by Lisa Rogak
“It was absolutely the worst, bitterest stuff I’ve ever had in my life,” said Higgins, who, with Steve, forced down a few swallows before giving up. Next, they headed for a steak house, and when the waiter asked for their drink orders, booze was the last thing on their minds.
“Chocolate milk,” said Steve.
The waiter, an African-American man, snorted. “Man, down here we don’t call it chocolate milk, we call it black or white milk.”
So Steve said, “I want a black milk.” The waiter asked the next boy what he wanted to drink and he replied, “A black soda.” Purinton thought that made sense. “He thought if they called chocolate milk ‘black milk,’ a Coke would be a ‘black soda,’ ” he said.
All of a sudden, the waiter got mad. “Are you trying to be funny? If you are, my gang’s waiting outside for you.”
The boys panicked and left the restaurant before their drinks arrived. Whether the waiter was serious or if he was pulling their legs, Purinton didn’t know, but the table of self-described hicks from Maine got a quick lesson in life in the big city.
The students arrived back home a few days later and had another week before they had to return to school, after the weeklong April vacation.
Steve’d done well enough in high school to be offered a partial scholarship to Drew University, a Methodist college in Madison, New Jersey. But his mother couldn’t afford to send him, so in 1966 he applied to the University of Maine at Orono.
Though he was awarded a full scholarship to the University of Maine, Steve couldn’t afford to laze around for the week off. He still needed money for textbooks and other expenses, so he started his summer job two months early at the Worumbo Mills and Weaving in Lisbon Falls. He mostly worked in the bagging area, where other workers would blow fabric up into huge bins on that floor above, and it was Steve’s job to stuff the fabric into bags. When school started up again, he would maintain a breakneck schedule until he graduated, attending classes during the day and working at the mill full-time.
Somehow, he still found time to write a one-act play for the annual Senior Night in May. Past classes had performed skits, played musical instruments, and presented awards such as Class Clown and the like to individual students.
Luckily for Steve, the faculty members who said it was okay for him to write a one-act play for Senior Night had short memories, because Steve’s play turned out to be little more than a G-rated version of The Village Vomit, where he returned to poking fun at teachers and students with his thinly disguised parodies.
The play was called Fat Man and Ribbon, a takeoff on the popular Batman TV series, which first went on the air in January 1966. “Steve played Fat Man and the play was set at Lisbon High,” said Peter Higgins. “Fat Man and Ribbon were at Lisbon High trying to catch a disruptive student named Lew Corruptington, who wore a black leather jacket and was clutching a beer bottle.” Higgins played his own father, the principal. His name in the play was Principal Wiggins and he came out wearing a fright wig.
Although many students had read their copies of The Village Vomit and roared with laughter, a number of people at the school, mostly faculty, didn’t appreciate Steve’s play.
He earned a newfound respect from some of the students and a sigh of relief from many teachers who were glad to see this brilliant troublemaker on his way out the door. At his high school graduation, Steve was relieved as well, since it meant that he could solely focus on reading and writing in college, a step he hoped would bring him that much closer to living his dream of being a full-time writer.
While Steve was working at Worumbo Mills, he was fascinated by the hordes of rats that constantly wandered throughout the mill. “While I was waiting for my bin to fill up, I’d throw cans at the rats,” he said. “They were big guys, and some of them would sit right up and beg for it like dogs.” His supervisor asked him to join a cleanup crew to work in the basement over the July Fourth weekend, but he declined. However, the following week he heard loads of stories from those who had worked over the holiday about aggressive rats, the water running through the basement, and a particularly sadistic supervisor, and Steve filed them away.
In late August of 1966, he headed north to Orono to enroll as a freshman at the University of Maine. He signed up as an English major and took courses at the College of Education so he could become certified to teach in case his dream of writing full-time took a little longer to materialize.
His brother, David, had entered the university several years earlier. When both were students, Ruth would send them $5 each week so they’d have some spending money. “After she died several years later, I found she had frequently gone without meals to send us the money that we’d so casually accepted,” he said. “It was very unsettling.”
On the first day of freshman orientation, Steve met up with several of his buddies—Lew Purinton and Pete Higgins—from the college track at Lisbon High who had also signed up at the university.
According to Higgins, Steve almost got kicked out of school before classes even started. It was the custom on campus for fraternities to hold a “smoker,” where groups gathered in a lounge or a living room to look over the freshmen. “They were evaluating the students to see if they wanted to accept any,” said Higgins.
Pete, Steve, and a few other students from Lisbon went to one smoker together where they met a student who wanted to light some fireworks he had left over from the Fourth of July and asked if they wanted to watch.
The group from Lisbon High stood and watched while their new friend lit the first fuses. “We ran like crazy when they went off,” said Higgins. “They weren’t just bottle rockets and sparklers, but meaty kaboomers loud enough to shatter a number of dormitory windows. The administration was called and announced if they found whoever was responsible for the fireworks, they would be kicked out of the incoming class of 1966 before they could start. We would have been disciplined because we were standing right there when the fireworks went off, and if Steve was caught, it could have stunted his whole career.”
3
THE GUNSLINGER
The first time Rick Hautala, another freshman English major, saw his new classmate, Steve was standing in the lunch line with his nose buried in a paperback book. “He was reading the kind of junk I liked to read,” said Hautala. “At suppertime he’d be in the line again, but with his nose in a different book. It seemed like he read three books a day since he always seemed to be reading a different book at every meal.”
Though both were English majors, their paths of study were widely divergent. “Steve stuck more with modern poetry and twentieth-century literature, while I focused more on Renaissance and medieval literature,” said Hautala. “His writing stood out from what the majority of students were writing. He wasn’t trying to be pretentious or artsy, he was writing real stories instead of precious little reminiscences.”
“Steve had a very strong point of view,” said classmate Michael Alpert. “He didn’t believe in the official canon—the Harvard curriculum—at all. He thought many of the more popular writers had more to say. He didn’t just talk about subject matter, he talked about language. His sensibility was already formed even back then.”
Jim Bishop had King as a student in freshman English. “He was never without a paperback book, and he talked about authors of popular fiction the other students and professors had never heard of,” said Bishop. “Even then, he saw himself as a famous writer and thought he could make money at it. Steve was religious about writing, and he wrote continuously, diligently. He created his own world.”
In the turmoil of living away from home for the first time and getting accustomed to a whole new slew of classes and a variety of students who were nothing like those back home—i.e., they had money and would occasionally lord it over the others—Steve managed to write his first novel, “The Long Walk,” during his first two semesters of college. He polished it in the summer between his freshman and sophomore year, and then in the fall of 1967, he heard about a
first-novel competition run by the noted editor Bennett Cerf at Random House. He sent off a copy of the manuscript, and it came back with a form rejection slip and no scrawled notes from the editor, which he had gotten used to from his submissions to the pulp magazines. He became discouraged and tucked the manuscript away in a drawer.
However, not all was bad news. Steve made his first professional sale to a pulp magazine, Startling Mystery Stories, for a story called “The Glass Floor.” They paid him the princely sum of $35. By his own count, before making the sale, he had received about sixty rejection slips.
He was on his way. Someone besides his mother and his classmates thought his work was good enough to pay real money for it.
Steve had first showed up on campus with a Barry Goldwater bumper sticker on his car, evincing his family’s stalwart Republican roots. Between his sophomore and junior years, Steve discovered that the political beliefs of his youth had been challenged, not only by the Vietnam War, but by the peace movement that was inundating much of the country. He’d gone from the rock-ribbed Republicanism of his youth to a radical form of liberalism that was sweeping across college campuses everywhere, even in a remote corner of Maine.
In August of 1968, Steve decided to head for Chicago to go to the Democratic National Convention to support his preferred candidate, Eugene McCarthy, a senator from Minnesota running against President Lyndon Johnson, who had promised to pull American troops out of Vietnam if elected. At the time, the country was in chaos. Martin Luther King had been killed in April and Robert Kennedy in June, so the stage was set for a contentious convention. With a hundred bucks for spending money, Steve headed for Chicago, staying at YMCAs along the way.
At the convention, word quickly spread that police were taunting the protesters, and vice versa, which resulted in violent clashes between the two groups. Steve was demonstrating outside the convention hall with thousands of other people when tempers suddenly flared and he was maced. He couldn’t see, but he somehow found his way back to the YMCA where he was staying.
In the aftermath of the convention, he became swept up in the political fury and turmoil that was escalating. When he returned to Orono for the start of his junior year in the fall of 1968, it seemed that overnight all the rules had changed. The university was not immune to students demanding radical change in classes and throughout the entire campus. And when it came to the stodgy curriculum of the English Department, Steve was one of the lead instigators.
The University of Maine had the reputation of being an old reliable school where the focus was on mechanical engineering. Any English courses that were offered didn’t stray far from the reliable canon of Dead White Men English literature and composition classes.
Encouraged by the unorthodox demands and requests from some of the undergraduates—Steve included—some of the professors thought it was time for a change as well. Two of Steve’s professors, Burt Hatlen and Jim Bishop, designed a workshop in contemporary poetry that was geared more to graduate students than undergrads. Each workshop met after hours and was limited to twelve students, who had to be approved to attend. They wrote, read, and discussed poetry and literature, and here King was first exposed to the work of Steinbeck and Faulkner.
“Burt was more than a teacher to me, he was a mentor and a father figure,” said Steve. “He made everyone feel welcome in the company of writers and scholars and let us know there was a place for us at the table.”
George MacLeod was one of the students in the workshop. “It was a discussion class held in a living room, which was something completely different than had been offered at the time,” he said. The second thing that stood out about the class was Steve, both his appearance and his contributions to the workshop.
“He was a larger-than-life kind of guy,” said MacLeod, describing how Steve was tall but always seemed to be trying to hide his height by slightly stooping over. It was also hard to miss his long, black, oily hair reaching to his shoulders, his Coke-bottle glasses, and his sloppy manner of dressing. “He sat on the edge of the circle and he’d harrumph and make comments about a poem or what the other students were saying,” MacLeod added. “He always had a different opinion and seldom concurred with the group. He liked to argue with people just to be different.”
Steve was equally contentious with the faculty. One day the faculty invited a few students to offer their input on the future curriculum of the English Department, and it didn’t take long for Steve to offer his two cents. He stood up and immediately criticized the department because of the total absence of popular culture in the courses. He complained that there was no class where he could read a Shirley Jackson novel for credit.
He became known for walking around the campus with a John MacDonald book or a collection of short stories by Robert Bloch. “Some asshole would always ask why was I reading that, and I’d tell them that this man is a great writer,” he said. “But people would see the picture on the front with some lady with her cakes falling out of her blouse, and they would say, ‘It’s garbage.’ So I’d ask, ‘Have you read anything by this guy?’ The inevitable reply would be ‘No, all I gotta do is look at that book, and I know.’ This was my first experience with critics, in this case, my teachers at college.”
He always liked that kind of fiction, he’d grown up with it, and he knew that those were the kind of stories that he wanted to write. Even so, it was a bit of a hard sell to some of his professors.
Even when he was in college, Steve told everyone that his dream was to write popular fiction. “And there he was, spending so much time reading seventeenth-century English literature that he felt was a total waste of time,” said MacLeod. “He definitely had this anti-snob thing going on, and I think that a lot of what motivated him politically was that he was from the wrong side of the tracks.”
Steve shocked the faculty even more when he offered to teach a class about popular fiction, which sent the professors into a tizzy. Many objected not only to including commercial fiction in a college-level course, but also to the idea of an undergraduate teaching it. After the faculty discussed the proposal, they agreed to let Steve teach the course—Popular Literature and Culture—along with Graham Adams, an English professor.
Soon after, MacLeod struck up a friendship with Steve. They both needed to find a new place to live at about the same time, so they looked for an apartment together off-campus with a couple of other students.
They rented a duplex on North Main Street in Orono with each roommate paying forty bucks a month. Downstairs there was a living room and a kitchen, and upstairs were four bedrooms—turned into five when one of them was partitioned with a blanket.
“It was a terrible apartment,” said MacLeod. “In winter, there was ice on the floors. And no one ever used the shower, it was so filthy. Everyone was dirt-poor, but Steve took it in stride since he obviously had grown up that way. He had very low expectations of his environment. We had one roommate who was better off than the rest of us since his parents were paying for his education. He had his own closet and kept his food in it, and the rest of us would filch it on a regular basis.
“But Steve had his own alternative universe in his reading and his books,” MacLeod continued. “He read books like the rest of us breathed. He could tell you how many books John MacDonald had written because he had read all of them. He absorbed every part of a book, and his focus was legendary.”
On virtually every college campus in America in the late sixties, drugs were a fact of life. Whether pot, pills, or acid there was always something around for whoever wanted it, and the apartment on North Main Street was no exception. One day, word spread across campus about a new kind of hallucinatory drug that someone had in a nearby dorm and was willing to share, with one caveat. According to MacLeod, the substance messed with your equilibrium, so he cautioned that anyone who took it should make plans to stay put for a while. “You had to sit on the couch and just wait for it to pass,” he said. Steve took some along with other students, and soon ev
eryone became lost in the experience, talking, listening to music, and laughing.
After a while, someone asked where Steve had gone. They looked around the house, but no one could find him. MacLeod suggested that he had wandered off somewhere on campus and that maybe he was so stoned he couldn’t find his way home. Despite that the effects of the drug were not favorable for conducting a manhunt, his roommates organized a search and began to comb the campus.
They searched the bars, the alleys off Main Street, some of the dorms, and the English Department. After several hours, they gave up and returned to the apartment, where they found Steve in the living room reading a book. “He was sitting in a three-legged easy chair with his feet up on a cranking kerosene heater, which was in the process of melting his rubber boots, and he was oblivious to it all,” said MacLeod. “I think he was reading Psycho. On this particular drug, no one else could even manage to turn the pages, but Steve was sitting there reading, totally safe in his own little cocoon of fiction.”
Later on, Steve would detail his drug consumption during his college years. “I did a lot of LSD and peyote and mescaline, more than sixty trips in all,” he said. “I’d never proselytize for acid or any other hallucinogen, because there are good-trip personalities and bad-trip personalities, and the latter category of people can be seriously damaged emotionally.”
No matter what kind of drug the guys at the apartment took, if the munchies arose, they were a short stumble from Pat’s Pizza and the Shamrock, two of the regular hangouts for students in Orono. Pat’s offered pizza and food cheap enough to fill a poor college student’s belly, while the Shamrock just sold beer, which Steve often referred to as poor man’s Valium.