Miller: "Tonight's guest has actually penned more books than I've read. Please welcome Stephen King, ladies and gentlemen. Steve..."
King: "How ya doing?"
Miller: "Thanks for coming on. I know you're afraid of flying so why are you out here? How did you get out here?"
King: "Well, I got out here on a United Airlines flight. And, ah, flew first class because I feel like if there is going to be an accident I want to be first to the crash sight..."
Miller: "Stake out your position..."
King: "Well, you don't have to linger in a burn ward, you know. If you're in the last row that can happen..."
Miller: "That's how I want Stephen King thinking!"
King: "Well, you know it goes with the territory I guess. But, ah, I don't think that my heartbeat ever got over 150 on this particular flight. What happens is I'll be going along 90 beats a minute, then they close that door..."
Miller: "Right."
King: "The minute thay close that door you're there. Forget it. Whatever happens is what happens."
Miller: "Right. Well, I can sometimes sum it up in that Zen understanding but most of the time I hear the door shut and I think, 'open the fucking door.'"
King: "Open the fucking door. But you have to go and, you know, the thing is you do what I do and get used to imagining the worst. That's, ah, that's part of what I do you know."
Miller: "Yeah, I'll say."
King: "And, ah, you really hit it on the head. I'll end up sitting next to somebody who'll say, 'where do you get your ideas?' and I'll say, 'Jesus Christ, I've never heard that one before, where do I get my...' But if you're over 40,000 feet and there's turbulence, you know the last thing you want to be doing is answering that question again when the plane goes down. I was ok until I was about 28 and I looked out one day and I saw there was no break-down lanes out there. You're just there and if you come down..."
Miller: "How petrified are you, though? Is it like... Like I'm kinda petrified but I can always force myself. You're like that too, right?"
King: "I'm out here..."
Miller: "Yeah..."
King: "I'm out here and I'm supposed to go back on, ah, on Monday. And I think..."
Miller: "Live here with us!"
King: "Well, you know, rent a car, too...you get that one-way rate. But, ah, one of these days it's going to be over."
Miller: "Yeah, you need the rate."
King: "I'm gonna get in the jetway and I'm gonna get halfway down there and I'm gonna fucking freeze. That's it, that's gonna be the end of it."
Miller: "You'll be there forever."
King: "The worst one..."
Miller: "What's your worst scenario? What's your worst flight scenario?"
King: "Oh, jeez..."
Miller: "What's the worst thing you can imagine? You're going down and they tell you to duck and cover, and cover your head with a Clive Barker novel or something..."
King: "The worst, the worst scenario is when you look out the window and you see that little gremlin from the Twilight Zone pulling at the engine cowling."
Miller: "You know that gremlin was looking in the window going, 'I'm so scared, it's Shatner's toupee!'"
King: "Right. No, about 10 years ago American Airlines used to have in first class, they used to have a monitor so you could watch the plane take off."
Miller: "Oh, I hated that, too."
King: "And you could watch the plane come down. You didn't want to watch that. You didn't watch it, I didn't watch it. But there was a plane that crashed in Chicago. Now, can you imagine watching yourself crash? That's the worst scenario as far as I'm concerned. 'Oh, we're going down. Look, what a point-of-view!' You know?"
Miller: "You know and I'm so compulsive I'm sure I would have been clicking to the next channel..."
King: "Absolutely, absolutely."
Miller: "Hey, look, Flintstones..."
King: "Give them that Michael Bolton soundtrack to go with Bette Middler, 'The Wind Beneath My Wings.'"
Miller: "Have you ever seen a therapist about it or discussed it with a support group or anything?"
King: "I went to a therapist and the therapist said, 'You have to imagine your fear as a ball that you can close up in your fist...' and the first thing I'm thinking is this lady doesn't know how much fear I've got. I can maybe get it down to the size of a soccer ball, but fear is my living...I can only get it so small. But it actually worked for a while and when I would take off, you know, and this is a physiological thing, I'm terrified
of flying and I get up there and, ah, for a while I was able to hold that thing in there. And then I was descending into Bahmingdale airport in a Lear 35 and we hit a clear turbulence and it was like hitting a rock wall in the sky. I thought we were dead. I though it was over. The oxygen mask came out. You never want to see an oxygen mask..."
Miller: "Ah..."
King: "Except on that film at the beginning. The seats flew out. I had on my seatbelt but it would have broken my neck. The catering was everywhere. I had grapes in my underwear when this thing was over..."
Miller: "Fruit-of-the-Loom..."
King: "Yeah, Fruit-of-the-Loom, that's right..."
Miller: "But..."
King: "And the fear just kinda squirted out of my hand like snot...it was everywhere. That was the end of my fear ball. I've never been able to get it back."
Miller: "There's a novel - 'Death of the Fear Ball'..."
King: "That's great."
Miller: "Now, ah, what do you think is the psychology behind the fears? Are you afraid of dying? Is that it or what?"
King: "Ah, I think that's it's the period between... You know, the pilots all have this Southern voice like Wally Sherod...they sound like an astronaut. And, you know, it's kinda like, 'You know, folks, we got a little problem here... We're gonna fucking die.' You know. But it seems to me..."
Miller: "Like Chuck..."
King: "It seems to me... Yeah, right, like Chuck... At 40,000 feet, you might have 72, 73 seconds between the start of the descent and the actual pow. That's the part I'm afraid of. Yeah, trying to get it all together in a period of time."
Miller: "Christ, now you could knock off two books in that time..."
King: "No, not in that state. But see, the thing is, I would fly in a plane with you because there have to be a few of us on every flight."
Miller: "Oh there are."
King: "We hold it up. Ok, the flight you have to be afraid of is the flight where there's nobody on who's afraid of flying. Those are the flights that crash. Trust me on this. You have three or four people who are terrified right out of their minds...we hold it up."
Miller: "Right. The degree of rigidity in our body keeps the wings up."
King: "No, it's some kind of psychic thing because, ok, this shouldn't work anyway. Anybody with half a brain knows that it shouldn't work. You see these diagrams and there's, like, arrows going over the wing, you know? You've seen this, right? And somebody help me please...it's
arrows, and arrows underneath the wing, but you've never looked out the window and saw an arrow in your life. Ok? So it's basically, I think, it's a psychic force and if you don't have enough of that..."
Miller: "Yeah, what about the thing they always say...it's supposed to calm you down? They always say it's safer than driving on the road. Do you buy that or is that just...?"
King: "Well, they also say one in fifty drivers that you pass is drunk, okay, and they're... Think how many there are. Of course it's safer there. We probably passed more cars on Sunset Boulevard coming here than there are over in L.A. tonight. I think they're cooking with the numbers."
Miller: "It's a mathematics thing."
King: "It's a mathematical thing. But basically, you know, you've got all these pilots up there in the peak of physical condition...they're sober."
Miller: "Ah, some of them are peaked..."
King: "Well some of them are peaked, but, ah, yeah, I think that when they say it's more likely that you get hit by lightning...man, I just don't buy that."
Miller: "What about The Langoliers? Does this come from your fear of flying? Inspired by that?"
King: "Yeah, you know, ah, I kept thinking that it would be great if you could knock yourself out while you were flying. That would be ideal."
Miller: "That was the point of departure."
King: "Yeah, yeah. So I was flying with some guys who had a small jet and I said, as, this would be really great if only you didn't, ah, have to be aware through the whole thing. If you could just get on and there'd be a black place in your mind. And the guy says to me, well, we can lower the oxygen back there and you'd go right out. And I said do it. And they wouldn't do it...but I got a story out of it."
Miller: "Yeah, I see. Everybody likes to get freaky when they're with you because they think you're freaky. But I..."
King: "Yes, they do."
Miller: "Remember years ago, and I can't tell if this is a pockrafou in my own mind or not, but I have a memory that I was in Pittsburgh and I was working on a kids show. And you were there, and you went out to a gravesite late at night and told Halloween stories. We taped you for this kid's show I was doing and you sat on a tombstone and told stories. Do you remember that or am I making that up in my head?"
King: "You're full of shit."
Miller: "Yeah? I swear. Remember, it was a guy named Arthur Greenwald? It was a show called Punchline and your little boy was there. Wasn't he an extra in the movie Creepshow?"
King: "Actually, he was the little boy at the beginning of the..."
Miller: "In Creepshow..."
King: "Yeah."
Miller: "And I remember him coming past. I do remember. He was telling you about... You said, 'How was the movie today?' and he said, 'Well, I had worms crawling out...' You know? And it was like you guys were talking about a little league game. And I thought, see, love, in a wierd way, is just like baseball, you know? Because...
Oh yeah, then they put the nail in his head."
King: "Ah, Joe in that. Joe was ten years old and, ah, he played the child of an abusive father and he's getting knocked around in the movie and he had this makeup on. After one of those nights when he worked we went through a McDonald's drive thru and he hadn't taken the makeup
off. So the big guy's driving the car, I had a beard
at the time and looked pretty degenerate, and the little guy has got the makeup, the bruises, all over his face. And the next thing you know two cops have got us in the back of the cruiser and Joe's eating his french fries and saying, 'It's just a movie...' And I'm going, 'That's right, just a movie, officers...'"
Miller: "Yeah, at close range."
King: "Yeah, sure."
Miller: "Stephen King, ladies and gentlemen."
The End
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