Billy’s Back in Town

The hottest movie in town is “Flatliners,” not because it’s any good, but because it’s about everyone’s favorite subject. Death.

Specifically, the film concerns what we call the near-death experience, during which one floats momentarily above one’s own lifeless body and then begins to flutter moth-like down a tunnel toward a white light at the end.

For anyone who reaches the light, death is permanent. But if for some peremptory reason you turn back, that’s near-death.

“Flatliners” expands on the theme by taking four medical students on an afterlife trip that brings them face to face with their past sins, such as the stoning of Billy Mahoney.

Billy who?

Mahoney. As the movie tells it, he was an oafish lad picked on by everyone in the neighborhood, including Kiefer Sutherland as a kid. During Kief’s near-death trip, we see him reliving his past by throwing rocks at Billy, who takes refuge in a tree.

However, alas, a rock strikes the boy in the head, killing him. Here’s the twist. Billy Mahoney follows Sutherland back from the Land of Near Death to real life and haunts him.

When Sutherland is least expecting it, there’s Billy in his face, bashing him bloody with fists, feet and a hockey stick. What a mess.

This comes as something of a disappointment, because after seeing “All That Jazz” years ago, I had assumed it was Jessica Lange who waited at the end of the tunnel, not Billy Mahoney.

That’s the trouble with death, you can’t count on it.

“Flatliners” is the kind of movie that makes up in theme what it lacks in finesse. Death fascinates us and near-death offers the compelling notion that dying, while something of a bother, may not be the end.

A bright light awaits, beyond which are green fields, sunshine, clean air and unleaded gasoline for 19 cents a gallon, praise the Lord.

Because of the movie, afterlife has been a subject of discussion on several talk shows, and the theme of at least one party, during which guests tried unsuccessfully to put themselves in a trance in hopes of experiencing near-death.

This, of course, is both foolish and dangerous, and should not be attempted without a designated live person.

I was invited to the party but didn’t attend, having already experienced near-death many times in Oakland on deadline with assistant managing editor Stanley Norton ripping pages out of my typewriter as I wrote.

Norton was a miserable old man with a rotting stomach who dragged one leg as he walked and screamed invectives at anyone within range. Worse, he sprayed the air with spittle every time he opened his mouth.

It wasn’t until after he died that we learned the old son of Satan had been suffering from tuberculosis all those years and was probably trying to take everyone with him by spewing tainted drool throughout the city room.

Because of “Flatliners” I went looking for someone who had gone to the brink of death and returned. I felt certain they were abundant in Los Angeles.

As luck would have it, I found Grace Coveney. She’s an exorcist.

I met with Grace one day in her well-appointed Calabasas condo, where she lives with her 90-year-old mother and a psychic dog. Grace is a woman in her mid-60s who is not only an exorcist but a past-life regressionist.

L.A., of course, is full of exorcists and past-life regressionists, but one rarely sees these specialties combined in one person. The closest would be an actor who simultaneously directs and produces.

Three decades ago, Grace was undergoing emergency surgery when she died. There was the obligatory tunnel and bright light, but there was more too.

At the end of the tunnel was her grandmother, a little boy, a man in uniform and an uncle. They wanted her to join them but she declined on the basis of prior commitments.

Well, sir, just as she was getting ready to return to the living, an offstage voice said: “In order to know this experience is real, your surgeon will lose a finger in a garage accident.”

Wouldn’t you know it, on the day Grace finally got out of the hospital, her sister called and said (you ready for this?) the surgeon had lost a finger in a power saw accident in his garage! Heavy.

“I believe what I saw happened,” Grace says, “and the doctor’s accident convinced me.”

I don’t doubt that at all. Everyone’s got to believe in something.

I believe in Jessica Lange at the end of the tunnel, arms outstretched. But sure as the Lord put fleas on a dog it will be Stanley Norton instead, shouting and waving his fist and spraying spit all over hell again.