Aversion Therapy

Quitter's Inc., ultimatums, and the power of addiction

Good morning!

Welcome back to The Barrens, a Stephen King book club. Currently we are making our way through Night Shift, King’s first collection of short stories. If you’d like to jump in, grab a copy and read “I Know What You Need” for next week.

Today’s story is “Quitters, Inc.” the only previously unpublished story in this collection. It hits on a couple of interesting themes, namely addiction, and I couldn’t help but relate some of the story to King’s own life or possible thinking at the time. Was it something he wanted to escape from in 1978 when this was published? Did he know he might falter even if the stakes were high?

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Addiction

“Quitter’s Inc.” was published in 1978, when King was in the throes of addiction. Proof came when Maine passed a returnable-bottle-and-can law in the early 80’s, and he saw how much he drank in a matter of days. He was an alcoholic.

I thought, I’m an alcoholic…I’ve gotta be really careful, because if somebody says, ‘You’re drinking too much, you have to quit,’ I won’t be able to.

It wasn’t just alcohol. In On Writing, King describes his version of rock bottom, when his wife Tabby brought her children in and some close friends to have an intervention. The deal: get sober or get out. To prove her point, she dumped a trash bag filled with empty beer cans, Xanax, Valium and Listerine bottles, cigarette packs and coke spoons covered in dried blood and snot. He took two weeks to think about it, and then he got sober.

But Nicotine was the last to go. King even admitted that the stimulant helped him write.

I used to be faster than I am now; one of my books (The Running Man) was written in a single week, an accomplishment John Creasey would perhaps have appreciated (although I have read that Creasey wrote several of his mysteries in two days). I think it was quitting smoking that slowed me down; nicotine is a great synapse enhancer. The problem, of course, is that it’s killing you at the same time it’s helping you compose.

—Stephen King, On Writing

King’s early novels often feature addiction riddled characters desperate to quit. Paul Sheldon in Misery, and famously, Jack Torrance in The Shining. At the time, a young King would have scoffed that these characters, or that addiction even, represented him at all. In On Writing, the timeline of recognizing himself in his own pages seems to follow on the heels of sobriety.

The Self Help Nightmare

So it’s no surprise when we open the pages of “Quitters, Inc.” and begin a dark journey into a satirical imagining of the ultimate self-help for addicts. You really wanna quit, the pages seem to say to us. I’ll give you the motivation you need.

We meet Richard Morrison, a hard working business man who spends his time traveling and moving up the company ladder. He eats too much, drinks too much and smokes too much. He stresses and doesn’t sleep well, and he looks it.

All that runs through his mind when he runs into an old friend, Jimmy McCann, at the airport. The man looks fit. He’s succeeding in life. He has everything that Morrison is chasing and more. Morrison chews an antacid as Jimmy McCann tells him about his life before everything changed.

“Well, to put the capper on it, the doc told me I had an incipient ulcer. He told me to quit smoking.” McCann grimaced. “Might as well tell me to quite breathing.

Morrison nodded in perfect understanding. Nonsmokers could afford to be smug. He looked at his own cigarette with distaste and stubbed it out, knowing he would be lighting another in five minutes.

That was it. Quitting smoking. The rest of his vices had fallen like dominoes, and here he was, a year or so later, fit as a fiddle. All with the help of “specialists.” Morrison wants to know how, but that part’s all secret. McCann had to sign a contract he says. But he leaves him a card, in case Morrison is ever interested.

QUITTERS, INC.
Stop Going Up in Smoke!
237 East 46th Street
Treatments by Appointment

Morrison soon forgets, as a man does when he’s busy with business flights and hotel rooms. A month passes when the card falls out of his wallet and onto another bar. And lucky for him, he’s only two blocks away.

**I really enjoy this aspect of King’s stories, the serendipitous nature of things. The seemingly inane course of events leading someone to a perverse kind of destiny, and usually not a good one. I’m not sure if that’s how most bad things happen to good people, but maybe that’s just some kind of defense that keeps me thinking, as long as I do my part, I’ll be okay.

Morrison’s about to find out that isn’t how it works. Not by a long shot.

Quitter’s Inc.

The place isn’t special in any way. People in business suits sit waiting in a reception area. The woman at the desk takes his card and his information, and tells him to take a seat. It isn’t long before he gets called back, the urge to smoke unnerving as always. A gray haired man waits for him, tall and heavyset.

Vic Donatti is his name, and after asking if Morrison really does want to quit smoking, he gets a signature on a form. That is when the curtain starts to lift.

“We employ no drugs. We employ no Dale Carnegie people to sermonize you. We recommend no special diet. And we accept no payment until you have stopped smoking for one year.”

Dale Carnegie, the father of self help

We interrupt this broadcast…

to talk about who Dale Carnegie is. It’s just what the caption above says. He is the father of self improvement, perhaps best known for his book How to Win Friends and Influence People. And judging by King’s tone here, I have a feeling he wasn’t impressed. Maybe that’s reading into the man behind the story a little too much. We do know that Morrison is not impressed.

Which is why he’s drawn to Donatti’s pragmatic approach.

/praɡˈmadik/

adjective

1. dealing with things sensibly and realistically in a way that is based on practical rather than theoretical considerations.

Well then, doesn’t that sound nice? We’re in King country, which means it won’t be.

What’s your wife’s name?

That’s when Morrison starts to get a little squirrely, but he answers. Do you love her? If you’re like Morrison, you may be wondering why the good doctor (or whoever he is) would ask that. He asks about his child, a boy with special needs living in a home full time. Which school is that? Donatti asks, but Morrison draws the line there, and doesn’t answer.

He shows up at three the next day for a followup, and Donatti welcomes him back in.

“I’m very glad you came,” Donatti said. “A great many prospective clients never show up again after the initial interview. They discover they don’t want to quit as badly as they thought. It’s going to be a pleasure to work with you on this.”

Donatti asks for his cigarettes, and pummels the pack into the desk. Morrison is unimpressed, and Donatti follows up the little show by giving Morrison all the details of his life. His wife’s name, their address, his son’s name and the name of the home he lives in.

After calming Morrison, Donatti tells him how intense cigarette addiction is, how the relapse rate for Nicotine is higher than heroin. Depriving men of cigarettes in prison leads to riots, and so on, buttering him up to understand why Quitters, Inc. has taken such a pragmatic approach to treatment.

Donatti drew the curtains, discovering a rectangular window that looked into a bare room. No, not quite bare. There was a rabbit on the floor, eating pellets out of a dish.

“Pretty bunny,” Morrison commented.

“Indeed. Watch him.” Donatti pressed a button by the windowsill. The rabbit stopped eating and began to hop about crazily. It seemed to leap higher each time its feet struck the floor. It’s fur stood out spikily in all directions. Its eyes were wild.

That’s right. Donatti, the pragmatist, is electrocuting the rabbit, a practice he calls aversion therapy. Which means, you guessed it, the secret method that makes Quitters, Inc. so successful is their use of aversion therapy. But it isn’t Morrison who will face a shock if he smokes a cigarette. It will be his wife. And not just a shock, but an increasing escalation of punishments. His wife, then his son, and ultimately, if nothing else works?

He opened one of the desk drawers and laid a silenced .45 on the desk. He smiled into Morrison’s eyes. “But even the unregenerate two percent never smoke again. We guarantee it.”

Success at Any Cost

The story continues with Morrison mostly succeeding. When he does slip up and smoke in his car, he comes home to an empty house, and a phone call from Donatti. His wife is shaken, but still proud of him for quitting. She even says she understands.

It’s one of the stranger parts of the story, but in a way it makes sense. She’s willing to undergo a little physical punishment on his behalf if it means he’ll quit smoking. I wouldn’t doubt that many people with loved ones who struggle with an addiction that is killing them would do the same.

Donatti doesn’t stop at smoking. The next call Morrison gets leads to an appointment about his weight. He’s gained a few pounds, but no sweat. Donatti prescribes some illegal diet pills, and gives him his maximum weight. One-eighty-two.

“And what happens if I go over one-eighty two?”

Donatti smiled. “We’ll send someone out to your house to cut off your wife’s finger,” he said. “You can leave through this door, Mr. Morrison. Have a nice day.”

Only eight months later and Morrison is fit, a light one-sixty-seven. He works out, he’s been promoted at work, and he hasn’t touched a cigarette. He passes a card to a guy at a bar, a man who asks how he ever gave up smoking.

I Can’t Help But Wonder…

Is this how King felt about his own addiction? Is this an exercise exploring whether he would be able to stop, given such an ultimatum? The story ends with a double date with Jimmy McCann. When Morrison goes to shake his wife’s hand, he notices something.

Her little finger is missing.

Is that not some sort of admission of defeat? That no matter how high the stakes, the smoking (or drinking, or cocaine use) must go on? Lucky for us, we know how his story ends.

I bargained, because that’s what addicts do. I was charming, because that’s what addicts are. In the end I got two weeks to think about it. In retrospect, this seems to summarize all the insanity of that time. Guy is standing on top of a burning building. Helicopter arrives, hovers, drops a rope ladder. Climb up! the man leaning out of the helicopter’s door shouts. Guy on top of the burning building responds, Give me two weeks to think about it.

I did think, though—as well as I could in my addled state—and what finally decided me was Annie Wilkes, the psycho nurse in Misery. Annie was coke, Annie was booze, and I decided I was tired of being Annie’s pet writer. I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to work anymore if I quit drinking and drugging, but I decided (again, so far as I was able to decide anything in my distraught and depressed state of mind) that I would trade writing for staying married and watching the kids grow up. If it came to that.

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What did you all think of the story, “Quitters, Inc.?”

I liked it myself, especially knowing that any autobiographical truth that was present when he wrote and published this in 1978, is no longer ruling over his life.

Or is King still waiting with bated breath, sniffing cigarette cartons and empty beer bottles, glancing to see if Donatti’s guys will catch him, bargaining with himself, deciding if Tabby’s pinky finger is really worth all that.

Maybe. After all, he subscribes to once an addict, always an addict.

But I’d like to think, I’d hope at least, that burden has gotten easier to carry.