It was one p.m. and we were out on the deck eating barbecued yellowtail and drinking beer. Milo was back from a week in Honolulu, where he’d managed to preserve a skim-milk pallor. Bad light brings out the worst of his complexion – the lumps, the acne pits, the scowl lines, gravity tugging at mastiff jowls. Today’s light was glorious but the best it could do was obscure the rough spots.

Despite that and the ugliest aloha shirt I’d ever seen, he looked good. None of the twitches and split-second winces that betray his attempt to hide the pain in his shoulder.

The shirt was a riot of puce elephants, aqua camels, and ocher monkeys on a sea of olive-green rayon that clung to his kettledrum torso.

The Hawaiian trip had followed a twenty-nine-day stay in the hospital: recuperating from a dozen shotgun pellets embedded in his left arm and shoulder.

The shooter, an obsessive psychopath, was dead, sparing everyone the nuisance of a trial. Milo had dismissed his own injuries as “a stupid goddamn flesh wound.” I’d seen the X-rays. Some of the pellets had missed his heart and lung by millimeters. One chunk of deer shot was too deep to remove without causing serious muscle injury, hence the winces and twitches.

Despite all that, only a three-day hospitalization had been projected. On the second day, a staph infection set in and he ended up on antibiotic drips for nearly a month. Sequestered on the VIP floor because he lived with Dr. Rick Silverman, director of the E.R.

Bigger rooms and better food didn’t help where it counted. His fever ran high and at one point his kidney function didn’t look good. Eventually, he pushed through and started griping about the accommodations and the twenty-one-year-old actress in the corner suite up the hall. Her official diagnosis was “Exhaustion.” The hospital’s detox director had virtually moved in.