EVERYTHING’S EVENTUAL
maps, a list of restaurants, directions to the cinema complex and the mall. I had a line on everything but the most important thing of all.
“Mr. Sharpton, I don’t know what to do, ” I said. I was talking to him on the phone just outside the caff. There was a phone in my room, but by then I was too nervous to sit down, let alone lie on my bed. If they were still putting shit in my food, it sure wasn’t working that day.
“I can’t help you there, Dink,” he said, calm as ever. “So solly, Cholly.”
“What do you mean? You’ve got to help me! You recruited me, for jeepers’ sake!”
“Let me give you a hypothetical case. Suppose I’m the President of a well-endowed college. Do you know what well-endowed means?”
“Lots of bucks. I’m not stupid, I told you that.”
“So you did—I apologize. Anyhow, let’s say that I, President Sharpton, use some of my school’s plentiful bucks to hire a great novelist as the writer-in-residence, or a great pianist to teach music.
Would that entitle me to tell the novelist what to write, or the pianist what to compose?”
“Probably not.”
“Absolutely not. But let’s say it did. If I told the novelist, ‘Write a comedy about Betsy Ross screwing around with George Washington in Gay Paree,’ do you think he could do it?”
I got laughing. I couldn’t help it. Mr. Sharpton’s just got a vibe about him, somehow.
“Maybe,” I said. “Especially if you whipped a bonus on the guy.”
“Okay, but even if he held his nose and cranked it out, it would likely be a very bad novel. Because creative people aren’t always in charge. And when they do their best work, they’re hardly ever in charge. They’re just sort of rolling along with their eyes shut, yelling Wheeeee. ”
“What’s all that got to do with me? Listen, Mr. Sharpton—when I try to imagine what I’m going to do in Columbia City, all I see is a great big blank. Help people, you said. Make the world a better place.
Get rid of the Skippers. All that sounds great, except I don’t know how to do it! ”
243
STEPHEN KING
“You will,” he said. “When the time comes, you will.”
“You said Wentworth and his guys would focus my talent. Sharpen it. Mostly what they did was give me a bunch of stupid tests and make me feel like I was back in school. Is it all in my subconscious? Is it all on the hard disk?”
“Trust me, Dink,” he said. “Trust me, and trust yourself.”
So I did. I have. But just lately, things haven’t been so good. Not so good at all.
That goddam Neff—all the bad stuff started with him. I wish I’d never seen his picture. And if I had to see a picture, I wish I’d seen one where he wasn’t smiling.
XIV
My first week in Columbia City, I did nothing. I mean absolutely zilch. I didn’t even go to the movies. When the cleaners came, I just went to the park and sat on a bench and felt like the whole world was watching me. When it came time to get rid of my extra money on Thursday, I ended up shredding better than fifty dollars in the garbage disposal. And doing that was new to me then, remember.
Talk about feeling weird— man, you don’t have a clue. While I was standing there, listening to the motor under the sink grinding away, I kept thinking about Ma. If Ma had been there to see what I was doing, she would have probably run me through with a butcher-knife to make me stop. That was a dozen twenty-number Bingo games (or two dozen cover-alls) going straight down the kitchen pig.
I slept like shit that week. Every now and then I’d go to the little study—I didn’t want to, but my feet would drag me there. Like they say murderers always return to the scenes of their crimes, I guess. Anyway, I’d stand there in the doorway and look at the dark computer screen, at the Global Village modem, and I’d just sweat with guilt and embarrassment and fear. Even the way the desk was so neat and clean, without a single paper or note on it, made me sweat. I could just about hear the walls muttering stuff like “Nah, 244