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!)
I awoke on Monday. I won't go into the horror details of no longer being in my cheery pre-surgery CICU, but lying there with tubes down my throat in a standard ICU cubicle, watching the hands of the huge high-school-study-hall-style clock mounted on the wall directly in front of me, I at last knew where Hell is housed. Do you remember how it took the minute hand several days to click over once? The agony? Remember?
"...In America, somehow, history turns into geology,
and...an artist is free of all mortgages except for
the ultimate one that forecloses on mountains."
Thomas B. Hess
I was back home by Friday the 19th. Susan, Joe Straczynski, and chicken soup had saved my life, but I won't expand on that part of it. I was back home, and now it is six weeks since everything fractured beneath me and I learned in the deepest part of my arrogant self just how tenuous is our grasp on the crumbling edge of the slide area.
The message that precedes all others—in art as well as life—is simple:
PAY ATTENTION
This might be my last book. After all these years, and all these words, and all those books, this might be the one that winds up faded by sunlight at the end of the shelf. I keep recalling a quotation, though I cannot remember the source: "Man always dies before he is fully born." I think now, as I never did before, about the end of the shelf.
The world seems precarious to me now. Everything changes so fast, and no one remembers anything. The known universe is tipped up at one end, and everything is sliding into electronic storage, where memory cannot find it, as one computer format after another becomes obsolescent. There is such unconscionable and hypocritical pandering to the youth demographic all around us, that anything older than a fortnight risks eternal oblivion. I sat at dinner in Chicago a year or so ago with a group of young people who were in publishing. Editors, publicists, designers. And I was, of course, the oldest one at the table by more than double the number of years of the second-oldest person seated there. And I made reference to a (I thought) cunning idea for a cover painting for an issue of the comic book that bears my name.
I said, "Picture Ronald Colman climbing back up the snow-covered mountains, trying to regain Shangri-La, with the wind whipping the white curtain across the frozen face of the massif... and he's wearing a fur parka and goggles, and he's down in the lower right of the cover painting, large in the foreground, looking out at us with a bewildered expression, because above him, near the summit of the great lost mountain, we see...McDonald's golden
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!)
I awoke on Monday. I won't go into the horror details of no longer being in my cheery pre-surgery CICU, but lying there with tubes down my throat in a standard ICU cubicle, watching the hands of the huge high-school-study-hall-style clock mounted on the wall directly in front of me, I at last knew where Hell is housed. Do you remember how it took the minute hand several days to click over once? The agony? Remember?
"...In America, somehow, history turns into geology,
and...an artist is free of all mortgages except for
the ultimate one that forecloses on mountains."
Thomas B. Hess
I was back home by Friday the 19th. Susan, Joe Straczynski, and chicken soup had saved my life, but I won't expand on that part of it. I was back home, and now it is six weeks since everything fractured beneath me and I learned in the deepest part of my arrogant self just how tenuous is our grasp on the crumbling edge of the slide area.
The message that precedes all others—in art as well as life—is simple:
PAY ATTENTION
This might be my last book. After all these years, and all these words, and all those books, this might be the one that winds up faded by sunlight at the end of the shelf. I keep recalling a quotation, though I cannot remember the source: "Man always dies before he is fully born." I think now, as I never did before, about the end of the shelf.
The world seems precarious to me now. Everything changes so fast, and no one remembers anything. The known universe is tipped up at one end, and everything is sliding into electronic storage, where memory cannot find it, as one computer format after another becomes obsolescent. There is such unconscionable and hypocritical pandering to the youth demographic all around us, that anything older than a fortnight risks eternal oblivion. I sat at dinner in Chicago a year or so ago with a group of young people who were in publishing. Editors, publicists, designers. And I was, of course, the oldest one at the table by more than double the number of years of the second-oldest person seated there. And I made reference to a (I thought) cunning idea for a cover painting for an issue of the comic book that bears my name.
I said, "Picture Ronald Colman climbing back up the snow-covered mountains, trying to regain Shangri-La, with the wind whipping the white curtain across the frozen face of the massif... and he's wearing a fur parka and goggles, and he's down in the lower right of the cover painting, large in the foreground, looking out at us with a bewildered expression, because above him, near the summit of the great lost mountain, we see...McDonald's golden
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