Seven different people asked me if I read the article in the New Yorker about hang overs. Seven. One is forgivable; he works at said magazine and we happened to be on our way to a wine bar at the time of the question. The other six?
“Well,” Darren tells me on the phone at work, after he lengthily toys with the idea of firing his entire staff, “maybe people are trying to tell you something?”
“That I need to subscribe to the New Yorker once I move into my new apartment?” I ask.
“That your liver is the size of Nebraska.”
Not true! In fact, yesterday I was out with Michelle and Joanna for a much-needed catch up dinner and I didn’t even have a drink. I stared down their fancy mojitos and raspberry margaritas and cooly ordered an iced tea. Unsweetened. How’s that for restraint?
“Are you still drunk?” Joanna asked me after I flung the lemon off my iced tea glass and knocked two knives onto the floor, and after a cluster of napkins met their fate in the cutlery graveyard.
Fair enough. I didn’t drink last night because I was sweating the ginger-infused cognac cocktail I had swilled in abundance the evening before. Because I had wallowed in a state of raveled up hang over nausea at my desk all day. Because walking twenty blocks from my office to the Mexican restaurant had put me in a state of near delirium.
No wonder those celebrities with drug and alcohol problems are always hospitalized for exhaustion. Hang overs are hard work.
On the phone with Darren, he is recalling all of those times I would get to work at our old job reeking of booze with he-said she-said stories full of hilarious missteps and general drunken verbiage on my part. There was always a man, (or the shadow of a man, or a joke of a man) and the embarrassment that I would create in my long-winded journey into the death of my liver.
And Darren doesn’t mince his words: “So, you didn’t drink because you were still drunk.”
“Yeah. I was sweating so much alcohol my shoes smelled like a tequila bar.”
“You’re the most disgusting person I know,” he says, trying not to laugh.
Yes, but he most love me for it. We immediately make plans to have a long, drunken brunch this weekend to celebrate Memorial Day the only way two New Yorkers without a pool to open know how.
So here is the short answer: No. I haven’t read the New Yorker article. It’s printed out and tucked away in my bag along with two books, some back episodes of This American Life, and a flask.
Just kidding. Jerks.
