The King Cat (with a C) was a ’70s movie theater in the Denny Triangle that showed Close Encounters of the Third Kind as a first run. It lasted a decade, then reopened as the King Kat (with a K), a rock venue where Nirvana played. Another decade and that venue went under, so the site briefly hosted a megachurch, and then took one last retro gasp as a combination rock club/movie theater. Last year it was demolished for new corporate headquarters. So there’s the direction of Seattle progress. Movie theater. Rock club. Megachurch. Corporate HQ.
In 2001, the King Kat rock venue had a huge hall, capacity of eighteen hundred, in a stout, boxy cement building with a lobby enclosed on three sides by glass. It was one of those venues always eulogized by the nostalgic punk at the party. One time, he saw Jello Biafra there. Another time, he saw the Melvins. He’ll tell you about it by the backyard fire pit while the light casts his shadow onto the new condos going up next door.
I first encountered the King Kat while on the committee to produce the National Poetry Slam. A weeklong tournament for spoken-word artists hosted in a different city every year, NPS is a diametrically imagined event. It is both the premier competition for poetry slam (a performance poetry contest popular around the world) and a one-off festival produced by a scrappy band of volunteers more accustomed to throwing shows in basements than high-capacity concert halls. This tension creates an event that is professional, capable of becoming a career-maker for the poets who win, and prone to the amateur missteps of volunteer staff. Imagine March Madness presented by your local community theater.
My job, despite being the newest transplant to Seattle on the committee, was managing venues. Specifically, I had to call renowned Seattle rock clubs and dive bars like the Crocodile and the Central Saloon and convince them that crowds would pack into their clubs to stand, drink, and listen to poetry. This suggestion elicited the common response “Did you say poetry?”
There was no need to convince the King Kat. We just had to pay the fee, sign the contract, and provide proof of insurance. It was slated to present a semifinal team bout and individual finals, some of the biggest shows in the festival. The venue manager was your standard Seattle rock-club guy. Buddy Holly glasses, black rock T-shirt, wallet chain, at least one tattoo sleeve, unfazed by a moon landing when he’s sober, but ready to riot over an a poorly twisted garnish when he’s not.
After two nights of preliminary bouts, Nationals were rolling along like civilization’s first wheel. It was a Friday evening in August around eight. A heavy breeze sent the smell of sea air all the way up Blanchard, and there was a chalky glow of evening light reflecting off the glass walls of the King Kat lobby. Inside the theater, our show was under way. Since it was one of four concurrent semifinal bouts happening around the city, I sat in the lobby with my radio waiting for the calls to come in.
“This is Sit & Spin. Our show just started.”
“The bout is under way at the Crocodile.”
“Semifinal in progress at Dutch Ned’s.”
Months of stressy e-mails and panicked phone calls would be over by the end of the night. I sighed with near freedom and overexhaustion. There was only one more show to launch, individual finals, the late event at the King Kat and a festival high point. All the audience members from the other three venues would be walking, driving, or busing to our venue to see it. The outcome would name the National Poetry Slam Champion of the year.
In the lobby, a steady flow of volunteers buzzed around, folding T-shirts on the merch table, selling tickets to the early and late shows. The atmosphere was so calm I decided to step out into the alley with some friends, and one offered me his joint. I wasn’t a huge pot smoker, but the festival atmosphere made me a little reckless. I was twenty-eight and blowing off steam from a hard week of long days. I came back into the venue mildly stoned, and slipped inside the theater to hear a few poems.
The bout was hot. I remember a group piece about consumerism, in which poets turned the word “Wal-Mart” into a droning chant. You know how you say a word enough times and it loses meaning? The poets changed “Wal-Mart” from profane to holy to nonsensical by repeating it for three minutes straight. It was spellbinding. The audience erupted after that piece and many others. Maybe that’s why I didn’t hear what was going on in the lobby.
When I left the theater again and turned my radio back on, everything was wrong. I caught the tail end of someone calling for the festival directors. I caught the word “injury.” A volunteer ran past me with an ice pack. Two workmen followed with a comically large piece of plywood. Someone with an industrial broom was sweeping glass into a pile on the carpet, and the sea-smelling night air blew through my hair. Then the venue manager was in front of me.
“I’m pulling the show,” he said. “Your audience is out of control. Show me your event insurance or I’m yanking the mics.”
It took frantic minutes to coax the story out of him. Apparently, an audience member meant to exit through one of the glass double doors to go outside and smoke a cigarette. Instead, he walked into a glass wall with his face. Venue Guy delivered the news with implication: Your poetry audience is OUT OF CONTROL! Everyone here is WASTED! This is ten times crazier than when RANCID was here.
Around this time, I became extremely self-conscious about being stoned. I coaxed Venue Guy into the office and stalled until the festival directors, Bob Redmond and Allison Durazzi, showed up wearing nervous smiles. They exchanged handshakes and insurance riders and sent me to hang out with the injured guy and wait for the ambulance. Allison said, “See if he seems, you know, impaired.” Maybe the most difficult job to assign someone who is “impaired” is to determine if a stranger is also impaired. Besides hair long enough for a horsetail, the guy who walked into the wall displayed no obvious signs of intoxication. He was also miraculously unhurt, with only a small cut on the bridge of his nose. He seemed almost apologetic about the whole thing.
Inside the office, the festival directors convinced Venue Guy that the scene would get ugly if he stopped the show, and they agreed to work out insurance details in the morning. The ambulance came and went, the pile of shards disappeared from the carpet, and the glass wall was replaced with a tidy slab of plywood while the four hundred audience members inside the theater enjoyed the final minutes of the show unaware. The situation was already coalescing into an anecdote for the festival postmortem, already fading into Nationals lore. And then the second person walked into a glass wall.
In a lobby filled with people who were incapable of conversation that did not involve the words “glass wall,” a volunteer who was busy folding T-shirts said, “I’m going to grab some more shirts from the van.” Then he turned and walked through a window.
I thought Venue Guy was going to peel off his tattoos like a wet suit and shred all the grease from his pompadour. The infamous King Kat, where the Melvins and Crash Worship played, was being reduced to literal shards by a bunch of performance poets. His brain must have been overwhelmed with conspiracy theories. Maybe we were all on a new club drug popular only in the poetry scene. But the T-shirt volunteer had been working on the show for hours, and his dinner had consisted of cold pizza and warm soda, not horse tranquilizers and bourbon.
When asked what happened, the volunteer’s primary response was embarrassment. He couldn’t believe it had happened either. The most jarring difference between the two cases was that the second guy didn’t even get a cut on his nose. It was like an opening scene in a superhero movie, where the lead doesn’t yet know he’s invincible but emerges from a bomb blast feeling a tad chilly. I played an unwitting extra, mumbling to the camera, “That guy’s got a tough forehead.”
Chaos erupted again. Everyone seemed to be running somewhere to get something that had to be gotten immediately. The merch table became a makeshift first-aid station. People keep floating curiously closer to the remains of the wall while other people yelled, “Get back.” Glass debris was spread around the lobby entrance, and the barrier between inside and outside vanished as people reported the events through the breach to the crowd gathering outside.
That’s when the second set of radio calls came in.
“Show just wrapped at the Crocodile. Four hundred people are headed up the hill.”
“We’re packing up at Sit & Spin. You should get our crowd any minute.”
“Bout is over at Dutch Ned’s. A mob is walking your way.”
In my memory, the audience members are zombies, converging on us from all sides, so long-dead on poetry their only desire is not for brains but to fling themselves bodily through plate glass. They moaned and dragged their way out of the theater by the hundreds, mumbling about bathrooms and cigarettes. From outside the building, an endless stream of pale faces stumbled out of the darkness toward the lobby, shambling in the direction of the remaining glass windows, prepared to gain entry with their unbreakable, undead faces.
I mustered the remaining volunteers like ragtag survivors, grouping them around me for a rousing speech. “See those glass walls?” I said to my frightened, unpaid staff. “Pick one and don’t let anyone walk through it.”
The next sixty minutes were a blur. The directors didn’t try to talk calmly with Venue Guy this time. They looked at the new pile of glass on the carpet and said, “We’ll get the checkbook.” More giant brooms appeared from the janitorial closet, and more plywood came from somewhere. Patrons approaching the venue from the street saw volunteers in matching T-shirts strung between the walls of the lobby like paper dolls and heard workmen screwing a barricade onto the building.
In the decade since, theories have arisen. Did the strange quality of the August evening light turn the walls invisible? Had the windows been recently cleaned, causing a pileup of bird carcasses that had been swept away before we arrived? Or was it just the old mystery of coincidence, another visit from the unexplainable, unpredictable element of chance?
More than twelve hundred people were ferried safely past those glass walls and into the once-movie-hall-turned-rock-venue that, for one night, presented poetry. They were that nearly mythical audience of word lovers in a world dominated by cellulose and amps. In the dark theater, the poems swept up the shards, hung shiny new plates of glass, revived our rotting corpses, and made the movies play again.