Teddy Duchamp's death

Teddy Duchamp's death, a car crash in Harlow around 1971 or early 1972, was the squalid end of a life that had been warped from childhood by his father's violence and that never found a way out of Castle Rock. The adult Gordon Lachance, narrating decades later, awards Teddy the bitter, self-mocking epithet "Dogpiss of the Year Award" — a phrase that captures both the waste and the grim inevitability of the crash. Teddy's death is the last of three that punctuate the story's aftermath, and it completes a pattern: of the four boys who walked the railroad tracks to find Ray Brower's body, only Gordon survived into a successful adulthood.

Background and Failed Dreams

Teddy's life after the 1960 hike was a long, slow defeat of his one consuming ambition: to join the military. He had always idolized his father, Norman Duchamp, a Normandy Beach veteran who had later been committed to Togus VA Hospital after burning Teddy's ears on a stove. Teddy spoke of his father with pride — "He stormed the beach at Normandy" — and he wanted nothing from the time he was old enough to want anything except to serve in the armed forces. But the Air Force turned him down, and the draft classified him 4-F. Anyone who had seen his thick Coke-bottle glasses and his hearing aid knew it was inevitable, but Teddy never accepted it. In his junior year of high school, when a guidance counselor suggested he think about another career, Teddy called the man a "lying sack of shit" and got a three-day suspension. He was held back a year for repeated absences, tardies, and flunked courses, but he did eventually graduate.

The Crash and Its Circumstances

After high school, Teddy got a job with the Castle Rock Public Works Department, filling holes with hotpatch. He drove an ancient Chevrolet Bel Air and hung around the same places where Ace Merrill and his gang had once held sway: the pool hall, the dance hall, Sukey's Tavern, and The Mellow Tiger. The crash happened over in Harlow. Teddy's Bel Air was full of his friends — two of them had been part of the group he and Vern Tessio had taken to bossing around back in 1960 — and they were all passing around a couple of joints and a couple of bottles of Popov vodka. The car hit a utility pole, sheared it off, and rolled six times. One girl came out technically still alive; she lay for six months in what the nurses and orderlies at Central Maine General Hospital called the C&T Ward — Cabbages and Turnips — until some merciful phantom pulled the plug on her respirator. Teddy Duchamp was posthumously awarded the Dogpiss of the Year Award.

Narrative Role and Significance

Teddy's death, like Vern's in a housefire and Chris's by a knife in a Portland restaurant, is presented by Gordon as the consequence of a trajectory that was set in motion long before the crash. Gordon reflects that of the four who flipped coins to see who would go down to the Florida Market for supplies, only the one who actually went — himself — is still alive. Teddy's death is the most squalid of the three, a drunken, pointless wreck that killed not only him but also his passengers. It completes the story's meditation on the difference between those who escape Castle Rock and those who drown. Teddy, who had wanted nothing but the service and was rejected by it, who had been damaged by his father and could never quite escape that damage, ended his life as a cautionary figure: the boy who could dodge trucks but could not dodge the fate that his own history had written for him.