The Dark Tower - Stephen King [299]
“Tell us how you came to be here, Joe,” Roland invited.
Joe grinned. “That’s a hair-raising story,” he said, “but if you really want to hear it, I guess I don’t mind tellin it.” The grin mellowed to a wistful smile. “It’s nice, havin folks to talk to for a little bit. Lippy does all right at listenin, but she never says nuffink back.”
He’d started off trying to be a teacher, Joe said, but quickly discovered that life wasn’t for him. He liked the kids—loved them, in fact—but hated all the administrative bullshit and the way the system seemed set up to make sure no square pegs escaped the relentless rounding process. He quit teaching after only three years and went into show business.
“Did you sing or dance?” Roland wanted to know.
“Neither one,” Joe replied. “I gave em the old stand-up.”
“Stand-up?”
“He means he was a comedian,” Susannah said. “He told jokes.”
“Correct!” Joe said brightly. “Some folks actually thought they were funny, too. Course, they were the minority.”
He got an agent whose previous enterprise, a discount men’s clothing store, had gone bankrupt. One thing led to another, he said, and one gig led to another, too. Eventually he found himself working second- and third-rate nightclubs from coast to coast, driving a battered but reliable old Ford pickup truck and going where Shantz, his agent, sent him. He almost never worked the weekends; on the weekends, even the third-rate clubs wanted to book rock-and-roll bands.
This was in the late sixties and early seventies, and there’d been no shortage of what Joe called “current events material”: hippies and yippies, bra-burners and Black Panthers, movie-stars, and, as always, politics—but he said he had been more of a traditional joke-oriented comedian. Let Mort Sahl and George Carlin do the current-events shtick if they wanted it; he’d stick to Speaking of my mother-in-law and They say our Polish friends are dumb but let me tell you about this Irish girl I met.
During his recitation, an odd (and—to Susannah, at least—rather poignant) thing happened. Joe Collins’s Mid-World accent, with its yers and yars and if-it-does-yas began to cross-fade into an accent she could only identify as Wiseguy American. She kept expecting to hear bird come out of his mouth as boid, heard as hoid, but she guessed that was only because she’d spent so much time with Eddie. She thought Joe Collins was one of those odd natural mimics whose voices are the auditory equivalent of Silly Putty, taking impressions that fade as quickly as they rise to the surface. Doing a club in Brooklyn, it probably was boid and hoid; in Pittsburgh it would be burrd and hurrd; the Giant Eagle supermarket would become Jaunt Iggle.
Roland stopped him early on to ask if a comic was like a court jester, and the old man laughed heartily. “You got it. Just think of a bunch of people sitting around in a smoky room with drinks in their hands instead of the king and his courtiers.”
Roland nodded, smiling.
“There are advantages to being a funnyman doing one-nighters in the Midwest, though,” he said. “If you tank in Dubuque, all that happens is you end up doing twenty minutes instead of forty-five and then it’s on to the next town. There are probably places in Mid-World where they’d cut off your damn head for stinking up the joint.”
At this the gunslinger burst out laughing, a sound that still had the power to startle Susannah (although she was laughing herself). “You say true, Joe.”
In the summer of 1972, Joe had been playing a nightclub called Jango’s in Cleveland, not far from the ghetto. Roland interrupted again, this time wanting to know what a ghetto was.
“In the case of Hauck,” Susannah said, “it means a part of the city where most of the people are black and poor, and the cops have a habit of swinging their billyclubs first and asking questions later.”
“Bing!” Joe exclaimed, and rapped his knuckles on the top of his head. “Couldn’t have said it better myself!”
Again there came that odd, babyish crying sound from the front of the