Slippage (2 page)

Then I was thrown sidewise, as the second wave struck. Thrown left down the winding deco staircase—everything now in pitch darkness—all electricity had gone out across the city—and bent double over the pony wall, cracking my forehead on the leading edge of a Lucite shelf holding pewter figurines of The Ten Greatest Inventions of History.

And then the main torque hit.

I was picked up and thrown forward, never touching the final flight of steps from the lower landing to the first floor. I was picked up and flipped heels-over-head to land flat on my back, missing the edge of the pool table by perhaps two inches. If I had been two inches to the right, it would have blasted open my skull; nothing less than a human omelette.

But before I could rise, off the wall to my left, a heavy painting slightly larger than 3'x3' wrenched itself off its hanger, and crashed down on me.

(Pause: charming little ironies of near-death experiences. The painting is a surreal rendering of a large stone mausoleum with ominous faces perceivable in the walls. It sits on a hill under a dark blue, threatening sky. Carved into the lintel of the building is the legend 6000 SA MO BL. The painting is called "Six thousand, same old bull." The irony is that 6000 SA MO BL is an abbreviation for 6000 Santa Monica Boulevard, the location of the cemetery crypt and mausoleum in Los Angeles where, among others, Al Jolson is buried. The painting weighs a ton. Well, that's figuratively speaking. It's heavy, because it has a double pane of glass on it—the second pane having stars painted on the inside surface, thus giving a very deep-dimensional look to the already eerie landscape—and when 6000 SA MO BL ripped loose, it plummeted and hit me full in the face, breaking my nose, blacking both my eyes, ripping open gashes in my face.) Knocking me unconscious.

Not for long, I guess. It was dark, the earth was still growling, I was woozy—maybe a concussion already, I don't know—and even if there had been light, I couldn't have seen anything. Too much blood in my eyes.

I started to pull myself to my feet, using the edge of the pool table, when the next wave struck; and this time it threw every book on the upper level out of the bookcases, hurled them over the railing, and down on me in the open space below the atrium. I was struck by hundreds of reference books, knocked to my knees, and then clobbered unconscious for the second time.

Everything after that, for two years, was recovery, rebuilding, and lamenting the loss of art and possessions I'd spent a lifetime gathering. No need to dwell on it, I've conveyed the part that's pertinent to this book. So now we can move on to the heart attack.

I had a free ride for fifty-nine years. Ran my body as if it were a PT boat skimming across enemy waters, explosions at every zig and zag. Went where I wanted to go, got involved with whomever I chose, ate everything with disregard for the consequences, fought fights, risked my life, played it fast and loose. Created stories and had one helluva good time.

"We are all serving a life-sentence

in the dungeon of self."

Cyril Connolly

Not I! For my part, it was the unheeding belief that I would live forever. I'd almost been splattered half a dozen times in different ways—on sports car racetracks, in riots, during civil rights marches in the South, in street brawls—but each time my indefatigable ability to walk the rubber band high across the Grand Canyon manifested itself; and I skimmed on across that bullet-stitched beachhead horizon as if I lived the life charmed. Skimmed along, mixing metaphors and gorging on fried chicken.

Then in 1992, I got chest pains.

I was in San Francisco, doing a signing, when I tried to climb one of those fabled hills. Found myself sitting on the curb with the defensive line of the Dallas Cowboys playing johnny-on-a-pony on my chest, and each of them wearing full battle armor.

Let me explain something you need to know. Maybe not today, and maybe not tomorrow, but one day you'll be in a place and at a weight where this little bit of data will light up like Times Square neon in your mind. And you'll thank me. Just before they take you off in the ambulance. And here it is, this piece of data:

It is not like in the movies, where Clark Kent's adoptive father (played by Glenn Ford) suddenly clutches his left arm, winces, and collapses. What it's
more
like, please try to remember this, is a tension that runs from one side of your chest to the other. At first you think it's indigestion, and it'll pass in a few seconds. Then the pain gets more intense, and you lie down and put your legs up so the heart doesn't have to work so hard pumping blood to all those far lands, but the tension continues. And what is happening to you, is that you've been operating for years with a 90% blockage of the right coronary artery, and you didn't know it, and at last all that pizza and Lawry's prime rib with extra helpings of Yorkshire pudding and creamed horseradish have caught up with you, and you are in deep deep chaos, my friend.

So. We got me back to L.A. and I went into Cedars-Sinai and they did an angiogram, and saw my 90% blockage, and they did an angioplasty ream-out job on me; and that was in June; and it closed down in August; and back I went; and they did another angioplasty. And I went back to a life of endless deadlines, constant faxes and phone calls telling me I was late with this or that piece of writing, the organized efforts of a quartet of vicious, envious creeps to maim my life and/or my reputation, pressure upon pressure, and I slipped back into the routine I'd come to endure for most of my adult life.

(Pause. Harriet Martineau, the British writer and journalist, wrote, in 1837, "Readers are plentiful; thinkers are rare." Every writer—particularly these days when it's so hard to keep a writing career afloat against the electronic
tsunami
of the Internet and television and non-books featuring performers in the OJ Simpson circus—needs and values readers. Without them, it all comes to a halt.

(But there is an aspect of the reader gestalt that is not only troubling, it's terrifying. Not all, but some, of one's readers become obsessive and act as if a writer is denying them their mainline fix if they don't get a new book when they want it. No matter that one has more than sixty
other
books they can enjoy...they want the
next
one. And they demand it! They write and complain, as if the writing and publishing of a book were akin to daily milk delivery. It creates in the writer a tension that becomes unbearable, that can even freeze the book in its progress toward publication.

(The assumption that a new book, not yet published, is already the property of the reader because he or she
desires
it, is a part of the job they never warned against when you were young and naive and starting out. They never warn you about the gravitic pull of the impertinent, intrusive, hungry audience. And there is no escaping the grip of that 6g pull. We need readers. And so, the produced by-product is tension.)

I went back to the old routine, and though I had some pains and pressures for the next four years, I still knew I was immortal; and I kept postponing the exercise and the vacation and the easing off. I worked every day, many nights, with the phone and the fax and the FedEx packages filling every waking moment.

I sit writing this on Thursday, May 23rd, 1996.

Little more than a month ago, April 10th, Susan and I were scheduled to go to the wrap-party for the cast and crew of the television series on which I serve as Conceptual Consultant,
Babylon 5.
My friend Joe Straczynski, creator and producer of B5, with Kathryn Drennan, and Susan and I were going to meet up early in the evening and go enjoy ourselves at the party that would celebrate the wrap-up of our third season on the air.

The pains started early in the morning. I got up, as usual, about five a.m. and started the day's routine. The first pains pressed me flat as I climbed the stairs to the upstairs atrium office (now, $200,000 later, reconstructed from the earthquake, leaving us dead broke). I sat down on the stairs, and breathed deeply. It was as if a large chunk of dry pumpernickel crust had lodged in the wrong channel in my chest. I managed to get to the sofa in my office, and I lay down for about an hour with my feet elevated. The pain did subside a little. I'm immortal. I shook it off and went to work. There was an essay about artist Barclay Shaw that needed to be written for Carl Gnam's publication
Realms of Fantasy.
There was the rewrite on "From a Great Height" for Bruce David at
Rage.
There was a freebie about A.E. van Vogt that was needed for the awarding of his upcoming Grand Master trophy. There was the introduction to SLIPPAGE that Mark Ziesing and Houghton Mifflin were both waiting for...the book had been delayed and everyone was getting surly with me. That 6g garrotte of the demanding readership.

I started writing.

An hour later, now almost seven a.m., I slouched downstairs and hit the bed. It'll get better, I told myself. I also told Susan. It'll get better.
 

Never made the B5 party. Had to cancel out.

Thursday the 11th. More pain. Luncheon meeting here at the house with Stefan Rudnicki and Lee Montgomery and Mary Aarons of Dove Audio/Dove Publishing. The lunch was pizza. I had three pieces. I was back in bed shortly thereafter. It'll pass, it'll get better, I said to Susan. We were scheduled to go to dinner that night with Don Shain and Joe and Kathryn at the exclusive Cafe Bizou. The band of pressure now reached from armpit to armpit, and I felt it in my back.

Susan kept saying, "You need to go to the hospital!" and I snarled back at her, leave me alone, I've got to get through this, I've got to get SLIPPAGE out of here, Mark's desperate for it, and Houghton Mifflin has sent a lawyer's letter. I'll go see John Romm (my internist for more than thirty years) as soon as I get the damned book out of here.

We never got to Cafe Bizou.

Friday, April 12th, I was still on my back. Every time I got up to travel through the house to the office wing, to climb the stairs, to write what I'm writing now, the pain would smack me and I'd stumble, shuffle, weave my way back to the bedroom. Finally, at 4:30 in the afternoon, I said to Susan, "You'd better call John Romm. I think I'm in trouble."

Immortal. But not very bright. Slow to learn. Too damned stubborn and obstinate and locked into the habit patterns of a lifetime, too overwhelmed by the bogus urgency of deadlines, to understand that there are deadlines and there are
dead
lines
.
Fault lines. Fissures. The fault in my lines is the same as the fault in our stars. We live in the slide zone. Slippage.

"A tiling is not necessarily true

because a man dies for it."

Oscar Wilde

John didn't even bother with the usual admittance procedure at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. He called ahead, as Susan and my assistant loaded me into the car, and in fifteen minutes I was being wheeled into the ER. How much damage I had done to the actual heart muscle by enduring three days of an ongoing heart attack, neither Susan nor I knew.

That was Friday. By the end of day—I had spent five and a half hours in the ER—only a curtain separating me from the unfortunate junkie whose hands were still cuffed from her arrest, as she whimpered and begged for attention—before they could free up a room in the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit.

They got me on blood thinners and beta blockers, and it was a convivial group of RNs who looked after me; and Susan, who stayed with me till quite late before she took a cab home. Susan doesn't drive.

Now, here's the interesting part.

I felt well enough the next day, Saturday, to ask Susan to bring in my typewriter and the folders of work that needed doing. My cardiovascular physician was out of town, and they had decided to keep me comfortable and stable in the CICU until Monday, when they'd go in for another angiogram. I still thought I was immortal.

So Susan brought in the portable Olympia, and three or four folders of projects that were in work and, trailing my IV, I managed to get out of bed with my ventilated-rear hospital gown gaping, and we propped up pillows on a chair, and I lowered the retractable table to its lowest point, and I sat there and typed out an essay titled "Trimalchio in West Egg" (which had been F. Scott Fitzgerald's original, discarded title for THE GREAT GATSBY) in about two hours. I'd finally licked at least one of the fault line deadlines in my rapidly disintegrating life. But see (I told the universe that wasn't even paying any attention), see, I'm fuckin' immortal; not even the hospital can stop me!

I asked Susan to fax off the piece to both Barclay Shaw and Shawna McCarthy, the editor of
Realms of Fantasy,
as soon as she got home; and I settled back to try and get some sleep. But sleep would not come. And by early Sunday I was telling my nurse, "I don't give a shit
where
my doctor is, get him back here, and
do me.
Now!"

The pain was overwhelming.

By early afternoon on Sunday the 14th of last month, as I sit writing this on May 23rd, 1996, four days till my 62nd birthday, which I guess I'll be around to celebrate, I'm told I came within a few micromillimeters of dying. He who was immortal, who wrote of looking at mortality with unblinking eye, finally got backed into a corner where hubris and stick-to-it-iveness were useless.

They took 27½"
of vein out of my left leg, cracked me open like a miser's change-purse with large rib-spreaders, pulled my lungs out and placed them over
there,
and pulled out my heart and placed it over
there
(just like the Scarecrow of Oz), and ripped off the sac that surrounds the heart—and can never be replaced—and put me on a pump that kept the blood moving while they stopped the evicted heart, and they built me a quadruple bypass. Built me a new superhighway that detoured around the crimped and strangulated passages that had been unable to pump me the proper amount of blood for who knows how many years. (As you are reading this in 1997, obviously I lived. No shit, Sherlock!)