Let’s get one thing straight: it’s fine to be a quitter. Every year, we make our resolutions and swiftly break them—so swiftly that the second Friday in January has become known as Quitter’s Day, the day most people give up on their New Year’s missives. In my view, that’s perfectly fine. I’ve never been a believer in the new year, new you mantra, and have little use for trying to overhaul my life just because the numbers on the calendar changed.
Life can be hard, so I’m not convinced that depriving ourselves of the things that bring us joy is a requirement, even if just for a few weeks in January. But there is perhaps one worthy new year mission, if only to avoid the wrath of the dreaded hangover: Dry January.
If you’re not embarking on Dry January this year (or ever), who cares! A drink here and there does not a hangover make (especially if you make it a good one). But if you are participating in the month-long tradition, I say keep going. Many have documented the benefits of abstaining from alcohol for the 31-day period, from better sleep, to clearer skin, to less money wasted at the bars.
Need some motivation on your mission? Look no further than the words of Richard Gehman, published in the January 1960 issue of Playboy. In his article “Heavy, Heavy, Hangover Thy Head,” Gehman digs into the why of hangovers—existentially and scientifically. But it’s his description of the wretched feeling of a hangover that will repel you from the bottle. Here, enjoy a portion of this article from the archives.
“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.