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Like, I lost the power of speech.
I know he asked me a question somewhere in there.
But I cannot tell you what it was.
Nor could I answer him.
I just stood there, gaping, like a widemouth bass.
He’s just a person, you’re thinking. Just a person who happens to be famous.
Sure. Fine.
But you try stepping into that moment and not just falling mute with awe.
I dare you.
Can I also just add that I really hadn’t expected him to answer the door at all? I assumed it would be an assistant, or a secretary, or a posh British butler in a morning coat and tails—anyone but the man himself.
Add to that, he was bigger than he looked.
And he looked pretty big to start with.
I felt really tiny, in comparison. Which was not my favorite power dynamic.
And I’ll add—and maybe this goes without saying—he was… alive.
As opposed to a celluloid representation of himself.
He was a living, breathing, three-dimensional creature.
Which was new.
I was getting a good look now, and he wasn’t nearly as buff as he had been in The Destroyers—and of course not—right?—because who can keep a five-hour-a-day workout regimen going indefinitely? So instead of witnessing a jacked-up, bemuscled he-beast, I got a slightly less defined, more subtle yet somehow more sophisticated, ordinary, everyday washboard stomach.
A washboard stomach that didn’t have to try too hard.
Which made him seem more human. Which should have been a good thing.
But more human made him more real.
And he wasn’t supposed to be real.
The real Jack Stapleton was less tan than his movie posters. The real him had irises that were more gray than blue. The real him had a little nick where he’d cut himself shaving. His lips looked a bit dry, like they needed some ChapStick. His hair was shaggier than I’d ever seen—How long since he’d had a haircut?—and flopping over his forehead in a way that just begged somebody to brush it off to the side. He had a Band-Aid on the back of his hand, and he wore a beat-up drugstore sports watch, and he had glasses on, of all things. Not cool-guy Prada glasses—just the kind of slightly bent glasses that regular people actually wear for seeing.
That’s how I knew I wasn’t dreaming, by the way. Because it never would have occurred to me to put a bent pair of ordinary glasses on Jack Stapleton.
And they somehow made him look both better and worse.
Exhausting.
OKAY, LET’S STARTthe moment back up.
Where were we? Oh, yeah:
Holy shit.
Friends and neighbors, I just met Jack Stapleton.
