Well.

The point of this is, simply, that a blackout is a selective thing, and yet there would appear to be something of random chance in its operation. I can for example recall evenings, pleasant social evenings, pleasant evenings of social drinking and conversation with faculty members and their wives, pleasant social evenings after which I would awaken with a three-hour memory lapse and the horrid certainty that I had in that unremembered gap done something unpardonable, committed some irredeemable sin, insulted some dear friend, performed, in short, some nameless but unspeakable horror. And I would subsequently find out that I had done nothing wrong at all, that I had impressed my friends as having been completely sober, at least no more than slightly high.

And yet it would be blacked out, gone.

Well.

Now, while Randolph Scott shot Comanches, I sucked on a cigarette and picked at my brain like a fussy eater. From the first drink there was no neat chronology, no full history. There were only flashes of memory, some vivid, some fuzzy, some barely present at all. I played with the memories like an archaeologist with a shredded scroll of papyrus, trying to straighten them out and fit them in place and read meaning into them.

A boisterous conversation with a large red-haired man, a merchant seaman. Each of us standing rounds of drinks, and then something that he said (his words lost to memory now) and I threw a punch at him, I missed, and fell on the floor, and I think he kicked me. Then several men hustled me out of the bar and dropped me at the curb. They were neither rough nor gentle, they took me out as if carrying garbage, took me out, dropped me.

Trying to get into a sidewalk phone booth, but it was occupied, a woman, a fat woman with an armload of packages making a phone call in the booth, and I outside, trying to get in, and stumbling from booth to curb and being violently ill in the gutter. Late at night by then, streetlights, neon, and I puked up my guts at the curb while the world cautiously ignored me.