Free Cigarettes and Alcohol: Confessions of a Stag Weekend by Phil Sloan

state.
    My eyes are streaming with tears, my beak is running with snot and I am battling to draw breath. I calm down and try to relax. I can’t have anything left to bring up I think, just as I projectile vomit up what looks suspiciously like half a lung or part of my gall bladder.
    I hurl up a load of rancid stomach lining which splatters all up my shoes and stinks worse than a baboon’s chocolate starfish. The spew just won’t stop coming, I am doing a superb impression of that possessed chick in The Exorcist but without the mucky crucifix stuff.
    If I don’t stop soon I am going to turn my intestines inside out and maybe lose a tooth with the force of ralfing my guts up so hard. Finally the sick switch turns to the ‘off position’ and I reel away from the huge humming lake of hurl I have made.
    Still it will give the birds and local foxes something to dine out on. Don’t say I don’t do anything for our animal friends!
    I decide to get back to the hotel for some well-earned R & R. Sparking up an oily rag as I’d rather have breath stinking of fag smoke than the gutsy smell of vom, I wander off down the road. My jeans are stuck to my legs by the warm thick sick and as I walk they unleash a vile stench which almost sets me off again but I get through it.
    All I have to look forward to now is the hangover from hell in the morning which is just a few short hours away. I’m going to wake up with a splitting head and a mouth as dry as the bottom of a budgerigar’s cage, complete with cuttlefish and a manky bit of millet, but hey, what the fuck.
    As they say, if you can’t do the time then don’t do the crime…
    I wobble around the streets for half hour or so and I have no idea where else I have been but somehow I’ve ended up back in my room of doom at Kebab Heights.
    Obviously the ‘beer scooter’ got me home in one piece yet again. I lay down on my filthy, stinking bed.
    Despite the stimulants I have necked, sleep is now almost upon me. My last thought of the night is what my brother & I used to say to each other when we were kids at bedtime: ‘Goodnight, sleep tight, don’t let the bed bugs bite.’
    Some hope of that in this filthy dive, my bed is crawling with the nippy little flesh-eating bastards.
    CIGARETTES SMOKED IN THIS CHAPTER: 1…..AS A POST VOMIT BREATH FRESHENER…..141 TO GO.
    BOOZE BINGED IN THIS CHAPTER: WITH MY HUMONGOUS UPCHUCK THIS IS A NEGATIVE AMOUNT OF ALCOHOL!
     

 
    PART TWO: EDINBURGH
     

 
    Chapter Thirteen: Dead Rabbits and Cock Crazed Hens!
     
    Two things pop into my head as I slowly wake up. Firstly how did we survive that crazy Friday night and secondly why is there someone with a pneumatic drill in my head?
    My bonce is splitting and as I check my watch I realise it’s now late morning on Saturday. Was I really tied up and manhandled by a hooker in front of all my best friend’s just hours before? No that was last month over in Amsterdam. We are somewhere else today – Scotland, I’m sure of that.
    There are fourteen of us just waking up in a guest house in Edinburgh. We’ve taken over the whole of the place, all five rooms of it. A small family run place, it’s cheap and cheerful but located in the centre of town. Right in the thick of all the action, exactly where a load of rampant stags want to be. The place is nicely done out with lots of potted plants in the hallways and is smartly decorated. Far too nice a place for us bunch of reprobates.
    After all the legends of the last trip have gone round the local it was easy to get the same recruits for this do up in sunny Scotland. This time around it is me heading down the aisle to certain wedded doom, so it’s the usual drill of flight, fooling around, drinking, drug taking and smoking for the weekend.
    We got in from a night on the beer just a few hours ago but all agreed to meet up at twelve noon for breakfast and get ready to get on the sauce again.
    At reception the owner apologises but says we’d missed