An evening with drunk friend goes something a little like this. She turns up at my house with a bottle of wine, I sense that something is awry. She’s already a bottle deep and quite excitable. Soon, she’s overexcited, playing Lighthouse Family’s greatest hits and tipping her drinks over between apologetic slurs. There’s not enough room in the house to contain her flailing limbs, so I need to herd her out.
After the initial excitement comes recklessness, running into the road and smashing bottles. It’s a bit annoying. My friend’s starting to look repellent and, by association, so am I. If I was planning on meeting anyone tonight, I'd have to ditch her. It’s not fun getting pissed in the company of a child. If the night doesn’t revolve around constant nurture, it’s constant guilt – a result of intermittent flashes of both the phone I am ignoring and visions of my friend being raped or run over. The phrase “lying face down in the gutter” was invented to make friends shirking from their responsibilities reconsider. The image is cemented in my mind thanks to years of suburban conditioning. So I stick with her.
Not content with ruining my evening plans, she becomes irrational. We need to get from one bar to the next, 20 metres up the road, and she refuses to walk. She’s become very argumentative. Like the crackhead couple wandering down the street, we become embroiled in an embarrassing argument about why it’s not worth getting a taxi. It’s like I'm trying to reason with a boiled potato. She wants to borrow money, cigarettes and the clothes off my back. I have to pay for a taxi and the driver thinks we’re idiots.
In the bar, she’s a magnet for drunken lunatics and before I know it, I'm heading up a conga line of idiots. Volume, distance, gropiness – these neanderthals have no perspective. Leaning heavily, they’re talking loudly, incomprehensibly and breathily into my face about something they seem to feel very passionately about.
That’s one of the worst things about the drunk friend. Generally, I like to be propped up. I’m the sapling to my wire grill friends. But tonight, I’m the wire grill. This girl’s utterly dependent, like a sponge with a few pipe cleaners for legs. She’s demonstrating the same level of absorbency and seems as close to excreting fluid all over you given a squeeze in the wrong place, be it tears, piss or vomit. All of her organs are overworked, on the brink of revolution. I could try to warn her but how can you talk straight to someone whose eyes are looking in completely different directions, like a lizard?
She wants to dance but it’s like dancing with a blancmange. It’s a bit rich for me to say because I used to be that blancmange. Actually, I was a “zombie” drunk, so I made a mid-year resolution to never get that drunk again. The downside of that is that I’ve become much more aware of the other drunks around me, including this one. Well, fuck you very much if you think you’re going to drag me down.
So I skulk off. She’s not in a gutter, she’s on the dance floor, I'm not going to let my mum’s irrational fears infiltrate my mind. Someone who remembers seeing us together earlier has come to find me. She’s not in the gutter, she’s pissing in the corner of the bar and wearing one shoe. She wants to go home and so I go and tell my more dignified acquaintances that I'm leaving. Miraculously, they agree to come back to mine.
Back at the house, my friend has become the life of the party. Any mild bitching I might have done in the bar now comes across as disloyal jealousy. Someone must have given her drugs. It can’t and doesn’t last. Soon, she’s asking the man from Barnsley whether he minds that his accent makes him sound less intelligent. Then she’s gone. Where is she? Someone comes to tell me that the toilet has been engaged for ages and people are starting to get annoyed. Oh no, the gutter, I think. But then I hear the sweet sounds of meaningless sex and realise that she’s not dead. I bang on the door and she emerges sheepishly and comes in for a hug. Momentarily forgetting her spongelike quality I hug her back. The rest of the evening is spent mopping up her vomit and wiping away her tears, reassuring her that no one hates her, until she falls asleep.
I wake up to an arse pinch from the cracked toilet seat and the sense of impending doom that that was Friday night and there’s still Saturday night to come.
Photograph: Rosie Kliskey
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.