I found the courage to say, “I wound up in the hospital.”

“And you’re out already?”

“I signed myself out this afternoon. I had a convulsion, that’s how I got there.”

“That’ll do it.”

We walked a little ways in silence. I said, “I wouldn’t be able to stay for the whole meeting. I have to meet a guy at ten o’clock.”

“You could stay for most of the meeting.”

“I guess so.”

It seemed to me as though everybody was staring at me. Some people said hello to me and I found myself reading implications into their greetings. Others didn’t say anything and I decided they were avoiding me because my drunkenness had offended them. I was so maddeningly self-conscious I wanted to jump out of my own skin.

I couldn’t stay in my seat during the qualification. I kept going back to the coffee urn. I was sure my constant visits to the urn were drawing disapproval but I seemed irresistibly drawn to it.

My mind kept going off on tangents of its own. The speaker was a Brooklyn fireman and he had a very lively story but I couldn’t keep my mind on it. He told how everyone in his firehouse had been a heavy drinker and how anyone who didn’t drink that way got transferred out. “The captain was an alcoholic and he wanted to surround himself with other alcoholics,” he explained. “He used to say, ‘Give me enough drunken firemen and I’ll put out any fire there is.’ And he was right. Man, we would do anything, we would go in anywhere, take any crazy goddamned chances. Because we were too drunk to know better.”

It was such a goddamned puzzle. I’d been controlling my drinking and it had worked fine. Except when it didn’t.

On the break I put a buck in the basket and went to the urn for still another cup of coffee. This time I managed to make myself eat an oatmeal cookie. I was back in my seat when the discussion started.

I kept losing the thread but it didn’t seem to matter. I listened as well as I could and I stayed there as long as I could. At a quarter of ten I got up and slipped out the door as unobtrusively as possible. I had the feeling every eye in the place was on me and I wanted to assure them all that I wasn’t going for a drink, that I had to meet somebody, that it was a business matter.

It struck me later that I could have stayed for the end. St. Paul’s was only five minutes from my hotel. Chance would have waited.

Maybe I wanted an excuse to leave before it was my turn to talk.