I’m sure I only had one glass of wine. I mean, not HAD one glass of wine all night. Trust me… I’m a big supporter of this sparkling wine manufacturer. BEE empowerment company producing sparkling wine for export all over the world. Kinda figured they deserve my support. If it’s good enough for the rest of the world… I gotta empower the empowerment company by drinking loads and loads of their produce, right?

Anyway, I was saying I don’t mean I only had one glass of wine tonight. What I mean is when I went to the bathroom there was only one glass in front of me. You with me? Great. Excellent. So then maybe you can tell me why there are four glasses in front of me now.

Maybe I had friends here. Am I so drunk that I’ve forgotten my friends? Did I not notice that they’d walked away? Maybe they weren’t even here and I’ve been talking to myself all night. Maybe I never had any friends and I’ve been talking to myself all my life.

Nice one, Frank. Spoken like a true drunken crazy man.

Maybe someone else joined me. Someone I didn’t know. Some ad exec who thinks it’s cool to say fuck in every sentence. Fuck this and fuck you and fuckin’ ay and fuck everything because he thinks he’s the man.

Or some white dude who’s always saying Aweh. Wait He wouldn’t be in a place like this. Not with shoes on anyway.

Or she. Maybe it’s a she. Why did I go to the man first, my therapist’s gonna ask me. Why did I manifest a male imaginary friend for myself? Do I have some kind of sexual identity crisis I’m working out through the creation of imagined scenarios? See? I don’t need to pay that hack every week. I’ve got the terminology down.

But wait. It would have to be three women here. Three glasses plus mine, right? That can’t be right. I could drink the empowerment company’s entire cellar of sparkling wine and their produce for the next eighty years and STILL not have the balls to ask ONE woman to join me for a drink. Suddenly I’m half a bottle down and I’ve orchestrated a prelude to a foursome?

I don’t think so, Frank.

The problem with that damn therapist is he makes me do all this thinking. I wouldn’t be standing here in this mess if it wasn’t for Doctor Jetski. Fine. Let’s do it his way. What if these three glasses belonged to members of my family? What would I say to them if they were standing here with me now? Okay, I would say Mom… oh, by the way, I worked as a waiter once. Cleaning up the dirty shit people were done with. Extraordinary. One night I went over to a table of customers and asked if everything was alright. A woman turned to me and said, do you mean in the restaurant or in the world? Actually I meant could I get them the bill so they’d bugger the hell off… but that was the only time a customer made me think about something.

Anyway enough Charles Dickens. Enough Catcher in the Rye. Enough stories of my misspent youth. I still haven’t solved the quandary of the four wine glasses. Quandary. Some words are just goddamn useless. Why did they even make it into the dictionary anyway?

Doctor Jetski says I can’t stick to one topic. Wants to diagnose me with ADHD. They didn’t have that shit when I was a kid. We never heard of anybody getting… what was I saying? Aweh? Dickens? Jetski? Jetski. It’s all very well for the good doctor to tell me everything will be okay. What does he know, except how to tweet from his yacht? My yacht. I’m paying for it. It should be called the SS Frank. The SS Sucker.

Hey, I could down the wine in all four glasses and get the hell out of here. I could be home and asleep in ten minutes. Hey, maybe I am asleep. Maybe… I’m dreeeeeaaaaming. Maybe this isn’t real. Maybe nothing’s real. Wait, the BEE sparkling wine is real. That’s one thing I know.

And what’s with the Marlboro reds on this table? I don’t smoke, not even when I’m drunk.

Wait… I’m standing at someone else’s table. Yup, that’s it. I am standing at someone else’s table.
Man, I gotta stop drinking.

Frank's Monologue - David Stein