Last Friday night, midway through the fifth hour of a six-hour drinkfest with Jonesey, I did something stupid. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I ordered a Budweiser. And another. Aaaaand another. I don’t know why I ordered a Budweiser. I know better than to order a Budweiser. Budweiser tastes like Murphy’s Wood Soap, for starters, and furthermore, Budweiser contains rice by-products, and I do not consider myself a picky eater by any means — I will consider, and have considered, a Hostess Fruit Pie a meal, and not under duress, either, and yes, that includes the “blue” “berry” kind with the scary nuclear purple filling, so it’s not like I lie awake at night contemplating the horrors of food additives, given that food additives constitute the bulk of my diet — but rice does not belong in a beer. In cakes? Fine. In paper? Fine. Want to make milk out of it? Go ahead. In a beer? No. Not normal. Not natural. Not okay. But most importantly, Budweiser indubitably and without fail causes the worst hangover headache in the wide, wonderful world of post-bar-crawl atonement.

Sure, champagne gives you a headache, but it’s a light-sensitive headache; put on a pair of sunglasses and you’ll live. And red wine can give you a headache too, but if you clean out the fuel injectors in your brain with a cup of high-octane coffee, you’ll feel fine in an hour or two. Every hangover has its headache — the “I smoked too much” headache, the “I took a bong hit after five gin-and-tonics and spent the rest of the night speeyacking, and now my eyeballs look like Night Of The Living Burst Blood Vessel” headache, the “I brought home the groom of Frankenstein, bonked him, only got three-and-a-half minutes of sleep and now I have to give a presentation at work while wearing the same crumpled, skunky outfit I wore yesterday, and by the way, what kind of alleged grown-up still sleeps in a twin bed, anyway, and could someone please kill me, please, thank you” headache — but there’s no headache on earth quite like the Budweiser headache, and I’ve had migraines. I’ve had migraines in a freshman dormitory, folks, on a hallway peopled by baseball players with an inordinate fondness for Metallica and loud grunty fights about video games, so I know a couple of things about headaches. A Budweiser headache doesn’t last as long as a migraine, but what it lacks in duration, it more than makes up for in intensity.

Imagine your head trapped in a vise, a vise turned by Satan. Eventually, your brain pan splits like an egg, but Old Scratch keeps turning the vise, the better to pierce your eyeballs with shards of your own shattered skull. Then, in keeping with the egg image, Satan scrambles the contents of your suppurating eye sockets with a wire whisk, adding salt to taste, before placing your entire head in a Cuisinart, and although you lie there moaning and begging either for sweet, sweet death or for the opportunity to mend your ways by learning to love Kathie Lee, Satan shows you no mercy. It’s hungover-head bouillabaisse he wants, and it’s hungover-head bouillabaisse he shall have. “You brought this on yourself,” Lucifer chortles, seasoning your blackened tongue with Tabasco. “Next time, order the Grolsch!” And then he jams a fondue fork up your nose to finish the job. That’s a Budweiser headache.

You can’t move. You can’t moan. You can only lie there, gathering the strength to turn over. Once you have turned over, you must lie there for another half an hour in preparation for swinging one leg over the side of the bed, and so on, and so on, until you can crawl, literally, into the bathroom and rest on the cold tile for a moment, and then haul yourself hand over hand up the side of the sink to the cabinet where the ibuprofen waits for you. Because your head weighs approximately four hundred pounds and is throbbing in a visible fashion a la Wile E. Coyote, you will have difficulty opening the childproof cap. You will probably begin to cry. You will shuffle back to bed, holding the ibuprofen in one atrophied claw, and you will lie on your side, moaning, and bang the bottle feebly against your alarm clock, which will only succeed in flipping the alarm clock on and sending yet another express train rocketing through the inside of your head. Eventually, after a Herculean effort involving your molars and a scream of enraged pain akin to that of Godzilla entangled in the web of the Brooklyn Bridge’s cables, you will get the bottle open and choke down five ibuprofen with the help of a glassful of room-temperature water that has a half dozen cat hairs floating in it, and then you will lower yourself gingerly back down onto your pillow, noticing — through a haze that you feel certain you read about in Kübler-Ross — that the fibers of your pillowcase make a deafening noise against your earlobe. You will sleep, and you will dream fitfully about large mallets making contact with your head, and men in black overcoats stomping on beautiful little butterflies, and a man in a tutu operating a jackhammer in your closet. You will surface occasionally, reach for the water glass, find it empty, and, lacking the strength to crawl into the bathroom and drink directly out of the toilet, you will slump back onto your pillow.

Hours will pass. You will awaken when the sun at last does you the favor of hiding behind a cloud. You will disentangle yourself from the sofa cushion you tied around your head to block out not only the sun’s rays but also the downright deafening footfalls of two cats on wall-to-wall carpeting. One of the cats, who had grown concerned and come over to watch you sleep, blinks at you. You try to tell the cat, “Hey, I’m alive,” but when you open your mouth, no sound comes out. You cannot speak. You have no saliva; every molecule has fled. You try again to talk; the cat, sickened by your breath, flattens its ears and skulks away. Water — you must have water. Can you sit up? Yes, you can. Can you stand without clinging to a wall? Will you have to use your desk chair as a cane again? No. You can stand. You can walk. You cannot walk straight, quite, but your apartment has ceased to imitate the teacups ride, and if you can avoid tripping over the clothes you shed so centrifugal-forcefully the night before…and that…pizza crust? And how did your toothbrush wind up out here? No matter. You need water.

In the bathroom, you drink a glass of water so quickly that water sluices around your chin and drenches your t-shirt. You peel the t-shirt off to find that you had put it on backwards and inside out, and you slept in your bra as well. The bra is unfastened for some reason, and it looks like tiny, pathetic vest as it dangles beneath your armpits. You drink a second glass of water, with a bit more dignity this time, while clawing the bra off of your shoulders with your other hand; topless, you drink a third glass. Halfway through glass number four, you begin to feel rather ill. You lower the glass. Your belly is distended. It has begun to make disturbing sounds like broooooooon and dooooowwwwaaaaaang. It is not happy. You feel very, very fragile. You want to die again, or, failing that, to go back to bed, but if you move so much as a hair right now, you will most certainly throw up, and you cannot stand throwing up anyway, but throwing up topless will force you to kill yourself because of the insupportable indignity involved, not to mention that nobody is around to see or care about your hurlesque dishabille, which makes it all the more pathetic and oh god — brrrraaaack. Ah, the burp. You feel better. You waddle over to the closet to find another t-shirt and put it on right-side out and frontways, and you waddle back to bed. You are sloshing, but you do not care. Ahhhh. Bed.

After evicting another pizza crust from the bed — this one with an anchovy fragment clinging to it — you fluff up the pillows and snuggle into the blankets. The cats, satisfied that you have not died, glue themselves to your knees. You drift off into a pleasant daydream in which Eric Stoltz is slowly undressing you, but just when you get to the good part, Eric inexplicably punches you in the kidneys, and you wake up all “what’s his problem?” and realize that you have to pee. Grumbling, you peel the cats off of you and lurch into the bathroom, trying not to wake up too much so that you can go straight back to bed and back into the dream and forgive Eric for punching you in the kidneys so that you can get to the sex, but no — you have to pee really badly, and you pee for approximately a week, and when you get back to bed, the cats have hogged the entire mattress, so you snatch a blanket out from under them magician-style and creep over to the couch, trying to think sleepy thoughts. Your head still hurts, but you have nothing to do today, so you will go back to sleep, or else.

You turn on the TV. The network executives of the world have rewarded your sloth by putting exactly nothing watchable on the airwaves. No Real World marathon, no Behind The Music weekend, nothing. Your eyeballs still feel like they have spiders walking across them in clogs, so reading is out, and so is napping; the cats have metastasized from the bed to the couch and invaded your lap, and if you move now, they will start howling about dinner, and you don’t feel terribly confident about loud noises just yet. So, you spend the day on the couch, your lap occupied by various cats and snacks and remotes, angrily watching Look Who’s Talking Now because you believe that any sudden movement could set off a reprise of the Budweiser headache. At last, as the sun slides down behind a building, you decide to brave the shower; if the headache returns, you can always quickly drown yourself, and besides, you smell like a day-old beer bottle into which the population of a small country has stuffed its cigarette butts. As you stand under the water, you vow never again to drink a Budweiser, because the dollar fifty you save just isn’t worth it. You have made this vow before, but this time you truly mean it. You have learned your lesson. You have taken it to heart. You will not make this mistake again. It took ten years, but you have mastered the secret: love the commercials, hate the beer.

Merchants of death.
Ugly reminders.
Oh, jeez.
Save yourselves.

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