Jack Torrance and Al Shockley

Jack Torrance and Al Shockley's friendship began in the faculty social circles of Stovington Preparatory Academy, where they were drawn together by a shared, heavy drinking habit. At school and faculty functions, they were consistently the two drunkest people present, and their bond deepened through late-night bar crawls and cases of beer consumed on back roads. Shockley, separated from his wife, and Jack, whose marriage to Wendy was deteriorating, found in each other a companion for mutual self-destruction. Jack later reflected that they had sought each other out "like two castoffs who were still social enough to prefer drowning together to doing it alone."

A Friendship Forged in Alcohol and Crisis

The pivotal event that transformed their relationship occurred when the two men, both very drunk, were driving Al's Jaguar on U.S. 31 near Barre. They hit a child's bicycle that was lying in the middle of the road, sending it flying into the windshield. After a frantic two-hour search for a body that was never found, they realized no one had been on the bike. This near-miss, which could have been a fatal hit-and-run, served as a catalyst. Al Shockley declared, "I'm off drinking, Jacky-boy. It's all over. I've slain my last martian." Jack, deeply shaken, later sat with the Spanish Llama .38 he kept in the closet, contemplating suicide before putting it away. The following morning, when Wendy was on the verge of asking for a divorce, Jack asked her to wait a week. He spent that week at Al's house, playing two-handed whist and not drinking, and both men began their sobriety together.

Patronage and Unequal Power

Al Shockley, the heir to a steel fortune and a member of Stovington's Board of Directors, became Jack's patron. After Jack lost his temper and beat student George Hatfield, leading to his dismissal, it was Al who secured him the winter caretaker position at the Overlook Hotel. Al was the sole dissenting vote on the Board that fired Jack, and he used his influence to get Jack the job, overriding the objections of manager Stuart Ullman. This act of charity, however, created a deep imbalance in their friendship. Jack was acutely aware that he was dependent on Al's goodwill, a feeling that festered into resentment. When Jack discovered the Overlook's sordid history and called Ullman to taunt him, Ullman immediately contacted Al, who then called Jack. Al demanded that Jack abandon his plan to write a book about the hotel, saying, "The thought of you doing some sort of a scum-job on my hotel and passing it off as a great piece of American writing, that makes me sick." Jack felt the weight of this demand as a form of artistic and personal control, a leash held by a wealthy friend.

The Fracture and the Final Promise

The phone call with Al marked a breaking point. Jack, seething with rage at being told what he could and could not write, was forced to agree to Al's conditions to keep his job. He promised, on his word of honor, not to write the book. This capitulation left him feeling emasculated and resentful, and he privately vowed that someday he would write the book anyway, exposing the hotel's entire history. The friendship, once a bond of shared vice, had become a cage of obligation. After the call, Jack suffered severe stomach cramps and a pounding headache, and he began chewing Excedrin again, a habit from his drinking days. The relationship was effectively over, replaced by a simmering hostility that the Overlook would exploit. Jack's final, bitter thought was that Al had taken his soul in exchange for the job, and he resolved that there would be a reckoning. The friendship, which had begun in mutual drunkenness and survived a shared brush with death, was ultimately destroyed by the very power imbalance that Al's patronage had created.