Authors populate the cracks in a conversation with Stephen King. And, I realize, all of them are, or were, popular authors, people whose work was read, and read with enjoyment, by millions.

“You know what’s bizarre? I did the Savannah book fair last week . . . This is happening to me more and more. I walked out and I got a standing ovation from all these people, and it’s like a creepy thing . . . either you’ve become a cultural icon, or they are applauding the fact that you are not dead yet.”

I tell him about the first time I ever saw a standing ovation in America. It was for Julie Andrews in Minneapolis on a tryout tour of Victor/Victoria. It was not very good, but she got a standing ovation for being Julie Andrews.

“That’s so dangerous though, for us. I want people to like the work, not me.”

And the lifetime achievement awards?

“It makes them happy to give them to me. And they go out in the shed, but the people don’t know that.”

Then Tabby King turns up to tell us that it is time for dinner, and she adds that back at the big house the gargantuan African spurred tortoise has just been discovered trying to rape a rock.

This interview originally ran in edited form in the UK Sunday Times, April 8, 2012.

Geoff Notkin: Meteorite Man

Some people change. Kids you knew at school become investment bankers or bankruptcy specialists (failed). They fatten and they bald and somewhere you get the sense that they must have devoured the child they once were, eaten themselves bit by bit, mouthful by mouthful, until nothing is left of the smart, optimistic dreamer you knew when you were both young.

On a bad day, I worry that it’s happening to me.

And then I see Geoff Notkin, and everything’s all right.

True, sometimes, when he looks in the right direction, I see his father, Sam Notkin, a man so cool we used to talk obscure 1940s American science fiction authors together. But mostly I see Geoff, and he hasn’t changed.

Geoffrey Notkin in 1976 was impetuous, brilliant, obsessed, really funny, easily angered but someone who would just as quickly forget that he’d ever been angry. We were both outsiders at school, Geoff because he was semi-American, me because I lived in books, and we bonded over music and comics. I took Geoff to a Lou Reed concert at the New Victoria, and we started a punk garage band, literally in his garage. Geoff was a terrific and passionate drummer.

We drew comics together, in the back of classes that bored us. Most classes bored us. We were smart kids who ignored most of school (we both liked the art rooms, I liked the school library) and taught ourselves, because that seemed like more fun. We liked being disliked by the teachers, and neither of us actually got around to graduating.

We were friends. We dated the same girls (although never at the same time). We read the same comics and listened to the same music (often at the same time) and even dyed our hair blond, or tried to. Geoff’s parents did not mind that he had dyed his hair blond. My father minded that I had dyed my hair a straw orange, and made me dye it black, which was even stranger. We signed to a record label as young punks, and none of our music is around anywhere except possibly tapes somewhere in Geoff’s storage lockers, and I like to think that as long as I get him this introduction on deadline any tapes will stay there. Geoff put me into the ambulance when I needed to get my faced stitched up after a grumpy punter expressed his dislike of our band by throwing an (unopened) beer can at me . . .