Stephen King - The Tommyknockers

Then there would come a morning like this when he would wake up wanting all the booze in the world. This seemed to be an actual thirst, a physical thing-it made him think of those cartoons Virgil Partch used to do in the Saturday Evening Post, the ones where some funky old prospector is always crawling across the desert, his tongue hanging out, looking for a waterhole.

All he could do when the urge came on him was fight it off-stand it off, try to earn a draw. Sometimes it was actually better to be in a place like Boston when this happened, because you could go to a meeting every night-every four hours, if that was what it took. After three or four days, it would go away.

Usually.

He would, he thought, just wait it out. Sit in his room and watch movies on cable TV and charge them to room service. He had spent the eight years since his divorce and separation from the University of Maine as a Full-Time Poet, which meant he had come to live in an odd little subsociety where barter was usually more important than money.

He had traded poems for food: on one occasion a birthday sonnet for a farmer's wife in exchange for three shopping bags of new potatoes. “Goddam thing better rhyme, too,” the farmer had said, fixing a stony eye upon Gardener. “Real poimes rhyme.”

Gardener, who could take a hint (especially when his stomach was concerned), composed a sonnet so filled with exuberant masculine rhymes that he burst into gales of laughter after scanning the second draft. He called Bobbi, read it to her, and they both howled. It was even better out loud. Out loud it sounded like a love-letter from Dr Seuss. But he hadn't needed Bobbi to point out to him that it was still an honest piece of work, jangly but not condescending.

On another occasion, a small press in West Minot agreed to publish a book of his poems (this had been in early 1983 and was, in fact, the last book of poems Gardener had published), and offered half a cord of wood as an advance. Gardener took it.

“You should have held out for three-quarters of a cord,” Bobbi told him that night, as they sat in front of her stove, feet up on the fender, smoking cigarettes as a wind shrieked fresh snow across the fields and into the trees. “Those're good poems. There's a lot of them, too.”

“I know,” Gardener said, “but I was cold. Half a cord'll get me through until spring.” He dropped her a wink. “Besides, the guy's from Connecticut. I don't think he knew most of it was ash.”

She dropped her feet to the floor and stared at him. “You kidding?”

“Nope.”

She began to giggle and he kissed her soundly and later took her to bed and they slept together like spoons. He remembered waking up once, listening to the wind, thinking of all the dark and rushing cold outside and all the warmth of this bed. filled with their peaceful heat under two quilts, and wishing it could be like this forever-only nothing ever was. He had been raised to believe God was love, but you had to wonder how loving a God could be when He made men and women smart enough to land on the moon but stupid enough to have to learn there was no such thing as forever over and over again.

The next day Bobbi had again offered money and Gardener again refused. He wasn't exactly rolling in dough, but he made out. And he couldn't help the little spark of anger he felt in spite of her matter-of-fact tone. “Don't you know who's supposed to get the money after a night in bed?” he asked.

She stuck out her chin. “You calling me a whore?”

He smiled. “You need a pimp? There's money in it, I hear.”

You want breakfast, Gard, or do you want to piss me off?”

How about both?”

“No,” she said, and he saw she was really mad-Christ, he was getting worse and worse at seeing things like that, and it used to be so easy. He hugged her. I was only kidding, couldn't she see that? he thought. She always used to be able to tell when I was kidding. But of course she hadn't known he was kidding because he hadn't been. If he believed different, the only one getting kidded was himself. He had been trying to hurt her because she'd embarrassed him. And it wasn't her offer that had been stupid; it was his embarrassment. He had more or less chosen the life he was living, hadn't he?

And he didn't want to hurt Bobbi, didn't want to drive Bobbi away. The bed part was fine, but the bed part wasn't the really important part. The really important part was that Bobbi Anderson was a friend, and something scary seemed to be happening just lately. How fast he seemed to be running out of friends. That was pretty scary, all right.

Running out of friends? Or running them out? Which is it, Gard?

At first hugging her was like hugging an ironing board and he was afraid she would try to pull away and he would make the mistake of trying to hold on, but she finally softened.

“I want breakfast,” he said, “and to say I'm sorry.”

“It's all right,” she said, and turned away before he could see her face-but her voice held that dry briskness that meant she was either crying or near it. “I keep forgetting it's bad manners to offer money to Yankees.”

Well, he didn't know if it was bad manners or not, but he would not take money from Bobbi. Never had, never would.

The New England Poetry Caravan, however, was a different matter.

Grab that chicken, son, Ron Cummings, who needed money about as much as the Pope needed a new hat, would have said. The bitch is too slow to run and too fat to pass up.

The New England Poetry Caravan paid cash. Coin of the realm for poetry-three hundred up front and three hundred at the end of the tour. The word made flesh, as you might say. But hard cash, it was understood, was only part of the deal.

The rest of the deal was THE TAB.

While you were on tour, you took advantage of every opportunity. You got your meals from room service, your hair cut in the hotel barbershop if there was one, brought your extra pair of shoes (if you had one) and put them out one night instead of your regulars so you could get the extras shined up.

Then there were the in-room movies, movies you never got a chance to see in a theater, because theaters persisted in wanting money for much the same thing poets, even the very good ones, were for some reason supposed to provide for free or next to it-three bags of spuds = one (1) sonnet, for instance. There was a room charge for the movies, of course, but what of that? You didn't even have to put them On THE TAB; some computer did it automatically, and all Gardener had to say on the subject was God bless and keep THE TAB, and bring those fuckers on! He watched everything, from Emmanuelle in New York (finding the part where the girl flogs the guy's doggy under a table at Windows on the World particularly artistic and uplifting; it certainly uplifted part of him, anyway) to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom to Rainbow Brite and the Star-Stealer.

And that's what I'm going to do now, he thought, rubbing his throat and thinking about the taste of good aged whiskey. EXACTLY what I'm going to do. Just sit here and watch them all over again, even Rainbow Brite. And for lunch I'm going to order three bacon cheeseburgers and eat one cold at three o'clock. Maybe skip Rainbow Brite and take a nap. Stay in tonight. Go to bed early. And stand it off.

Bobbi Anderson tripped over a three-inch tongue of metal protruding from the earth.

Jim Gardener tripped over Ron Cummings.

Different objects, same result.

For want of a nail.

Ron popped in around the same time that, some two hundred and ten miles away, Anderson and Peter were finally getting home from their less-than-normal trip to the vet's. Cummings suggested they go down to the hotel bar and have a drink or ten.

“Or,” Ron continued brightly, “we could just skip the foreplay and get shitfaced.”