My first real hangover hit me during the summer when I was 16. If you ask me, I usually say that I was still 15 when I started drinking, but I don’t think you can actually count much before your first hangover. Whatever happens before that is the overly cautious foreplay leading up to your first naïve fuck-up and subsequently horrible next-morning. Sure, getting buzzed off of a couple stolen Mike’s Hard Lemonades seems daring at the time, but it hardly constitutes heavy experimentation with drinking. Heavy drinking most often results in a hangover, and before you have one, you just have no idea.
My first hangover happened, as I said, the summer I was 16, a work party, the kind of lifeguard posse summer party that I would one-day host. After a few excited shots, some green, and a couple of keg-cups, I became the newbie-drunk the baby of the party, and the one who flew the furthest when bouncing back off of walls that I had run into. I had to be put to bed by some of the more responsible folk more than once, because I kept getting back up and trying to rejoin the crowd and then of course, a wall or table would get in my way again.
At 16, "calling in hungover" to work isn’t even on the radar, plus it was a work party so everyone would know what had happened. So I showed up in 85-degree weather with the rest of the crew the next morning to lifeguard in the heat for 8 hours. They may have had the same alcohol-parched-skin and headache, resonating with every step, like I did, but if so they were used to this game and appeared fine. I, on the other hand, looked, felt and acted hungover all day. I couldn’t stomach food until about 3 in the afternoon, but no one warned me that it was essential for hangover food to be greasy or bland, so I mistakenly ordered a deli meat-filled Subway sandwich on jalapeño cheddar bread, dooming it to be left, uneaten. It was a miserable day, but by the end of the day I was a member of the club of hang over pros.
I don’t think often about what the early days of drinking were like, beer is so beholden in my heart, it is easy to forget that I didn’t drink it out of a sippy-cup as a child. Yet sometimes I get too comfortable, I forget that I wasn’t born drinking, and I find myself in a drinking snafu that reminds me that I am no better than a wasted little 16 year old. This usually happens if there is tequila, or a generous well-pour by the bartender. Last night there were both.
Reading over the texts messages I sent, full of periods in places that there should have been apostrophes, is the evidence of the far reaches of my stupor, and also serves as a reminder for parts of the evening that I may have forgotten. Not that I can forget too much, the pounding veins in my head are persistent at reminding me.
You can learn so much about yourself and your drinking limits with each hangover, and I think that many of us believe that we will someday hone in on our perfect recipe to drinking success: 1 part perpetual fun buzz, 1 part enough-to-sleep well, 1 part no hangover. I wonder if we think that someday we will know that perfect combination of alcohol to make fun minus-shitty-the-next-day a 100% guarantee. Looking in my cupboard for something I could stomach at 8 this morning and settling on a bag of chips that has been open for weeks told me no, I will never rid myself of hangovers. Crunching on a chip to test its relative freshness I thought that f I haven’t learned by now, 7 years into the game, how to avoid the occasional slip-up, then I probably never will. And why? My coffee and chips tasted delicious, I got a day off work, and my friends (and hopefully my girlfriend) will forgive me for being wasted because they got to see me pee on a sidewalk, in front of the taco place we had just walked out of, and that shit is just funny.
O lord, did I just say that I’ve been doing this for 7 years? Well shit n fire, pat my liver on the back and pass the sauce.
