Cover Page

Bored to Death

The Origin Story

By

Jonathan Ames

Scribner
New York London Toronto Sydney

Also by Jonathan Ames

I Pass Like Night
The Extra Man
What’s Not to Love?
My Less Than Secret Life
Wake Up, Sir!
I Love You More Than You Know
The Alcoholic

As Editor

Sexual Metamorphosis

Copyright Page

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

“Bored to Death” copyright © 2009 by Jonathan Ames
Originally published in The Double Life is Twice as Good in 2009 by Scribner

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Scribner Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

First Scribner electronic books edition September 2009

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN 978-1-4391-8403-5

BORED TO DEATH

Chapter 1

The trouble happened because I was bored. At the time, I was twenty-eight days sober. I was spending my nights playing Internet backgammon. I should have been going to AA meetings, but I wasn’t.

I had been going to AA meetings for twenty years, ever since college. I like AA meetings. My problem is that I’m a periodic alcoholic, even with going to AA. Every few years, I try drinking again. Or, rather, drinking tries me. It tries me on for size and finds out I don’t fit and throws me to the ground. And so I go crawling back to AA. Or at least I should. This last go-round, I was skipping meetings and just staying home and, like I said, playing Internet backgammon.

I was also reading a lot of crime fiction and private detective fiction, writers like Hammett, Goodis, Chandler, Thompson. The usual suspects, as it were. Since my own life was so dull, I needed the charge that came from their books—the danger, the violence, the despair.