Meeting Steve, Missing Hank
Happy Birthday, Steve-O. You were very kind to me back in 1978, when you were Guest of Honour at a Science Fiction convention here in Nashville. That was Kubla Khan Ate, which you later mentioned in a biographical work. I was then writing for a local alternative paper "Take One"; they asked me to try for an interview with you. With much trepidation, I hesitantly inquired: "Uh...excuse me, Mr. King, but are you giving any press opportunities this weekend?" You replied: "Well, a bunch of guys are coming up to my room to hang out and drink beer later," and gave me your room number.
This was *before* "Different Seasons" came out and helped you transcend the genre, when you could still AFFORD to hold court at SF conventions. It might have been one of the very last times you just gave out your room number and said "Come on up, kid." A small group of local journalists gathered in a circle as you sat drinking beer on the bed, coming across like the cool English teacher you used to be. Those were still your drinking days, Steve; you were putting down 3 to my one, and I drank 5 beers. Yet you were crisp, direct, and without any detectable phoniness. Most of all, you had a great sense of humour, and as I've said, you were very kind to us, giving your personal time, for which you were not paid extra. "Wouldn't it be a bitch if God turned out to be, I don't know, Mickey Mouse?" you said, and "Take One" used that as an outtake for my article. To illustrate how different your station in the literary world was at that time, my exclusive beer-soaked interview with Stephen fuckin' KING was NOT the cover story; it was page 5 or so. The dumbasses were way behind the curve.
Anyway, after my 4th beer, I got brave and said, "Y'know, Steve, that scene in 'The Stand' where the conditions are all absolutely perfect for that atom bomb to be set off in Vegas, entirely due to the karma of the characters, not NEEDING any deus ex machina to cause it, why exactly did you feel the need to actually have the *literal* hand of God appear and make it happen? I mean, God hadn't done SHIT for any of the protagonists up to that point; it felt sort of gratuitous; why did you do that?" Like I said, I was 21, a kid.
Steve, who was then a bit chubby, a big man with wide shoulders, smiled through his Winter beard, drained his 9th beer, and chuckled: "'Cuz God can do whatever He wants!"
I said: "I can't argue with THAT."
God CAN indeed do whatever He wants, ESPECIALLY if He is being written by Stephen King. Many years later, I loaned the issue of "Take One" with my King interview to one of my many psychotic girlfriends; naturally, it was lost, and thus I have no proof that this story is true. You could ask my first wife, I guess; she would back me up, wherever she is. But hang with me a moment and trust this wonderful memory: before Steve became ***STEPHEN KING***, before the public had even read the novellas in "Different Seasons", much less seen the films "Stand By Me" or "Shawshank Redemption"; before his kids started saying "Oh, Daddy's going off to be Stephen King" whenever he went on tour; long, long before Roland got anywhere near the Dark Tower, this man was very kind, and most of all, very human, with a punk kid from West Nashville.
I ALMOST met Charles Bukowski at the poet Miller Williams' house in Fayetteville, AR when I was 15; I missed him by a week, but when I later read of his stay with Miller in the book "Women", it was still a great kick to read his impressions of Miller and his wife, Becky, whom Buk described as "looking like a movie star, only with more class." He was right on the money about Becky.
But let's say that if God had offered me a choice between meeting Buk as a loud, opinionated 15-year-old acid head who believed he was already a poet, and meeting Stephen King as a very slightly more subdued 21-year-old trapped in a horrible marriage, a kid who had pretty much given up the idea of ever being able to write again; a kid who had no hope of ever getting one hour alone to himself, much less solitude for creating art, a kid whose world was one of bleak and continual loveless responsibility to his manipulative invalid wife...well, I would have to say:
"Well, *shit*, O Nuit, my Lady of the Stars...Buk was in full Chinaski Mode at the time...they told me he grabbed Becky's ass and puked on Miller's rug...dude would probably have been on the edge of blackout drunk, and might have called me as 'a sniveling little shit" or some equally dismaying snarl of dismissal, and it would have fucked up my enjoyment of his work...SO, if it be Thy Will, set me up with Steve King when I'm at my lowest and need it most, and if You can, make it happen BEFORE he gets too big to be able to afford just having some guys come up to his room for beer and talk. A couple of hours with Steve? Plus BEER? THANK YOU, O Goddess of Infinite Space and the Infinite Stars thereof!!!"
I really think I got a good deal from Her. Let me say in passing that I have zero respect for the opinions of 'serious' writers, whether of the Academy or the so-called "small press", who, not having read a single book by Stephen King, somehow "know" that his Work is "trash". These types seem to believe that it takes no craft, determination, discipline, or real imagination to do what Mr. King has done--that is, to have married real life and its continual petty problems, including scenes we rarely see in novels, such as the main character being interrupted while taking a shit, with the incursion of "unreal" and "irrational" forces such as vampires, dark Gods from the Lovecraft Cycle, sociopathic cops, rabid dogs, pyrokinetic children, and haunted hotels (I was lucky enough to have stayed at the Stanley Hotel in Colorado, the basis of King's 'Overlook Hotel' in "The Shining", with my wife Maxine, just before we became parents to our Wonder Twins, Logan & Morgan. The room in which Steve had begun "The Shining" was, as usual, occupied by some young writer who thought the "luck" might rub off, with a 3-year waiting list of future guests. As we all know, however, hard work, unlike "luck" doesn't rub off--as Buddha said about "salvation", we must do it ourselves.)
Steve King makes us CARE what happens to the realistic people he has created when the fangs and tentacles come out of the pregnant darkness. When relatively obscure South American writers run this sort of gig, the Academics coo over it and praise it as "Magical Realism". When Stephen King does it, and does it WELL, because he can WRITE...well, it's like this: if a long-dead Eastern European writer has someone wake up transformed into a cockroach, it's ART of the most rarified kind. But if Steve King turns someone into a bug, or a werewolf, or even his own shadow-self, WELL. That's not Art, that's *vile trash*, ESPECIALLY if *too many people read and enjoy it*, because, as we all know here in the hermetically sealed Ivory Tower, anything POPULAR--like rock music, science fiction, comic books, The Simpsons, Bukowski stories, or similar gutter leavings that will never, ever have a learned thesis written about them--ANYONE who is *accessible*, anyone who is POPULAR--you automatically KNOW not to consider it 'serious' writing.
YOU did it all 'correctly'. It should be YOU at the top of the bestseller list, with your novel about driving around Connecticut in your Volvo whilst suffering midlife angst, your plodding ode to the Winters in Jersey, or your book of heavily Buk-influenced poetry angrily denouncing Bukowski and all his Works. YOU are a 'serious' writer of 'literature', not a fat, drunk, drug-addicted hack churning out 'potboilers' up in Maine. Let's just forget that Steve wised up early on into the kind of fame that kills a lot of artists around the age of 27. He lost the weight, tossed the booze, passed through the fire of drug addiction and came out whole, only to be smashed nearly to bits by a moron in a van. Once again, he was on heavy opiate painkillers soon after escaping them. And once again, Steve King showed his steel and kicked the Oxycontin, rehabilitated his body, got back up and got DOWN to writing his fucking ass off.
He even included the accident that smashed him in the final volume of his 7-book, 30-year epic, "The Dark Tower", and got revenge on the idiot who ran into him by portraying him as what he WAS--a drunken imbecile who couldn't watch the road because he had to stop his dog from eating the hamburger out of the cooler in the back seat of his van. And in doing so, in telling this very personal story of how it feels to be knocked out of your boots by a ton of hurtling steel, he maintained such a high pitch of dark, brilliant humour that I couldn't help laughing my ass off as fictional Steve went flying into a tree. I knew that Mr. King would gladly forgive me. He was probably laughing himself as he wrote the sequence.
There are a lot of precious little writers simpering around who can't write if they have a mild headache or just feel, you know, sort of *depressed*. Fucking Steve was back at the keyboard before the final casts came off. So, though I may love you personally (or not, as the case may be), I do not love your UNINFORMED OPINIONS about Stephen King, and you can shove those up your ass sideways. As the great Harlan Ellison has noted, people are always quick to claim "I'm entitled to my own opinion!" Harlan's riposte for such folks is this: you are entitled to your INFORMED opinion.
If you haven't watched one episode of the Simpsons, but "know" (as did the grim bitch I lived with in Philly for 4 grueling years) that it's "trash"; if you've never perused a graphic novel by Neil Gaiman, but "know" that all "funny books" are puerile, childish nonsense bereft of Art; if you absolutely KNOW FOR SURE that Stephen King is a terrible hack writer, and your opinion is based on (as one anti-King writer on Pressure Press admits) having seen one really rotten film based on a single King short story (that would be "Maximum Overdrive", based on "Trucks", a solid little short story, but a whole film based on a very short story--oy! not much depth to work with), plus ONE book, "Gerald's Game" (which is psychosexual existential 'real life' horror, and not for the squeamish, definitely), and you have IGNORED King's other FIFTY or so books because you "know" they are "trash" (unlike your brilliant work about how cold it is in Jersey during the Winter), well. You don't have an INFORMED OPINION, motherfucker.
So you go right on believing that you could write rings around King, and that your position (much like my own) as a writer who is known (just barely) only to the small press, is a gross miscarriage of divine justice because YOU are a 'serious writer', and that somehow, King has usurped your rightful place in the Sun. Let's forget he WORKED his way out of a trailer that nearly blew over in a high wind, that he wrote (as did I once) in a closet next to the water heater, balancing a child's desk on his knees, that he and Tabitha raised 3 incredible children, one of whom, Joe Hill, is already a writer of astounding talent for ANY genre (read "Horns", please, and INFORM yourself).
I know that Bukowski was an asshole, sure. And I know that Steve King, like all of us, surely has plenty of pettiness and bullshit in him; he's a human, right? But he was kind to me with nothing really in it for himself; I wasn't there representing the New York Times, after all, just a throw-away local rag. So I do grow tired of the jealousy-based, UNINFORMED shit-sniping at Bukowski and King which seems so ubiquitous wherever writers, that lousy crew of which I'm part, gather online or in person. Yes, King has written some clinkers--if you write a LOT, you will, by simple mathematics, write SOME shitty stuff. But what were *you* doing when Steve-O was WORKING? Admiring your first edition of G.K. Chesterson? Online, whining about how dreadful things are now that Joseph McCarthy (like Joe DiMaggio in the Simon & Garfunkel song) has gone away, leaving a secret Muslim in charge? If you aren't Working, don't badmouth the writers who ARE.
Stephen King Works every day but Christmas and his birthday, and his wife says he's lying about not writing on his birthday. Which is TODAY; the dirty liar is probably working on a short story or revising a novella about now. Well, get your Work out of the way, Steve-O, than relax and enjoy your family. You've earned it. You ARE the American Dickens; you have outsold the Bible; your work is appreciated and taught in the Universities of the world. Only the blind knee-jerk willfully ignorant reality-snobs oppose you, and they are feeble, man, like bugs that have crawled out of a bottle of ink...
The great Science Fiction writer and theologian Phillip K. Dick says that God is like an elusive animal, a Zebra, perhaps, who is always there, but often hidden in the form of "trash" like Science Fiction, comics, rock music, and "childish" cartoons. We find the Logos in the rubbish heap; He is indeed like the Biblical cornerstone which the builder rejected. The Work of Stephen King is one such cornerstone for an edifice that may not stand forever, but STAND it will, for hundreds of years...or longer. Even if we Apocalypse ourselves, the survivors will still remember fragments of the King they read, and put their heads together beside the fire to try and remember back the books that have been vaporized.
Happy Birthday, Stephen, and thanks again for tolerating me at Kubla Khan Ate.
Your pal,
Curt
PS: Oh yes, shit, I almost forgot; I'm being asked for my favourite King short story. That's a tough one, but I think I'll go with "Everything's Eventual".
EXCALIBUR,
your Constant Reader
C Ra