God Hates a Piss-Head

The dawn cracks like a free-range egg on the hard edge of the city bowl. Its bright, orange yolk spills across the streets and buildings and in through my bedroom window. God is a chef and this is Her fry-up.

On a beautiful morning like this I should be walking in the dog park or circling the block on a swift, brisk morning run. At the very least I should be out in the garden with a cup of Kenyan or apricot jam with some toast stuck underneath.

But I’m not. I’m lying on my back in bed, my shirt almost unbuttoned and one sock halfway off my foot, my tongue’s probably hanging out and I’m definitely snoring… until God flips that yolk through the window and it slaps across my fragile frontal lobe.

I sit up with an audible grunt. At first not sure where I am or how many eyes I’m supposed to have – I could swear only two – and for a sliver of a second I’m sure I feel fine. In that same fraction of a clock tick images from the previous night’s misbehavings hurtle past.

I was drunk. Very drunk. And I have somehow escaped a hangover.

Then that post-bingeing anomaly of something happening slowly but at the same time very quickly swirls between my stomach and head. In this long/rapid moment I realise that the alcohol is toying with me; lulling me into a false sense of security before whisking my brain into a frothy eggnog.

I swing off the bed and hastily zig-zag my way to the bathroom, smacking my shoulder on the wall and my hip on the hall table.

The ingredients placed inside my stomach last night have scrambled and, if I may stretch a metaphor to breaking point, a vomit-omelette is ready to be served.

The toilet laughs at me through his porcelain lips. He gargles the regurgitation down, knowing there’s more where that came from. I glare at his pasty judgement and crawl back into my dungeon of despair.

The scary thought that I’m dying enters my mind.

An hour later the more horrific thought that I won’t die torments me.

It is arguable that the most elusive medical breakthrough is not the cure for the common cold, but the perfect remedy for a bad babalaas.

Some swear by the “little, red ambulance” – Coca-Cola. Others will tell you water and exercise.

I knew a lawyer who would mix tomato juice and Black Label in a big glass and neck it – he called it a “Bloody Label”. From the banal to the bizarre.

I slowly rise from my pillow and place a pair of dark glasses over what used to be my eyes but are now no more than pain receptors. My furry tongue feels like a bloated blowfish, dead and decomposing. Funnily enough, the chorus from Lionel Ritchie’s “Dancing on the Ceiling” is looping in my head.

There must be some wisdom out there, I think, somewhere in the world there must be a decisive cure for the hangover. I conclude that I must ask the all-knowing consciousness that floats in the very air around us; that enigmatic, online oracle known in this dimension as Google.

At first she tells me what to do before I started drinking. However, in order to build a time machine I would need “a wormhole, a large Hadron Collider or a rocket that goes really, really fast”, according to Stephen Hawking.

I have none of these things.

Then she says I should eat toast. But what if anything I send down there demands a return ticket? And not via the scenic route, I might add.

There is a thick rubber band at the bottom of my throat. It shoots everything right back at me.

As I search I discover that in Puerto Rico a hangover is cured by rubbing lemons under your armpits, Africans generally believe peanut butter does the trick and the Native Americans consume six almonds before the drinking begins.

If you have an Irish mate you could get him to bury you up to your neck in mud – and they wonder where the reputation comes from.

A recommendation of breathing in the smoke from a coal fire makes me regret quitting the Chesterfields.

And in Romania I come across something called tripe soup: veggies and the lining from a cow’s stomach, boiled and steaming. Yummy!

You’d think that at my age, with all the binge drinking experience I’ve compiled, I’d be able to navigate the morning-after with ease. But my whiskey-soaked brain can’t turn the library door handle, let alone remember where the reference section is.

So my only option is to ride it out, groaning and sweating like a bad porno actress.

I try to bargain with God, telling Her I’ll never do this again… or at least not for a very long time. But She can see through my bullshit and lies. And I can feel her taloned fingers digging into my brain.

God hates a piss-head, so I implore the scientists of the world to cease the search for pimple pastes and constipation cures and focus on that which inflicts us all at some point.

I could really use your help right now.