A cigarette, Mountain Dew in a bottle.  Hard mattress and over-starched sheets.  A hotel room that looks out with small sights, 11 stories over downtown Chicago, which does not sound like as many flights of stairs down as it actually is once you begin a descent on foot.

And the gray-haired lady in the next bed was not my choice, but my boss’, for “economy” she said.  I just stumbled in from a bar on the corner.  It was a piano bar (which should, in all fairness, also be in quotes, as there was a piano in the bar, but no player).  I went in that hole with two people from work, but left with 5 new friends instead.

Not long after my return to this room (by elevator, of course), I hurried to the bathroom to vomit the congregation of martinis gathered in my upper gut.  I was trying to be quiet so she wouldn’t hear and wake to my shame.

I threw up all the martinis and the $87 spaghetti, and the phone number of that young real estate salesman at the “piano” bar.

I threw up my pills.

I threw it all up into the sink in a cheap room 11 stories above the street on the Magnificent Mile.  I rinsed the sink and wiped it with toilet paper.  I carried my pathetic frame to the cheap mattress to look at Facebook long enough to see what the regular people were up to.

And I fell asleep thinking of my family, hundreds of miles away, warm in their beds.