The 55-year-old King smiles at the teenager looking back at him and says that actually, no, he didn't think he'd get out at all. ''The thing about that guy in the picture is, you say, 'Would he ever in his wildest dreams have imagined this happening?' And the answer is no. But if you said to him, 'Are you afraid of that?' he would have said 'F -- -, no!' I wasn't afraid of anything.'' King picks up the picture and takes a deeper look, squinting at his younger self. ''Doesn't it sort of look like a picture of a guy who'd end up as an accountant, or dead in Vietnam, or possibly a mass murderer?''
As he polishes off his burger, licking stray bits of mustard from his fingers, the waitress comes over. King shoots her a smile and says, ''I want a piece of strawberry cheesecake.'' Then he looks across the table at me and says, ''You do too, you just don't know it.''
In his 2000 memoir on writing, stephen king says that his earliest memory is being 2 1/2 or 3 and, pretending he was the Ringling Bros.' circus strongboy, hoisting a cement cinder block that unfortunately housed a wasps' nest -- a scene that was later borrowed and put to use in The Shining. He doesn't remember what happened a year earlier, when his father, Donald, walked out to get a pack of smokes and never returned. For years afterward, King, his older brother, David, and his mother all referred to the missing man in their life as ''Daddy Done,'' as in ''Daddy Done Left.''
There was a period during his childhood when King's mother, Ruth, who died 29 years ago, left him in the revolving-door care of relatives. He guessed it was because she had a breakdown. Recently, though, he found out the real reason: that his AWOL father had run up debts all over the Northeast and she was off working to make good on them. ''I remember before we went off to grammar school, she got all serious and took us aside and said, 'People are going to ask what your father does. Tell them he's in the Navy.' She didn't want anybody to know that he left her.''
Maybe it's because King is so wealthy now that he can detail his early poverty with such humor and candor. The man who's sold hundreds of millions of books and had more movies adapted from his work than any other American author laughs about working at a woolen mill where rats the size of Chevy pickups would prowl the graveyard shift; how he toiled at a laundry like his mother, dreading that he was repeating her life; and how he and his college sweetheart-turned-wife, Tabitha, lived in a trailer in Maine with two kids -- Naomi and Joe, with Owen yet to come -- by the time he was 24, subsisting on donated food. He even finds a sort of gallows humor in the $6,400 a year he made as a schoolteacher. ''When I left I was about to be put in charge of the debate club, and that would have been the final straw. I could see myself 20 years later with an ulcer, a rampant drinking habit, divorced, paying alimony, and miserable because I wasn't doing what I was supposed to be doing.''
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