Joyland

by Stephen King

“There are two important showbiz rules, kiddo: always know where your wallet is…and show up.”

When you’re twenty-one, life is a roadmap. It’s only when you get to be twenty-five or so that you begin to suspect you’ve been looking at the map upside down, and not until you’re forty are you entirely sure. By the time you’re sixty, take it from me, you’re fucking lost.

When it comes to the past, everyone writes fiction.

Pop gave him a cool stare that settled Tom down—a thing not always easy to do. “Son, do you know what history is?” “Uh…stuff that happened in the past?” “Nope,” he said, tying on his canvas change-belt. “History is the collective and ancestral shit of the human race, a great big and ever-growin pile of crap. Right now we’re standin at the top of it, but pretty soon we’ll be buried under the doodoo of generations yet to come. That’s why your folks’ clothes look so funny in old photographs, to name but a single example. And, as someone who’s destined to be buried beneath the shit of your children and grandchildren, I think you should be just a leetle more forgiving.” Tom opened his mouth, probably to make a smart comeback, then wisely closed it again.

We could see other fires—great leaping bonfires as well as cooking fires—all the way down the beach to the twinkling metropolis of Joyland. They made a lovely chain of burning jewelry. Such fires are probably illegal in the twenty-first century; the powers that be have a way of outlawing many beautiful things made by ordinary people. I don’t know why that should be, I only know it is.

In the Book of Proverbs we are advised that “as a dog returns to its vomit, so a fool repeats his folly.”

“I can’t understand why people use religion to hurt each other when there’s already so much pain in the world,” Mrs. Shoplaw said. “Religion is supposed to comfort.”

All I can say is what you already know: some days are treasure. Not many, but I think in almost every life there are a few. That was one of mine, and when I’m blue—when life comes down on me and everything looks tawdry and cheap, the way Joyland Avenue did on a rainy day—I go back to it, if only to remind myself that life isn’t always a butcher’s game. Sometimes the prizes are real. Sometimes they’re precious.

The last good time always comes, and when you see the darkness creeping toward you, you hold on to what was bright and good. You hold on for dear life.