Page 216 - The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous

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WOMEN SUFFER TOO 201
didn’t account for these violent reactions. I knew
what they were, all right—a drink would fix them. It
must have been a long time since I had my last drink
—but I didn’t dare ask this stranger for one. I must
get out of here. In any case I must get out of here
before I let slip my abysmal ignorance of how I came
to be here and she realized that I was stark, staring
mad. I was mad—I must be.
The shakes grew worse, and I looked at my watch—
six o’clock. It had been one o’clock when I last re­
membered looking. I’d been sitting comfortably in a
restaurant with Rita, drinking my sixth martini and
hoping the waiter would forget about the lunch order
—at least long enough for me to have a couple more.
I’d only had two with her, but I’d managed four in
the fifteen minutes I’d waited for her, and of course
I’d had the usual uncounted swigs from the bottle as
I painfully got up and did my slow spasmodic dressing.
In fact, I had been in very good shape at one o’clock
—feeling no pain. What could have happened? That
had been in the center of New York, on noisy 42nd
Street... this was obviously a quiet residential sec­
tion. Why had “Dorothy” brought me here? Who
was she? How had I met her? I had no answers, and
I dared not ask. She gave no sign of recognizing any­
thing wrong, but what had I been doing for those
lost five hours? My brain whirled. I might have done
terrible things, and I wouldn’t even know it!
Somehow I got out of there and walked five blocks
past brownstone houses. There wasn’t a bar in sight,
but I found the subway station. The name on it was
unfamiliar, and I had to ask the way to Grand Central.
It took three-quarters of an hour and two changes to