I’m on the highway to hell.

“Highway to Hell,” AC/DC, 1979.

Roadwork unfolds in a neat three-part structure comprised of November, December, and January, respectively, with narrative momentum established by movement toward a clear deadline–January 20, 1974, the date Barton Dawes is supposed to be out of his house. That the three-month structure straddles the transition from 1973 to 1974 is significant due to the centrality of Watergate in my reading of King’s oeuvre’s depiction of our haunted American history: Nixon resigns in August of ’74. Roadwork‘s resident Nixon reference appears thus:

The house was hot. He had turned the thermostat to seventy-eight degrees and had left it there ever since Mary left. What energy crisis? Fuck you, Dick. Also the horse you rode in on. Fuck Checkers, too.

Is the extravagant consumption Dawes displays here to be taken as a heroic stand for individualism, or, conversely, emblematic of the problematic national penchant to preserve individual rights that led to this period’s “energy crisis” in the first place, or some combination thereof? Here Dawes conceives of the extravagance as a direct flouting of authority in the form of Nixon, still president in the timeline of the narrative, resigned-in-disgrace emblematic-King-villain outside of the text. The latter creates the possibility that opposition to this villainous figure renders Dawes the “good guy,” figuring the extravagant consumption here as more explicitly heroic, and thus condoning it, which would be a problem. This is another one of those instances where it seems like the exact device King-as-Bachman is deploying in order to generate sympathy for Dawes’ character instead makes me hate him.

Train the Dog

My first Roadwork post discussed how this lack of sympathy for Dawes largely manifests by way of the failure of the device of his son Charlie deployed on this front. Part of the reason the Charlie fails to generate sympathy is because his lack of development is highlighted by a stark contrast: there is much more emotional development and detail prevalent in the backstory surrounding the Dawes’ television. In this flashback sequence, both Dawes and his wife get side jobs to be able to buy a color one, which, when they do, leads to sex, creating a counterpoint to Charlie, a byproduct of sex, that might figure television as a hedonistic detriment to society rather than something more conducive to a fruitful continuation of our species….

The structure the television provides for plot, a linking of past and present, occurs when Dawes smashes the television near the height of his self-destructive (or system-inducing self-destruction) spiral, a gesture whose ultimate significance is hard to read in light of Dawes’ almost immediate regret for doing so. Is King-as-Bachman advocating for taking concrete action to escape television’s insidious influence? Is it ultimately figured as a helpful escape from Dawes’ tortured senseless plight of having to move to a new house, or does it play a more insidious role in his paralyzed stasis? It seems ironic that King would indict television on any level seeing the extent of the influence visual media has had on him (not to mention the success he has had in it, though perhaps not quite as much at the time he wrote Roadwork), but… maybe it’s a Freudian form of the father he needs to kill.

We basically see Dawes see the world through the lens of (television) advertisements, and how this impacts/ connects to real-life actions:

“Try one of these,” Harry said, and took a roll of pills from his breast pocket. Written on the outside was:

ROLAIDS

“Thanks,” he said. He took one off the top and popped it into his mouth, never minding the bit of lint on it. Look at me, I’m in a TV commercial. Consumes forty-seven times its own weight in excess stomach acid.

and

They watched the news in silence for a while. A commercial for a cold medicine came on—two men whose heads had been turned into blocks of snot. When one of them took the cold pill, the gray-green cube that had been encasing his head fell off in large lumps.

“Your cold sounds better tonight,” he said.

and

He masturbated instead, in front of the TV, and came to climax while an announcer was showing incontrovertibly that Anacin hit and held the highest pain-relief level of any brand.

It seems like you can track a pattern where we see Dawes increasingly isolated in each of these life-related-to-ad moments; in early ones he’s out interacting with people thinking of ads, then later he’s in front of the TV relating the ads he’s seeing to memories rather than directly experienced life in a reversal of the earlier moments. So when we get a theory Dawes advances to Olivia, it reads ironically in light of his own relationship to television and its attendant advertisements:

“The Trained Dog Ethic, first advanced by Barton George Dawes in late 1973, fully explains such mysteries as the monetary crisis, inflation, the Viet Nam war, and the current energy crisis. Let us take the energy crisis as an example. The American people are the trained dogs, trained in this case to love oil-guzzling toys. Cars, snowmobiles, large boats, dune buggies, motorcycles, minicycles, campers, and many, many more. In the years 1973 to 1980 we will be trained to hate energy toys. The American people love to be trained. Training makes them wag their tails. Use energy. Don’t use energy. Go pee on the newspaper. I don’t object to saving energy, I object to training.”

….

“Like Pavlov’s dogs,” he said. “They were trained to salivate at the sound of a bell. We’ve been trained to salivate when somebody shows us a Bombardier Skidoo with overdrive or a Zenith color TV with a motorized antenna. I have one of those at my house. The TV has a Space Command gadget. You can sit in your chair and change the channels, hike the volume or lower it, turn it on or off. I stuck the gadget in my mouth once and pushed the on button and the TV came right on. The signal went right through my brain and still did the job. Technology is wonderful.”

I’m definitely conditioned to a disturbing degree by the sound of my work email notification…at any rate, Dawes’ constant mental references to advertisements show us he is as trained in the Pavlovian manner by technology in the form of television as the “American people” he so disdainfully describes, which might be especially emphasized in this ad reference:

Before he had a chance to say what, there was a commercial for Gravy Train. The man in the commercial was saying that Gravy Train, when mixed with warm water, made its own gravy. He asked the audience if it didn’t look just like beef stew. To Barton George Dawes it looked just like a loose bowel movement that somebody had done in a red dog dish.

Dawes’ Pavlovian training seems to ultimately reveal itself in a sequence out in the “real world” when he sees a woman in the grocery store drop dead:

He was on his way down a middle aisle toward the checkouts when God perhaps spoke to him. There was a woman in front of him…. She made a funny gobbling, crowing noise in her throat and staggered. The squeeze bottle of mustard she had been holding in her hand fell to the floor and rolled, showing a red pennant and the word FRENCH’S over and over again.

“Ma’am?” he ventured. “Are you okay?”

The woman fell backward and her left hand, which she had put up to steady herself, swept a score of coffee cans onto the floor. Each can said:

MAXWELL HOUSE Good To The Very Last Drop.

After a nearby doctor establishes this woman has died of a brain hemorrhage, the scene ends with:

His calm of the last five days was shattered, and probably for good. Had there ever been a clearer omen? Surely not. But what did it mean? What?

It means Dawes thinks a woman’s death has more significance as a sign for him than it means for her. The brand names prevalent in the surrounding descriptions of this death seem to heighten its horror via juxtaposition/contrast with the ordinary/mundane, but the prevalent presence of objects reinforces the woman’s usage as an object to be read as a sign of relevance for Dawes. Which would seem illustrative of a type of thinking King has a female character explicate in a much later story, “Mr. Harrigan’s Phone,” from his 2020 novella collection If It Bleeds:

“Kids your age have a Ptolemaic view of the universe. I’m young enough to remember.”

“I don’t know what—”

“Ptolemy was a Roman mathematician and astrologer who believed the earth was the center of the universe, a stillpoint everything else revolved around. Children believe their entire worlds revolve around them. That sense of being at the center of everything usually starts to fade by the time you’re twenty or so, but you’re a long way from that.”

It’s telling that in 2020 King is citing children as the most vulnerable to this worldview, when it seems equally applicable to the willful blindness of the white patriarchy, a system designed to revolve around a particular demographic that perpetuates its own worldview (ie that of its own inherent supremacy) as “normal.” When you are inherently supreme, everyone else exists for your benefit, as the woman in the store does for Dawes. The text seems conscious to a degree that Dawes doing this is not exactly the most stable thing to do, that he is a “trained dog” as it were, trained to read all surrounding signs and symbols for their relevance to him. But it seems ironic that, per Matthew Salesses’ ideas I discussed in my first Firestarter post, this is a problem the text itself is perpetuating, training the audience/culture to read all signs for their relevance to…the white man. If Dawes is a “trained dog,” this is another way he is a victim of the systemic injustices of the systems designed to revolve around the white men…a victim of the self-centered conceptual framework that advertising cultivates, even more so when that self is a white man.

(Olivia as a character also amounts to little more than a plot device; sleeping with Dawes for no other apparent reason except his initial refusal to do so, she–or more specifically, his sleeping with her–becomes a pawn the powers that be can blackmail Dawes with. Mary as a female figure doesn’t fare much better.)

Advertising itself ends up affecting the plot more directly when, after Magliore won’t sell him explosives, Dawes hears a PSA about not taking gas home from the gas station because it’s explosive, which then inspires him to use it for homemade molotov-cocktail-style explosives (another Night Shift call back by way of “Trucks”) to vandalize the roadwork site. But this vandalism is ultimately ineffective, foreshadowing the climactic gun-and-car-battery sequence. As this final part unfolds, Dawes’ visual-text trained-dog associations shift from ads to movies:

When the first police car screamed around the corner in a calculated racing drift like something out of The French Connection he was ready.

and

“You know what, fellow? You’ve seen too many movies.”

“I don’t go to the movies much anymore. I did see The Exorcist, thought. I wish I hadn’t. How are your movie guys coming out there?”

and

“You’ll never take me alive!” he yelled, delirious with joy. “You’re the dirty rats who shot my kid brother! I’ll see some of ya in hell before ya get me!”

These passages seem to reveal a pattern of escalation in their own right: internal reference, external interaction that then implicates media in the type of problematic influence we’ve seen the silver screen in Dawes’ living room having, and finally, Dawes literally performing something from a movie as if he is in it. A merging of worlds–but in his head. This is actually creepily starting to seem symbolic of King himself and the extent to which he is a prism of American literary and pop culture…

The treatment of the media here becomes interesting in light of the conclusion of Firestarter, which seems to valorize the freedom of the press pretty unequivocally. Roadwork‘s conclusion is more…equivocal. We’re told people will remember the image of Dawes’ exploding house as filmed by the media, and that the reporting got a Pulitzer for revealing the bad guy/monster is the system itself (in theory making Dawes’ death worthwhile or mean something)…but then people forget again…and nothing changes. It also seems worth noting that the media aspect frames the whole book via the prologue we get of Dawes meeting the reporter who will break his posthumous story–but whom Dawes also won’t remember, a possible symbol of how we don’t realize/recognize how much of what we see/know is “framed” by the media…and yet what the media seems to be revealing in Dawes’ case is how Dawes has in effect been “framed” as the bad guy in this narrative…so, mixed signals.

The Failure

King scholar Patrick McAleer notes a larger pattern that the futility of Dawes’ one-man stand against the larger system can be read into:

…the theory that King’s writing is purposely set up so that the characters fail, suggests that King, at least through his “dark half” Richard Bachman, focuses his writing on failure to criticize his peers: death may be a quite unfavorable climax to anticipate, but the beneficial cost and the moral purpose of, essentially, martyrdom is an ideal that King constantly revisits in order to remind the Boomers of what they abandoned and that their infamy remains alive and as a mark of shame when compared to the foolish and quixotic yet heroic, memorable, and perhaps admirable characters in the Bachman books.

Patrick McAleer, “I Have the Whole World in My Hands … Now What?: Power, Control, Responsibility and the Baby Boomers in Stephen King’s Fiction.” The Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 44, No. 6, 2011, pp1221-1222

Dawes’ death serves to reveal a larger problem–the highway extension itself being an unnecessary and destructive product of bureaucratic budget acrobatics–but does little to solve it. I suppose this could qualify him as a “martyr,” but that he’s “admirable” would be a stretch for me.

McAleer’s charting of King’s representation of Boomer failures manifests primarily in the figures of Father Callahan from ‘Salem’s Lot, Louis Creed from Pet Sematary, Roland Deschain from The Dark Tower, and (somewhat confusingly since he doesn’t fit the generational profile) Paul Edgecomb in The Green Mile, to support the thesis that:

What King, then, seemingly aims to do through his fiction is to suggest that as many of his characters are placed within positions of power and are given numerous chances to remedy their respective situations, they often fail, and it is through this failure, despite the abundant opportunity to amend any potential wrongs, that King provides a layered discussion focused on a constant lamentation for himself and his generation—the Baby Boomers: a selection of people who were positioned to radically alter their social landscape and who reportedly had the necessary means to do so, yet failed to use the available resources, which were required to accomplish their ends and must now live with and face the constant reminders of their resonating and collective collapse.

Patrick McAleer, “I Have the Whole World in My Hands … Now What?: Power, Control, Responsibility and the Baby Boomers in Stephen King’s Fiction.” The Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 44, No. 6, 2011, p1210.

Ouch. As a millennial, I can appreciate putting the onus back on the Boomers in a certain reversal…and reading Roadwork in 2020-21, the Boomers’ failures are nothing but amplified on the climate-change front. McAleer’s article as well, now a decade old, has attained new resonance in light of our recent election of yet another Boomer for president:

The real tensions of the new Administration, which began with a twenty-two-year-old old Black poet offering wisdom to a seventy-eight-year-old white President, are generational. Was American liberalism contingent on boomer optimism, and was that contingent on a once-in-human-history sequence of prosperity? There are plenty of ways to define Biden’s agenda, but one is that he is trying to apply a politics built on boomer optimism to an era in which that optimism has faded.

Benjamin Wallace-Wells, “The Conservative Case Against the Boomers,” January 28, 2021.

What McAleer does not seem to directly acknowledge is how King’s “lamentation for himself” included in his generational indictment can be applied to the failure of King’s work–with the “abundant opportunity” inherent in its massive mainstream platform–to provide more equitable representations of marginalized demographics, with two of his more prominent failures on this front being those of gay people and black people. As McAleer himself says, the Bachman books are as relevant as any in King’s oeuvre when it comes to discerning patterns, etc., in his work, and so can offer evidence of King’s problematic treatment of both the Queer presence and the Africanist presence.

In Roadwork, the latter seems more prominent, while the former manifests in Magliore’s use of the term “fruitcake” as a label for Dawes, which is apparently supposed to indicate craziness more than queerness–as in “Nutty as a fruitcake“–though it seems to encode queerness. Queerness also comes up indirectly in references to “coming out of the closet” applied to non-queer contexts, such as:

He had joined the mainstream of lunacy, he had come out of the closet.

This is doing double duty in terms of being offensive to non-“mainstream” demographics, conflating queer people and people with mental-health issues and thus implying there’s some kind of inherent connection between them. The other figurative closet invocation provides a springboard to the appearance of the Africanist presence:

“Are you really going to drink that down-by-de-Swanee-Ribber stuff? I always thought you were a scotch man.”

“I was always a private Comfort-and-ginger-ale man. I’ve come out of the closet.”

Up until this point in the novel, when Dawes doesn’t give a shit anymore because everything’s been taken away from him, he feels the need to hide that this was his drink of choice, as we learn upon its introduction fairly early:

…drinking his private drink, Southern Comfort and Seven-Up. It was his private drink because people laughed when he drank it in public.

It was not until I read the racist fake-dialect-emphasizing exchange where Dawes “come[s] out of the closet” about this drink that I understood the reason people (i.e., white people) would laugh at it has racialized, or more specifically, racist, implications. Dawes is, in effect, aligning and/or associating himself with black people by drinking a drink associated with them, an alignment that is replicated/reiterated through the figure that offered our other platform to the queer presence: Magliore. Magliore invokes the N-word to describe a black person he claims blew up a federal courthouse in an anecdote he presents to Dawes as evidence for why Dawes’ efforts toward vandalism/sabotage (or “action” as McAleer might formulate it) will be futile (or fail). Magliore thus creates a narrative equality/equivalency between Dawes and this nameless black person that underscores how the novel’s entire plot figures Dawes as marginalized by the system in the same way that minorities are. Before he was given his walking papers by the powers that be, Dawes had to hide any potential affinity that would link him to such marginalized groups–he has to stay in the closet when he’s drinking his Southern Comfort. Once he’s been victimized/tossed aside by the system like they’ve been, he can empathize, and, by the text’s formulation, he’s essentially been outed as one of them.

Dawes expresses a similar affinity for blackness/black people elsewhere:

He rode up with a black woman who had a large Afro. She was wearing a jumper and was holding a steno notebook.

“I like your Afro,” he said abruptly, for no reason.

She looked at him coolly and said nothing. Nothing at all.

This seems an attempt on Dawes’ part to declare an allegiance of sorts, one that this black woman doesn’t accept/rebuffs–with silence. But does her silence give her power in this exchange, or is this the text not giving a black woman a voice? Is it some type of progress that this “black woman” is not only given the “Afro” attribute but two other non-racially charged descriptors?

To complicate these questions, we have another nameless avatar of blackness to unpack the stereotypical and sartorial trappings of:

In Norton, blacks stood around on street corners and outside bars. Restaurants advertised different kinds of soul food. Children hopped and danced on chalked sidewalk grids. [Dawes] saw a pimpmobile—a huge pink Eldorado Cadillac—pull up in front of an anonymous brownstone apartment building. The man who got out was a Wilt Chamberlain-size black in a white planter’s hat and a white ice cream suit with pearl buttons and black platform shoes with huge gold buckles on the sides. He carried a malacca stick with a large ivory ball on the top. He walked slowly, majestically, around to the hood of the car, where a set of caribou antlers were mounted. A tiny silver spoon hung on a silver chain around his neck and winked in the thin autumn sun. He watched the man in the rearview mirror as the children ran to him for sweets.

Sweet Jesus…

This figure’s outfit and accessories (inadvertently) reveal how this entire description is a white projection of blackness: the black figure is literally cloaked in whiteness. One might initially be able to conceive of the use of the term “black” as a noun (rather than as an adjective preceding some version of “person”) as Dawes being racist and King just depicting the truth of a white man’s mindset in this particular place and time. But the clothes and car description, in existing in the text as concrete objects, become King’s projection of blackness rather than just Dawes’. There’s also the fact–which I know to be one based on several other references to same appearing in other ’80s King novels–that the figure (who is a “man” by the end of the passage) is unequivocally associated with drug use via the “tiny silver spoon,” and further coded to be a drug dealer corrupting the neighborhood (or perhaps an inherent part of the corruption of a black neighborhood?) via the children running to him for “sweets.”

A version of this sequence recurs in another Magliore-linked section clunky for narrative reasons and even more so for racial reasons: Dawes has a nightmare about a dog from a story Magliore told him, and the pimp from before explicitly appears in this nightmare with all the same markers of car, antlers, suit, hat. And he has candy. All the children run to him but one:

All the children around the pimp were black, but the little boy approaching the dog was white.

Dawes desperately wants the white boy to go to the pimp for candy instead of to the dog, but the boy goes to the dog and gets attacked, at which point he sees it’s Charlie. This would seem to figure the pimp’s candy, formerly symbolically drugs, as some sort of potential saving grace. That or it symbolizes that a white boy will be torn to pieces in a black neighborhood (the dog is “black”)–or rather, the fear that this is what will happen in a black neighborhood. This anecdotal dog of Magliore’s, used several times as a means to highlight Dawes’ rising anxiety and which is here also associated with race, hearkens back to the figurative trained dog of Dawes’ theory, and thus to advertising. This link creates the possibility that the text demonstrates–however inadvertently–how the two-dimensional worlds constructed in the fantasies of advertising become manifest in two-dimensional white projections/fantasies of blackness.

Ultimately the novel engages with interesting political questions, but what would seem to be the defining feature of the Bachman brand up to this point: a literal execution(s) that’s executed poorly, figuratively, which is to say, the text seems to fail largely in its intended aims, at least for an audience that would include myself and people for whom the put-upon white man who has always had everything handed to him while honestly believing what he was being handed was the product of his own hard work having to deal with things no longer being handed to him but even actively taken away from him…

-SCR