I had become a habitué of such places, as had many of my fellow patients. By way of whiling away the time, we took turns at relating the horrific adventures which alcohol had gotten us into. One man—an actor—had inadvertently crawled into the Pullman berth occupied by a heavyweight fighter and his wife. A reporter had bedded down in a garbage wagon and was dumped into a penful of hungry hogs. A writer, gripped by a fit of vomiting, had become lodged head and shoulders in a toilet seat and had to be extricated with crowbars. One of the best, or, at least, the funniest stories was told by a Hollywood director, a sad-eyed little man who was given to spells of extreme melancholia. For years, when he reached a certain stage of saturation, he would telephone the newspapers and announce that he was about to commit suicide. He really meant to when he made the calls, but by the time the reporters arrived he was always out of the notion.
