Big Fame

Kim Ricketts told me the Stephen King story. . .

To snag a Stephen King event, Kim said she’d had to agree to his standard terms. She’d had to hire bodyguards and find a venue that would hold five thousand people. Each person could bring three items to have autographed by Mr. King. The event would last some eight hours, and someone would have to stand beside the signing table and hold an ice pack to the author’s shoulder for the duration.

The day arrived, and Kim held the ice pack to the shoulder in question. The venue, Town Hall, a deconsecrated church on Capitol Hill, has a jawdropping view of downtown Seattle. It was filled with the five thousand mostly young people, all ready to wait hours for their three signatures.

King sat and began to sign autographs. Kim stood holding the ice pack to his pesky shoulder. Not a hundred books into the eventual fifteen thousand, Kim said that King looked up at her and asked, “Can you get me some bandages?”

He showed her his signing hand, how the skin along the thumb and index finger had fossilized into a thick callus from a lifetime of marathon book signings. These calluses are the writer’s equivalent of a wrestler’s cauliflower ear. Thick as the armor on the hide of a stegosaurus, the calluses had begun to crack.

“I’m bleeding on the stock,” King said. He showed fresh blood smudged on his pen and a partial fingerprint of blood on the title page of a book belonging to a waiting young man who didn’t appear the least bit distressed to see his property stained by the vital fluids of the great wordsmith and teller of tales.

Kim started to step away, but it was too late. The next person in line had overheard the exchange and shouted, “No fair!” He shouted, “If Mr. King bleeds in his books then he has to bleed in mine!”

This, everyone in the building heard. Shrieks of indignation filled the cavernous hall as five thousand horror fans each demanded their own ration of celebrity blood. Echoes of rage boomed off the vaulted ceiling. Kim could scarcely hear as King asked, “Can you help me out?”

Still pressing the ice pack against him, she said, “They’re your readers…I’ll do what you decide.”

King went back to signing. Signing and bleeding. Kim stayed beside him, and as the crowd saw that no bandages were forthcoming, the protest gradually subsided. Five thousand people. Each with three items. Kim told me that it took eight hours, but King managed to sign his name and smear a trace of his blood in every book. By the end of the event he was so weak the bodyguards had to carry him under the armpits to his Lincoln Town Car.

Even then, as the car pulled out to deliver him to his hotel, the disaster wasn’t over.

A group of people who’d been shut out of the event because of overcrowding jumped into their own car and chased King’s. These book lovers rammed and totaled the Lincoln—all for the opportunity to meet their favorite author.

In that tavern, Kim and I sat looking out the window at the empty street. Pondering the night . . .

. . . I asked, “So that’s the big fame we’re all striving for?

                                                                                               --- Chuck Palahniuk, Consider This