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poultry). Each miracle lasted less than one minute at a charge of twenty-five dollars per. Labo would pluck wet darkness from Andy’s brain and arm and chest but mostly from the towel with which he wiped his hands. “He actually seemed to be getting better at first,” said Lynne. “He believed it was magic. He was eating, we were taking walks, everything was going great. But then, all of a sudden, he just went down.” Zmuda flew over at right about that time to surprise them, which worked, and Andy was buoyant, then faltered again. Zmuda would recall, “Lynne and I told him at one point, ‘Why don’t you become Tony? Tony couldn’t be sick.’ And he summoned whatever energy he had left and Tony stepped out of the wheelchair—‘Hey, how’re doin’? Where’s the chickies….’ And then he collapsed again. For a minute there, we thought Clifton had cured him.” Convulsions started a few days later and Lynne said it was time to go home.

George and Linda and Elayne met them at the airport on April 28 and saw that there was now less of him and what there was of him moved more deliberately. Linda would recall, “He was really trying to walk normal. I went over and took his arm to help him and he told me, ‘I’m cured.’” They got him back to the Pacific Palisades house (where John Gray had stayed during their absence due to marital separation) and, there, he denied reality—his unparalleled forte—for as long as he could muster strength to do so. “He came back worse than ever,” said Rubins. One day, he rallied suddenly and went with Elayne to see three movies in a row which was fun up until sometime during the third one. Also, he briefly flew with Lynne to Denver and back to have crystals laid upon him. But, on May 7, he was admitted to Cedars-Sinai for controlled care and radiation and heavy dosages of Demerol for the pain. He went home five days later (hated the hospital) and Michael and Carol and Mommy and Daddy promptly arrived because there wasn’t much life left. He was home for only a couple of days.

“Don’t worry,” Michael told him, saying something/anything.

It was time to go back to the hospital.

“I’m not worried!” he snapped.

He went back to the eighth floor VIP wing.

He was registered under the name Nathan McCoy.

Nathan Richards = unctious happy oblivious man.

Kid McCoy = cut the kidding, Pearl would say.

May 16, 6:20 something P.M

Suite was very large. They were scattered in various corners dozing. They had been awake, it seemed, for days. Watching. Waiting. Mommy and Daddy and Michael and Carol and Lynne, they all nodded, eyelids leaden. Linda stood beside the bed, giving him moisture, dipping a cloth into the water, then onto his lips. His brain, hours earlier, fell into ether. Not long before that, however, he and Michael had sung a little piece of a song together. Mostly, for days, he had faded in and faded out and now he had faded out but he breathed through chapped lips, which Linda dampened.

Then his eyes opened and he gasped, but it was a rattle more than a gasp. Linda said/knew it was the death rattle. She woke them up and they came to the bed and each one took a part of him, held a part of him—a hand, a foot, a leg. Lynne pressed her mouth to his forehead. Stanley and Michael and Carol tried coaxing him back—“Come on, Andy, you can stay with us! You can stay!” Janice stroked him serenely. And they all said they loved him. Then Michael said, “Bye, Andy. Have a great trip.” And they cried. Because there was nothing left to do. And at twenty-seven minutes past the hour, he had finished.

But his eyes stayed open.

And when a nurse tried to close them, they opened again.

Elayne came in from the lounge down the hall.

She stared into those eyes that would not concede.

“I remembered a reviewer’s words,” she would later write. “‘This guy doesn’t know when to get off.’”

Linda stayed alone in the room with him as the others wandered away to find sense and reason. “I turned the television on to the news because I thought Andy might get a sort of weird kick out of having the news reporting his death while his body was lying