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Lawrence Block, in Out on the Cutting Edge, has his character, Matt Scudder, at an AA meeting where a woman recounts how she used to take the first drink of the day as soon as her husband left for work. She kept the vodka bottle under the sink, in a container that had previously held oven cleaner.
“The first time I told this story,” she said, “a woman said, ‘Oh dear Jesus, suppose you grabbed the wrong jar and drank the real oven cleaner.’
“‘Honey,’ I told her, ‘get real, will you? There was no wrong jar. There was no real oven cleaner. I lived in that house for thirteen years and I never cleaned the oven.’
“Anyway,” she said “that was my social drinking.”
I love that story.
Ran it through my mind two days later as I entered Nestor’s. The sentry was at the bar, sunk in gloom, mutt
