Then there would come a morning like this when he would wake up wanting all the booze in the world. This seemed to be an actual thirst, a physical thing – it made him think of those cartoons Virgil Partch used to do in the Saturday Evening Post, the ones where some funky old prospector is always crawling across the desert, his tongue hanging out, looking for a waterhole.
All he could do when the urge came on him was fight it off – stand it off, try to earn a draw. Sometimes it was actually better to be in a place like Boston when this happened, because you could go to a meeting every night – every four hours, if that was what it took. After three or four days, it would go away.
Usually.
He would, he thought, just wait it out. Sit in his room and watch movies on cable TV and charge them to room service. He had spent the eight years since his divorce and separation from the University of Maine as a Full-Time Poet, which meant he had come to live in an odd little subsociety where barter was usually more important than money.
He had traded poems for food: on one occasion a birthday sonnet for a farmer's wife in exchange for three shopping bags of new potatoes. 'Goddam thing better rhyme, too,' the farmer had said, fixing a stony eye upon Gardener. 'Real poimes rhyme.'
Gardener, who could take a hint (especially when his stomach was concerned), composed a sonnet so filled with exuberant masculine rhymes that he burst into gales of laughter after scanning the second draft. He called Bobbi, read it to her, and they both howled. It was even better out loud. Out loud it sounded like a love-letter from Dr Seuss. But he hadn't needed Bobbi to point out to him that it was still an honest piece of work, jangly but not condescending.