In eight years, I’d never once just walked out to my car and gotten in.
I must’ve seemed like the craziest person ever.
But once you know how terrible the world is, you can’t unknow.
No matter how much you might want to.
I wasn’t sure exactly how much Jack Stapleton knew about the world, but part of my job today, and going forward, was to educate him. You absolutely have to get buy-in from the principal, because you really can’t do it alone. Making it clear that protection is necessary without freaking anyone out is a crucial task at the beginning.
You have to calibrate exactly how much clients can handle.
Arriving at Jack Stapleton’s door, I clutched a checklist of things to cover so that he could hold up his end of the safety bargain. I also had some basic in-person tasks that his assistant in LA couldn’t do for him: fingerprints, a blood draw, a handwriting sample. Plus, a list of questions that Glenn called the VPQ—Very Personal Questionnaire—that gathered info on tattoos, moles, fears, weird habits, and phobias. Normally, we’d do a video recording, too, but, obviously, for this guy: no need.
Anyway, that was all I had to do. Stick to the script.
But wow, did I feel nervous.
And that was before he shocked the hell out of me by opening the door.
Shirtless.
Just opened up the front door. To a total stranger. Utterly naked from the waist up. What kind of a power move was that?
“Jesus Christ!” I said, spinning around and covering my eyes. “Put some clothes on!”
But the image of him was already burned into my retinas: Bare feet. Frayed Levi’s. A corded leather necklace encircling the base of his neck, just above his collarbones. And I don’t even have words for what was happening in the midsection.
I squeezed my eyes tighter.
How the hell was I supposed to work with that?
“Sorry!” he said, behind me in the doorway. “Timed that wrong.” Then, “It’s safe now.”
I made myself drop my hand and turn back around …
Where I beheld Jack Stapleton halfway through the process of wriggling into a T-shirt—six-pack muscles undulating like they wanted to put me in a trance.
Let me just stop the clock right here for a second, because it’s not every day you stand in Jack Stapleton’s doorway, squinting directly into his magnificence, while he does a completely normal yet utterly astonishing thing, like put on a T-shirt.
What was it like, you must be wondering, for me to live through that moment?
Maybe this will help: My brain shut down.
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.