I try to forget him, but then I start to think of Zoey and what a shitty person I am again, so I go back to focusing on how much I hated the drunk guy, who is probably even shittier. In the middle of the night I look up words for “drunk” on the OED to distract myself. It’s a treasure trove. Cup-shotten (first recorded in 1330). Tap-shackled (1604). Swilled (1637). Muzzed (1788). Elephant trunk (1859). (I figure this is a thing you run into now and then where slang is made up of weird rhymes, like when “pork pies” meant “lies” in London in the 1800s.) Loaded for bears (1890). (Yeah, no idea what the hell people were thinking there.) I try to memorize and repeat them to get my mind off of everything. It helps a little, but not much. Maybe even that guy never cheated on anyone. But I never really do get any sleep. Just a few minutes here and there. And when I nod off at all, I wake up sweating from bad dreams that I’m grateful not to remember. In the morning I go to the library downtown, just to give myself something to do besides think about Zoey and Morticia and Drunky and everything else.
