Toward the end of 2005 I'd been in a kind of malaise of pending illness. Not really sick, not really well and not getting better. I assumed that it was diabetic related. Diabetes had been enthusiastically kicking my ass for about six years.

I went to NYC for a show and for the last couple of days in New York I began having breathing difficulties. Nothing serious, but enough to keep me from getting a good night's sleep. My ex-wife, Harriett, joined me in Virginia to spend some time with my Mom and family.

The breathing problem continued. My Mama and brother Joe gave me some xanax, the family drug of choice. And that helped me sleep.

Just before Christmas I was building a dog-pen for Harriett, at her new digs. After we finished the pen I went to dinner with her at one of those theatrical chop-jockey Japanese steak houses. I had some miso soup, some raw tuna over sliced cucumbers in a ponzu sauce and a sushi roll with soft-shell crab. The japanese cook was at the grill acrobatically cooking steak and shrimp and rice and veggies to the delight of a four-year old boy sitting with his Dad immediately to my left.

That's the last thing I remember until I woke up being hauled out the front door of the place by two men. I could hear some woman yelling "Call 911" behind me. The cold night air somewhat brought me back to my senses.  I was no longer unconscious. 

One of the men said  "I've never had to carry dead weight before."  Harriett gave him a dirty look

The two men set me on a bench outside the restaurant. One of the men was the dad of the four-year old boy -- he went back in to attend to his kid. The other guy stayed with me on the bench while I revived and Harriett went back in to settle the bill and to get our food to take out.

So what if the guy is dying? Get that food you paid for!

I told them I was ok, only partially a lie. No reason for an ambulance. I didn't feel like a trip to the emergency room or an overnight in the hospital, where a guy could really get sick. I've tried to stay away from the medical profession as much as possible but it's a losing battle.

I'd passed out. I'd gone face down at the table and I hadn't even been drinking or taking drugs. One second I was there and the next minute I wasn't. Like someone had shut off the switch.

After recuperating for an hour or so at Harriett's I drove home. I felt a bit like I was high on acid and I made a couple of wrong turns and ended way the fuck off course. I had difficulty understanding exactly where I was. I had some concern about losing consciousness at highway speed but I finally got to Interstate 75 and made my way home. I was out-of-body directing my body to do what it had to do.

Then, on Christmas day, I joined Harriett, the girls and their boyfriends at Harriett's place. Walking up the driveway wiped me out. I felt like I'd run a marathon out of shape. I told Harriett that I was going to check into an emergency room after I left her and the kids.

I packed a bag and drove myself to the St. Joseph's Hospital emergency room where blood was drawn, I was injected with drugs, x-rayed, shot up with iodine, imaged by a CT scanner and harangued by a hostile ER physician who treated me as if I had ruined an otherwise pleasant evening.

The hostile ER doc -- with some satisfaction -- told me I had all the signs of congestive heart failure. I already knew this. I'd recognized the symptoms. I remember them in my Father before he died of congestive heart failure twenty-five years earlier.

Death comes to me like smoke under a door. It's becoming difficult to breathe and I'm thinking that maybe I should just open the door and welcome the beast in for a few beers and a little convivial conversation.

I envy the Living but they don't seem to want to have very much to do with me. Maybe it's the stench. Or maybe it's because I'm no longer a member of their club. I can hear their weak laughter, the pounding reverb from their Techo/Industrial soundtrack and the noisy business of their continuum. But I'm outside and the weather sucks.

"I'm sorry, sir. We don't serve the dead. You're not on the list."

"Oh, yeah? Well I've been thrown out of better joints than this!"

This hasn't been a religious experience. No epiphany. Organized Faith means less now I think. This in a world where I'd already not given a shit. Metaphysics, however, may sustain. But the World's religions -- from Hekate Wicca to Sunni Muslim -- are really just a means of crowd control. As are political systems, Corporatism and HDTV.

Compliant humanity can burn in Hell. I'll be working the door. Everyone gets in.

After the new year I checked into the hospital for a little deep probing and catheterization. They sent a tv camera up an artery in my groin and into my heart. I watched it on the monitor. The Doctor leaned over and said "You're all clogged up. You need surgery".

My twins, Nikki and Rita had just turned 21. So I postponed my surgery until we could celebrate that auspicious event at the surreal Clermont Lounge, my favorite stripclub.

Harriett, my daughters Molly and the birthday girls Nikki and Rita and I were there, as well as a flock of their friends. We took up a substantial corner of the bar. The only other group flying its colors that night was an entourage of Yuppie lesbians. But around the bar, a variety of singular slimeballs of every stripe drank while Blondie stripped down to her naked brown flesh and platinum bleached pussy. The Clermont is where your mother strips. And maybe your grandmother. Blondie said "Hi, baby" to me and made lewd comments about Harriett's ass. Everyone was drunk and boisterous. And the birthday girls got a lapdance from a 60-year-old stripper they called "Carla's Mom"

My kids called her "Carla's Mom" because she looked like the mother of Molly's highschool pal Carla. She was dressed in a skimpy Little Red Ridinghood outfit and danced to "Little Red Ridinghood" (Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs). She'd quickly flash her titties and her cute little shaved vulva as she pranced for dollars.

Better to go out with fresh and pleasant memories of mortal fun than not.

The morning of my bypass the surgeon strolled into the waiting area. He looked like a movie star, perfectly coifed, manicured, composed and spotless. He'd already performed five surgeries and it wasn't even noon. Not a spot of blood anywhere on him.

I was put on a gurney and attached to an IV. My body was shaved from my ankles to my neck, leaving only the cutest little landing strip. A catheter was rammed up my urethra and a breathing tube was jammed down my throat.

Then they sent me off to Nod.

The next thing I know I'm in a very fucked-up fog. Not much color in my fisheyed vision. My hearing was asymmetrical, distorted. There was a masked nurse was in my face.

"Your surgery went very well" she said. "You had a quadruple bypass. Dr. Langford says your heart is strong and healthy." I was clogged up with unprocessed sugar and hog fat.

The day after he'd sawed through my sternum Dr. Langford, immaculate and infallible, was expounding on the red-hot trends in heart surgery game with Diane Sawyer on "Good Morning America".

Since my recovery I've discovered my scar is an object of curiousity. A chick magnet. "I'll show you my gash if you show me yours."

In my dream I'm at my grandparent's farmhouse in the rolling hills outside Appomattox, Virginia. The barn, off in the pasture, explodes into flames. It's consumed immediately and fiery embers, floating on the wind, are all around me. The embers ignite the house and I run to connect a water hose. I start hosing down the house -- it's enkindled here and there. I extinguish the fire on the porch and in the living room but there's a new fire on the roof. I smother the flames there and I notice a yellowed Sunday paper smoldering under the eaves. Thrown there, I suppose, by an errant paper-boy long ago. So I extinguish the paper.

At once there are children all around the house. They are excited and laughing. The fire is their entertainment. They dance around the house and squeal. They yip and shriek.

I seem to have put out the flames when a back-building becomes engulfed and ablaze. I run around back with the water hose, attempting to douse the fire. The children are shrill and full of furious and playful agitation. They are as volatile as the flames with their clamor and frolic.

Suddenly the water flow stops. The hose dribbles impotently and I shout "Water! Water!" to some men in the front of the house but no one can hear me because of the howling kids. As I look frantically toward the house I see that it has re-ignited and there's nothing I can do. I yell "Water!" but I'm drowned out by the voices of happy children. I turn to the kids and scream "SHUTUP!"

I wake myself up with the shout. And Harriett too.

I'm back to sleep and I'm dreaming again. I'm talking to someone. Maybe my Father, but I'm not sure. I'm explaining the meaning of the earlier dream.

"The house is my life and the fire is my disease. I'm being consumed by the illness but I'm having some small success controlling my sickness, the water representing my deliverance. The newspaper is an accounting of my life. I'm yesterday's news. After awhile it's plain that mine is a losing battle. I can't be heard over the jubilant play of the children. The children represent the the living and the healthy. They will continue their play while all that I am and was goes up in flames. I hate them for that. If only they would shut up their capricious dancing on my grave. I'm jealous of their good health and I covet their survival."

I had a doctor's appointment and I brought along my copy of "Septuagenarian Stew" to piss away the long hours of waiting built into the system. I was reading when Iris, my fifty-something doctor walked in. She's an affable woman. I liked her the first time I met her. A hopeless Liberal, she's always bitching about the corporate and bureaucratic nature of the hospital. And she talks about having a fondness for the rock 'n' roll. I suspect she has some hippie in her curriculum vitae. Probably knows my comix. But I'm not going to talk to her about that stuff. Antiquity belongs to the historians. I'm there for the medical care. I'll get some, if I'm lucky

"What are you reading?" she asked.

"Bukowski" I said.

"He wrote Factotum" she said. "I just saw the movie."

"I didn't" I said. "I read the book."

"He wrote about drinking and womanizing" she said -- almost like a question.

"And about Life and Death and all the shit in between." I said.

She was surprised to hear he was as literarily erudite as he was. I told her "He didn't care much for the beat writers -- the group he's most closely associated with. Didn't like Burroughs or Ginsberg. He thought Keroac was a Mama's boy. He liked Celine and Dostoevski and Huxley. Dos Passos and Steinbeck. Didn't care much for Robert Frost or Mailer and considered Dreiser a complete fool."

We drifted into a conversation about Flannery O'Conner and her dark and horrific stories.

I guess I like a Doctor with an interest outside the test-tube. She said she'd pick up some Bukowski and check it out.

In my dream I'm standing on a hill looking down at my life nestled in the valley below me.

I hear a familiar voice coming from the middle. She asks "Where are you now?"

"I'm with the ghosts."

I'm holding the heart of her and she whispers again "Where are you now?"

"I'm 17 with Chips, my first real Love. I'm with Cecilia -- my first wife and mother of Megan -- for six years. I'm with Francy for five passionate, combustible years. I'm with Harriett and our three babies for twenty years. I'm with Sonia trying desperately to get that final love fix.  Now it's just me."

"What do you want?" she asks.

"I want to keep what I already have. You ask too many questions. Life is all about losing what's dear to you. Harriett taught me that truth."

"How do you feel?" she asks.

"I'm not at peace. Maybe I'm hungry for what I'm becoming."

"What will you do?" she asks.

"I will continue on course, slouching toward Bethlehem."