by Lisa Rogak
“Fans still buy the food I put on my table. On one level it still knocks me out that people get off on what I’m doing that I can’t help but love them. But if you buy the book and spend two or three days reading it and really get off on it, then that’s all you deserve. That’s all your $17.95 should buy. It isn’t like a ticket into my house or my life or my bedroom or anything else.
“I’ve been a lightning rod for a certain number of crazy people. We keep files on them. The people who are the most devoted fans have a churning need to identify emotionally with the object of their worship.” Where it got really scary, he said, was when the adulation spilled over into actual resentment. “They feel that what I have achieved was really meant for them.”
As usual, Tabby didn’t mince words when she gave a pointed warning to his fans in the pages of Castle Rock two months after Misery was published: “In some very real way, you, the readers, know this man very well. I would like to suggest that you do not know him at all. In seventeen years of marriage, I am still discovering things I did not know about Steve, and I hope he’s still discovering the unknown in me.”
Steve said the same thing about Tabby: “I think of my wife as holding a deck of fifty-two cards. If you ask me how many she is showing me, I wouldn’t know. We are as close to each other as two people can be, but one can never be sure how much you do and do not know about another person.”
His original idea for Misery was a lot more graphic: Annie Wilkes had planned to kill Paul Sheldon, feed him to Annie’s pig—named Misery after the heroine in Paul’s books—and take his skin to bind the book he’d written for her. The original title? The Annie Wilkes First Edition.
Even though Annie was based on an amalgam of King’s scariest fans, he did grow quite fond of her while writing the book. “Of the characters I’ve created that readers know about, Annie Wilkes is my favorite. She always surprised me, she never did exactly what I thought she would do, and that’s why I liked her,” he explained. “She had a lot more depth and she actually generated a lot more sympathy in my heart than I expected.”
In truth, however, Annie Wilkes was a standin for Steve’s addictions. “I was writing about my alcoholism and didn’t have a clue.”
King’s next book was The Tommyknockers, published in November of 1987, the story of a female writer who discovers an alien spaceship buried in her yard, and how the inherent evil in the spaceship affects the people in her town. Even his loyal fans said it wasn’t among his best—and critics lambasted it.
The response to The Tommyknockers underscored a criticism of his writing that he’d been getting for some time. King’s books had become bloated from his typical overwriting, and his work badly needed an editor. Steve once joked that he suffered from a permanent case of literary elephantiasis. “I have a real problem with bloat. I write like fat ladies diet.”
“The guy is a machine,” said Stephen Spignesi, the author of numerous books about King, including The Essential Stephen King. “He is a very prolific creator, and he sometimes tends to overwrite. He doesn’t look at his work and say this could be shorter and he would be more effective. For instance, he’ll go on for two pages describing a room or something when the reader just wants some action.” But Spignesi admits some buried treasures are in the bloated pages: “Very often the excess description is often where King excels in literary imagery.”
“Nobody can make me change anything,” Steve once said in regard to his writing style. “Where does a ten-thousand-pound gorilla sit? The answer is, any place he wants. It’s too easy to hang myself. I have all this freedom, and it can lead to self-indulgence.” He was well aware of the criticism. “I think that I’m a little more sloppy than I was. I’m forty-four, my editor’s thirty-five, and I think, ‘What the fuck does he know? Don’t tell me how to make this hat, boy, I’ve been making these hats since from when you were in your mother’s womb.’
“But the fucking hat doesn’t have any brim or the thing’s inside out, and in fact he knows quite a lot. I try to listen and figure, if you’re the biggest ape in the jungle, you better be pretty careful.”
Even Steve was unhappy with the way The Tommyknockers turned out. “It just went on and on. It was a hard one to write, to keep track of all those people in the story. When I finished the first draft, it looked like the Bataan Death March, with lots of cross-outs and stuff. I locked myself in the bathroom and I laughed hysterically and cried and then laughed again. I never did that with a book.”
Of course, the trouble could have come because Steve had hit bottom in his drug addiction and alcoholism. After dealing with his drinking and blackouts for years, Tabby was starting to hint at an ultimatum. Steve recognized he was on thin ice, admitting that he didn’t trust himself, and that was why he continued to push himself, crank out the books, push people past the gross-out point they’d become accustomed to in his previous novels.
His writing life started to look especially bleak after he handed in the manuscript for The Tommyknockers early in 1987, when he came down with a severe case of writer’s block. “It was terrible,” he said. “Everything I wrote for the next year fell apart like tissue paper.”
In the fall of 1987, Stephen King should have been on top of the world. Despite the negative reaction to The Tommyknockers, Misery had met with wider acclaim than his books usually did. The New York Times, a newspaper not previously known to look favorably on Steve’s novels, called it “an intriguing work,” while USA Today crowned it “King’s best.” The Running Man, with Arnold Schwarzenegger in the starring role, pulled in just over $8 million on opening weekend in mid-November. But perhaps the thrill of Steve’s entire year came in October at a Johnny Cash concert at the Bangor Auditorium, when he was invited onstage by the Man in Black to join him on “Johnny B. Goode.”
He was tickled by the chance to play with Cash, but Stephen King was not in a good place. While he was thinking about what new horrors to inflict upon the lives of the characters in his work-in-progress, he was trying to forget about the horrors in his own life, specifically his overwhelming addictions. When he took the stage with Cash, no one in the audience or in the band could have imagined that the internationally famous horror writer who stood at the mike belting it out was only sober for about three hours a day, and he spent most of that time thinking of blowing his brains out.
“I love my life and my wife and kids, but I’ve always been somewhat quasi-suicidal most of the time, constantly wanting to push things past the edge,” he said.
His blackouts from cocaine and alcohol had become more frequent in the last few years, as he drank and drugged more not only to keep up the pace but also to keep the demons at bay: “You think the world loves you? We really know what’s going on, and we’re not going to let you forget we’re here.”
He said, “My kind of success does not lead you humbly to say, ‘Yeah, I guess you’re right. I’m an asshole.’ Rather, it leads you to say, ‘Who the fuck are you to tell me to settle down? Don’t you know I’m the king of the fucking universe?’ ”
He tells a story his mother had told him during his childhood. When Ruth was pregnant with him, she’d pull up a piece of tar from the road in front of the house and chew it. She didn’t know why she was compelled to do it, but she absolutely craved something in that tar, and if she couldn’t have it, she’d do nothing but think about it until she gave up and ran out into the middle of the road, where she fell on her hands and knees and clawed a hunk of asphalt out with her fingernails. She waited until she was heading back to the house before she popped it into her mouth and began mindlessly chewing as if it were a piece of taffy. She instantly felt better. Her husband, Donald, Steve’s father, was thoroughly disgusted and ordered her to stop, but she couldn’t. “There was something in that tar that she, that I, needed,” Steve would say years later.
Her son would later joke that something in that tar spawned his craving for drugs and alcohol, or else he had inherited the addiction gene from Ruth and it got r
ewired somewhere along the way. Or maybe it was responsible for the gene that compelled him to write, which he was thoroughly convinced was an addiction as well.
Tabby had cut Steve an awful lot of slack through the years. She saw how he was able to continue writing through the alcohol-and coke-induced fogs, and she’d seen him when he wasn’t writing: it wasn’t pretty. She too worried that if he stopped drinking and drugging, he would not be able to write a word, and that he would be much more difficult to live with than now.
Like many writers with an inclination toward booze and drugs, Steve believed if he stopped snorting cocaine and drinking, his output would slow to a crawl. He felt the same way about psychotherapy: talking about his deep-seated demons would automatically dilute the ideas and terrors that seemed to fuel his stories and novels.
But even he realized that things were getting out of hand. The blackouts were becoming more frequent. Tabby had long ago gotten used to sleeping alone night after night, padding down the magnificent mahogany staircase in their twenty-four-room restored Victorian mansion each morning only to find her husband passed out in a puddle of vomit in his office. The creature lying in the middle of the floor, her husband, was starting to resemble Jordy Verrill from the movie Creepshow, the character Steve had played, where, little by little, a nasty green fungus enveloped his entire body, finally asphyxiating him.
Now, the same thing was happening with Steve’s alcoholism—yes, Tabby could finally use the word to describe one of her husband’s addictions—he was suffocating.
Aside from hangovers that lingered into the afternoon, while he put on the horrormeister face for his public and his devil-may-care face for his family, he was starting to worry that booze and coke were affecting his work. The bashing The Tommyknockers received was a tiny wake-up call.
While his addictions were interfering with his output, they were also starting to trump plain old common sense: Steve was beginning to think he was immortal. The volume of his work had actually increased through the years along with his consumption, despite the blackouts.
Tabby had finally had enough. One day she combed through Steve’s office gathering up everything that wasn’t being used in moderation or for its original purpose. Some of it was in plain sight: empty beer cans, and empty bottles of NyQuil and Listerine. Some of it she had to dig for, because Steve still denied he was using cocaine.
“I didn’t just have a problem with beer and cocaine, I was an addictive personality, period,” he admitted later. “I was smoking two packs of cigarettes a day, I loved Listerine, I loved NyQuil, you name it. If it would change your consciousness, I was all for it.”
Tabby went through the bookcases and found tucked into file folders and underneath unopened office supplies the drug paraphernalia: plastic bags with the residue of white powder inside, coke spoons, everything. She loaded everything into a garbage can and, in a confrontational exercise straight out of the AA playbook, gathered up the kids and a few friends and upended the loaded can onto the floor in front of her husband.
She was no longer in denial. Tabby issued an ultimatum: he could either continue on his current path or get sober. If he chose to do himself in, his family sure as hell wasn’t going to stick around to watch.
“The worst side effect of addiction is the inability to see what you’re doing to yourself and to others,” she said. “I made Stephen acknowledge that. Then he decided to save himself.”
Steve sat there stunned as he stared at the evidence. Scattered and hidden around the house, it didn’t seem like much. But now, as he stared at the detritus of twenty years’ abuse, it took up more space than he thought. A lot more. It was time to face the truth. He knew if he didn’t do something about his addiction, he’d be dead within five years, ten tops.
When Tabby told him he was basically hungover seven days a week until the middle of the afternoon for years on end, and that he started drinking for the day as soon as the clock chimed five o’clock and didn’t typically stop until seven hours later, he didn’t believe her. Toward the end, he was drinking and taking drugs around the clock. Over the winter and spring of 1986, he revised and edited IT while he was in a nonstop blackout.
So he started to think about cutting back. But that’s all he was doing, thinking about it. He did dabble a bit with moderation: maybe only one six-pack a night, or two instead of three, and cutting the coke down by half, snorting up only five lines instead of ten.
“I was looking for a détente, a way I could live with booze and drugs without giving them up altogether,” he said. “Needless to say I was not successful in this.”
He’d pull off moderation for a few days, then he’d be right back where he’d started. The alternative—no drugs, no booze, stone-cold sober twenty-four hours a day—scared him more. He’d been drinking almost as long as he’d been writing. He didn’t always write when he was drunk or stoned, but his primal belief was that alcohol made it possible for him to write, and without it he’d have to sweat out each word. If his brain was forced to stand on its own, without a crutch, he was deathly afraid that his writing ability would shrivel up and blow away.
It took a full two years of hits and misses, false starts, broken promises, and the quiet realization that he couldn’t simply do it himself before he got 100 percent sober—and stayed that way. He finally realized he had to go cold turkey in 1989.
It took two weeks of absolute torture. Once he’d checked each item off his list on his journey through withdrawal—the dry heaves, nausea, constant tremors, and insomnia—Steve knew he’d made it. He’d never pick up another beer or snort another line of coke again if it meant he had to repeat the previous two stinking, miserable weeks. He felt strange and unsettled as his body and brain adjusted to his new reality.
“My coke addiction was a blessing in disguise,” he said. “Without coke, I’d have gone on drinking until the age of fifty-five and I would have died of a stroke. Once you add the coke, you eventually tip over, that stuff eats you from the inside out.”
His body and mind were not accustomed to sobriety.
The calm was so loud it buzzed. For someone who wasn’t used to the sensation—after all, Steve had started drinking when he was barely a teenager—it was unnerving. Steve turned to the one thing that had saved him time and time again through the years, had distracted him from illness and poverty, and had ultimately made him wealthy and famous behind his wildest imagination:
He sat down to write.
In a plot twist at once so horrifying and ironic it could have come straight out of one of his own books, his greatest fear of all came true.
He couldn’t. The words wouldn’t come, his sentences were complete gibberish, and each letter might as well have been a hieroglyph. For years, he had imagined that if he stopped drinking and drugging, his ability to write would simply shrivel up and blow away. And it finally had. Now what?
Steve seriously considered the pros and cons of a relapse, returning to his old ways. He knew he could live without the booze and the coke. What he couldn’t live without was his writing. He was prepared to sign a deal with the devil in blood, and he knew it would be worth every drop. So what if he died early? Look at the body of work he already had to leave behind.
He considered it very seriously.
During these early, fragile days, Tabby could read her husband’s mind, and she wasn’t buying any of it. She sat with him, cried with him, and kept him on a short leash until she felt the danger was past. She knew how easy it would be for him to slide back into his old ways.
They both knew if he did, she’d be out of there. That knowledge was enough to carry him through the rough spots. She helped him write one word at a time. He wrote a lot of crap trying to recapture the rhythm of writing without the input from either a high or a low. Little by little, his ability to tell a story came back.
In 1988 he started going to AA and NA meetings and found great irony—and truth—in the organization’s slogan. “Nobody lives one day at a time
like a drug addict,” he said. “You don’t think yesterday or tomorrow, you just think now.”
About a year after Tabby’s ultimatum, Steve was driving on I-95 outside Bangor. At the time, he was still playing around with the idea of moderation, whipsawing between swearing off booze and coke forever, then partaking from his hoarded stash in secret, always with an eye on the closed door to make sure Tabby didn’t suddenly come barreling through it.
The section of the highway between Augusta and Bangor is a pretty tedious stretch of road, not much more than asphalt and pine trees as far as the eye can see. It was perhaps the perfect place for King to experience the epiphany that he would later credit with saving his life.
He was by himself. The day was cloudy. As was his norm most afternoons, he was thinking about getting high later in the day once he returned home. Then, out of the blue, came a voice that told him to reconsider.
You don’t have to do this anymore if you don’t want to was the exact phrase he heard. “It’s like it wasn’t my voice,” he said later.
And that, as he’s said in his books, was that.
When he decided to give up drugs and alcohol, he thought it would be a good idea to see a therapist, primarily because he felt that he needed to learn how to deal with the substantial void that getting sober would leave in his life. Though it did help him, he decided to tread carefully, however, because he was afraid it would affect his writing. “I’d be afraid that it would put a hole in the bottom of my bucket, and then everything might go out the wrong way,” he said. “I don’t know if it would exactly destroy me as a writer, but I think it would take away a lot of the good stuff.”
Once he got sober, he looked at other parts of his life that needed some cleaning out. One of the victims was Kirby McCauley, King’s longtime literary agent. Steve ended his long relationship with McCauley and hired Arthur B. Greene, a personal manager who would handle agenting responsibilities along with financial matters. Greene’s first task was to negotiate a new contract with NAL, with Steve responsible for writing only one book a year for the next four years. Though he was writing again, King was still newly sober and didn’t know what to expect every day when he woke up in the morning.