Beer

When I first came to Hong Kong, some of my friends were in a darts team at the “Old China Hand”, a grotty little pub on Lockhart Road surrounded by Girlie Bars and Bathroom Suppliers. Having been a stalwart darter in my College years (Stalwart in this context actually means ‘Constantly drunk’) I was invited along for support and in an effort to increase bar sales. Feeling obliged to help out, I asked my mates what beer I should be drinking and the answer was “Saint Michael”. (NOTE! I hope you will have guessed that “Saint Michael” is not the actual name of the beer referred to, but a cleverly disguised simile used in an effort to avoid legal embarrassment.)

“Saint Michael” was brewed in Hong Kong using only the finest ingredients consisting primarily of Formaldehyde and fresh mountain spring water which, having once gushed out of a crystal font, was subsequently dosed with more Chlorine than the swimming pool at a school for incontinents. The resulting beverage was dry, crisp and guaranteed to get you hammered in less than four pints. I’m sure that I had several more than that, but that’s about all that I am sure of.

At some point in the evening, I said farewell to my darting colleagues and headed back to my flat, about 300 metres away on the adjacent Jaffe Road. There’s a gap in the tape at this point, as if the dog had licked the VCR. At the time, I lived in a serviced apartment, a room with a bed, desk and bathroom off and when the tape picked up again, I was lying on my bed as if crucified to it. My arms and legs were hanging off the edges, numb from cut off circulation, and my head… oh my head. My head felt as if Beelzebub himself had taken up residence. Alarm bells were ringing in my ears, door buzzers and jack-hammers were fighting to get in and a quarrel of mosquitoes droned in the space formally occupied by my brain.

Needless to say, the room started to spin. Slowly and with a degree of amusement at first, it quickly accelerated to some sort of gyroscopic punk ballet. My stomach didn’t like that at all and started to heave. Acid retching precursed the seemingly inevitable call for Uncle Hughey and I tried to raise myself, but it seemed that someone had replaced my hair with the lead off the local church roof. Bile was rising and I either had to move or do a Mama Cass without the sandwich, so with a desperate lurch I hauled myself to a vertically supine position.

Unfortunately, the lack of blood and feeling in my hands and feet combined with the weight of my hair, so that I immediately commenced to fall and it was only years of training that enabled me to use this impetus in order to fall in the general direction of the bathroom door which, again unfortunately, was closed, thereby causing my head to batter into it, whereupon it sprang open, allowing me to fall directly onto the bathroom floor whilst smacking my head a good one against the toilet bowl. Sweet relief was only permitted for a nano-second and as my gorge continued to rise, I grabbed the rim above my head and tried to haul myself in, but to no avail. Weakened by my trials, I slumped back to the cold, brittle tiles and proceeded to vomit in the manner of Linda Blair, Mary-Kate Olsen and other such teen movie stars.

After about a year and a half in Purgatory, I became once more aware of my surroundings and slowly managed to haul myself into the bathtub. There, fully clothed, I turned on the shower in an effort to wash away my sins. The bits on top came away quite freely and, given the fact that there was no large aggregate involved, swirled merrily down the plughole. But much to my surprise and subsequent alarm, there was an underlying coating of what appeared to be red mud. Sticky and tenacious, it seemed to have covered most of my elbows to fingers, knees to toes (I seemed to have lost my sneakers) and, after several difficult maneuvers, the seat of my trousers. Whereas I had a vague recognition of most of the spew, I had absolutely no clue as to the source of the red mud. Perhaps I’d been caught in a fight with a bunch of home pottery enthusiasts, but somehow, I doubted that the Hong Kong Women’s Institute had a late night Wanchai venue. So, for the time being, the mystery remained a mystery and I concentrated my efforts on getting clean and trying to locate the remnants of my brain.

For several days, I remained incapable of even smelling beer without an automatic gag reflex, but the human psyche is a powerful, elemental being and I drifted back towards those amber shores, longing for the dry tang of hops, barley, and the sweet release of 4.6% alcohol. But apart from the gagging, I also had another disturbing symptom of over indulgence, each night saw me wake in a lather, the sheets wrapped round my torso like a cotton constrictor, nightmares of the vaguest nature. Trapped in a stinking pit, I was clawing my way up the sides of a dark and slimy hole, but I could see no light, just a cloying blackness streaked with blood and, overhead, the dimmest glimmer of a star, a wavering beacon of hope, of escape. But the smell was overpowering, the stench of sulphurous decay, of rancid fat, of rats and old jockstraps. The gaseous stink was a physical force, dragging me back down as hard as I tried to struggle out.

Even with my reputation as an olfactory factory, this smell hung around my waking hours and niggled me as I walked to and from work each day.

Eventually, after almost a full week of abstinence, Darts Night fell like a kicked bottle, clattering into my conciousness. I made my way to The Old China Hand swearing never to touch the demon “Saint Michael” ever again and, I did quite well, substituting it for the other local chemical waste, “Carziebarf”. I also drank considerably less, just enough to see me only partially blind and able, with the aid of any passing wall, to stand upright. I left the Pub earlier too, stood outside the door, gasping in lungfulls of Wanchai night, a mix of monoxide, dishwashing steam and cheap perfume. I waited for a sizable gap in the traffic and launched myself over the road, where a friendly wall arrested my rubber legged trajectory by smashing into my face.

I paused and gathered my senses, collected my legs underneath me and set off homeward, hand over hand along the canyon face of walls, windows and doors. The walls reading like Braille to a blind mans’ fingers. Brick, stone, marble, metal, glass, plastic signs, paper posters, wood, air, Whoa! Air! I windmilled my arms and, falling into the air, struck wood again, arresting my collapse. I steadied myself and squinted into the blackness. I looked back along the way I had come. The brightly lit bars and shopfronts of the serried buildings gave onto a gap and the gap had a wooden hoarding, except that where I stood, the centre panel had been left out. I looked through the gap and as my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I could see a huge hole in the ground, the sides of which were covered in red mud. The bottom of the hole was set with concrete with ranks of rusty steel bars sticking up. Vlad the Impalers rec room. Foul stinking water washed the base of the pit and the gaseous smell brought me to my senses. I realized that one week prior, I had made this same journey but with possibly one more pint of fuel on board. I had stumbled at the same gap in the hoarding but that time, I must have fallen in and then in the darkness and my confused state had reached for the safety of the wall and, hand over hand followed it right around the perimeter of the pit until, eventually, I returned to the hole in the hoarding and fell back out onto the street, picked myself up and proceeded on my homeward migration. Sporting, of course, a new skin of red mud.

I looked in horror at all the various ways of dying in that pit. Impaled upon a metal spike, Drowned in a fetid puddle, Gassed, Knocked unconscious and eaten by rats and I swore that my life would change henceforth. Never again would I expose myself to such an horrific end. The following week, pissed as a rat, I left the Pub but remembered not to cross the road until I was well past the building site.

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