Damien Galeone

I walk through the doors of our local pub. Two of my three comrades are at the table already. As I walk in, I am hearing the tune of the Magnificent Seven. It is also possible that I hear that song because I am humming that song. My friends – we’ll call them Bertie and Jay – are in good spirits. Bertie has just received a renewal on his permanent residence. He is visiting after a long absence in Prague. Jay is in a good mood because we are in our testing period at the university and work for the day is well over. Done. Finished. A thing of the morning and the past.

It is time to day drink.  

When I was a younger man, day drinking was put into play on a whim. Any random Tuesday or Thursday could turn into a session with no help from anyone or anything except some guy who might ask ‘so you want something to drink?’ It might be mentioned that this person was often a paid employee of an establishment, and, given the time and context of his question, ‘something to drink’ usually meant iced tea or a coke.

But such were the frenzied outlaw days of my early outlaw life. When ‘liver health’ was a phrase I heard Thursday nights on ER. When a hangover was twenty minutes of discomfort in the morning and cured by a glass of water. Sometimes day drinking was a continuity of the night before, one of those special times when all hit right, everyone’s tolerance was shifted into overdrive, and you could just keep going, and so, in a way that was agreed-upon without a word exchanged, you did just that: kept going until you were done.

But now that my age recently stopped starting with a 4, things have changed. They changed when my age stopped starting with a 3, but I was stubborn. Nowadays, a drink at lunch can mean a headache until dinner. A hangover is a phasal thing, like the moon cycle, or a werewolf cycle. Day one is head pain, day two is joint pain, day three is anxiety, day four is when all the pieces begin to settle back into place, day five, I begin to find hope in the world once again. Just in time for the weekend.

So to decide on a program of day drinking is not done lightly. Affairs have to be put in order, obligations taken care of, organized, pet duties relegated to a mildly irked partner, meals plotted and planned. It’s a scene man. And when all of this is done, there is still one big ole X factor. And that is Knox Wren. And he has just walked through the door. The waiter’s knees buckle.  

Now and then a human being comes along who has a legendary tolerance to alcohol. The exploits of Oliver Reed are well documented and probably exaggerated. He was rumored to have put down 126 beers in a day of drinking (literally 24 hours). He also invented a drink called ‘gunk’ which was a wee bit of every alcohol at a bar. Hunter Thompson’s breakfast was like Aerosmith’s dinner, including ‘four Bloody Marys, two grapefruits, a pot of coffee, Rangoon crêpes, a half-pound of either sausage, bacon,’ and for dessert ‘two margaritas and six lines of the best cocaine’. If for no other reason, Thompson should be permanently applauded for adding dessert to breakfast. Rasputin could put down a pub and a whole pharmacy and still try to overthrow the Tsar. His would-be assassins tried to poison him several times and, though they were not successful, he did later complain of a little heartburn.

These guys walk in the footsteps of a man called Winston Churchill. Winston was known to start his morning with whiskey and sodas while reading newspapers and working. He continued with these throughout the morning until lunch when he switched over to ‘an imperial pint of champagne or wine’. The afternoon called for cognac and then more champagne, then a nap to reconstitute, and then dinner brought of course champers and brandy and then a few more whiskey and sodas before bed. And then cognac. Because bed.

In between whiskey and sodas, he wrote 18 books, published hundreds of published articles, painted 500 paintings, won the Nobel Prize in Literature, helped develop the tank, and was prime minister. Oh yeah, and he won World War II. Not bad for a day drinker.

We are a few hours into our session. The world has gone a bit blurry. I am floating on the blissful Lake Forgetful. We are playing poker, we are laughing. There is a party on the deck and a waiter has brought out a tray of about 200 fried steaks and nobody is touching them. This is a source of extraordinary consequence to Jay, who stares longingly and mentions regularly our predicament of being drunk and so close to food we can’t eat. I know I am getting drunk when I miss a full house in Hold ‘Em.

Knox Wren is of the tolerant ilk. I have been drinking with him roughly 10,000 times and of those I believe that 2 times I left the bar the more sober person. The other 9,998 times I have been the droolier and more proto-human of the two of us. I somehow make it home and Knox goes off on a daytrip to Brno or goes bowling with a group of British naval officers. I think once he won concert tickets at a raffle he happened to be passing by and spent the evening seeing Imagine Dragons or something. Had he met Oliver Reed, there’s no doubt he’d have arm wrestled him in a Malta dive bar. Were he of age in the 1960s, he surely would have impressed Hunter at breakfast. And maybe he and Winston could have made the tank even better after a few dozen cocktails. Who knows. I’d have been asleep dressed like Winnie the Pooh in the next room, the remnants of whatever passed for a kebab at those times on my nightstand.  

Tonight is threatening to be much the same. I begin slipping into proto-human functions: I’m grunting, I’m louder, I’m grunting louder. My thought process simplifies to two things: 1. food, 2. home. Best case scenario is if I be at 2 with 1. I look at my watch (all three of them) and have mild alarm over the fact that it’s only 6:30 pm. If I don’t want to wake up at midnight with a hangover, I need to martial my resources and keep going. At this point, Knox suggests (i.e. orders for everyone) another shot. This seems like the best course of action.

When I awake in bed in the morning, I rejoice. I made it. An opened jar of peanut butter on the counter tells me that I at least partially succeeded in my final quests. I check that my wallet and my keys are still in my possession (they are). I check messages and it doesn’t seem that I have done anything unforgiveable. I briefly consider following parts of Hunter Thompson’s breakfast or even Winston’s bed-and-cocktail reading hour. But instead I make partial peace with who I am, I pour a coffee, take two Aleve, and settle down for a three-day tour of my psyche. I wonder if Knox beat those sailors at bowling.