by Stephen King
After the cake and ice cream (van-choc-straw, of course), I saw Terry flash Dad a glance. Dad looked at Mom and she gave him a nervous little smile. It is only in retrospect that I realized how often I saw that nervous smile on my mother’s face as her children grew up and went into the world.
“Come on out to the barn, Jamie,” my dad said, standing up. “Terence and I have got a little something for you.”
The “little something” turned out to be a 1966 Ford Galaxie. It was washed, waxed, and as white as moonlight on snow.
“Oh my God,” I said in a faint voice, and everyone laughed.
“The body was good, but the engine needed some work,” Terry said. “Me n Dad reground the valves, replaced the plugs, stuck in a new battery . . . the works.”
“New tires,” Dad said, pointing to them. “Just blackwalls, but those are not recaps. Do you like it, Son?”
I hugged him. I hugged them both.
“Just promise me and your mother that you’ll never get behind the wheel if you’ve taken a drink. Don’t make us have to look at each other someday and say we gave you something you used to hurt yourself or someone else.”
“I promise,” I said.
Astrid—with whom I would share the last inch or so of a joint when I took her home in my new car—squeezed my arm. “And I’ll make him keep it.”
After driving down to Harry’s Pond twice (I had to make two trips so I could give everyone a ride), history repeated itself. I felt a tug on my hand. It was Claire. She led me into the mudroom just as she had on the day Reverend Jacobs used his Electrical Nerve Stimulator to give Connie back his voice.
“Mom wants another promise from you,” she said, “but she was too embarrassed to ask. So I said I’d do it for her.”
I waited.
“Astrid is a nice girl,” Claire said. “She smokes, I can smell it on her breath, but that doesn’t make her bad. And she’s a girl with good taste. Going with you for three years proves that.”
I waited.
“She’s a smart girl, too. She’s got college ahead of her. So here’s the promise, Jamie: don’t you get her pregnant in the backseat of that car. Can you promise that?”
I almost smiled. If I had, it would have been fifty percent amused and fifty percent pained. For the last two years, Astrid and I had had a code word: recess. It meant mutual masturbation. I had mentioned condoms to her on several occasions after the first time, had even gone so far as to purchase a three-pack of Trojans (one kept in my wallet, the other two secreted behind the baseboard in my bedroom), but she was positive that the first one we tried would either break or leak. So . . . recess.
“You’re mad at me, aren’t you?” Claire asked.
“No,” I said. “Never mad at you, Claire-Bear.” And I never was. That anger was waiting for the monster she married, and it never abated.
I hugged her and promised I would not get Astrid pregnant. It was a promise I kept, although we got close before that day in the cabin near Skytop.
• • •
In those years I sometimes dreamed of Charles Jacobs—I’d see him poking his fingers into my pretend mountain to make caves, or preaching the Terrible Sermon with blue fire circling his head like an electric diadem—but he pretty much slipped from my conscious mind until one day in June of 1974. I was eighteen. So was Astrid.
School was out. Chrome Roses had gigs lined up all summer (including a couple in bars, where my parents had given me reluctant written permission to perform), and during the days I’d be working at the Marstellars’ farmstand, as I had the year before. Morton Fuel Oil was doing well, and my parents could afford tuition at the University of Maine, but I was expected to do my share. I had a week before reporting for farmstead duty, though, so Astrid and I had a lot of time together. Sometimes we went to my house; sometimes we were at hers. On a lot of afternoons we cruised the back roads in my Galaxie. We’d find a place to park and then . . . recess.
That afternoon we were in a disused gravel pit on Route 9, swapping a joint of not-very-good local grass back and forth. It was sultry, and stormclouds were forming in the west. Thunder rumbled, and there must have been lightning. I didn’t see it, but static crackled from the dashboard radio speaker, momentarily blotting out “Smokin’ in the Boys’ Room,” a song the Roses played at every show that year.
That was when Reverend Jacobs returned to my mind like a long absent guest, and I started the car. “Snuff that jay,” I said. “Let’s go for a ride.”
“Where?”
“A place someone told me about a long time ago. If it’s still there.”
Astrid put the remains of the joint in a Sucrets box and tucked it under the seat. I drove a mile or two down Route 9, then turned west on Goat Mountain Road. Here the trees bulked close on either side, and the last of that day’s hazy sunshine disappeared as the stormclouds rolled in.
“If you’re thinking about the resort, they won’t let us in,” Astrid said. “My folks gave up their membership. They said they had to economize if I’m going to college in Boston.” She wrinkled her nose.
“Not the resort,” I said.
We passed Longmeadow, where the MYF used to have its annual wienie-roast. People were throwing nervous glances at the sky as they gathered up their blankets and coolers and hurried to their cars. The thunder was louder now, loaded wagons rolling across the sky, and I saw a bolt of lightning hit somewhere on the other side of Skytop. I started to feel excited. Beautiful, Charles Jacobs had said that last day. Beautiful and terrifying.
We passed a sign reading GOAT MTN GATEHOUSE 1 MILE PLEASE SHOW MEMBERSHIP CARD.
“Jamie—”
“There’s supposed to be a spur that goes to Skytop,” I said. “Maybe it’s gone, but . . .”
It wasn’t gone, and it was still gravel. I turned into it a little too fast, and the Galaxie’s rear end wagged first one way, then the other.
“I hope you know what you’re doing,” Astrid said. She didn’t sound frightened to be driving straight toward a summer thunderstorm; she sounded interested and a little excited.
“I hope so, too.”
The grade steepened. The Galaxie’s rear end flirted on the loose gravel from time to time, but mostly it held steady. Two and a half miles beyond the turnoff, the trees pulled back and there was Skytop. Astrid gasped and sat up straight in her seat. I hit the brake and brought my car to a crunching stop.
On our right was an old cabin with a mossy, sagging roof and crashed-out windows. Graffiti, most of it too faded to be legible, danced in tangles across the gray, paintless sides. Ahead and above us was a great bulging forehead of granite. At the summit, just as Jacobs had told me half my life ago, was an iron pole jutting toward the clouds, which were now black and seemingly low enough to touch. To our left, where Astrid was looking, hills and fields and gray-green miles of woods stretched toward the ocean. In that direction the sun was still shining, making the world glow.
“Oh my God, was this here all the time? And you never took me?”
“I never took myself,” I said. “My old minister told me—”
That was as far as I got. A brilliant bolt of lightning came down from the sky. Astrid screamed and put her hands over her head. For a moment—strange, terrible, wonderful—it seemed to me that the air had been replaced by electric oil. I felt the hair all over my body, even the fine ones in my nose and ears, go stiff. Then came the click, as if an invisible giant had snapped his fingers. A second bolt flashed down and hit the iron rod, turning it the same bright blue I had seen dancing around Charles Jacobs’s head in my dreams. I had to shut my eyes to keep from going blind. When I opened them again, the pole was glowing cherry red. Like a horseshoe in a forge, he’d said, and that was just what it was like. Follow-thunder bellowed.
“Do you want to get out of here?” I was shouting. I had to, in order to hear my
self over the ringing in my ears.
“No!” she shouted back. “In there!” And pointed at the slumping remains of the cabin.
I thought of telling her we’d be safer in the car—some vaguely remembered adage about how rubber tires could ground you and protect you from lightning—but there had been thousands of storms on Skytop, and the old cabin was still standing. As we ran toward it, hand in hand, I realized there was a good reason for that. The iron rod drew the lightning. At least it had so far.
It began to hail as we reached the open door, pebble-size chunks of ice that struck the granite with a rattling sound. “Ouch, ouch, ouch!” Astrid yelled . . . but she was laughing at the same time. She darted in. I followed just as the lightning flashed again, artillery on some apocalyptic battlefield. This time it was preceded by a snap instead of a click.
Astrid seized my shoulder. “Look!”
I’d missed the storm’s second swipe at the iron rod, but I clearly saw what followed. Balls of St. Elmo’s fire bounced and rolled down the scree-littered slope. There were half a dozen. One by one they popped out of existence.
Astrid hugged me, but that wasn’t enough. She locked her hands around my neck and climbed me, her thighs locked around my hips. “This is fantastic!” she screamed.
The hail turned to rain, and it came in a deluge. Skytop was blotted out, but we never lost sight of the iron rod, because it was struck repeatedly. It would glow blue or purple, then red, then fade, only to be struck again.
Rain like that rarely lasts long. As it lessened, we saw that the granite slope below the iron rod had turned into a river. The thunder continued to rumble, but it was losing its fury and subsiding into sulks. We heard running water everywhere, as if the earth were whispering. The sun was still shining to the east, over Brunswick and Freeport and Jerusalem’s Lot, where we saw not one or two rainbows but half a dozen, interlocking like Olympic rings.
Astrid turned me toward her. “I have to tell you something,” she said. Her voice was low.
“What?” I was suddenly sure that she would destroy this transcendent moment by telling me we had to break up.
“Last month my mother took me to the doctor. She said she didn’t want to know how serious we were about each other, that it wasn’t her business, but she needed to know I was taking care of myself. That was how she put it. ‘All you have to say is that you want it because your periods are painful and irregular,’ she said. ‘When he sees that I brought you myself, that will do.’”
I was a little slow, I guess, so she punched me in the chest.
“Birth control pills, dummy. Ovral. It’s safe now, because I had a period since I started taking them. I’ve been waiting for the right time, and if this isn’t it, there won’t ever be one.”
Those luminous eyes on mine. Then she dropped them, and began biting her lip.
“Just don’t . . . don’t get carried away, all right? Think of me and be gentle. Because I’m scared. Carol said her first time hurt like hell.”
We undressed each other—all the way, at last—while the clouds unraveled overhead and the sun shone through and the whisper of running water began to die away. Her arms and legs were already tanned. The rest of her was as white as snow. Her pubic hair was fine gold, accentuating her sex rather than obscuring it. There was an old mattress in the corner, where the roof was still whole—we weren’t the first to use that cabin for what it was used for that day.
She guided me in, then made me stop. I asked her if it was all right. She said it was, but that she wanted to do it herself. “Hold still, honey. Just hold still.”
I held still. It was agony to hold still, but it was also wonderful to hold still. She raised her hips. I slid in a little deeper. She did it again and I slipped in a little more. I remember looking at the mattress and seeing its old faded pattern, and smudges of dirt, and a single trundling ant. That she raised her hips again. I slid in all the way and she gasped.
“Oh my God!”
“Does it hurt? Astrid, does it—”
“No, it’s wonderful. I think . . . you can do it now.”
I did. We did.
• • •
That was our summer of love. We made it in several places—once in Norm’s bedroom in Cicero Irving’s trailer, where we broke his bed and had to put it back together—but mostly we used the cabin at Skytop. It was our place, and we wrote our names on one of the walls, among half a hundred others. There was never another storm, though. Not that summer.
In the fall, I went to the University of Maine and Astrid went to Suffolk University in Boston. I assumed this would be a temporary separation—we’d see each other on vacations, and at some hazy point in the future, when we both had our degrees, we’d marry. One of the few things I’ve learned since then about the fundamental differences between the sexes is this: men make assumptions, but women rarely do.
On the day of the thunderstorm, as we were driving home, Astrid said, “I’m glad you were my first.” I told her I was glad, too, not even thinking about what that implied.
There was no big breakup scene. We just drifted apart, and if there was an architect for that gradual withering, it was Delia Soderberg, Astrid’s pretty, quiet mother, who was unfailingly pleasant but always looked at me the way a storekeeper studies a suspicious twenty-dollar bill. Maybe it’s all right, the storekeeper thinks, but there’s just a little something . . . off about it. If Astrid had gotten pregnant, my assumptions about our future might have proved correct. And hey, we might have been very happy: three kids, two-car garage, backyard swimming pool, all the rest. But I don’t think so. I think the constant gigging—and the girls who always hang around rock bands—would have broken us up. Looking back, I have to think that Delia Soderberg’s suspicions were justified. I was a counterfeit twenty. Good enough to pass in most places, maybe, but not in her store.
There was no big breakup scene with Chrome Roses, either. On my first weekend home from school in Orono, I played with the band at the Amvets on Friday night and at Scooter’s Pub in North Conway on Saturday. We sounded as good as ever, and we were now hauling down a hundred and fifty a gig. I remember I sang lead on “Shake Your Moneymaker” and played a pretty good harp solo.
But when I came home for Thanksgiving, I discovered that Norm had hired a new rhythm guitarist and changed the name of the band to Norman’s Knights. “Sorry, man,” he said, shrugging. “The offers were piling up, and I can’t work in a trio. Drums, bass, two guitars—that’s rock and roll.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I get it.” And I did, because he was right. Or almost. Drums, bass, two guitars, and everything starts in the key of E.
“We’re playing the Ragged Pony in Winthrop tomorrow night, if you want to sit in. Guest artist kind of thing?”
“I’ll pass,” I said. I’d heard the new rhythm guitarist. He was a year younger than me, and already better; he could chickenscratch like a mad bastard. Besides, that meant I could spend Saturday night with Astrid. Which I did. I suspect she was already dating other guys by then—she was too pretty to stay home—but she was discreet. And loving. It was a good Thanksgiving. I didn’t miss Chrome Roses (or Norman’s Knights, a name I would never have to get used to, which suited me fine) at all.
Well. You know.
Hardly at all.
• • •
One day not long before Christmas break, I dropped by the Bear’s Den in the University of Maine Memorial Union for a burger and a Coke. On the way out, I stopped to look at the bulletin board. Among the litter of file cards advertising textbooks for sale, cars for sale, and rides wanted to various destinations, I found this:
GOOD NEWS! The Cumberlands are reuniting! BAD NEWS! We’re short a rhythm guitarist! We are a LOUD AND PROUD COVER BAND! If you can play Beatles, Stones, Badfinger, McCoys, Barbarians, Standells, Byrds, etc., come to Room 421, Cumberland Hall, and bring your ax. If
you like Emerson, Lake, & Palmer, or Blood, Sweat, & Tears, stay the f**k away.
By then I had a bright red Gibson SG, and that afternoon, after class, I toted it over to Cumberland Hall, where I met Jay Pederson. Because of noise restrictions during study hours, we played tennis-racket style in his room. Later that night we plugged in down in the dorm’s rec area. We rocked the place for half an hour, and I got the gig. He was a lot better than me, but I was used to that; I had, after all, started my rock-and-roll career with Norm Irving.
“I’m thinking of changing the name of the band to the Heaters,” Jay said. “What do you think?”
“As long as I get time to study during the week and you split fair, I don’t care if you call it Assholes from Hell.”
“Good name, right up there with Doug and the Hot Nuts, but I don’t think we’d get many high school dances.” He offered me his hand, I clasped it, and we gave each other that dead-fish shake. “Welcome aboard, Jamie. Rehearsal Wednesday night. Be there or be square.”
I was many things, but square wasn’t one of them. I was there. For almost two decades, in a dozen bands and a hundred cities, I was there. A rhythm guitarist can always find work, even if he’s so stoned he can barely stand. Basically, it all comes down to two things: you have to show up, and you have to be able to play a bar E.
My problems started when I stopped showing up.
V
The Fluid Passage of Time. Portraits in Lightning. My Drug Problem.
When I graduated from the University of Maine (2.9 cume, missed the Dean’s List by a coat of paint), I was twenty-two. When I met Charles Jacobs for the second time, I was thirty-six. He looked younger than his age, perhaps because when I saw him last he had been thinned and made haggard by grief. By 1992, I looked much older than mine.
I’ve always been a movie fan. During the 1980s I saw a lot of them, mostly on my own. I dozed off on occasion (Heathers, for instance—that one was a nodder for sure), but mostly I’d make it through no matter how stoned I was, surfing on noise and color and impossibly beautiful women in scanty clothing. Books are good, and I read my share, and TV’s okay if you’re stuck in a motel room during a rainstorm, but for Jamie Morton, there was nothing like a movie up there on the big screen. Just me, my popcorn, and my super-sized Coke. Plus my heroin, of course. I’d take an extra straw from the concession stand, bite it in half, and use it to snort the powder off the back of my hand. I didn’t get to the needle until 1990 or ’91, but I got there eventually. Most of us do. Trust me on this.