Joyland

by Stephen King

People think first love is sweet, and never sweeter than when that first bond snaps. You’ve heard a thousand pop and country songs that prove the point; some fool got his heart broke. Yet that first broken heart is always the most painful, the slowest to mend, and leaves the most visible scar. What’s so sweet about that?

What I know now is that gallant young men rarely get pussy. Put it on a sampler and hang it in your kitchen.

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.

The bathroom’s not much, I know, but it beats having to take a dump in a dormitory bathroom while a couple of guys at the sinks fart and tell lies about the girls they made out with last night.”

When it comes to the past, everyone writes fiction. ♥

“Love you, too.” That sounded perfunctory rather than fervent. She’s just tired, I told myself. I rolled north out of Boston with a distinct feeling of unease. Something about the way she had sounded? That lack of enthusiasm? I didn’t know. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. But I wondered. Sometimes even now, all these years later, I wonder. She’s nothing to me these days but a scar and a memory, someone who hurt me as young women will hurt young men from time to time. A young woman from another life. Still I can’t help wondering where she was that day. What those things were. And if it was really Renee St. Clair she was with.

After the meal was eaten and the dishes washed, we sat on the couch, drinking beer, eating popcorn, and watching a movie starring Gene Hackman as a tough cop with a foot fetish.

Bradley Easterbrook surveyed us, then suddenly displayed those horsey teeth in another grin. This one looked big enough to eat the world.

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.

Eddie looked at him the way a man might look at a new species of bug

We climbed aboard. Three of us in a car designed for two made for an extremely tight fit, and I was very aware of Erin’s thigh pressing against mine, and the brush of her breast against my arm. I felt a sudden and far from unpleasant southward tingle. I would argue that—fantasies aside—the majority of men are monogamous from the chin up. Below the belt-buckle, however, there’s a wahoo stampeder who just doesn’t give a shit.

It’s hard to let go. Even when what you’re holding onto is full of thorns, it’s hard to let go. Maybe especially then.

like with most bullies, you scratch the surface and find pure chickenshit underneath. Usually not very far underneath, either.

I remember Mike’s day at the park—Annie’s day, too—as if it happened last week, but it would take a correspondent much more talented than I am to tell you how it felt, or to explain how it could have ended the last hold Wendy Keegan still held over my heart and my emotions. 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.