----------------------- Page 62-----------------------

Portland's Congress Street and bought it. 

I thought I had put finish to my story in a Shawshank prison cell on a bleak January day 

in 1976. Now it's late June of 1977 and I am sitting in a small, cheap room of the 

Brewster Hotel in Portland, adding to it 

The window is open, and the sound of the traffic floating in seems huge, exciting, and 

intimidating. I have to look constantly over at the window and reassure myself that there 

are no bars on it I sleep poorly at night because the bed in this room, as cheap as the room 

is, seems much too big and luxurious. I snap awake every morning promptly at six-thirty, 

feeling disorientated and frightened. My dreams are bad. I have a crazy feeling of free 

fall. The sensation is as terrifying as it is exhilarating. 

What has happened in my life? Can't you guess? I was paroled. After thirty-eight years of 

routine hearings and routine details (in the course of those thirty-eight years, three 

lawyers died on me), my parole was granted. I suppose they decided that, at the age of 

fifty-eight, I was finally used up enough to be deemed safe. 

I came very close to burning the document you have just read. They search outgoing 

parolees just as carefully as they search incoming 'new fish'. And beyond containing 

enough dynamite to assure me of a quick turnaround and another six or eight years inside, 

my 'memoirs' contained something else: the name of the town where I believe Andy 

Dufresne to be. Mexican police gladly cooperate with the American police, and I didn't 

want my freedom - or my unwillingness to give up the story I'd worked so long and hard 

to write - to cost Andy his. 

Then I remembered how Andy had brought in his five hundred dollars back in 1948, and 

I took out my story of him the same way. Just to be on the safe side, I carefully rewrote 

each page which mentioned Zihuatanejo. If the papers had been found during my 'outside 

search', as they call it at the Shank, I would have gone back in on turnaround ... but the 

cops would have been looking for Andy in a Peruvian seacoast town named Las 

Intrudres. 

The Parole Committee got me a job as a 'stock-room assistant' at the big FoodWay 

Market at the Spruce Mall in South Portland - which means I became just one more 

ageing bag-boy. There's only two kinds of bag-boys, you know; the old ones and the 

young ones. No one ever looks at either kind. If you shop at the Spruce Mall FoodWay, I 

may have even taken your groceries out to your car ... but you'd have had to have 

shopped there between March and April of 1977, because that's as long as I worked there. 

At first I didn't think I was going to be able to make it on the outside at all. I've described 

prison society as a scaled-down model of your outside world, but I had no idea of how 

fast things moved on the outside; the raw speed people move at. They even talk faster. 

And louder. 

It was the toughest adjustment I've ever had to make, and I haven't finished making it yet 

... not by a long way. Women, for instance. After hardly knowing that they were half of 

the human race for forty years, I was suddenly working in a store filled with them. Old 

women, pregnant women wearing T-shirts with arrows pointing downward and the 

printed motto reading BABY HERE, skinny women with their nipples poking out of their 

shirts - a woman wearing something like that when I went in would have gotten arrested