Mortification: Writers’ Stories of Their Public Shame Read Online Free Page A

smiley. After the second egg, I can stand no more. I look at him through bruised eyeballs.
    ‘Alan, I’m really sorry about last night.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Last night. I’m sorry.’
    ‘Last night what?’
    ‘You must have noticed.’
    ‘Noticed what?’
    ‘I was drunk. I was drunk when I arrived. I was drunk in the Indian restaurant. I was drunk when I read. I threw up massively and comprehensively in the lav at your shop – I had to hack my way through the audience; you can’t have missed that.’
    ‘No, well, you went to the loo at one point, yes. I didn’t know you were feeling unwell.’
    ‘Didn’t know … But, wait a minute, I went to sleep during the reading. Didn’t I do that?’
    ‘Did you? Can’t have been for more than a second or two. I certainly didn’t notice.’
    ‘Or that I was shitfaced?’
    ‘Not at all. You must hold your drink pretty well, that’s all I can say.’
    A miracle. It’s a miracle. And as Alan’s assurances mount up, so the skull-clamps ease and the black bile in my gut begins to dissolve.
Not guilty
. But wait a moment – the party.
    ‘Alan, when we got back to your place … I had a good time … did I?’
    ‘Seemed to enjoy yourself. I remember you danced a bit. Well, we all did.’
    ‘And then –?’
    ‘Then … nothing. Went to bed, I expect.’
    He pays for breakfast, walks me to the Green Line station and waves me off. I wave back. I am beginning to formulate the notion that drunks look better, behave better,
act
better than they sometimes think. I survive the bus-ride and get home where – sure – I throw up, but it’s little more than a hiccough-and-plop.
    A week later and I’m having a drink at the Pillars of Hercules with Ian Hamilton. We’re catching up. He asks me to review a volume of poetry. I say I hate that poet’s work. He says, Exactly. I say,
en passant,
that I gave a reading at Alan Hancox’s bookshop last week. He says, ‘I know.’ His eyebrow lifts a fraction; and there’s that lopsided smile. Suddenly, the head-clamps are back, and the black bile.
    I say, ‘Go on.’
    ‘I was on the phone to Alan and he mentioned you’d been up there.’
    ‘What did he say?’
    ‘In so many words?’ Ian chuckles. He becomes Alan Hancox on the phone:
    It was fantastic! David Harsent was totally rat-arsed! He staggered about talking drivel, he left the restaurant without paying his share, he passed out and snored through most of the reading, he threw up at top-decibels in the shop loo, he signed his books indecipherably, he told people repeatedly to fuck off, he danced round my living room like a wallaby on amphetamines, he propositioned every woman in the place, he …

‘The drowning man is not troubled by rain.’ Persian proverb
Carl Hiaasen
    Any book event that begins with a near-death experience should be abandoned at once. I learned this lesson the hard way several years ago, when I inexplicably agreed to do a reading at a bookstore in a small town in Arkansas. Getting there required flying first to Memphis on a small, propeller-driven commuter aircraft, not ideally engineered for breaching heavy, low-altitude thunderstorms. The jolting turbulence yanked the earphones of my Sony Walkman off my head, just as a mountainous woman next to me began singing Bible hymns at the top of her lungs. The trip was so dreadful that the pilot insisted on apologizing to each of us personally after our very rough, but welcomed, landing.
    Instead of bolting straight to the nearest bar, I idiotically climbed in a rental car for the long rainy drive to the bookstore. That leg of the journey also brought adventure as a tractor-trailer rig jack-knifed a mile or so ahead of me, rolled over and effectively blocked the interstate highway in both directions. At this point a sane person would have understood that God was trying to send a message; I, however, was on a mission to sell books. Blithely I steered at high speed off the pavement, dodging the mangled truck