Part Five
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Now back to today. My girlfriend is in Las Vegas on a well-deserved company junket.
There, losing your money slowly is occasionally interrupted by a win or two which, in turn, encourages you to bet more and lose more. Your few moments of winning are a brief interruption in the Casino's taking all your money.
They are very patient. They do not mind an interruption or two.
While she is gone I have been reading Hemingway's Men Without Women, since that is what I am. It is a collection of short stories and I am reading the last one entitled, Now I lay Me, which is about a man who has trouble sleeping at night, so he thinks about fishing or he prays for everyone he has ever known.
I do the latter, most every insomniac night. If that doesn't work I think about women.
I had just gotten to the part of the story where he is having trouble remembering the Lord's Prayer. All he can remember is "On Earth as it is in Heaven."
Suddenly, as I read I was interrupted by an argument between an aging matador and his picador.
Something is very wrong.
I look at the bottom of the page and see that it is numbered 17 where it should naturally say 225.
The book has been misbound and mangled. So the conversation I am reading would normally occur on pages 17-18 of The Undefeated, which it does, except that in my misbound copy these two pages are now nestled between pages 224 and 227 instead of their natural nesting place.
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