I had a terrible hangover one Saturday when I was going to visit my friend Dick at his new apartment on Park Avenue. One of those mystical hangovers that are beyond pain. An exquisite nauseous weirdness. Like you’ve died and turned into a zombie. You’re thinking, “This is what it feels like to be dead.”
I treated myself to a taxi. Heading up Park, a cacophony of clock sounds burst out of the radio. Alarms and grandfather clock chimes. The opening of Pink Floyd’s “Time.” If you know the song, you’ll recall that after all the clock noises swirl for a bit, an ominous tick-tock comes in. Then you get the big single notes on the guitar over drum fills. The tension builds and builds until … bump-bump-bump on the toms and … “Ticking away the moments that make up the dull day,” David Gilmour comes in singing.
The taxi enters the Park Avenue tunnel at 33rd during this intro, and, as we are flying along in the dark, I think how cool it would be if we came back out into the sunshine right when Gilmour starts singing. Very cinematic. But then I realize, wow, it looks like the timing will be perfect. Yes, here comes the end of the tunnel. Here it comes. Here it comes. That circle of sunlight is rushing towards us as the drums hit that intro fill. Yes! Yes! Yes!
And, no kidding, the driver changes the station. Salsa. Carnival has erupted into the taxi and is stomping my hungover skull.
Anyway, I go up to Dick’s apartment where all I could do was groan and complain about my head. Finally, Dick gets mad and orders me to fill a glass with vodka and down it in a single gulp.
This was the last thing I wanted to do. After the previous night’s debauchery and given the transcendental nausea I felt at the moment, Dick’s command was like telling me to drink from an unflushed public toilet.
What?
Do it! Now!
You’re kidding.
Do it or I’m kicking you out. Now!
So I drained the glass. Almost instantly, I felt normal. My epic hangover had vanished.
That’s the first time I had any clue about what it means to be a real drinker. Or, really, what it meant to be an alcoholic.
My real friendship with Dick began when he really hit bottom.
When I visited New York the first time, my friend Wayne was living in Dick’s spare bedroom. As we took the bus from Port Authority up to East 65th, Wayne warned me that Dick could be … shocking.
Shocking? How so.
Oh, you know, he can say things. Do things.
Huh?
That first visit, all that I encountered was a sophisticated older gentlemen with a mustache. He chain-smoked and put on a blazer when we went out to eat. He was clearly gay.
For the whole visit, I kept waiting to be shocked.
My second visit to New York, we arrived at the tiny apartment and Dick was stark naked. He was toting stacks of papers out to the incinerator chute. Drafts of his own writing that he had decided, in utter despair, was worthless.
I was a sheltered 21-year old from Mississippi. Dick was in his fifties. So this was an OLD man pacing around naked with a pot belly, scrawny legs and wrinkled ass. Like having to see my father naked.
Dick’s head was bleeding. He had shaved it to feel like a monk.
All this qualified as shocking.
And, again stark naked with the perpetual cigarette in his hand, he held court and said many shocking things. Most of it was too much information about what he liked about men and gay sex.
I forget how long this lasted. But, to the best of my knowledge, his British wife out in New Jersey called and threatened to divorce him. This was a huge deal because she had tolerated some pretty extreme behavior over the years. He’d been a hard-drinking, gonzo journalist for 25 years. He’d put the family through numerous manic-depressive breakdowns. He’d invited male lovers to live with them as they raised the children. But he and Jean were deeply devoted to sharing the whole adventure of marriage. Divorce had never been on the table.
So the threat really hit Dick. He asked me to run down to the store to buy another bottle of vodka and a couple of liters of Diet Coke. He was very sober, serious and SPECIFIC about the instructions.
When I got back, he told me to fill the bottom of a big glass with a few fingers of sugar before adding the Coke. He drank it down and asked me to make another.
He didn’t touch the vodka.
It hit me that this was a routine. How many times over the years had he followed it to get off the booze?
The vodka was there for security. He needed to know that it was there. But he never touched it.
So I sat by his bed while he talked and talked and talked. And smoked and smoked and smoked. I kept refilling his glass with sugar and Coke. The window open to New York City.
He went to the first AA meeting he could find the next day.
By the time I came to visit him with my hangover, I had gotten used to him as a non-drinker who still nonetheless said many shocking things.
When my hangover vanished, I thought, “Damn, only an alcoholic would know a trick like that.”
I always understood “hair of the dog” as a mimosa or a Bloody Mary at brunch. Some sweet or spicy delivery mechanism for a small dose of alcohol. The idea of drinking a glass full of vodka would just never have occurred to me.
And the result! I felt more normal than normal.
I shared this thought with Dick.
He blew a big cloud of smoke and said, “Indeed.”
Kenny Nowell 