Waiting in morning for him to wake up. I have hated it, particularly on a Saturday morning. But he needs his sleep.
Funny thing happens when he drinks. The first time it happened I didn’t know what to expect, but today I know what to do.
I’ve been a nondrinker since age 19. It’s been a while since anyone around me got really drunk. There were wars in my mother’s house over alcohol, until it was pronounced forbidden. It had been the enemy that made the truth come out too sharply.
I had no quarrel with it for myself, but had left it for my personal convictions after a briefly rebellious period of experimentation, and then just for practical reasons.
I never missed it. I never missed the taste of it; I never missed the whirling lack of control, and I never missed the hangovers of course. It became my badge of independence. I’ve held myself away from alcohol even in the most oppressive situations, even in the face of Irish musicians, and THAT’s quite a fight to win, let me just say. I’ve seen myself through many a New Years bash without it, I’ve been insulted by wine connoisseurs, pushed and chided and made fun of, and generally disliked for it. But alcohol just doesn’t belong in my life, I’ve no use for it.
My job in my several circles of friends over the years has always been to ferry them home, to guard, to pick up the coats or wallets or keys they were leaving in the club coat=check by mistake, to hold hair back, mop up, to close the blinds in the morning, to answer over and over again that no, he or she loves or loved them, to discuss the wounds that might have taken them that far knowing it will all be forgotten sands in the morning, to pull off the boots and tuck them in with a wastebasket left close. I never minded that I was the odd one out. I felt like their angel, black or grey checkered though I might have been at the time myself.
And you have to live in Asia to really understand Alex’s reasons, and you have to forgive a bit. I came to see the point of it, even being a staunch non-drinker, while living in Japan. It’s a bit backward, but Asian colleagues always drag each other out to get drunk at least a few times a year (and usually much more often) — it’s an obligatory bonding ritual, with or without karaoke, and neither males nor females are exempt. You have to commit to the group there.
I being an outsider, was thankfully exempt, but the social pecking order and overall repressive structure of just living in an Asian culture is so completely restrictive in businesses over there that alcohol has provided them their only social escape. They use alcohol to step outside the ever-present threat of blame, shame, loss of face, and to be allowed, for a brief night, to be somewhat themselves. Various rice wines and Tsing Tao in China, Sake and Sapporo in Japan, Soju or Hite other Korean liquors here in Koreatown, are the chosen weapons of the mass destruction of the crushing daily inhibitions and restrictions they live under. And they are incredibly STRONG, both the weapons and the pressures.
You’re fully expected to get smashed with your boss, so the bunch of you can feel equally human, and your boss can feel duly superior by paying for the whole ordeal. You can’t bow out, it would be considered completely unfriendly. Some people manage to drink less and fake their drunkenness, but it’s tough to do since there are drinking games or rounds of toasts, always poured by others into one’s glass.
Alex usually passes on going at all if he can. It’s the only time he drinks and always gets a taxi home, such a good boy. But there was that first Friday — an important event, since he’d just begun working at a new company — when he came home looking impaired, but not smashed. He washed up, wobbled off to bed. All was well for a few hours. I thought the worst might be ahead. It was, but I hadn’t at all expected the result.
Rather than just parking his cookies in the middle of the night like a white boy, I was woken by moans.
I asked what the matter was, but he was out of it. When I put my hand on his forehead, he was obviously way past a normal fever temperature. I don’t measure, I’m not a medically inclined person, I had no thermometer. But he was scalding.
I was actually scared.
I made him wake up and take some water, which made him sick, and some more alcohol left in reverse gear. All the better.
I couldn’t get him normal temperature. I couldn’t get him to be conscious enough to realize this was serious. He wouldn’t sit up.
I put cold wet towels on him that made him protest the sting and shiver, and he kept begging for blankets.
I changed his blanket to a sheet.
More cold towels, back and forth to the bathroom over and over. He protested over and over.
He took aspirin, he threw it up. More towels.
Finally he began to cool down and look the right color. Eventually I could tell he was passing out normally.
He slept till 4pm the next day, and woke miraculously with no hangover at all.
I think the problem is, he doesn’t GET hangovers, he just completely malfunctions.
Why don’t people remember alcohol is poison? Especially when it registers on the body this dangerously? And his is the mild part — it doesn’t touch on the fraternity deaths caused by everclear, the BILLIONS of deaths on the highway, the babies that were an Oops, the paralysis or broken bones from drunken falls, the abuse caused by dark personalities turned on a dime, the triggers pulled that wouldn’t have been, the monetary waste of bar-room brawls ending in a jail cell, the soccer stadium tramplings, or just the quiet daily submergence of an ailing spirit.
He says it only puts him to sleep. He’s just never realized what his body’s doing in sleep.
So here it’s another of those mornings, I hate waiting to drag my man’s sorry carcass out of bed to go and do something on a Saturday.
But today I can’t. It’s not fair to. That company is going belly-up fast and he resigned before things got ugly. They gave him a sendoff party and now it’s up to him to find another gig.
And that’s another challenge.
And another wasted Saturday morning after, no doubt.
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