One morning, after a particularly energetic foray into the wonderful world of Shiraz with my friend Sue, I woke up to find a McDonald’s receipt on the bedside table. It was for a sizeable amount too. Over R200. My stomach felt raw, like someone had sandpapered it from the inside. That wasn’t the usual feeling I had after consuming a truckload of fat and sugar. I crawled through to the kitchen and rummaged for the packaging to see what I’d eaten, but there were no cartons anywhere. I looked at the receipt and I couldn’t understand it. According to the bill, we had ordered one of practically everything. There were burgers of every type, from Big Macs to Quarter Pounders. There were drinks and chips and nuggets with sweet-and-sour and barbeque sauce. There was even one of each sundae: caramel, chocolate and strawberry. So where was everything?
I got dressed. Well, more dressed. As usual, I’d passed out in half my clothes. I seemed to do that often; perhaps I lost interest halfway through or perhaps I felt I’d disrobed enough. Either way, I would often wake up in a bra and jeans or T-shirt and socks. Charming and classy. Said no one ever. I went to check the outside bin. Perhaps I’d chucked all the empty packaging in there. But, no, that was empty too. I called Sue.
“Hey hey!”
“Yeah, fuck you a lot. I’m dying. How much did we drink last night?”
I glanced over at the table. Four empty wine bottles and two glasses, one lying on its side in a puddle of wine, as though it had just given up. I knew how it felt.
“Four bottles.”
“Holy crap.”
I had to know.
“Listen, what happened to the stuff we bought last night at McDonald’s? Did we go to your place to eat it?”
Silence.
“You don’t remember?”
“Going to your place? Nope.”
“We didn’t go to my place. We got back to yours and had a fight and I went home.”
I didn’t remember that. I dimly remembered driving home. Emphasis on dimly.
“What did I do?”
I asked because she was cross. So whatever had happened was probably my fault. Or I had at least started it.
“You gave all the food to a beggar.”
I looked at the receipt again. That was a lot of food.
“All of it?”
“Yes, Sam, all of it. From the milkshakes to the burgers to the chips to the ice cream.”
Dear God.
“And he didn’t even want it all. You just forced it on him.”
“How did I force food onto a beggar?”
“You got out of the car and put it all on the pavement next to him. All of it. All of it.”
I didn’t remember that either, but I wished I had. It must have looked hilarious, this poor man surrounded by more food than he’d probably seen in a week, not knowing whether to laugh, cry or run away.
“Sorry.”
“Yes, we went out hungry and came home hungrier.”
I laughed. I couldn’t help it. Even while small men with hammers worked very hard on mining inside my head, I laughed.
“How cross are you really?”
She laughed reluctantly.
“Yeah, okay, it was funny. But I was starving! And the next time we drink like that we’re ordering in!”
The next time we drink like that. We knew there would be a next time. It was inconceivable that there wouldn’t. And it was funny. So many things are funny afterwards. I would laugh along with others when they said, “Do you remember when …?” and I’d try not to think too hard about the fact that they were laughing because they remembered some hilarious occurrence and I was laughing because it was the first time I had ever heard the story. That memory was gone. My brain was like Swiss cheese when it came to drinking. I’d had the blackouts from early on in what I thought of as my drinking career. It was worrying occasionally, but I didn’t let myself think about it too often. Instead I would comfort myself with what quickly became something of a mantra for me: “This sort of thing happens to everyone.”
But it didn’t. Not to everyone. Not to very many people. Just to me.
I became a bit of a Sherlock Holmes when it came to my own missing pieces. One morning I woke up clutching a toy duck – a big yellow fluffy one. How had I got this duck? I was a little worried, not because I was clutching an unfamiliar toy that had not been there the day before, or that it had obviously come into my possession during a bender, but more because I hoped I hadn’t taken it from a child. That would be bad. I had visions of wrestling a soft toy from a toddler. I was 23, I could drink and vote. Please don’t let me have relinquished my adulthood to bitchslap a child out of his or her snuggly. That might mean I Had A Drinking Problem. No one who just likes an occasional glass of wine or whiskey or vodka would snatch a toy from a child. I hoped against hope. With a sick feeling of dread, I phoned Sue, whose party it had been. Was it a party? Actually, maybe it was lunch. A lunch that evolved into a party. Or maybe it was only me who had seen the party side of the lunch.
“Uhm … how did I end up with a duck?”
“That was the witblits.”
The best definition for the term ‘witblits’ I’ve managed to find is that it’s sorta kinda the equivalent of American ‘moonshine’, an illegally distilled liquor that can be up 50% proof or more, except moonshine is made from corn and witblits from grapes. But don’t let soft fruit fool you. Not for nothing does it translate as ‘white lightning’. That stuff is lethal.
But Sue’s mention of witblits had jogged my memory. I remembered a little more about the day; there was a very annoying man at the lunch/party/mess. He was loud and overbearing and brought a bottle of the murky stuff he’d filched off someone at a hotel in Polokwane where a group of what sounded like equally irritating men had been playing a drinking game. This I remembered clearly. Just not how I ended up drinking it. Or going home with a toy duck.
“He dared you to match him shot for shot. And you did. Which we all thought was mad.”
Yeah, that was mad. He was huge and I was not. And when it comes to holding your alcohol, the bigger you are, the better you are at it. What was I thinking? Obvious answer: I wasn’t.
“And then you said you had to leave so you wouldn’t have to drive home drunk. And you took my sister’s duck.”
So what part of that sentence should I have latched on to? The first bit where I drink loads of illegal spirit and then drive? Or the second where I experience relief that her sister is 27 years old and therefore couldn’t possibly have spent the evening sobbing brokenheartedly over a stolen duck.
“Why did I take her duck?”
Sue laughed.
“Because you said you didn’t want to drive home alone!”
I laughed too. Made perfect sense. Mystery solved.
I can’t remember now whether, at that point, I knew this was weird. I don’t think I did. The stories were good, even the one where I drank alone at home and woke up on the floor of the study, clutching the computer mouse. When I pulled myself up onto the chair I discovered I had tried to order a French maid’s outfit from some American website. Luckily, I had forgotten my credit card number, or couldn’t find my purse, or thought I had submitted it correctly but hadn’t, which – considering that even 20 years ago it was nearly $60 – was a good thing …
And, besides, I could tell a good story! I still can; I can take a tiny, insignificant event and turn it into a narrative masterpiece. Ever the