Drinking in the bar put me under a double pressure. I didn't want to leave the bar. I had no place to go. People— even friends—were tired of seeing me. Tired of loaning me money or having me drink up all the booze in their house or talking all that ragtime talk of the past and the good old days, tired of the old stories, just generally sick and tired of a pest and in some ways a stranger who was on a different circuit and one that had only one direction— downhill. Mainly I couldn't go back to the room. If I had been able to sleep, it might have been OK, but not to lie there and look at the the ceiling and the four walls in a room that was to be my coffin. The constant vision of my runaway wife. Christ, I couldn't be drinking over her. We hadn't slept together for the last five years, and the last two were miserable. Maybe one preferred misery over lonesomeness.