Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant Brilliant Brilliant

by Joel Golby

  And I thought: God I hope the book goes well god I hope the—

  And things fell apart for them, a bit, afterwards. And he sort of moved back to London—he was sleeping on friends’ sofas for a bit—but he never got back to where he was. And I thought of the man I knew—chronically unemployed, yellowing slightly, quite often snoozing lazily on the same sofa he used to sleep on, ruining another relationship in slow motion with his refusal to quit. And I looked at myself—single, beer with dinner, at the height of my personal success but also everything balanced perilously on a knife edge, it could all tumble beneath me, I could be the Jenga block that topples the tower it sits under—and said: Ha-ha, ha. Ha-ha. That’s really funny.

  13% ABV

  For some reason I remember vividly the moment I realized I could just, like, buy a can. I was about twenty-two, living in a shared flat in London but feeling alone about it, and I was doing my usual Friday night routine—home on the bus to an empty flat, nine episodes of Seinfeld and chips for dinner—when I realized, at the shop opposite, I could just: buy a can. Like: I could buy a can of beer. And nobody could stop me doing that. I didn’t need to be at a party. I didn’t need to be at a show. I could just: buy a can. I bought three, drank them alone with dinner, and thought: I have the greatest creative mind in the universe. I just invented nirvana.

  95% ABV

  The ethnic makeup of Chesterfield is basically entirely working-class white apart from an old Italian community (there are: two Italian restaurants), a small Indian/Pakistani following, and, after a brief swell of immigration in the mid-’00s, a bustling Polish population. I never quite understood what it was that drove Poles here, exactly: I was English and didn’t want to be there, much less travel across Europe for the chance of it, and most people outside the county didn’t even know the town was there: How did Poland hear about it? And I had been to Poland, too: it’s beautiful, and the pints cost £1, and they eat fat lumps of pork for every meal, surrounded either by high Gothic architecture or rolling verdant hills, and I could quite happily live there, perhaps becoming a Polish soccer team ultra, taking a firm-faced Polish wife who hated me and everything I stood for. Why they came here—where the main thing in town was two Wetherspoons and a Frankie & Benny’s—always baffled me to my core.

  The point is when we—just about post-teenagers, thirsty boys with our first jobs and our first few flushes of cash and a hankering for a party—realized that the new Polish shop on West Bars offered the strongest vodka in town, and, well. We just had to see it for ourselves.

  The tradition was this: every payday, we would all throw £20 into a kitty, and then clatter downtown to the Polish shop, then group in front of the counter staring at the vodka selection and saying “Errr?” for half an hour until someone took pity on us and helped us. We drank Zubrowka that way, Wyborowa. Lubuski and Soplica. We had a muddy-looking vodka that came served to us in the shape of a glass cockerel, its head coming off at the top like a shot glass. We tried herbal liqueurs and intensely concentrated fruit mixers. And then one day we came in and the shopkeeper looked both ways, then went back, and I saw what he had in his hands and heard angels sing: Spirytus Duch Puszczy, rectified spirit. The label literally had a ghost on it. A tiny half-liter bottle that would cost us most of our stash. But there, on the label, bold as brass: 95% ABV.

  Rule #1, the shopkeeper told us, keeping both hands firmly on the bottle like it was a mogwai about to go crazed if fed after midnight. Rule #1 is, you don’t drink it neat. Rule #2: You only have half shots of it, never full (the cocktail he suggested was a Mad Dog, which is a half shot of spirit, half shot of black currant liqueur, and a shot of Tabasco: a shot that somehow manages to burn you three ways at once). Rule #3: Keep it in the freezer at all times, to…well, to hide the taste. You don’t want to taste this, boys. It tastes bad. And Rule #4 is please stop coming to my shop.

  Memories get fuzzy after this because—to reiterate—what I was drinking was 95 percent proof, which is essentially what Russian governments use to kill people. I remember our friend’s younger brother telling us he was training in judo and was a reformed Christian, so we made him do high kicks in the garden until he fell on his tailbone and cursed God. I remember having one Mad Dog, then another. Then…I want to say I had six more? Deep dark night fell around us. My friend Party (we called him Party because he liked to Party) was looking a little worse for wear, and so I volunteered myself to walk him home. “I reckon I’m the most sober one here, anyway,” I told the party. “I’ll sort him out.”

  The walk to Party’s house takes about twenty minutes each way, but records on file from the time tell me I was gone somehow for two hours. At some point his brother, the Christian, spied some construction up ahead and sprinted towards it, clanging his fist on a shipping container that had been left there. Dogs barked, a cul-de-sac of lights came on around us. “What,” I asked him, “what in the fuck are you doing?” And he turned to me with deep, real fear in his eyes and told me: The Devil’s in There.

  And I said, what, in there. That’s a bulldozer, mate. It’s not The Devil.

  And he said: It’s The Devil. In there. I know.

  And he pounded on the container—more dogs, more lights—shouting, “I KNOW YOU’RE IN THERE,” before turning his ear to the still-ringing metal and going: Oh, no. My bad.

  He said:

  There’s nothing in there at all.

  When I got back to the party, things were starting to peter out, so I went to get another Mad Dog to steady my nerves. My friend Chris stopped me. “You know,” he said, “you know you’re not actually speaking, when you’re trying to do speaking?” He explained: “You’ve basically been making just animal sounds for a few hours now. I didn’t know quite how to tell you.” I agreed with him that it was probably time to go home (“AUGHHGH! YUAUAHGHH!”—me.), and I woke up at 3 p.m. the next day with my head ringing like a clanged bell. Even my mum, who liked to treat my more regular hangovers with the delicacy they deserved—i.e., dropping every pan she owned loudly on the floor of the kitchen while yelling “GET UP!”—knew to leave me alone, so deathly ill I looked. I tried to turn over once in bed and straight up vomited. I tried to watch a Steve Carell film and nearly sobbed. I was essentially paralyzed for twenty-four straight hours after that one. Was it worth it? I nearly saw The Devil in a shipping container, mate. Hell yes, it was worth it.

  14% ABV

  There’s a very particular clang that a bin full of empty cans makes when you decant it into a garbage bag. A clang on top of another clang. A very hollow, empty sort of clang—not a deep clang, like a gong, or a high alarming clang, like a school bell—something weaker, more pathetic. I suppose I had emptied my bedroom bin out eight, ten times before I noticed. Man, I thought. I drink a lot of cans. After Mum died I didn’t really notice it, but I started drinking more—something in the fuzzy, liminal space between my conscious and unconscious would tell me, “Hey, who’s gonna tell you off about it?”—and my intake increased. At first I didn’t notice it—the routine would be, in a house full of boys, that everyone would come up to my room to drink beer and play videogames. But then there were those odd Tuesdays where no one was home but me. The times near the ends of the month where I would decant change out of my change jar and take it to the shop to buy as many singular cans as I could afford. I got into Desperados, which is a cheap lager sweetened and strengthened with a shot of tequila, which I can now no longer stand. A relationship crumbled around me without me noticing. I got fat as fuck. And still I didn’t really notice how unhealthy my bin-bag situation was. Clank, clank. A very specific noise of one empty beer can falling against another. There’s no other noise like it. It was the sound of the monster tiptoeing in.

  15% ABV

  I’ve had enough periods of sobriety now that I can see it less like a fun sort of challenge (I now understand my own psychology enough to know that I am electrifyingly tur
ned on by maintaining streaks of good behavior: if I weigh myself every day, or stick to a gym routine, or ride my bike five days a week, or don’t eat meat for a fortnight; if I ever need to do something, I just need to give myself a time-dependent deadline on when I can do it again, and then I can abstain) and can actually pull out enough and self-examine why I do drink when I do. Fundamentally it’s because it relaxes me: two pints in and the muscles in my shoulders unclench, my posture loosens, my heart rate slows, I flush gooey and warm, I talk more and without any mental gatekeeping on what I’m saying or who I’m saying it to. That’s fine, but it’s also possible to relax without putting two pints of very mild poison in your body (like: read a book, my guy, have a warm cocoa and a snooze), and learning that was a steep curve. Drinking to grease the rigid wheels of my own personality felt like a losing battle, so I also edited the amount I was drinking on nights when I was: switching from cans to bottles, pints to halves, pacing myself with soft drinks in between. Being drunk became less like the goal and more like the happy side effect: instead of racing after a hurricane, I was falling backwards into a warm, soft swimming pool. You can do a lot of things drunk—charm, flirt, be funny, be open, be open to adventure, vomit in a bin, dance—and it’s entirely possible to do all those things sober, too. Literally the only thing in the world you have to be drunk for first is karaoke. Everything else can be done after pounding a load of Diet Cokes.

  16% ABV

  Friends have gone sober, and my attitude towards them has gone from hard to soft with it. In my early twenties, my friend Paul did a month off alcohol, and I was incredulous—“Why, though? Why?”—and he shrugged and said: To see if I can do it. And later, when I tried it myself, I understood: it’s a feeling of control and regulation, one my dad never got to feel and I did, and there’s a curiously powerful buzz to that. It helps that your skin clears, your sleep loosens, you lose that puff of extra weight, you have more money at the end of the month. I never had the wherewithal to analyze just how much alcohol was affecting my mood until, when I was six weeks into a stretch of sobriety, my friend remarked how much he had been on it lately and how run-down he was feeling as a result. “It’s probably all those liters of depression juice you pour into your body,” I said, and despite being the world’s most sanctimonious hypocrite, I was mostly right: unmoderated alcohol input leads to a tight, spiraling, subverted feeling of unhappiness, one that’s very hard to shake. But sobriety is the calm eye of a raging storm, and in my case it’s still underpinned by fear: in real life I am pathologically, near-serial-killer levels of calm and composed, but internally the way my thoughts bend and lean towards alcohol veer to chaos. In bed, in the blue-black darkness, six weeks clear of a beer, fingers kneading against each other as I drop into a pure dreamless sleep, I sit and wonder: What if I’m not as in control as I think I am? What if it’s all a ruse drunk me is pulling on myself? And then I can’t shift it. And then I can’t stop thinking about it.

  0.5% ABV

  At first I started for a month to see if I could do it, then I read somewhere that that itself is a sign of alcoholism, so then I extended it to two months, then ten weeks, to avoid that particular pothole. The thing is when you’re not drinking people get incredulous about it, so you need to come up with some excuses to sidestep any uncomfortable situations that might arise (you can only pretend you are on antibiotics, “which will react very violently, with me, just vomit everywhere, honestly, the worst, so yes, a Diet Coke is fine please,” for so long). One way I word it is by saying, “Oh, I’m not drinking…at the moment.” It opens up this distant possibility that one day you will snap and go rage on the beers and tequilas and wine again, and you will open up and once again become fun, and not that the lid is tightly on you, forever, now. Another good tactic I’ve found is to order nonalcoholic beer, because holding it and drinking it and clinking it against others’ beers in a cheers formation feels better, tickles the same synapses, as actually drinking does. I go bursts of not drinking now: a couple of months here, a fortnight there, circle back with a big night out here and then before cycling back out again. The worst realization is, somewhere between 11 p.m. and midnight, everyone starts talking shit: talking in circles, the same tired anecdote stretched long and repeated, awful, and they just want to keep going, everyone forgets every normal social cue, friends stop noticing you are uninterested hours before you can leave them. At a party at my house recently I went to bed at 1 a.m., clarifyingly sober, and when I got up at three thirty for a 0.5 percent beer-induced piss there was a friend, on my sofa still, alone, fiddling with the AUX cord, looking for that one song—no honestly, mate, you have to listen to this one precise song right now. I don’t think I’ll ever go sober-sober—too much of my social life, for better or worse, is tied in with drinking and going to the pub—but I’ve managed to screw the bottle from a different angle now: I can say no to a beer, I never drink alone, I know when to order myself a taxi home, I haven’t shattered one of my front teeth in ages. I call it running alongside the wagon: knowing when to hop on, when it is good for me to stop, when I need the mental breathing room. But also being able to jog alongside it enjoying a cool beer on a hot day.

  0% ABV

  The one interesting thing about me, I tell girls on dates, is my birth was registered in a pub. You have forty-two days to register the birth of a child in the United Kingdom, is the thing. And on Day 41, so the legend goes, my dad—instead of, like, phoning every registry office in the south London area—went to his local pub and loudly moaned about the situation to anyone who would listen. “There’s a massive fine,” he said. “For fuck’s sake.” Inexplicably, this tactic worked: I’m a registrar, a man three stools down said, and wherever my special registrar ink and registrar pen and registrar paper goes, well, that’s a registry office. And my dad said: “If I meet you here at lunchtime tomorrow and buy you a pint, could you register my large illegal son?” And the man thought for a moment and said: Yes.

  And so in the bright August sunshine, in the beer garden of Peckham’s Clockhouse pub, so it came to pass: Young Joel Golby, forty-two precious little days old, soft and pink and snoozing, was legitimized under the eyes of the law. Apparently a circus walked past during the ceremony, which didn’t move me. Apparently everyone got drunk. I slept through it. And I think of that, sometimes: the great irony that I was birthed and notarized in the same liquid that would blight my life, forced under a curse that would never truly be lifted, and that thirty years later, I’m still struggling with it today. That my dad clinked ciders with men he’d lose touch with when he moved away from here to die. That my mum sat there and watched, not knowing what doom this spelled for us all. “Raise a glass,” my dad said, “to my son,” and the people cheered. How little they would know. How little they would know.

  Acknowledgments

  Love and appreciation to all the following lads: Lain, Adam, Party, Paul, Lacey, Davio, Emma, Lizzie, Nat; Duncan Vicat-Brown’s thirty-five-hour “Ambient Noise” Spotify playlist but not Duncan Vicat-Brown himself, he knows why; Christopher Bethell, Bekky Lonsdale, Michael Segalov, Ben Smoke; all my Vice gang but most especially Jamie, Simon, Jack, Dipo, Tshepo, Wiegertje, Ryan, Nana, Toby, Angus, Kev Kharas, Amelia Abraham, and, of course, the Goblins; Max Brokman, my tall and emotionless brethren; John Saward, my hero and my mate; Carl Anka and Jack Fitzgerald but absolutely fuck Tom Bradley; Bill Stiteler, I am so sorry I have never sent you a single postcard in response to your many postcards, but I hope this dedication goes some small way to healing the wound; Andy Riley, please see the bit I wrote for Bill; my family—Chris, Steph, Sam, Christina, Oscar, Elijah, and Val—you weird, weird, weird, weird bastards; everyone who has ever put me up during the writing of this book but most especially Jemma and Arthur, you legends, sorry about all the mess I made; Stripes, Molly; Terri, Keith; Felix Cohen but more importantly Esme. Emily, Phoebe, and the cursed lurker “Gabby LM.” James “Jay” Driscoll, the only person who overtly requested his
presence in the acknowledgments. World’s Greatest Illustrator Dan Evans. As a result of a lost bet, I am legally obliged to present the name of the following acknowledgee as thus: “2K17 Monopoly: No Mercy Edition ultimate champion Kimeya Baker.” Sam Diss will be expecting a long sentence here saying how much he means to me as a friend and a brother—in fact I imagine this is the first page you have turned to, isn’t it, you little prick, running your fat little finger thru the dense acknowledgments to find your bit—but I refuse to give him the satisfaction. Dawn, Grant, and Nancy Diss, however, get my eternal gratitude and thanks. All the Lovely Lads at Mundial. Sacha, Sarah, Jasmine, and Robocop. Monica! Heisey! Moon-faced shed shagger Oobah Butler and his vile accomplice Joe Zadeh. Emmeline Saunders (who I don’t even like but know will kick off most of all, out of everyone I know, if I don’t put her name in here), as well as: Annesie, Jo, Jess, Rhiannon, and all the lads at heat. James Clee, my wife. Chardonné Cooper, meme lover, pasta fiend, friend to pigs. Mia, Ed, and Max. Wiggy and Sam. Sweet Thomas Bellringer. Horrible, horrible Fred. Ella, Jamie, Janina, Caroline, Henry Harris, and John. David, David, and Peter. Bob Foster. Colin Brightwell. Everyone who helped the book get to where it is today: Jon Elek, Jack Fogg, Zoe Ross, Yaniv Soha, Dan Walker, Cara Reilly, Dolly Alderton, Mary Beth Constant. I would also like to thank myself, because I don’t think I ever get enough due. Curses: as ever, curses go to my enemies. Apologies: apologies obviously go out to the many people above who I forgot. Thanks: thanks go out to any reader (you.) who has made it this far. That is the end, now. Fin.