Haunted Heart: The Life and Times of Stephen King

2 HEAD DOWN

Even though Ruth thought her youngest son was a bit too intrigued by horror stories and movies, she herself enjoyed a really frightening story or movie. However, she despised what she called an Alfred Hitchcock ending, where, after getting a viewer sucked into the lives of the characters up on the silver screen, Hitch chose an ending that was deliberately murky and unclear. Young Steve filed that opinion away.

One day Steve asked his mother if she had ever seen a dead body. She nodded, then told him two stories.

The first time, she was standing outside the Graymore Hotel in Portland when a sailor jumped off the roof twelve stories above the street. “He hit the sidewalk and splattered,” she said.

The other time was while growing up in Scarborough. One day she went to the beach and saw a crowd of people standing on the shore and several boats attempting to go out to sea. A woman had been swimming, and a riptide had drawn her out to where she couldn’t swim back on her own. The boats were unable to reach her since the current was too strong. Ruth said, “People stood on the beach and listened to that woman scream for hours before she finally drowned.” It sounded like a story Steve would read in one of his E.C. comics, and it stuck with him for years.

Spurred on by his mother, Steve continued to write whenever he had a free moment. Though he had already begun to submit some of his stories to magazines, his work would be greeted by form rejection slips. So he decided to take matters into his own hand, and when he was fourteen, he wrote a sixteen-page novelization of the movie The Pit and the Pendulum, which had come out in 1961, starring Vincent Price and Barbara Steele based on the Edgar Allan Poe story. Steve typed up the story—replete with misspelled words—and added his own touches, remembering his mother’s advice to make up his own story, so much so that it didn’t come close to resembling the movie. He ran it off on an ancient copy machine, brought the copies to school, and hawked it to his classmates for a quarter apiece, since his mom had established that as the going rate. By the end of the day, he had a pocketful of quarters. He was suspended from school not because of plagiarism, but because his teachers and the principal thought he shouldn’t be reading about horror, let alone writing about it.

He apologized effusively to his teachers, the principal, his mother, and to the students who’d plunked down a quarter to read his writing. He wanted everyone to like him, and Ruth thought that his desire to please was hardwired into his system. One of his mother’s favorite lines was “Stevie, if you were a girl, you’d always be pregnant.”

But in Steve’s mind, he wanted to please his mother in particular because he knew how hard her life was. They ate a lot of lobster while Steve was growing up—back then it was considered to be poor man’s food. A family would often keep a pot of stew on the stove for several days, reheating it when necessary and adding more lobster meat, potatoes, onions, and carrots when the pot ran low. Though it provided necessary sustenance, many families were embarrassed at having to rely on it.

“If the minister visited, she took it off the stove and put it behind the door, as if he wouldn’t be able to smell it,” said Steve, “but the smell was all through the house and got in your clothes, your hair.”

Nineteen-sixty marked a huge leap into the modern world for Steve as he moved from the one-room schoolhouse to a new building where nothing was a hand-me-down, from the desks and chairs to the books. Durham Elementary was for grades one through eight and opened to much fanfare in a town that had previously had two run-down one-room schoolhouses. Steve joined its first class of seventh graders.

On the first day of school, the kids were most excited about having flush toilets and running water indoors. For many students, it was the first time they rode a bus to school.

Lew Purinton first met Steve in the seventh grade when Durham Elementary opened. Since they lived on opposite ends of town, they had attended different one-room schools.

Steve was hard to miss. “He was the biggest kid in the class,” said Purinton. “I remember seeing him walking down the aisle between the desks, and I asked him how old he was, since he looked so much bigger than the rest of us. He looked down at me and said, ‘I’m old enough to know better, but I’m too young to care.’ ”

With that acerbic remark, Purinton knew he had a new friend. They were in the same class of twenty-five students, and soon they began to hang out outside of school.

Purinton visited Steve at his house, which he remembers was an old farmhouse much different from his own home. “It was obvious that they didn’t have money, that they were struggling,” he said. “The house wasn’t neat and clean.”

However, the thing that stood out in his mind was Steve’s tiny bedroom, where literally hundreds of paperback books were stacked around the edges of the room and even at the end of Steve’s bed, with no bookshelf in sight. Most of the books were science fiction and horror.

When Lew asked his friend about them, Steve said he’d read every one of them. Scattered through the piles of books were numerous volumes by H. P. Lovecraft, a horror writer from the early twentieth century widely considered to be the genre’s successor to Edgar Allan Poe.

Steve was thirteen when he first discovered Lovecraft, which he later maintained was an ideal age to start reading his work. “Lovecraft is the perfect fiction for people who are living in a state of sort of total sexual doubt, because the stories almost seem to me sort of Jungian in their imagery,” he later said. “They’re all about gigantic disembodied vaginas and things that have teeth.”

With Lovecraft and his other favorite authors around, Steve viewed his room as a sanctuary away from the pressures of school and the need to fit in as an unathletic kid with bad eyes and little coordination and no success with girls. He wasn’t popular, yet he wasn’t totally stigmatized such as two girls who lived in his neighborhood.

One was a girl whose mother entered every single sweepstakes and contest that came down the pike. She won prizes regularly, but they tended toward the unusual: enough pencils or tuna fish to last for a year. The most expensive and prestigious prize she won was Jack Benny’s old Maxwell car, though she never drove it and let it sit beside the house to slowly rust and rot into the ground.

Even though she had enough money to buy postage stamps to enter all the contests and sweepstakes, she apparently had little left over for her kids. The children were given one set of clothes that had to last from September through June. Obviously, they were an easy target of ridicule for the other kids.

Sophomore year, the girl broke ranks and wore a completely different outfit after returning from Christmas vacation. Her usual outfit—black skirt, white blouse—was swapped out for a woolen sweater and a skirt that was in style. She’d even permed her hair. “But everybody made more fun of her because nobody wanted to see her change the mold,” said Steve.

He had taken to doing odd jobs for neighbors. A couple of times, he was hired to dig a grave at the local cemetery. His friend Brian Hall’s father oversaw the graveyard and hired the boys to do the job, which paid twenty-five bucks, a fortune to a teenage boy in the early sixties.

Another time, he was hired by the mother of the other outcast girl, who tried to make herself as small as possible whenever she had to walk down the halls of high school. The family lived in a trailer near Steve’s house in West Durham. When Steve went into the trailer to do an odd job for the mother, he was dumbfounded by the enormous crucifix that towered over the living room. The Jesus figure was particularly realistic, with blood dripping from the hands and feet and an anguished look on his face.

The girl’s mother told Steve that Jesus was her personal savior, then asked him if he’d been saved. He said he hadn’t and left the house as quickly as possible.

When he started to write Carrie, the memory of these two outcasts inspired his portrayal of the main character. He later discovered that both girls had died by the time he began writing the story; the girl with one outfit for the entire year shot herself in the stomach shortly after giving birth to a child, while the other, an epileptic, had moved out of the trailer after graduating from Lisbon High, but had suffered a seizure in her apartment and died alone.

From the time he was ten years old, though Steve loved to play sports, he wasn’t athletic. At his new school, the students spent recess and lunchtime out on the playground playing games.

Baseball was a popular choice for these informal recreation times, and Steve loved to play baseball, but when it came time to pick sides, he was inevitably one of the last kids picked.

However, he was actively recruited for football because of his size. “I had to play football, because if you were big and didn’t play football, that meant you were a fucking faggot,” he said. “All I was good for in football was left tackle.” Though he had a few good friends he hung out with, that didn’t stop him from feeling different from the other kids at school.

He was also unofficially banned from joining the Boy Scouts since he didn’t have a father to help the boys out.

If Steve was bothered by being excluded—first the ball field, then Boy Scouts—he didn’t show it. One day in the fall of 1960, he’d made an important discovery in the attic above his Aunt Ethelyn and Uncle Oren’s garage. The musty space had long been a catchall for old stuff that various family members no longer had any immediate use for but, being frugal Mainers, wouldn’t throw away. After all, you never knew when somebody might be able to put something to good use.

The children in the family—including Steve and his brother, David—were discouraged from going into the attic. The wooden planks of the floor had never permanently been attached to the beams, and in a few places there were gaps.

Nevertheless, one day Steve decided to go exploring and got the biggest surprise of his life so far. His mother had stowed away most of the artifacts from her ill-fated marriage to Steve’s father in the attic years earlier after it was clear that Don had gone AWOL for good. Steve discovered that his long-gone father had a penchant for the same kinds of pulp paperbacks—mysteries and horror—that he devoured.

What was even more shocking was that in another box, young Steve found a stack of rejection slips from magazines with hastily scribbled notes of encouragement asking Don to try again.

His father had been an aspiring writer too!

Steve continued to dig through the other boxes, but didn’t find any of his father’s manuscripts or published stories. He ran downstairs to confront his mother, accusing her of hiding the truth about his father from him. Ruth calmed him down and explained.

“My mother told me that he wrote lots of really good stories, that he sent them off to magazines, and he got letters back saying, ‘Please send us more.’ But he was kind of lazy about it and never really did very much,” Steve said.

Then she delivered the one-two punch that would remain with Steve all his life. “Steve,” she said, kind of laughing, “your father didn’t have any persistence. That’s why he left the marriage.”

Steve saw what his father’s laziness had done to his mother and his family, and he swore he would never be like that.

But he was also intrigued by what he shared with his father. Maybe writing—and getting published, Steve’s dream—would be a way to connect with the father he’d never known.

Steve thanked his mother for telling him the truth and excused himself from the room. He made a beeline for the attic back at their old, ramshackle farmhouse with the peeling paint, sat down at the desk under the alcove in the attic, and slipped a fresh sheet of paper into the typewriter.

In the spring of 1962, Steve graduated from eighth grade at the top of his class. He would later wryly say it was because “there were only three of us in the class, and one of them was retarded.”

In the fall, King entered the freshman class at Lisbon High School in Lisbon Falls, eight miles away from West Durham.

Lisbon High had approximately five hundred students in grades nine through twelve, many of them, like Steve, coming from surrounding towns that had no high school. Two of Steve’s classmates from elementary school entered in the same freshman class: Lew Purinton and Pete Higgins, whose dad was the principal at Lisbon High. The school had three official academic tracks: the A group, for students who planned to go on to college; the B track, for business-oriented students; and the C track, called the commercial track, where all the other students ended up, similar to the vocational/technical high school programs offered today. Occasionally a student would move from one track to another, most often downward from A to B, or B to C, when he started to fall behind. Steve, Pete, and Lew were in the college track, and so they were in all of the same classes, including algebra, English, and French.

Other unofficial tracks at the school were hammered out according to social strata: the athletes, the hoods, the nerds, and everybody else.

Though he always had his nose stuck in a book and never tried to hide his intelligence, Steve didn’t fall into the nerd group because he liked people and was a bit of a ham in school. He excelled in English and easily earned straight A’s in his classes, but his grades were lower in his science classes: C’s in chemistry and B-minuses in physics. “I was never a geek, but on the other hand, I saw a lot of movies in the fifties like The Thing and Them!” he said. “I know that radiation causes monsters, and most important of all I know that if we mess around too much with the unknown, something awful will happen.”

He obviously wasn’t the James Dean type for the same reason he didn’t fall into the athlete category. “I wasn’t too cool,” he said. “I wasn’t the kind of kid who would get elected to student council, but neither did I lurk around the lockers looking like I was just waiting for somebody to haul off on me.”

According to Pete Higgins, Steve fell into the catchall group of everybody else, but he traveled freely between the three other groups primarily because of his quick wit and offbeat sense of humor.

“He was a little bit different because he was taller than most of the kids,” said Higgins. “He also wore those dark black glasses, and judging from his appearance, it was obvious he didn’t come from a lot of money. But he was always ready to add something to a class discussion that would make the kids or the teacher laugh.”

Steve also learned how to disarm those students who would otherwise have felt inclined to pick on him. “He gained a certain amount of confidence in high school,” said Lew Purinton. “Kids accepted him more once they realized that he was intelligent and he could do a lot of things. And he was a genuinely nice guy.”

Despite his efforts to make classmates feel comfortable, some students and teachers still misunderstood him. Prudence Grant, who taught at Lisbon High School when Steve was a student there, remembered that he was often teased by a few of the older boys on his way home from school. “He was the butt of a lot of pranks,” she said. “They’d hide in a hollow, and as Stephen came down over the hill, they would jump out at him or scare him.” Later on, when she read Carrie, she immediately recognized that he had based several characters in the novel on teachers at the school.

“I know that Carrie was heavily based on Lisbon High down to several faculty members,” Grant said. “We had a bumbling assistant principal, and he’s portrayed in the book as the guy who closes the file-drawer door and slams his thumb in there. There were other teachers who were portrayed in the book, but I didn’t make the story, which is fine by me.”

Peter Higgins remembered one kid in particular who was a thorn in Steve’s side who fell into the James Dean–wannabe category. “In study halls, he’d bug Steve and call him Mickey Mouse because he said that’s what Steve looked like.” Higgins added that the other kid would tease Steve under his breath so the teachers wouldn’t hear, and that the other students were well aware of what was going on. “But no one stepped in to stop it because they were afraid that the guy would turn to them next,” said Higgins.

“I hated school,” said Steve. “I always felt I was wearing the wrong clothes, or like I had too many spots on my face. I don’t trust people who look back on high school with fondness; too many of them were part of the overclass, those who were taunters instead of tauntees.”

Steve got through his freshman year and spent the summer upstairs in the attic of the old, creaky farmhouse, banging away on the typewriter without an M. He dutifully continued to send out stories, receiving a steady stream of rejection slips. He collected so many that he drove a nail into the wall above his desk and stabbed the slips on it. Most notices came back with no personal comments, but occasionally he’d get one with a hand-scribbled note that said, Terrible story, shows some talent. “At least I knew it wasn’t just robots reading my work,” he said.

On September 12, 1963, Steve had just started his sophomore year in high school when he came home from school one day and checked on his grandmother as usual. Her room was eerily still. He called her name, but she didn’t respond. He froze for a moment, then recalled a couple of movies where a character held a pocket mirror up to a person’s mouth to see if it fogged up. He tiptoed over to her dresser and grabbed a compact and held it up to her mouth. It stayed clear. Nothing. He sat down in a chair across the room and stared at his grandmother’s body. He’d seen corpses before, but only for fleeting moments or from across the room at the wakes at his friends’ homes.

So this was what a dead body really looked like.

He lost track of how long he sat there before his mother came home to find him.

Despite being forced to discontinue selling his novelization of The Pit and the Pendulum in seventh grade, Steve resumed offering his stories to fellow students, though this time he was smart enough not to sell them. At the time, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. was a popular TV show, and during study hall Steve would make up a story of his own using the characters Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin from the program. Lew Purinton witnessed the process several times.

“He’d start writing, and when he was done with a page, he’d hand it to me, and I’d start reading,” Purinton remembered. “By the time I got down to the bottom of the page, he had the next page ready. He brought other kids in the class into the story and set it in Lisbon Falls and Durham. Every time I was finished with a page, he’d have another one for me. He loved to write, and he was always writing.”

Finally in 1965, the long-awaited day arrived: a letter arrived from the magazine Comics Review, telling him they wanted to publish his story “I Was a Teenage Grave Robber.” The story was about a mad scientist who cultivated human-size maggots and hired an orphaned teenager to dig up fresh corpses for them to feed upon. Steve drew on his experience digging graves to add a note of realism to the gravedigging part, and revenge ensued when the maggots attacked and ate the scientist and the teenager escaped.

The only compensation the magazine offered was a couple of copies of the magazine, and the editor changed the title to “In a Half World of Terror.” Steve didn’t care, he was thrilled that someone wanted to print his work.

Being a published author did nothing to advance him in the eyes of the female students at Lisbon High. Whether it was his gawky looks, his obvious poverty, the lack of a car, or some combination of these, he struck out with the girls more often than not. The logistics of living so far out in the country in the early sixties obviously didn’t help. Hitchhiking was a possibility, though a clearly unpalatable option for everyone involved.

“We could thumb it, but things were more complicated than that,” King explained. First, he went to one of his friends who owned a car to see if he wanted to go to the movies, and Steve offered to pay for half the gas if his buddy would play chauffeur or bring his own date. “He’d agree, so I’d go ask some pretty girl out and she’d say she was busy.” Or else the friend would have a girl with him and Steve would be dateless. “After I got my license, I can remember going to the drive-in a couple of times, and I’m behind the wheel all by myself while they’re making out like crazy in the backseat,” he complained.

But he didn’t have much time to spend feeling sorry for himself. Between his studies, his reading—Purinton remembered Steve reading a book as he walked down the hallways from class to class—and his writing, in the tenth grade he became the editor in chief of The Drum, the school newspaper at Lisbon High. Then, as now, Steve was more interested in fiction as opposed to stories that required facts and research—and therefore had to be 100 percent true—so his heart wasn’t in it. He did write several stories for the paper including “The 43rd Dream” and “Code Name: Mousetrap,” but he raised eyebrows when instead of publishing an issue every week or two as his predecessor had, he produced only one issue over the year.

During one slow night at the newspaper’s office when his attention wandered to all of the comics, horror flicks, and detective novels he could be reading—or writing—instead of slogging through class reports and navel-gazing adolescent poetry, he got a brainstorm: why not publish a newspaper that kids will want to read? Of course, it went without saying that it would be something he actually enjoyed writing. And so The Village Vomit, a four-page satirical broadsheet where thinly disguised stories of his least favorite teachers and students appeared above the fold—in other words, an exact parody of The Drum—was born.

Steve printed it up and distributed copies around the school, and it was an instant hit. In one story, he poked fun at a business teacher, a prim and proper old maid, by having the Wolf Man—then a popular horror-movie character—carry her off.

He neglected to put his name anywhere in the paper, but word quickly spread who was responsible. He was suspended from school for three days and had to apologize to every teacher he’d made fun of. His notoriety earned him new respect among his classmates, even among those who had teased and bullied him before. Steve learned that his writing could serve as a shield, to deflect attention from people who didn’t like him for whatever reason.

A few days after his suspension ended, the administration met to discuss how they could help Steve channel his talent, and he landed a job working part-time as a sports reporter for the Lisbon Weekly Enterprise, writing up high school football and basketball games. He enjoyed his work, but all the while he was watching the games, dutifully taking notes and interviewing fans, he wished he could be playing the games instead of reporting them.

“He loved sports, but he wasn’t athletic,” said Purinton. “I think that was a big frustration for him, because he really wanted to be a good athlete.” He did play football one year, but perhaps a greater obstacle for Steve than his lack of athletic ability was that he lived so far from school and lacked both a car and a license.

With no bus service, Steve usually took Yanko’s Taxi Service, a local livery company hired specifically to ferry students the eight miles back and forth to school. But getting home after school was a different story. If he missed the afternoon taxi service, he’d have to grab a ride with someone who was heading his way or hitchhike. And if no one stopped, he’d have to walk home, often after it had turned dark and cold.

To Steve, the best thing about the taxi service—run by a Slovakian man named Yanko—was that part of the fleet was made up of old Pontiac and Cadillac hearses from the 1940s and ‘50s. The girl who lived a few houses away from Steve’s, whose living room contained the life-size crucifix, rode along. Steve and the other students were sure to be first in line when the taxi arrived. “There was a rush to get the best seat,” said his neighbor and classmate Brian Hall, “because no one wanted to ride all the way to Lisbon with her on his lap.”

In high school, Steve’s musical tastes continued to develop. Elvis notwithstanding, in 1963 the majority of music played on the radio harkened back to the fifties with easy-listening instrumentals and doo-wop pop hits. Henry Mancini and Barbra Streisand won Grammys that year, but so did a little-known acoustic trio by the name of Peter, Paul, and Mary, who won Best Performance by a Vocal Group for their song “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Folk music was starting to spread across the country, even to rural outposts such as Durham, Maine.

Steve and his buddies took notice of the new trend. Along with his friend Chris Chesley, Steve began to explore folk music and was particularly drawn to singers such as Dave Van Ronk, Bob Dylan, and Tom Paxton. “We were crazy about Phil Ochs because he sounded the way we felt most of the time, pissed off and confused,” said Steve. “The music had an urgent, homemade feel that spoke to our hearts. When I started smoking Pall Malls a year or two later, I did so because I was sure that my hero, Dave Van Ronk, smoked them. What other brand could the elucidator of ‘Bed Bug Blues’ possibly smoke?”

Chesley had a Gibson guitar and taught himself how to play, and between odd jobs and borrowing a few dollars, Steve managed to retrieve a guitar he had hocked earlier at a Lewiston pawnshop. He, Chris, and a few others formed a ragtag band and played together at a few school functions, but they never got good enough to play at the high school dances.

Steve was more a wallflower than a Fred Astaire, but the common practice at the school was to cruise the girls, not gravitate to the dance floor. The guys would stand on one side of the gym and the girls on the other—though some girls would always be out dancing—and they’d walk around the perimeter of the dance floor, flirting and laughing at whomever they wanted to impress.

According to Pete Higgins, Steve was far from being a ladies’ man, and he was much more interested in going to some of the unofficial parties. A few classmates organized the after-hours parties at a cluster of abandoned houses a few miles from where Steve lived, and one of the houses was supposedly haunted; the last family to occupy the house went by the name of Marston.

After the students grew bored with the music and tired of being hounded by chaperones at the high school dance, they’d get three or four carloads of their classmates together and head over to the Marston house to scare the girls, drink, and make out. The drinking age in Maine at the time was eighteen, so it wasn’t too difficult to buy beer and whiskey, especially with a hulking six-foot-three-inch student in your midst. Someone would suggest a drive to a liquor store in Lewiston, thirteen miles away, and if the clerk refused to sell booze to Steve, they’d hover outside the door until they found someone to buy it for them, in the time-tested ways of teenagers everywhere. Or else, some kids would bring booze along from their parents’ stock.

On February 5, 1965, Steve saw his second dead body in just over a year when his grandfather Guy Pillsbury died. The death of her father meant Ruth was free from the grueling manual labor and subsistence living the family had been dealing with for almost seven years. Or so she thought. The family continued to live in the house, and she sought work in the area.

But as before, all she could find was menial, mind-numbing manual labor. Though she was no longer tied down to the house and her parents and was now earning cash instead of canned goods and hand-me-down clothes, the family was no better off than before.

Though it had been more than a decade since her husband had walked out on the family, Ruth never gave up trying to track him down, at least in order to receive some child support or an official divorce. But she never found him.

With her hard schedule and being away from home now, Ruth had no patience for pretense, especially when it came from her own sons. One day, she passed by Steve’s room and saw him preening in front of the mirror, playing with the lapel of his shirt and pushing up the cuffs of his sleeves, and something struck a nerve inside his mother. She rushed into his room, pushed him against the wall, and said, “Inside our clothes, we all stand naked. Don’t ever forget it.”

He was just trying to figure out how he could dress for the upcoming senior-class trip so that he wouldn’t stand out as much in the big city, but her words stuck in his head. However, as it turned out, he didn’t have to worry about standing out. The whole class did.

Two busloads of seniors from Lisbon High and a number of chaperones headed south for a weeklong trip to see the sights of New York City, Washington, D.C., and York, Pennsylvania, in April of 1966. The first stop was in New York for a couple of nights before heading to York. The class would spend a night each in Pennsylvania and Washington, then return to New York for two days before heading back to Maine. They stayed in hotel rooms, visited all the usual tourist attractions such as the Empire State Building in Manhattan, the Washington Monument and the Smithsonian in D.C., and Gettysburg in Pennsylvania.

What’s the one thing that high school seniors are going to do when they’re away from home in the big city—many for the first time—and easily able to dodge the chaperones? Find alcohol. Steve and his friends were no exception. The drinking age in New York was eighteen, the same as it was in Maine, and since Steve and some of the other students were already of age, they had no problem buying beer and liquor. But in York, Pennsylvania, where the drinking age was twenty-one, things got tougher.

“Steve was big and he looked older than the rest of us, so the choice was unanimous,” said Lew Purinton. “We sent him into the liquor store to buy beer and liquor. I remember him coming out of the store and looking very proud.”

Back in New York on the return trip, the high school seniors were feeling full of themselves with their success on the road, but their luck soon changed. They went into a bar in Times Square, but the bartender recognized trouble in the large group of cocky, out-of-town teenage boys and refused to serve them. So they headed to a pizzeria, where Pete Higgins noticed a beer named Tiger’s Club, a Bavarian black beer. They ordered a pizza and a round of Tiger’s Club for the table.

“It was absolutely the worst, bitterest stuff I’ve ever had in my life,” said Higgins, who, with Steve, forced down a few swallows before giving up. Next, they headed for a steak house, and when the waiter asked for their drink orders, booze was the last thing on their minds.

“Chocolate milk,” said Steve.

The waiter, an African-American man, snorted. “Man, down here we don’t call it chocolate milk, we call it black or white milk.”

So Steve said, “I want a black milk.” The waiter asked the next boy what he wanted to drink and he replied, “A black soda.” Purinton thought that made sense. “He thought if they called chocolate milk ‘black milk,’ a Coke would be a ‘black soda,’ ” he said.

All of a sudden, the waiter got mad. “Are you trying to be funny? If you are, my gang’s waiting outside for you.”

The boys panicked and left the restaurant before their drinks arrived. Whether the waiter was serious or if he was pulling their legs, Purinton didn’t know, but the table of self-described hicks from Maine got a quick lesson in life in the big city.

The students arrived back home a few days later and had another week before they had to return to school, after the weeklong April vacation.

Steve’d done well enough in high school to be offered a partial scholarship to Drew University, a Methodist college in Madison, New Jersey. But his mother couldn’t afford to send him, so in 1966 he applied to the University of Maine at Orono.

Though he was awarded a full scholarship to the University of Maine, Steve couldn’t afford to laze around for the week off. He still needed money for textbooks and other expenses, so he started his summer job two months early at the Worumbo Mills and Weaving in Lisbon Falls. He mostly worked in the bagging area, where other workers would blow fabric up into huge bins on that floor above, and it was Steve’s job to stuff the fabric into bags. When school started up again, he would maintain a breakneck schedule until he graduated, attending classes during the day and working at the mill full-time.

Somehow, he still found time to write a one-act play for the annual Senior Night in May. Past classes had performed skits, played musical instruments, and presented awards such as Class Clown and the like to individual students.

Luckily for Steve, the faculty members who said it was okay for him to write a one-act play for Senior Night had short memories, because Steve’s play turned out to be little more than a G-rated version of The Village Vomit, where he returned to poking fun at teachers and students with his thinly disguised parodies.

The play was called Fat Man and Ribbon, a takeoff on the popular Batman TV series, which first went on the air in January 1966. “Steve played Fat Man and the play was set at Lisbon High,” said Peter Higgins. “Fat Man and Ribbon were at Lisbon High trying to catch a disruptive student named Lew Corruptington, who wore a black leather jacket and was clutching a beer bottle.” Higgins played his own father, the principal. His name in the play was Principal Wiggins and he came out wearing a fright wig.

Although many students had read their copies of The Village Vomit and roared with laughter, a number of people at the school, mostly faculty, didn’t appreciate Steve’s play.

He earned a newfound respect from some of the students and a sigh of relief from many teachers who were glad to see this brilliant troublemaker on his way out the door. At his high school graduation, Steve was relieved as well, since it meant that he could solely focus on reading and writing in college, a step he hoped would bring him that much closer to living his dream of being a full-time writer.

While Steve was working at Worumbo Mills, he was fascinated by the hordes of rats that constantly wandered throughout the mill. “While I was waiting for my bin to fill up, I’d throw cans at the rats,” he said. “They were big guys, and some of them would sit right up and beg for it like dogs.” His supervisor asked him to join a cleanup crew to work in the basement over the July Fourth weekend, but he declined. However, the following week he heard loads of stories from those who had worked over the holiday about aggressive rats, the water running through the basement, and a particularly sadistic supervisor, and Steve filed them away.

In late August of 1966, he headed north to Orono to enroll as a freshman at the University of Maine. He signed up as an English major and took courses at the College of Education so he could become certified to teach in case his dream of writing full-time took a little longer to materialize.

His brother, David, had entered the university several years earlier. When both were students, Ruth would send them $5 each week so they’d have some spending money. “After she died several years later, I found she had frequently gone without meals to send us the money that we’d so casually accepted,” he said. “It was very unsettling.”

On the first day of freshman orientation, Steve met up with several of his buddies—Lew Purinton and Pete Higgins—from the college track at Lisbon High who had also signed up at the university.

According to Higgins, Steve almost got kicked out of school before classes even started. It was the custom on campus for fraternities to hold a “smoker,” where groups gathered in a lounge or a living room to look over the freshmen. “They were evaluating the students to see if they wanted to accept any,” said Higgins.

Pete, Steve, and a few other students from Lisbon went to one smoker together where they met a student who wanted to light some fireworks he had left over from the Fourth of July and asked if they wanted to watch.

The group from Lisbon High stood and watched while their new friend lit the first fuses. “We ran like crazy when they went off,” said Higgins. “They weren’t just bottle rockets and sparklers, but meaty kaboomers loud enough to shatter a number of dormitory windows. The administration was called and announced if they found whoever was responsible for the fireworks, they would be kicked out of the incoming class of 1966 before they could start. We would have been disciplined because we were standing right there when the fireworks went off, and if Steve was caught, it could have stunted his whole career.”