It's almost midnight on a Friday, but Jaime Bayly is still happily posing for photos with audience members after his show. When the last admirer leaves, he walks slowly from the empty set to a small, bare white room nearby. He thuds his large frame into a small plastic chair and slaps his monstrously large dress shoes on the carpet. An assistant brings him a fruit punch that stains his lips blood-red.
"I'm dying," he volunteers abruptly. "I'm 45 and I've had a good life. When I was young and living in Peru, I enjoyed life as much as I could. I did a lot of drugs. I loved cocaine. It was really good for me and good for my mind. Years later you pay the price."
Michael McElroy
Bayly spars with City of Miami communication director, Angel Zayon, during a December 20 episode of Bayly.
Michael McElroy
Bayly on set of his late-night show.
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According to Bayly, that price is that his lungs and liver now barely function. (He refuses to be much more specific.) He declines almost all interviews in order to save his voice for his show. He says his doctors have told him that without a liver transplant, he has less than two years to live.
"I don't see myself waiting for a new liver," he says. "You have to get on a list and wait for some teenager to get crushed in an accident, and then you get the liver. I think that lacks dignity. I believe a writer should live and die the way he was born, with his natural vital organs."
But Bayly is not going without one last fight. He ends most shows by holding up a copy of his newest novel, You Will Die Tomorrow. Like his 12 others, the novel is a thinly veiled take on his own life. Unlike the others, it's about revenge. It is the story of a writer who learns he has only a few months to live so he sets about murdering those who have wronged him.
"I just hope that I'll be able to survive my traitors," he says. Then he wanders off into one of his signature monologues. "I won't kill them, you know. I'd love to, but I'm too lazy. [Then again] it might be worth it. I'm really excited about trying that before leaving the scene. I would love to."
As always, it's hard to tell if he's serious. Maybe it doesn't even matter. After a long and scurrilous career, "the sniper" is going out guns blazing, one way or another. He doesn't regret his career: the scandals, the questionable ethics, the tabloid love affairs. In fact, he sees himself as one of the only honest men around.
"In Peru, people are so fucking cowardly about saying what they really think or what they really are. There is so much hypocrisy and moral duplicity: one public behavior and one private behavior. And I just hate that, you know? I've seen it all my life, especially among rich, well-educated people. They are such fucking liars.
"I've made my life, my books, my public demeanor a way of challenging that," he says.
He pauses, as if to weigh the careers he's ruined and friends or lovers lost. "I don't think that they will cry when I die, but I think that maybe they will miss me for a little while. Very few people cry when you die. If you get to five people crying over your death, hey, you've been a good man. But I don't think that I'm going to make that. If I die tomorrow, I think that, in the best case, three people are going to cry. Well, maybe my mom. But even if she cries, we're still stuck at fucking four."