Hungover by Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall

Author:Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-11-19T16:00:00+00:00

THE HUNGOVER GAMES (THE LAST DROP)

It is my final evening in Scotland, and I’m sitting with John McFetrick, drinking beer and whisky at the Last Drop. It is a great name for a pub, and here it is practically a triple entendre. They once hanged deviants in the street outside, and the wooden sign above the door depicts a swinging noose. But also it was places like this one, Edinburgh Castle looming above it, that helped coin the expression “to go on the wagon.”

Back in the day, condemned prisoners were taken from whatever dungeon or tower they’d been locked in, put on a horse-drawn cart and paraded through the streets to the public gallows. Sometimes, if the magistrate was feeling magnanimous or the condemned prisoner was well liked, they would stop at the pub for one last drink. The prisoner would empty his glass, presumably very slowly, and then it was time to get “back on the wagon.”

“Well, that’s both informative and cheery,” says McFetrick, in that sardonic Eeyore tone that hasn’t changed since university. At the time, though we adored each other, we were not very similar. But now, twenty years later, we have a lot in common: two mostly Irish Canadians drinking in Scotland, we both have young sons, complicated domestic situations, profound contradictions embedded in our souls, a love for whisky, strange demons lurking around us and a dangerous habit of messing with them.

McFetrick, for example, has spent the last long while studying thousands of hours of videotaped conversations with manic-depressives institutionalized at the University of Edinburgh, while I have been studying hangovers. We knock our glasses together: to old times and new ironies.

We order some haggis and I ask him about his hangovers. (I recall him having some doozies.) He tells me about one before I knew him, when—in sweltering heat, presenting his squadron while the bugles were blowing—he somehow puked on his drill sergeant without the man ever noticing. He laughs about it—and then about the time I got us busted by the Montreal transit police.

It was Valentine’s Day, and he and my longtime girlfriend Ibi and I decided we’d all eat hallucinogenic mushrooms, drink a lot and go to a late-night screening of Caligula—as you do. Then, on the way there, we convinced McFetrick to jump the turnstile. He tripped, the subway cops descended, and a very awkward sort of chaos ensued.

“Those,” says McFetrick, “were the good old days.”

Looking around, it is easy to imagine Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur Conan Doyle tying one on in this very bar. They were, after all, drinking buddies and classmates at the university here.

Traveling these weeks around the UK, I’ve noticed several connections about the route I’ve taken. I show McFetrick the poker I made at the blacksmith’s forge in that little Devon town, which it turns out is right next to the Buckfast Abbey.

“The Buckfast Abbey,” I say, as our haggis arrives. “Do you know what that is?”

“A place to put monks?” says McFetrick.

“Well, yeah. But it’s also where Buckie comes from.

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