On the morning of Annie’s actual birthday, I taught a lesson or two with my laptop (needed to book a few in while I was away to ensure my income didn’t grind to a halt completely), then went for a stroll along Oakland’s main drag for an hour at the request of Annie, so that she and Taylor could have a birthday shag in peace.

Nothing interesting happened on this walk: I went to Starbucks, drank a coffee, and ate a strange bean-cheese wrap that tasted like ham. I came back when Annie text me to give the all-clear:

Finished fucking!

In the evening we went out for dinner – with Taylor very kindly paying for both Annie and myself. The restaurant was in SF and we drove over the Bay Bridge listening to Kendrick Lamar while the girls passed joints back and forth in the front. It was dark outside the windows that shook with bass, and sitting in the backseat I watched as the twinkling night-time skyscrapers glided into view like heavenly ghost ships.

It was, I decided, quite an anxiety-inducing lifestyle the girls led – for me, at least. All those decibels, all that rushing around, all those doobies, all that ‘oh FUCK we forget the [whatever], turn the car around’. It was all very high-octane. I felt, for the first time in a long time, something close to the nervous intoxication I used to get from Berlin: I wanted to go home and eat a healthy meal and get under the duvet and turn off my phone to shut out the world – and somehow, at the same time, I wanted the total opposite. I wanted to go wherever these two nutters were headed, to feel whatever they felt.

We drove between skyscrapers listening to Eminem (Annie’s idol, who Taylor insists is shit), and after getting parked up (a block from the Church of Scientology) we walked down a wide brick sidestreet and entered a fancy jazz bar that looked like it was first built as a grand bank. We sat upstairs and a friendly waiter gave us menus. Taylor and Annie discussed eating options while I, uncomfortable with grandeur and unused to culinary sophistication, looked around and wondered how many people inside were truly rich, and how many, like me, were just pretending. How does wealth act in a restaurant? Cold, Scroogian boredom, or boom-laughing Fezziwig merriment? I didn’t want the waiters realising I didn’t belong. They could smell the hot dogs on me, I just knew it.

The girls decided what we would eat: shrimp, oysters, caviar, wagyu beef, and a trayful of some kind of sprout that Annie insisted upon. Beer was not served, wine neither, so I drank a margarita with salt around the rim. After the shrimp I tried two oysters, a dainty bit of caviar, and a great hunk of the wagyu – and all for the first time in my life. We washed it all down with more margs and sorbet, and when we left the restaurant I felt a little woozy. My belly was straining against my jeans, which was odd because the portions weren’t particularly massive.

Annie wanted to spend her birthday evening at a club near a neighbourhood she called ‘the Castro’, the city’s gay area. She must have sensed that I’d have turned this down given the chance, because when she told me the plan she added ‘you have to come, it’s my birthday’ before I could open my mouth. I nodded, knowing there was no point trying to wriggle out of it; I could awkwardly skank through just one more club night before retiring from the sticky-floor night scene for good.

We had a couple of hours to kill, however, so we went for a pint in Vesuvio, the Beat bar that had held me in a state of rapture the day before. I couldn’t appreciate it though; my stomach, which had continued to bloat and by now resembled a blemished pink beach ball, was giving me hell, and I told Annie as much.

“I’ll buy you some amaro, boys,” she said, frowning in earnest concern. “It’ll help settle your tummy.”

I don’t know why, but I found her use of the word ‘tummy’ tremendously out of character and endearing. I don’t know about America, but in the UK the word is used for childhood maladies. ‘It’ll help settle your fucking GUTS’ would have been more in-keeping with Annie’s usual parlance – but then, that’s why I like her. You never know what she’ll come out with.

I drank whatever an ‘amaro’ is and followed it up with a beer, and sitting on the balcony in Vesuvio I tried to appreciate it again, to think about the Beats and what it all meant, but my head was cloudy with days of alcohol and my stomach was threatening to pop the button off my jeans, so I could only sit and stare glassily around the room while the girls looked at something on Instagram. I went down two flights of stairs to the ancient bathrooms and felt dizzy and nauseous and tried without success to fart away my stomach ache, and as I stood there, legs slightly parted, looking mournfully into the mirror and straining, I thought about my poetic heroes and the glamourisation of alcoholism and how, in reality, Kerouac probably spent many a night doing his own crab-squat ow-my-belly cramp-farts down in this very basement, and he too probably promised himself to knock it on the head the minute the current debauchery, whatever it was, came to an end.

*****

We parked up outside a colourful cinema – or movie theaduurr – at the Castro, and Taylor hurried away to start her evening shift at the club. Annie and I still had an hour until it opened to the public, so we found a down-to-earth gay bar on a corner (windows cornered too, like Nighthawks) and I complained about the intestines that were writhing around my belly like Medusa’s severed head in a sack.

“Bitters’ll help,” said Annie. “It’s really good for your tummy.”

Why does she keep saying ‘tummy’? I wondered, even through the twisting internal grimace of my poor fat belly. It just didn’t make sense: silver-haired neo-goth combat-booted ketamine fingerblast DJ and… tummy.

I didn’t spend too long contemplating this rather charming contradiction, however, because I was about to shit my pants. The bar, whose patronage consisted exclusively of svelte men with good haircuts, had two toilets: one at ground level, one upstairs. I made for the downstairs one because it was closer, obviously, but just as my sphincter had begun to gratefully unclench in anticipation, I noticed with horror that there was no lock on the door.

‘No lock on door. Use upstairs if need lock’, the sign said – or something like that, I don’t know, I didn’t spend a long time reading it because, as I have mentioned already, I was about to fucking BLOW. 

(And by BLOW I mean SHIT IN MY OWN JEANS.)

I ran upstairs and crashed through the door like a rhino, and I barely had time to think ‘goodness this is a cute little bathroom’ before I had shoved my naked bum through the seat hole and unleashed all seven levels of Hell.

Now, usually after an experience such as this (and believe me I’ve had plenty), after the initial awfulness comes a sense of relief that is almost euphoric. It’s a feeling like no other: lying naked and sweaty and shivering on the bathroom floor, stomach totally empty, cloud of nausea finally lifted, grateful normality seeping gently in – just normality, just lack of sickness, which now feels comparatively rapturous. This time, however, no such relief was afforded me. I wanted to stay there all night; to lock myself in and weep and shiver and be safe, away from prying eyes – but of course before I’d even flushed, there was a knock at the door. Then another, then another.

I finished up as quickly as I could, and, fully aware that the next person into the bathroom after me was going to suffer viscerally, I opened the door and scurried away with my head down and eyes fixed on the floor.

“My stomach’s fucked,” I told Annie, sitting back down. “I’ve destroyed that bathroom. We can never come here again.”

“Relax,” said Annie. “I’ve got you boys. Here, drink the bitters, you’ll see your stomach’s better in no time.”

I drank the bottle of ‘bitters’ – a substance I’d assumed belonged to the era of quacks and apothecaries, to be honest – and halfway down I felt my stomach twist.

“I’m not sure it’s helping,” I said, and then I waddled away to shit everywhere again.

In the end, Annie gave up trying to heal me with mysterious drinks and we decided it was best to call me an Uber home.

“As much as I love you and want you to be happy and to not let you down, I don’t want to poo all over the dancefloor,” was how I explained it.

“Awww, it’d make a hella funny story if that happened,” laughed Annie.

“For you, you bastard.”

“It’d be funny for you too! I can just imagine you laughing it off, dancing around, making a joke out of it.”

“Making a joke out of my own shit-filled pants?” I asked, staring at her with my mouth hanging open. “Who do you… is that what you think of me?!”

I felt bad to be going home, but also quite excited to have a full, proper night’s sleep and not be required to perform six hours of reluctant two-stepping. I had a nice chat with the taxi man about the Hotel California, which we drove past and he told me is full of crack heads.

I don’t know what caused my mystery illness: possibly the copious amounts of shellfish that I’d never eaten before, possibly the fancy cocktails I’d never drunk before, possibly the endless days of boozing that to be honest my body should be quite familiar with by now. At any rate, it seems apparent that my body is explosively allergic to expensive things.

Well, fine by me.