Part 2:
Chapters 26, 27, 28, 29, & 30
Arnie and Leigh take the bus out to the airport after school. They plan on picking up Christine, then motorvating into downtown Pittsburgh to do some Christmas shopping. Their shopping trip never happens because of what they find in the airport parking lot: Christine has been utterly demolished. Arnie vows revenge on the “shitters” in a voice that Leigh does not recognize.
That night, Arnie returns home, exhausted, a shell of his former self. (Whoever… or whatever… that was.) Regina tries to apologize, but Arnie brushes her words away. He has to get some rest, he tells her, because he is going back to Darnell’s early in the morning. He has to fix Christine. Regina demands that Arnie worry more about school. Arnie threatens to quit school if she doesn’t get off his — and Christina’s — case. Later, after he’s fallen asleep, Regina checks on him and is horrified by what she sees. In the half-light of his room, Arnie looks like an old man.
Leigh visits Dennis in the hospital. She is distraught because Arnie drifts through school like a ghost. She tells Dennis that Arnie refused to call the police or report the crime. After Michael calls the authorities in his son’s stead, Arnie refuses to say who did it.
Thanksgiving rolls around, and Arnie, bearing gifts (turkey sandwiches, a six-pack of beer, and homemade apple pie), finally pays a visit on Dennis. Arnie and Dennis enjoy their repast, and then Dennis asks his friend about Christine. Arnie claims that the damage is not nearly as bad as everyone thinks. Dennis, however, can tell that Arnie is lying. To change the subject, Arnie shows off his newest fashion accessory: a back brace. Not as old-fashioned or dirty as the one LeBay wore, but a back brace like the old man’s all the same.
Before leaving, Dennis asks Arnie to sign his cast, telling his friend that his original signature had worn off. That is not altogether true. Later, Dennis compares this new signature to Arnie’s old one, which he had saved when the doctor had cut back much of the cast on his leg. To Dennis horror, the signatures different. It is as if they were written by two different people.
A week after Thanksgiving, Moochie Welch is making his way back home from the Jackson Browne concert. Hitchhiking to Libertyville, Moochie is dropped off on JFK Drive. While walking to the gas station where Buddy and his friends work and hang out, Moochie sees Christine. Worse, Christine sees Moochie. After running him over multiple times, Christine heads back to Darnell’s. The dents that Moochie’s body made in Christine’s magically disappear as she pulls into her parking space at the garage. No one exits the car…
I’ve brought up the issue of Arnie’s and LeBay’s connection to Christine before. (I’ll bring it up again and again as we go on.) Given how close the points of that particular lover’s triangle are to one another, I wonder why Arnie was not aware in some preternatural way of what was happening to Christine at the hands of The Buddy Repperton Glee Club. It is obvious from his reaction that he did not know what had happened. I’m trying to figure out if this is a blind spot on his part or if Christine took the beating knowing how Arnie would react and that it would bring them closer together — and drag him further away from Leigh and his parents.
During the conversation between Dennis and Leigh, he recalls an overheard comment his father made about Arnie’s parents:
“The final triumph, Dennis’s father had said once, standing at the window and watching Regina lead Arnie by the hand down the Guilders’ walk to whee Michael waited behind the wheel of the car. Arnie and Dennis had been perhaps seven then. Momism supreme. I wonder if she’ll make the poor slob wait in the car when Arnie gets married…” (222)(Emphasis mine)
Momism?
Say what now?
“Momism,” according to Merriam-Webster, is “an excessive popular adoration and oversentimentalizing of mothers that is held to be oedipal in nature and that is thought to allow overprotective or clinging mothers unconsciously to deny their offspring emotional emancipation and thus to set up psychoneuroses.” Man, if that don’t nail the Regina-Arnie relationship right on the head, I don’t know what does.
For as controlling as Regina can be (and thus far in this novel, she hasn’t been painted in the most sympathetic light), I really feel for her. As Arnie drags himself into the house after spending the day with Chrsitine, Regina knows that every decision she’s made up to that point concerning her son and his car has been the wrong one. She is unable to really make amends. She simply is not wired that way.
On top of that, she feels her son slipping further and further away from her. He is in her eyes (and the reader’s) becoming a person so different from her “good boy” that she does not — cannot - recognize him:
“A stranger… my son is a stranger to me. Is this really my fault? Is it? Because I only wanted what was best for him? Can that be? Please, God, make this a nightmare I’ll wake up from with tears on my cheeks because it was so real.” (217)
The nightmare, unfortunately for Regina, is only too real and is one that she may never wake up from.
I mentioned that the day Arnie and Dennis ate lunch on the bleachers together felt like the last good day of their friendship. Well, the Thanksgiving scene at the hospital gives that earlier scene a run for its money. Dennis really feels the passage of time as he and Arnie talk about their shared past. I think this is King at his best, when he is talking about friendship and love and how both change as time moves on. Maybe the best example of this is from his 1986 novel IT when…
…all of the surviving members of the Losers Club begin to forget each other in the wake of Pennywise’s defeat. Talk about heartbreaking!
Stephen King must have been a Wonder Bread freak as a kid, because he mentions it in several stories. I don’t think I ever ate the stuff growing up. My mom, like Arnie and Dennis’s mothers, made me eat whole wheat. (How dare she care about my nutritional health and listen to our family doctor!)
Created by the Taggert Baking Company in 1921, Wonder Bread’s overly processed, bleached white appearance was originally seen as a sign of its purity. At the time, people had a lot more faith in industrial factory foods. Wonder Bread was so processed that by the time it came out the other end of the factory all of its vitamins and nutrients had been removed. Believe it or not, the FDA saw this as a bad thing. These important nutritional elements had to be reintroduced to the dough later, which is where the term “enriched bread” comes from. Wonder Bread’s long shelf life was also seen as a boon to post-WWII moms. Unfortunately, this was due mainly to the amount of sugar that Wonder Bread contained.
These days, most consumers see Wonder Bread as a symbol of everything wrong with the American diet. The local, artisan bakeries, whose so-called “unhealthy” and “impure” practices were supposed to have been surpassed by Wonder Bread’s industrial manufacturing processes, have gotten the last laugh, it would seem. Maybe Wonder Bread could stand to learn a little something about selling enriched bread? It’s all about putting more stock into specialty bread. You just can’t rely on your sweetdoughs anymore, don’cha know!
Let’s go back to a discussion we started to have about a week ago about Stephen King’s idea of the “myth-pool.” In his history of horror, Danse Macabre (which, really, I can’t recommend highly enough — if you have any interest in horror, it’s as good an overview of the genre up until 1980 as there is out there), King identifies the myth-pool as “that body of fictive literature in which all of us, even the nonreaders and those who do not go to films, have communally bathed” (50). So even if you’ve never read Bram Stoker’s Dracula (and you should!) and if you’ve never seen a vampire movie, because Dracula has been absorbed into the universal consciousness, so to speak, you would still understand the power of that image. We pinpointed three (maybe four) members of the horror myth-pool: The Vampire (Bram Stoker’s Dracula), The Werewolf (Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), and The Thing Without a Name (Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein).
(The Ghost is also part of the myth-pool but, according to King, there is no single ghost story that really nails down that trope in our minds — although he does give an honorable mention to the Henry James story “The Turn of the Screw.”)
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| What even is this cover?! |
I promised to let you know when we reached the point in Christine when King dips his toe into the myth-pool. When Dennis gets Arnie to re-sign his cast then compares the two signatures, King tips his hand as to which “modern myth” he is referring to. It is a text that he returns to again and again throughout his career, though it isn’t one that many people are familiar with nowadays: Curt Siodmak’s 1942 science fiction-horror novel Donovan’s Brain.
Dr. Patrick Cory, in time-honored “Mad Doctor” fashion, experiments with keeping brains alive after death. W.H. Donovan is a meglomaniac millionaire (is there any other kind?) under investigation for tax evasion and other criminal activities. Lucky or unlucky for both men (we will leave that up to the reader), Donovan’s private plane goes down near Cory’s home. The good doctor is unable to save Donovan’s life, but — waste not, want not — he is able to remove his brain and place it into a glass tank filled with an electrically charged, oxygenated saline solution (patent pending).
According to the machines to which the tank is hooked up, Donovan’s brain is still active. One night, Dr. Cory finally receives unconscious commands from the brain. (“Change my saline solution!” being one of them presumably.) Cory jots the commands down in a handwriting that is distinctly not his own.
(Now where have we heard that one before?)
Soon, Donovan’s will completely overpowers the doctor’s. Cory is a mere vessel for Donovan as the magnate continues his criminal activities. Cory is taken over — both mentally and physically by Donovan: he project’s Donovan’s paranoia and takes on Donovan’s limp.
(Sound familiar?)
Donovan conspires to kill a young girl who stands in the way of his plans. Cory, fed up with being Madame to Donovan’s Wayland Flowers, draws the line at murder. He fears that soon he will have no will of his own and that Donovan may usurp him in his own body. The doctor’s lab assistant, Dr. Schratt, comes up with a plan to destroy the brain when it is “resting.” (It seems that even a brain in a jar needs a good eight hours of sleep per night.) Donovan attempts to take over Schratt, but the lab assistant is able to fend off the brain’s hypnotic attacks by repeating the phrase “Amidst the mists and coldest frosts he thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts.” The glass tank is destroyed, but before he finally dies, Donovan commands Schratt’s heart to stop.
Any of King’s Constant Readers will recognize the influence of Siodmak’s story on his work. Lifelong stutterer Bill Denborough in IT uses the phrase “He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts” to ward off Pennywise. Mark Petrie uses another rhyme — Bitter Betty bought some butter; “But,” said she, “this butter's bitter!” — to ward off the hypnotic commands of Danny Glick, Kid Vamp. These are just little touches that King uses here and there. With Christine, I think King goes full Donovan’s Brain.
Arnie’s personality is slowly undergoing a sea change. Everyone — his mother and father, his girlfriend, his best friend — sees it happening. The use of the word “shitter,” the back brace, the old-fashioned haircut, his very signature — everything about Arnie is different. It’s as though he were turning into someone else entirely. Like Dr. Cory in Siodmak’s novel, he seems unable to get out from under the will of LeBay. How long is it before Arnie is gone for good? And if LeBay is Donovan, is Christine the glass tank filled with an electrically charged, oxygenated saline solution (patent pending) that houses the old man’s “brain?” Can Dennis take an ax to her and save Arnie?
You will just have to keep reading to find out, Blog-o-weeners!
There’s a motel just over the next hill, and I for one am looking forward to a little shuteye. I am pretty pooped from all of today’s gabbing. Before we wrap up today’s trip, however, I’d like to talk a bit about Pittsburgh’s Civic Arena.
The concert that Moochie goes to — Jackson Browne — takes place at what King calls the “Civic Center,” but it’s really the good old Civic Arena. Built in 1961 (and called the Civic Auditorium at the time), the Civic Arena was originally the home of Pittsburgh’s Civic Light Opera. Later, in 1967, it became the home of the National Hockey League team, the Pittsburgh Penguins. It was the first major sport venue with a retractable roof. My mom said that when she saw Liberace there (no judgment!) they opened the roof. I myself saw The Beach Boys in the 1980s when they did the same. It was pretty cool.
I saw many great concerts at the Civic Arena during the 1980s — Triumph (my first ever concert), Rush, Iron Maiden, Dio, Journey, Heart, Ratt, Bon Jovi, Frank Sinatra (!). I wish they had opened the roof at most of those shows because things ended up getting a little “smoky” in the Igloo… if you know what I mean… and I think you do.
There was no show scheduled a week after Thanksgiving in 1978. Jackson Browne last played the Civic Arena in August of 1977 and wouldn’t return until 1980. Post-Thanksgiving, Moochie could have enjoyed Neil Diamond on 8 December. If he had, then he might have welcomed Christine dancing the Mashed Potato on his head on his way home.
I kid! I kid!
Whew! That was a haul, was it not, Blog-o-weeners? Five chapters! And we didn’t get to half of them. That’s okay. You can’t win ‘em all.
There’s no rest for the wicked, however. If Christine keeps truckin’, then so do we. For tomorrow, read Part 2: Chapters 31, 32, & 33. We’ll meet Lieutenant Rudolph Junkins, Pennsylvania State Police, Detective Division. He has some questions for Arnie. Ol’ Rudy seems to suspect something about Arnie’s girl… and I don’t mean Leigh. Junkins sees a line running straight from Buddy Repperton to Moochie Welch back to Christine. Look out, Arnie! He doesn’t seem like your average donut-eating cop.
In addition to all the concerts, I sat through quite a few indoor soccer games at the Civic Arena. The Pittsburgh Spirit were not a great team, but they were always entertaining, and I loved ‘em. I remember my dad taking me on my birthday to see the Spirit play the best team in the Major Indoor Soccer League, the San Diego Sockers. My dad was the guy who always wanted to leave the sporting event when there was still plenty of time on the clock, so he could beat the traffic heading home. The Spirit were down 3-0, and I could feel my dad getting antsy. I begged him to let us stay until the bitter end — it was my birthday, after all. We did, and the Spirit came from behind to win in overtime with a goal from my favorite player, Helmut Dudek. I was ecstatic! My dad… not so much. It took us what felt like hours to get out of Pittsburgh and back home.
I’m sure now he laughs about it, but at the time he must have felt like an object lesson for other parents in why you should put your foot down with your kids. “Study this moment well,” he’d tell his fellow fathers, “because…
