On my second try I staggered to my feet, fell with a clatter against the mailboxes, pushed myself back to standing. The small room stretched and contracted, the tiles in the floor spun. I sucked my teeth, they felt furry.

I tried the door into the building but it was locked. I patted my jacket, and then my pants, and was shocked to find my keys and wallet still in their rightful places. Okay, good, things were not totally out of control. I was home, I hadn’t been mugged, this could all be handled. I unlocked the door, pushed it open, fell forward through the doorway.

My apartment, two flights up, was in as disastrous shape as was I. The cushions of the couch were slashed, the walls defaced, the shade of each lamp distended and torn. Atop a large television, with its screen smashed, sat another television, a small portable, with one of its rabbit-ear antennae bent like a defective straw. You might surmise that this was all fallout from my wild night, but you would be wrong. It had been like this for months, the by-product of a rage expressed toward me by an overzealous dental hygienist. The less said about her the better, yet the telling point is not that it happened but that, in the time since it happened, I hadn’t done anything about it other than applying a few rolls of duct tape to the slashed fabric. What it said about the state of my life could fill volumes, but it wasn’t volumes I was interested just then in filling as I burst through my door and staggered to the bathroom.

In front of the mirror, as the back of my hand wiped my dripping mouth, I recoiled from a ghastly sight. Lon Chaney was starring in the story of my life, and it was definitely a B movie. Turning my attention to my costume, I quickly realized that the only thing salvageable was my tie, an indestructible piece of red synthetic fabric that was a miracle of modern science. You want to know where all the money thrown at the space program went? It went into my tie.