by Lisa Rogak
Tabby grew up a self-described loner, introspective and independent, and she loved to write: she kept a diary and wrote letters to friends. Like Steve, she was an inveterate reader. “Once I discovered the public library, I was rarely at home,” she said. “One time, the librarian called home to say that I’d been reading adult books, and my mother told her if I understood them, it was okay, and if I didn’t, they couldn’t harm me.”
Also like Steve, Tabby wouldn’t care if she never saw another lobster in her life. As a teenager, she worked at a tourist seafood restaurant near Bangor called Lobsterland and often ran the lobster press, where all of the lobster left over from customers’ plates was gathered and dumped so it could appear on new plates the next day as lobster salad or lobster roll. She grew to detest the way the stale seafood smell permeated her skin, hair, and clothes, but it was the only work open to her at the time.
“When I grew up in Old Town, there wasn’t any women’s movement,” said Tabby. “I learned real early that whatever I did, the basic problem was I was female, and being a female who wore glasses was a real downer. Then I grew boobs and that didn’t get me anywhere either.” She graduated from John Bapst Memorial High School in Bangor in June of 1967. After graduation, she proceeded to the University of Maine, the typical path for smart high school students from families with little money to send their kids to an out-of-state college. Like Steve, she attended UMO with the help of scholarships and part-time campus jobs. Once she got to college, she hoped to find freedom from the restraints that had held her back intellectually. Instead, she encountered new forms of sexism. She recalled how one professor would regularly scrawl across the top of the term papers of female students, Drop out and get married.
Persevering, she brushed such slights aside despite not being sure of her academic focus. For a while, she changed her major about once a semester. She eventually settled into English and history. After graduation she planned to pursue a master’s in library science and become a full-time librarian.
At least that was the plan. Meeting Steve changed all that.
“I knew Tabby was my ideal reader from the first time that I gave her something to read, before we were married, which was a story called ‘I Am the Doorway,’ and she told me it was really good,” he said. “That’s usually the extent of her comments, if she likes something.” Of course, he would in time find out that if she didn’t like something, she wouldn’t hesitate to tell him and follow it up with suggestions for how he could improve his work.
From the first time they met—Steve got loaded on their first date—they were joined at the hip. They understood each other and were interested in the same things.
By dating Tabitha, Steve instantly joined a big family, the kind he’d never had but always dreamed of.
As part of the requirements to earn his certificate to teach high school when he graduated, Steve started student teaching in January of 1970 at Hampden Academy, a public high school in nearby Hampden, Maine. Though it added significantly to his workload, he continued to take classes, study, read, and write while also teaching English.
By this time, he and Tabby were living together at the Springer Cabins by the Stillwater River in Orono. They were notoriously cheap accommodations, but since they were both in school and money was rare, it was all they could afford. This was especially important since Tabby was already three months pregnant. She continued to go to classes despite stares of disapproval, especially from her male professors. Though Roe v. Wade was still three years down the road, abortions were available if inquiries were made through the right circles. Since free love ran rampant in the late sixties and early seventies, many women opted for abortion rather than for birth, because motherhood was viewed as “square” in many circles at the time.
Which described Steve and Tabby to a T. Although Steve had taken more than his fair share of drugs and led marches to the president’s house to make outrageous demands, his worldview hadn’t strayed far from that of his conservative childhood. Abortion was not an option. Besides, Tabby was raised Catholic and they had already planned to marry after Steve graduated from college.
Most likely, to Steve, aborting a child was the same as abandoning one, and he swore he would refuse to do anything that smacked of his father’s behavior toward his family. So Steve and Tabby soldiered on. Though Steve had never had any trouble finding the motivation to write, now he had even more incentive. Writing, he believed, would be their ticket out of a difficult life. He had recently started to send some of his short fiction to men’s magazines such as Gallery and Cavalier, and he began to sell a story here and there. They paid only a couple of hundred bucks, but to Steve, it was a fortune.
One day in March, Steve was working at the library when the librarian set out several reams of bright green paper for students, free for the taking. It was easy to see why the staff had no use for the paper: the sheets were as thick as cardboard and wouldn’t easily roll through typewriters. They measured seven by ten inches, an irregular size that professors would frown on.
Most of the students passed, but Steve took as much as he could. While he knew that most people viewed a blank sheet of paper with abject fear, to him it represented great promise. He regarded the paper, with its unusual size and color, as a gift. He wanted to save it for something special and ran his fingers over the reams as he giddily compared himself to “an alcoholic contemplating a case of Chivas Regal, or a sex maniac receiving a visit from a couple of hundred willing young virgins.” He took the paper back to the cabins, rolled the first sheet into the same Underwood typewriter he had banged away on since childhood—he’d finally brought it down from Durham—and typed the first line of a novel whose idea he had based on a Robert Browning poem, “Childe Roland,” about a young man’s quest through an unfamiliar and dark landscape to a faraway tower.
“The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed.”
In addition to the detective, horror, science fiction, and comic books King was reading, he was exploring another genre popular at the time: fantasy, most notably Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series.
“I was just knocked out by the magic of the stories, by the idea of the quest, the broadness of it, and how long it took to tell the tales,” he said. Naturally, he thought about writing his own book along the same lines, and as he worked on the first of a projected seven-book series, he knew he had to consciously avoid Tolkien’s style and stories. At the same time, he knew he wanted the books to have one foot in the fantasy world and one foot in the real one.
While he began to explore the world of the character Roland Deschain, he worked feverishly on other stories and novels while also finishing up the course work he needed to graduate. He continued to tell anyone within earshot that his goal was to become a full-time writer. Unlike many of his fellow students, who were succumbing to the pessimism of the Vietnam War period, Steve was still incredibly optimistic about his future. As a result, he saw opportunity and ideas in absolutely everything that crossed his path, even in a bunch of paper that nobody else wanted.
It would take twelve more years, but that oddly shaped green paper would serve as the genesis of his Dark Tower series.
4
DESPERATION
One month before his college graduation, Steve was arrested by the Orono, Maine, police in a bizarre incident involving three dozen rubber traffic cones. He’d been drinking heavily at a local bar, and on the way home he’d hit a traffic cone so hard that it had snagged the muffler from the dilapidated Ford station wagon he was driving at the time. Earlier in the day, he had seen that the town highway department was painting new crosswalk marks all over town and had set the cones so motorists and pedestrians would know to watch for the wet paint.
Not Steve. He was so indignant that he had to buy a new muffler for his car that he decided to teach the town a lesson. “With a drunk’s logic, I decided to cruise around town and pick up all the cones,” he remembered. “The following day, I would
present them, along with my dead muffler, at the Town Office in a display of righteous anger.”
He’d collected about a hundred cones in the back of his wagon before running out of room. He knew he was far from finished, however, so he went back to his apartment to clear out his car and deposit the cones before returning to the streets to round up the rest of the offenders. He had gathered up a good number on his second run when a cop spotted him and turned on the blue lights. The policeman spotted enough cones in the back of Steve’s car—even on the second cone run—to arrest King for larceny. “Had I been caught with the hundred or so already stashed in my apartment building, perhaps we would have been talking grand larceny,” he said.
A trial date was set for August.
Stephen King graduated from the University of Maine at Orono in the spring of 1970 with a BS in English and a certificate that qualified him to teach at the high school level. A draft board examination conducted immediately after he graduated declared him to be 4-F and unsuitable to be drafted due to his high blood pressure, limited vision, flat feet, and punctured eardrums. Undoubtedly, for the first time in his life, instead of looking back at the sadistic doctor of his childhood with revulsion, he may have been just a wee bit thankful.
Even though he was no longer a student, Steve continued to write for the Maine Campus. One of the stories was “Slade,” the story he’d started writing on that odd-size green paper a few months earlier.
Tabby’s first child, Naomi Rachel, was born on June 1, 1970, just after Steve’s graduation but a year before her own. Though he and Tabby were thrilled, they were understandably nervous about how they would be able to support a child when they were having trouble supporting themselves. As he had planned to do all along, Steve applied for a teaching position at Hampden Academy, and when he found no openings, he applied at a few other high schools in the area, only to be told the same news.
He had to make some money and didn’t want to return to work at Worumbo Mills, so he got a job pumping gas at a service station in Brewer. The working conditions were intended to keep the attendants on their toes. If a customer filled up his or her tank, Steve had to morph into salesman mode.
“With a fill-up you got your choice of The Glass—an ugly but durable diner-style water tumbler—or The Bread, an extralong loaf of spongy white,” he said. “If we forgot to ask if we could check your oil, you got your fill-up free. If we forgot to say thank you, same deal. And guess who would have to pay for the free fill-up? That’s right, the forgetful pump jockey.”
After footing the bill for several customers’ free fill-ups, Steve learned his lesson, even though the job was incredibly boring. In August, his trial came up for cone theft, and he took the day off from work to go to court. But he didn’t want his boss to think she had hired a miscreant, so he said he needed the day off to attend the funeral of one of Tabby’s relatives.
He headed to Bangor District Court, defended himself without a lawyer, and was promptly found guilty. The judge fined him a hundred bucks, but he’d recently sold a horror story to Adam called “The Float” about four college students who swim out to a raft in the middle of a lake one fall day only to encounter a creature beneath the murky water, so he used the check to pay the fine. If the judge only knew where the money had come from …
The next day when he showed up for work at the gas station, he was fired for lying about the reason for his absence the day before. One of the boss’s relatives had followed Steve in the court docket and told his aunt that her employee had been in court the same day.
He needed to find another job immediately, so he applied at several different places and was offered a job that paid $1.60 an hour at the New Franklin Laundry, which handled laundry from commercial establishments and businesses.
He thought long and hard before accepting it. After all, at one point his mother had worked in a laundry, and the last thing he wanted was to replicate his mother’s life, something she would wholeheartedly agree with.
Despite his college degree, he was well on his way down Ruth’s depressing path: supporting a wife and a newborn created a lot of stress for Steve. Although he knew in his heart the easy way out would have been to replicate his father’s life, to excuse himself after dinner one night to go buy a pack of cigarettes and then put his head down, keep walking, and never look back, he knew he could never go down that path.
Besides, he had made contact with an editor in New York who liked his work and who thought he had a future as a novelist.
Since graduating from college, Steve had been working on a novel he called Getting It On, the story of a high school student who kills two of his teachers and holds his entire algebra class hostage. He finished it over the summer and thought it was as good—or better—than a lot of the paperback novels he was reading at the time and decided to send it to a publisher. He’d recently read a novel called Parallax View by Loren Singer that he admired. He saw similarities between his own novel and Singer’s, which was published by Doubleday, so he packaged his up and addressed it to the “Editor of Parallax View” at Doubleday in New York. Unbeknownst to Steve, that editor had since departed the house, so his manuscript landed on the desk of a fiction editor named Bill Thompson.
Thompson wrote back to say that he liked Steve’s novel but that it needed some work, spelling out the changes he wanted the young author to make. Excited beyond belief, Steve made the changes and sent the revised manuscript back to Thompson. After a few months, the manuscript came back with a note that the other editors on staff wanted to see a few more changes. Steve fixed the story for the second time and sent the manuscript back.
Thompson sent it back a third time, apologetically asking for yet more changes that were this time requested by the editorial board. Steve hesitated, but he figured this was what publishing was like, so he dutifully followed the board’s suggestions and returned the manuscript.
When the thick package came back a fourth time with the Doubleday return address, Steve’s spirits sagged. He ripped open the envelope to discover that after all of his hard work and despite doing everything the editors had asked for, Getting It On was rejected.
“It was a painful blow for me,” he later wrote, “because I had been allowed to entertain some degree of hope for an extraordinarily long time.”
He licked his wounds for a short time before starting on the next project. After all, Thompson liked his work and told him he would have accepted Getting It On long ago if the decision were solely up to him. Plus, Steve didn’t feel totally dejected, as he had learned a lot about the editorial process and the nitpicky things that some editors preferred and others detested. Later on, Steve would find out that Bill had actually sent the novel to a few editors he knew at other publishing houses in hopes of placing it elsewhere, something he could have been fired for if the top brass found out.
Bill had asked Steve to keep him in mind for other novels he might be working on, and so Steve took the next novel in the stack and sent it along. The Long Walk was about a group of a hundred boys who participate in a yearly punishing walk with myriad rules—no breaks are allowed, walking speed must not drop below four miles an hour—that lasts until only one walker remains. Again, the same pattern commenced: Bill requested a few changes, then the other editors wanted to get their two cents in, followed by the editorial board, which finally turned thumbs-down on the project.
All this was happening while Steve was working full-time at the laundry and writing short stories for the men’s magazines, where his track record was better than with Doubleday.
Steve had made his first sale to Cavalier over the summer, and “Graveyard Shift” was published in the October 1970 issue. The story was about giant rats in an old factory basement and the men who were sent in to clean out the basement. He’d based it on the stories he’d heard from the July Fourth cleanup crew at Worumbo Mills. Maurice DeWalt was the editor in charge of screening over-the-transom short fiction at Cavalier, a hip alternative to Playboy that b
egan publishing in the late sixties. Along with contemporary articles and fiction, the primary appeal of the magazine was the photos of sparsely clad female models.
One day DeWalt called his main editor, Nye Willden, to tell him that he had just read an amazing story by a writer named Stephen King. “But,” said Willden, “he also told me that it had little or no relevance to the kind of stories we published at the magazine. I told him to bring it over anyway, and when I read it, it truly gave me chills.”
He wrote to Steve to accept the story and said he’d pay a hundred bucks. Steve wrote back immediately to accept the offer and enclosed a few more stories for Willden’s consideration.
Of course, it was a skin magazine, but Steve knew he had to pay his dues, and he was still optimistic about his future. He continued voraciously reading anything he could get his hands on, the more popular the genre and the trashier the cover art, the better. But occasionally he’d be waylaid when he picked up a book at the library where the covers weren’t anywhere in sight. “I’d open it up and in the front I would see something like ‘The author would like to thank the Guggenheim Foundation for the money to write this book,’ and I’d think, ‘You fucking shithead, where do you get off taking that money so you can sit on your ass in some cabin in New Hampshire while I’m trying to write a book at night and I’ve got bleach burns all over my hands? Who the fuck are you?’
“Steam would come out of my ears, I was so mad and jealous of these guys,” Steve said. “And I would think it was all because they would all sit around and sniff each other’s underwear in the literary sense. Some English professor says to his grad student, ‘You ought to go out and read some Nathaniel Hawthorne,’ and the kid comes back and says, ‘Gee, chief, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s great. Will you sign my application for the Guggenheim scholarship?’ It used to make me crazy.”
Back on the home front, Steve and Tabby planned to get married, but she had one condition: he get a better job than working at the laundry. So he promised to apply for more teaching jobs in the spring.