And Hardin might have drunk the beers in the Pot o’ Gold, but if a Florida state trooper produced the dreaded Breathalyzer kit in its little blue plastic case, it was Dykstra’s intoxicated molecules that would wind up inside the gadget’s educated guts. He might have paid for the Jag with books written under the Hardin name, but it was as John Andrew Dykstra that he lived the majority of his life, and that was the name the flashlight would shine on if he was asked for his operator’s license. He’d gone two beers over his usual limit at the Pot o’ Gold (maybe three) and had set the Jag’s cruise control at sixty-five, not wanting to see any strobing red lights in his rearview mirror tonight. What did was that he had to piss like a racehorse, whoever he was. None of that mattered just south of Ocala. There was a fundamental problem with beer any undergraduate understood: You couldn’t buy it, only rent it. But who was he on Route 75, as he flowed from one town to the other beneath the bright turnpike lights? Hardin? Dykstra? No one at all? Was there maybe a magic moment when the literary werewolf who earned the big bucks turned back into the inoffensive English professor whose specialty was twentieth-century American poets and novelists? And did it matter as long as he was right with God, the IRS, and the occasional football players who took one of his two survey courses? And Dykstra when he let himself into his canal-side house on Macintosh Road, certainly. Who, for instance, was he on his biweekly ride back to Sarasota? He was Hardin when he left the Pot o’ Gold in Jax, for sure, no doubt. No one really knew, and that was a large part of the fun. Traven, who had written Treasure of the Sierra Madre. well, no one really knew, did they? As was the case with the mysterious Mr. Westlake, who wrote hardboiled “caper” novels as Richard Stark, and K.C. Sometimes he told himself the answer to that was no, the whole Rick Hardin/John Dykstra thing was nothing but an artificial construct, pure press agentry, no different from Archibald Bloggert (or whatever his real name might have been) performing as Cary Grant, or Evan Hunter (whose actual birth name had been Salvatore something-or-other) writing as Ed McBain. He supposed that at some point between Jacksonville and Sarasota he did a literary version of the old Clark-Kent-in-the-phone-booth routine, but he wasn’t sure just where or how. To read every Esquire story ever published, upgrade to All Access. You’re certainly not the person who raises the kids and passes the mashed potatoes at dinner.” “Rest Stop” is the first story of King’s to appear in Esquire it was first published in the December 2003 issue. “You want to know who you are when you write,” says thriller and short-story master Stephen King of the motivation for his story “Rest Stop," “and whether or not there’s a difference between who you are when you write as yourself and as somebody else.
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