JК
Danse Macabre :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 351 из 359And it's not just Puff and Tink and Peter Pan that are left behind in that rush for the driver's license,the high school and college diploma, in that mostly eager training to achieve "good work habits." We have each exiled the Tooth Fairy (or perhaps he exiles us when we are no longer able to provide the product he requires), murdered Santa Claus (only to reanimate the corpse for our own children), killed the giant that chased Jack down the beanstalk. And the poor old boogeyman! Laughed to death again and again, like Mr.
Dark at the conclusion of Something Wicked This Way Comes .
Listen to me now: At eighteen or twenty or twenty-one, whatever the legal drinking age may be in your state, "getting carded" is something of an embarrassment. You have to fumble around for a driver's license or your State Liquor Card or maybe even a photostat of your birth certificate so you can get a simple fa' Chrissakes glass of beer. But you let ten years go past, get so you are looking the big three-o right in the eye, and there is something absurdly flattering about getting carded. It means you still look like you might not be old enough to buy a drink over the bar. You still look a little wet behind the ears. You still look young .
This got into my head a few years ago when I was in a bar called Benjaman's in Bangor, getting pleasantly loaded. I began to study the faces of entering patrons. The guy standing unobtrusively by the door let this one pass . . . and that one . . . and the next one. Then, bang!
He stopped a guy in a U of M jacket and carded him. And I'll be damned if that guy didn't do a quick fade. The drinking age in Maine was then eighteen (booze-related accidents on the highways have since caused the lawmakers to move the age up to twenty), and all of those people had looked about eighteen to me. So I got up and asked the bouncer how he knew that last guy was underage. He shrugged. "You just know," he said. "It's mostly in their eyes.” For weeks after, my hobby was looking at the faces of adults and trying to decide exactly what it was that made them "adult faces." The face of a thirty -year-old is healthy, unwrinkled, and no bigger than the face of a seventeen-year-old. Yet you know that's no kid; you know . There seems to be some hidden yet overriding characteristic that makes what we all agree is the Adult Face. It isn't just the clothes or the stance, it isn't the fact that the thirty -year-old is toting a briefcase and the seventeen-year-old is toting a knapsack; if you put the head of each in one of those carnival cut-outs which show the body of a capering sailor or a prize-fighter, you could still pick out the adult ten tries out of ten.
I came to believe that the bouncer was right.
Dark at the conclusion of Something Wicked This Way Comes .
Listen to me now: At eighteen or twenty or twenty-one, whatever the legal drinking age may be in your state, "getting carded" is something of an embarrassment. You have to fumble around for a driver's license or your State Liquor Card or maybe even a photostat of your birth certificate so you can get a simple fa' Chrissakes glass of beer. But you let ten years go past, get so you are looking the big three-o right in the eye, and there is something absurdly flattering about getting carded. It means you still look like you might not be old enough to buy a drink over the bar. You still look a little wet behind the ears. You still look young .
This got into my head a few years ago when I was in a bar called Benjaman's in Bangor, getting pleasantly loaded. I began to study the faces of entering patrons. The guy standing unobtrusively by the door let this one pass . . . and that one . . . and the next one. Then, bang!
He stopped a guy in a U of M jacket and carded him. And I'll be damned if that guy didn't do a quick fade. The drinking age in Maine was then eighteen (booze-related accidents on the highways have since caused the lawmakers to move the age up to twenty), and all of those people had looked about eighteen to me. So I got up and asked the bouncer how he knew that last guy was underage. He shrugged. "You just know," he said. "It's mostly in their eyes.” For weeks after, my hobby was looking at the faces of adults and trying to decide exactly what it was that made them "adult faces." The face of a thirty -year-old is healthy, unwrinkled, and no bigger than the face of a seventeen-year-old. Yet you know that's no kid; you know . There seems to be some hidden yet overriding characteristic that makes what we all agree is the Adult Face. It isn't just the clothes or the stance, it isn't the fact that the thirty -year-old is toting a briefcase and the seventeen-year-old is toting a knapsack; if you put the head of each in one of those carnival cut-outs which show the body of a capering sailor or a prize-fighter, you could still pick out the adult ten tries out of ten.
I came to believe that the bouncer was right.