Thursday 13 January 2011

BOOZE HOUNDS

(From WAXXX 1.0 November 2010) 


that’s how it starts. 


When I woke up the first thing I noticed was that I was on my mattress, but for some reason it was in the living room and underneath a table. My lip was split in two, my eye horribly black and swollen, the white of it filled with blood. Bruises and cuts all over my body. The entire flat was destroyed, all the furniture had been turned upside down and everything was bent out of shape like it had been beaten with some sort of crude bat. The room was littered with signs of chaos, kitchen surfaces completely covered in lime husks, all the upholstery soaked in booze. I sat there wondering, what  bastard has done this to me, and why?

Once I’d fully woken up I realised that the bastard was in fact, me.

The “why” is more complex. I’d noticed that since the Liverpool mephedrone scene has died out people have gone down one of two routes. One being people snorting  any and every illegal, legal and semi-legal substance in an attempt to get a similar kind of high. They’ve not been very successful.  The second being people drinking themselves into a frenzied mess so they can enjoy nights again in a blur of depraved behaviour. These people have been successful, sadly.

I decided I needed to explore this second route to see what it’s about. So I called my research assistant and he came around at once to help out. He brought around two bottles of rum and as many limes as he could carry. My assistant has never believed in the philosophy that one should enjoy alcohol responsibly, rather he believes that the purpose of alcohol is to help you reach rock bottom.

“I’ll make you my favourite cocktail” my assistant said “the bastard”.  Which seemed to consist of just a pint glass filled with rum and a quarter chunk of lime.

“I’m not one for cocktails” he said, then began drinking straight from his bottle.

A rum drunkenness comes on slow. So with a little practice you can drink a full bottle without feeling the effects. But as soon as you finish that last drop you’ve got to get where you’re going as soon as possible, because you’ve got mere minutes before you turn into a weeping mess.

I spent too long in the flat fiddling around putting my shoes on. So by the time we were out the door we were both in the grip of a terrible booze madness. Walking normally seemed out of the question. To get any sort of motion going my assistant was walking sideways with both his arms gripping the wall. I had to lean all the way back so my head was pointed skywards and then to offset the weight imbalance take huge strides with my legs kicking up high. It looked a little odd but at least we were going in the right direction.
“For fucks sake!” My assistant said “We need to get our shit together. the bouncers will be on to us before we even do anything, if they see us walking like this they’ll probably just take us into the back and beat us in the head.”

With a horrific effort we were able to walk upright and forward for just enough time to convince the door staff that we were just a couple of average drunks, but once we got inside it became impossible to hold ourselves together anymore and we became completely crazed.

Liverpool is a different place since mephedrone died. Everyone  could afford it so everyone was on it. People would make ten new best friends every night. After the bars closed and everyone was too wired to sleep there’d be an all night house party in any direction. Now when you look around everyone is doing there own thing, huddled in groups, barely looking up.

Sometimes your eyes will scan across the room and they’ll make contact witha half remembered face, someone who was your best friend in the world for ten minutes and you’ll both look away and get back to your drink.

I’d started to suspect  that we were all doomed.

My assistant was loosing it a little, the rum was soaking into his brain. He kept harassing the barman and banging his fists on the table and making bizarre booze orders.

“I need seven rums.” He said. “All for me. And three Gins and a pint of wine, for this man” pointing at me. He befriended a young male fresher at the bar. “It’s okay, you’re with me now” He said to the frightened child “Get this kid some damn rum, god help you if it’s not rum!” I turned away from this madness, I could tell this would not end well.

There is an undeniable freedom to being this boozed up in public. Most of the higher parts of the brain have shut down. Your mind becomes like a recording camera that’s been tied to a mad hound that’s running around screaming, pissing itself and crashing into things.

I saw my editor and became panicked. I was long past my deadline and it would be hard to explain that I was not drunk but in the depths of background research. When I approached him I discovered he was completely rigid with booze, unable to move or talk. When I asked if he was okay, he simply handed me a Waxx business card and said “Email me“.

I began to feel like a saviour for all the lost souls in the bar. The booze had shifted gear on me and now I felt frantic and felt the need to approach complete strangers and explain their problems to them. I went over to a group of break dancers, trying to explain that this show of athleticism was inappropriate and unnecessary.  My speech came out garbled and frantic and the group began to get angry. Before things could get any worse I felt the familiar sturdy grip of a bouncer dragging me out.

I was making slow progress getting back to my flat. I had to keep stopping as I forgot what I was doing or where or was. Then I remember my break dancing friends appearing in front of me.
“Is there a problem, amigos?” I said.

I was answered by a quick punch to the face and blood shot up in front of my eyes from my broken lip.  Then something slammed into the back of my head and I fell to the floor. I was thrashing around as wild kicks landed all over my body. I could hear the sound of shoes smacking bone. A lot of the kicks glanced off harmlessly. But some of them didn’t, some of them were hitting vital things, my brains, my kidney, my spine discs.  I suddenly realised that I was about to die. The thought that I was being kicked to death by a pack of break dancers filled me with such horror than I began howling like a small child.

They eventually stopped, out of pity more than anything else. My assistant tells me that he  found me huddled on a street corner spitting blood and cackling to myself. He dragged my bloody corpse back to the flat and carried me up the stairs.

I was pretty low at this point, but I knew it wasn’t rock bottom. I began tearing apart the flat. Blaming it for the madness that had descended onto my life. I was swinging my lamp into anything that looked at me the wrong way. My assistant understood the vibe that I was on and began throwing furniture into the walls. My assistant quickly took off his clothes and became naked, except for a pair of aviators. He climbed out of the window and made his way to the roof. He stood there naked in the middle of the night drinking tequila, shouting at the moon or anyone who would listen.

The need for another beating became terrible. I picked a large pair of cymbals and began roaming around the halls of my building banging them together and screaming my own name. Challenging anyone to pick up a kitchen knife and end this terrible night once and for all. Sadly, the beating never came and I came back into the flat defeated.

When  I came back in my assistant, still mostly naked, had a bottle of high strength vodka and was pouring it all over the flat. He tried to set it alight, to finally put an end to the flat and ourselves. He quickly gave up and fell asleep then vomited.

I woke up shaking, huddled on a mattress in a sea of chaos.

I was still completely deranged by booze and began thinking dark thoughts. What the hell was I doing? What was the purpose of any of this?  Is this rock bottom or could there be more? My body was completely beaten, all my property destroyed in a moment of madness and I‘m not even sure what I achieved. I was too hangover to hold a coherent thought and too badly beaten to use a pen or keyboard.  A man in this state is in no position to criticise anyone, even those people who’re are chasing that long gone high.

As I looked around I began to see a certain beauty to what we’d done and I began to think maybe we weren’t all doomed. Maybe we‘re just all moving on to different things. Maybe this is just how it starts.


BOOZE HOUNDS by Stephen Baxendale is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License