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.