I DECIDED THAT EVENING THAT MY LAZARUS ACT AT CIRCA Tabac was long overdue. I went for a haircut, shave, and manicure, then went home, took a long hot bath, put on a custom-made Stefano Ricci black-on-black silk shirt and a beautiful gray custom-made chalk-striped suit of Dormeuil pashmina. I pulled on new black lisle socks, freshly buffed crocodile shoes. I put on my cashmere-lined python-skin duster with the dark mink collar, my Lock & Co. midnight-blue homburg, and I went out into the night.

“Gimme a club soda with lemon,” I said. “The bartender reached instinctively for a wedge of lime. I caught him and repeated the word “lemon.”

Lee was at the other end of the bar. I smiled at him, let him be. I knew that he would sooner rather than later use me as an excuse to get away from whoever was bending his ear.

It had been a long time, I reflected. A long time without a drink. I did not know exactly how long. But a long time. The club soda, effervescent with the tang of the lemon, was refreshing. It was good. I was changing, goddamn it, and I felt great.

The talk of those in their cups could be overheard. One spoke of the fine line between good and evil.

People were always talking about the fine line between this and that. The fine line between genius and madness. The fine line between love and hate. The fine line between pleasure and pain. But where were these and all the other fine lines to be discerned?

The truth was that there were no such fine lines. They did not exist. There was not the least, most translucent filament of a line between the one and the other. It was as impossible to see where love became hate, where genius became madness, and so on, as it was to distinguish where red became orange or green became blue on the spectrum.

There was a certain sense of dejected festivity in the air. The little tootsie with the pizza was coming.

Already I had begun to receive invitations to Christmas celebrations. I merely threw them into the trash, along with most of the seasonal cards that arrived.

It was my editor Michael who told me of the card that Evelyn Waugh had concocted to send in response to most of those who wrote to him, asking him to do this or that, inviting him here or there: “Mr. Evelyn Waugh deeply regrets that he is unable to do what is so kindly proposed.” A bit archly polite perhaps, but oh so wonderful a stroke.

“Hey,” said Lee when he worked his way down to me. “You’re looking pretty damn good there for a corpse.”

“Hell, man, you know me. Best-dressed cat in the boneyard.”

So much for the thin line between life and death.

“You hear about the Jewish dilemma?” he asked. I’d heard this one before, but not from a Jew, and he was a Jew, so I shook my head.

“Free ham.”

I laughed. He laughed. He asked me what I was drinking. I told him it was vodka and soda. He called the bartender, who was nearby, and told him he’d have the same. Only then did I tell him what was really in my glass.

“Put some vodka in mine,” he told the bartender.

I loved this guy. So much in common. So much apart. Yet together, we always let all the birds fly free from the cage. We talked a good long time. We laughed a good long time. We sloughed the layers of secrets from us and came away clean with new skin.

“You know,” he said to me at one point, referring obliquely to the night the ambulance took me from here, and probably to a lot of other nights as well, “with you it’s not the booze and drugs that worry me. It’s the diabetes.” Then, as if intuiting that I wanted him to change the subject, he asked me if I was at work on something new.

“Nah. In fact, I’m thinking of quitting the racket.”

“You could never stop writing,” he said. His words made me think of something else Michael had told me: “You’re only happy when you’re writing.” I wondered if they were right, the both of them.

“Besides,” Lee said, “it’s all a fucking racket. All of it. Everything.”

I told him about my plan to get a driver’s license, my dream of a little place with a hammock, far away from it all.

He laughed. I grew defensive for a moment, then reminded myself that it was him.

“Yeah.” I laughed a little as well. “I guess dreaming’s a racket, too.”

“Well, dream on. It’s how I make my money.”

We laughed a little together then. Yeah, I thought, the fine line between this racket and the next. The endless fine lines that simply weren’t there in the infinite wheel of suckers’ rackets that constituted the racket of being. World without end. Amen.

Afterwards I went over to the Lakeside, then later dropped in at Reade Street.

Yeah. The dirty unshaven drunk slobbering on his dirty shirt, shaking in his dirty stinking pants. Or he who stood before them now. Which would they remember? Both perhaps. But if so, it would be the power of transformation that they remembered most of all. And the embodiment of that power would be me.

Yeah. I showed them all what change looked like. Showed them all what they could never look like, change or no change.