They get a lot of brochures from places with climates similar to
London's so they can raise the rooks until the pollution problem is
finally licked. One place with a similar climate, but low pollution
count, turns to be Bangor, Maine. So they put an ad in the paper
soliciting bird fanciers and talk to a bunch of guys in the trade.
Finally, they engage this one guy at the rate of $50,000 a year to
raise rooks. They send an ornithologist over on the concord with
two cases of rook eggs packed in these shatterproof cases - they
keep the shipping compartment constantly heated and all that stuff.
So this guy has a new business - North American Rook Farms, Inc.
He goes to work right off incubating new rooks so London will not
become a rookless city. The only thing is, the London City Council
is really impatient, and every day they send him a telegram that
says: " Bred Any Good Rooks lately? "
THE
HARDCASE
SPEAKS
STEPHEN KING
From
Contraband #2
In fields and christless allies the psalter is handed
greedily around with purple bottles of cheap port
punctuated by the sodium lightness glare of freights
rising past hobo cinder gantries and pitless bramble
hollows:
Dukane, Grand Rapids, Cedar Forks, Harlow, Dover-
Foxcroft,
names from the back platform of the A-train
so don't gimme that shit don't gimme that crap
I'll put the hoodoo on you, I can do it, it comes in a can
in 1954 in a back alley behind a bar they
found a lady cut in four pieces and written in her juice on
the bricks above
he had scrawled PLEASE STOP ME BEFORE I KILL
AGAIN in letters that leaned and
draggled so they called him The Cleveland Torso Murderer
and never caught him,
it figures
all these liberals are brainless
if you want to see jeans just peak into any alabaster
gravel pit in Mestalinas
all these liberals have hairy shirts
Real life is in the back row of a 2nd run movie house in
Utica, have you been
there
this guy with his hair greased back was drunk
and getting drunker when I sat down and his face kept
twisting; he cried I'm a
goddamn stupid sonofabitch but doan choo try to tell me
nothin I didn't he
might have come from Cleveland
if the stars are right I can witch you I can make your hair
fall out
You don't need hairy jeans to stand outside a Safeway
store in Smalls Falls and watch a cloud under the high
blue sky ripple the last shadows of summer over the asphalt
parking lot two
acres wide
A real hack believes blackboards are true
for myself I would turn them all soft like custard scoop
them feed them to blackbirds save corn for murderers
in huge and ancient Buicks sperm grows on seatcovers
and flows upstream toward the sound of Chuck Berry
once I saw a drunk in Redcliff and he had stuffed a
newspaper in his mouth he
jigged jubilantly
around a two shadowed light pole
I could gun you down with magic nose bullets
There are still drugstore saints
Still virgins pedalling bikes with playing cards affixed to
the rear spokes
with clothespins
The students have made things up
The liberals have shit themselves and produced a satchel-
load of smelly
numbers
Radicals scratch secret sores and pore over back numbers
bore a little hole in your head sez I insert a candle
light a light for Charlie Starkweather and let
your little light shine shine shine
play bebop
buy styrofoam dice on 42nd street
eat sno-cones and read Lois Lane
Learn to do magic like me and we will drive to Princeton
in an old Ford with four retread skins and a loose manifold
that boils up the
graphite stink of freshcooked
exhaust we will do hexes with Budweiser pentagrams and
old
Diamond matchboxes
chew some Red Man and let the juice down your chin when
you spit
sprinkle sawdust on weird messes
buy some plastic puke at Atlantic City
throw away your tape player and gobble Baby Ruths
Go now. I think you are ready.
Harrison State Park '68
Stephen King
Published in "Ubris", 1968
"All mental disorders are simply detective strategies
for handling difficult life situations.''
---Thomas Szasz
''And I feel like homemade shit.''
---Ed Sanders
- Can you do it ?
She asked shrewdly
From the grass where her nylon legs
in gartered splendor
made motions.
- Can you do it ?
Ah!
What do I say?
What are the cools?
Jimmy Dean?
Robert Mitchum?
Soupy Sales?
Modern Screen Romances is a tent on the grass
Over a dozen condoms in a quiet box
and the lady used to say
(before she passed away)
- If you can't be an athlete,
be an athletic supporter.
The moon is set.
A cloud scum has covered the stars.
A man with a gun has passed
this way
BUT -
we do not need your poets.
Progressed beyond them to
Sony
Westinghouse
Cousin Brucie
the Doors
and do I dare
mention Sonny and Cher ?
I remember Mickey Rooney
as Pretty Boy Floyd
and he was the shortest Pretty Boy Floyd
on record
coughing his enthusiastic
guts out in the last
reel.
We have not spilt the blood.
They have spilt the blood.
A little girl lies dead
On the hopscotch grid
No matter
- Can you do it?
She asked shrewdly
With her Playtex living bra
cuddling breasts
softer than a handful of wet Fig Newtons.
Old enough to bleed
Old enough to slaughter
The old farmer said
And grinned at the white
Haystack sky
With sweaty teeth
(radiation radiation
your grandchildren will be monsters)
I remember a skeleton
In Death Valley
A cow in the sunbleached throes of antiseptic death
and someone said:
- Someday there will be skeletons
on the median strip of the Hollywood Freeway
staring up at exhaust-sooty pigeons
amidst the flapping ruins of
Botany 500
call me Ishmael.
I am a semen.
- Can you do it?
She asked shrewdly
When the worms begin
their midnight creep
and the dew has sunk white to
milk the grass...
And the bitter tears
Have no ducts
The eyes have fleshed in.
Only the nose knows that
A loser is always the same.
There is a sharp report.
It slices the night cleanly
And thumps home with a tincan spannnng!
Against the Speed Limit sign down the road.
Laughter
The clean clear sound of a bolt levered back...
Silence...
Spannng!
"Aileen, if poachers poached peaches, would the
poachers peel the peaches to eat with poached eggs
poached before peaches?"
oh don't
don't
please touch me
but don't
don't
and I reach for your hand
but touch only the radiating live pencils
of your bones:
-- Can you do it?
IN A HALF WORLD
OF TERROR
Stephen King
First appeared in
Stories Of Suspense, a.k.a.
I Was A Teenage Graverobber 1966
It was like a nightmare. Like some unreal dream that you wake up
from the next morning. Only this nightmare was happening. Ahead
of me I could see Rankin's flashlight; a large yellow eye in the
sultry summer darkness. I tripped over a gravestone and almost
went sprawling. Rankin whirled on me with a hissed oath.
"Do you want to wake up the caretaker, you fool?"