by Jay Wilburn
The plan is to reread all of Stephen King’s works in the order that they were published. Richard Chizmar of Cemetery Dance had the vision. I’m doing it because I am a writer and I want to improve my fiction. And I love Stephen King’s stories. I think there is something to be learned through this process.
You can also go back to the beginning and read Before Carrie or any of my other posts up through this one and beyond by checking out this link to the Master List of all my #StephenKingRevisited posts.
I had some difficulty pulling together the details in this post. This is not a time period I dwell on a lot. Some of the details have faded a good bit from lack of attention.
I bought Gerald’s Game one myself when I was kicked out of my parents’ house the second time during my senior year of high school and into that summer.
I was working nights at a Waffle House and going to school during the day. I was exhausted, disconnected, and more than once I nearly fell asleep in the car driving straight from work to school. I was just surviving, not living.
From that time, what I remember most, is hating being cold. I hated it more than being hungry. Fortunately, I could eat when I was working a shift and sometimes weekday nights were slow. Also, being a waiter at Waffle House, I left every shift with cash. Not always a lot, but some, so in this second round of homelessness, I could usually afford food and gas. A few times a week, usually on my off days, I’d ask a friend if they minded if I swung past their place to grab a shower before some imaginary activity I supposedly had. During the winter, sleeping in my car on nights that I was off or in the afternoon between school and my next night shift, I despised being cold. It took everything in me not to run out the last of the gas in my car to run the heater, knowing I might die from gathering carbon monoxide.
In the summer, nights in the car could get miserably hot. It was still better than winter.
I remember picking up Gerald’s Game in July and reading it to fight boredom. I was calculating what I could afford to spare from food money. Meals were more because I had graduated and couldn’t grab school meals.
It was at that moment that I realized I needed to do something different or this would be my life. I was reading Gerald’s Game in my car on an off night. The sun was going down. I knew once there was not enough sun left to read by, I would turn around and lean against the dashboard so I could catch light from the streetlamp above where I was parked.
In my memory, it was my radio that was playing, but now that I think about it, I didn’t run my car when I was parked, so I think it was a car parked nearby. Either way, Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” was playing and the line “Leave tonight or live and die this way” came to my ear.
At best, I was going to scrape together apartment money and probably with terrible roommates in a terrible part of town which was what happened last time I was homeless and a couple years younger.
I had scholarships to a junior college starting in the fall. There was only a few hundred dollars left to cover classes, room, and board for the first quarter. I had gotten my acceptance back in the school year at the beginning of being out on my own again and I was sure I could save it up. I had all but pushed that out of my mind at this point.
That night, I drove to my parents’ house and played the prodigal son for my father’s amusement. He was a bastard with a closed fist style of discipline. I didn’t believe I was in the wrong with a man who had beaten me my entire life. I laid out my plan to them. He gave me lectures on responsibility and accepting the consequences of my actions. I nodded along.
I stayed at “home” the rest of that summer and squirreled away my money while working all my shifts and everyone else’s who ever called in sick.
My dad came to me and said I needed to pay rent. I told him I was going to pay for the first quarter of college and then he could have everything else I had left. I saved up almost enough to cover the difference in scholarships for all three quarters of my first year. I sold my car to get the rest after my last shift at Waffle House.
I took a shower one morning, told my dad I had a double shift at the Waffle House I no longer worked at, and after he left, I called a friend to come pick me up. I can’t remember what my mom was doing, but I managed to pack up everything I was taking with me into his car and left.
He drove me over to the home of a woman from my church. I can’t remember her name. I spent an hour just now digging around trying to find her name, but I came up empty. I transferred my stuff from my friend’s car to her car. Her and another woman drove me up to college and dropped me off.
I didn’t pay my dad anything and he tried to hold that over me for a while until he reached a point where he wanted to pretend none of that ever happened in the last years before his death.
I finished reading Gerald’s Game while I was staying there in that tenuous situation with my parents. My dad was reading it after I finished and I didn’t think to take it when I packed. That was one of the books I took back from his shelf after he died.
I don’t know that I could relate to a woman chained to a bed exactly, but I could relate to a sense of peril and doom. I could relate to desperation to escape.
I’m rereading this novel, the same copy from that summer before college, under much better conditions now.
My next post will be After Gerald’s Game which will be linked on the Master List of all my Stephen King Revisited posts.
Jay's Patreon Page | Purchase Signed Books