There was a kind of ritual involved in getting drunk to forget. First of all, you wanted to reach the first level of drunkenness very quickly so you drank drinks with gin in them. In this case, Tobin used martinis. Then you wanted to sit by yourself with a window to stare through, which was easy enough to do on a cruise ship. Then you wanted to be left entirely alone with only a jukebox for company. This tiny dark bar, festooned with nautical symbols, had a jukebox that ran to Sinatra and Nat King Cole and Johnny Mathis. You couldn't ask for more than that.
It didn't always work as you intended it to, of course. There was a certain kind of drunkenness that was just bloody wonderful, when you reached the exact point where sadness and despair meshed-there was an almost overwhelming and perverse sweetness to it.
Unfortunately, Tobin must have gone right past it without noticing it because, almost as if he'd been in a car accident, he looked up and saw a gigantic bartender in white shirt and white ducks and white apron leaning in and hauling him out of the booth.
"You've had enough for this afternoon, Mr. Tobin," the bartender said.
Enough? How long had he been drinking. Enough?
He couldn't possibly have had more than fourteen or fifteen martinis. So what if he did kind of trip and fall on his last journey to the jukebox ("Strangers in the Night" just kept sounding better and better). He tripped; was that a capital offense or what? "Come on now, Mr. Tobin. Come on now."