Slippage Read Free Page A

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