I have had fun reading this manuscript and comparing it to the final text of the 1st edition years later. Unlike The Shine which had large portions of text editing out due page count constraints to keep the issue price lower, this manuscript, Getting It On, only has minor changes to some paragraphs and sentences to make the story flow better and to offer more explanation where assumptions had to be made in the original text. The novel was also expanded later with two extra chapters and the additions of many paragraphs and sentences. As we all know this short novel was later renamed Rage and has now been out of print for many years and removed from The Bachman Books. King wrote the first forty pages while still a High School senior in 1966 but then he found the unfinished manuscript and went on to finish it in 1971. It was then published as a mass market paperback in 1977.
Stephen King - Getting It On - US Manuscript Copy
http://i.imgur.com/E4xitLL.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/lZlJLwp.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/MPTLFJI.jpg
The setting for he novel was changed from John Gates High School, Gates Falls to Placerville High School, Placerville.
Mrs. Underwood was teaching Latin I rather than Algebra II.
Chapter IV in the manuscript has been split with revisions into Chapters 4 and 6 in the final book with the insertion of a new chapter 5 and the introduction of character Randy Earl who does not appear in the manuscript.
Ted Jones father is vice-president of Gates Mill and Weaving Inc. rather than the Placerville Bank and Trust.
The death of Charlie's aunt has been modified.
http://i.imgur.com/8gFD4PO.jpg
Chapter 33 in the final book is not in the manuscript and was written later.
The ending in the manuscript features Ted Jones being killed by his classmates and Charlie being convicted of his murder along with the two teachers. In the final novel Ted survives.
XXVIII.
I looked up at the wall-clock. It was twelve-thirty. I drew in all my mental breath and got ready to start down the home stretch.
“So ends the short, brutal saga of Charles Everett Decker,” I said. “Questions?”
There were no questions.
Don Lordi was looking at me in a hungry way that reminded me of a shark I had once seen in an Ivan Tors movie. Sylvia was smoking the last cigarette in her pack. Pat Fitzgerald labored on his plane, crimping the paper wings, the usual slyly-funny expression gone from his face, replaced by something that was wooden and carved. Sandra Cross still seemed to be in a pleasant daze. Even Ted Jones seemed to have his mind on other matters, perhaps on a door he had forgotten to latch when he was ten, or a dog he might once have kicked.
“Then that brings us to our final order of business in our brief but enlightening stay together,” I said. “Have you learned anything today? Who knows the final order of business? Let’s see.”
I watched them. There was nothing. I was afraid it wouldn’t come, couldn’t come. So tight, so frozen, all of them. When you’re five and you hurt, you strike out every time. At ten, maybe half the time. But by the time you make fifteen the average drops and you begin to eat poisoned apples that grow on your own inner tree of good and evil. You begin to cram your fist into your mouth to stifle the screams. But they had gone so far—
And then Pig Pen looked up from his pencil. He was smiling a small, red-eyed smile, the smile of a ferret. His hand crept up into the air, the fingers still clenched around his cheap writing instrument.
So it could be easier for the rest. One electrode begins to arc and sputter, and—voila!—look, professor, the monster walks tonight.
Susan Brooks put her hand up next. Then there were several together. Sandra raised hers. Grace Stanner raised hers—delicately. Irma Bates. Corky. Don. Pat. Sarah Pasterne. Some smiling a little, mostly solemn. Tanis. Nancy Caskin. Dick Keene and Mike Gavin. George and Harmon. Melvin Thomas, the shortest boy in the twelfth grade. Anne Lasky. At the end all of them were up, all but one.
I called on Carol Granger, because I thought she deserved her moment. You would have thought that she might have had the most trouble making the switch, crossing the terminator so as to speak, but she had done it almost effortlessly, like a girl shedding her clothes in the bushes during the class picnic.
“Carol?” I said. “What’s the answer?”
She thought about how to word it. She put a finger up to the small dimple beside her mouth as she thought, and there was a furrow in her milk-white brow. “We have to help,” she said. “We have to help show Ted where he has gone wrong.”
That was a very tasteful way to put it, I thought.
“Thank you, Carol,” I said.
She blushed.
I looked at Ted, who had come back to the here and now. He was glaring again, but in kind of a confused way. “I think the best thing,” I said, “would be if I became a sort of combination judge and public attorney. Everyone else can be witnesses; and of course you’re the defendant, Ted.”
Ted laughed strangely. “You,” he said. “Oh Jesus, Charlie. Who do you think you are? You’re crazy as a bat.”
“Do you have a statement?” I asked him.
“You’re not going to play tricks with me, Charlie. I’m not saying a goddam thing. I’ll save my speech for when we get out of here.” His eyes swept his classmates accusingly and distrustfully. “And I’ll have a lot to say.”
I had the pistol on safety and now I brought it up suddenly, pointed at his head, and screamed “BANG!”
Ted shrieked.
Anne Lasky laughed merrily.
“Shut up!” Ted yelled at her.
“Don’t you tell me to shut up,” she said. “What are you so afraid of?”
“What—“ His jaw dropped. The eyes bulged. In that moment I felt a great deal of pity for him. The Bible says the snake tempted Eve with the apple. What would have happened if he had been forced to eat himself?
Ted half-rose from his seat, trembling. “What am I—“
He pointed a shivering finger at Anne, who did not cringe at all. “YOU GODDAM SILLY BITCH! HE HAS GOT A GUN! HE IS CRAZY! HE HAS SHOT TWO PEOPLE! DEAD! HE IS HOLDING US HERE!”
“Not me, he isn’t,” Irma said. “I could have walked right out.”
“We’ve learned some very good things about ourselves, Ted,” Susan said coldly. “I don’t think you’re being very helpful, closing yourself in and trying to be superior. Don’t you realize that this could be the most meaningful experience of our lives?”
“He’s a killer!” Ted said tightly. “He killed two people. This isn’t television. Those people are really dead. He killed them.”
“Soul-killer!” Pig Pen hissed suddenly.
“Where the fuck do you think you get off?’ Dick Keene asked. “All this just shakes the shit out of your tight little life, don’t it? You didn’t think anybody’d find out about you banging Sandy, did you? Or your mother. Ever think about her? You think you’re some kind of white knight. I’ll tell you what you are. You’re a cocksucker.”
I could watch it, actually watch it gathering steam and drive and purpose. Earlier it might have been illuminating, but I was very tired.
“Witness, witness!” Grace cried merrily, waving her hand. “Ted Jones buys girlie magazines. I’ve seen him in Ronnie’s Variety, doing it.”
“Beat off much, Ted?” Harmon asked. He was smiling viciously.
“And you were a Star Scout,” Pat said dolorously.
Ted twitched from them like a bear that has been tied to a post for the villager’s amusement. “I don’t masturbate!” He yelled.
“Right,” Corky said disgustedly.
“I bet you really stink in bed,” Sylvia said. She looked at Sandra. “Did he really stink in bed?”
“We didn’t do it in bed,” Sandra said. “We were in the car. It was over so quick—“
“That’s what I figured.”
“All right,” Ted said. His face was sweaty. He stood up. “I’m walking out of here. You’re all crazy. I’ll tell them—“ He stopped and added with a strange, lunatic irrelevancy: “I’ve never meant what I said about my mother.” He swallowed. “You can shoot me, Charlie, but you can’t stop me. I’m going out.”
I put the gun on the blotter. “I have no intention of shooting you, Ted. But let me remind you that you haven’t really done your duty.”
“That’s right,” Dick said, and after Ted had taken two steps toward the door, Dick came out of his seat, took two running steps of his own, and grabbed him. Ted’s face dissolved into utter amazement. He tried to give Dick an elbow in the belly and then his arms were pinned, one by Pat and one by George Yannick.
Sandra Cross got slowly out of her seat and walked to him, demurely, like a girl on a country road. Ted’s eyes were bulging, half-mad. I could taste what was coming, the way you can taste thunderheads before the rain, before the summer rain.
She stopped before him and an expression of sly, mocking devotion crossed her face and was gone. She put a hand out, touched the collar of his shirt. The muscles of his neck bunched as he jerked away from her. Dick and Pat and George held him like springs. She reached slowly inside the open collar of the khaki shirt and began to pull it open, popping the buttons. There was no sound in the room but the tiny, flat tic-tic as they fell to the floor and rolled. He was wearing no tee shirt and his flesh was bare, smooth. She moved as if to kiss the flesh and he spit in her face.
Pig Pen smiled from over Sandra’s shoulder, the grubby court jester with the king’s paramour. “I could put your eyes out,” he said. “Do you know that? Pop them out just like olives.”
“Let me go! Charlie, make them let me—“
“He cheats,” Sarah Pasterne said loudly. “He always looks at my paper in Trig. Always.”
Sandra stood before him, now looking down, a sweet, murmurous smile barely curving the bow of her lips. The first two fingers of her right hand touched the slick spittle on her cheek lightly.
“Hero,’ Billy Sawyer whispered. He crept up behind Ted on tippy-toe and suddenly pulled his hair.
Ted screamed.
“He cheats on the laps in gym, too,” Don said harshly. “You really quit football because you don’t have no sauce, dint you?”
“Please,” Ted said. “Please, Charlie.” He had begun to grin oddly. Sylvia had joined the little circle around him. She might have been the one who goosed him, but I couldn’t really see.
They were moving around him in a slow kind of dance that was nearly beautiful. Fingers pinched and pulled, questions were asked, accusations made. Irma Bates pushed a ruler down the back of his pants. Somehow his shirt was pulled off and flew to the back of the room in two tatters. Ted was breathing in great, high whoops. Anne Lasky began to rub the bridge of his nose with an eraser. Corky scurried back to his desk like a good mouse, found a bottle of Carter’s ink, and dumped it into his hair. Hands flew out like birds and rubbed it in briskly.
Ted began to weep.
“Soul brother?” Pat Fitzgerald began to ask. He was smiling, whacking Ted’s bare shoulders lightly with a notebook in cadence. “Be my soul brother? That right? Little Head Start? Little free lunch? That right? Hum? Hum? Brothers? Be soul brothers?”
“Got your Silver Star, hero,” Dick said, and raised his knee, placing it expertly in the big muscle of Ted’s thigh.
Ted screamed. His eyes bulged and rolled toward me, the eyes of a horse staved on a high fence. “Please…please…ple__” And then Nancy Caskin stuffed a large wad of notebook paper into his mouth. He tried to spit it out, but Sandra rammed it back in.
“That will teach you to spit,” she said reproachfully.
Harmon knelt and pulled off one of his shoes. He rubbed it in Ted’s inky hair and then slammed the sole against Ted’s chest. It left a huge, grotesque footprint.
“Admit one!” Corky cried gleefully.
Tentatively, almost demurely, Carol stepped on the stockinged foot and twisted her heel. Something snapped. Ted blubbered.
He sounded like he was begging somewhere behind the paper, but you couldn’t tell. Pig Pen darted in spiderlike and suddenly bit his nose.
There was a sudden black pause. I noticed that I had turned the pistol around so that the muzzle was pointed at my head, but of course that would not be at all cricket. I unloaded it and put it carefully in the bottom desk drawer, beside Mrs. Underwood’s purse.
They were smiling at Ted, who hardly looked human at all anymore. In that brief flick of time they looked like gods, young, wise, and golden. Ted did not look like a god. Ink ran down his cheeks in blue-black teardrops. The bridge of his nose was bleeding and one eye glared disjointedly toward no place. Paper protruded through his teeth. He breathed in great white snuffles of air.
I had time to think: We have got it on. Now we have got it on.
They fell on him.
XXIX.
I had Corky pull up the shades before they left. He did it silently, with quick, jerky motions. There were now what seemed like hundreds of cruisers out there, thousands of people. It was three minutes of one.
The sunlight hurt my eyes.
“Goodbye,” I said.
“Goodbye,” Sandra said.
They all said goodbye, I think, before they went out. Their footfalls made a funny echoey noise going down the hall. I closed my eyes and imagined a giant one-hundred-foot centipede. When I opened them again they were walking across the bright green of the lawn. I wished they had used the sidewalk; even after all that had happened, it was still a hell of a lawn.
The last thing I remember seeing of them was that their hands were streaked with black ink.
People enveloped them.
One of the reporters, throwing caution to the winds, eluded three policemen that tried to grab him and raced down, pell-mell.
The last one to be swallowed up was Carol Granger. I thought she looked back, I couldn’t tell. Philbrick started to walk stolidly toward the school. Flashbulbs were popping all over the place. I wondered if he knew Ted Jones hadn’t come out with the others. Doubtful. Too much confusion.
I though perhaps he would be hungry enough to come right down, but he was still taking no chances. It was the intercom. And he was puffing and blowing again.
Chink.
“Decker?”
“Right here.”
“Come out with your hands up.”
I sighed. “You come down and get me, Philbrick old sport. I’m pretty goddam tired. This psycho business is a hell of a drain on the glands.”
“All right,” he said, tough. “They’ll be shooting in the gas canisters in just about one minute.”
“Better not,” I said. “There’s still one of them down here. He’s hurt.” That was only a little lie.
His voice was instantly wary. “Who?”
“Ted Jones.”
“How is he hurt?”
“Stubbed his toe.”
“He’s not there. You’re lying.”
“Have I lied to you yet? Go back and count noses, Philbrick.”
No answer. Puff, snort, blow.
“Come on down,” I invited. “The gun is unloaded, in the bottom of the desk drawer. We can play a couple of cribbage hands, then you can take me out and tell the papers how you did it single-handed.”
Chink. He was off the horn.
I closed my eyes and put my face in my hands. All I saw was gray. Nothing but gray. Not even a flash of white light. For no reason at all I thought of New Year’s Eve, when all those people crowd into Times Square and scream like jackals as the lighted ball slides down the pole, ready to shed its thin party glare on three hundred and sixty-five new days. I had always wondered what it would be like to be caught in one of those crowds, screaming and not able to hear your own voice, your individuality momentarily wiped out and replaced with the blind empathic overslop of the crowd’s lurching, angry anticipation, hip to hip and shoulder to shoulder with no one in particular.
I began to cry.
When Philbrick stepped through the door, I made as if to grab something behind Mrs. Underwood’s row of books. “Here it comes, you shit cop!” I screamed.
He shot me three times.
XXX.
CHARLES EVERITT DECKER, convicted in Superior Court this day August 27, 197- of the willful murder of Theodore Lloyd Jones, a human being.
Two counts of willful murder held in abeyance.
It has been determined by five State psychiatrists that Charles Everett Decker is not a sane human being. He has thus been remanded to the Augusta State Hospital, where he will be held in treatment until such time as he can be certified responsible for his acts.
To this writ I have set my hand.
Signed,
Judge Samuel K.N. Deleavney
In other words, until shit sticks on the moon, baby.
XXXI.
Sept. 19th
Dear Charlie,
They tell me you can have mail now, so I thought I would drop you a line. Maybe you noticed this is postmarked Boston—yer old buddy finally made the big time, and I’m taking sixteen credit hours here at B.U. It’s all pretty slushy except my English class. The instructor assigned us a book called The Postman Always Rings Twice that was really good, and I got an “A” on the exam. It’s by James Cain, did you ever read it? I’m thinking about majoring in English, how’s that for a laugh? Your influence, I guess. And you always were the brains of the combination.
I saw your Mom just before I left Gates Falls, and she said you were just about all better from the holes in you. I was sure glad to hear it. She said you aren’t talking much. That doesn’t sound like you, skinner. It would sure be a loss to the world if you clammed up and just scrunched in a corner all day.
Altho I haven’t been home since the semester started, Sandy Cross wrote me a letter with a lot of news about all the people at home (will the bastards censor this part? I bet they read all your mail). Sandy herself decided not to go to college this year. She’s just sort of hanging around, waiting for something to happen, I guess. I might as well tell you that I dated her a couple of times in August, but she just seemed kind of distant. She asked me to say “hi” to you, tho.
Pig Pen has joined the Navy, can you believe it? I guess his mother raised the devil but couldn’t budge him. He was old enough to sign the papers himself. Sandy says he’s stationed in San Diego and They’re going to teach him to be a radio operator. Carol Granger’s validictory (sp?) speech was reprinted by Seventeen magazine. As I remember, it was on Self Integrity and A Normal Response To It, or some such happy horseshit.
Oh Yeah, and Irma Bates is going out with some “hippy” from Lewiston. I guess they were even in a peace demonstration at The Brunswick Naval Air Station. Mrs. Bates must be having birds about it. Dick Keene was going to start at the U. of Maine, but he got in a car accident and broke both arms. He’s going to be okay, tho. And Gracie Stanner, that little chick, is getting married.
Well, guess that’s all for now. I hope they are treating you right, Ferd, as you’ve got to be out of there as soon as they’ll let you. And if they start letting you have visitors, I want you to know that I’ll be the first in line.
There are a lot of us pulling for you, Charlie. Hard. You have to believe that.
Keep your thumb on it,
Joe
XXXII.
I haven’t had any bad dreams now for two weeks, almost. I do lots of jigsaw puzzles. They give me custard and I hate it but I eat it just the same. They think I like it. So I have a secret again. Finally I have a secret again.
My mom sent me the yearbook. I haven’t unwrapped it yet, but maybe I will. Maybe next week I will. I think I could look at all the senior pictures and not tremble a bit. Maybe next week I will.
