I was staring down at what looked like a whole ounce of pure, glittering white cocaine. My first instinct was to jerk a 100-peso note out of my pocket and quickly roll it up for snorting purposes, but by this time Frank had his hand on my arm. “For Christ's sake,” he was whispering, “don't do that shit here. Take it into the bathroom.”

Which I did. It was a difficult trip, through all those chairs and tables, but I finally managed to lock myself in the toilet stall and start lashing the stuff up my nose with no thought at all of the ominous noise I was making. It was like kneeling down on a beach and sticking a straw into the sand; after five minutes or so, both my nostrils were locked up like epoxy and I hadn't even made a visible depression in the dune right in front of my eyes.

Good God, I thought. This can't be true. I must be hallucinating!

By the time I staggered back to the table, the other had calmed down. It was obvious that Bloor had already been into the can, so I handed it back to Frank with a twisted smile. “Be careful with this stuff,” I mumbled. “It'll turn your brain to jelly.”

He smiled. “What are you people doing here?”

“You'd never believe it,” I replied, accepting a tall glass of rum from the waiter. The band was taking a break now and two of the musicians had wandered over to our table. Frank was saying something about a party later on. I shrugged, still fighting to clear my nasal passages with quick sniffs of rum. I sensed that this latest development might have serious consequences for the future of my story, but I was no longer especially concerned about that. . .

From somewhere down deep in my memory, I heard a snatch of some half-remembered conversation between a construction worker and a bartender at a bar in Colorado. The construction man was explaining why he shouldn't have another drink: “You can't wallow with the pigs at night and then soar with the eagles in the morning,” he said.

I thought briefly on this, then shrugged it off. My own situation was totally different, I felt. In about three hours, I was supposed to be down on the docks with my camera and tape recorder to spend another day on one of those goddamn boats.

No, I thought, that geek in Colorado had it all wrong. The real problem is how to wallow with the eagles at night and then soar with the pigs in the morning.

In any case, it made no difference. For a variety of good reasons, I missed my boat the next morning and spent the afternoon passed out in the sand on an empty beach about ten miles out of town.