mental Hospital in New York. Roos had been arrested after killing nine people that day, two with a butcher’s knife and seven with a shotgun. The murderer had left his will in a locker.
Initially uncommunicative and sitting strait-jacketed and chained to an oak chair that was bolted to the floor, Roos told Judkins he might talk if Judkins took off a band-aid covering a shaving cut! The fragment ends at this point.
Edgar Roos was a slender young man, weighing about 150 pounds. He had a narrow face, glossy black hair and wore glasses. The killings had earned him the nickname “The Commuter Killer.” All we really know of Dr. Judkins was that he had been married for eleven years. There is only one other character of note, a technician wearing an orderly’s uniform, Hector Alonzo. He was to video and audiotape the interview and had also provided Dr. Judkins with the key to the locker in which Roos had left his will.
Judkins was assigned to evaluate Roos because the psychologist on call that week, Livermore, had just had his gall bladder removed (we are left with the uneasy impression that this might turn out to be bad luck for Judkins, and good luck for Livermore). Seven other psychologists were affiliated with the Crown County Mental Hospital.
The Crown County Mental Hospital is in “the smallest county in the state of New York.” There is also a Crown City in the County (confused yet?) and the Crown City High School and Crown City YMCA are mentioned.
The story is not linked to any other King fiction. However, King does appear to have a fascination for stories involving psychologists or psychiatrists. In Chip Coombs, another story fragment from this journal the title character visits a psychiatrist and tells her his life story; and, in The Boogeyman, Lester Billing’s psychiatrist turned out to be the title character. Comb Dump, another unpublished partial story is set in a Maine psychiatric hospital; and, in yet another incomplete piece titled Keyholes, Michael Briggs visited a psychiatrist to discuss his son.
The fact that King attempted two such stories in this one Journal and at least another two that we know of without publishing the result of any may indicate his desire to find another viable storyline from this potentially deep well. Typical of King, the story is already fascinating by the time it stops abruptly after only a few pages. Any multiple killer in a King story is likely to be of interest and Roos’ refusal to talk to Dr. Judkins unless he took off the band-aid covering a shaving cut has ominous undertones. It seems unlikely that King will again pick up this particular storyline, but it would seem certain that the reader would be in for not a few chills, spills and twists if he did!
Movie Show
This is a part manuscript only. There are 25 single pages. The notation in King’s handwriting reads “Movie Show more,” as it was apparently a continuation of the story. Despite its fragmentary nature it is a very important work, due to its autobiographical nature, explained in detail below.
In this Maine Street Horror piece a boy heads to the movies. Jacky had been prepared to go strawberry picking in Harlow, Maine one morning in June 1959 but the work was called off due to rain. The boys picked for H.A. “Frosty” Snowman, who owned a strawberry farm on Larkspur Road, on which Jacky and his mother lived. “Frosty” had very bad arthritis, resulting in swollen, misshapen hands and leaving him in constant pain. After the work was called off Jacky hitched a ride to Lewiston with a fairly old man driving an old farm truck. The man wore bib overalls, had bright eyes and chewed tobacco.
Arriving on Lisbon Street in Lewiston Jacky headed to a movie theater, the Ritz, and purchased a ticket for the advertised double bill, She Beast (starring Barbara Steele) and The Black Scorpion (starring Mara Corday and Kenneth Tobey). The ticket-seller was the magnificently named Delphinia (“Lillin”) Ouelette. Jacky observed the other patrons, of whom there were few, and at this point the story fragment ends.
Jacky wrote the story when he was 45 (it is unclear exactly how old he was at the time he lived in Harlow and hitchhiked to the movies in Lewiston). He says he was attending Gates Falls High five years later, in 1964, and that when he grew up he lived at 131 Elm Avenue, Utica (a town King mentions ironically from time to time) in a second floor apartment. He had also dropped acid and almost died of an amphetamine overdose there.
We are told Jacky’s mother was employed in June of 1959, quite an unusual circumstance for a mother in rural America in those days. We are left with the distinct impression that she was a single mother (much as was King’s mother, Ruth; and Liz Garfield, mother of Bobby in the semi-autobiographical Low Men in Yellow Coats).
Among the other boys who lived in Harlow were Arthur; Alvin Andrews; Bill Brown; the twin brothers, Myron and Steve Doucette (the latter described as a stool-pigeon for Snowman); and Tom Haverford.
King’s favorite baseball team, the Red Sox, was mentioned, they had lost a double-header in June 1959, presumably because Williams was sidelined with a strained ligament. A single business in Harlow is mentioned, Downy’s Store.
We are given a quick tour of Lisbon Street, Lower Lisbon Street and Maple Street in Lewiston. The businesses mentioned are Ben Wisden’s Men’s Shop; Kowloon Express, a Chinese restaurant that would later appear on the site of the Ritz movie theater; a restaurant, Manoir; a pawn shop, Penchan’s House of Loans; and two movie theaters – the Ritz, which would close in 1968, and the Met. Double bill admission tickets to the Ritz cost eighty cents in 1959.
King lovingly describes the advertisements published in the Lewiston Sun for the two movies. The She Beast ad showed a picture of a woman dressed as an alien coming out of the surf. Another girl screamed while a lobster-like creature tried to kill her boyfriend. The promotion for The Black Scorpion showed a picture of a young woman in a black bathing suit screaming while a gigantic scorpion demolished the Colosseum.
She Beast is an actual B-movie classic and did, indeed, star Barbara Steele. It was released in 1966 and so could not have been showing in mid-1959. The Black Scorpion, starring Mara Corday (but not Kenneth Tobey), has a storyline of mutant Mexican scorpions on attack and was released in the US in October of 1957.
There are three clear links to King’s other fictional works in this fragment. Larkspur Road in Harlow, on which Jacky and his mother lived, leads from Harlow to Pownal, which is a real town. Johnny Smith’s father lived in Pownal in The Dead Zone and Johnny was residing in that home when he and Sarah Hazlett (nee Bracknell) made love for the first, and only, time.
Harlow, Maine is the town in which Jacky and his mother, Arthur, Snowman, the Doucettes and the other boys lived. Between Lewiston and Augusta, the town “…sprawled in a tract of woods and seemed to have more graveyards than people.” When I visited Durham, Maine – the town in which King spent much of his latter childhood and his teenage years – this would have been a perfect description, even at the late point of 2002, more than forty years after Movie Show is set. Additionally this version of Harlow has a Shiloh Hill and to this day the spectacular Shiloh Church is set on a Durham hill. This Harlow is eighteen miles from Lewiston.
Harlow is also a key location in two of the three versions of It Grows on You (Marshroots / Weird Tales and Whispers) as well as Riding the Bullet. It receives considerable mention in both Blaze and The Body and is also mentioned in each of Bag of Bones, The Dark Half, Gerald’s Game, The Hardcase Speaks, Rage and in the Skeleton Crew versions of Nona, Under the Dome and Uncle Otto’s Truck.
King relates something of Larkspur Road, Harlow in this story (it is not mentioned in any other King tale). Arthur and Jacky lived at the west end of it in 1959. It was not paved in those days, but was later. Snowman’s property was on the east end, as was the Doucette home. Later, a housing development was built on Snowman’s farmland. The road makes its way to Pownal
and New Gloucester and intersects with Route 9.
Jacky’s mother had gone to Gates Falls to get her hair done the morning the strawberry picking was cancelled. Gates Falls, Maine is one of King’s oldest fictional towns (it is almost certainly inspired by Lisbon Falls, Maine) and is a key location in Graveyard Shift, It Grows on You, The Revenge of Lard Ass Hogan, Riding the Bullet and Sword in the Darkness. It is also mentioned in Blaze, The Body (as the location for Gordie LaChance’s Lard Ass Hogan tale), The Dark Half, The Dead Zone, Gramma, Hearts in Atlantis, Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut, Needful Things, The Plant (but only the electronic version), Rage and ‘Salem’s Lot.
Both these towns are clearly dear to King’s heart, having been created early in his career and receiving constant encores, including replacing other town names in the revision of certain works. Their introduction in this aborted story must be regarded as noteworthy.
There are clear autobiographical overtones in this piece. King provided the following insights in part 18 of the “C.V.” section of On Writing and it is clear from them that Movie Show derives directly from King’s early teenage years in Durham.
What I cared about most between 1958 and 1966 was movies.
As the fifties gave way to the sixties, there were only two movie theaters in the area, both in Lewiston. The Empire was the first-run house ... (but) when I lay in bed at night under my eave, listening to the wind in the trees or the rats in the attic, it was not Debbie Reynolds as Tammy or Sandra Dee as Gidget that I dreamed of, but Yvette Vickers from Attack of the Giant Leeches or Luana Anders from Dementia 13. Never mind sweet; never mind uplifting; never mind Snow White and the Seven Goddam Dwarfs. At thirteen I wanted monsters that ate whole cities, radioactive corpses that came out of the ocean and ate surfers, and girls in black bras who looked like trailer trash.
Horror movies, science fiction movies, movies about teenage gangs on the prowl, movies about losers on motor-cycles – this was the stuff that turned my dials up to ten. The place to get all of this was not at the Empire, on the upper end of Lisbon Street, but at the Ritz, down at the lower end, amid the pawnshops and not far from Louie’s Clothing, where in 1964 I bought my first pair of Beatle boots. The distance from my house to the Ritz was fourteen miles, and I hitchhiked there almost every weekend during the eight years between 1958 and 1966, when I finally got my driver’s license. Sometimes I went with my friend Chris Chesley, sometimes I went alone, but unless I was sick or something, I always went. It was at the Ritz that I saw I Married a Monster from Outer Space, with Tom Tryon; The Haunting, with Claire Bloom and Julie Harris; The Wild Angels, with Peter Fonda and Nancy Sinatra. I saw Olivia de Havilland put out James Caan’s eyes with makeshift knives in Lady in a Cage, saw Joseph Cotten come back from the dead in Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte, and watched with held breath (and not a little prurient interest) to see if Allison Hayes would grow all the way out of her clothes in Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman. At the Ritz, all the finer things in life were available . . . or might be available, if you only sat in the third row, paid close attention, and did not blink at the wrong moment.
Chris and I liked just about any horror movie, but our faves were the string of American-International films, most directed by Roger Corman, with titles cribbed from Edgar Allan Poe. I wouldn’t say based upon the works of Edgar Allan Poe, because there is little in any of them which has anything to do with Poe’s actual stories and poems (The Raven was filmed as a comedy – no kidding). And yet the best of them – The Haunted Palace, The Conqueror Worm, The Masque of the Red Death – achieved a hallucinatory eeriness that made them special. Chris and I had our own name for these films, one that made them into a separate genre. There were westerns, there were love stories, there were war stories … and there were Poepictures.
“Wanna hitch to the show Saturday afternoon?” Chris would ask. “Go to the Ritz?”
“What’s on?” I’d ask.
“A motorcycle picture and a Poepicture,” he’d say. I, of course, was on that combo like white on rice. Bruce Dern going batshit on a Harley and Vincent Price going batshit in a haunted castle overlooking a restless ocean: who could ask for more? You might even get Hazel Court wandering around in a lacy low-cut nightgown, if you were lucky.
So, there you have it. The answer to the question of how autobiographical is Movie Show? Very! It is clear that this fragmentary story is King’s love letter to that part of his youth.
Readers will also recall that in the story Billy Harper was a fellow student of Jacky’s at Gates Falls High and they got into a fight there in 1964 over Jacky’s wearing of Beatle boots (sound familiar?).
As a final note we are reminded yet again in this tale of King’s very strong record of creating twins as characters. Perhaps the Doucettes were based on real twin boys King knew in Durham when growing up, Dean and Doug Hall?
Chip Coombs
The last new piece in the Journal is untitled but we have sub-titled it Chip Coombs in honor of its lead character. This is a part manuscript only and there are 36 single pages in King’s handwriting, making it the longest piece in the Journal.
In this America Under Siege story Chip Coombs attends his first appointment with a psychiatrist, Dr. Monica Good at her office in downtown Cleveland. He had unspecified concerns and had requested more and more frequent electro-cardiograms from his family physician, Dr. Amos Light, who had finally referred him to Good. Coombs had also begun to lose weight.
Coombs told Dr. Good about his background. He claimed to have a “dangerous friend” and said they would call him Red McFarland. He and Red had attended school in Paradise Falls, Ohio together, played basketball on a Championship team and then decided to learn barbering together in Zanesville, Ohio. During their six-months at the barbering school they shared an apartment and a car (by this stage the reader is already wondering if Chips and Red are in fact the same person).
McFarland was very successful with women but started drinking heavily and then hitting the girls he brought home to the apartment. On graduation McFarland moved to the town of Blood, Ohio in the hills above Paradise Falls, and opened his own barber shop in the Paradise Mall. Coombs, on the other hand, headed for Boston, got a job in a barber shop there and stayed for seven years. Coombs had then returned to Paradise Falls, eleven years before his appointment with Dr. Good.
Doctor and patient scheduled a second appointment for the next day. Coombs now mentioned A Cut Above, a barber’s shop in the Paradise Mall in Blood, which had been owned by Roger McFerry but had now gone out of business. McFerry had been running the business into the ground for four years but had suddenly “returned” with a nest egg. Presumably, the reader is to suspect that Red McFarland had morphed into Roger McFerry. Unfortunately, the story fragment ends at this point.
The first appointment took place about 16 June 1989 and the second the next day (Dr. Good cancelled her attendance at a cocktail party for the Mayor of Cleveland to make that appointment).
Chip Coombs’ actual first name was Chester. He was born in 1951 or 1952, and was raised in Paradise Falls, Ohio. He attended Paradise County Consolidated school and was part of the team that won the Ohio State High School basketball championship in 1969. He graduated in 1970. In September that year he enrolled at the barbering school in Zanesville, Ohio and graduated in February 1971. He was not drafted for Vietnam due to flat feet and a perforated eardrum, which resulted from a childhood infection. After graduation from the barbering school he moved to Boston and worked at The Boston Clipper barber’s shop. He returned to Paradise Falls in 1978 and gave up drinking in 1983, sometimes attending AA meetings (Chips did not like attending because of the “drunks” there). Still a barber, he owned and operated his own shop in Paradise Falls at that time.
What we know of Red McFarland is no more than the information Coombs imparted to Dr. Good. In summary this was that Coombs had a “dangerous friend” who was often drunk and might harm him if he remembered a night they’d had together in March of 1989. Coombs told
Good they would call him Red McFarland. Red was born in Blood, Ohio and attended Paradise County Consolidated school. He was part of the same team that won the Ohio State High School basketball championship in 1969 and graduated in 1970. In September 1970 he also enrolled at the barbering school in Zanesville, Ohio from which he graduated in February 1971. He opened a barber’s shop at The Paradise Mall in Blood, Ohio shortly thereafter. He was not drafted. By 1971 he was already a drunk. Good looking, he was also a successful ladies’ man but had descended to violence towards his girlfriends.
On the other hand Roger McFerry apparently owned A Cut Above, a barber shop in The Paradise Mall. It had closed by mid-June 1989.
During Chip’s time in Boston he worked for Al Carlson. Carlson had served in the United States Navy, was short, broad-shouldered and had tattooed forearms. He retired from the Navy in 1968 after 30 years’ service. He owned The Boston Clipper barber shop, was a smoker and employed Coombs for seven years from about March 1971 (but only after a two week unpaid trial). He preferred to call Coombs “Chet.”
We are told little of Dr. Monica Good. A smoker, she gave up in 1984 and had been a psychiatrist since 1977. Stella, her secretary, had at least one son, Timmy, who had named the office pet rabbit “Mortimer the Good” before her sex had been known.