the Dogpiss of the Year Award

The Dogpiss of the Year Award is a bitterly ironic, self-awarded epithet that the adult Gordon Lachance bestows posthumously on his childhood friend Teddy Duchamp. It appears in the final chapter of Gordon's memoir, after he has recounted the deaths of all three of his boyhood companions, and it crystallizes the novel's bleakest insight: that some lives end not with a tragic fall but with a squalid, meaningless crash that drags others down too. The phrase is Gordon's own invention, a private, savage joke that measures the distance between the romanticized daring of twelve-year-old boys and the grim statistical reality of what becomes of them.

Origin and Meaning of the Phrase

The award is never spoken aloud to anyone; it exists only in Gordon's retrospective narration. He coins it after describing Teddy's death in a car wreck in Harlow around 1971 or early 1972. Teddy's Chevrolet Bel Air, full of friends, hit a utility pole, sheared it off, and rolled six times. One girl survived for six months in what hospital staff called the C&T Ward—Cabbages and Turnips—before someone pulled the plug on her respirator. Gordon then writes: "Teddy Duchamp was posthumously awarded the Dogpiss of the Year Award." The phrase draws on a local saying from Gordon's childhood: "If you go out alone you're a hero. Take somebody else with you and you're dogpiss." The award thus inverts every conventional notion of glory. Teddy, who had spent his boyhood trying to prove his courage by dodging trucks on Route 196 and who idolized his father's service at Normandy, dies not in a blaze of military heroism but in a drunk-driving crash that kills or maims innocent passengers. The "award" is a coroner's verdict on a life that mistook recklessness for valor.

Teddy's Life and the Path to the Award

Teddy's trajectory toward the Dogpiss of the Year Award was set long before the crash. He was turned down by the Air Force and classified 4-F by the draft because of his Coke-bottle glasses and hearing aid—the permanent damage inflicted by his father, Norman Duchamp, who had held Teddy's head down on a cast-iron stove burner when Teddy was eight. The rejection crushed him; in his junior year of high school he called a guidance counselor a "lying sack of shit" for suggesting he consider another career, earning a three-day suspension. He was held back a year for repeated absences and flunked courses, but he did graduate. Afterward he got a job with the Castle Rock Public Works Department filling potholes with hotpatch. He hung around the same pool halls and taverns—Sukey's Tavern, The Mellow Tiger—where Ace Merrill and the older toughs had once held sway. The boy who had once shouted "Paratroops over the side!" and who had wanted nothing from life but military service ended up as a municipal laborer, drinking and driving with a car full of friends, passing around joints and bottles of Popov vodka.

The Crash and Its Aftermath

The crash itself was the squalid fulfillment of every warning the boys had ignored. Teddy's Bel Air was full of people—two of them had been part of the younger group he and Vern Tessio had bossed around back in 1960. They hit a utility pole on a road in Harlow, sheared it off, and the car rolled six times. One girl came out "technically still alive" and lay for six months in the C&T Ward at Central Maine General Hospital, a vegetable, before some "merciful phantom" pulled the plug on her respirator. Gordon does not name the girl; she is a casualty of Teddy's ride, a nameless victim of the Dogpiss of the Year. The award is posthumous, but it is also collective: Teddy takes others with him, and the phrase "dogpiss" reduces the entire catastrophe to something contemptible and wet, the opposite of the dry, clean death of a soldier on a battlefield.

Thematic Significance: The Inversion of Boyhood Romance

The Dogpiss of the Year Award is the final, brutal answer to the romanticism of the boys' childhood games. Teddy had spent his youth trying to live up to the image of his father storming the beach at Normandy; he had dodged trucks, climbed to the top of a pine tree on rotten branches, and tried to dodge a freight train on the trestle. The adult Gordon, looking back, sees that all that daring was not preparation for heroism but for a drunk-driving fatality. The award also echoes the novel's recurring meditation on death. Gordon had earlier described the corpse of Ray Brower, the twelve-year-old they found on the railroad tracks, as "can't, don't, won't, never, shouldn't, wouldn't, couldn't"—a negation of all possibility. Teddy's award is the same negation, but with the added stain of having taken others along. The phrase is Gordon's way of saying that some people do not drown alone; they drown and pull others under with them, exactly as in the nightmare he had on the camping trip, where the corpses of Vern and Teddy held Chris's ankles and dragged him down. The Dogpiss of the Year Award is the waking version of that dream.