Bangkok Old Hand

by Collin Piprell

  Halcyon days. And you had been treated to a "Surf's up!" only the week before.

  So where has all this idle reminiscing got us? What significance can we salvage from it all? As "a rose is a rose is a rose", can we conclude that a prophylactic is a contraceptive is a prophylactic? No, we cannot, as catchy as that proposition may sound. In fact, for almost one hundred years rubber contraceptives were against the law, in the United States, while rubber prophylactics were not. That's right. In 1873, Congress passed legislation that most states had already made law in 1868 — the sale of condoms as contraceptives became illegal. In some parts of the country it was illegal even to tell someone that the condom could be used to prevent pregnancy. These laws have since been declared unconstitutional, but until quite recently all packets of condoms had to bear this proviso: "Sold only for the prevention of disease."

  Our preoccupations change. What in times past were prophylactics later became contraceptives and now seem to have become primarily prophylactics once again. As we have seen, however, there, there is no reason to restrict ourselves to only two applications. Condoms were probably first used, long ago, as protection against disease. This, the archaeologists suggest, is what the 17th-century English soldiers at Dudley Castle were doing with them. So far as I know, however, they have not even considered the hypothesis that those skins had been intended for a crossbowmen's Shmoo Shoot. Or maybe the soldiers planned to put an alien blob in the company commander's cot, but were interrupted by the Civil War. Prophylactics can be contraceptives; but they can also be shmoos or alien blobs.

  There is still money to be made in condoms, I figure. I'm thinking of writing a book entitled 101 Uses for a Condom, but I'll bet someone else beats me to it.

  20 THE GREAT WATERMELON FUMBLE

  Here is Stack Jackson's secret recipe for a "Watermelon Surprise". Those of you who are still happily married may not want to try this one.

  That morning, Stack said, he'd tried shaving with toothpaste. Not as bad as brushing his teeth with shaving cream, which he had also done once before, but still no great shakes.

  "I went to sleep at 4:00 a.m.," he told me, "and do you know what time I got up this morning? Seven o'clock. Porn was singing. I haven't heard her sing like that since the honeymoon. Of course back then I didn't feel like screaming at her to shut up."

  "But you can't still have a hangover," I said. After all, it was 4:30 in the afternoon.

  "Yeah?" Stack replied. 'You haven't tried my Watermelon Surprise. It's got a half-life of 24 hours."

  "What's a Watermelon Surprise?"

  "Don't ask."

  "Have a beer," I suggested.

  "A hair of the dog? Oh, no. Not me. To hear Porn talk you'd think I was an alcoholic already. She's not too happy about last night."

  'Then what was she doing singing at 7:00 a.m.?"

  "Well, she was happy and she wasn't — both, I guess you could say."

  That Saturday afternoon I had met my old friend Stack Jackson at a local hostelry where from time to time we quaff a few jars and trade observations on What It All Means.

  Every since I've first known him he's been worried about his drinking. Usually this concern extends to matters such as "Is there going to be enough beer to last everyone the night?" and "Am I really a sissy because I prefer Kloster beer to Singha?" Sometimes, however — especially since his marriage (he's been married to Porn for three years) and always when he's hung over (which has happened a couple of times during our acquaintanceship) — his worries take a morbid turn.

  "Have a beer," I said. "As long as you're having a good time you're not an alcoholic."

  "Do I look like I'm having a good time?"

  "Have a beer."

  "Okay."

  By degrees Stack's outlook on things grew less bleak, and finally he brought himself to unfold the tale of the Great Watermelon Fumble.

  "It was yesterday evening," he said. "I tried to find you and the other guys, but nobody was around. I had a special treat lined up." Stack brightened momentarily and took a pull at his beer. "Yeah, it was going to be a surprise. I'd also picked up a video of the 49ers-Falcons game.

  Figured we could have a nice quiet evening — a few drinks, some football..."

  "Stack," I said. "What's a Watermelon Surprise?"

  "I'm coming to that. A couple of weeks ago I bought a big watermelon and souped it up with some rum. It was a bottle of Barbados rum somebody had given us last New Year's. Like I was saying, you guys weren't around, and Porn was at her sister's place in Bang Khen. Even the maid had the night off. I was kind of at loose ends, so I thought I'd just taste this stuff..."

  "How," I interrupted again, "do you soup up a watermelon?"

  "Nothing to it. You cut a wedge out of the rind, you see? Then you dig out some of the meat, mash up what's left, dump in the rum..."

  "A whole bottle?"

  "Yeah; I only had the one. You dump in the rum, put the wedge of rind back, tape it up, keep it cool for a week or two, and Bob's your uncle." Stack essayed a grin, only it came across more as a grimace.

  "You're kidding."

  "Naw. And yesterday I took a look in the fridge to see how things were progressing. Pretty well, it turned out. You could hear this gurgling coming from the watermelon. That's how you know it's ready. And that's when I went to look for you guys and couldn't find you.

  "I headed back home and put on the football game,'' he continued. "I sat down with the watermelon on my lap, thinking maybe I'd just sample it a bit to see if it was okay. I stuck a glass straw in it." A look of awe appeared on his face. "Delicious. It was amazingly delicious.

  "The game was pretty good, as well. Before I knew it, it was half-time, and the 49ers were 20-0. About then I had to get up to answer the call of nature. You know that hallway in our place, with the toilet down at the end and to the right?"

  I remembered.

  "Yeah. Well, I started down the hall, the watermelon cradled in my arms. Then I kind of lost my balance. I began to go over on my face and it looked like I was going to fumble. I took a couple of little steps to catch up with myself, but I was still overbalanced. The next thing I knew I found myself running headlong, watermelon at arm's length, moving like I was going for a 40-yard gain."

  Quite a picture. There we had him, fumbling his watermelon, hurtling down this hallway towards some as yet unimaginable rendezvous with Fate.

  "Sounds like this Watermelon Surprise was good

  stuff."

  "Oh, it was." Stack's demeanour was still quite serious, despite the glasses of beer already applied to his aching psyche. "It was. I went running like a son of a gun clear down the hall, failed to negotiate the turn, and ran smack into the wall at the far end."

  Stack snorted into his beer and came up chuckling, face splattered with foam. "The watermelon exploded. Holy cow, what a fumble. There was watermelon everywhere. All over me, the carpet, and up the walls to the ceiling. I was flat out on my back. 'What a mess,' I thought. 'I'll have to get all this cleaned up before Porn gets home.' Trouble was, I couldn't seem to stand up. Then I thought it might help if I just rested for a minute...

  "I woke up some time later, still on the hallway floor — soggy, groggy, and the object of my wife's undivided attention. The maid was also home; she was scrubbing a wall."

  This did not sound like a recipe for domestic bliss to me. "I seem to recall your saying that Porn was both happy and unhappy," I prompted. "Where, in what you have related, are the grounds of all this breaking into song at daybreak?"

  "I'm getting there," Stack said. "Porn didn't say too much while the maid was cleaning up around me. She was playing it low-key. Crisis management. Minimise the loss of face. But it was hard to construe things satisfactorily, and I wasn't being any help. I should've got up, but it was fairly comfy where I was, for the time being. It helped if I kept my eyes closed. I was thinking we could say I'd been walking down the hall minding my own business when a big watermelon came crashing down on me from anoth
er dimension where watermelons smell something like rum.

  "In the event. Pom decided her legless husband was really sick. Before I could say no, she'd lifted my head and was feeding me an evil black mess from a glass. It was her mother's secret Chinese herbal cure for everything. There's been a jug of it around the house ever since we got married. Like a curse. This stuff would make a dead man walk, just to avoid a second tablespoonful.

  "But what Porn doesn't know is that her brother, a medical genius, modified the original mixture a little when he was here last summer. The stuff looks the same and smells the same, but now it's about 80% alcohol."

  Stack had almost fully recovered by now, and was more like his usual ebullient self. He had taken over the ordering of the beer and was waxing ever more loquacious. I was spellbound.

  "Porn was set on punishing me with a couple of massive doses of this elixir. On top of the Watermelon Surprise, which was still very much with me, it was Lazarus all over again. I could walk and everything. Things are a mite hazy after that, but I know I took Porn to a disco for the first time in two years, and we finally got to sleep at 4:00 a.m. I guess we had a good time, judging by her disposition this morning. Sure did reaffirm her faith in Mother-in-Law's elixir, anyhow."

  There was a pause while we reflected on those matters he had related and on their relation to the Greater Scheme of Things.

  "So I'm thinking," said Stack, "this is what we do: have you got some room in your fridge? I mean, Porn isn't going to be totally keen on having watermelons around the place for a while. What do you say? It'd be ready for Christmas."

  I now have a watermelon in my fridge. It hasn't started to gurgle yet, but I'm afraid it soon will.

  21 THE JOY OF HANGOVERS

  So you just couldn't resist trying a "Watermelon Surprise". Don't say you weren't warned.

  There are better things than a hangover. --S.Tsow

  It was the kind of day you wouldn't have been dead for a hundred bucks. Unless, of course, you had a force- 10 hangover, which I did have, and I would've gladly shuffled off this mortal coil in exchange for 75 cents and the eternal promise of no more hangovers.

  I did have a pretty good excuse, mind you, since I'd spent the previous night at a kind of informal wake, mourning the passing away of one Sid "Siddiqi" Davis, who had been crushed to death by a falling bargirl named Big Toy. That's all really only incidental, but given the state of my constitution, I figured Sid had taken the easier course, and I might have traded places with him even without the 75 cents.

  But as I was saying, if I had to feel that way, I

  couldn't have picked a nicer day for it. It was unseasonably cool and clear, for Bangkok. At midday the sky was violently blue, with great white wads of cloud drifting gently across the firmament, taking care not the obstruct the sun as they did so. Lovely for sure, though of course the sunlight was driving spikes right through my eyeballs and into the back of my brain.

  And from somewhere in the back of my brain rose the shape of a desperate resolve. For some months already I'd been threatening to run and row my way back to a 10- years-younger me, and this suddenly seemed as good a time as any to start. It might make me feel better, I told myself; and even if it didn't it would maybe kill me, which would be okay too. Exercise is the only thing, in fact — aside from time and the gentle stroking of my fevered brow by understanding and lithesome young ladies — that has ever made me feel any better after a real night on the sauce.

  As we get older, they say, we are supposed to get wiser, and to suffer correspondingly fewer hangovers. Even if we don't get any wiser, it is generally true that the severity of one's hangovers increases with age, so aversion to pain in any case tends to discourage what wisdom may not. And I might mention another ugly truth about getting older: not only do the hangovers get more and more remarkable, the only real cures become harder to effect. That is to say, the ladies who are stroking your brow tend to get both less understanding and less lithesome, as time goes by, while exercise also becomes harder to get into and less effective besides. The best thing is not to have any hangovers, and that is the truth.

  It has often been suggested that the existence of hangovers points to a basic flaw in the Scheme of Things (the late Sid Davis so argued, for one). But hope springs eternal. There is actually a worldwide fellowship — kind of a latter-day cargo cult — which devoutly believes that one day wise and talented beings from another galaxy will come to Earth bearing cures for both the Protestant work ethic and the common hangover. This, it is felt, should then allow humankind to rest easy and settle down to its manifest destiny, which is the brewing and unconstrained appreciation of the Perfect Ale.

  Yes, there is hope. But what is the common hangover, and what can be done about it while we wait for our Promethean friends from another world? First ask yourself this: Where do hangovers come from, and how can you recognise one when it appears? Know the enemy.

  I personally don't have any trouble recognising a hangover in the normal course of events. A real hangover always surprises you with the revelation that existence could harbour something this unpleasant, and furthermore causes you to think that if this is the case, then existence isn't everything it's sometimes cracked up to be, and you want out.

  Different people are more or less susceptible to the headaches, stomach problems, and various other pains often associated with the syndrome. These discomforts are as nothing, though, when compared to the core symptom. This sensation is difficult to describe. Call it a malaise of the spirit, rather than the body. A soul-ache, perhaps. It seems to include equal parts of guilt, exhaustion, pain, and apprehension that it all might get still worse or, worse still, never get better. But the real test is this: Would you honestly and sincerely rather be dead? If the answer is yes, then it's probably a hangover.

  But where do they come from? Most people believe that hangovers are caused by drinking too much alcohol. That notion, however, has by no means been established to everyone's satisfaction. Some would even call it an old wives' tale. Look at all the other factors involved. For one thing, a night on the town is going to take you into some pretty grotty atmospheres, places where you'll be breathing lots of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide and maybe even cheap perfume and stuff like that as well. And you're probably going to stay up way past your bedtime, so exhaustion has to be taken into account. Then there's the food; at what other time are you likely to find yourself eating half of pound of peanuts, an entire dish of deep- fried dried chili peppers, and a pint of Lek's first-ever attempt at garlic-pickle cheese dip? Who is to say which excess is responsible for what symptoms, and in what proportion?

  My own brother, who is something of an expert, used to have a theory that booze didn't have anything at all to do with the hangover, and that it was really the smoking — he used to go through three or four packs of cigarettes in a good evening. If it weren't for that, he would say, there'd be no problem. Then one day, in the spirit of scientific enquiry, he gave up smoking. Imagine his surprise when he found he still got hangovers! So it was back to the drawing board.

  One reflective Sunday morning not too long after that, he came up with a new improved theory — and this one, he claims, has so far resisted falsification: It's sleep that gives you hangovers. He wonders why no one has ever tumbled to this simple truth before. It's so obvious. You go out boozing and you feel just great; in fact, the more you drink, the better you feel. Right up to the time you go to bed, when you're still as happy as can be, and you're thinking this world is somewhat better than okay and isn't it a shame the night is so short. But then, before you know it, you're awake again and it's morning and if this isn't a hangover you're looking at, then it'll have to do till one comes along. So it's sleep that does it. As long as you never go to sleep, you'll never wake up with a hangover. And as long as you stay awake and keep drinking, you'll feel great. My brother has been known to keep the party going till noon the next day in a heroic attempt to thwart the demon Sleep.

  Some
of you may well query this logic, as sound as it might appear upon first hearing. I myself must admit to certain doubts. Indeed, I have seen with my own eyes at least one instance where a person definitely went from drinking to being hung over without so much as a moment's sleep intervening. I used to have a Japanese girlfriend, and on our first date I took her to a jazz concert at a pub in Oxford. I had a pint of beer and she ordered a sherry. As she explained it later, she didn't drink as a rule, and she'd only asked for the sherry so I wouldn't think she was being unsociable. In any case, just a couple of minutes after she'd got her drink, I glanced around to see how she was enjoying the music, but she was nowhere to be seen. Hearing giggles, I looked down to find her disposed in a fairly relaxed heap on the floor. She was wearing a lop-sided expression and her face was bright red. When I lifted her to her feet, her legs kind of flopped away in different directions, and I had to plant her firmly in a chair for fear she'd collapse into a pool of protoplasm and run away through a crack in the floor. Before long her giggles wore off. She was still bright red, though whether it was mostly from the sherry or from embarrassment, now, it was hard to say. Then she rapidly became so ill I didn't even laugh.

  I was flabbergasted at this lightning progression from one glass of sherry to legless inebriation to gruesome hangover. It was the sort of thing you almost wanted to ask her to do again, just so you could watch more carefully the second time. Only later was I to learn that this talent is shared by many Asians, and that it may be attributed to a tiny genetic difference between these people and the majority of Caucasians.

  Normally alcohol is converted to acetaldehyde by the enzyme "alcohol dehydrogenase". If the acetaldehyde builds up in one's system, within minutes it produces the following syndrome: the face becomes hot and flushed, and this soon spreads to the entire body; a severe, throbbing headache then makes its appearance; finally, there can be difficulty breathing and nausea.