Stephen King - The Tommyknockers

“In the meantime, I'm going to finish with a dangerous act: I'm going to read a fairly long poem from my first book, Grimoire.”

He winked in Patricia McCardle's direction, then took them all into his humorous confidence. “But God hates a coward, right?”

Ron snorted laughter behind him and then they were all laughing, and for a moment he actually did see a glint of her pearly-whites behind those stretched, furious lips, and oh boy howdy, that was just about as good as you'd want, wasn't it?

Watch out for her, Gard. You think you've got your boot on her neck now, and maybe you even do, for the moment, but watch out for her. She won't forget.

Or forgive.

But that was for later. Now he opened the battered copy of his first book of poems. He didn't need to look for “Leighton Street'; the book fell open to it of its own accord. His eyes found the subscript. For Bobbi, who first smelled sage in New York.

“Leighton Street” had been written the year he met her, the Year Leighton Street was all she could talk about. It was, of course, the street in Utica where she had grown up, the street she'd needed to escape before she could even start being what she wanted to be-a simple writer of simple stories. She could do that; she could do that with flash and ease. Gard had known that almost at once. Later that year he had sensed that she might be able to do more: to surmount the careless, profligate ease with which she wrote and do, if not great work, brave work. But first she had to get away from Leighton Street. Not the real one, but the Leighton Street which she carried with her in her mind, a demon geography populated by haunted tenements and her sick, loved father, her weak, loved mother, and her defiant crone of a sister, who rode over them all like a demon of endless power.

Once, that year, she had fallen asleep in class-Freshman Comp, that had been. He had been gentle with her, because he already loved her a little and he had seen the huge circles under her eyes.

“I've had problems sleeping at night,” she said, when he held her after class for a moment. She had still been half-asleep, or she never would have gone on from there; that was how powerful Anne's hold-which was the hold of Leighton Street -had been over her. But she was like a person who has been drugged, and exists with one leg thrown over each side of the sleep's dark and stony wall. “I almost fall asleep and then I hear her.”

“Who?” he asked gently.

“Sissy… my sister Anne, that is. She grinds her teeth and it sounds like b-b-b-”

Bones, she wanted to say, but then she woke into a fit of hysterical weeping that had frightened him very badly.

Anne.

More than anything else, Anne was Leighton Street.

Anne had been

(knocking at the door)

the gag of Bobbi's needs and ambitions.

Okay, Gard thought. For you, Bobbi. Only for you. And began to read “Leighton Street” as smoothly as if he had spent the afternoon rehearsing it in his room.

“These streets begin where the cobbles

surface through tar like the heads

of children buried badly in their textures,”

Gardener read.

“What myth is this? we ask, but

the children who play stickball and

Johnny-Jump-My-Pony round here just laugh.

No myth they tell us no myth, just they say hey motherfucker aint nothing but Leighton Street here, aint nothing but all small houses aint only but back porches where our mothers wash there and they're and their.

Where days grow hot and on Leighton Street they listen to the radio while pterodactyls flow between the TV aerials on the roof and they say hey motherfucker they say Hey motherfucker!

No myth they tell us no myth, just they say hey motherfucker aint nothing but Leighton Street round here

This they say is how you be silent in your silence of days, Motherfucker.

When we turned our back on these upstate roads, warehouses with faces of blank brick, when you say “O, but I have reached the end of all I know and still hear her grinding, grinding in the night…

Because it had been so long since he had read the poem, even to himself, he did not just “perform” it (something, he had discovered, that was almost impossible not to do at the end of a tour such as this); he rediscovered it. Most of those who came to the reading at Northeastern that night-even those who witnessed the evening's sordid. creepy conclusion, agreed that Gardener's reading of “Leighton Street” had been the best of the night. A good many of them maintained it was the best they had ever heard.

Since it was the last reading Jim Gardener would ever give in his life, it was maybe not such a bad way to go out.

It took him nearly twenty minutes to read all of it, and when he finished he looked up uncertainly into a deep and perfect well of silence. He had time to think he had never read the damned thing at all, that it had just been a vivid hallucination in the moment or two before the faint.

Then someone stood up and began to clap steadily and hard. It was a young man with tears on his cheeks. The girl beside him also stood and began to clap and she was also crying. Then they were all standing and applauding, yeah, they were giving him a fucking standing 0, and in their faces he saw what every poet or would-be poet hopes to see when he or she finishes reading: the faces of people suddenly awakened from a dream brighter than any reality. They looked as dazed as Bobbi had on that day, not quite sure where they were.

But they weren't all standing and applauding, he saw; Patricia McCardle sat stiff and straight in her third-row seat, her hands clasped tightly together in her lap over her small evening bag. Her lips had closed. No sign of the old pearly-whites now; her mouth had become a small bloodless cut. Gard felt a weary amusement. As far as you're concerned, Patty, the real Puritan ethic is no one who's a black sheep should dare rise above his designated level of mediocrity, correct? But there's no mediocrity clause in your contract, is there?

“Thank you,” he muttered into the mike, sweeping his books and papers together into an untidy pile with his shaking hands-and then almost dropping them all over the floor as he stepped away from the podium. He dropped into his seat next to Ron Cummings with a deep sigh.

“My God,” Ron whispered, still applauding. “My God!”

“Stop clapping, you ass,” Gardener whispered back.

“Damned if I will. I don't care when you wrote it, it was fucking brilliant,” Cummings said. “And I'll buy you a drink on it later on.”

“I'm not drinking anything stronger than club soda tonight,” Gardener said, and knew it was a lie. His headache was already creeping back. Aspirin wouldn't cure that, Percodan wouldn't, a “Iude wouldn't. Nothing would fix his head but a great big shot of booze. Fast, fast relief.

The applause was finally beginning to die away. Patricia McCardle looked acidly grateful.

The name of the fat shit who had introduced each of the poets was Arberg (although Gardener kept wanting to call him Arglebargle), and he was the assistant professor of English who headed the sponsoring group. He was the sort of man his father had called a “beefy sonofawhore.”

The beefy sonofawhore threw a party for the Caravan, the Friends of Poetry, and most of the English Department faculty at his house after the reading. It began around eleven o'clock. It was stiffish at first-men and women standing in uncomfortable little groups with glasses and paper plates in their hands, talking your usual brand of cautious academic talk. This sort of bullshit had struck Gard as a stupid waste of time when he was teaching. It still did, but there was also something nostalgic and pleasing-in a melancholy way-about it now.