The Celebrity Sightings

Throughout the book, as a way to describe various people drifting through, I often wrote “this driver looked like Stevie Wonder,” or that person “had a Bob Dylan beard.”  On the cold, cold, night on Day 17, the guys hook up around a campfire next to the Pacific Ocean, with a quintet who “look like the Beach Boys.”  Later on, of course, is the double section featuring Detroit and Paul McCartney. A friend who read an early manuscript said, “Say Ken, your characters meet a lot of people who look like celebrities . . . just one time, why don’t have you them meet the actual person?”  That’s how the section with Joe Namath came about (Day 32).  Again, as it happened on the trip it was only a person who looked like Namath, but for the book I turned it into him actually being there.  A stretch? Maybe.  Most people accept it as just one more fantastical sequence.  Ironically, just last night (in real life) I had a dream that I WAS friends with Joe Namath.  So who knows, maybe at some point in my life it’ll come true.  For now, “Joe” in the book is an embellishment.