Stunning

Maybe it was the kosher meal of spaghetti and meat sauce that almost killed me, but who knows? It was actually pretty good. Like artisan Chef Boyardee, but with a Rabbi's blessing. If you're a Jew in Los Angeles, you're familiar with Cedars Sinai hospital and any yid in the know will tell you that the kosher meals are better than the regular. Supposedly the same is true on airplanes, not that there are meals on flights anymore. I think that pasta was the first solid food I had in nine days or maybe it was just the first meal I had out of intensive care, I don't remember. But I do remember what happened an hour after, which was that I started bleeding internally or to put it in layman's terms, blood started pouring out of my ass. And Italian food usually agrees with me.

Intensive care had been aptly named, and my nine days there a blur, save for a few unimaginably painful highlights. I'd had open heart surgery, and because I was a long-term addict my tolerance for opiates was too high for the pain medication to be effective, so I just screamed for three days, my freshly cut sternum manifesting as a vicious hell pain in my back. Not back pain, like "Oh, I've got a bad back." Back pain like, we just sawed your chest in half wood shop style, then stapled it back together and good luck to you, my friend. When they save your life, you don't complain but you do wail and beg for mercy. A few days later, I was given propofol, the Michael Jackson drug, and finally got some relief. I had a vision that I was in the high grass in Vietnam, the tall green stalks swaying in the helicopter wind. It was a day or two after that I ate the spaghetti and all hell broke loose.

Some say they have a white light experience when death comes calling but that was not the case for me. As the blood left my body, I was overtaken with an inner hysteria, the likes of which I’d never felt before and have never felt since. The life force was draining out of me, but as opposed to begging the doctors to save my life, I cried "Please, please, put me out!" I didn't know if I'd live or die, but whatever the outcome I didn't want to be awake for it. The next thirty-six hours are a story for others to tell, and legend has it my ex-wife collapsed in my brother's arms when they told her they weren't sure they could save me.

See, they couldn't clamp the bleeding and so they just kept me on a loop transfusion, sixteen pints worth, twice the amount of blood in my body. This fuck-up of a stomach doc didn't have his shit together and to make matters worse he punctured my duodenum, trying to get the job done. Then some miracle worker came in from another angle and stopped the bleeding and off to emergency surgery I went. I finally came to in a white room two days later. If you had told me I was in the bardo, I wouldn’t have questioned it, and it was only when a nurse came in that I knew I was still on this side of the line. I asked to see my wife, and no word I have ever uttered had as much meaning as that one did in that moment.

The next two months were challenging to say the least. I was fed through my arm and wasn’t allowed to drink water, which had me half insane and I would plead with passing strangers to bring me a cup, my brain and body desperate to be quenched. Too nauseous to lay down, I sat in a chair for half of April, all of May and then some. The days were an onslaught of tests and regret, and the evenings worse. It was the dark night of the soul on repeat. If it weren’t for the love and loyalty of my brother and wife, I don’t know what.

June 14th, 2007. That’s when I finally went home after 66 days in the hospital. 9 1/2 weeks and no Kim Basinger to make it worth my while. But I got something even better than the blonde. I got to kiss death on the mouth. They didn’t shove their tongue down my throat, but I felt their lips and smelled their breath. It is so beautiful to be taken down to zero like that. To be that intensely miserable for that long with no way out. If you want to have a profound spiritual experience there is nothing like a giant cannon of your own weakness aimed right at your face.

"Give up all hope of fruition.” That’s a Buddhist expression and it’s a good one. When I got out of the hospital, I had done exactly that or maybe it had been done for me. I was on 180 milligrams of methadone and sleeping ‘til three in the afternoon, the scar down my chest and belly as fresh and red as just slaughtered beef. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I had been cured of myself through loss and suffering. Not fully cured, but relieved of a few essential illusions. I'm not even sure what those illusions are, I just know that I've been relieved of them. That I have crossed the threshold and been to the bottom of the well and that the darkness is stunning— Especially if you’re able to climb out.