Stephen King: Uncollected, Unpublished - Revised & Expanded Edition (56 page)

We are given a quick tour of Lisbon Street, Lower Lisbon Street and Maple Street in Lewiston. The businesses mentioned are Ben Wisden’s Men’s Shop; Kowloon Express, a Chinese restaurant that would later appear on the site of the Ritz movie theater; a restaurant, Manoir; a pawn shop, Penchan’s House of Loans; and two movie theaters – the Ritz, which would close in 1968, and the Met. Double bill admission tickets to the Ritz cost eighty cents in 1959. 

King lovingly describes the advertisements published in the Lewiston
Sun
for the two movies. The
She Beast
ad showed a picture of a woman dressed as an alien coming out of the surf. Another girl screamed while a lobster-like creature tried to kill her boyfriend. The promotion for
The Black Scorpion
showed a picture of a young woman in a black bathing suit screaming while a gigantic scorpion demolished the Colosseum.
 

She Beast
is an actual B-movie classic and did, indeed, star Barbara Steele. It was released in 1966 and so could not have been showing in mid-1959.
The Black Scorpion
, starring Mara Corday (but not Kenneth Tobey), has a storyline of mutant Mexican scorpions on attack and was released in the US in October of 1957. 

There are three clear links to King’s other fictional works in this fragment.
Larkspur Road in Harlow, on which Jacky and his mother lived, leads from Harlow to Pownal, which is a real town. Johnny Smith’s father lived in Pownal in
The Dead Zone
and Johnny was residing in that home when he and Sarah Hazlett (nee Bracknell) made love for the first, and only, time. 

Harlow, Maine is the town in which Jacky and his mother, Arthur, Snowman, the Doucettes and the other boys lived. Between Lewiston and Augusta, the town “…sprawled in a tract of woods and seemed to have more graveyards than people.” When I visited Durham, Maine – the town in which King spent much of his latter childhood and his teenage years – this would have been a perfect description, even at the late point of 2002, more than forty years after
Movie Show
is set. Additionally this version of Harlow has a Shiloh Hill and to this day the spectacular Shiloh Church is set on a Durham hill. This Harlow is eighteen miles from Lewiston. 

Harlow is also a key location in two of the three versions of
It Grows on You
(
Marshroots
/
Weird Tales
and
Whispers
) as well as
Riding the Bullet
. It receives considerable mention in both
Blaze
and
The Body
and is also mentioned in each of
Bag of Bones
,
The Dark Half
,
Gerald’s Game
,
The Hardcase Speaks
,
Rage
and in the
Skeleton Crew
versions of
Nona
,
Under the Dome
and
Uncle Otto’s Truck
. 

King relates something of Larkspur Road, Harlow in this story (it is not mentioned in any other King tale). Arthur and Jacky lived at the west end of it in 1959. It was not paved in those days, but was later. Snowman’s property was on the east end, as was the Doucette home. Later, a housing development was built on Snowman’s farmland. The road makes its way to Pownal and New Gloucester and intersects with Route 9. 

Jacky’s mother had gone to Gates Falls to get her hair done the morning the strawberry picking was cancelled
.
Gates Falls, Maine is one of King’s oldest fictional towns (it is almost certainly inspired by Lisbon Falls, Maine) and is a key location in
Graveyard Shift
,
It Grows on You
,
The Revenge of Lard Ass Hogan
,
Riding the Bullet
and
Sword in the Darkness
. It is also mentioned in
Blaze
,
The Body
(as the location for Gordie LaChance’s Lard Ass Hogan tale),
The Dark Half
,
The Dead Zone
,
Gramma
,
Hearts in Atlantis
,
Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut
,
Needful Things
,
The Plant
(but only the electronic version),
Rage
and
‘Salem’s Lot
. 

Both these towns are clearly dear to King’s heart, having been created early in his career and receiving constant encores, including replacing other town names in the revision of certain works. Their introduction in this aborted story must be regarded as noteworthy. 

There are clear autobiographical overtones in this piece. King provided the following insights in part 18 of the “C.V.” section of
On Writing
and it is clear from them that
Movie Show
derives directly from King’s early teenage years in Durham. 

What I cared about most between 1958 and 1966 was movies.  

As the fifties gave way to the sixties, there were only two movie theaters in the area, both in Lewiston. The Empire was the first-run house ... (but) when I lay in bed at night under my eave, listening to the wind in the trees or the rats in the attic, it was not Debbie Reynolds as Tammy or Sandra Dee as Gidget that I dreamed of, but Yvette Vickers from
Attack of the Giant Leeches
or Luana Anders from
Dementia 13.
Never mind sweet; never mind uplifting; never mind Snow White and the Seven Goddam Dwarfs. At thirteen I wanted monsters that ate whole cities, radioactive corpses that came out of the ocean and ate surfers, and girls in black bras who looked like trailer trash.  

Horror movies, science fiction movies, movies about teenage gangs on the prowl, movies about losers on motor-cycles
–
this was the stuff that turned my dials up to ten. The place to get all of this was not at the Empire, on the upper end of Lisbon Street, but at the Ritz, down at the lower end, amid the pawnshops and not far from Louie’s Clothing, where in 1964 I bought my first pair of Beatle boots. The distance from my house to the Ritz was fourteen miles, and I hitchhiked there almost every weekend during the eight years between 1958 and 1966, when I finally got my driver’s license. Sometimes I went with my friend Chris Chesley, sometimes I went alone, but unless I was sick or something, I always went. It was at the Ritz that I saw
I Married a Monster from Outer Space,
with Tom Tryon;
The Haunting,
with Claire Bloom and Julie Harris;
The Wild Angels,
with Peter Fonda and Nancy Sinatra. I saw Olivia de Havilland put out James Caan’s eyes with makeshift knives in
Lady in a Cage,
saw Joseph Cotten come back from the dead in
Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte,
and watched with held breath (and not a little prurient interest) to see if Allison Hayes would grow all the way out of her clothes in
Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman.
At the Ritz, all the finer things in life were available . . . or
might be
available, if you only sat in the third row, paid close attention, and did not blink at the wrong moment.  

Chris and I liked just about any horror movie, but our faves were the string of American-International films, most directed by Roger Corman, with titles cribbed from Edgar Allan Poe. I wouldn’t say
based upon
the works of Edgar Allan Poe, because there is little in any of them which has anything to do with Poe’s actual stories and poems
(The Raven
was filmed as a comedy
–
no kidding). And yet the best of them
–
The Haunted Palace, The Conqueror Worm, The Masque of the Red Death
–
achieved a hallucinatory eeriness that made them special. Chris and I had our own name for these films, one that made them into a separate genre. There were westerns, there were love stories, there were war stories … and there were Poepictures.  

“Wanna hitch to the show Saturday afternoon?” Chris would ask. “Go to the Ritz?”  

“What’s on?” I’d ask.  

“A motorcycle picture and a Poepicture,” he’d say. I, of course, was on that combo like white on rice. Bruce Dern going batshit on a Harley and Vincent Price going batshit in a haunted castle overlooking a restless ocean: who could ask for more? You might even get Hazel Court wandering around in a lacy low-cut nightgown, if you were lucky.
 

So, there you have it. The answer to the question of how autobiographical is
Movie Show
? Very! It is clear that this fragmentary story is King’s love letter to that part of his youth. 

Readers will also recall that in the story
Billy Harper was a fellow student of Jacky’s at Gates Falls High and they got into a fight there in 1964 over Jacky’s wearing of Beatle boots (sound familiar?). 

As a final note we are reminded yet again in this tale of King’s very strong record of creating twins as characters. Perhaps the Doucettes were based on real twin boys King knew in Durham when growing up, Dean and Doug Hall? 

Chip Coombs 

The last new piece in the Journal is untitled but we have sub-titled it
Chip Coombs
in honor of its lead character. This is a part manuscript only and there are 36 single pages in King’s handwriting, making it the longest piece in the Journal. 

In this America Under Siege story Chip Coombs attends his first appointment with a psychiatrist, Dr. Monica Good at her office in downtown Cleveland. He had unspecified concerns and had requested more and more frequent electro-cardiograms from his family physician, Dr. Amos Light, who had finally referred him to Good. Coombs had also begun to lose weight. 

Coombs told Dr. Good about his background. He claimed to have a “dangerous friend” and said they would call him Red McFarland. He and Red had attended school in Paradise Falls, Ohio together, played basketball on a Championship team and then decided to learn barbering together in Zanesville, Ohio. During their six-months at the barbering school they shared an apartment and a car (by this stage the reader is already wondering if Chips and Red are in fact the same person). 

McFarland was very successful with women but started drinking heavily and then hitting the girls he brought home to the apartment. On graduation McFarland moved to the town of Blood, Ohio in the hills above Paradise Falls, and opened his own barber shop in the Paradise Mall. Coombs, on the other hand, headed for Boston, got a job in a barber shop there and stayed for seven years. Coombs had then returned to Paradise Falls, eleven years before his appointment with Dr. Good. 

Doctor and patient scheduled a second appointment for the next day. Coombs now mentioned A Cut Above, a barber’s shop in the Paradise Mall in Blood, which had been owned by Roger McFerry but had now gone out of business. McFerry had been running the business into the ground for four years but had suddenly “returned” with a nest egg. Presumably, the reader is to suspect that Red McFarland had morphed into Roger McFerry. Unfortunately, the story fragment ends at this point. 

The first appointment took place about 16 June 1989 and the second the next day (Dr. Good cancelled her attendance at a cocktail party for the Mayor of Cleveland to make that appointment).  

Chip Coombs’ actual first name was Chester. He was born in 1951 or 1952, and was raised in Paradise Falls, Ohio. He attended Paradise County Consolidated school and was part of the team that won the Ohio State High School basketball championship in 1969. He graduated in 1970. In September that year he enrolled at the barbering school in Zanesville, Ohio and graduated in February 1971. He was not drafted for Vietnam due to flat feet and a perforated eardrum, which resulted from a childhood infection. After graduation from the barbering school he moved to Boston and worked at The Boston Clipper barber’s shop. He returned to Paradise Falls in 1978 and gave up drinking in 1983, sometimes attending AA meetings (Chips did not like attending because of the “drunks” there). Still a barber, he owned and operated his own shop in Paradise Falls at that time.