The thing is, if you hang out with hipsters, drinking ironic cocktails—“Death of a Cucumber Salesman”—from jam jars, you will, eventually, get a hangover.
Once you have realized that you will never be a reasoned and disciplined drinker, it all gets easier, really.
It’s the years where you keep thinking it might be possible to go out, have two glasses of wine over dinner, and be safely in bed by eleven p.m.—flossed and serene—that are the hardest. The constant collapse of intentions confuses you. You are discombobulated by the regularity of the chaos. You don’t know why it’s happening again.
Last time you spoke to yourself in the restaurant it was 9:38 p.m., and you were in the toilets, going, “Hey, dude! There we are, in the mirror. I will be honest with us—I feel pretty sober, tbh. The wine seems unexpectedly . . . thin tonight. I think we might need to have a third glass—just to see this thing off properly. Maximize the potential. Promote the healthful sleep, etc. Still totally on for that ten thirty p.m. bus, though, amigo! This isn’t one of those nights! We remember it’s Tuesday! Or Wednesday! Whichever day it is! It is that day!”
Five hours later, and you’re standing in the alleyway behind a Spanish bar, smoking a brand of cigarettes you’ve never seen before, which seem very dry, and which you bought off a passing tramp for a pound. (“Kind sir! Let us come to some manner of agreement of equal benefit to us both!”)
The last ten minutes have consisted of a rant about Marxism, which jolted—with the jump-cut high-flying magic that alcohol brings—into an equally passionate display of how you can boost the volume levels of the speakers on the iPhone by putting it in your mouth.
You are now triumphantly pointing at your face, issuing muffled cries of “See! See! LOUD!,” while your head transmits a pounding version of “Now That We Found Love” by Heavy D and the Boyz.
Your schedule has been far too busy—two bottles of red wine, three gins, a shot of vodka, and whatever the hell this is in this glass right now: Fernet-Branca? Aquavit?—to really check in with yourself again, but you do remember seeing yourself, dimly, in the dark window glass, halfway up the stairs, coming back from the toilet.
You only looked yourself in the eye for a moment, mouthing the words, “Tuesday. It is Tuesday,” to which you replied, “I am going to kill tomorrow for tonight. I will make the beautiful sacrifice.” And then you passed again, and you saw yourself no more.
After, in the morning—in the terrible morning—years ago, you would have panicked. In your twenties, or early thirties, you were shocked fresh that you were always crashing in this same car.
“When will I stop doing this?” you asked yourself, under the shower—washing your hair clean in the way you wish you could wash your lungs.
And you would spend the day berating yourself—making the panicky, sweating promise that last night was, obviously, by way of a wake for drinking. Last night was the night you toasted the toasts—raised the glass for the last time—as you are now, surely, too old to do this anymore.
Certainly, when you look at your hands—veins raised, and everything of a mauvish hue—they appear to belong to a two-hundred-year-old.
But years later—now—you know there is no ending. You will never learn to have just two glasses, because you don’t want to have just two glasses—you don’t want to miss a trick; you will ride every tiger that passes by the pub door, until you know them by name, and call them in from the street.
As intimations of the grave occur—the child now up to your shoulder, the wondering horror of remembering something from twenty-five years ago—a hangover seems a slight prospect, in comparison. Indeed, it seems kind of necessary.
Because you don’t fight these hangovers, now—you don’t deny them, or try to wash them away. Instead, you lie perfectly limply in the beast’s jaws until it takes you for a corpse—and finally moves on, around five p.m.
You offer no resistance—you sit squarely in the center of the thermonuclear sweats, the urine like treacle, the sporadic pulses of self-loathing where you must find a mirror in order to tell yourself, “Dude, no. You are not an international terrorist,” and you let them have their full head. You allow the full horror.
And you say to yourself, “I am currently in the kiln, being burnished. My enamel is being baked. This is where I become truly powerful, and unafraid. Every one of these I sit through, unblinking, takes me up a level. So that, when Death finally comes, I will just treat him as nothing more than a hangover, too. I will come to him in the doorway in this cheap polyester slip, with this disheveled hair, and this sausage sandwich, and simply say to him: ‘Dude, do you know where I left my purse last night? I think I left it in the cab.’”