The Alcohol Coat
There’s a specific moment in a night out with your friends when you come to the biggest decision of your early 20s. Boots on, too-small purse shoved up your armpit, (fake) ID wedged surreptitiously between your boob and the almost too-padded VS bra you only bring out on special occasions; you’re ready to head out. But just before you take those first fateful steps onto the front, your Type A, the mum friend of all mum friends, pipes up.
“Do you think it’ll be cold?,” she elicits, completely innocently.
The second the words leave her mouth, a rush of goosebumps run across your arms. The hairs on your knees stand on end. Hell, even your nose turns red and you start to sniffle. She put something into motion no drunk girl wants to comprehend – you’re cold. And now, you’re realising it.
But here’s the thing – you’re not actually cold yet. Not really. You’re just potentially cold. It's a quantum state of shivering: you’re figuratively fine until you admit you’re not. And that, right there, is when you face the most iconic of early-twenties conundrums: do you trust in the promise of the alcohol coat, or do you (God forbid) lug yourself down with the laden load of taking a jacket with you?
The alcohol coat, as any seasoned night-out philosopher knows, is not a garment but a gamble. It's the unwavering belief that three shots of tequila will turn you into a human radiator. That vodka is, somehow, thermal. That Red Bull and regret will circulate fast enough in your bloodstream to keep your limbs toasty. It’s an invisible shield of delusion and defiance, woven from equal parts hubris and Jäger.
But then there's the coat. The real coat. Probably a puffer. Possibly your mum’s leather jacket – which if you had to tell her you lost in the basement of one frat, or thrown off the roof of another in a drunken stupor, you’d never be able to look her in the eye again. Always extraordinarily, egregiously, enormous. And suddenly the night ahead seems divided between two futures: one where you’re sleek, sexy, tight and toned and ever so slightly blue around the lips, and one where you’re warm but resemble a marshmallow that’s been emotionally devastated. You’d be DUFFing yourself at that point.
“You’ll regret it later,” she – oh so wise, yet oh so naïve to the politics of a night out – warns, already slipping into her fake North Face like some wise oracle who’s seen too many post-club Ubers spent shaking in silence. And maybe she’s right. Maybe the alcohol coat isn’t really a coat at all, but a fleeting spell – one that vanishes the moment you’re standing in line at Asian Ghetto, clutching your heels, mascara weeping, goosebumps back in full protest.
With all that whizzing around your head, you do what you must. You take one last look in the mirror, smooth down your skort, and say what generations of freezing girls before you have said with tragic, misguided pride:
“I’ll be fine. I’ll drink through it.”
