hungover
enchanted forests, football, and alcohol
i am perched on a little wooden chair, limbs contorted like a deformed pretzel made by a newly hired auntie anne’s employee. amateured and pimple faced, he can only produce the grotesque, lumpy pretzel that is me. it is uncomfortable being warped in this way, but i want to prop up all my weighty and sore limbs. my phone is at twenty-eight percent, quickly trickling down because the battery health is so poor due to my supersonic charger, who zings life into it at the speed of a racing horse. the janus-faced charger. like a dialectic contradiction, carrying within its virtue the germ of its own negation by granting battery speed in the present only by mortgaging the future. the laundry machine is laboriously whirring behind me. i am proud of her. i have cracked open the door to our garden, and despite the modest view, with overgrown, dry crops and mismatched furniture, i enjoy looking at it. i need to breathe and so does this kitchen, as the odor of the olive-heavy dinner my housemates cooked last night has faintly lingered.
there is a pleasing symmetry to the french words of inhale and exhale: inspiration and expiration. i drum these two words into my head, intently and so deliberately doing the act. this is the aftermath of last night’s final excess. as i draw breath into myself, inwardly, i am also receiving, as in the familiar figurative way of creative inspiration. i crave to write. the anglophone world got it so wrong in its decided meaning of the word. i feel so wholly alive as i expire, the french way.
prior to opening the notes app, i sat in this chair for a solid twenty minutes in stillness. chin laid on my right knee, nursing a cup of mint tea, swirling my finger on the rim of the mug. with every passing circle my finger satisfyingly ran over a chip, the tiny interruption arriving with dependable regularity. i occasionally picked at the scab on the heel of my left foot. both my feet seem irreparably damaged, pained and blistered to oblivion. a sobering dose of what my life could have looked like had i continued pursuing ballet. over the past three days they have been adorned with black suede stilettos, beer-soaked yellow-black onitsuka tigers, and chunky boots. they have walked me through three of the busiest days of my life.
a flight home to london from warsaw, upon which i had to immediately descend into a different sort of unreality. there was barely enough time to take the elizabeth line home, exchange one set of clothes for another, and call an uber across the city before arriving at my housemates enchanted-forest-themed twenty-first birthday party. four hours earlier i had been spraying myself with duty-free perfumes and avoiding speeding rolling suitcases; now i was stepping into a wine bar in belgravia populated by creatures who had wandered out of folklore. everyone looked regal. floor-length dresses swept the concrete. dark suits were accented by bright flowers pinned to lapels. one friend wore a peacock-colored gown, a feathered choker drawing the eye to her décolletage. another paid homage to stevie nicks, arriving in a black hat accented with whimsical detailing that placed her between total rock star and woodland witch. a friend of a friend’s had dusted green glitter across his cheeks, as though he had spent the afternoon asleep beneath moss and awoke only moments before.
that evening i drank a casual eight glasses of wine (that is not casual for me). stirring awake at ten am, so began the prolonged hangover. then i prepared for war. saturday and sunday shifts, at my pub in north london.
i do not care for football. i know little about it. the rules remain entirely inaccessible to me. but over the course of those two days i came to understand football less as a sport and more as a religion. in one word, what occurred can only be called liturgical.
arsenal had just won the premier league for the first time in twenty-two years. north london swelled beyond its own physical dimensions. men who looked as though they had not cried since the birth of their child in the nineties looked permanently on the verge of doing so, whether it be from pride, a sense of kinship, or eventually, tragedy. hundreds of thousands had poured through, following open-top buses carrying men they would never meet and yet loved with a devotion reserved for saints and monarchs. the celebration had the scale of a civic myth. red smoke spread through the air like frankincense in church. songs were chanted with such intensity that eyes bulged and forehead veins protruded.
ten hours on saturday. ten hours on sunday. i spent both shifts serving crowds with the determination of a pack mule. the floor developed the texture of adhesive. my legs, my arms, my face, my hair: all covered in every lager, spirit, and soft drink known to mankind. madri waterfalls flowed from the taps, liquid gold with yeasty foam. i think my boss has become a millionaire. we ran out of just about everything. if one were to faithfully transcribe in written sequence every instance of me saying “cheers” over those two shifts, the resulting manuscript would parallel a nineteenth-century russian novel in length and heft.
my customer base is, in all honesty and very surprisingly, kinda lovely. they call me “darling”, “love”, and “dear” with a reflexive quality that it is not really flirtatious, but more so grammatical. requests tend to arrive cushioned by apology. “sorry darling, could i just grab another pint?” “cheers love.” their faces fascinate me. shiny domes poking through thinning hair. crooked, sometimes pointy, sometimes bulbous noses. arms now and then tattooed. deep creases around the eyes carved by decades of squinting into sun and smoke. and bodies looking as though they had been assembled from pints, sunday roasts from grans and then wives, and thirty years of standing in the same spot at the same local. they wore victory well. not elegantly, not elegantly at all, but so enthusiastically. i find something endearing about the certain strain of working-class british masculinity i have found in this special establishment.
our boss, recognizing that his troops were nearing mutiny six hours in, periodically fed us. we would eat our kebabs and burgers with the decorum of medieval soldiers. it was our version of mutton and grain slop. no conversation at all. both of these greasy foods possess the nutritional classiness of industrial machinery. they were perfect. i would chew in silence, feet throbbing. for seven uninterrupted minutes nobody would require anything from me. no pints. no directions to the toilets. just meat, bread, and a moment of peace.
and beyond food, there was alcohol. lots of fucking alcohol. between the many drinks we were bought by jubilant customers, our boss, in amazing spirit, generously allowed us to set up a staff tab and go feral both nights.
it would begin innocently enough. a pint poured during the final two hours. a cheeky vodka shot. then, as the evening progressed and the crowd gradually thinned, the ratio would shift. less work… and more drinking. by the time we were putting up the chairs and wiping down the tables, a collective intoxication would officially settle over us.
eventually the last customer would leave. the doors would lock. and suddenly the pub belonged to us. speakers held hostage. trashy pop. electronic music. reggaeton.
there are few things more comforting than discovering that the people waiting for you at the end of a shift are people whose company you would seek out anyway. there is one coworker, soon to graduate from lse, with whom i maintain an entirely unserious rivalry. as a ucl student i consider it a patriotic duty. yet he has single-handedly restored much of my faith in men our age. he possesses an innate reliability. he is positive without being naive, kind without being performative, and is guided by a life philosophy that is simultaneously simple and mortally difficult to practice for us (the messes). then there is my other coworker, who is quite simply one of the coolest people i know. a fashion student. fierce. tiny. beautiful. in tattoos that sprawl across the backs of her shoulders. she carries herself with the sort of confidence that cannot be manufactured. i love when she claps back at customers. i have told her things i had no intention of telling anyone. gossip about my sex life. embarrassing stories. she will catch my eye across the bar, grin, and usher me outside for a cigarette. every time this happens i experience a petite feeling of pride, as though i have somehow been admitted into a club whose membership criteria remain entirely mysterious to me (friendship!).
i think that is what i keep returning to when i reflect on my time here. not necessarily having new experiences, now knowledgeable about how to work a bar. not even the money. it is the extraordinary luck of finding these singular, remarkable people. in all sincerity, finding this job has felt serendipitous.
my phone is now at one percent. yes, i am hungover. and i am the happiest i’ve ever been to be so.
