Haunted Heart: The Life and Times of Stephen King

12 MISERY

The last year of the millennium began beautifully for Steve. He had four solid projects scheduled: The Storm of the Century, the story of a stranger who shows up in a small town in Maine just before a massive blizzard and who knows all the residents’ secrets, would debut as a miniseries in February. The novel The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon was slated for publication in April, and Hearts in Atlantis, a collection of stories that link a group of friends from childhood through adulthood who are influenced by the Vietnam War, was scheduled for September. The eagerly anticipated Green Mile movie would reach theaters in December, just in time to attract the Christmas crowds.

Stephen King had been scaring the bejesus out of readers and movie lovers all over the world for a quarter of a century. He decided to throw himself a party on the anniversary of the first publication of Carrie. After an exquisite dinner and lots of champagne—except, of course, for the host—the highlight of the night finally arrived: the lights were dimmed, a projection screen was lowered, and the invited dignitaries were treated to a best-hits version of the bloodiest, scariest snippets from films based on King’s novels.

He could have chosen any venue in the entire world and flown two hundred of his closest friends and colleagues in via first class and it wouldn’t have made a dent in his bank account. But staying true to form, he wanted his celebration to be held at nothing less than Manhattan’s Tavern on the Green, which fit his persona as the hick from Bangor perfectly, as the landmark restaurant is a place most New Yorkers would disdain as suitable only for tourists who don’t know any better.

Though he still sold movie rights and usually eschewed getting involved in the script or the production, he would occasionally go to the other extreme and write the screenplay, serve as executive producer, and spend as much time on the set as possible. Storm of the Century was one of those projects.

“I think that the best rule is to either be all the way in or be all the way out,” he said. “With Storm of the Century I was all the way in, and I really enjoyed the process.”

In developing the story for the four-part miniseries, King returned to a theme he had explored countless times before: the secrets that people in a small town know about each other but rarely give voice to. Not until a stranger enters the community do the secrets and long-held resentments finally get aired, which leads to a total meltdown for the town and the people.

As he had done previously with The Stand and IT, King had to shape the screenplay to get by the ABC censors. By this time, he’d had a lot of practice in what they’d accept and what they’d give a thumbs-down. He’d figured out a sneaky trick: “I build in three or four paper tigers that I can let go in trade for the stuff I feel is really important, and generally that works pretty well.”

The one tug-of-war with Storm of the Century occurred when a deputy says, “You know, this is gonna be one bad mother of a storm.” The censors told Steve to take out the phrase. Steve’s reply: “Every sitcom on American TV is salacious in tone. We argued back and forth, but finally, I got my own way. Usually, with TV, if you whine enough, you do.”

Traditionally, his least favorite part of a new book or movie project was the dog and pony show that any publisher, magazine, movie director, or TV network wanted him to do to promote it. With Storm of the Century, the big surprise was that he didn’t balk at going on talk shows and meeting with reporters. In fact, he enjoyed it so much that he wanted to do another project for ABC and pondered the possibility of adapting Bag of Bones for a TV mini-series. “What I’d like to do is to have the Storm of the Century experience again, which is one of the reasons that I’ve done most of the promotion that they’ve asked me to do,” he said.

Critic Tim Goodman said the miniseries suffered from the same affliction as King’s books: “It’s edge-of-the-couch good in some spots. The trouble is that it has too many spots. So many that the title should have been changed to Story That Lasts a Century.”

Steve still spoke of retiring, but he was becoming more realistic about the remoteness of the chances: “I can’t retire until I finish the Dark Tower books, because there are people out there who would slaughter me if I didn’t finish. I feel like Conan Doyle after he tried to kill Sherlock Holmes by sending him over Reichenbach Falls. A lot of people will not let me rest until I finish with Roland.”

In March, one of Steve’s professor friends, Anthony Magistrale, associate chair of the English Department at the University of Vermont, invited Steve to spend three days in Burlington to give a lecture, read from his work, and meet with students who were studying his work. To Magistrale’s great delight, Steve accepted.

They were walking to the chapel before his lecture when King asked Magistrale a curious question.

“Why are thirty-five hundred people coming here?”

“I said, ‘Oh, come on, do I have to answer that?’ But Steve just shook his head and said, ‘I will never understand this.’ And you know, he wasn’t just being false humble,” Magistrate said. “He really doesn’t get why people have this attachment to him or how he went from the guy who went to the University of Maine at Orono on an academic scholarship with one pair of blue jeans and ended up Horatio Alger.”

A similar thing happened when they had a few hours to kill and played a few rounds of tennis. Tony asked Steve if he wanted to take a sauna. “He looked at me and asked, ‘A sauna?’ like I was asking him to copulate with an animal. I saw it as a testament to his working-class background, and no one he knew would ever take a sauna, that was for people with money,” Magistrale explained.

At the end of the three days, Tony handed Steve a check for $15,000 for three days’ work. “I apologized that it was so small, but then he turned it over and gave it back to me.”

“Use it for something else,” he said.

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon was published on April 6 to coincide with Opening Day for the Red Sox, since the Tom Gordon in the title is a relief pitcher for Boston. King described the 224-page book in this way: “If there was such a thing as a Stephen King young-adult novel, it would be The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon.” It was the second book of his three-book deal with Scribner, and it immediately hit the top of the bestseller charts.

Also in the spring of 1999, Steve and Tabby became grandparents for the first time. Joe and his wife, Leanora, had a son, whom they named Ethan. Grandpa started early on his grandson’s indoctrination, bringing the infant to his first Red Sox game at Fenway Park at the ripe old age of ten days.

Steve was reenergized and began to talk with Peter Straub about collaborating on another novel, Black House, and Hearts in Atlantis was scheduled for September publication.

He was hitting the sweet spot. Life was good.

In June of 1999, King was in the middle of writing a new novel, From a Buick 8, and had also decided he was ready to return to his nonfiction work-in-progress On Writing, when fate horribly intervened.

At 4:30 p.m. on Saturday, June 19, 1999, Steve was doing what many in the area consider his daily ritual: he was walking against traffic on the shoulder of Route 5 in North Lovell. As usual, he was reading a book on his walk. That day he was reading The House by Bentley Little, the story of five strangers who begin to experience hallucinations and nightmares, and the only thing they share in common is that they all lived in identical houses during their childhoods.

When Steve hit a stretch of the road with no sight line at the crest of a hill, he stopped reading but continued to walk. A light blue Dodge van careened toward him, and King thought that the driver would realize his mistake and veer away. Instead, another split second later, Steve realized it wasn’t going to happen, and so instead he turned away from the vehicle that had not slowed down and, if anything, was picking up speed.

“Steve turned a little,” said Matt Baker, a deputy with the Oxford County sheriff’s office, and the first officer to show up on the scene. “If he hadn’t turned, it would have hit him square on and he probably wouldn’t have made it.” He landed in a patch of grass instead of an outcropping of rocks. “If he hit those rocks, he would have died.”

The deputy estimated that the van was going forty miles an hour when it hit King. “I went out like a light,” Steve said, “and when I came to, my lap was kind of on sideways and I thought, ‘Oh, boy, I’m in trouble here.’ ”

Bryan Smith, the forty-two-year-old man who was driving the van, left the scene to call the police, then returned. He sat on a rock watching Steve as he lay there unconscious, and he was the first person King saw when he came to. Smith told him an ambulance was on the way.

As Steve recalled, Smith told him he’d never even gotten a parking ticket in his life. “Here it is my bad luck to hit the bestselling writer in the world,” he said, before adding, “I loved all your movies.”

As Tabby was summoned along with an ambulance, she had no idea of the extent of Steve’s injuries or the painful path that lay ahead.

“I got a phone call to meet the policeman,” she said. “I didn’t understand the extent of his injuries for some time. He was conscious, his head was very bloody, but he was still talking and coherent.

“Time stopped,” Tabby said later. “And then it started up again, all different.”

The details slowly emerged in the aftermath of the accident.

Smith had been veering from one side of the road to the other for at least a half mile before he hit King because one of his rottweilers, named Bullet—he had another rotty at home, named Pistol—was in the back of the van trying to get into a cooler full of meat. From the driver’s seat, Smith was trying to swat the dog away from the cooler.

When he first felt the impact, Smith thought he’d hit a small deer. He pulled over to the side of the road and discovered he’d hit a grown man when he saw a pair of blood-covered eyeglasses sitting on the front passenger seat and saw a bloodied, twisted body lying in a patch of grass just off the road. He headed off on foot to find a pay phone to call for help.

King was transported to Northern Cumberland Memorial Hospital in nearby Bridgton, where he was stabilized. The doctors there quickly arranged to fly him to Central Maine Medical Center (CMMC) in Lewiston via helicopter once they realized the extent of his injuries.

En route to Lewiston, King’s lung collapsed. He said, “I remember one of the guys saying, ‘Oh, shit,’ and then I heard the crackle of something being unwrapped. Somebody said he was going to stick me, and then I could breathe again after they had intubated me and pumped up my lung.”

Then his hands started to swell. The EMTs cut off his clothing, took off his shoes, then told him they had to remove his wedding rings. He wore one on each hand: the original he’d bought with Tabby’s ring at $15.95 for the pair, and the other one she gave him years later. The ring on his left hand they were able to pull off, but they had to cut off the one on his right.

At one point, an EMT asked him to wiggle his toes, and Steve complied, but then asked, “Were they moving?”

The EMT nodded. “Good wiggle.”

Even through his haze of pain and shock, Steve didn’t believe him. “Do you swear to God, are my toes really moving?’

“Yes, they are.”

“Am I going to die?”

“Not today.”

Once the helicopter arrived at CMMC, the paramedics rushed him into the operating room, and surgery began around eight thirty, about four hours after he was struck by Smith’s van.

King was in surgery for hours, then was moved into the critical care unit at 3:30 a.m., where he remained until Sunday afternoon.

“If there was a bone on the right side of my body, it was broken, with the exception of my head, which was only concussed,” he said.

A preliminary list of his injuries included his right knee, split down the middle; his right hip, fractured; four broken ribs; a deep gash to his head that required twenty stitches to close; and his spine, which was chipped in eight places. His doctors had to decide whether to amputate his right leg below the knee, since it was broken in at least nine places. Steve later joked that the bones were like marbles in a sock.

The doctors decided to first try to stabilize the leg by attaching an external fixator, a device resembling a wire cage that goes over the leg to immobilize the bones and the joints.

Steve went back into the OR on Monday for another round of surgeries that lasted almost ten hours.

When he woke up in a hospital bed after the first couple of surgeries, he had a phenyltol patch on his arm and was hooked up to a morphine drip and a slew of different painkillers. He took one look and thought, “My God, I’m a junkie again. I was as grossed out by that as I was by the injuries. If I thought anything was unfair about what had happened to me, it was that after struggling and winning a battle to get off all sorts of drugs and alcohol, it was that I had to take them again.”

He decided that the only way to deal with the number of highly addictive painkillers being infused into his body—such as Percocet and Vicodin, which he would happily have knocked back a little over a decade ago—was to be conscious of how many painkillers he was taking and try to stay below the recommended dose. “On the other hand, I didn’t get sober to suffer, so if I’m in a situation where I’m miserable and medication will help that suffering, I’m going to take it,” he said.

On Tuesday, June 22, the day after his second round of surgeries, his doctors told him they would like him to start walking by the end of the week, then asked him if he had any short-term goals he wanted to shoot for.

Steve replied that the All-Star Game was at Fenway Park on July 13. “Do you think I could get down there in a wheelchair?” he asked.

“Two nurses in the room threw each other these pitying looks, and it put chills in my heart.”

He went back in for surgery on Wednesday, June 23—his third round of procedures in five days. He was on the operating table that night when a fierce thunderstorm hit eastern Maine, which caused power outages throughout the state. The electricity at the hospital flickered on and off and the lights dimmed a few times throughout the night, but at no point did they lose power thanks to battery backup and the hospital’s two generators.

He was scheduled for another marathon in the operating room on Friday, but the medical team canceled it, concerned about the amount of anesthesia King had received for three major bouts of surgeries in just five days. By the end of the first week, Steve was able to take a few steps with the help of therapists and a walker.

Steve would spend the next three weeks in the hospital and undergo two more extensive surgeries.

An investigation later showed that when Bryan Smith hit Steve, he was driving from a campground where he was staying to a local store to pick up a few Mars’s bars. One of the sheriffs met with King in the hospital and commented that the can of Pepsi Steve was drinking had a higher IQ than Smith. King would later say, “It occurs to me that I have nearly been killed by a character right out of one of my own novels. It’s almost funny.”

Though Smith had told King at the accident scene that he’d never even gotten a parking ticket, it was far from the truth. In reality, the list of Smith’s driving offenses was lengthy, with some charges going back to when he was a juvenile and had only his driver’s permit. Some of the more recent convictions included several DUIs as well as failure to stop for a police officer. His license had been suspended three times in 1998 alone.

Surprisingly, on June 19, Smith had not been tested for drugs or alcohol at the accident scene.

When Steve returned home to West Broadway, his life looked radically different. He had lost over forty pounds, had round-the-clock nurses, was swallowing at least a hundred pills a day, and began daily sessions of excruciating physical therapy.

The first goal of his PT was to flex his knee to allow the leg to bend ninety degrees. “The pain was just excruciating, and I filled the house with my howls,” he said. “I can’t imagine how my poor wife ever stood it, but the physical therapist would just laugh and tell me to do a little bit more. I’d tell her I couldn’t and to let me stop, and she wouldn’t.”

After he’d been home for a few weeks, one of the nurses confided in him that before they were assigned to his care, a supervisor had told each one that under no circumstances were they to make any Misery jokes. Steve appreciated her candor and said that none of them had even broached the topic, though given his penchant for black humor, it might have taken his mind off his pain for a short while.

In addition to dealing with the physical agony, Steve was plagued by weakness and wasn’t sure if he’d be able to write again, given the myriad effects of so many different medications. But five weeks to the day after the accident, he started to write. Though it wasn’t the longest hiatus he’d ever had from writing, he had been forced into it against his will and it was the most painful one to endure.

But writing was much harder than he’d anticipated: “At first, it was as if I’d never done this in my life. It was like starting over again from square one. There was one awful minute when I didn’t know if I knew how to do this anymore.” He wasn’t sure if it was from a lack of confidence, a side effect of all the medication, or a memory lapse from spending so much time away from it. He wrote for ten or fifteen minutes before stopping. A few days passed before he worked up the nerve to read what he had written. The sentences were a bit clunky, but his biggest concern was if they still made sense, and they did.

He slowly built up his tolerance, writing a little more every day until he could write for an hour and a half. His fractured hip made it painful to sit at his desk. He could write at the kitchen table as long as he was sitting on a large pile of pillows. He resumed On Writing, the nonfiction book he was working on at the time of the accident.

Sometimes he wrote on a laptop, other times he wrote by hand with a Waterman fountain pen because it was more comfortable for him and he could write for longer stretches of time. Instead of having his fingers fly over a computer keyboard, he was forced to slow down, which changed his writing. If he wrote at night, instead of working by the overhead light he lit a candle and worked in the light of a flickering flame.

The writing helped his life to become as normal as possible under the circumstances, while also distracting him from the constant pain. He began writing Dreamcatcher in mid-November.

Though he had long been accustomed to calling the shots in his life, he realized that given his current physical state, it was pretty much impossible, and he had to cede total control to others. “I’ve become a totally passive person,” he said. “You recognize immediately that you’ve been seriously hurt and you can’t deal with your own life and that you’re going to have to depend on other people to pull you through, so you just kind of let go.”

However, despite his vigilance, Steve was soon taking more medication than was necessary, specifically OxyContin, which one of his doctors had prescribed after he came in to check on him after his first surgery and noticed King was hitting the morphine pump a little too often. King realized that he had fallen back into the abyss of addiction, as the pain from the fractures and breaks and subsequent surgeries was too much for him to bear without massive amounts of painkillers. The difference between his addiction now and the one he had kicked more than ten years earlier was that this time he was fully aware of what was happening, and he vowed as soon as the pain let up, he’d kick drugs for the second time in his life.

But he wasn’t quite ready for that to happen yet: “I took the pills until I didn’t need them anymore, but then I continued to take them because pain is subjective. The addict part of my brain began inventing pain just to get these painkillers.”

Not long after the accident, due to an overload of morphine and a bevy of other painkillers to get him through the pain of three marathon surgeries in the first week, he began to hallucinate. In one, Steve believed that Tom Gordon from his most recent book had murdered his family, and the only reason King was in the hospital was because he knew about the crime and he thought the Red Sox player was hunting for him and would kill him next.

He also imagined that one man who visited him in the hospital looked like a gym teacher dressed all in white, and that he was a character in one of his books. Instead, the man was Steve’s primary orthopedic surgeon. Steve added that several times during his hospital stay “I seemed to be a character in one of my own books, and that was a very frightening place to be.”

On September 30, 1999, the Oxford County grand jury indicted Bryan Smith on two charges: aggravated assault and driving to endanger. Smith objected to the indictment, saying he hadn’t committed a crime and referring to the June 19 tragedy as “an accident without a cause.”

Steve and Tabby were pleased with the indictment. “I believe that by indicting Bryan Smith, the grand jury did the right thing, and I am very grateful to them for doing it—not only as the injured party, but as a citizen of the State of Maine,” said their statement. “The indictments send a powerful message: when we slide behind the wheel of our vehicles, we are responsible for the lives of others and must be held accountable when we fail in that responsibility.”

In case Smith or a relative got the idea to cash in on the gruesome history of the van, King’s friend and lawyer Warren Silver offered Smith $1,500 for the vehicle, which he accepted. For a while, Steve played with the idea of using the van for a fund-raiser for a Bangor charity—five bucks buys you three swings with a sledgehammer—but Tabby discouraged him. In the end, the van was crushed and cubed.

The pair of Steve’s glasses found on the front seat of Bryan Smith’s van made out better than Steve’s body did. The wire frames were bent, but even after the impact of the van at forty miles an hour, the lenses were fine. He chose to reuse the lenses and put them in new frames.

That fall, as he recovered and began to give interviews, his typical humor returned. King vowed that if the external rotator was still on his leg in late October, he would hang a string of Halloween lights on the clamps of the device.

He also realized it was time to quit his painkillers. While he was aware the pain was fading away, from several previous decades’ worth of heavy addiction to alcohol and drugs, his body was beginning to invent new pain in order to justify the drugs. “I was manufacturing the pain to get the medication. There was a point there where either I stopped using or I would have to get my Vicodin prescription filled in a wheelbarrow,” he joked. The only choice was to go cold turkey. “Kicking a prescription like that is physical. It took about two weeks. You kick it and you sweat, you’re awake nights, you twitch, and then it’s gone.”

By the time The Green Mile movie came out on December 10, Steve was well enough to attend the premiere. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote, “By taking the extra time to allow the movie to run for three hours, Darabont has made The Green Mile into a story which develops and unfolds, and has detail and space. The movie would have been much diminished at two hours.” Janet Maslin of the New York Times said that “unassumingly strong, moving performances and Mr. Darabont’s durable storytelling make it a trip worth taking just the same.”

Undoubtedly, that woman in the grocery store would have denied that it was a Stephen King movie too.