The Real Difference Between Good and Evil

Stephen King taught me to masturbate.

His cock stood out stiffly from a mass of reddish-gold pubic hair. It didn't take long; he was too excited. Two or three quick jerks through his closed fist and orgasm came, immediate and savage. He spat semen onto the bedspread in a convulsion.

That's from King's CUJO, which I read when I was about thirteen or fourteen. The junk in question belongs to Steve Kemp, an adulterer and all-around scary d-bag who has just trashed an innocent family's home while they're gone, mostly in revenge for the wife he's been sleeping with breaking off their affair. For a little extra oomph (and evidently because Kemp has never heard of DNA testing) he tosses off on the couple's bed.

Now, I wasn't a fan of any of this activity, not in the least. Kemp is a scumbag, in a generally unlikeable novel full of unlikeable people (except for the great, rabid titular Saint Bernard), and no hero in any novel or movie would be caught dead in such a realistic pose, a spiteful spermicidal event.

But the thing is, when you're a teenager, even villains have lessons to impart. In fact, if you think about it, the villain is often the most realistic character in any novel or movie.

The villain has desires or thoughts which are cruel, petty, manic, or deviant. The villain wants power, money, prestige, sex and influence. Heroes never want for such things; if anything, a hero finds any positives in his/her life by pure chance or pure effort, a kind of reward for living fictionally as a "good person."

But the villain doesn't expect to be rewarded. Whatever good comes to him/her, the villain must take it.

And this is realism. This is what all "good" human beings in the real world, for time and time again, have denied themselves. They may seek to be good, solid citizens, but they also live to eat, sex, sleep and defecate. Not "evil" desires, merely banal ones.

Cujo wanted nothing more than to be a GOOD DOG. So did I.

A hero has a purpose, a mission, for good, or at least some kind of return to a peaceful status quo. And then what? What did Atticus Finch do after TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD? What did Scarlet O'Hara deign once she'd been told by her husband that he "didn't give a damn"? Even the Grinch had to continue to survive, eating, crapping, and having sex. The villain is the purest form of humanity, a survialist without moral boundaries generally.

Where the hero might refer to his penis as "himself," a kind of code for his sexuality as a whole, made abstract, the villain revels in sweaty release.

A hero, swelled to explosive dimensions by his love for this woman he has shared adventures with, dodged bullets with, supped godly nectars from, will find "himself," usually in a moment of climactic love deep inside this co-star, with a pulse racing like an electric current in their loins. When the hero makes love, he does so abstractly, so as not to alienate the reader/watcher.

The villain's world is much different. His penis is a weapon, "cock" being what you do when you draw back your arm to strike. The villain's pubes will be realistically described, "reddish-gold." The villain "spats" semen, an act of aggression, unlike the hero, who will utter a manly groan, his ejaculation unseen within a tender woman's embrace. The hero is fulfilled in this. The villain loves to make a mess.

Dee Wallace in CUJO, the movie: I spat for her too, but felt bad about it later because I loved her so and heroes didn't do things like that to women they love. Did they?

I didn't have any idea about a hero's world when I was a boy, no inkling how a hero masturbates, since heroes in stories do not masturbate. Yes, unless the writer of the hero wishes to alienate a general admission audience. Or unless John Updike is writing them, meaning the hero is "literary" and closer to the pimples of reality. But who reads for reality unless reality is something strange and unlike anything they know? Like, to a teenager, the new reality of masturbation.

Only villains jerk off, which is what Steve Kemp in CUJO did. And being jerk-curious, I tried it out soonafter while taking a bath and, in a blinding revelation that would change my life as it has so many boys' before me, I "spat" hot semen and was never the same again. In an instant, I had become cursed with a selfish, shameful activity. A villain would surely laugh.

A moment of villainy, courtesy of Stephen King--reality within fiction that serves a purpose. Not many in the real world are all good or all evil, and masturbation did not provide a gateway to monstrous acts of devilry, nor did it straddle some ethical line, barring Christian attitudes. No matter how pedestrian the act, which a hero would never scrape toward, I had to accept I was not a hero, like my heroes Indiana Jones or Flash Gordon. But also, in my enlightenment, I perceived neither Indiana or Flash could be a hero all the time. Not with those sexy girlfriends they had. No wonder the villains hated the heroes--the heroes were too fictional to be taken seriously.

Sooner or later, even the heroes demand sexual satisfaction, else they are not human--not even fictionally human. And I was definitely human, verified for the first time, no longer even possibly someone else's character. I was my own.