Sweet Bypass Blues

I am lying in a bed at Good Samaritan Hospital in one of those gowns that does not cover your behind, when a medical assistant at the foot of my bed says, “OK, let’s go.” I say, “I’ve changed my mind.”

“Sure you have,” he says, loading me onto a gurney. I have already been sedated so I have no strength to rise up and punch him in the mouth, which is my tendency.

“One of these days,” I say to my wife, Cinelli, as they wheel me down the hall toward surgery, “I am going to come back and beat the crap out of him.”

She is walking beside me holding my hand, as she has always held my hand when times have not been good for me.

“He’s pretty big,” she whispers. “Maybe you should just plan on writing the crap out of him.”

I am sinking deeper into a kind of twilight world, but I do remember thinking as we approach the operating room there are familiar elements here for something creative, but I can’t focus on what that might be.

My surgeon is a preppy young doctor from a famous family; another cardiologist is a cute, perky woman with a Peter Pan haircut. A third is a French-Canadian with Paul Newman eyes, and the anesthesiologist is a hip guy who wears a gold chain around his neck and speaks jive.

Then it hits me. “My God,” I say to Cinelli, half-rising from the gurney, “this is a television series and they’re wheeling me onto a sound stage.”

“I’ll call your agent,” she says, kissing me gently. Tears shine in her eyes. The door of the operating room opens.

“I wonder if I’ll be any taller,” I call back, as the world I knew before closes behind me. “They say some people get taller after a bypass. . . .”

I did not come casually to this moment. I hurtled downhill from a place where I smoked cigarettes, drank martinis, ate cows and floated in seas of sauces and whipped cream.

Two of my arteries were clogged and they weren’t going to get suddenly unclogged. Miracles don’t work for me. That was proved beyond doubt when Cinelli and I spent overnight in Lourdes once while driving through France. Where others were being cured at the grotto, I got the flu.

I remember Cinelli saying, “I don’t know what somebody’s trying to tell you, but I wouldn’t ever count on God or Bernadette for quick cures if I were you.”

“It’s no screaming emergency,” the surgeon at Good Sam was saying, “but don’t wait until Christmas to have it done.”

“All right,” I said, “let’s do it.” I felt like Walter Mitty before the firing squad. To hell with the blindfold.

“Just one thing,” I said to the cardiologist. “No country-Western music.”

I had just seen the film “The Doctor,” in which the cardiologist performed surgery to a background of spit-kickin’ music. If anything went wrong, I didn’t want to die with “Okie from Muskogee” running through my fading subconscious.

“I don’t do the procedure to music,” he said, peering at me through round, wire-rimmed glasses.

When he left I turned to Cinelli. “Thank God, it’s a procedure, not actual surgery where they have to cut you open.”

“You keep bugging them,” she said, “it’ll be a barbecue.”

The surgery, I mean procedure, involved three major risks, the cardiologist with the Peter Pan haircut had said to me earlier. I don’t remember the other two, but one of them was death.

“We have to say that,” she said, “but I don’t think it will be a problem in your case.”

She was right. I emerged from the anesthesia cursing the tubes in my nose, my chest and in other areas I do not choose to mention. There is a healing quality to rage. I will not go gentle into that good night.

Also, I did not hallucinate, which was supposed to be a post-procedural problem. At least I don’t think I did. Sometimes I’m not sure where reality ends and hallucinations begin. That’s why they made me a columnist.

Was I afraid? Everyone’s afraid of something. Darkness, pain, memories, the thought of Jerry Brown somehow winning the presidency. My only fear is that I might actually learn to like tofu.

I don’t mean to minimize heart bypasses. It’s serious business and should not be tried at home on your little friends.

But it’s over for me, and I feel like an old alley cat, back prowling the streets again. You helped. You sent cards and left phone messages. You said, “Come back, old alley cat. Dance under the moon again.”

I’ve been given another chance, one more dance in L.A. It’s a kind of renewal, so I’ll end this column the way I ended the first I ever wrote, with one variation:

Good morning. My name is Martinez. I write. Still.