Surprise party


“Stay!” the owner, a man stuffed into a shirt and bow tie cried, handing us more shot glasses to down. We drank, then fled.

It had been a boozy day; first in the afternoon, visiting my old college friend, Astrid, and placidly drinking beer while her girls played with La Serpiente Aquatica Negra. Then, after the customary rainstorm and long taxi ride home, I’d had barely enough time to bathe my daughter before going out for drinks to celebrate baby 2.0’s impending arrival. Ok, that’s not for another six months, but any excuse for a drink.

So we started with a bottle of Heineken shared in the hawker centre, and then to the craft beer emporium upstairs in the Chinatown Complex. They’re running down their stock for Christmas, so we could choose only between barley wine and a 6.9% stout. Now, you only drink barley wine if you want to wake up having lost five years of your life and with a new career driving a combine harvester, so the stout was the safer of two evils. It actually turned out to be perfectly pleasant: I’d expected some overwrong monstrosity. Then we moved on to bottles: a faintly horrible bottle of Jubeale for me, fair IPA for my accomplice, Renato. They’d sold out of Fucking Hell (that really is a beer, apparently) so, in search of something different, we went up to 28.

Curiously, 28 was shut, but round the corner Bitters & Love was having its second birthday celebration. To begin with, I was put off: it looked like a private party, but in fact anyone with money could join. We got a couple of drinks, and a beer each, and an ice cream, and then felt sad that we couldn’t claim our free manicures. Then again, if a man goes out drinking and gets a French Polish, he might be in trouble when he gets home.

They also had a photo booth. I’m not sure why there was a need to record drunks being drunk (there was a professional photographer there too, although his camera wasn’t fast enough to avoid getting photos of me blinking) but I’m the star of my own documentary so I had to get proof I was there.

And what proof it is. One hundred percent proof, basically, where my head is apparently twice the size of Renato’s. Me, egocentric? Surely not.

It wasn’t over then though. Idiotically, I agreed to more drinks, vacuumed them down, then turned to go, only to be ambushed by the owner, demanding we stay and do shots. By now the bar was very crowded with the young and the beautiful, but apparently it was important to keep two dishevelled men in their late thirties drinking too. Maybe we added an air of mystery to this. Or people were getting drunk off the fumes from my breath.

Shots we had. No idea what they were. And then more shots. We really had to be going. “Stay!” he shouted. Shots, then I fled. I knew what the morning after would be like…


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