But nothing came of it-she didn’t like me, and I could see that before we were halfway through dinner. The night before, I’d gone out with one of my co-workers, who, like me, was recently divorced, and we’d had dinner, gone to a couple of places afterward. I was on something of a tear myself-a mini-tear, I guess you’d call it. It was a Saturday night, rain sizzling in the streets and steaming the windows, the dinner crowd beginning to rouse itself over decaf, cheesecake, and V.S.O.P., and the regulars drifting in to look the women over and wait for the band to set up in the corner. But this man-he was in his forties, tall, no fat on him, dressed in a pair of stained Dockers and a navy-blue sweatshirt cut off raggedly at the elbows-seemed to have been going at it steadily for weeks, months even.

Hardly surprising, since this was a bar, after all, and what do people do at bars except drink, and one drink leads to another-and if you’re in a certain frame of mind, I suppose, you don’t stop for a day or two, or maybe more. The man I want to tell you about, the one I met at the bar at Jimmy’s Steak House, was on a tear.

Wake me up inside the office