Desperation   ::   Кинг Стивен

The Literary Lion walkedstiffly into the desert, his long gray hair brushing against the shoulders of his motorcycle jacket, the scrubby mesquite and paintbrush ticking against his leather chaps (also from Barneys). He looked around carefully hut saw nothing coming in either direction. There was something parked off the road a mile or two farther west—a truck or maybe a motor home—but even if there were people in it, he doubted that they could watch the great man take a leak without binoculars. And if they were watching, so what. lt was a trick most people knew, after all.

He unzipped his fly—John Edward Marinville, the man Harper’s had once called “the writer Norman Mailer always wanted to be,” the man Shelby Foote had once cailed “the only living American writer of John Stein-beck’s stature”—and hauled out his original fountain pen. He had to piss like a racehorse but for almost a minute nothing happened; he just stood there with his dry dick in his hand.

Then, at last, urine arced out and turned the tough and dusty leaves of the mesquite a darker, shiny green.

“Praise Jesus, thank you, Lord!” he bellowed in his rolling, trembling Jimmy Swaggart voice, it was a great success at cocktail parties; Tom Wolfe had once laughed so hard when he was doing the evangelist voice that Johnny thought the man was going to have a stroke. ‘Water in the desert, that’s a big ten-four! Hello Julia!”

He sometimes thought it was this version of “hallelujah,” not his insatiable appetite for booze, drugs, and younger women, that had caused the famous actress to push him into the pool during a drunken press conference at the Be]-Air hotel… and then to take her emeralds elsewhere.

That incident hadn’t marked the beginning of his 2 decline, but it had marked the point where the decline had become impossible to ignore—he wasn’t just having a bad day or a bad year anymore, he was sort of having a bad lije. The picture of him climbing out of the pool in his sopping white suit, a big drunk’s grin on his face, had appeared in Esquire’s Dubious Achievements issue, and after that had commenced his more-or-less regular ap-pearances in Spy magazine. Spy was the place, he’d come to believe, where once-legitimate reputations went to die.

At least this afternoon, as he stood facing north and pissing with his shadow stretched out long to his right, these thoughts didn’t hurt as much as they sometimes did. As they always did in New York, where everything hurt these days. The desert had a way of making Shake-speare’s “bubble reputation” seem not only fragile but irrelevant.