Frank Borchard, a successful Hollywood producer and the ""Sammy that's running"" is forced to stop when he has a massive heart attack, actually an arrest from which he is brought back alive to find that he no longer wants to live with himself -- that is his former self. With the memories of those he'd screwed and/or shafted. Disappearing just before the ""saphenous vein transplant"" he needs (there's lots of advanced surgery here), he gets exposed to that higher satori serene side of existence at a Center -- his wife will go there too -- before he has his bypass operation which guarantees his physical existence. Lots of altered states, right before your eyes, but none of them lasting any longer than next New Year's resolution in what is essentially a pop novel clutching at various kinds of psychosexual experiences.