Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant Brilliant Brilliant

by Joel Golby

  3% ABV

  He was dead at fifteen (I was fifteen, not him) and I suppose you can blame the drink. I’ve been thinking about it for half my life now and I’m not sure I exactly do. He was found, prone and backwards, lifeless in his council flat, and for a while I thought he might have died while pissing, like a sort of unglamorous Elvis—the last time I’d seen him, he had a golf-ball-sized purple lump on the dome of his head, where, losing his balance while having a drunk midafternoon wee, he’d collapsed backwards and hit his head squarely on a jutting electrical socket directly in the hallway behind. Maybe this is how Golbys die, I thought. Ridiculously.

  But no, he’d died the normal way: his liver, fatty and engorged from years of cheap cider-shaped abuse, finally failed, and the rest of his body crumpled along with it. He and my mum had split a couple of years earlier—the arguments with the drink finally spiraling to breaking point, just as his marriage to his first wife had before me—and he ricocheted from one council flat to another, losing weight, incrementally, losing lucidity, growing ever less like a human being and more and more like a phantom. I never really knew him, I don’t think. I only ever knew a symptom of a disease. When I ask people what he was like, their eyes fill with a sort of sparkling joy when they tell me how bright he was, how talented, his eye for a photo, the art he could produce, the way he could do anything, really, if he put his mind to it. When I was nine or ten every boy at my school and I got simultaneously obsessed with Swiss Army knives—so intricate! so many blades in one small space! so useful! toothpicks!—and to stave me off buying an actual knife and inevitably stabbing myself with it, he crafted me one out of wood: a balsa blade, slotting neatly into an offshoot of curtain rod, fixed in place with a wooden peg so I could still flick it and softly threaten people with it. I played with it endlessly one summer. He could fix my lust for knife violence. Why couldn’t he fix himself?

  4% ABV

  Dad died at the age everyone at school got into alcohol and fingering, so he stole my formative drinking years away from me, because to be honest I associated alcohol with arguing and death, and that’s a real boner-kill when you’re trying to pass a bottle of Strongbow round a park with a group of your peers and do some artless hand stuff with them (“Hey, wow, a great long chug of the poison that killed my dad—thanks!” No.). This continued throughout my late teen years, and sort of pushed me to the edges of it a bit: my friends, a tight knot of whom have seen me through every major event of my life, were dabbling in beer, and weed, and clubbing, and getting off with girls, and I was just sort of very quietly eating pizza and staying in on Friday watching Robot Wars and scrolling through Internet bulletin boards. Would I have fucked before the age of twenty if my dad hadn’t died? No. You can’t blame everything on your dead dad, you soft nerd.

  5% ABV

  I don’t remember my first beer, precisely, and I don’t remember the first time I got drunk, either: often, people with that love-hate relationship with booze seem to be able to remember with remarkable clarity that first sparkling sip of it, how it danced on the tongue, how suddenly the pieces seemed to click into place, how they knew—right then—that this would be a long and stormy friendship. I remember my mum used to come home from nights out dancing—when I was old enough to be left alone in an evening and she was trying to piece her social life back together after the explosion of death through it, she would announce that she was “out boogying” that night and spend like six hours getting ready for it, a cloud of perfume and that lipstick smell, leaving the house in a sparkly top, and then me, alone, with money for a pizza—and got in the habit of bringing me a single drink, drip-feeding it to me, hoping I would get the taste for it but not the thirst. Once she came home when I was still up—Vanishing Point with Viggo Mortensen was on late-night TV and I had decided it was the greatest film ever made about driving your car for ninety minutes until you died—and she thrust at me an Irn-Bru-flavored vodka WKD, which I sat and drank while Viggo drove himself full pelt into concrete, and I thought: I feel nothing. This does nothing for me. As origin stories go, it’s not a good one.

  6% ABV

  When I was younger, I was constantly paranoid that I would succumb to the Disease. It ran in my family, I was told—a cousin had struggled with it when I was a kid, distant grandparents “liked a tipple,” my sister quit abruptly when I was college-aged—and I always assumed I would take a sip of beer once and then one day, boom, wake up forty years later, dazed and deranged on the sofa. One time, when Dad was out, Mum and I emptied an old cupboard, where we’d stored a case of continental beers left over from a New Year’s Eve party (these are the beers mums buy for guests when they don’t want them to at all drink beer, and so are always leftover, and in fact if you have a garage right now, there is almost certainly at least 80 percent of a case of them left there, whether you brought them here or not: tiny 200 ml brown-glass bottles of sour lager that are near impossible to enjoy, entirely useless things). Only, they weren’t: when we looked closer, we noticed every lid had been carefully pried off the bottles, which had been drunk and filled with water again, then put back. Alcoholics do this, with booze, like cats kick their sand over shit: hide it, disguise that it ever happened, the flawed logic of a drunken fool. Can you imagine being that desperate for a beer that you would do that? I watched Mum heave the case onto the kitchen counter and dust her hands in preparation for the bollocking to come, and I thought: That’ll be me, one day. Drinking beer and pretending I didn’t. (Dad’s excuse, by the way, was: “Maybe that’s how the shop sold them to us. You should complain.” He maintained this for over an hour. He even lifted the beer up and made motions to walk it back up the hill to Lidl supermarket before he gave up and promised to go to AA, again.)

  7% ABV

  Every guide I read before I went to university told me that Freshers’ Week was a sort of bacchanalian period—days of excess where I would drink and fuck and make friends and fuck and drink and join a rugby club? For some reason? And fuck and drink and fuck and fuck and fuck and drink and fuck. The pamphlets mostly lied. Week one I was the victim of some sort of accounting error that meant my loans didn’t come in, so I was living off a £20 note my mum left for me, and in the end bought one beer at an English department meet-up, vaguely hoping I would like the taste, more so hoping it would push me far out of my social comfort zone into the free-talking cool guy I always suspected I would become one day and never did, more so than that hoping it would push me through various developmental stages of pubescence during the course of one 500 ml bottle and make me brave enough to talk to the tall brunette I spent the next three years silently lusting after—but never, very crucially, ever talking to—on my course. It didn’t. I looked down at the bottle—Spitfire Amber Kentish Ale, I remember very vividly—dark and brown and nutty, foamy but not fizzy, out in the parking lot on a hill behind what would become the English department go-to pub, looking out dark across the channel that separated mainland Wales from the island of Anglesey, perched from my position on the path towards an unillustrious 2.1 from Bangor University. It was cold, and the beer was sort of lukewarm, and there were no fuzzy lights or agitations to speak to anyone, and I kind of looked at everyone else jealously—they were all of them in the same smoking corner, bathed in yellow-white light and soft and relaxed with drunken giggles, and though they were a few yards over they may as well have been a million miles from me—and after that I went back to my dorm and ate three apples and went to sleep. Maybe I’d never catch the bug, I thought, for better or worse. Maybe I’d be all right.

  8% ABV

  You can make chili vodka a variety of ways, but the way the Skerries in Bangor, North Wales, makes it is like this: dozens, hundreds of dried chilies, left in a jug for months, years maybe, occasionally topped up with the most methylated clear vodka they can find. Nobody orders this shot because they don’t want to die. The Skerries in Bangor, North Wales, is an old-man pub with a tatty pool table and fuzzy corner-mounte
d TVs showing uninteresting continental soccer and red-pink-faced men shouting catastrophically in Welsh. It does not like two boys who have spent the afternoon drinking cider crashing through that delicate atmosphere, ruining it. That is why they give them the shot.

  By year three of university I had discovered drinking. I do not recall where, exactly, or when. I remember a giddy, gleeful realization that I was drunk one summer evening, seated next to my friend David after what must have been two or three pints of fizzy lager, euphoric with this odd new feeling (my arms were…wow! my…wow! I…my head was…ha-ha, wow!), but when it became a regular habit I don’t know: the tracks imperceptibly slipped, and I switched from one to another, and I never saw the join, like a skilled magician had guided it with unseen hands. I was living with a housemate who had two medical strikes against him—an allergy to gluten and a stewing, nascent alcoholism—and we would rail cases of cider together, splitting them halfway down the middle, to accommodate his allergy. “If I get beer, I’ll bulge up and go all red,” he would say, and I would look at him—bulged up, red—and think: Hmm, okay. We would take semiweekly trips to a pharmacist to pick up his doctor-prescribed carbohydrates—crumpets, breads—then stagger back with heavy bags of them, deciding on the way that we deserved a pint.

  The Night We Got Shot was a big one. We’d started early—splitting a case of Strongbow Dark Fruits between us, cracking the first can a little past noon, then staggering up to the corner store a few hours later for another. Friends texted us to say they were in a nightclub further up the town and that we should join them, and we decided to go: not changing from the jumpers and sweats we’d been drinking in all day, instead downing our cans and grabbing one for the road and staggering to the Skerries, the nearest pub to our house. “One shot, please!” we said at the bar, and the barmaid said: Of what? And we said: “Surprise us!” And that was our first mistake.

  The plan was to dip into every bar along the high street and have a shot in each, but that went out of the window as soon as the chili vodka hit. The thing is, it didn’t hurt at first: we made it maybe a hundred yards before the searing started, first in our mouths and then in our throats and guts, a sort of delayed pain I imagine (Kill) Bill experienced after the Five-Point Palm Exploding Heart technique, chest pumping and burning at the same time, tears streaming, snot just everywhere. There was a thin rain in the air, and we held our tongues up to it for solace: “MILK!” we were crying, trying to gulp down drops of water from the clouds. “WE NEED MILK!” One of us vomited in a bin. I think every hardened drinker has a story where they ruined, forever, one drink for the rest of their lives—some recoil at the smell of tequila, some can’t do red wine after a sickness with it, some even beer—but that’s the one for me. Not, oddly, chili vodka. Waking up with the sickly medicine-fruit smell of Dark Fruits Strongbow in my house was enough to put me off it for life. Every time I see a can of it, I am transported back to Bangor, back ten years again: me, alone, rain-sodden, hands on the rim of a bin, begging an unyielding god for a sweet, cold taste of milk.

  9% ABV

  When I turned eighteen, my mum threw me a party, which was her way of getting out of buying me actual, proper presents. When your mum throws you a party, it’s very rarely the party you want, exactly: me and all my boyish mates were confined to the house’s front room, where we played N64 and had arguments about whether the Foo Fighters were good or not, while at the front of the house a bunch of my mum’s grown-up friends, plus an occasional handful of family, were milling around a buffet. Occasionally I was dragged forth to be shown off to my mum’s work friends like some large, dumb prize—“An eighteen-year-old boy! A large, hearty boy! I made that!”—then sloped off with a paper plate full of lasagna and birthday cake to go and get sugar-high and rowdy with my mates. When you turn eighteen, it’s not for you, really. It’s just an occasion where your mum can remember that time she turned her body inside out for you, the agony, the agony, and now look: you made it to adulthood, sort of, you might yet turn into something, all the gore and stitches might one day prove to be worth it.

  I barely saw my mum that day—my teenage moodiness clanged against her life-of-the-party electricity—but when she said good-bye to some friends and stopped outside the front gate to have a cigarette I briefly joined her. “I might have a beer,” I said, and she nodded. “Well. You are eighteen.” I looked to my friends, inside, yelling at an aging copy of Mario Kart, seemingly deep in a well of fun I couldn’t quite tap into. “I might get drunk.” And she stopped for a second, and looked at me, and it wasn’t begging, exactly, in her voice—it was something more fragile than that—but it was weak, and naked, and human. “Please don’t,” she said. “Please.” And she flicked her cigarette out into the road and walked inside.

  10% ABV

  So I just woke up one day and my tooth was chipped. My tooth was chipped. My tooth! Was chipped. My tooth! You know how many teeth you get? Not many. Run your tongue across the front of your teeth. Are they chipped? No. Exactly. Mine is. Right side, front and center, slight chip along the base. It’s wild how much a small chip can throw off the feel of your whole mouth: once so pure, so smooth, like an inverse of a pebble, and now just a slight snag of jaggedness, lingering there, something you could catch a strand of cotton on. My tooth, forever chipped. I surveyed the room around me—blankets tied around my legs like a knot, the air in here warm and close, the whole room smelling like my breath, clothes discarded and thrown slumped in the wardrobe, all the signs of high drunkenness—and thought back: Where was I last night? In the same pub we always went to after work. But why did—Oh, right, yeah. Around my third or fourth pint I’d really swung the glass up to my face—that’s thirst, baby—and clicked it against my front tooth. I guess it had chipped then. I ran my tongue along it again, sharp enough to just cut the flesh. Fuck. I cried a bit, then got up and brushed what was left of my teeth and washed my face, then pulled on last night’s jeans and headed to work. My dad’s drinking injuries were always so extreme—the golf ball, the time he fell face-first down some train-station steps and shattered his nose and his camera, that time his liver failed and he died—so I guess I got off lightly. But I still had to get off the bus halfway in and vomit on the side of the street. There was still a golf-ball-sized bulge on my dignity.

  11% ABV

  People tell me I am a very charming drunk. My eyes go heavy-lidded and I have a placid smile on my face, and I really lean into the tell-people-what-you-really-think-of-them “You know what, mate? I love you. And above that I respect you”–type pub chat, and I’m generous getting the rounds in and I’m not afraid to keep the party going if it starts to sag, and most importantly I’m me but with a few knots untied—day-to-day I can be quite uptight, a clenched fist vs. my drunk version’s open palm; day-to-day I can be tense and unapproachable, throwaway jokes sometimes coming out mean and unnecessarily cutting. And then I’m drunk, and the gears shift down, and everyone likes me more. “Hey,” they say, everyone, in one perfect chant in unison (this is how I remember it, sober remembering drunk). “Fun Joel Is Here!” Apart from one goth kid’s brother, once, at a bar in Chesterfield where he really wanted to fight me. And one extremely gnarly bouncer at a field in Leeds Festival that one time. A Deliveroo driver punched me quite recently, in front of some girls. But other than those three times and no other times at all: I think everyone likes me when I’m drunk, more so than they do when I’m not. Which, I suppose, if you think about it for more than one second, is part of the problem.

  12% ABV

  My sister’s mum was coming to stay. I’d just broken up with a girl and had to move house in a hurry and needed somewhere stable where I could write (this.) (this book.) and my sister was going on holiday and her mum had already agreed to house-sit for them, so there was me, thirty-year-old child-boy relentlessly checking his ex’s Instagram account thirty or forty times a day, and then there was my sister’s mum, seventy-plus and new to Weig
ht Watchers and the recipes therein (the key lime pie? not bad!), and we were in a weird Odd Couple situation for a week or five days, sharing a house and tending to the house and the cats in it, and then in the evenings we would eat vegetable stir-fry together and silently watch QI. And then one night I was like, Hey, What Was My Dad Like, and she was like, Oh—

  It’s funny, actually, she said. She said: He was a brilliant man, really. He was a producer, when he had a career, a big player on the nascent advertising scene in London in the ’70s. A golden boy, for a while. He could have done whatever he wanted. He had big offers from advertising houses all across Europe. And then he sort of…fucked it up.

  And I am thinking: I hope my book goes well I hope my book goes well—

  She said: He just sort of got carried away with himself. And then the drink set in, obviously. He lost a job directly because of his drink problem: even in advertising, ’70s London advertising, he drank too much. He drank too much for the advertising industry to deal with. And then they had to move from the house they had in London—they had to sell it, she said, and she looked up how much it would be worth now and it made her shit—and out to Devon, back where she was from, and then he started to get worse: to make ends meet he was working in a pub, which wasn’t ideal, bumbling home happy-drunk across country fields in the yellow-orange haze of a late-summer sunset. And to think that, just a few months ago, he had been thriving, top of the world, a big hitter, a happy marriage with a young daughter. And now he was here. All his dreams shattered and no agitation to change.