Helen walked into the bar, he wrote. Why? he thought to himself, and realized that he had no idea why Helen walked into the bar. In All My Colors she didn’t even drink. He crossed the line out. Helen walked into the diner, he wrote. But writing the word diner just made him think about Janis, and how she’d tricked him by making him think she was seeing the Dyke with the Bike and not Joe Hines, good old best buddy pal Joe who, not content with drinking Todd’s liquor, was now screwing Todd’s wife…

Todd sat up with a jolt. The piece of paper he’d been writing on was now balled up in his hands. He tossed it into a waste paper basket and started again.

By five o’clock, Todd had written precisely two words. One was CHAPTER and one was ONE.

“Fuck this,” he told both words. “I need to find a bar.”

By nine o’clock, Todd was awesomely drunk. He was trying to drink his whiskey from the shot glass without using his hands. As Todd’s head was resting on the bar at this point, and the bartender pretty much didn’t care if his clientele were alive or dead, Todd might have gotten away with it if he hadn’t become ambitious and tried to do the same with his bottle of beer. The bottle failed to connect with Todd’s mouth and spun across the bar where it frothed into the lap of a big bearded man.

“I’m very sorry,” slurred Todd.

“You’re gonna be,” said the big man, and hit Todd in the eye with his fist. Todd rolled on the floor and, after a while, climbed to his feet again, which was when the bartender asked him to leave.

It must have taken Todd a half hour to cross the road from the bar to the motel. Twice he got turned around and found himself heading back toward the bar. Two or three times the sudden presence of a truck honking down on him caused Todd to scurry back to his starting point. And once he set off too fast, tripped and saw the sidewalk coming up at him like a drawbridge being raised.

Eventually he made it to his room where, after dropping his key several times, he got himself onto the bed and passed out with the door open and his shoes still on.

*  *  *

The next day, Todd wrote six pages in a hungover frenzy.

*  *  *

The day after that, he tore them up, went to the bar, learned he was no longer welcome there, and went to the liquor store.

The day after that, Todd spent in bed. When the maid came, he hid under the blanket until she left.