Driving home from Norman Spinrad’s New Year’s Eve party at which I finally met Cass Elliot—as invigorating an experience as one could wish for the dawn of a new year—skimming the crusty ’67 Camaro with its 56,000+ miles of dead years in its metal bones through Beverly Hills. KFAC was working Ravel’s Bolero. Not tired, it was still early for a New Year’s Eve, something like one o’clock.
Thinking.
No. Woolgathering. (THE AMERICAN HERITAGE DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE, p. 1473, col. 2: woolgathering n. Absent-minded indulgence in fanciful daydreams.) That’s what I was doing: woolgathering.
Frequently, that’s how my writer’s mind conceives plots for stories, or more accurately, concepts for stories. The unconscious computer makes a storage bank search of idle thoughts looking for linkages, cross-references, points of similarity. When it finds something interesting, it checks it against all the muddle and mud swirling around in the cortex, and comes up with something that makes a story.
The elements this time were these:
1972 is gone. It’s a new year. 1973. Another year.
One year older. Moving on up the road toward the grave just the way old Camaro is moving on up the road to Beverly Glen. Traveling the road.
Harry Truman is gone. I miss him. Salty old Harry who told them all to go fuck themselves. Ten years ago he said he wouldn’t die for at least ten more because he had ten years work still to do in the Truman Library in Independence, Missouri. Ten years later, all the work done, almost to the month, he died. Did he know?
Could I know when I’m going to die?
Will I get to finish all the stories I have to write?
Will I suddenly get rammed by a Pontiac Grand Am at the next light, centerpunched into an early oblivion?
When will I die?
New Year’s Eve is a good time to think about it.
So. This column.
Thinking about when I’ll die. Mortality is the subject.
I will die in 1973. Here is how it happened.
I went to New York to be guest of honor at a science fiction convention called the Lunacon. To amortize the cost of the trip I accepted several lecture gigs in surrounding areas. So I went into Manhattan two weeks before the convention. I had just returned from speaking at Dartmouth, and was staying with my friend Max Katz, the Sesame Street segment director, in his Penthouse G on East 65th Street. Max and Karen were out when I taxied in from Kennedy International, and after putting away my overnight case I found the note they’d left for me: We went to dinner at The Proof of the Pudding. If you get in by nine, join us. Love, M&K.
I looked at my watch. It was 9:28. Still time to meet them for a piece of Key West lime pie. I left the apartment and took the elevator to the lobby. The street was quiet and pleasant with an April breeze. I started to walk down 65th to First Avenue, carefully avoiding the piles of dog shit.
Two guys in Army field jackets were coming toward me, up the street. I instinctively tensed. I was in New York and could not forget that Karen had had her purse ripped off her shoulder in broad daylight in front of Bloomingdale’s, in front of hordes of people who would not help her as she struggled with the snatcher. New York was not what it had been when last I’d lived there, in 1961.
As they came toward me they parted so I could walk between them. I guess I knew in my gut what was about to happen. They swung on me and jammed me against the brick wall of the poodle-clipping joint down the street from Max’s building. They both had knives.
“Gimme your wallet,” one of them said, not even lowering his voice. He pushed his knife against my collarbone. The other one smelled of fish.
I remembered a way I’d confounded a mugger many years before. I began mumbling unintelligibly in what was supposed to be a foreign tongue, waving my hands feebly as if I didn’t understand English.
“Your money, motherfucker…I’ll shove this in your fucking throat!”
I rolled my eyes wildly and continued babbling.
A group of people had come out of Max’s apartment building, were turning toward us. “Come on,” said the one who smelled of fish. “You cocksucker!” the one with the knife at my collarbone said.
They let go and moved off. I took two steps and felt broiler-sizzling pain. I tried to turn against the pain and saw that the one who had done all the talking…he hadn’t walked away…no, he had spun and come back at me. He had driven the knife deep into my back, below my right shoulderblade. It got worse. Doors slammed in my head. Everything went silver. I fell to my knees and said something unintelligible, filled with bloody bubbles of spit.
The group from Max’s building walked past me. I fell down and lay there. In a little while I died.
Max and Karen came home from dinner and didn’t find out I’d been killed outside their building till the next afternoon. Karen cried, the Lunacon had a minute of silence for me, and my replacement, Isaac Asimov, said dear good things about me, better than I deserved.
I died on April 19th, 1973.
I will die in 1981. Here is how it happened.
I was living in Perthshire, in Scotland. I had had a bad cold for weeks. I was living alone. The girl who had been staying with me had gone away. I was writing DIAL 9 TO GET OUT at last. My big novel. The one that would finally break my name into the memory books of great writers. It had taken me ten years to get to it. I was deep in the writing. I didn’t eat regularly, I’ve never been one for cooking for myself. I developed pneumonia in that handsome old farmhouse.
It killed me. I never finished the book. My stories were read for a few years, but soon went out of vogue.
No one in that little Scottish town understood that as I lay there, doped up and dying, that the pathetic movements of my hands were my attempts to convey to the nurse or the doctor that I wanted my typewriter, that I wanted more than anything, more than even life, to finish that book.
I died on December 11th, 1981.
I will die in 1986. Here is how it happened.
ALL THE LIES THAT ARE MY LIFE had been published in March. Book-of-the-Month Club had taken it as its April selection. The film rights were being negotiated by Marty. It looked to be the best year I’d ever had.
I was on a publicity tour for the book, fresh from a talk show over holovid. Oh, yes, I should mention holovid. After two-dimensional-depth television, Westinghouse developed “feelie,” a rather euphemistic name for projected video, giving the vague impression of the actual presence in your living room of the actors. Then the cable people in conjunction with LaserScience, Ltd. of Great Britain combined holograms with 3-D projection techniques and came up with holovid, in which the viewer actually became a part of the show or studio audience.
I was in Denver, preparing to be choppered over to the studio, when I fell ill. I was using depilatory on my beard in the hotel suite’s bathroom when I felt dizzy and suddenly keeled over. The publisher’s rep and the PR woman heard me crash and came running. They got me to the hospital where the phymech took readings. (A phymech is a robot physician, used primarily for running physicals and determining the nature of the illness. Lousy bedside manner, but they’ve cut down the incidence of improper analysis by eighty percent over their human counterparts.)
The judgment was cancer of the stomach.
I went into surgery the next morning. It had spread, running wild, not even the anti-agapic drugs would work. I was listed as terminal. Perhaps two weeks, the last five of those days heavily sedated against the pain. It was a shame: the Cancer Society was on the verge of a major breakthrough. Had I lived another five years, I’d have seen cancer become no more serious than the flu.
I spent the last two weeks in a hospital bed, a typewriter propped on a little table. The newspapers came and did their interviews briefly…I was abrupt with them, I’m afraid. I didn’t have too much time to talk, I had things to write.
I finished my last novel in that bed, but the final twenty thousand words were rather garbled, I was so drugged, going in and out of consciousness. But I finished it, and was saved the horror of having another writer complete the work from my notes.
When I died, I was not unhappy. I rather regretted being denied those last twenty years, though. I had such stories to write.
I died on my birthday, May 27th, 1986.
I died in 1977 when a right-winger shot me because I’d done an article in World magazine on President Agnew, and how he should be indicted as a criminal for the war in Brazil.
I died in 1979 in a plane crash in Sri Lanka. I was on my way to see Arthur Clarke. We were going to go scuba diving off the coast of coral. The plane exploded; I never knew what hit me. My fourth wife got the flight insurance.
I died in 1982 during the worst blizzard the East Coast had ever seen. I froze to death in my car on a lonely Connecticut road where I’d run out of gas. Some asshole suggested that because I’d been frozen, they might try to preserve me cryonically for restoration later. Fortunately, he was ignored.
I died in 1990 from a sudden, massive coronary. I was sitting at home on a Sunday afternoon and felt the slam of it, and had just a moment to realize I was dying the same way my father had died. But he never had a U.S. postage stamp commemorating his achievements.
I died in 1998 from ptomaine poisoning in a seafood restaurant in the undersea resort city of Cayman. They had to wait three weeks to ship my carcass out; it would have been simpler to turn me into fish food and let my soul wander the Cayman Trench. I always hated the lack of imagination of Those in Power.
I died in 2001 on my way back from Sweden. I died very peacefully, in my sleep, on board the catamaran-cruiser Farragut, somewhere in mid-Atlantic. I died with a smile on my face, lying in bed, holding the Nobel Prize for Literature to my chest like a teddy bear.
I died in 2010 from weary old age, surrounded by grandchildren and old friends who remembered the titles of my stories. I didn’t mind going at all, I was really tired.
Hey! You! The skinny sonofabitch with the scythe, I’m over here…Ellison. I saw you looking at me out of the corner of that empty socket in your skull-face, you sleazy eggsucker. Well, listen, m’man, understand this: since I know I’m going straight to Hell anyhow, and since I’ve always lived with the feeling that Heavens and Hells are sucker traps for the slowwitted and one should get as much goodie as one can while one is breathing, you’d better get used to the idea that you’re going to have to come and get me when my time’s up. Kicking and screaming, you blade-boned crop-killer. Hand to hand or at gunpoint, you’re going to have to fight me for my life.
Because I’ve got too much stuff yet to do, too many stories yet to write, too many places I’ve never seen, too many books I’ve never read, too many women to admire, and too many laughs yet to cry. So don’t think I’ll be a cheap acquisition, clatterframe! And if you do get me, I’ll be the damnedest POW you ever saw. I’ll try and escape, and if I can’t, I’ll send back messages.
And it’ll drive your boney ass crazy, Mr. D., because I’ll be the first one to write about what it’s like over there in your country.