Desperation by Stephen King

Lord!” he bellowed in his rolling, trembling Jimmy Swaggart voice. It was a great success at cocktail parties; Tom Wolfe had once laughed so hard when he was doing the evangelist voice that Johnny thought the man was going to have a stroke. “Water in the desert, that’s a big ten-four! Hello Julia!” He sometimes thought it was this version of “hallelujah,” not his insatiable appetite for booze, drugs, and younger women, that had caused the famous actress to push him into the pool during a drunken press conference at the Bel-Air hotel . . . and then to take her emeralds elsewhere.
    That incident hadn’t marked the beginning of his decline, but it had marked the point where the decline had become impossible to ignore—he wasn’t just having a bad day or a bad year anymore, he was sort of having a bad life. The picture of him climbing out of the pool in his sopping white suit, a big drunk’s grin on his face, had appeared in Esquire ’s Dubious Achievements issue, and after that had commenced his more-or-less regular appearances in Spy magazine. Spy was the place, he’d come to believe, where once-legitimate reputations went to die.
    At least this afternoon, as he stood facing north and pissing with his shadow stretched out long to his right, these thoughts didn’t hurt as much as they sometimes did. As they always did in New York, where everything hurt these days. The desert had a way of making Shakespeare’s “bubble reputation” seem not only fragile but irrelevant. When you had become a kind of literary Elvis Presley—aging, overweight, and still at the party long after you should have gone home—that wasn’t such a bad thing.
    He spread his legs even wider, bent slightly at the waist, and let go of his penis so he could massage his lower back. He had been told that doing this helped sustain the flow a little longer, and he had an idea that it did, but he knew he would still have to take a leak again long before he got to Austin, which was the next little Nevada shitsplat on the long road to California. His prostate clearly wasn’t what it used to be. When he thought about it these days (which was often), he pictured a bloated, crenellated thing that looked like a radiation-baked giant brain in a fifties drive-in horror movie. He should have it checked, he knew that, and not as an isolated event but as part of a complete soup-to-nuts physical. Of course he should, but hey, it wasn’t as if he were pissing blood or anything, and besides—
    Well, all right. He was scared, that was the besides. There was a lot more to what was wrong with him than just the way his literary reputation had gone slipping through his fingers during the last five years, and quitting the pills and booze hadn’t improved things as he’d hoped. In some ways, quitting had made things worse. The trouble with sobriety, Johnny had found, was that you remembered all the things you had to be scared of. He was afraid that a doctor might find more than a prostate roughly the size of The Brain from Planet Arous when he stuck his finger up into the literary lion’s nether regions; he was afraid that the doctor might find a prostate that was as black as a decayed pumpkin and as cancerous as . . . as Frank Zappa’s had been. And even if cancer wasn’t lurking there, it might be lurking somewhere else.
    The lung, why not? He’d smoked two packs of Camels every day for twenty years, then three packs of Camel Lights for another ten, as if smoking Camel Lights was going to fix everything somehow, spruce up his bronchial tubes, polish his trachea, refurbish his poor sludgecaked alveoli. Well, bullshit. He’d been off the cigarettes for ten years now, the light as well as the heavy, but he still wheezed like an old carthorse until at least noon, and sometimes woke himself up coughing in the middle of the night.
    Or the stomach! Yeah,