A different kind of hangover

Hangovers never lasted long enough to prevent me from hitting the bottle again. And since booze brought out my inner party boy, my drinking buddies didn’t want me to stop. I had to hit rock bottom before I could wake up to a different path. Handling one’s liquor comes easy for some. For me, it didn’t.

I used to drunkenly stumble to my apartment, on a regular basis, to call my boyfriend. He often came over and spent the night so I could cap off my evening suitably.

He wasn’t always impressed. “What the fuck are you doing?” he hollered one night.

I woke up standing, mumbling something back at him. I needed to take a leak and made my way to the bathroom.

Like every morning after, my eyes opened to a pounding headache. My boyfriend asked how I felt in a half-caring, half-condescending tone. He knew I felt like shit but at least he also gave one.

“I had the weirdest dream,” I said rubbing my head. “I dreamt I peed all over my computer keyboard.” It was the one from my old computer, sitting on a trunk at the end of the bed.

He laughed as he explained it was not a dream. Just a few days prior, I had gotten a new computer and moved the old one to the top of the storage trunk to save some files before tossing it. The previous night I’d apparently mistaken it for the toilet.

I scurried to the keyboard and lifted it. It was heavy – and I could hear liquid sloshing inside. I detached it from the computer carefully and took it over to the kitchen sink. I might as well wash it off and try to salvage it while I could.

Knowing my pack-rat habits, my boyfriend took the keyboard out of my hands. Trying to save it was disgusting, he said, walked out with it and tossed it in the dumpster.

I pulled my clothes on and ventured to the dumpster to find it. Luckily it sat on a pile of trash bags, not touching anything yucky. Mostly out of curiosity, I rinsed it and set it on the windowsill to dry, and preceded to clean the trunk it had sat on.  Then I called my drinking buddies to describe what an awesomely dumb thing I had done.

The next day the keyboard seemed dry, I plugged it in, and sure enough it worked perfectly. No glitches. Alcohol was the winner, and the keyboard wound up lasting longer than the boyfriend.

Once I was done saving files from the computer, I put it all up for sale at a friend’s garage sale. A guy there asked how much I wanted for the keyboard – he was blond, nerdy, and extremely handsome. I could not stop drooling over him, and considering the keyboard’s water sport past, I could only bring myself to ask for two dollars. I felt bad about it, but it was kind of hot to think about a sexy straight guy typing on a keyboard I once corrupted.

Only about a month later I found out that the sexy guy wasn’t so straight. I saw him alone at a gay bar and instantly spotted an opportunity – but the only opening line I could think of was about our previous meeting at the garage sale. If I were to actually go on to date him, sooner or later I’d have to tell him that I sold him soiled equipment.

At that moment I set my drink down as I realized that alcohol hadn’t made me a hilarious winner. Suddenly I was the guy who couldn’t ask someone on a date because I urinated on a keyboard and then sold it to him. And while that wasn’t the worst of the rock bottoms, it felt like a whole new kind of hangover – one that wouldn’t go away.