September 7 - 14, 2000
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I looked in the bathroom mirror this morning and saw Edward Kennedy. A face like a paintball fight. An aurora borealis of poor health. And the face that scowled back at me from the mirror in the bedroom, with its blazing natural light, was no more encouraging. That face looked like a satellite shot. I could actually see the little tire tracks leading to and from the missile silos. I zoomed in. Was that -- no, couldn't be -- movement? Drink or swim
Whatever happened to the happy hangover?
by Chris Wright
Through no fault of my own, I find myself on the wrong end of a five-day bender. A wedding, a going away, a coming back, a barbecue, more wedding. It's not so much that I drank too much -- though I did. It's what I drank. I mixed drinks that shouldn't even be allowed in the same room: Blackcurrant Ale, meet Kahlúa; champagne, here's my good friend gin; Miller Lite, I don't believe you've been introduced to the Australian cabernet. Yerp.
To make matters worse, when I'm drinking I smoke like a Texas wildfire. Tiny helicopters hover above me dumping little swashes of water, to no avail. And so now, as well as looking and feeling terrible, I sound like a walking squeezebox. Or would if I could walk.
At some point, I'm not sure exactly when, hangovers stopped being fun.
In my early 20s, hangovers were an adventure. I loved the illicitness of them -- the sense of having done something bad. I'd be proud of the Sid Vicious aura I thought I projected. "Drank four six-packs of Rolling Rock last night," I'd wheeze to anyone who would listen. "Threw up in the back of a moving van." And I'd smell like a seagull's breakfast to prove it. Or was that my breakfast?My favorite hangover eatery at the time was the now-defunct Deli King in Allston. I'd sit there noshing on corned-beef hash, staring senselessly at the morning paper, wondering whether I should go see the latest Chuck Norris flick or stay home and watch Family Ties. Not that it mattered -- I'd cry at TV ads and laugh at parking meters anyway. What really mattered was the fact that it didn't matter. The inability to make the simplest of decisions can be a wonderfully liberating thing.
Hangovers used to be a drug. The day after a binge would leave me relaxed and jittery, oblivious and alert, ecstatic and lugubrious. It was that no-man's-land moment between sleep and wakefulness stretched out over an entire day. The world moved into soft-focus, suffused with a kind of melancholy significance. As I strolled the streets of Boston, weird and unexpected thoughts would surface in my mind. "George Washington redefined imperialism." Stuff like that.
I used to do this a lot -- stroll and muse. I'd muse like it was going out of fashion. I'd muse in coffee shops and in video arcades. I'd muse on buses and in restrooms. Sometimes I'd gaze at the beautiful women in Harvard Square and just pretend to muse. And when I was done musing, I'd reflect. I'd go down to the banks of the Charles and watch the sun set over the river while I reflected on this solemn, momentous thing that was my life. Then I'd go home and watch Family Ties.
Back then, I had happy hangovers. Booze was as enjoyable in its retreat as it was when it first washed over me. But that was before the scorched-earth hangovers, the slash-and-burn mornings after, the internal carpet bombing that now follows a night on the town. That was then.
Now, as I sit whimpering into a mug of echinacea tea, it occurs to me that I'm not only paying the price of five straight nights of drinking, I'm paying for the time I accompanied my hangover to the Omni Theater, when I took my hangover shopping at Copley Place, when my hangover and I cavorted on the giant flume at Water Country. In those days, I could drink an entire gallon of deplorable red wine and get off scot-free.You play, you pay. I used to laugh at the idea. You play, you pay. Tee hee. But that was when I was still on the Play Now, Pay Later plan. What I failed to fathom at the time was that I was racking up an unmanageable deficit, that I would wake up one day and find myself a thousand sick days in arrears. Today, I don't just get hangovers, I get hangovers with compound interest. I get hangover hangovers.
Of course, the hangover hangover is largely a matter of physiology. I'm older now. My natural resources are depleted. My constitution, undermined by years of abuse, simply cannot take it any more. But there's something else to all this. I'm older now. And along with age comes responsibility. A hangover these days is amplified and intensified by guilt. Maybe even a little mortal dread.
In my 20s, I believed I was a work in progress. If I wasn't capable of infinite perfectability, at least I was capable of improvement. Moral and physical dissolution alike could be chalked up to the process of character building. So what if I woke up feeling like death? So what if I didn't make it in to work? I knew tomorrow I'd feel better. I knew there would be other jobs. It didn't matter how bad things got, because I could rest assured that they could always get better.
What I didn't realize then was that, although we are all indeed works in progress, this does not mean that life is one big training session. Human development doesn't end when we reach our personal best. Today, the truth presents itself to me with awful clarity: progress and decline go hand in hand. As pimples recede, gray hairs emerge. Naïveté becomes cynicism. Lack of experience gives way to lack of vigor. In life, death. And Christ -- Christ! -- you really can't afford to lose that job. These are the kinds of thoughts a hangover hangover brings.
And so these days, the brain will preface a night out with a perfunctory admonition: "Careful, you'll feel like shit in the morning." But then it will soften: "Oh, go on then, have one little one." And the next thing I know, it's the morning and I'm prying my mouth open with a spatula, wondering what's going to become of me.
Right now, the answer to that question is relatively straightforward. Staring into the mirror at this motley, mustard-faced stranger, there's one thing I know for sure: tonight I'll relive the good old days. A friend of mine is having a keg party. I'm staying in and watching reruns of Family Ties.
Chris Wright can be reached at cwright[a]phx.com.
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