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herself. These things were caused by stress. She'd certainly caused me enough stress lately.
    That cunt, she was killing me!
    Dr. Hoffman appeared with the X rays. He dropped them into a wall panel and backlit them. Worse than I thought. The left lung had at least ten blotches on it, some as big as a quarter. When the doctor looked at me, I held my breath, what was left of it.
    “Negative.”
    “Negative what?”
    Negative, I was clean.
    “But the blotches?”
    “Gas.”
    “Gas?”
    “Gas.”
    “Gas?”
    “Gas.”
    “But what about the cough? I don't have a cold. Surely—”
    “An allergy, probably to smog.”
    “Whuh?”
    Ten percent of Angelenos had it, he said. The filthy air caused the allergy, which caused postnasal drip, which got in my throat,which made me cough. I should clean my nostrils with warm water every morning and night, maybe use a nasal spray, the cough would go away.
    Was he certain? “Couldn't it be—”
    “Get out of here.”
    As happy as I was about keeping my lungs, I was also a little embarrassed. I'd gotten that from my father, who was a doctor and used to bitch about all the crackpots who'd call him in the middle of the night complaining about painful hiccups. I was going to live, though, and to celebrate my good fortune, I decided to stop at Johnny Rockets on the way home for a double cheeseburg and a chocolate shake. On little Santa Monica I saw an enormous woman coming out of a fitness center. She was stuffed into a shiny, metallic aerobics outfit that made her look like a fat robot. A block farther I saw a muscular man dressed ghoulishly in a black bodysuit, wearing a black bonnet, his face covered by a black scarf. He was doing pirouettes on roller skates in the middle of the intersection and he stared at me as I drove by, and he seemed like Death, and I'd just wriggled free of him, and he didn't look happy.
    Something occurred to me: What if it wasn't gas in the X rays? Hoffman wasn't a radiologist. How could he be so sure? Besides, I knew, cancer didn't always show up on X rays. Only if it was in the advanced stages. Good God, what if the tumor was so big he didn't even notice it? What if he was looking for peas and staring at a melon? Then the shame again. Hoffman was a doctor, I was a fucking idiot.
    I normally didn't do writerly things in public, such as taking a pad and pen to a coffeehouse, and I always felt a little embarrassed for those who did. It seemed pretentious and calculated and Hemingwayishbecause, really, who the hell could do good work with twenty-five other pseudo-bohemians sitting around them using words like “masturbatory” and “bourgeois”? That said, it was midafternoon and I was the only one sitting at the Johnny Rockets counter, so I thought, What the hell? I ran out to the car and got my script and I started editing while I waited for my burger.
    My server was a couple years younger than me and he was dressed in a fifties-style malt shop outfit complete with a white paper hat, straight out of an
Archie
comic book. I felt sorry for him. When he saw me editing, he asked if I was a writer, which was embarrassing because of what I just mentioned, but, as I said, he was standing there in a hamburg flipper uniform, so I fessed up.
    “Anything I would've heard of?”
    “No.”
    “Kind of stuff?”
    “Urn …”
    “Film, TV?”
    “Film.”
    “Me too.”
    This was depressing.
    “Sold anything yet?”
    “Not yet.”
    “Me neither,” he said. “But I will. And when I do, I'm gonna kick ass. Know why?”
    I lifted my chin.
    “I've written
three
action spec scripts, and they all have the same lead character.”
    “Same one.”
    “See, if I could just sell the first one, I've got two sequels lined up back to back.”
    I stared at this lunatic, my waiter.
    “Could you please get me the mustard?”
    He did, but hung around as I ate, telling me about his other four unsold spec scripts and asking if I knew anyone who would read them. He also rattled