In the early 1980s Dirk Whittenborn fell ill from a virus contracted in Indonesia. For years he attributed the sickness to drug abuse, so logically enough, he treated the symptoms with more drug abuse. “I was taking cocaine homoeopathically, anything to feel better,” he says, sitting in the residents’ lounge of the Clarence Hotel, smoking like a chimney, his boyish good looks still intact.

We’re here to talk about Whittenborn’s new novel Fierce People, and along the way touch on his time as a comedy writer/script doctor, buddy of John Belushi and veteran of New York’s uptown-downtown scenes in the 1980s. But we’ll cover the case history later. Right now I want you to hear him describe the Rubicon he had to cross in order to get back from the realm of the nearly dead to the land of the living; 14 hours on the slab, having his calcified heart peeled like an orange.

“I had this terrible heart operation, and they did things to me out of the Spanish Inquisition,” he says. “They sawed me open from here to here, big scar, ripped my ribs apart. They wanted to see if my heart was really diseased or if it was calcified, protected. I was told I had a one in three chance of dying, one in three chance of having an artificial heart and a one in three chance of making a miraculous recovery.

“But I’ll never forget they did this one thing where they lie you on a table and they go, ‘Now lie perfectly still or you’ll bleed to death’. And they proceed to put these wire tubes, like snakes you’d use to clean out a toilet, in your artery here, down the neck, and in the artery you have on the inside of your thigh, and they could see what was going on in each ventricle of my heart. They can’t anaesthetise your heart, but they need a tissue sample, so they would flick out these little blades and snip it. Imagine someone taking a razor blade to your palm – that’s what it felt like.

“And there was a student, a guy from India, had a turban on, and they wanted to teach him how do it, ’cos it’s kind of a rare procedure. And he kept losing the tissue sample and I’m laughing, going, ‘Are we kidding about the bleeding to death?’ ’cos it was the only way I could get through it. Finally the guy got it on the third try. But with so many things, it’s like, ‘How do you get through this shit if you can’t make a joke about it?’”

So what was the recovery period like?

“I was like a 15-year-old, I couldn’t drive a car, I couldn’t run for eight, nine months. Having sex was risky; you’re thinking you might die at any moment. (Laughs) And you feel so bad but you feel so good to be alive. And it hurt to laugh, but it was so good to be alive and laughing that you didn’t mind that it hurt so much and your ribs were so sore.”

Fierce People is related in the wry voice of its chief protagonist Finn, the fifteen-year-old smart-ass son of a recovering coke-addict single mom. For once the blurb on the back cover gets it right, namechecking Salinger and Fitzgerald, although one might also throw in Rick Moody’s The Ice Storm: the tale takes place in the dysfunctional family fallout of the snowed-in late ’70s, when flower child libertarianism got soured by the bitter realities facing the boomers. Following the last great party of the century, before sex and drugs equated with death and decrepitude, the fortunate few abandoned downtown lofts for gated estates in the suburbs, while the rest, like Finn’s Mom, struggled to make do, raising their young in the ruins of their utopian ideals.

On the face of it, it’s hard to see how Whittenborn’s heart operation could’ve had any bearing on this sardonic tale, but he maintains it did.

“All of that experience, which was about 11 years ago, really prepared me to write this,” he explains, “because if the novel works or fails or whatever degree of success it has, it is in sustaining that humour. That ability to laugh at life was very present in my mind trying to do that.”

The son of a neuro-psychopharma-cologist, Whittenborn says he used to tell stories to cheer up his sisters and alleviate an otherwise neurotic and lonely childhood. After leaving school he published a couple of novels before graduating to writing skits for Saturday Night Live. The atmosphere on the set at that time was akin to early Rolling Stone, or perhaps more accurately Creem magazine, a madcap lab where the crazyheads were allowed to run the asylum.

“I only really worked on Saturday Night Live for a minute,” Dirk says, “but I worked on a lot of other projects with them, and it interested me more to do the riskier things. Like there was this sketch called ‘Kitty Swim School’ that I always wanted to get on the show, I did it in a movie called Mondo Video where I taught 27 cats to swim at a swimming pool. Adolescent humour, but it was kinda funny.”

It sounds more like Jackass than Jackass.

“It was ahead of its time in that regard. There was that feeling a lot, not just on Saturday Night Live but in New York at the time, the city was kinda going bankrupt, New York was like Baghdad, it was just before Giuliani cleaned it up, it was wild, anything went. And of course there was still stuff left to parody then. I mean how are you ever gonna parody George Bush? I think the death of parody was having an actor become president, Ronald Reagan. The truth was funnier than anything you could invent, and more absurd.”

Whittenborn’s best buddy and mentor throughout the late ’70s was the late John Belushi, legendary comic actor, professional enfant terrible, punk patron and the first guy to get moshing on national American television. So, was Belushi a comic genius who died too soon, or was he a spent force by the time he speedballed his way into oblivion in January 1982?

“John, like a lot of people, was immensely talented but I don’t think he achieved one tenth of what he could,” Whittenborn says. “He was an incredibly gifted actor, he could do anything; he just had this innate skill. I don’t think he understood it at all. He was a very naïve guy. And he was disillusioned: there was a sadness to John; he didn’t just want to be the fat funny man.

“But I remember John began to talk more and more about deals. I was once at a meeting with him and a bunch of people and he goes, ‘First we make the deal, then we talk about what we’re gonna do’. And I was like, ‘Wow, that’s so unhealthy’. Certain things he should’ve done. When Milos Forman was putting together Ragtime he wanted John to play Houdini, and he said to him, ‘You’re gonna lose 60lb, Houdini was a great guy, he was an incredible athlete and I want to centre the picture around him’. I’m not privy to all the economics of it, but because John wasn’t getting top billing he didn’t do the deal. I always felt that movie might’ve saved John’s life because it would’ve been on another artistic level. And then he did just another straightforward comedy that trapped him.”

These days Whittenborn subsists on what he calls a “poor man’s speedball” of cigarettes, coffee, Diet Coke and Nutrasweet. When did he clean up his act?

“I stopped doing drugs in ’87. But there were extenuating circumstances to my own drug use. There’s no excuse, cocaine’s a pernicious drug, but I didn’t know I had this virus, I caught it about ’79, ’80. I thought I just had terrible dysentery and parasites and I went and got that treated, but it got worse and worse. And cocaine was around and I was just doing it to sustain myself and keep writing. And when you’re writing and high all the time, bad thing.

“But in the late ’70s sex was safe and cocaine wasn’t addictive. I’ve always thought if cocaine looked or smelled like shit, even if it wasn’t white, if it didn’t have that thing of cleanliness to it, it wouldn’t have been nearly as popular. People were always going, ‘Well, this isn’t addictive’. Of course it’s wildly addictive, but that didn’t come out in the papers until after you did it for about four years and developed a big habit. And if you’re a kid making money, what are you going to spend it on? It was stay up late, party and girls. Also for me, I was so young, right out of college, and all these people I met who were really successful were doing blow and I was like, ‘Well, I guess that’s one of the seven steps to success, that’s the way a writer lives’.

“But I quit drugs and I just went into hibernation rather than resort to some 12-step programme. Not putting them down, but a lot of people who gave up that life and got sober, they became incredibly boring. There was a wonderment to that time where your life was an adventure, you’d stay up late and you wouldn’t come home for two days. You’d wake up in some strange chick’s house and they’d go to work and you’d be alone and you’d look around and read their diaries and shit. It would be a window into a complete stranger’s life, pre-AIDS and all that. You felt like an anthropologist, and as a writer it was just great raw material.”

Did he frequent that great monument of coke-addled hubris, Studio 54?

“I was there the opening night. I mean, to think the nightclub everyone went to had a huge moon which would be lowered, and the moon would snort cocaine! It was just done openly everywhere. And the levels of sex: they had these rooms in the basement where things went on. It was a different time, y’know, it wasn’t cool to be rich then. It was a time when rich people didn’t get past the velvet rope, they were kept waiting. I found a life in New York where the wilder and more original you were, if you ate eggs with scissors, stuff like that, you were cool. This sort of alternative life really flourished, and what got you past the velvet rope was being really beautiful, really exotic, really crazy; if you were a guy wearing a dress on roller skates, you got in.

“There was a moment at the end of the ’70s, and John loved you for it, if you’d say no to people, he’d say, ‘Great – what you say no to?!’ It was just this time where people liked you for being rebellious and wild and irreverent, busting self-important people in public. And that changed in the ’80s.”

It sounds like American Gigolo meets Caligula; like Dali’s New York…

“It was exactly that, people would walk a lobster. I set the book just a few years after Studio 54 opened, because I really think that moment, around 1978, is when ass-licking became networking. It’s curious that that was the time just when Ralph Lauren launched that look, American WASP, and managed to sell it to the rest of the world over the next two decades. And it was amazing, people you knew from the Mudd Club got rich off that downtown world and became very successful and suddenly started talking to you about, ‘I want to get my daughter a pony, I wanna start having her be part of a pony club’. They suddenly became grander, and money became more and more important.”

New money and inherited wealth are subjects that fascinate Dirk Whittenborn. After finishing Fierce People he got involved, helping his nephew to make a documentary entitled Born Rich, about the offspring of folk who are not so much well heeled as wearing platforms of Gene Simmons proportions.

“The kids in the movie are pretty interesting,” he says, “everyone from Bloomberg’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, the director of Microsoft’s kid who is 18 years old and goes to World Trade Organisations to protest and has been arrested six to 12 times. Hats off to that kid, at least he’s trying to change the world.”