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"The Colorado Kid" -- A Theory
Please be aware that this thread covers the circumstances of "The Colorado Kid" and may therefore contain spoilers.
I recently finished “The Colorado Kid”, and I must say that I found it a spectacular read, mainly because of how it is told. The fact that these two old men take in this young, beautiful woman and tell her a story in the fullest of honesty is rather astonishing. How often do conversations between two people (or in this case, three) exist where not a spot of dishonesty comes into play? In my experience, not very often.
As an avid fan of Mr. King, upon finishing “The Colorado Kid” I knew there had to be more. Call me a sparkly-eyed hopeful, or even just a Constant Reader that can’t let go, but the conclusion of TCK left me reaching for something greater (which, I suspect, is exactly what Mr. King wanted from me as his reader). But it was the afterword, one of a very few areas of a published work where the author can speak his mind directly without the tag-along presence of characters or situations, that sealed the deal for me--especially when he writes, “But if you tell me I fell down on the job and didn’t tell all of this story there was to tell, I say you’re all wrong. On that I am sure.” That was enough motivation for me to seek out what Mr. King had been trying to tell me all along.
So began an attempt to solve “The Colorado Kid”, an attempt that has led me down a much brighter alley than the murky street on which the Kid can still be found, propped against that uncanny trashcan with his fingers still begging to clasp that long-gone hunk of rich meat. A solution to the puzzle of TCK may be found on that dark street, but I have come to believe that it may not be found at all. Not because Mr. King took a liberty and wanted to leave his readers high-and-dry, or even because the solution is so difficult to piece together that only the story’s master could stamp “SOLVED” on it. The reason I believe a solution to the Kid’s existence on that beach can’t be found in the fictional world of TCK is because the story has no concern with how a man must’ve hopped a series of cars and planes to get to his final resting place, but rather how the Kid got there to begin with--via the imagination of a skilled writer.
In other words, I believe the Kid represents Stephen King himself. I first started fleshing this theory out when I checked out the history of the chervonetz. As it turned out, the chervonetz was issued for a third time between the years of 1975-1982, and was issued to compete with the South African krugerrand. The reference to South Africa sparked the memory of one of Mr. King’s stories in which a man escapes South African captors and buys a pack of cigarettes at the end. I think it was then, with that memory, that I began to believe TCK held more than just a simple whodunit. After a quick glimpse at Mr. King’s biography to see if those years held any significance, I learned that 1975 was the year he left Colorado with his family to return to Maine. At the very moment I discovered that, I was positive this story had to be about himself, or at least about how his thought processes over the years led to the invention of TCK.
Other findings have confirmed this theory (at least in my mind), and they centralize the idea that Mr. King has created a blueprint of his craft (a web, I think he so slyly called it in his afterword) and the inspirational materials that have helped him refine it. For example, the song “Tea for the Tillerman” by Cat Stevens has the lines ‘Bring tea for the tillerman; steak for the son.’ The Kid did both, of course, as he so kindly brought the ferryman in Maine a cup of coffee, and had a nice juicy steak for himself to celebrate his coming to fruition. Taken literally, this would mean the Kid is the son of the ferryman, but I think its intended to mean that the Kid is Mr. King himself, and that he has done his duty of bringing tea to the tillerman (or at least done his best--it was coffee, not tea), so now he can sit on the beach and enjoy his steak. Another possibility is that Mr. King considers the Kid a son of his, a creation of his, and now that the Kid has fulfilled his duty of bringing tea to the tillerman, he can have his steak.
Another of the main reasons I consider TCK an explanation of how Mr. King has evolved as a writer, is due to the focus on the cigarette in the story. Yes, the Kid had smoked one, but at one point in the story one of the characters (I can’t remember who, pardon) mentions that “one or two” were missing. It was very subtle, and I think there was a reason for that. If there was a second missing cigarette, it had to have gone to someone, as the Kid only smoked one, but who? At around the same time I was considering this question, I happened upon a novel by Eddie Dean Woolrich entitled “Cigarette” (I had been looking up a lot of crime noir writers at the time, and I’d say the luck was in the draw on this one). It’s about a man that chases another man down because he has unknowingly handed him a cigarette with cyanide in it.
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, I would like a little further information from the items in the evidence locker and as Mr King is the only one that can obtain them perhaps he would be so kind as to provide the details.
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