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Direct Quotes: Richie’s Bisexuality in the Book

Richie and girls

• Looking at a dirty magazine with girls in it and getting turned on.

as Richie Tozier was sneaking a look at the half-undressed girls in a copy of Gem he had found at the bottom of his father’s socks-and-underwear drawer and getting a regular good boner

—

• His attraction to Beverly.

Richie liked Bev a lot. Well, he liked her, but not that way. He admired her looks (and knew he wasn’t alone—girls like Sally Mueller and Greta Bowie hated Beverly like fire, still too young to understand how they could have everything else so easily . . . and still have to compete in the matter of looks with a girl who lived in one of those slummy apartments on Lower Main Street), but mostly he liked her because she was tough and had a really good sense of humor. Also, she usually had cigarettes. He liked her, in short, because she was a good guy. Still, he had once or twice caught himself wondering what color underwear she was wearing under her small selection of rather faded skirts, and that was not the sort of thing you wondered about the other guys, was it?

And, Richie had to admit, she was one hell of a pretty guy.

[...]

“Hi, Richie,” Bev said, and when she turned toward him he saw a purple-blackish bruise on her right cheek, like the shadow of a crow’s wing. He was again struck by her good looks … only it occurred to him now that she might actually be beautiful. It had never really occurred to him until that moment that there might be beautiful girls outside of the movies, or that he himself might know one. Perhaps it was the bruise that allowed him to see the possibility of her beauty—an essential contrast, a particular flaw which first drew attention to itself and then somehow defined the rest: the gray-blue eyes, the naturally red lips, the creamy unblemished child’s skin. There was a tiny spray of freckles across her nose.

[...]

She leaned against Richie’s shoulder for a moment and Richie had just time to reflect that her touch, and the sensation of her lightly carried weight, was not exactly unpleasant.

[...]

Her eyes, that fine clear shade of blue-gray, turned up to his. They were coolly amused. She pretended to primp her hair and asked him, “Oh dear, am I being asked out on a date?”

For a moment Richie was uncharacteristically flustered. He actually felt a blush rising in his cheeks. He had made the offer in a perfectly natural way, just as he had made it to Ben … except hadn’t he said something to Ben about owesies? Yes. But he hadn’t said anything about owesies to Beverly.

Richie suddenly felt a bit weird. He had dropped his eyes, retreating from her amused glance, and realized now that her skirt had ridden up a bit when she shifted forward to drop the ice-cream cone in the litter barrel, and he could see her knees. He raised his eyes but that was no help; now he was looking at the beginning swells of her bosoms.

Richie, as he usually did in such moments of confusion, took refuge in absurdity.

“Yes! A date!” he screamed, throwing himself on his knees before her and holding his clasped hands up. “Please come! Please come! I shall ruddy kill meself if you say no, ay-wot? Wot-wot?”

“Oh, Richie, you’re such a fuzzbrain,” she said, giggling again … but weren’t her cheeks also a trifle flushed? If so, it made her look prettier than ever.

[...]

“Sure,” she said. “Thank you very much. Think of it! My first date. Just wait until I write it in my diary tonight.” She clasped her hands together between her budding breasts, fluttered her eyelashes rapidly, and then laughed.

“I wish you’d stop calling it that,” Richie said.

She sighed. “You don’t have much romance in your soul.”

“Damn right I don’t.”

But he felt somehow delighted with himself. The world seemed suddenly very clear to him, and very friendly. He found himself glancing sideways at her from time to time. She was looking in the shop windows—at the dresses and nightgowns in Cornell-Hopley’s, at the towels and pots in the window of the Discount Barn, and he stole glances at her hair, the line of her jaw. He observed the way her bare arms came out of the round holes of her blouse. He saw the edge of her slip strap. All of these things delighted him. He could not have said why, but what had happened in George Denbrough’s bedroom had never seemed more distant to him than it did right then. It was time to go, time to meet Ben, but he would sit here just a moment longer while her eyes window-shopped, because it was good to look at her, and be with her.

[...]

Bev spotted daisies growing on the riverbank and picked one. She held it first under Richie’s chin and then under Ben’s chin to see if they liked butter. She said they both did. As she held the flower under their chins, each was conscious of her light touch on their shoulders and the clean scent of her hair.

[...]

She scolded Richie all the time they were picking them up again, and Richie joked and screeched in many Voices, and thought to himself how beautiful she was.

—

• The full story of his ex-girlfriend Sandy and his vasectomy.

“Well,” Richie was saying, “I could make this long and sad or I could give you the Blondie and Dagwood comic-strip version, but I’ll settle for something in the middle. The year after I moved out to California I met a girl, and we fell pretty hard for each other. Started living together. She was on the pill at first, but it made her feel sick almost all the time. She talked about getting an IUD, but I wasn’t too crazy about that—the first stories about how they might not be completely safe were just starting to come out in the papers.

“We had talked a lot about kids, and had pretty well decided we didn’t want them even if we decided to legalize the relationship. Irresponsible to bring kids into such a shitty, dangerous, overpopulated world . . . and blah-blah-blah, babble-babble-babble, let’s go out and put a bomb in the men’s room of the Bank of America and then come on back to the crashpad and smoke some dope and talk about the difference between Maoism and Trotskyism, if you see what I mean.

“Or maybe I’m being too hard on both of us. Shit, we were young and reasonably idealistic. The upshot was that I got my wires cut, as the Beverly Hills crowd puts it with their unfailing vulgar chic. The operation went with no problem and I had no adverse aftereffects.

[...]

“Sandy and I lived together for two and a half years,” Richie went on. “Came really close to getting married twice. As things turned out, I guess we saved ourselves a lot of heartache and all that community-property bullshit by keeping it simple. She got an offer to join a corporate law-firm in Washington around the same time I got an offer to come to KLAD as a weekend jock—not much, but a foot in the door. She told me it was her big chance and I had to be the most insensitive male chauvinist oinker in the United States to be dragging my feet, and furthermore she’d had it with California anyway. I told her I also had a chance. So we thrashed it out, and we trashed each other out, and at the end of all the thrashing and trashing Sandy went.

“About a year after that I decided to try and get the vasectomy reversed. No real reason for it, and I knew from the stuff I’d read that the chances were pretty spotty, but I thought what the hell.”

“You were seeing someone steadily then?” Bill asked.

“No—that’s the funny part of it,” Richie said, frowning. “I just woke up one day with this . . . I dunno, this hobbyhorse about getting it reversed.”

“You must have been nuts,” Eddie said. “General anesthetic instead of a local? Surgery? Maybe a week in the hospital afterward?”

“Yeah, the doctor told me all of that stuff,” Richie replied. “And I told him I wanted to go ahead anyway. I don’t know why. The doc asked me if I understood the aftermath of the operation was sure to be painful while the result was only going to be a coin-toss at best. I said I did. He said okay, and I asked him when—my attitude being the sooner the better, you know. So he says hold your horses, son, hold your horses, the first step is to get a sperm sample just to make sure the reversal operation is necessary. I said, ‘Come on, I had the exam after the vasectomy. It worked.’ He told me that sometimes the vasa reconnected spontaneously. ‘Yo mamma!’ I says. ‘Nobody ever told me that.’ He said the chances were very small—infinitesimal, really—but because the operation was so serious, we ought to check it out. So I popped into the men’s room with a Frederick’s of Hollywood catalogue and jerked off into a Dixie cup—”

“Beep-beep, Richie,” Beverly said.

“Yeah, you’re right,” Richie said. “The part about the Frederick’s catalogue is a lie—you never find anything that good in a doctor’s office. Anyway, the doc called me three days later and asked me which I wanted first, the good news or the bad news.

“ ‘Gimme the good news first,’ I said.

“ ‘The good news is the operation won’t be necessary,’ he said. ‘The bad news is that anybody you’ve been to bed with over the last two or three years could hit you with a paternity suit pretty much at will.’

“ ‘Are you saying what I think you’re saying?’ I asked him.

“ ‘I’m telling you that you aren’t shooting blanks and haven’t been for quite awhile now,’ he said. ‘Millions of little wigglies in your sperm sample. Your days of going gaily in bareback with no questions asked have temporarily come to an end, Richard.’

“I thanked him and hung up. Then I called Sandy in Washington.

“ ‘Rich!’ she says to me,” and Richie’s voice suddenly became the voice of this girl Sandy whom none of them had ever met. It was not an imitation or even a likeness, exactly; it was more like an auditory painting. “ ‘It’s great to hear from you! I got married!’

“ ‘Yeah, that’s great,’ I said. ‘You should have let me know. I would have sent you a blender.’

“She goes, ‘Same old Richie, always full of gags.’

“So I said ‘Sure, same old Richie, always full of gags. By the way, Sandy, you didn’t happen to have a kid or anything after you left L.A., did you? Or maybe an unscheduled d and c, or something?’

“ ‘That gag isn’t so funny, Rich,’ she said, and I had a brainwave that she was getting ready to hang up on me, so I told her what happened. She started laughing, only this time it was real hard—she was laughing the way I always used to laugh with you guys, like somebody had told her the world’s biggest bellybuster. So when she finally starts slowing down I ask her what in God’s name is funny. ‘It’s just so wonderful,’ she said. ‘This time the joke’s on you. After all these years the joke is finally on Records Tozier. How many bastards have you sired since I came east, Rich?’

“ ‘I take it that means you still haven’t experienced the joys of motherhood?’ I ask her.

“ ‘I’m due in July,’ she says. ‘Were there any more questions?”

“ ‘Yeah,’ I go. ‘When did you change your mind about the immorality of bringing children into such a shitty world?’

“ ‘When I finally met a man who wasn’t a shit,’ she answers, and hangs up.”

Bill began to laugh. He laughed until tears rolled down his cheeks.

“Yeah,” Richie said. “I think she cut it off quick so she’d really get the last word, but she could have hung on the line all day. I know when I’ve been aced. I went back to the doctor a week later and asked him if he could be a little clearer on the odds against that sort of spontaneous regeneration. He said he’d talked with some of his colleagues about the matter. It turned out that in the three-year period 1980–82, the California branch of the AMA logged twenty-three reports of spontaneous regeneration. Six of those turned out to be simply botched operations. Six others were either hoaxes or cons—guys looking to take a bite out of some doctor’s bank account. So . . . eleven real ones in three years.”

“Eleven out of how many?” Beverly asked.

“Twenty-eight thousand six hundred and eighteen,” Richie said calmly.

Silence around the table.

“So I went and beat Irish Sweepstakes odds,” Richie said, “and still no kid to show for it. That give you any good chucks, Eds?”

—

Richie and boys

• Conscious of looking queer in public.

Alarmed, Richie put an arm around Bill’s shoulders (after taking a quick glance around to make sure no one who might mistake them for a couple of fagolas was looking).

“You’re okay,” he said. “You’re okay, Billy, right? Come on. Turn off the waterworks.”

“I didn’t wuh-wuh-want h-him t-to g-g-get kuh-hilled!” Bill sobbed. “TH-THAT WUH-WUH-WASN’T ON MY M-M-M-MIND AT UH-UH-ALL!”

“Christ, Billy, I know it wasn’t,” Richie said. “If you’d wanted to scrub him, you woulda pushed him downstairs or something.” Richie patted Bill’s shoulder clumsily and gave him a hard little hug before letting go. “Come on, quit bawlin, okay? You sound like a baby.”

—

• Checking out Bill’s shoulders and back and describing him as handsome.

Looking at Bill’s back, which was amazingly broad for a boy of eleven-going-on-twelve, watching it work under the duffel coat, the shoulders slanting first one way and then the other as he shifted his weight from one pedal to the other, Richie suddenly became sure that they were invulnerable . . . they would live forever and ever. Well . . . perhaps not they, but Bill would. Bill had no idea of how strong he was, how somehow sure and perfect.

[...]

Bill was here, and Bill would take care; Bill would not let things get out of control. He was the tallest of them, and surely the most handsome.

—

• His relationship with Eddie and his love for him.

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

“Don’t do that! I hate it when you do that, Richie.”

“Ah, you love it, Eds,” Richie said, and beamed at him.

[...]

“Oh—you mean it was your idea, Eds? Jesus, I’m sorry.” He fell down in front of Eddie and began salaaming wildly again.

“Get up, stop it, you’re splattering mud on me!” Eddie cried.

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

“Stop it, I hate that!”

[...]

“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 were the first time I met you.”

“Sometimes you’re really a turd, Richie.”

“It takes one to know one, Eds, and you know em all.”

[...]

“This wise man,” Richie said, “told me this: ‘No matter how much you squirm and dance, the last two drops go in your pants.’ And that’s why there’s so much cancer in the world, Eddie my love.”

[...]

“Put him down,” Beverly said. “He can stay here.”

“It’s too dark,” Richie sobbed. “You know . . . it’s too dark. Eds . . . he . . .”

“No, it’s okay,” Ben said. “Maybe this is where he’s supposed to be. I think maybe it is.”

They put him down, and Richie kissed Eddie’s cheek. Then he looked blindly up at Ben. “You sure?”

“Yeah. Come on, Richie.”

Richie got up and turned toward the door. “Fuck you, Bitch!” he cried suddenly, and kicked the door shut with his foot. It made a solid chukking sound as it closed and latched.

“Why’d you do that?” Beverly asked.

“I don’t know,” Richie said, but he knew well enough.

—

How IT manifests itself to Richie

• Sees himself as the werewolf, who is partly a man and partly a monster that can’t help the way he is.

The movies were great. The Teenage Frankenstein was suitably gross. The Teenage Werewolf was somehow scarier, though . . . perhaps because he also seemed a little sad. What had happened wasn’t his own fault. There was this hypnotist who had fucked him up, but the only reason he’d been able to was that the kid who turned into the werewolf was full of anger and bad feelings. Richie found himself wondering if there were many people in the world hiding bad feelings like that. Henry Bowers was just overflowing with bad feelings, but he sure didn’t bother hiding them.

[...]

Richie chanced a glance behind him as he flung himself onto the package carrier and saw the Werewolf crossing the lawn toward them, less than twenty feet away now. Blood and slobber mixed on its high-school jacket. White bone gleamed through its pelt about the right temple. There were white smudges of sneezing powder on the sides of its nose. And Richie saw two other things which seemed to complete the horror. There was no zipper on the thing’s jacket; instead there were big fluffy orange buttons, like pompoms. The other thing was worse. It was the other thing that made him feel as if he might faint, or just give up and let it kill him. A name was stitched on the jacket in gold thread, the kind of thing you could get done down at Machen’s for a buck if you wanted it.

Stitched on the bloody left breast of the Werewolf’s jacket, stained but readable, were the words RICHIE TOZIER.

—

• IT chooses to taunt him with Beverly and Eddie.

“You hear me, Richie? Bring your yo-yo. Have Beverly wear a big full skirt with four or five petticoats underneath. Have her wear her husband’s ring around her neck! Get Eddie to wear his saddle-shoes! We’ll play some bop, Richie! We’ll play AAALLLL THE HITS!”

—

The final verdict? Richie Tozier is bi as fuck.