Richie Tozier Quotes

would go on a mad Parcheesi jag at Richie Tozier’s house, making blockades, sending each other back with great abandon, deliberating exactly how to split the roll of the dice while rain

Eddie, my love

That's cause they know how cute you are, Eds - just like me. I saw what a cutie you were the first time I met you.

Richie jumped to his feet second time and pinched Eddie’s cheek. “Cute, cute, cute!” Richie exclaimed.

Now he had to go back to being himself, and that was hard—it got harder to do that every year. It was easier to be brave when you were someone else.

Richie had about a dozen different Voices. His ambition, he had told Eddie one rainy afternoon when they were in the little raftered room over the Kaspbrak garage reading Little Lulu comic books, was to become the world’s greatest ventriloquist.

Richie came bopping down to the stream, glanced at Ben with some interest, and then pinched Eddie’s cheek.

Man, he had hated it when Richie called him Eds…but he had sort of liked it, too. It was something….like a secret name. A secret identity. A way to be people that had nothing to do with their parents’ fears, hopes, constant demands. Richie couldn’t do his beloved Voices for shit, but maybe he did know how important it was do creeps like them to sometimes be different people.

Gonna getcha, creep! the ghostly voice of Henry Bowers screamed, and he felt more crypts cracking open inside of him; the stench he smelled was not decayed bodies but decayed memories, and that was somehow worse.

He said when we come down here nobody gives us any static.’ Eddie said. His voice was thin and whistling but it was also unmistakably firm. ‘And he’s right. When guys like us go to the park and say we want to play baseball the other guys say sure, you want to be second base or third?’ Richie cackled. ‘Eddie Gets Off A Good One! And…You Are There!

He called Eddie Kaspbrak next, but Eddie sounded even more depressed than Bill - his mother had gotten them each a full-day bus pass, he said, and they were going to visit Eddie’s aunts … ‘They’ll all pinch my cheek and tell me how much I’ve grown,’ Eddie said. ‘That’s cause they know how cute you are, Eds - just like me. I saw what a cutie you are the first time I met you.

Not bad,' Rich said. He even smiled a little. This was bad, and it had admittedly knocked him for a loop, but he felt that he was going to be able to handle it. No sweat. He began getting ready to go back home. And at some point during the next hour it occurred to him that it was as if he had died and had yet been allowed to make all of his own final business dispositions... not to mention his own funeral arrangements. And he felt as if he was doing pretty good.

if Mike hadn’t called, he supposed he might never have thought of it again in his life. And yet there had been a time in his life when he had walked past that great red brick pile every day—and on more than one occasion he had run past it, with Henry Bowers and Belch Huggins and that other big boy, Victor Somebody or-Other, in hot pursuit, all of them yelling little pleasantries like We’re gonna getcha, fuckface! Gonna getcha, you little smartass! Gonna getcha, you foureyed faggot! Had they ever gotten him?

He dialed the hotel he had last seen through the horn-rimmed spectacles of his childhood. Dialing that number, 1-207-941-8282, was fatally easy. He held the telephone to his ear, looking out his study’s wide picture window. The surfers were gone; a couple was walking slowly up the beach, hand in hand, where they had been. The couple could have been a poster on the wall of the travel agency where Carol Feeny worked, that was how perfect they were. Except, that was, for the fact they were both wearing glasses. Gonna getcha, fuckface! Gonna break your glasses!

Something was happening down there in the vaults, down there where Rich Tozier kept his own personal collection of Golden Oldies. Doors were opening. Only they’re not records down there, are they? Down there you’re not Rich “Records” Tozier, hot-shot KLAD deejay and the Man of a Thousand Voices, are you? And those things that are opening... they aren’t exactly doors, are they? He tried to shake these thoughts off. Thing to remember is that I’m okay. I’m okay, you’re okay, Rich Tozier’s okay. Could use a cigarette, is all. He had quit four years ago but he could use one now, all right.

They’re not records but dead bodies. You buried them deep but now there’s some kind of crazy earthquake going on and the ground is spitting them up to the surface. You’re not Rich “Records” Tozier down there; down there you’re just Richie “Four-Eyes” Tozier and you’re with your buddies and you’re so scared it feels like your balls are turning into Welch’s grape jelly. Those aren’t doors, and they’re not opening. Those are crypts, Richie. They’re cracking open and the vampires you thought were dead are all flying out again. A cigarette, just one. Even a Carlton would do, for Christ’s sweet sake. Gonna getcha, four-eyes! Gonna make you EAT that fuckin bookbag!

What did he have, exactly? In his mind’s eye he saw a boy with a tartan bookbag running from the tough guys; he saw a boy who wore glasses, a thin boy with a pale face that had somehow seemed to scream Hit me! Go on and hit me! in some mysterious way to every passing bully. Here’s my lips! Mash them back against my teeth! Here’s my nose! Bloody it for sure and break it if you can! Box an ear so it swells up like a cauliflower! Split an eyebrow! Here’s my chin, go for the knockout button! Here are my eyes, so blue and so magnified behind these hateful, hateful glasses, these horn-rimmed specs one bow of which is held on with adhesive tape. Break the specs! Drive a shard of glass into one of these eyes and close it forever! What the hell!

Here sits a man, he thought, here sits a man dressed in a mossy green sportcoat purchased at one of the best shops on Rodeo Drive; here sits a man with Bass Weejuns on his feet and Calvin Klein underwear to cover his ass; here sits a man with soft contact lenses resting easily on his eyes; here sits a man remembering the dream of a boy who thought an Ivy League shirt with a fruit-loop on the back and a pair of Snap-Jack shoes was the height of fashion; here sits a grownup looking at the same old statue, and hey, Paul, Tall Paul, I’m here to say you’re the same in every way, you ain’t aged a motherfucking day.