Heavy, Heavy, Hangover Thy Head

One of the most inadequate definitions in Webster's New International Dictionary of the English Language, Second Edition, Unabridged, is: "hang'-o'ver, n. The effect of a period of dissipation after the exhilaration has worn off." The understatement is devastating, for in that one word "effect" is concealed a terrible world of meaning.

When you do not simply awaken, but fight to get up from bottomless black depths, when your eyelids have turned to stone and it costs you an elephantine effort to open them, when someone has driven red-hot railroad spikes into your skull, when the flesh on your face reacts slowly to your touch (as though you were feeling it from a great distance, with a stick), when your tongue has turned into a furry vole with careless habits, when your throat has been first seared with a blowtorch and then covered with sand, when you would kill your mother for a drink of water, when your chest says clearly that a heart attack may occur within the next few minutes, when your stomach is a leaden vessel brimming with sulphuric acid, when the bed in which you lie suddenly has been fitted with a helicopter motor, when there are frightening and mysterious pains running all over your body, when assorted bruises hurt killingly on your arms and legs, when your own breathing sounds like the roar of a tornado, when you dare not face a recollection of the night before and know you could not face it anyhow because you do not remember anything whatever about it, when you are certain that you will never get out of the bed (or the chair, or up from the floor) because your mind cannot command your limbs to move and they would not have the strength to move anyhow -- then, Mr. Webster, you can be said to have a hang'-o'ver, n.

The fury of the hangover varies, of course, from individual to individual, and from one onslaught to another. As Dr. Ben Karpman, eminent psychotherapist of St. Elizabeth's Hospital, Washington, D.C., and something of an authority on hangovers, has said, "The hangover defies description in its range; sweep and variability ... no brief, comprehensive description of it is possible."

Nevertheless, many men have condensed their reactions to the harrowing indisposition into pithy, memorable sentences. When Robert C. Ruark told Eddie Condon that he had been having a bout with gout, Condon nodded sympathetically and replied, "I had the gout myself when I woke up this morning -- right between the ears." Baby Dodds, the old-time jazz drummer, once said, "Whiskey won't kill you -- but it'll sure leave you sittin' there wishin' it had."

Such remarks are rueful, lefthanded tributes to the durability of the human spirit and to the quality that enables a clown to paint on a smile while his guts are weeping. A hangover is no laughing matter; it is a terrifying, paralyzing state of mind and body, in which hallucinations and pain vie for supremacy. Strong men have become so immobilized by it they have been unable to venture outside the house. Tim Costello, the eminent literary saloonkeeper in New York, after suffering one such, later said of it, "I got outside, all right, by using superhuman strength -- but once in the street, I couldn't cross it." Other men have seen things -- animals, surrealist birds, demons and devils. There is only one good thing about a hangover. Eventually, given sufficient time, rest, food and restoratives, it goes away.

There are two explanations for hangovers, a short one and a long one. The short one hardly need be mentioned: a man gets a hangover because he drinks too much. The long one, according to medical men at the Yale Institute of Alcohol Studies -- men who have been studying hangovers for more than two decades -- is predicated upon the way the human body functions. This complicated machine we live in, says one Yale psychiatrist, has three ways of using up alcohol, which is a food, albeit a highly individualistic kind of food -- since it contains no vitamins, no proteins and no minerals, and tears right into the blood stream without being digested. In the case of some people, alcohol can be absorbed into the blood stream right through the walls of the throat, but this is unusual.

Urination is the first method the body uses to dispose of alcohol, but urination accounts for only about five percent. Between five and 15 percent more of the alcohol is volatilized in the lungs and exhaled as breath (most commonly, as bad breath). The rest of it -- anywhere from 80 to 90 percent -- is oxidized, like all other food, in a process that begins in the liver, a stubborn little organ that will only do so much work in a given space of time. And all it will do in a single hour is dispose of a little less than the alcohol in one one-ounce shot of whiskey, gin or vodka.

Some men think that certain drinks make them drunker and give them worse hangovers than others; but this is entirely dependent on the strength of the drink. The martini, traditionally made (according to Toots Shor) of "genitals and fists," as well as its familiar components of gin and vermouth, makes a man drunker more quickly than, say, a Scotch highball simply because the alcoholic content is higher. A martini is likely to contain two and a half or three ounces of hard stuff, which makes it about 45 percent alcohol, discounting the vermouth. A highball probably contains only about an ounce and a half or two ounces of whiskey and a proportionately lower amount of alcohol. If you drink four martinis before dinner, a half-bottle of wine during it, a couple of brandies with coffee and then settle down to some serious bourbon-belting for the rest of the evening, you will most likely wind up with a hangover, but less because you mixed your drinks than because of the amount of alcohol consumed, although mixing drinks may occasionally cause stomach distress.

Theoretically, say the scientists, a man could drink a one-ounce shot of anything alcoholic every hour of the day, day in and day out, and never get drunk, or suffer a hangover. The liver, with its ability to dispose of only one shot (or ounce) per hour, is not the sole cause of a hangover, but it is a very important factor, and the thing for the drinker to remember is that all men's livers are alike, and if a liver gets more booze than it can oxidize in its plodding fashion, a hangover is usually the result.

Next to the limited activities of the liver, the chief factors in hangover-production, viscerally speaking, are the stomach, the intestines, and the bowels. Alcohol is an irritant, no matter how delectable its taste. It provokes, at first, an unusual flow of digestive juices -- and, since alcohol does not have to be digested because it passes into the blood stream without waiting for the process, these juices tend to boil around in the stomach and cause gastritis. The stomach passes the misery along to the intestines, and they in turn give it to their extensions, the bowels.

Alcohol is not the only offender. All drinkers who smoke are inclined to smoke more when they are punishing the bottle. Whereas alcohol dilates the blood vessels (which is why drinkers' eyes so often resemble mercurochrome stains in the snow), smoking contracts them. The smoke more often than not wins out over the alcohol, contracting veins in the head and brain (which causes headaches) and in other parts of the body (which sometimes causes those odd twinging pains).

In one sense, these annoying phenomena are merely symptomatic. The major cause of a real hangover is the reaction of the central nervous system, doctors say. Alcohol in the blood replaces some of the oxygen in the blood. The upper part of the brain is least able to do without oxygen in its tissues if it is to function normally. The percentage of alcohol in the blood stream necessary to make a person drunk varies according to individual susceptibility, though most people get drunk when alcohol makes up 15% of the blood stream. When this happens, the cortex does not operate at its usual rate of efficiency. This causes slurring of speech, staggering, inability to light matches, etc. And when the alcohol begins to be used up by the bodily processes described previously, the cortex is left in a supersensitive state. The result is a hangover. The immediate result is the headache -- but the nervous system is also involved in all the other maladies and tremors.

The parching, demanding thirst that all hangover victims experience is due, in large part, to the nervous system's causing a shift of water within the body. Scientists are not entirely certain why this shift occurs, but they know that it does. (And so does anybody who has endured a hangover.) The body is composed of approximately 70 percent water. A third of it is in the form of blood, lymph gland secretions, digestive juices. The other two thirds are in the body's cells. For no reason that hangover scholars are able to pin down, alcohol causes the cells to lose their water, or part of it. When this happens, the victim gets thirsty. And he remains thirsty until the liver and kidneys have resumed their normal functions, and all other alcohol-eliminating functions have done their duties so that only a negligible amount of alcohol remains in the blood stream.

These days scientists are coming to believe that alcohol's effect on the cortex is even more of a determinant in hangover stomach trouble than the direct action of alcohol on the stomach. The nervous system first tells the stomach to speed up its activity (which is why a drink or two before dinner will make a man's appetite hearty). Then the cortex tells the stomach to slow down. Finally it forces its activity to stop altogether. After seven or eight drinks, you usually do not feel hungry; all normal stomach activity has stopped. The pyloric valve, between the stomach and the small intestines, has closed. This means that the stomach can't pass along whatever food might be in it to be digested, and when digestion leaves off, nausea usually takes over. When everything is out, the valve opens again and the stomach and intestines attempt to get back on their routine.

It is the alcoholic's lack of hunger, caused by the letdown in digestive processes, that causes the horrendous diseases from which alcoholics die or get laid up for long periods. It has been conclusively proved that alcohol itself does not harm the human body. Neither does it harm the nervous system; it upsets its balance for the moment -- but usually not for more than 48 hours. Animals who have been kept on the stuff in laboratories and have been fed regularly, have continued to function normally, if drunkenly, and produce children. But the lack of hunger causes a person to stop eating which, in turn, causes malnutrition, and it, in turn, causes cirrhosis of the liver, kidney trouble, neuritis and other diseases ordinarily associated with alcoholism. However, the fact remains that the drunk who eats as regularly as he drinks won't fall victim to these maladies.

Of all the hangover's attendant maladies, the headache is usually the worst. As noted before, it frequently is caused by fluctuations in blood pressure. The liver's malfunction also can cause headache. But again it is the central nervous system, its imbalance, and the extreme sensitivity that follows, that causes the shooting pains or the dull, implacable aches in the head.

There is another -- and perhaps more important -- factor in the headache. First advanced by Dr. Harold Wolff in Headache and Other Head Pain, a newly accepted theory holds that a headache results because the alcohol-stimulated brain just does too much while drinking. The drinker almost always engages in excesses. He talks more than usual, sings at the top of his lungs, laughs wildly, tries impossible athletic feats and in general makes an energetic fool of himself. This requires tremendous brain effort. The brain gets tired. A headache results. More often than not, he is remorseful the next day. Remorse is now recognized as an important factor in any severe hangover.

There are guilt feelings in all of us, the psychoanalysts say, and in most of us there are more than we realize. The morning-after knowledge of excessive behavior the night before awakens these hidden feelings in people who have not adjusted themselves competently. Wally Cox once told a friend that he did not drink for years because he could not bear the hangovers, which brought out all sorts of guilts and feelings of re-

(continued on page 72) Heavy, Heavy, Hangover (continued from page 68) morse. Finally he completed a successful psychoanalysis. "Now," he said, "I can drink all evening long -- and feel a little queasy next day, but without feeling a trace of headache. I have no remorse; all I remember is what a good time I had." Experiments conducted at Yale revealed that the presence of other people is more exciting to the drinker, and does more to contribute to guilt feelings. The Yale men put several men in rooms by themselves and gave them as much as they wished to drink, with instructions that they should drink until they passed out. Next morning, none of the men had headaches.

Remorse is not the only psychological factor in the hangover. One of the men cited in Dr. Karpman's The Hangover, a certain Axel, set down 12 different kinds of hangovers he had gone through, classifying them by his behavior during each. Some days he felt guilty, angry, or just plain bored; other days, he turned to religion and tried to straighten himself out; still others, his sex drives were stronger than they normally were. Axel was a confirmed alcoholic, and certainly not to be compared with those of us who drink for fun, but many of us have known most of the emotions that coursed through his morning distresses.

"My hangovers never reach the suicide-contemplating stage," says Robert Ruark, "but even have a sort of gentle melancholy, or something, which leaves me feeling sexy." A number of people consulted in the research for this article also said that girls seem to look especially good to them when they have hangovers. A psychiatrist says that this particular hangover reaction is quite common, and may be explained by the fact that a hangover sends anxieties and insecurities floating up to the top of the consciousness, like the sea giving up her dead. "The hangover, which makes a man feel worthless, makes him wish to prove his worth," this doctor says, "and one of the first methods that occurs to him is the conquest of a woman." Fortunately, many women are similarly affected.

With other men, sex is the last thing on their minds: it is effort enough just to sit and endure the splitting head and the inside-out stomach. Aspirin sometimes helps relieve the pain of the headache, some mild alkali will help settle the stomach, and a tranquilizer may aid in calming the nerves. But for the most part, men behave like Prince Michael Romanoff, the Hollywood restaurateur, who recently said, "I do nothing but suffer. That is all I can do. Naturally, I try to do it regally. A sleeping pill helps."

Fatigue, as Romanoff realizes, is another major component of the hangover. Usually the drinker does not sleep enough. He may fall into a sodden, dreamless sleep as soon as he passes out, but after a few hours the trouble the alcohol has caused in his body will begin to catch up with him, and the uneasy cortex finally awakens him. "Thus," Lincoln Barnett and Henry C. Clark wrote in an article in Life, "sleeplessness compounds the fatigue which overhangs and exacerbates the localized hangover symptoms."

Upon awakening, few hangover victims can sit still. The inner tremors and rumbles are too demanding. The late John McNulty, the chronicler of many a Third Avenue hangover (and the participant in many more), used to use up his mornings-after by buffing his English shoes. Wild Bill Davison polishes his collection of antiques. Marc Rubin, a New York restaurateur, gives his dog a bath. Joe Ferrer plays tennis. Other men clean up their quarters; others go about nervously picking things up and putting them down. Ruark says that his hangovers are characterized by an inability to put anything down: "My hands become entangled with keys, cigarettes, matches, handkerchiefs, old letters, hats, shoes and anything else handy, and I just sort of change the impedimenta from one fist to the other."

Some hangovers evoke an uncontrollable wanderlust -- a desire to get the hell out of the house and go somewhere. Nearly all hung-over men are great visitors; they always need companionship and sympathy in enormous quantities. Humphrey Bogart used to go out, wander around aimlessly, and buy things he didn't need; once he bought a painting in Paris, a dark and murky composition that he thought was a battle scene. It turned out, when he had a clearer look at it, to be a rendering of a harvest. Jackie Gleason is another wanderer, and a firm advocate of the theory that the only way to get rid of the fires of a hangover is to douse them with alcohol.

Hair of the dog can temporarily banish the headache, help calm the nerves, furnish a bit of energy and arouse the patient's appetite, but it is obviously not without its dangers.

The advocates of dog hair swear by it. Here is another peculiarity of the hangover sufferer. He usually has his own hangover cure, and he becomes almost belligerent in defending it. The same is true of hangover preventives. More nonsense has been written and spoken about cures and preventives than perhaps any other subject, except possibly religion and sex, in the history of mankind. The superstitions concerning cures go back to the time of the Romans, who advocated eating owlet's eggs, roasted sheep's lights, or the ashes of a swallow's beak. Men today swear by bland foods (milk, scrambled eggs, huge loaves of Italian bread), by hot foods (chili, oysters with Tabasco), or by a combination of the two (scrambled eggs inundated by some sort of hot sauce).

Preventives are just about worthless, scientists say. You may delay the absorption of the alcohol into the blood by coating the stomach with milk, cream or olive oil taken straight, but the alcohol will get there sooner or later. As a hangover cure, milk with booze is innocuous tasting and appearing, but it is something like an iceberg. It has hidden dangers, as Jimmy Ryan, the New York jazz joint proprietor, once learned to his sorrow. Ryan awoke one morning with a bad hangover and a terrible thirst for milk. Psychiatrists say that hangover victims often want milk because it is a "security food," that is, it is associated in the subconscious with childhood, when all was warm and comfortable and a hangover was something that only Daddy got. Ryan also wanted a drink. He decided to combine the two by making a brandy milk punch -- one shot of brandy, one of bourbon, milk, cracked ice, a drop of vanilla, and nutmeg on top. He stirred up a shakerful. The drink tasted very good. Ryan got on the telephone and invited over some friends. The shaker he was using was not big enough to make a batch of milk punches for everyone. He thereupon got a bucket and began making them in that. Gallons of milk were consumed. More calls were made. Presently there were about 20 communicants in the room, hurling down the nourishing, intoxicating punch. Ryan thereupon decided a bigger mixing vessel was needed, and sent out for a washtub. Needless to say, he was stoned before dark, and so were his guests.

Ryan spent the next day in a Turkish bath. This is a hangover cure highly recommended by many men. The theory is that steam, which causes sweat, will help the body throw out some of the noxious matter you threw in the night before. Not true, say the doctors at Yale. Nor is exercise any solution; in many respects it is the worst thing a man can do, for what a hangover needs most is rest. Oxygen is a good restorative, if you can get to it, which most of us can't (except in Las Vegas, where oxygen machines are installed at the airport). Then too, there is the bolt-and-jolt theory: first, a mild sedative, such as Miltown or Equanil, to calm the nerves, then a speed-up pill, such as benzedrine, to clear the head.

Actually, the best thing to do for any hangover is to ignore it, if possible. Since it almost never is possible, the next best thing is to drink something, alcoholic or (concluded on page 84) Heavy, Heavy, Hangover (continued from page 72) non-alcoholic. Toots Shor swears by plain cola, and drinks gallons of it. Ruark takes cola with chocolate ice cream. There are beer men -- stale-beer men and freshly-opened-beer men -- and there are ale men and there are champagne men (Sherman Billingsley swears by champagne and also claims that it wards off colds). Many Englishmen prefer champagne mixed half and half with stout, which makes the noble drink called black velvet. The most familiar and popular cures are those mentioned in The Moaning After (Playboy, January 1956), to wit:

Prairie Oyster

This is the oldest and most stunning of all morning-after drinks. It should be swallowed in one determined gulp without stopping. Mix it in an old fashioned glass.

1 jigger cognac

2 teaspoons vinegar

1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce

1 teaspoon catsup

1/2 teaspoon angostura bitters

1 egg yolk

Dash of cayenne pepper

Into the old fashioned glass put the cognac, vinegar, Worcestershire sauce, catsup and bitters. Stir very well. Add two ice cubes and again stir very well. Put a yolk of egg on top of the drink without breaking yolk. Sprinkle yolk lightly with cayenne pepper. Swallow. Grit your teeth. Open your eyes very slowly.

Morning Fizz

For those who like something light and bubbly to clear a dark-brown mouth, the morning fizz is recommended.

1 jigger rye whiskey

1 egg white

Juice of 1/2 lemon

1 teaspoon sugar

2 dashes Pernod

Place all ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake very well. Strain into an eight-ounce glass. Add siphon water, stirring until glass is filled.

Clam Juice Cocktail

For men who want a non-alcoholic pick-me-up, a snappy clam juice cocktail, prepared in a cocktail shaker with ice, is a wonderful bracer. Bottled clam juice may be used.

4 ozs. clam juice (wine glass full)

2 teaspoons catsup

Dash each of salt, celery salt and pepper

Juice of 1/4 lemon

Dash of Worcestershire sauce

Put all ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake very well. Strain into a six- or seven-ounce glass. This is either for fainthearts or for people whose hangovers are so fearful they simply cannot stand the notion of morning-after booze.

Suisesse

Barney, the chief bartender and one of the stockholders in the Absinthe House, a New York restaurant which is one of the literary crowd's hangouts, holds for the Suisesse. "One makes you feel better," says Barney, "two help a lot more . . . and the third one, well, watch out for it. It sneaks up on you."

1/3 oz. anisette

2/3 oz. Pernod

Dash of lemon juice

White of an egg

Shake, strain as you pour.

Suffern Bawstard

At Los Angeles' Bel-Air Hotel, chief bartender Lou Harvey offers both his sympathy and a drink said to have originated at the old Shepheard's Hotel in Cairo, Egypt. It is called the suffern bawstard.

1/2 oz. gin

1/2 oz. brandy

1/2 oz. Rose's lime juice

Dash of angostura bitters

Build over crushed ice, fill with ginger ale, decorate with a slice of lime and a sprig of mint.

There are those who believe, with Eddie Condon, that prettied-up drinks such as the above are much too time-consuming to make. Condon's classic cure has been quoted endlessly, but it bears repetition: "You take the juice," he says, "of two quarts of whiskey." Others believe that any drink is too risky, unless taken with food. Vic Mehaffey, bartender at the Stevens House in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, serves his customers vanilla ice cream with crème de menthe poured over it.

None of the above are cures; all are nothing more than tide-overs. As Dr. Ferdinand C. Helwig and Walton H. Smith have pointed out in their monumental boozeology, Liquor, the Servant of Man, untold riches and fame await the genius who finally comes up with a sure, swift remedy for the hangover. From time to time it is reported that the Brothers Mayo are at work on a hangover remedy or a new kind of tranquilizer which will automatically do away with the hangover in a trice. This is pure gossip and rumor, not based in fact, according to a spokesman for the clinic. The chances are that man will never find a hangover pill because the ailment is composed of too many different elements, both physical and mental. Robert Benchley made what may be the ultimate comment on the subject:

"There is no cure for the hangover," Benchley said, "save death."