Duma Key

by Stephen King

At the time it was like being in hell and not knowing why you were there.

Edgar Freemantle’s Four Rules for Success (feel free to take notes) were: never borrow more than your IQ times a hundred, never borrow from a man who calls you by your first name on first acquaintance, never take a drink while the sun’s still up, and never take a partner you wouldn’t be willing to embrace naked on a waterbed.

Once, when I was ten and growing up in Eau Claire, I took a comic book from a drugstore spin-around, put it down the front of my jeans, then dropped my tee-shirt over it. As I was strolling out the door, feeling jacked up and very clever, a clerk grabbed me by the arm. She lifted my shirt with her other hand and exposed my ill-gotten treasure. “How did that get there?” she asked me. Not in the forty years since that day had I been so completely stuck for an answer to a simple question.

One-armed men should tell the truth whenever possible.

It was artless, unrehearsed, and sweet: a straight shot to the heart.

Borders

wow, borders!

“Like the House of Usher,”

The idea that such a breeze and snow in St. Paul might exist at the same time, in the same world, seemed absurd to me—science fiction.

So far as I can remember (and I’m better at that now), it was the first time in my life I named a picture. And as names go, it’s a good one, isn’t it? In spite of all the damage that followed, I still think that’s the perfect name for a picture drawn by a man who was trying his best not to be sad anymore—who was trying to remember how it felt to be happy.

where I grew up, children are raised to believe mayonnaise, bologna, and white bread are the food of the gods—and

Because it is

Later, Wireman would tell me God always punishes us for what we can’t imagine.

There is no tyrant as merciless as pain, no despot so cruel as confusion.

In any case, there weren’t that many rainy days—not for nothing is Florida called the Sunshine State.

Has Stephen King ever been to Florida?

Tampa Devil Rays

The good old days

Healing is a kind of revolt, and as I think I’ve said, all successful revolts begin in secret.

Pam’s father had been diagnosed with rectal cancer. It didn’t surprise me. Put a bunch of white assholes together and you’re going to find that going around.

Naming lends power.

Love conveys its own psychic powers, doesn’t it?

The only religions I don’t like are the ones that insist their God is bigger than your God.

I just didn’t want Ilse to be hurt. I thought she was going to be. But everyone gets their share, don’t they?

Could I trust a suitor who called my daughter Punkin and signed himself Smiley? I didn’t think so. It might not be fair, but no—I didn’t think so.

You deserve to get better, you know. Sometimes I wonder if you really believe that.”

Someone besides Kamen, that is, whose job it was to scrape caked-on grime off those troublesome unwashed pots in the sinks of the subconscious.

That was the day, I think, when Jack Cantori became my friend rather than my part-time gofer.

Her gift was hungry. The best gifts—and the worst—always are.

do the day and let the day do you!”

She also told me that The Hummingbirds had played a big church in Pawtucket, Rhode Island—sort

The extraneous dropped away almost entirely, and when that happens, you begin to hear yourself clearly.

And clear communication between selves—the surface self and the deep self is what I mean—is the enemy of self-doubt. It slays confusion.

Pam was the experiment . . . or so I told myself, but we fool ourselves so much we could do it for a living. That’s what Wireman says, and he’s often right. Probably too often. Even now.

Kamen specialized in tricking the victims of terrible accidents into believing the pallid imitations of life they were living were as good as the real thing.

Peek not through a keyhole, lest ye be vexed,

It wasn’t the only time we laughed together. Wireman was many things to me—not least of all my fate—but most of all, he was my friend.

Men do not sham convulsion, Nor simulate a throe.

Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein.

It’s a big word, isn’t it? Gulf, I mean. Big enough to drop a lot of things into and watch them disappear.

Ominous

palaver.

That was something else I’ll never forget about Jerome Wireman; the man had a strong grip.

Past tense

but a life without books is a thirsty life,

“That’s all right, Edgar,” she said. “Poetry sometimes does that to me, as well. Honest feeling is nothing to be ashamed of. Men do not sham convulsion.”

Then things changed, didn’t they? Because art is magic, and not all magic is white.

I guess it gets cold everywhere. I bet it even snows in hell, although I doubt if it sticks.

I felt as if I were confessing to having spent the last week or so downloading pictures of Lindsay Lohan.

and the real truth is red.

“The table is leaking. It must be. I’m so sorry.”

I mentioned this once to Wireman and he said life is like Friday on a soap opera. It gives you the illusion that everything is going to wrap up, and then the same old shit starts up on Monday.

Parenting is the greatest of hum-a-few-bars-and-I’ll-fake-it skills.

And then there’s the desire to believe things happened a certain way; when it comes to the past we all stack the deck.

you can lead a whore to culture, but you can’t make her think.

“Go back, go back, Tessie, you don’t belong here. And make the big boy go away.”