Candy

Chapter Seven

HANGOVERS COME IN seven different varieties. They also come in an infinite variety of degrees, from chicken crap mildness to sulphur-and-brimstone severity, but this is a matter for specialists.

The seven fundamental varieties, on the other hand, should be familiar to every hard-drinking layman. Just as the invalid ought to get thoroughly acquainted with his malady, the sot should know as much as he possibly can about the various aspects of the Morning After.

He owes it to himself to do this.

It doesn’t ease the hangover. For this there are as many remedies as there are modes and manners of getting fried in the first place. Hangover remedies range from tomato juice with Worcestershire sauce through raw eggs in warm milk all the way to the most physiologically logical notions of doses of Vitamin B-1 or doses of the hair of the dog in the manger. A shot or a pill—either one—usually comes closest to bringing back a semblance of order.

But, without further ado, let us enumerate the seven varieties of the hangover.

First and most common and trivial is the headache. In its uncomplicated form this variety is indistinguishable from mild eye-strain. You wake up and your head hurts. You take two aspirins with a water chaser, wait for time to pass, and with the passage of time the headache goes back to normal. If you’re one of those sad sacks who was born with a lifelong headache, or if you’re married to one, you can have this form of hangover without knowing it.

Hangover Number Two is the Long Thirst. With this type of affliction you feel fine. You get out of bed, wander over to the sink and down six tumblers of water in quick succession. You’re still feeling fine so you get dressed, brush your teeth, shave, and drink another six tumblers of water. This goes on for as long as the hangover stays with you. It’s one of those hangovers that make perfect sense and as a result you don’t resent it. You realize that the alcohol has dried up your blood and your body craves water to wet your blood down again. So you drink constantly and urinate almost as constantly and after awhile everything’s all right again.

Hangover Number Three is located in the stomach. The stomach, poor thing, has a habit of rejecting anything that is placed in it. When you try to take aspirin you vomit them back up, which is disconcerting to say the least. With this type of hangover you play a waiting game, hoping that it stops before you die of starvation.

Number Four is a variation of Number Three. The stomach rejects your hopeful offerings in yet another manner by kicking everything out through the back door. I’ve yet to discover the right method of coping with this nonsense, although an acquaintance strongly recommends a good cork.

Number Five is pain, soul-shattering pain, ear-splitting pain. You wake up wearing somebody else’s head and the head doesn’t fit. Your arms ache and when you close your eyes you can see your nerves twitching. I don’t want to talk any more about this one. It’s terrible.

Number Six is Number Five with a hangover of its own. You see things and you hear things and even your hair hurts. The only way to lick this one is to join it. You have to go out and get drunk all over again, praying for an easier time the following morning.

Number Seven is seventh heaven or seventh hell depending upon your point of view. The nicest thing about it is that it does not hurt. The nastiest thing about it is there is nothing you can do about it. It is a very complex problem and the novice is likely to suspect that he isn’t hungover at all, that the world is simply set at the wrong angle.

This hangover deserves careful consideration. It goes something along these lines: you don’t ache but you can’t move. Well, you can move, but it is an enormous effort and you do not really want to. You just want to sit and think about things.

Time passes very slowly. Your mind works at a staggering pace and you think with the speed of light. You can’t concentrate on anything in particular but you can see things very clearly and very logically within your limited perception.

This is a dilly. In a weird way it is almost fun, which is fortunate in that it is with you for the duration of the day. The only thing that eliminates it is a good night’s sleep and even that has been known to fail. You have to resign yourself to sitting in one spot and doing nothing for a good sixteen hours.

I woke up, in case you haven’t guessed it, with Hangover Number Seven.

I woke up, probably, at seven-thirty.

Probably, because I really have no way of knowing. I woke up, opened my eyes, and lay there on top of the bed waiting. Waiting? Yeah—for Godot, or for Lefty, or for Christmas, or for something else. God alone knows what I was waiting for.

But I do not know what time I woke up. I do know that it was a few minutes after eight when I looked at the clock. It seemed several hours that I lay there without taking the trouble to look at the clock.

A few minutes after eight. Plenty of time to get up, change clothes, eat a hearty breakfast and get to work at Beverley Finance Company.

But why?

Who in hell wanted to perform this array of jolly little tasks?

Not me.

So there I remained. I lay there with my eyes open and thought about the voyeuristic activities of the previous evening, with a nameless dyke doing nasty little things to my former mistress. It was hard to take the whole thing too seriously at this stage of the game. Not that I wasn’t furious with Candy, not that I didn’t want to beat the crap out of the gal who was keeping her.

It was just that I couldn’t bring myself to feel too strongly about anything.

It was nine-thirty when the phone rang. I can be sure of this because I remember glancing at the clock on my way to the phone. The phone rang a good minute before I picked it up. It was an extension of the hotel phone rather than a private line and it gave one long continuous ring. I took a lot of time walking over to the table where the phone was, sitting down in the chair beside it, and lifting the receiver to my ear.

“Jeff?”

I grunted. Anything else would have required more effort than I was willing to give it. “Les, Jeff. You coming in today?”

I grunted again.

“Jeff? It’s nine-thirty. You sick or something?”

“No.”

“Coming in?”

“No.”

A long pause.

“Jeff?”

“Yeah?”

“What’s wrong?”

I shrugged. I don’t suppose he could hear the shrug over the telephone but I didn’t have anything to say.

“You drunk, Jeff?”

“Nope.”

Another long pause. His tone, when he spoke, was one of infinite patience. He sounded like a father explaining an eternal truth to a lost child.

“Jeff,” he said, “this is Les Boloff. It is nine-thirty in the morning, Wednesday morning, and you were supposed to be at work half an hour ago. Your name is Jeff Flanders and you work here at the Beverley Finance Company.”

I knew all these things so I didn’t say anything.

“Coming in, Jeff?”

“Nope.”

“Why not?”

“Don’t feel like it,” I said, simply.

And I hung up on him.

It was my day for phone calls.

“Mr. Flanders?”

I grunted.

“My name’s Hardesty,” a voice assured me. “I’m serving as attorney for your wife. She wants me to institute divorce proceedings.”

I grunted again. I wasn’t particularly surprised; I had been wondering when Lucy was going to get around to making our separation legally binding.

“Do you plan to contest the divorce?”

“Nope.”

“Mrs. Flanders is planning a Nevada divorce on grounds of extreme mental cruelty. As you may know, the sole grounds for divorce in New York State is adultery, which makes for a rather embarrassing situation. False evidence and all that.”

I didn’t say anything. He wasn’t telling me anything I didn’t know so I didn’t bother answering him.

“That’s why I advised a Reno divorce,” he went on. “I felt it would be better for all concerned.”

It was decent of the old bastard.

“Mr. Flanders?”

I gave another grunt.

“Mr. Flanders, divorce is a sideline with me and it’s something I’m not particularly fond of. I’ve sounded out Mrs. Flanders and I’m quite certain she’d be willing to try a reconciliation if you’d meet her halfway. She’s coming to my office early this afternoon and I thought that if you’d drop up to the office it might work out for the two of you. I may be costing myself a fee but I’d rather see it turn out that way.”

He said some more things that I didn’t listen to. I gave the notion a whirl in my mind. I’d wanted a reconciliation; hell, I would have given my right arm for it. Lucy and I together could push all the bad part out of the way and start fresh. Maybe we’d even have a kid this time—that might be good for us both.

“Mr. Hardesty?”

“Yes?”

“Where’s your office?”

He said it was way downtown in the financial district. I thought about going all the way down there, thought about getting out of bed and changing my clothes and taking a subway downtown and walking around and …

“Hell with it,” I said. “Let her get the divorce.”

And I hung up on him, too.

Gee, I thought a good half hour later, it’s a shame that lawyer couldn’t have brought Lucy over to the hotel. Then the two of us could have gotten together and everything would have been sweetness and light again. Funny how little things like the location of a law office can make all the difference in the world.

Yeah.

Funny.

Real funny.

Like a rubber crutch.

Like a wheelchair without wheels.

Funny. This is the way your mind works during a seventh grade hangover. Not that I spent all my time on such trivia as the way my life was going. I took a good hour figuring how many shots could be poured from a fifth of liquor, how many shots if the bartender was shorting you and giving you one-tenth of what you should have been getting, how many if he was filling the glass the same amount over the line.

Now these are important questions and I had to give them a great deal of thought. I gave all sorts of important questions a great deal of thought while the time crawled by on little cat feet, and I went on sitting and thinking and, occasionally, smoking, went on in this manner until it was midnight and I was tired enough to sleep.

This may be hard to believe. It should be hard to believe unless you have had the privilege of living through just this variety of hangover. But I actually sat in that chair for better than fourteen hours and did nothing more active than smoke.

Well, I made a few trips to the bathroom. And there was one time when I stared out the window at a woman who was parading around half-naked. But only for a minute or two because I remembered my last experience at window-peeping and decided it wasn’t worth it.

Fourteen hours.

It seems impossible. In retrospect it seems thoroughly impossible because, looking back on it, it seems as though I didn’t even do much thinking during that time. I should have taken notes but it didn’t seem to be worth the effort at the time.

At midnight I went back to bed, my stomach empty because I hadn’t eaten anything, my body ready for sleep more because of the weakness caused by lack of food than because of any tiredness or desire for sleep. But I went to sleep quickly and slept very soundly for eight solid hours. If I dreamed any dreams I cannot remember them.

When I woke up I felt as though I could eat a horse. Or a box of candy.

I got undressed—I never did manage to undress the night before—and I took a hot shower and followed it up with a cold shower, and I brushed my teeth and shaved my beard and combed my hair and got some clothes on.

I felt wonderful. It seemed positively indecent to feel that good, but that’s how I felt.

I took the elevator downstairs and went across to the Alamo for breakfast. Chile may not sound like the most sensible breakfast in the world, especially on an empty stomach, but it was delicious and I surprised myself by downing two plates full of the stuff. I washed them down with two bottles of ice-cold ale, which sounds nauseating now that I think about it, but which was great at the time.

And then, a spring to my step and a whistle on my lips, I walked briskly to my office.

There I was informed, without undue ceremony, that I was no longer an employee of the Beverley Finance Company.

Joe Burns did the honors. Weasel-faced Joe Burns with a gigoloish moustache and a perpetual sneer. He was waiting for me like a spider for a fly, leaning against my desk and sneering at me. It was a few minutes to nine when I walked in but both he and Les were already at the office, Joe sneering and Les looking very very sad.

“You’re through,” Joe Burns said.

I must have looked surprised. I should have. I was surprised.

“Clear the bottles out of your desk and get the hell out,” he said. “Your mustering-out pay’s in the top drawer. You were a good man but you sure went to hell in a hurry.”

I also left Beverley in a hurry. There was nothing in my desk that I wanted except for the pay; Joe and Les could fight over the nearly-empty bottle of rye in the bottom drawer. I didn’t want it any more than I wanted the picture of Lucy that still reposed in its cheap metal frame on the top of my desk.

So out I went from the office. So down I went in the elevator. So back I went to my room.

To brood.

There was plenty to brood about and if I hadn’t felt so god-damned great that morning I really would have felt terrible. God knows there was plenty to feel terrible about. No wife, no woman, no job.

But things didn’t seem that bad. I had been pulling down around two hundred a week for some time now with no expenses outside of food, liquor and rent. I had a lot of money in my wallet and a lot of money floating around the room so I could get by for a while without working. I couldn’t live like a king on the dough I had but I wouldn’t starve either, and if I felt like it I could get unemployment compensation. For that matter I could get another job on a moment’s notice. Legit loan sharks are like used car salesmen—they spend their lives floating from one outfit to another and they don’t need glowing recommendations from former employers in order to get work. Both businesses are too much on the border between respectability and thievery for employers to care much about their workingmen’s characters.

So, a member of the ranks of the unemployed after years of job-job-job, I felt positively great.

So great that the Candy problem seemed to be no problem at all. Hell, I was a reasonable man. The world was a reasonable world.

Why shouldn’t the dyke be a reasonable dyke?

Why indeed?

It seemed simple. I would get hold of the dyke, get her off in a corner somewhere and explain to her just how much I needed Candy. I would also tell her that her sex life was twisted and convince her of the error of her ways. She would break down, cry a little, give Candy back to me, and go out to find a man and raise a family.

I would snarl a little at Candy, get her to beg me to take her back, then pet her and kiss her and slip her a quickie on the rug or something. Then we would be thicker than thieves and life would be a bowl of cherries again.

Simplicity itself. I gave myself a mental pat on the back for being such a logical member of the human race, able to view the world and its problems with enviable objectivity, clear-headed and always on hand to come up with the right solutions to any pressing difficulty.

Shrewd old Flanders.

Sharp thinker.

Cool-headed bastard.

One in a million.

Great guy.

Genius.

Double genius.

Genius in spades.

I got carried away at this point and delivered a weird monologue on the way down in the elevator, informing the elevator op what a lucky Joe he was to have me in his car. He must have figured I was stoned again because he nodded very sagely and didn’t open his mouth.

I walked to the dykery, my own private name for Candy’s current love-nest. I passed all the bars and remembered the time I had passed them before and the trip back when I hadn’t passed them. That was the beauty of it—I could remember the whole scene, the whole evening, and I found the House on 53rd Street without any trouble.

I took the elevator to the fourth floor this time and found Apartment 4-B without any trouble. I stood outside the door for a minute, getting myself ready for the master salesmanship pitch, and then I buzzed the little buzzer.

The door opened.