After bar.
And I couldn’t wash the foul taste of what I had seen from my mouth or drown the memory of it.
Chapter Seven
HANGOVERS COME IN seven different varieties. They also come in an infinite variety of degrees, from chicken crap mildness to sulphur-and-brimstone severity, but this is a matter for specialists.
The seven fundamental varieties, on the other hand, should be familiar to every hard-drinking layman. Just as the invalid ought to get thoroughly acquainted with his malady, the sot should know as much as he possibly can about the various aspects of the Morning After.
He owes it to himself to do this.
It doesn’t ease the hangover. For this there are as many remedies as there are modes and manners of getting fried in the first place. Hangover remedies range from tomato juice with Worcestershire sauce through raw eggs in warm milk all the way to the most physiologically logical notions of doses of Vitamin B-1 or doses of the hair of the dog in the manger. A shot or a pill—either one—usually comes closest to bringing back a semblance of order.
But, without further ado, let us enumerate the seven varieties of the hangover.
First and most common and trivial is the headache. In its uncomplicated form this variety is indistinguishable from mild eye-strain. You wake up and your head hurts. You take two aspirins with a water chaser, wait for time to pass, and with the passage of time the headache goes back to normal. If you’re one of those sad sacks who was born with a lifelong headache, or if you’re married to one, you can have this form of hangover without knowing it.
Hangover Number Two is the Long Thirst. With this type of affliction you feel fine. You get out of bed, wander over to the sink and down six tumblers of water in quick succession. You’re still feeling fine so you get dressed, brush your teeth, shave, and drink another six tumblers of water. This goes on for as long as the hangover stays with you. It’s one of those hangovers that make perfect sense and as a result you don’t resent it. You realize that the alcohol has dried up your blood and your body craves water to wet your blood down again. So you drink constantly and urinate almost as constantly and after awhile everything’s all right again.
Hangover Number Three is located in the stomach. The stomach, poor thing, has a habit of rejecting anything that is placed in it. When you try to take aspirin you vomit them back up, which is disconcerting to say the least. With this type of hangover you play a waiting game, hoping that it stops before you die of starvation.
Number Four is a variation of Number Three. The stomach rejects your hopeful offerings in yet another manner by kicking everything out through the back door. I’ve yet to discover the right method of coping with this nonsense, although an acquaintance strongly recommends a good cork.
Number Five is pain, soul-shattering pain, ear-splitting pain. You wake up wearing somebody else’s head and the head doesn’t fit. Your arms ache and when you close your eyes you can see your nerves twitching. I don’t want to talk any more about this one. It’s terrible.
Number Six is Number Five with a hangover of its own. You see things and you hear things and even your hair hurts. The only way to lick this one is to join it. You have to go out and get drunk all over again, praying for an easier time the following morning.
Number Seven is seventh heaven or seventh hell depending upon your point of view. The nicest thing about it is that it does not hurt. The nastiest thing about it is there is nothing you can do about it. It is a very complex problem and the novice is likely to suspect that he isn’t hungover at all, that the world is simply set at the wrong angle.
This hangover deserves careful consideration. It goes something along these lines: you don’t ache but you can’t move. Well, you
Time passes very slowly. Your mind works at a staggering pace and you think with the speed of light. You can’t concentrate on anything in particular but you can see things very clearly and very logically within your limited perception.
This is a dilly. In a weird way it is almost fun, which is fortunate in that it is with you for the duration of the day. The only thing that eliminates it is a good night’s sleep and even that has been known to fail. You have to resign yourself to sitting in one spot and doing nothing for a good sixteen hours.
I woke up, in case you haven’t guessed it, with Hangover Number Seven.
I woke up, probably, at seven-thirty.
Probably, because I really have no way of knowing. I woke up, opened my eyes, and lay there on top of the bed waiting. Waiting? Yeah—for Godot, or for Lefty, or for Christmas, or for something else. God alone knows what I was waiting for.
But I do not know what time I woke up. I do know that it was a few minutes after eight when I looked at the clock. It seemed several hours that I lay there without taking the trouble to look at the clock.
A few minutes after eight. Plenty of time to get up, change clothes, eat a hearty breakfast and get to work at Beverley Finance Company.
But why?
Who in hell wanted to perform this array of jolly little tasks?
Not me.
So there I remained. I lay there with my eyes open and thought about the voyeuristic activities of the previous evening, with a nameless dyke doing nasty little things to my former mistress. It was hard to take the whole thing too seriously at this stage of the game. Not that I wasn’t furious with Candy, not that I didn’t want to beat the crap out of the gal who was keeping her.
It was just that I couldn’t bring myself to feel too strongly about anything.
It was nine-thirty when the phone rang. I can be sure of this because I remember glancing at the clock on my way to the phone. The phone rang a good minute before I picked it up. It was an extension of the hotel phone rather than a private line and it gave one long continuous ring. I took a lot of time walking over to the table where the phone was, sitting down in the chair beside it, and lifting the receiver to my ear.
“Jeff?”
I grunted. Anything else would have required more effort than I was willing to give it. “Les, Jeff. You coming in today?”
I grunted again.
“Jeff? It’s nine-thirty. You sick or something?”
“No.”
“Coming in?”
“No.”
A long pause.
“Jeff?”
“Yeah?”
“What’s wrong?”
I shrugged. I don’t suppose he could hear the shrug over the telephone but I didn’t have anything to say.
“You drunk, Jeff?”
“Nope.”
Another long pause. His tone, when he spoke, was one of infinite patience. He sounded like a father explaining an eternal truth to a lost child.
“Jeff,” he said, “this is Les Boloff. It is nine-thirty in the morning, Wednesday morning, and you were supposed to be at work half an hour ago. Your name is Jeff Flanders and you work here at the Beverley Finance Company.”
I knew all these things so I didn’t say anything.
“Coming in, Jeff?”
“Nope.”
“Why not?”
