Hungover: The Morning After and One Man's Quest for the Cure

Praise for Hungover

"Who knew subject matter so (literally) uncomfortable could be so much damn fun? Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall is the perfect endearingly flawed and funny narrator to take us on this wild, worldwide adventure into the history of our painful mornings after. Whether he’s piloting a fighter plane in Vegas, chatting with a blacksmith in Devon, cheating death in the desert and the alps, or attempting twelve pints in twelve pubs, his daring, wit, and insight never disappoint—all with, it would seem, a blazing hangover. Part science, part folklore, part string of the author’s very bad ideas with good intentions, Hungover is a highly knowledgeable and ridiculously enjoyable ride."

—Stacey May Fowles, author of Baseball Life Advice

Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall has risked life and liver to write this book, a perilous trip into many mornings after—historical, cinematic, literary, and of course his own. That’s the entertaining part. As to whether Bishop-Stall has, in fact, invented a hangover remedy that actually works? I live in hope.

—Adam Rogers, author of Proof: The Science of Booze

"It takes a writer as skilled as Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall to write a rip-roaring adventure story about the morning after. Thoroughly researched, rich in history and humor, against all odds, Hungover makes you wish you were there."

—Tabatha Southey, author of The Deep Cold River Story

Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall invests health, wealth, and well-being in a wild Dionysian quest for a viable hangover cure. In the end he gets more than one, and we do, too.

—Linden MacIntyre, Scotiabank Giller Prize–winning author of The Bishop’s Man

Praise for Down to This

Nothing short of a masterpiece.

—National Post (Canada)

Some writers go to great lengths to write a book. They climb Mount Everest, follow armies into war zones, go undercover with a professional sports team, or travel around the world on a motorbike. . . . Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall has more guts than any of those writers.

—Edmonton Journal

Intensely perceptive, Bishop-Stall tumbles heartbreak with hilarity, outrageous despair with shimmering hope.

—Calgary Herald

PENGUIN BOOKS

HUNGOVER

Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall’s first book, Down to This: Squalor and Splendour in a Big-City Shantytown—about a year he spent living with the homeless—was shortlisted for several prestigious awards, none of which it won. His first novel, Ghosted, about a guy who becomes a professional ghostwriter of suicide letters, was nominated for the Amazon First Novel Award, which it also lost. His work has appeared in dozens of magazines—most of which no longer exist. He played the role of Jason, a well-dressed, bad-mannered journalist, on CBC’s The Newsroom—in what turned out to be its final season. He used to own a bar, called The Lowdown, but that didn’t work out either. He is not very good at social media—but he also has trouble letting things go, so you might want to check for updates on his quest and improvements on the cure at hungoverlowdown.com.

PENGUIN BOOKS

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Copyright © 2018 by Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Bishop-Stall, Shaughnessy, author.

Title: Hungover : the morning after and one man’s quest for the cure / Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall.

Description: New York, NY : Penguin Books, [2018]

Identifiers: LCCN 2018021163 (print) | LCCN 2018021546 (ebook) | ISBN 9780698178939 (ebook) | ISBN 9780143126706 (paperback)

Subjects: LCSH: Detoxification (Substance abuse treatment)—Popular works. | Alcohol—Physiological effect—Popular works. | Hangover cures—Popular works. | BISAC: COOKING / Essays. | COOKING / Beverages / Wine & Spirits. | SCIENCE / Life Sciences / General.

Classification: LCC RC565 (ebook) | LCC RC565 .B52 2018 (print) | DDC 362.29/18—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018021163

Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.

Version_1

For Brandy Bob Stall,

Who lived so fast,

He soared right past his day of dying,

And still has never been hungover,

though not, of course, for lack of trying.

SPOILER, DISCLAIMER AND FULL DISCLOSURE FROM THE AUTHOR

This book took almost a decade to write. And as of the time of this note, I am still alive. That’s the spoiler.

As a disclaimer: this subject proved to be far richer than I first imagined. Though my original intention was to make it an entirely global venture, the narrative takes place mostly in what we call the West. I hope, one day—after much recuperation—to delve more deeply into Russia, Asia and Africa, and farther south into South America.

In terms of full disclosure: over the past many years I have traveled to too many cities in too many countries and drunk far too much of everything—with barkeeps, businesspeople and brewers, winemakers, winos and whiners, distillers, doctors and druids, as well as some people I probably shouldn’t have. I have tried every tincture, tonic, powder, pill, placebo, root, leaf, bark, chemical and therapeutic process I could legally test, and then some others. And although everything on these pages did take place and I’ve done my damnedest with the fact-checking, the order in which some events appear is not always chronological. No matter how I tried, however, the morning after did still follow the night before.

CONTENTS

Praise for Hungover

Praise for Down to This

About the Author

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Spoiler, Disclaimer and Full Discloser from the Author

Preface: A Few Words About a Few Words

Welcome to Your Hangover

PART ONE: WHAT HAPPENS IN VEGAS

First Interlude: A Drink Before the War

PART TWO: WHAT HAPPENS ABOVE VEGAS

Second Interlude: Plenty of Aversion; A Version of Pliny

PART THREE: THE HAIR THAT WAGS THE DOG

Third Interlude: And Up She Rises

PART FOUR: A MAD HATTER IN MIDDLE EARTH

Fourth Interlude: Werewolves of London

PART FIVE: TWELVE PINTS IN TWELVE PUBS

Fifth Interlude: The Withnail Awards; A Press Release

PART SIX: THE HUNGOVER GAMES

Sixth Interlude: A Roots of Remedy Roundup

PART SEVEN: THE FUTURE’S SO BRIGHT

Seventh Interlude: Killer Parties

PART EIGHT: THE TIGER ON THE ROOF

Eighth Interlude: I Woke Up This Morning

PART NINE: BEYOND THE VOLCANOES

Ninth Interlude: Aspirin or Sorrow

PART TEN: WHEN LIZARDS DRINK FROM YOUR EYES

Tenth Interlude: The Hangover Writer

PART ELEVEN: AFTER THE FLOOD

For the Love of Hangovers: A Kind of Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Permissions

Notes on Sources

Bibliography

PREFACE

A FEW WORDS ABOUT A FEW WORDS

A title is the start of any story that happens to have a title. And this one has already caused some controversy, at least with my editor, who is pressing for a hyphen (Hung-over), and my father, who is adamant it be two words (Hung Over). But in my opinion, one of them drinks a helluva lot, and the other not quite enough. And anyway, it is my book, so we’ll be going with hungover—along with helluva, alright and goddamn.

Hungover is an adjective, derived from the noun hangover, not to be confused with drunk—a difference well explained in Richard Linklater’s 2003 film School of Rock:

DEWEY FINN: (Jack Black): Okay. Here’s the deal. I have a hangover. Who knows what that means?

KID: Doesn’t that mean you’re drunk?

DEWEY FINN: No. It means I was drunk yesterday.

Or as Clement Freud, the nephew of Sigmund, put it, ‘Drunk’ is when you have too much to drink. ‘Hangover’ is when some of you is sober enough to realize how drunk the rest of you is.

But on some level, you probably already knew that—whereas you might not know what an etymological newcomer hangover is. At the turn of the twentieth century it didn’t even exist. The state of being drunk yesterday was known as crapulence, or having the jim-jams, or just feeling really awful. It is one of the youngest words in the English lexicon, and yet, in the mere hundred years since it was coined, hangover has become ubiquitous in describing a condition that is older than language.

People have been getting drunk since the dawn of history. From the Bronze Age to the Iron Age to the Jazz Age, empires have fallen, wars have been waged, civilizations enslaved—all because of hangovers. Yet, in reading what’s been written about them, the thing you’ll read most often is how little has been written about them. Whether booze-soaked Beowulf, the liquored-up Iliad or a thousand drunken Arabian knights, as Barbara Holland puts it in The Joy of Drinking, Nobody discussing those Herculean bouts of yore mentions the hangover, and our ancestors didn’t even have a word for it.

In his massive compendium of writing about drinking, aptly titled The Booze Book, Ralph Schoenstein introduces Kingsley Amis’s essay On Hangovers with two short lines: The Literature of hangovers is small. In fact this is all I was able to find.

It is almost as if hangovers didn’t exist until the fateful word to describe them. Or were so omnipresent that to write about them seemed needless, like mentioning that a character is still breathing every time she speaks a word. But it’s not just the poets and historians who have, for whatever reason, ignored the hangover through history. So have the pros in white coats.

Though it’s one of the most common and complex illnesses known to man, there have been practically no state-sponsored attempts to address the hangover as a legitimate medical condition—the explanation being that it is a malady for which the victims have only themselves to blame. And while that might be true—the you-did-it-to-yourself-ness of it all—one would think that even medical experts have fallen hiccupping off their moral high horses enough in the past few thousand years to try and make a go of it. But to this day, there are far more entrepreneurs than doctors digging in—extracting grape seeds, peeling guavas, mulching prickly pears, then bottling it all to line the shelves of convenience stores and surround cash registers like tiny hopeful soldiers. And where it might end is anyone’s guess—much like this quest of ours.

And so to the other part of this title. While I’m the One Man—for better or worse—the Quest itself is still up for grabs. It will involve some real, fundamental research: talking to very smart people, squinting at scientific studies, compiling current data, learning about chemistry and all that, in an effort to understand what’s out there. But even more so, it will depend on my applied research—and that’s where things are sure to get dodgy.

From the lowlands of Vegas and Amsterdam to the highlands of Scotland and the Rockies; from a Canadian Polar Bear Swim to the pools of an Alpine spa; from the world’s first Hangover Research Institute to an Oktoberfest Hangover Hostel; from a voodoo church in New Orleans to the London office of a doctor who has announced he has made synthetic alcohol; from those trying to research a remedy to those who say they’ve already found it—neither the quest nor this book will truly be finished until I’ve found my best concocted cure.

Sitting on my desk, next to the almost-empty bottle of (insert sponsoring brand), is a monstrous stack of little books, most of them oddly square in shape and published within the past decade, including Hangover Cure, The Hangover Cure, Ultimate Hangover Cure, Cure for a Hangover, Cure Your Hangover, How to Cure a Hangover!, How to Stop a Headache and Cure a Hangover, Hangover Cures, Hangover Cures (Miracle Juices), Natural Cures for Hangovers, Real Hangover Cures, Hangover Cures for Hungover Heads, 10 Ways to Quickly Cure a Hangover, The Hangover Handbook: 15 Natural Cures, 40 Cures for Hangovers, 50 Hangover Cures, 50 Ways to Cure a Hangover, Hangover Cures (52 Ways), The Hangover Handbook: 101 Cures for Humanity’s Oldest Malady!, The World’s Best Hangover Cures, and A Little Book of Hangover Cures. And yet, none of them, as far as I can see, brings anything new to the literature of hangovers, let alone one single, actual Cure.

Treatments, maybe. Balms, soothers, pick-me-ups, hairs of the dog, words of advice and a thousand Hail Marys, for sure—but a real-life, bona fide cure? If that were here, I’d be on to a second bottle by now, with a whole other book to write.

My point is this: when it comes to hangovers, both books and people tend to use the word cure lightly. So I’ll try to keep in mind one particular truism; it’s oft been ascribed, in all sorts of meaningful publications, to the greatest hangover writer ever: Sir Kingley Amis. Yet no one I’ve found so far—not his official biographer, nor even his renowned novelist son—can identify the source of this supposedly famous Amis quote:

Like the search for God, with which it has other things in common, the search for the infallible and instantaneous hangover cure will never be done.

So whether he said that or not, I’m in for a helluva challenge—but I’ll give it a shot.

In fact, better make it a double.

WELCOME TO YOUR HANGOVER

You tumble from dreams of deserts and demons into semiconsciousness. Your mouth is full of sand. A voice is calling from far away, as if back in that blurry desert. It is begging you for water. You try to move, but can’t.

And now that call is getting louder, like a pain in your head. A headache . . . But no, oh no, this is so much more—something terrible and growing. It is like your brain has started to swell, pressing against your cranium—eyes pushing out of their sockets. You cradle your head, in shaking hands, to keep your skull from splitting . . .

But in truth your brain isn’t growing at all. It is, in fact, drastically shrinking. As you slept, your body, bereft of liquid, had to siphon water from wherever it could, including from those three pounds of complex meat that hold your messed-up mind. So now your brain, in the awful act of shrinking, of constricting, is pulling at the membranes attached to your skull, causing all this goddamn pain, tugging at the fibers of your very being.

Alcohol is a diuretic. And out with the H2O went all those other things—electrolytes, potassium, magnesium—that make your cells (i.e., you) actually function. So that persistent call from your dried-out brain has a point: You’d better get some water!

With Sisyphean effort, you raise your head. The room begins to spin. The bar last night was spinning too, and not in a fun, disco-ball way. More like being trapped on a hellish carousel. When you closed your eyes, it just got worse—up and down, faster and faster on some devil’s spinning pony.

The cause of all this whirling around (apart from the booze you drank) happens to be a fish that crawled onto land 365 million years ago and became the physiological precursor to all animal life, including ours. Its fins became talons, claws and fingers. Its scales became feathers, fur and skin. And its jawbone, containing a mysterious gel that’s older than time, became your inner ear, wherein today you have microscopic hairlike cells measuring the movement of that gel, sending messages to your brain regarding sound, the tilt of your head and acceleration. And that’s why the world is spinning. It is, essentially, a kind of landlocked seasickness.

Booze is like a pirate. It likes adventure—to go with the flow for a while, then suddenly take command, and also stir shit up a bit, especially once it reaches your inner ear. Alcohol is much lighter than the weird old gel in charge of your equilibrium. Unable to mix, to come to terms, the booze gives chase, around and around, until your brain thinks you’re spinning out of control. When this happens, your body tries to find a fixed point—a spot on the imagined horizon. Last night, when you shut your eyes, hoping for the spinning to stop, your pupils kept darting to the right—tracking a point that wasn’t there.

And now, the morning after, most of the booze has left your body; what remains is burnt out and broken down and escaping through your bloodstream. So now the chase in your inner ear is going in reverse, the world spinning in the opposite direction—your eyes twitching to the left this time. This is one of the reasons why police at roadside safety checks shine a light in your eyes. In observing the direction of your pupils, they should be able to tell if you are drunk, hungover or hopefully neither.

Not that you care about that right now; spinning is spinning, and you’d like it to stop. Sure, you might have drunk too much, but this part is hardly your fault. It wouldn’t even be happening if that stupid old fish had contained a different gel—or just stayed in the water where it belonged. Okay, now you’re getting irritable—even a bit irrational. A lot of that has to do with exhaustion and a rebounding of stimulant. You may have passed out, but not in any restful way. Once the sedation dissipated, there was no chance of reaching those deep and deeply needed levels of sleep. As much as a hangover is dehydration, it is just as much fatigue.

So even now, with the call for water like static thunder, you drop back down, thinking maybe, just maybe, you can fall asleep and dream instead of drinking in the desert. This time, though, when you close your eyes, the spinning moves downward. And now you feel your guts.

At some point last night, the booze pushed right through the lining of your stomach, inflaming the cells and making a surplus of hydrochloric acid—the same stuff used to peel paint and polish stone. So on top of the dehydration and fatigue, you’ve got a gut full of industrial cleaner. And your stomach cells aren’t the only ones on fire. The rest of your organs are inflamed as well, swelling and tightening the tissues of your kidneys, your pancreas, your liver, and so on—impeding their ability to release toxins or absorb nutrients and water, even if you manage to get some down. To be fair, though, it’s not just the alcohol that’ll make this morning so rough. It’s what your body’s been doing to fight it.

Your liver is central command when it comes to destroying poisons in the body. To deal with your intake of alcohol, it sent out kamikaze troops called free radicals. Mission accomplished, they should have been neutralized. If, however, you kept on drinking, the free radicals just kept on mobilizing. So you might have won the battle, but now you’ve got rogue killers roaming through your body, looking for fights wherever they can . . .

In a desperate attempt to rein in the radicals, to regain control, your liver is kind of freaking out—and the result is a buildup of acetaldehyde. This is the same way that one of the meanest drugs ever created works. Antabuse was developed to treat severe alcoholism. When mixed with booze, it causes headaches and vomiting so extreme that even the most die-hard drinker becomes terrified of another sip. For decades, the only medical treatment for alcoholism was a prescription for instant, crippling hangover—a little taste of which you’ve got right now: pain and nausea until your brain stops thinking of water and begs for mercy instead.

But of course, that is all just physical; the worst is yet to come. Attempting to go fetal, you roll onto something. It feels like a fish, but it is your soul. And your squishy soul is moaning and laughing, as though you did this to yourself. Which, of course, you did.

There is rarely a time that people knowingly make themselves so quickly ill as when they get drunk or high. That’s part of why, as the physical effects change, the metaphysical trauma will spread. Just as the quality and quantity of the spirits consumed may dictate the physical aspects of your hangover, the spirit in which you consumed the spirits will often decide the metaphysical. It’s what makes an I won the Oscar!/Super Bowl!/lottery!–induced hangover and an I lost my job/girlfriend/a thousand bucks at the blackjack table hangover feel so very different. The one you have now is the latter kind. And eventually the pain and nausea will be a welcome relief from the thoughts swirling around in your head like antediluvian gel, or goddamn desert demons:

You’ve squandered your potential.

And another day of your life.

You’ll never find another girlfriend.

You probably have liver cancer.

And will end up dying alone.

But right friggin’ now, you just need to throw up.

Welcome to your hangover.

PART ONE

WHAT HAPPENS IN VEGAS

IN WHICH OUR MAN ON THE GROUND DRINKS A LOT, DRIVES A RACE CAR, SHOOTS A SAWED-OFF AK-47 AND GOES TO HANGOVER HEAVEN. APPEARANCES BY NOAH, DIONYSUS AND AN EIGHT-POUND HAMBURGER.

Oh, God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains.

—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

The glass is large and twisty. The olives are massive and stuffed with cheap, yet pungent Stilton that oozes down the plastic sword, creating a drifting layer like sea foam. But more baffling than this drink is what the hell I’m even doing here: trying to get drunk in time to get sober in time to do things you would never want to do with a hangover. I take a big sip.

It’s not just the obvious ingredients—bachelor parties, free booze and a blockbuster movie trilogy—that make Las Vegas the undisputed hangover capital of the world, but a far more complex cocktail of geography, biology, meteorology, psychology, pop-culture philosophy and alcohol bylaws.

From the flight attendants’ carefully cheeky landing jokes to the omnipresent What happens here, stays here motto to the celebration of its gangster creation myth, you are handed a line upon arrival as light and bright as a lei around your neck: The normal rules do not apply! So the usually sedate conference-goer grabs one of those giant fluorescent test tubes of booze on her way to check-in at 10:15 in the morning. Then the day is a string of complimentary drinks through endless rooms of flashing lights, manufactured oxygen and cigarette smoke. It is Vegas, after all. The normal rules do not apply . . . though no one told your liver.

I’ve experienced the Vegas effect a number of times, but still can’t let go of this nagging worry: that now, when it really counts, I might not get hungover. Which brings us to this bar, and this complicated martini. I take another sip and try to focus.

The idea was to combine two assignments. This is something freelance writers often do. It helps, of course, if the two stories are somewhat compatible: a quick piece on digestifs for Digest Digest while on a wine tour for AeroFrance’s in-flight publication, for example. But what I’ve decided to do is combine g-force with hangovers.

I am in Las Vegas for this book, but also on assignment for a men’s magazine. For the book, I am researching a place called Hangover Heaven, which will involve me getting drunk enough, again and again, to put the world’s foremost hangover doctor to the test. For the men’s magazine, I will be piloting a fighter plane in a mock dogfight at six thousand feet, jumping off a thousand-foot building, zip-lining down a mountain, shooting machine guns and driving a race car—all part of an Extreme Vegas publicity junket. What could possibly go wrong?

As it is, I have just twelve hours to get drunk, hungover, then straight again before negotiating a ten-turn track at 150 miles an hour. My math is not nearly good enough to know whether this is even possible, but I figure three ounces of vodka and two cheese-stuffed olives are a good place to start. I study my dwindling martini and try to assess whether it was shaken or stirred. A study published by the British Medical Journal concluded that shaking a martini is more effective in activating antioxidants and deactivating hydrogen peroxide than stirring one—supposedly lessening a double-O agent’s chances of getting cataracts, cardiovascular disease and hangovers.

There is a clanging sound behind me, bells and whistles, then shouting as someone hits a jackpot. Another? says the waitress.

Yes, I say, but ask her to hold the cheese.

To be honest, I’m already a bit hungover. Due to an early flight from Toronto, I haven’t slept off last night’s drinks, and my gut has been bad since flying over Nebraska. I’m meeting some other journalists and our Vegas host for dinner in half an hour. But I don’t know how boozy a meal it will be, and I am hesitant to tell them about my ulterior motives. At some point, I’ll probably have to; our schedule is so full of dangerous stunts that, without their cooperation, I don’t know how I’ll manage each day to get as drunk, then sober, as required. I already feel drained, and as if half my stomach is back in Canada. There’s a lot riding on this next martini.

A girl comes by wearing a pillbox hat, with a tray full of goodies around her neck. I buy a pack of Camels, a roll of Rolaids and a lighter. I chew the Rolaids, and the martini is here by the time I’ve lit my smoke. I take a sip.

This one is excellent: a little smoky, a little dirty, bare-knuckled and cold. And suddenly, my gut doesn’t feel so bad. The oxygen they’re pumping into the casino—to keep people gambling and drinking and gambling—is finally reaching my lungs. I kick up my feet, soak it in and order one more, just to be safe.

It’s good to be back.

EXTREME VEGAS, IT turns out, refers not only to the driving, flying and falling, but also the eating and drinking. As such, the giant scallop and raw beef appetizers come with a tasting flight of single-malt Scotches. And they’re mighty big tastes.

The main course includes five kinds of wild game. When I ask for a glass of full-bodied red, I’m brought a bottle instead. While drinking it, I explain to my dinner companions how convenient this all is—that I’m actually getting drunk! I start to tell them about my book . . . but suddenly, one of the other journalists, a travel writer from New York, just wants to talk about accident insurance—and whether we’re all going to be operating motor vehicles on the same track at the same time in the morning.

I swear he’s looking at me when he asks this, and he agrees that he is. Our host suggests we decide on dessert. It’s almost midnight and we’re scheduled at the racetrack for 9 a.m. I look at my watch, attempt the calculations and order a Grand Marnier.

It is perhaps worth mentioning that two of the subjects I’ve tackled most actively during my writing career are drinking and gambling, which might suggest that those are fairly central preoccupations—which, in certain circles, at certain times, can certainly be seen as a problem. I’m not saying I’m a problem gambler, or even a problematic drinker. It’s just worth mentioning, is all . . . especially on our way out of the restaurant and toward the poker tables, where the drinks are free.

Because here’s the thing: when you’re writing a book about hangovers and paying for your own research, and free booze is available (but only on the condition that you gamble while imbibing it), well, then, isn’t it financially and professionally irresponsible not to gamble, at least a little? To answer this mostly rhetorical question, I do a brief cost-benefit analysis, which I then cross-reference with a very general understanding of probability.

And this is what I find: the chance of losing money at the poker table is somewhere in the high double digits, whereas the chance of getting more drunk by drinking alcohol at the poker table (which contributes directly to my professional endeavor and therefore my eventual livelihood) is a solid 100 percent. Clearly, I have no choice but to sit down.

It is no-limit Texas hold’em, blinds ten-ten. A waitress comes by and I ask for a whisky and a beer. She tells me they can only bring one drink at a time. I ask her for a whisky and then a beer, and pre-tip her a ten-dollar chip. The dealer pats the table.

I post my blind, then sit back and wait for the cards, trying to gauge my drunkenness, but I’m just not sure; part of me feels disturbingly sober. Other than that, everything’s going just fine—the waitress circling back, the cards landing on felt . . .

THE MORNING AFTER THE DAWN OF TIME

Hangovers predate humanity. That’s at least as safe a bet as evolution—or, if you prefer, the Garden of Eden. Just leave an apple in the right place for long enough and see what happens to the birds and the bees, let alone the snakes and the apes. As long as flora and fauna have existed, so has fermentation.

If we’re to go with evolution, surely our prehistoric ancestors staggered around drunk long before they could walk upright. Such debaucheries might have been rare, festive, sometimes terrifying accidents—but it is fair to assume that the world’s first hangover came shortly after the world’s first drunkenness. Since alcohol predates the written word by thousands of years, however, any records are relegated to the realm of ancient storytelling. And in most origin myths, it was the gods, not the beasts who first suffered the woes of fermentation—and in so doing changed the start of human history.

In African Yoruba mythology, the god Obatala got bored one day and started making humans out of clay. Then he got thirsty and started drinking palm wine. Then he got drunk and made such a mess of things—molding a bunch of his brand new humans with deformities and such—that the next morning, in typical hangover parlance, he swore off booze forever (a very long time when you’re a god).

The Sumerian water god Enki was a perfectly imperfect embodiment of the dichotomy of alcohol. Somewhat fishy in appearance, he was a walking, swimming contradiction—the god of wisdom and knowledge, but also a careless, drunken letch. As such, he tried to take advantage of Inanna, the goddess of sex and fertility, by getting her plastered. But Inanna drank Enki under the table and tricked him into handing over his me—the governing laws by which he planned to subjugate mortal life. The next morning, realizing his drunken stupidity, he chased after her, running down the riverside while puking on his own feet. But it was far too late; humankind had acquired free will, and Enki a god-sized hangover—complete with immortal regret.

Early Israelite tradition, as well as later Christian and Jewish belief, has it that the tree of knowledge was actually a sacred vine and the forbidden fruit was a bunch of luscious grapes. When Adam consumed them, he felt himself become enlightened, powerful. And it was this godlike high that caused his fall from grace—to this lowly, fallible plane: mortality born of the first human hangover.

In the Hebrew tradition, just as Adam was being cast from heaven, he quickly cut a piece of the vine that caused his downfall. And it was this very cutting that Noah then cultivated upon the Earth—a divine gift, but given and received without the immediate knowledge of an apparently semi-omniscient God.

Most scientists and creationists agree that about ten thousand years ago there was a great flood across the Earth—and also that viniculture, the making of wine, was invented shortly thereafter. In several ancient texts, the end of the Great Flood corresponds directly with the advent of profane drunkenness. Whether it be Kezer of prehistoric Siberia, Deucalion (whose name literally means sweet wine) of Greek mythology, Utnapishtim in The Epic of Gilgamesh or Noah of the Old Testament, the first thing these survivors did after finally parking their arks was learn how to make booze.

And then things got complicated. According to the Bible, Noah got so drunk on his first batch of wine that he passed out, sprawled and naked. And then, waking to discover that his son Ham had found him like this, he flew into a rage and punished him. Or rather, he punished one of Ham’s four