On pages 83-102 of Stephen King’s IT, Eddie Kaspbrak gets a call from Mike Hanlon telling him that IT has returned and so Eddie has to return to Derry to help fight it. (I just realized that I’ve been misspelling Eddie’s last name in my posts. His last name is “Kaspbrak”, not “Kasprak”.) Eddie runs a successful limousine company, and he’s explaining to his wife, Myra, that she will have to drive Al Pacino. But Myra is afraid that she will do the task incorrectly (i.e., get lost) and that Al Pacino will yell at her. On page 94, Eddie tries to reassure Myra that the task is not that hard:
“Myra, it’s all as easy as one-two-three. One, you make the pick-up at the Saint Regis tomorrow at seven P.M. and take him over to the ABC Building. They’re retaping the last act of this play Pacino’s in—American Buffalo, I think it’s called. Two, you take him back to the Saint Regis around eleven. Three, you go back to the garage, turn in the car, and sign the greensheet…If it looks like he’s going to party all night, you can call Phil Thomas on the radio-phone after midnight. By then he’ll have a driver free to relieve you…You’ll be snug in your own bed by one in the morning, Marty—one in the morning at the very, very latest. I apple-solutely guarantee it.”
I can identify with Myra here: being afraid of making a mistake and humiliating myself, worse, being yelled at. But it’s good when somebody breaks the task down and presents it as manageable to me—better yet, encourages me that I can do it. And I do reassure myself that intimidating events will be over—that I’ll be in bed that night. That’s the way it was with my comprehensive exams, which appeared very intimidating to me. Unfortunately, though, there have been some bad events that have left scars.
While I’m on this section of the book, I really liked something Eddie thought on page 93. Eddie reassures Myra that Al Pacino is a nice and understanding man, and thus won’t yell at her. On page 93, Eddie thinks: “He had never driven Pacino before in his life, but contented himself with knowing that at least the law of averages was on the side of this lie—according to popular myth most celebrities were shitheels, but Eddie had driven enough of them to know it usually wasn’t true.”
But at least Eddie was comforting Myra! Hopefully, she did her task and Al Pacino did not yell at her. Unfortunately, the book does not tell us what happened in this incident.