''And if a guy wanted to indulge himself in great hyperbole in that circumstance, who wouldn't forgive him? But that was perfect, the simplicity of that. ''Here's a guy looking right down the barrel of the gun,'' he said. Weeks later, Letterman was still struck by the reply. ''How much you're supposed to enjoy every sandwich,'' Zevon answered. Letterman asked Zevon if his condition had taught him anything about life and death. But there's certainly a limit to how explicitly I want them to tell me it's going to go.'' And compared to that, this is a walk in the park, however it turns out. Zevon says: ''I've talked to people who have, you know, paralyzing illnesses and those kinds of debilitating illnesses. In one called ''My Dirty Life and Times,'' Zevon sings, ''Some days I feel like my shadow's casting me/Some days the sun don't shine/Sometimes I wonder why I'm still running free/All up and down the line.'' The album in progress is sometimes somber, sometimes rowdy, and while the new songs are conscious of mortality, they're not daunted by it. I have to move fast, because I don't know what's going to happen.'' Zevon and his longtime bassist and collaborator, Jorge Calderon, have been writing whenever ideas strike them - including, Zevon says, via cellphone conversations ''from the aisle of the health-food store. I'm probably in the intensest creative period of my life.'' But at the same time, the songs have never come like this, so I'd have to feel more gratitude than anything else. I have my moments when I'm not too thrilled about this whole deal. ''I'm on the periphery of a lot of despair, of course,'' he said. And in the part of that time that he is not spending with family and friends, he is writing and recording songs. He has been informed he has only months to live. He has mesothelioma: the same kind of lung cancer, he dryly noted, that killed Steve McQueen. The show's only guest would be Warren Zevon, the songwriter known for the twisted humor of songs like ''Lawyers, Guns and Money,'' ''Werewolves of London'' and ''Poor Poor Pitiful Me'' and for troubled love songs like ''Hasten Down the Wind'' and ''Accidentally Like a Martyr.'' Zevon, 56, is a dying man. ''If you hear sad news, don't make that sympathy sound,'' one instructed. They warned against whistling, which could overload the microphones. They encouraged laughter, the more enthusiastic the better. In the lobby of the Ed Sullivan Theater, two perky handlers for ''The Late Show With David Letterman'' were giving their nightly pep talk to the people headed for the front rows.
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