Six cans of beer before dinner (and then came the cocaine): Stephen King's addictions

As he himself recalls Stephen King, His first drunken binge took place in 1966 , when he was almost nineteen. It was during his graduation trip to Washington, shortly before entering university. The students and teachers who accompanied them spent their first night in New York , where the young writer and several daring companions bought cheap whiskey that didn't end too well for them, especially him. The next morning he could barely stand, much less attend the activities planned for that day. Despite the bad experience, the future master of horror was drunk again when they continued on their way to Washington ; at one of the stops, he bought a bottle of Four Roses and that same night he again felt the ravages of alcohol. It would be an unhealthy hobby that he wouldn't stop until well into his 80s and almost 90s , made worse by drugs.

His time at university wasn't only marked by the interesting ideas he presented, the demands he echoed, or the strange appearance he sometimes presented for the setting in which he moved. For example, some classmates pointed out how common it was to find quite a few empty beer bottles under his bed. It's no wonder that during the first twelve years of his marriage to Tabitha , he repeatedly erected different barriers that ended with the assertion that he simply liked to drink. Nothing more. There was also the excuse that being a writer, sensitivity easily surfaced, a sensitivity he had to control with drinking. Excuse after excuse. The Maine native even got drunk while delivering the eulogy in honor of his mother. Even so, he continued to erect defenses to protect himself from something that, deep down, he knew was already a problem. Instead of solving it, it ended up making it worse.

He even got drunk while giving the eulogy in honor of his mother.

During the toughest times before publishing Carrie, when frustration was mercilessly attacking him, when he barely had time for his dream of being a full-time writer , between exams and family, he used to go to his usual bar to smoke and drink with the little money he had left. Tabitha was crazy that he would burn the money like that, especially since they didn't have any to spare. The few tense situations that the Kings experienced , with both of them as protagonists, arose in this way, due to the addictions that were beginning to surface in the novelist.

The success of his first books didn't alienate them; quite the opposite, when it should have been the other way around: once you succeed, that frustration disappears. Steven proved that theory and practice don't always mix , sometimes drinking up to six cans of beer before dinner and single-handedly filling bags and bags of garbage with the remains of everything he ingested. And that was before the arrival of drugs.

Again, he himself admitted, years later, that between 1978 and 1986, he used cocaine compulsively. It was his way of dealing with compulsive writing, literary success, and the ever-increasing demand for his works from publishers, agents, and readers. With alcohol, he could wait it out, even occasionally stop, but cocaine was different: it was impossible to stop. Although he never lacked drugs, the same wasn't true of alcohol. When such disaster struck, anything helped to relieve his addiction: from aftershave to cough syrup, even mouthwash. Sometimes just something to rub on his gums would do the trick. By 1985 , alcohol and drugs were a real problem for Uncle Steve. From the outside, it was obvious, but he believed he was still functioning normally. When he thought about leaving, fear gripped him, a powerful dread of not being able to function without what he was taking, as if he'd forgotten what life was like before cocaine and endless beers and bottles of whiskey. Fortunately, it was Tabitha (Tabby again) who took control of the situation, confronting Stephen who was exhausted, haggard, confused, and constantly feeling like he was about to be written off. The King family staged a full-blown intervention, where the writer showed him the remnants of his addictions she'd found in his office. She then gave him a choice: rehab or leave home. She didn't want to be front and center for that atrocious spectacle of her husband slowly committing suicide.

Anything helped him relieve his addiction: from aftershave to cough syrup.

The author haggled. He made promises. He was charming. However, like any good alcoholic, he knew none of it led anywhere good, so despite the terror he felt at believing that without his addictions he wouldn't be able to continue working, much less with the quality his readers assured him he had, he chose marriage and the wonderful promise of watching his three children grow up. Slowly but surely, he found his way again, both personally and professionally. He got his groove back and reintegrated with his family. Coffee and tea became the new drinks. His addictions returned, the original ones, the ones that beer and cocaine had buried: Tabby, Naomi, Joe, and Owen. And writing, of course. The only ones worthwhile. The ones that saved his life.

A horizon full of possibilities opened up.

What would a horror writer be without fear? Something like a carpenter without wood, a fisherman without a boat, or a teacher without students. If you pay attention, reader, you'll see that the three examples are different in both form and substance; for the carpenter, I've indicated the material he works with, for the fisherman, one of his tools, and for the teacher, the person toward whom his teachings are directed . I wasn't mistaken, because fear is everything, even more so for the author of one of the three fantasy genres; fear is the material, the tool, and the ultimate goal of the horror creator. In his hands, it's infinitely malleable, but it doesn't just go in one direction; it also moves from the inside out, both for the reader and for the nightmare builder himself.

What's he looking for? To be scared by what he writes, which is nothing more than the representation of his imagination in physical reality. However, this would be a vast oversimplification of the concept of fear for a horror writer, especially when it comes to Stephen King.

Many have pointed out that the Maine native could very well be a perfect psychologist and/or psychoanalyst, given his vast knowledge of the human psyche. Similarly, it has been asserted that he would be quite a match for a professional career in philosophy, considering his understanding of our existential keys as a species; from what moves us to what terrifies us. The key in this case is fear, which the author knows how to utilize perfectly . If a writer seeks to create emotions in the reader ( joy, sadness, anxiety, disgust, surprise ), he is no different, raising the flag of panic, not only so that the reader feels it with his stories, but also so that they confront their personal demons from a distance as leisurely as it is safe. Someone who suffers from a terrible fear of rats will hardly bear to come face to face with one.

But what about diving into reading the short story The Last Shift ? That's a different story. What if the reader suffers from coulrophobia, the popular fear of clowns ? Delving into It could be a great way to combat it from a safe position; as soon as Pennywise becomes too unbearable, all you have to do is close the novel until you regain some of your lost courage.

You could say that just as Steven sees books as uniquely portable magic, he also considers them pocket-sized psychologists (or not so pocket-sized if they're hardcover; excuse the joke) capable of treating our traumas, including the author's own, of course. King himself has confessed that while he was writing The Shining and creating Jack Torrance , he wasn't even aware that he was drawing a part of himself that he feared he would become, that is, a frustrated writer, too fond of drinking and throwing tantrums at his family; he was more aware of what he was doing when he built Pet Sematary , where the fear of losing his children and going crazy because of it, as happens to Louis Creed , is one of the great protagonists; much has been said about how Annie Wilkes in Misery represents his drug addiction and the way it forced him to write day and night, in a love-hate relationship similar to the one Paul Sheldon suffers with the peculiar nurse; and editing and participating in the anthology Por los aires, dedicated to everything that can go wrong when one is suspended at ten thousand meters high, made sense for someone like him, who hates flying.

While writing 'The Shining' he wasn't even aware that he was drawing a part of himself that he was afraid of becoming.

What else scares Uncle Steve? Breaking a mirror and experiencing seven years of bad luck, for example, thus proving he's quite superstitious, hence why he's also not too keen on crossing under a ladder. Some of this also lies in his fear of the number thirteen (seven, however, is his favorite), suffering from what's known as triskaidekaphobia, to the point where he never stops writing on page thirteen or one of its multiples, stopping when he reaches what he calls a safe page; he performs the same "ritual" when reading. He was once forced to fly on a Friday the 13th, and indeed, reader, he didn't have a good day. Continuing with what gives him the creeps, the King doesn't feel much sympathy for bugs in general and large, hairy spiders in particular. He's been afraid of choking ever since one of his sons nearly suffocated in bed at the very moment his mother, Nellie Ruth Pillsbury, was dying of cancer, far away. He's no stranger to the shudders produced by darkness, which he considers something primal, natural, something we all carry within us, and he can't understand how people can lack them when shadows dominate a room. He's terrified of suffering from Alzheimer's and ending his days without remembering who he is, who the family members around him are, and the stories he's created over the years.

This connects with his fear of the dreaded writer's block. For Stephen, writing is necessary to stay sane; as he noted earlier, it's his way of externalizing his insecurities, fears, and night terrors. He does this on paper, as many therapists instruct their patients when advising them to write down the demons that haunt them. Instead of paying a psychiatrist, his regular readers pay him, both to have them psychoanalyzed and to psychoanalyze himself in his novels and short stories.

There's a lot of that in It . Of all the titles in our beloved Steve's extensive bibliography, it's the one that best and most deals with the theme of fear, even being considered, from certain points of view, as an essay on the subject itself. This is no wonder when you observe that the main antagonist, the creature known as It, transforms into what its victims fear most, among other reasons because fear gives them a better taste, and thus it can devour them with greater enjoyment. The entity lurking in the sewers of Derry transforms over pages and pages into an infinity of monsters and phobias built around the character before whom it presents itself. This serves to get to know them more deeply, delve into those fears and develop them before seeing who is capable of overcoming them... or not, thus falling into the clutches of the beast. This is what happens to the Losers, even more so when they are adults and must return to the town, realizing how their childhood traumas hit them so hard that they barely feel competent to face the new challenge posed by their old enemy. King thus uses It as a metaphor for the traumas that stay with us throughout our lives, even when we grow up and leave the place that so helped us develop them. After all, sometimes, afraid to name these traumas, horrified by giving them a concrete definition, we treat them as something vague.

As if they were a... that.