Different Seasons - Stephen King [49]
What has happened in my life? Can't you guess? I was paroled. After thirty-eight years of routine hearings and routine details (in the course of those thirty-eight years, three lawyers died on me), my parole was granted. I suppose they decided that, at the age of fifty-eight, I was finally used up enough to be deemed safe.
I came very close to burning the document you have just read. They search outgoing parolees just as carefully as they search incoming 'new fish'. And beyond containing enough dynamite to assure me of a quick turnaround and another six or eight years inside, my 'memoirs' contained something else: the name of the town where I believe Andy Dufresne to be. Mexican police gladly cooperate with the American police, and I didn't want my freedom-or my unwillingness to give up the story I'd worked so long and hard to write-to cost Andy his.
Then I remembered how Andy had brought in his five hundred dollars back in 1948, and I took out my story of him the same way. Just to be on the safe side, I carefully rewrote each page which mentioned Zihuatanejo. If the papers had been found during my 'outside search', as they call it at the Shank, I would have gone back in on turnaround but the cops would have been looking for Andy in a Peruvian seacoast town named Las Intrudres.
The Parole Committee got me a job as a 'stock-room assistant' at the big FoodWay Market at the Spruce Mall in South Portland-which means I became just one more ageing bag-boy. There's only two kinds of bag-boys, you know; the old ones and the young ones. No one ever looks at either kind. If you shop at the Spruce Mall FoodWay, I may have even taken your groceries out to your car but you'd have had to have shopped there between March and April of 1977, because that's as long as I worked there. At first I didn't think I was going to be able to make it on the outside at all. I've described prison society as a scaled-down model of your outside world, but I had no idea of how fast things moved on the outside; the raw speed people move at. They even talk faster. And louder.
It was the toughest adjustment I've ever had to make, and I haven't finished making it yet not by a long way. Women, for instance. After hardly knowing that
they were half of the human race for forty years, I was suddenly working in a store filled with them. Old women, pregnant women wearing T-shirts with arrows pointing downward and the printed motto reading BABY HERE, skinny women with their nipples poking out of their shirts- a woman wearing something like that when I went in would have gotten arrested and then had a sanity hearing-women of every shape and size. I found myself going around with a semi-hard almost all the time and cursing myself for being a dirty old man. Going to the bathroom, that was another thing. When I had to go (and the urge always came on me at twenty-five past the hour), I had to fight the almost overwhelming need to check it with my boss. Knowing that was something I could just go and do in this too-bright outside world was one thing; adjusting my inner self to that knowledge after all those years of checking it with the nearest screwhead or facing two days in solitary for the oversight that was something else.
My boss didn't like me. He was a young guy, twenty-six or -seven, and I could see that I sort of disgusted him, the way a cringing, servile old dog that crawls up to you on its belly to be petted will disgust a man. Christ, I disgusted myself.