When I was eighteen there was a brief period when poker was all the rage among people I knew. It was one of those strange phenomena which seemed to cross all social boundaries without rhyme or reason, like skateboards or tazos.
Remember these?
As far as games go, you can do a lot worse than poker. I enjoyed it. The rules were easy enough to pick up, and the game became relatively interesting once you knew a few tricks. It was also an excuse to drink. That was the bit that got me in trouble.
It was a cold winter night. I was getting over an infection around one of my wisdom teeth, with the help of some antibiotics. I had an invitation to hang out with my friends. They'd recently acquired a poker set, complete with casino chips, and they were keen to have a few games. It sounded fun to me, and my teeth were feeling okay, so I went.
It was already quite late when I got there, but none of us had eaten dinner. We decided to make the best dinner a group of eighteen year-old boys could think of: fuck-tons of potato wedges. We filled the oven with tray after tray of frozen wedges and gorged ourselves on their delicious, oily goodness. We washed it all down with beer, and a good lot of wine. I held off at first, I remembered hearing somewhere that alcohol and anti-biotics didn't mix, but the siren call of alochol was too tempting. I had one glass, then two, then three. After that I stopped counting. At the point that none of us could stand to eat another starchy wedge of potato we sat down to play some poker. While we were playing we decided to have some more wine. After all, you can't play poker without booze, that would be like turning up to your sister's wedding without your gimp mask.
Hey, look over there. Uncle Dave forgot his mask too.
Wine was really cheap at the time, so each of us had a bottle to ourselves. We were classy young lads, so we drank directly from the bottle while we played. The bits I can remember are golden memories. We were full of junk food, we were drinking like hobos and we were playing poker. We envied no man.
I was rapidly approaching the point where the world looked as if someone had rubbed my eyes with Vaseline. At 3:30 in the morning I decided it was probably a good idea to stumble off home. I shuffled away into the night, and somehow managed to make it back to my house, where I poured myself into bed.
The next morning I woke up feeling like someone was crushing my brain in a vise. I choked down some water, and lay in bed until I began to feel half-way human again. It was at that point that I remembered that I needed to take my antibiotic pill. I wasn't feeling too good, but it was mostly just the headache. I got up to face the day.
I didn't really feel like eating; I remembered my dentist telling me that I needed to take the pill with food, though. I quickly made myself some Vegemite toast and ate it with the pill. At this point I was feeling pretty good about myself. I'd drunk myself stupid while on antibiotics, and nothing bag had come of it.
Then it hit me. A wet, cold wave of nausea swept up from my diaphragm. It was like a ghost had suddenly reached into my abdomen and squeezed my stomach. Any other time this wouldn't have been a major problem for me, I'd have run to the bathroom and prayed to the porcelain shrine like any other teenager regretting a night of wild drinking.
This time, however, I had a scientific concern:
When you use antibiotics it wipes out the bacteria in your body, but if you don't take the entire course you may not kill all of them. If that happens the bacteria will grow and multiply again, but this time they'll have developed a resistance to the antibiotics.
That put me in a difficult situation. I really needed to vomit, but I'd already taken my antibiotic pill. If I threw up now I wouldn't have taken the whole course of drugs. In my head I saw myself cursing the world with a new strain of superbug, because of my callous disregard for antibiotic protocol. I panicked. (In my defence I came up with all this while clenching my teeth and trying to hold back a wall of puke).
As I rushed to the bathroom, trying not to vomit all over the carpet on the way, I came up with the perfect plan. If I plugged the sink and threw up into it then I could search through my vomit to find the pill to re-swallow it. It was brilliant. I ran to the sink and filled it with my intestinal symphony. There was a lot, like, way more than I expected. It was also an ugly shade of purple.
Six hours of fermentation in my body had not gone down well for the contents of my stomach. It was an oily, starchy concotion consisting of last nights wedges and warm red wine; all mixed up with stomach acid and bile for good measure. It smelled absolutely foul. It was like a sick jaguar had crapped into an open grave. The smell curled up out of the sink and coated the inside of my nostrils.
Like this, but warm and purple... and chunky.
At this point I probably should have given up and washed that hideous gut-abomination down the sink. I didn't. I plunged my hand in up to the wrist, coating it in warm, oily, wine-barf. I spent at least ten minutes dredging through it with my fingers, looking for a hard lump. I was there long enough that it was starting to get unpleasantly luke-warm (because wasn't already unpleasant enough).
It was at this point something in my brain snapped. It was as if I'd suddenly woken up to myself and gone, "I'm in my bathroom, I'm hung over, and I'm sloshing my hand around in a bowl of my own vomit. I think I need to reassess my life goals."
I decided to screw it all. I wasn't going to spend another second looking for this damn pill. I pulled the plug, and washed the puke down the sink.
Once I'd cleaned the sink I moved to myself. My hand smelled foul. I scrubbed it with some soap and water.
It still stank.
I scrubbed harder.
It still stank.
Slowly a horrific realisation dawned on me: the disgusting cherry on top of my already awful morning. The oil from the wedges had mixed with the wine and stomach juices so that it was sealed into my skin. No matter how hard I scrubbed it wouldn't come off.
Ha ha ha, good luck getting rid of me you bastard!
I spent the rest of the day smelling faintly of rotten puke-wine, and worrying about the world ending superbug festering in my gums. It's kind of sad when you realise that wasn't the worst outcome either.
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