... at least, I think it was Dean R. Koontz. I mean -- he said he was Dean R. Koontz and since I have been a Koontz fan for almost twenty years, I believe it! Anyway, this is what happened:
It was a dark and stormy night in November of 1995. Really, it was! It was so stormy, as a matter of fact, that all flights into and out of Chicago's O'Hare Airport were delayed. This was back in the days when even if you didn't have a ticket you could go to the terminal gates and wait to pick up a passenger, and my fiancée was due in on the 6:42 p.m. flight from LA, and I was there to pick him up. We'd only been engaged a couple months, and I was so excited to have my hubby-to-be back that I forgot about the weather, neglected to call the airlines to see if the flight was delayed, and arrived at the airport an hour early.
Four hours later -- a little before 10:00 -- there still wasn't any firm arrival time announced for his flight, and I was seriously thinking about letting the son of a bitch get a cab home. I don't know if you have ever waited four hours in an airport to pick up some schmoe who was "...going to pick up that ring next week, I promise," but it can really test the strength of a relationship. Still, I'd waited that long so I figured okay, I can hold out a little longer.
So I was seated in one of those incredibly uncomfortable molded plastic chairs designed for butts size three and under, and I was reading Strange Highways by Dean R. Koontz -- which was fresh out in hardcover and is a book of his short fiction -- when I became aware of someone standing in front of me. "Would you like me to sign that for you?" asked a male voice.
Great, this is exactly what I'm in the mood for, I thought, remembering that I'd left my pepper spray in my other pocketbook. I looked up to see a pleasant, kinda round, mustachioed face looking back down at me, wearing a smile. A quick look at the back of the book told me that he kinda/sorta looked like Dean R. Koontz. "Ummm ... are you Mr. Koontz?" Okay -- not the brightest question in the world -- I mean really, what was he going to say, even if he wasn't -- but I'd been in the airport FOUR HOURS.
"I am indeed," he said, pulling a pen from the breast pocket of his blazer, and holding out his hand for my book. "Who should I make it out to?"
"Uh, Missy," I said. "You know, I didn't think you guys flew commercial."
"My Learjet is getting the oil changed," he said, grinning. He wrote a few lines, signed his name with a flourish, handed the book back to me, turned, and walked away. When I opened the book, I saw he had written: "YOU SHOULD HAVE STUCK TO THE STRANGE HIGHWAY -- YOU'D BE THERE BY NOW. Dean R. Koontz."
The fiancée's flight finally got in at 11:46, he told me categorically that Dean R. Koontz did not walk around airports signing his books for strangers and that somebody had made a fool out of me, we had a big fight about it and three months later I dumped his ass after I found out that he had a girlfriend in Sheboygan. My autographed copy of Strange Highways is on the top shelf of my bookcase -- right next to my grade school copy of Winnie the Pooh, and the framed newspaper photo of my ex-fiancée being lead away in handcuffs after they lowered the boom on an insider trading deal he got involved with a couple of years after we broke up -- and you know what? I don't care if it was really Dean R. Koontz I met in that airport that night, or really him who signed the book. It is still a treasured memory for me. I mean, after all, if we hadn't had that fight about Koontz on the way home that night, I might have actually married that loser!
But I have to ask one favor -- if you folks at ReadersRoom ever do a Coffee with Koontz -- PLEASE don't ask him if he remembered doing that, or if he might have done it, or even if it is something he would do.
I don't want to know.
Have you had a close encounter with your favorite author? If so, please contact us at ReadersRoom2@aol.com We'd LOVE to hear your story!
Copyright 2003 by ReadersRoom, LLC. All rights reserved.
