A Few Too Many
- By Misc Author
- Published 05/26/2008
- Hangovers
- Unrated
Many folk cures for hangovers are soups: menudo in Mexico, mondongo in Puerto Rico, işkembe çorbasi in Turkey, patsa in Greece, khashi in Georgia.
The fact that all of the above involve tripe may mean something.
Hungarians favor a concoction of cabbage and smoked meats, sometimes forthrightly called “hangover soup.”
The Russians’ morning-after soup, solyanka, is, of course, made with pickle juice. The Japanese have traditionally relied on miso soup, though a while ago there was a fashion for a vegetable soup invented and marketed by one Kazu Tateishi, who claimed that it cured cancer as well as hangovers.
I read this list of food cures to Manuela Neuman, a Canadian researcher on alcohol-induced liver damage, and she laughed at only one, the six-pack of Coke.
Many of the cures probably work, she said, on the same distraction principle as the hair of the dog: “Take the spicy foods, for example. They divert the body’s attention away from coping with the alcohol to coping with the spices, which are also a toxin.
So you have new problems—with your stomach, with your esophagus, with your respiration—rather than the problem with the headache, or that you are going to the washroom every five minutes.”
The high-fat and high-protein meals operate in the same way, she said. The body turns to the food and forgets about the alcohol for the time being, thus delaying the hangover and possibly alleviating it. As for the differences among the many food recommendations, Neuman said that any country’s hangover cure, like the rest of its cultural practices, is an adaptation to the environment.
Chilies are readily available in Mexico, peanut butter in Africa. People use what they have. Neuman also pointed out that local cures will reflect the properties of local brews. If Russians favor pickle juice, they are probably right to, because their drink is vodka: “Vodka is a very pure alcohol. It doesn’t have the congeners that you find, for example, in whiskey in North America.
The congeners are also toxic, independent of alcohol, and will have their own effects. With vodka you are just going to have pure-alcohol effects, and one of the most important of those is dehydration. The Russians drink a lot of water with their vodka, and that combats the dehydration. The pickle brine will have the same effect. It’s salty, so they’ll drink more water, and that’s what they need.”
Many hangover cures—the soups, the greasy breakfast—are comfort foods, and that, apart from any sworn-by ingredients, may be their chief therapeutic property, but some other remedies sound as though they were devised by the witches in “Macbeth.”
Kingsley Amis recommended a mixture of Bovril and vodka. There is also a burnt-toast cure. Such items suggest that what some hungover people are seeking is not so much relief as atonement. The same can be said of certain non-food recommendations, such as exercise.
One source says that you should do a forty-minute workout, another that you should run six miles—activities that may have little attraction for the hung over. Additional procedures said to be effective are an intravenous saline drip and kidney dialysis, which, apart from their lack of appeal, are not readily available.
There are other non-ingested remedies. Amazon will sell you a refrigeratable eye mask, an aromatherapy inhaler, and a vinyl statue of St. Vivian, said to be the patron saint of the hung over. She comes with a stand and a special prayer.
The most widely used over-the-counter remedy is no doubt aspirin. Advil, or ibuprofen, and Alka-Seltzer—there is a special formula for hangovers, Alka-Seltzer Wake-Up Call—are probably close runners-up. (Tylenol, or acetaminophen, should not be used, because alcohol increases its toxicity to the liver.)
Also commonly recommended are Vitamin C and B-complex vitamins. But those are almost home remedies. In recent years, pharmaceutical companies have come up with more specialized formulas: Chaser, NoHang, BoozEase, PartySmart, Sob’r-K HangoverStopper, Hangover Prevention Formula, and so on.
In some of these, such as Sob’r-K and Chaser, the primary ingredient is carbon, which, according to the manufacturers, soaks up toxins. Others are herbal compounds, featuring such ingredients as ginseng, milk thistle, borage, and extracts of prickly pear, artichoke, and guava leaf.
These and other O.T.C. remedies aim to boost biochemicals that help the body deal with toxins. A few remedies have scientific backing. Manuela Neuman, in lab tests, found that milk-thistle extract, which is an ingredient in NoHang and Hangover Helper, does protect cells from damage by alcohol.
A research team headed by Jeffrey Wiese, of Tulane University, tested prickly-pear extract, the key ingredient in Hangover Prevention Formula, on human subjects and found significant improvement with the nausea, dry mouth, and food aversion but not with other, more common symptoms, such as headache.
Five years ago, there was a flurry in the press over a new O.T.C. remedy called RU-21 (i.e., Are you twenty-one?). According to the reports, this wonder drug was the product of twenty-five years of painstaking research by the Russian Academy of Sciences, which developed it for K.G.B. agents who wanted to stay sober while getting their contacts drunk and prying information out of them.
During the Cold War, we were told, the formula was a state secret, but in 1999 it was declassified. Now it was ours! “HERE’S ONE COMMUNIST PLOT AMERICANS CAN REALLY GET BEHIND,” the headline in the Washington Post said. “BOTTOMS UP TO OUR BUDDIES IN RUSSIA,” the Cleveland Plain Dealer said.
The literature on RU-21 was mysterious, however. If the formula was developed to keep your head clear, how come so many reports said that it didn’t suppress the effects of alcohol? Clearly, it couldn’t work both ways.
When I put this question to Emil Chiaberi, a co-founder of RU-21’s manufacturer, Spirit Sciences, in California, he answered, “No, no, no. It is true that succinic acid”—a key ingredient of RU-21—“was tested at the Russian Academy of Sciences, including secret laboratories that worked for the K.G.B.
"But it didn’t do what they wanted. It didn’t keep people sober, and so it never made it with the K.G.B. men. Actually, it does improve your condition a little. In Russia, I’ve seen people falling under the table plenty of times—they drink differently over there—and if they took a few of these pills they were able to get up and walk around, and maybe have a couple more drinks.
"But no, what those scientists discovered, really by accident, was a way to prevent hangover.” (Like many other O.T.C. remedies, RU-21 is best taken before or while drinking, not the next morning.) Asians love the product, Chiaberi says. “It flies off the shelves there.”
In the United States, it is big with the Hollywood set: “For every film festival—Sundance, the Toronto Film Festival—we get calls asking us to send them RU-21 for parties. So it has that glamour thing.”
Most cures for hangover—indeed, most statements about hangover—have not been tested. Jeffrey Wiese and his colleagues, in a 2000 article in Annals of Internal Medicine, reported that in the preceding thirty-five years more than forty-seven hundred articles on alcohol intoxication had been published, but that only a hundred and eight of these dealt with hangover.
There may be more information on hangover cures in college newspapers—a rich source—than in the scientific literature. And the research that has been published is often weak. A team of scientists attempting to review the literature on hangover cures were able to assemble only fifteen articles, and then they had to throw out all but eight on methodological grounds.
There have been more studies in recent years, but historically this is not a subject that has captured scientists’ hearts.
Which is curious, because anyone who discovered a widely effective hangover cure would make a great deal of money. Doing the research is hard, though. Lab tests with cell samples are relatively simple to conduct, as are tests with animals, some of which have been done.
In one experiment, with a number of rats suffering from artificially induced hangovers, ninety per cent of the animals died, but in a group that was first given Vitamins B and C, together with cysteine, an amino acid contained in some O.T.C. remedies, there were no deaths. (Somehow this is not reassuring.)
The acid test, however, is in clinical trials, with human beings, and these are complicated. Basically, what you have to do is give a group of people a lot to drink, apply the remedy in question, and then, the next morning, score them on a number of measures in comparison with people who consumed the same amount of alcohol without the remedy.
But there are many factors that you have to control for: the sex of the subjects; their general health; their family history; their past experience with alcohol; the type of alcohol you give them; the amount of food and water they consume before, during, and after; and the circumstances under which they drink, among other variables.
(Wiese and his colleagues, in their prickly-pear experiment, provided music so that the subjects could dance, as at a party.)
Ideally, there should also be a large sample—many subjects. All that costs money, and researchers do not pay out of pocket. They depend on funding institutions—typically, universities, government agencies, and foundations. With all those bodies, a grant has to be O.K.’d by an ethics committee, and such committees’ ethics may stop short of getting people drunk. For one thing, they are afraid that the subjects will hurt themselves.
(All the studies I read specified that the subjects were sent home by taxi or limousine after their contribution to science.)
Furthermore, many people believe that alcohol abusers should suffer the next morning—that this is a useful deterrent. Robert Lindsey, the president of the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence, told me that he wasn’t sure about that.
His objection to hangover-cure research was simply that it was a misuse of resources: “Fifteen million people in this country are alcohol-dependent. That’s a staggering number! They need help: not with hangovers but with the cause of hangovers—alcohol addiction.”
Robert Swift, an alcohol researcher who teaches at Brown University, counters that if scientists, through research, could provide the public with better information on the cognitive impairments involved in hangover, we might be able to prevent accidents.
He compares the situation to the campaigns against distributing condoms, on the ground that this would increase promiscuity. In fact, the research has shown that free condoms did not have that effect. What they did was cut down on unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted disease.
Manufacturers of O.T.C. remedies are sensitive to the argument that they are enablers, and their literature often warns against heavy drinking. The message may be unashamedly mixed, however.
The makers of NoHang, on their Web page, say what your mother would: “It is recommended that you drink moderately and responsibly.” At the same time, they tell you that with NoHang “you can drink the night away.” They list the different packages in which their product can be bought: the Bender (twelve tablets), the Party Animal (twenty-four), the It’s Noon Somewhere (forty-eight).
Among the testimonials they publish is one by “Chad S,” from Chicago: “After getting torn up all day on Saturday, I woke up Sunday morning completely hangover-free. I must have had like twenty drinks.” Researchers address the moral issue less hypocritically.
Wiese and his colleagues describe the damage done by hangovers—according to their figures, the cost to the U.S. economy, in absenteeism and poor job performance, is a hundred and forty-eight billion dollars a year (other estimates are far lower, but still substantial)—and they mention the tests with the airplane pilots, guaranteed to scare anyone.
They also say that there is no experimental evidence indicating that hangover relief encourages further drinking. (Nor, they might have added, have there been any firm findings on this matter.) Manuela Neuman, more philosophically, says that some people, now and then, are going to drink too much, no matter what you tell them, and that we should try to relieve the suffering caused thereby.
Such reasoning seems to have cut no ice with funding institutions. Of the meagre research I have read in support of various cures, all was paid for, at least in part, by pharmaceutical companies.
A truly successful hangover cure is probably going to be slow in coming. In the meantime, however, it is not easy to sympathize with the alcohol disciplinarians, so numerous, for example, in the United States. They seem to lack a sense of humor and, above all, the tragic sense of life.
They appear not to know that many people have a lot that they’d like to forget. In the words of the English aphorist William Bolitho, “The shortest way out of Manchester is . . . a bottle of Gordon’s gin,” and if that relief is temporary the reformers would be hard put to offer a more lasting solution.
Also questionable is the moral emphasis of the temperance folk, their belief that drinking is a lapse, a sin, as if getting to work on time, or living a hundred years, were the crown of life. They forget alcohol’s relationship to camaraderie, sharing, toasts.
Those, too, are moral matters. Even hangovers are related to social comforts. Alcohol investigators describe the bad things that people do on the morning after. According to Genevieve Ames and her research team at the Prevention Research Center, in Berkeley, hungover assembly-line workers are more likely to be criticized by their supervisors, to have disagreements with their co-workers, and to feel lousy.
Apart from telling us what we already know, such findings are incomplete, because they do not talk about the jokes around the water cooler—the fellowship, the badge of honor. Yes, there are safer ways of gaining honor, but how available are they to most people?
Outside the United States, there is less finger-wagging. British writers, if they recommend a cure, will occasionally say that it makes you feel good enough to go out and have another drink. They are also more likely to tell you about the health benefits of moderate drinking—how it lowers one’s risk of heart disease, Alzheimer’s, and so on.
English fiction tends to portray drinking as a matter of getting through the day, often quite acceptably. In P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster series, a hangover is the occasion of a happy event, Bertie’s hiring of Jeeves. Bertie, after “a late evening,” is lying on the couch in agony when Jeeves rings his doorbell. “ ‘I was sent by the agency, sir,’ he said. ‘I was given to understand that you required a valet.’ ”
Bertie says he would have preferred a mortician. Jeeves takes one look at Bertie, brushes past him, and vanishes into the kitchen, from which he emerges a moment later with a glass on a tray.
It contains a prairie oyster. Bertie continues, “I would have clutched at anything that looked like a life-line that morning. I swallowed the stuff. For a moment I felt as if somebody . . . was strolling down my throat with a lighted torch, and then everything seemed suddenly to get all right. The sun shone in through the window; birds twittered in the tree-tops; and, generally speaking, hope dawned once more. ‘You’re engaged,’ I said.”
Here the hangover is a comedy, or at least a fact of life. So it has been, probably, since the Stone Age, and so it is likely to be for a while yet.
The New Yorker May 26, 2008
The fact that all of the above involve tripe may mean something.
Hungarians favor a concoction of cabbage and smoked meats, sometimes forthrightly called “hangover soup.”
The Russians’ morning-after soup, solyanka, is, of course, made with pickle juice. The Japanese have traditionally relied on miso soup, though a while ago there was a fashion for a vegetable soup invented and marketed by one Kazu Tateishi, who claimed that it cured cancer as well as hangovers.
I read this list of food cures to Manuela Neuman, a Canadian researcher on alcohol-induced liver damage, and she laughed at only one, the six-pack of Coke.
Many of the cures probably work, she said, on the same distraction principle as the hair of the dog: “Take the spicy foods, for example. They divert the body’s attention away from coping with the alcohol to coping with the spices, which are also a toxin.
So you have new problems—with your stomach, with your esophagus, with your respiration—rather than the problem with the headache, or that you are going to the washroom every five minutes.”
The high-fat and high-protein meals operate in the same way, she said. The body turns to the food and forgets about the alcohol for the time being, thus delaying the hangover and possibly alleviating it. As for the differences among the many food recommendations, Neuman said that any country’s hangover cure, like the rest of its cultural practices, is an adaptation to the environment.
Chilies are readily available in Mexico, peanut butter in Africa. People use what they have. Neuman also pointed out that local cures will reflect the properties of local brews. If Russians favor pickle juice, they are probably right to, because their drink is vodka: “Vodka is a very pure alcohol. It doesn’t have the congeners that you find, for example, in whiskey in North America.
The congeners are also toxic, independent of alcohol, and will have their own effects. With vodka you are just going to have pure-alcohol effects, and one of the most important of those is dehydration. The Russians drink a lot of water with their vodka, and that combats the dehydration. The pickle brine will have the same effect. It’s salty, so they’ll drink more water, and that’s what they need.”
Many hangover cures—the soups, the greasy breakfast—are comfort foods, and that, apart from any sworn-by ingredients, may be their chief therapeutic property, but some other remedies sound as though they were devised by the witches in “Macbeth.”
Kingsley Amis recommended a mixture of Bovril and vodka. There is also a burnt-toast cure. Such items suggest that what some hungover people are seeking is not so much relief as atonement. The same can be said of certain non-food recommendations, such as exercise.
One source says that you should do a forty-minute workout, another that you should run six miles—activities that may have little attraction for the hung over. Additional procedures said to be effective are an intravenous saline drip and kidney dialysis, which, apart from their lack of appeal, are not readily available.
There are other non-ingested remedies. Amazon will sell you a refrigeratable eye mask, an aromatherapy inhaler, and a vinyl statue of St. Vivian, said to be the patron saint of the hung over. She comes with a stand and a special prayer.
The most widely used over-the-counter remedy is no doubt aspirin. Advil, or ibuprofen, and Alka-Seltzer—there is a special formula for hangovers, Alka-Seltzer Wake-Up Call—are probably close runners-up. (Tylenol, or acetaminophen, should not be used, because alcohol increases its toxicity to the liver.)
Also commonly recommended are Vitamin C and B-complex vitamins. But those are almost home remedies. In recent years, pharmaceutical companies have come up with more specialized formulas: Chaser, NoHang, BoozEase, PartySmart, Sob’r-K HangoverStopper, Hangover Prevention Formula, and so on.
In some of these, such as Sob’r-K and Chaser, the primary ingredient is carbon, which, according to the manufacturers, soaks up toxins. Others are herbal compounds, featuring such ingredients as ginseng, milk thistle, borage, and extracts of prickly pear, artichoke, and guava leaf.
These and other O.T.C. remedies aim to boost biochemicals that help the body deal with toxins. A few remedies have scientific backing. Manuela Neuman, in lab tests, found that milk-thistle extract, which is an ingredient in NoHang and Hangover Helper, does protect cells from damage by alcohol.
A research team headed by Jeffrey Wiese, of Tulane University, tested prickly-pear extract, the key ingredient in Hangover Prevention Formula, on human subjects and found significant improvement with the nausea, dry mouth, and food aversion but not with other, more common symptoms, such as headache.
Five years ago, there was a flurry in the press over a new O.T.C. remedy called RU-21 (i.e., Are you twenty-one?). According to the reports, this wonder drug was the product of twenty-five years of painstaking research by the Russian Academy of Sciences, which developed it for K.G.B. agents who wanted to stay sober while getting their contacts drunk and prying information out of them.
During the Cold War, we were told, the formula was a state secret, but in 1999 it was declassified. Now it was ours! “HERE’S ONE COMMUNIST PLOT AMERICANS CAN REALLY GET BEHIND,” the headline in the Washington Post said. “BOTTOMS UP TO OUR BUDDIES IN RUSSIA,” the Cleveland Plain Dealer said.
The literature on RU-21 was mysterious, however. If the formula was developed to keep your head clear, how come so many reports said that it didn’t suppress the effects of alcohol? Clearly, it couldn’t work both ways.
When I put this question to Emil Chiaberi, a co-founder of RU-21’s manufacturer, Spirit Sciences, in California, he answered, “No, no, no. It is true that succinic acid”—a key ingredient of RU-21—“was tested at the Russian Academy of Sciences, including secret laboratories that worked for the K.G.B. "But it didn’t do what they wanted. It didn’t keep people sober, and so it never made it with the K.G.B. men. Actually, it does improve your condition a little. In Russia, I’ve seen people falling under the table plenty of times—they drink differently over there—and if they took a few of these pills they were able to get up and walk around, and maybe have a couple more drinks.
"But no, what those scientists discovered, really by accident, was a way to prevent hangover.” (Like many other O.T.C. remedies, RU-21 is best taken before or while drinking, not the next morning.) Asians love the product, Chiaberi says. “It flies off the shelves there.”
In the United States, it is big with the Hollywood set: “For every film festival—Sundance, the Toronto Film Festival—we get calls asking us to send them RU-21 for parties. So it has that glamour thing.”
Most cures for hangover—indeed, most statements about hangover—have not been tested. Jeffrey Wiese and his colleagues, in a 2000 article in Annals of Internal Medicine, reported that in the preceding thirty-five years more than forty-seven hundred articles on alcohol intoxication had been published, but that only a hundred and eight of these dealt with hangover.
There may be more information on hangover cures in college newspapers—a rich source—than in the scientific literature. And the research that has been published is often weak. A team of scientists attempting to review the literature on hangover cures were able to assemble only fifteen articles, and then they had to throw out all but eight on methodological grounds.
There have been more studies in recent years, but historically this is not a subject that has captured scientists’ hearts.
Which is curious, because anyone who discovered a widely effective hangover cure would make a great deal of money. Doing the research is hard, though. Lab tests with cell samples are relatively simple to conduct, as are tests with animals, some of which have been done.
In one experiment, with a number of rats suffering from artificially induced hangovers, ninety per cent of the animals died, but in a group that was first given Vitamins B and C, together with cysteine, an amino acid contained in some O.T.C. remedies, there were no deaths. (Somehow this is not reassuring.)
The acid test, however, is in clinical trials, with human beings, and these are complicated. Basically, what you have to do is give a group of people a lot to drink, apply the remedy in question, and then, the next morning, score them on a number of measures in comparison with people who consumed the same amount of alcohol without the remedy.
But there are many factors that you have to control for: the sex of the subjects; their general health; their family history; their past experience with alcohol; the type of alcohol you give them; the amount of food and water they consume before, during, and after; and the circumstances under which they drink, among other variables.
(Wiese and his colleagues, in their prickly-pear experiment, provided music so that the subjects could dance, as at a party.)
Ideally, there should also be a large sample—many subjects. All that costs money, and researchers do not pay out of pocket. They depend on funding institutions—typically, universities, government agencies, and foundations. With all those bodies, a grant has to be O.K.’d by an ethics committee, and such committees’ ethics may stop short of getting people drunk. For one thing, they are afraid that the subjects will hurt themselves.
(All the studies I read specified that the subjects were sent home by taxi or limousine after their contribution to science.)
Furthermore, many people believe that alcohol abusers should suffer the next morning—that this is a useful deterrent. Robert Lindsey, the president of the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence, told me that he wasn’t sure about that.
His objection to hangover-cure research was simply that it was a misuse of resources: “Fifteen million people in this country are alcohol-dependent. That’s a staggering number! They need help: not with hangovers but with the cause of hangovers—alcohol addiction.”
Robert Swift, an alcohol researcher who teaches at Brown University, counters that if scientists, through research, could provide the public with better information on the cognitive impairments involved in hangover, we might be able to prevent accidents.
He compares the situation to the campaigns against distributing condoms, on the ground that this would increase promiscuity. In fact, the research has shown that free condoms did not have that effect. What they did was cut down on unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted disease.
Manufacturers of O.T.C. remedies are sensitive to the argument that they are enablers, and their literature often warns against heavy drinking. The message may be unashamedly mixed, however.
The makers of NoHang, on their Web page, say what your mother would: “It is recommended that you drink moderately and responsibly.” At the same time, they tell you that with NoHang “you can drink the night away.” They list the different packages in which their product can be bought: the Bender (twelve tablets), the Party Animal (twenty-four), the It’s Noon Somewhere (forty-eight).
Among the testimonials they publish is one by “Chad S,” from Chicago: “After getting torn up all day on Saturday, I woke up Sunday morning completely hangover-free. I must have had like twenty drinks.” Researchers address the moral issue less hypocritically.
Wiese and his colleagues describe the damage done by hangovers—according to their figures, the cost to the U.S. economy, in absenteeism and poor job performance, is a hundred and forty-eight billion dollars a year (other estimates are far lower, but still substantial)—and they mention the tests with the airplane pilots, guaranteed to scare anyone.
They also say that there is no experimental evidence indicating that hangover relief encourages further drinking. (Nor, they might have added, have there been any firm findings on this matter.) Manuela Neuman, more philosophically, says that some people, now and then, are going to drink too much, no matter what you tell them, and that we should try to relieve the suffering caused thereby.
Such reasoning seems to have cut no ice with funding institutions. Of the meagre research I have read in support of various cures, all was paid for, at least in part, by pharmaceutical companies.
A truly successful hangover cure is probably going to be slow in coming. In the meantime, however, it is not easy to sympathize with the alcohol disciplinarians, so numerous, for example, in the United States. They seem to lack a sense of humor and, above all, the tragic sense of life.
They appear not to know that many people have a lot that they’d like to forget. In the words of the English aphorist William Bolitho, “The shortest way out of Manchester is . . . a bottle of Gordon’s gin,” and if that relief is temporary the reformers would be hard put to offer a more lasting solution.
Also questionable is the moral emphasis of the temperance folk, their belief that drinking is a lapse, a sin, as if getting to work on time, or living a hundred years, were the crown of life. They forget alcohol’s relationship to camaraderie, sharing, toasts.
Those, too, are moral matters. Even hangovers are related to social comforts. Alcohol investigators describe the bad things that people do on the morning after. According to Genevieve Ames and her research team at the Prevention Research Center, in Berkeley, hungover assembly-line workers are more likely to be criticized by their supervisors, to have disagreements with their co-workers, and to feel lousy.
Apart from telling us what we already know, such findings are incomplete, because they do not talk about the jokes around the water cooler—the fellowship, the badge of honor. Yes, there are safer ways of gaining honor, but how available are they to most people?
Outside the United States, there is less finger-wagging. British writers, if they recommend a cure, will occasionally say that it makes you feel good enough to go out and have another drink. They are also more likely to tell you about the health benefits of moderate drinking—how it lowers one’s risk of heart disease, Alzheimer’s, and so on.
English fiction tends to portray drinking as a matter of getting through the day, often quite acceptably. In P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster series, a hangover is the occasion of a happy event, Bertie’s hiring of Jeeves. Bertie, after “a late evening,” is lying on the couch in agony when Jeeves rings his doorbell. “ ‘I was sent by the agency, sir,’ he said. ‘I was given to understand that you required a valet.’ ”
Bertie says he would have preferred a mortician. Jeeves takes one look at Bertie, brushes past him, and vanishes into the kitchen, from which he emerges a moment later with a glass on a tray.
It contains a prairie oyster. Bertie continues, “I would have clutched at anything that looked like a life-line that morning. I swallowed the stuff. For a moment I felt as if somebody . . . was strolling down my throat with a lighted torch, and then everything seemed suddenly to get all right. The sun shone in through the window; birds twittered in the tree-tops; and, generally speaking, hope dawned once more. ‘You’re engaged,’ I said.”
Here the hangover is a comedy, or at least a fact of life. So it has been, probably, since the Stone Age, and so it is likely to be for a while yet.
The New Yorker May 26, 2008
