19

It happened on a freezing day in December, and though I’m not certain it had anything to do with what was to come, I had just read a notice in Weekly Variety about the coming relocation from Off Broadway to Broadway of a daring production of Hamlet in which the “To be or not to be” soliloquy was staged with Prince Hamlet standing at a urinal with senile old Polonius eavesdropping on him from hiding in a toilet stall. I stared blankly at the print for a while, then decided to get up, put on a thick wool sweater, cap and coat, selected the “away” message on my computer, warning that messages containing the words “elderly” or “spry” would be blocked, left my twentieth-floor condo overlooking the East River and the Brooklyn Bridge and slowly shuffled to Second Avenue and the new supermarket where Foley’s apartment used to be. Foley got Parkinson’s and died in the charity hospital on Welfare Island. A light, fluttering snow had begun to fall and I cupped my hands to my mouth and yelled up at the ghost of Foley’s front window, “Hey, Tommmmmyyyyyy! It’s El Bueno! Come on down! Let’s play handball and then dunk at Kip’s Bay!” People walked past me in both directions. No one looked at me. This was New York. The swirling snowflakes grew thicker, some landing on my eyes and making me blink as I kept squinting up with longing for the childhood I wanted back, and when I lifted my hands for another shout, suddenly my arms felt so weak I had to let them drop. Light-headed. Trouble breathing. And now a numbness in my arm, my left side, pins and needles, and then this pain in my chest. I took a wobbly step forward, then another, and the next thing I was aware of was hearing a distant voice—a paramedic’s, I was told—saying quietly, “I think he’s dead,” and the very next second I was speeding through a narrow, pitch-black tunnel toward this brilliant white light—so much brighter than anything I’d ever seen—at the end of it, just like I’d read in a bunch of books in the “El Bueno Supernatural Book Club,” which said also that as soon as I got to the light my whole past life was going to flash before me—every good thing, every bad thing—in just a few seconds and that I was going to be judged, but then someone must have put on the brakes because before that could happen I was waking up in Bellevue’s Intensive Care ward looking dumber and even more confused than my wont. The rest I guess you’ve pretty much heard, except I really had died and been resuscitated, no biggie, then was moved to a ward deemed far more friendly to my at-times unusual statements and behavior. Another ride on the Cyclone.

Now we plunge.