The Idler

SICK NOTES

From Idler 25, Winter 1999

LOUIS THEROUX remembers his greatest vomits.

It’s a strange fact of my life that I’ve puked more than anyone I know. Name a London landmark, and I’ve probably vommed in it. I’ve yakked in the toilets of the Royal Academy at an exhibition by Elizabeth Frink. I’ve yooked between my legs during a production of Master Harold and the Boys at the National Theatre. (In an act of unsolicited kindness which I’ve never forgotten, the man in the seat in front began passing back Handy Andies, without looking round, as the play continued.) I’ve barfed off the back of a 37 bus on the Wandsworth Road, in the toilet of an electric train bound for Robert Moses State Park in Long Island, into a bin on the 42nd Street stop of the New York Subway BDFQ line, off beautiful Magdalen Bridge in Oxford, and in the cloisters of Westminster Abbey, close to Poets’ Corner.

Like a gibbon marking its turf, I’ve left the scent of my vomit across a good portion of the English speaking world.

For a long time I wondered why I puked so often. Was I drinking so much more than my peers who, the morning after a binge, would be scarfing down greasy breakfasts while I sweated and went outside to take deep breaths of fresh air, vainly trying to calm my roiling guts? Was I just cursed with a weak stomach? I’m quite a shy person and easily embarrassed, so these occasions when I was at a friend’s house and I was aware that I was on the verge of vomiting were acutely painful. I’d fall silent in the grip of nausea and then feel self-conscious and awkward about asking for an aspirin or for directions to the toilet, with the unspoken statement hanging in the air: “I’m just off to blow chunks - back in a tick!” It was a double shame I felt: the embarrassment of being too nauseated to be good company or make small talk, and then on top of this the shame that I, who was too ill to contribute anything in the way of repartee, was now making myself ostentatious by being about to puke.

This, I realised, is the paradox of the puke: that it is a provocative act and yet at the same time utterly involuntary. It’s like Tourette’s Syndrome made physical. I wanted nothing more than to be in bed with a cup of sugary tea and yet here I was instead staging weird, almost avant garde actions, spraying the walls of my friend’s parents’ toilet with regurgitated carrot.

But over the years my attitude to the puke evolved. What was once simply embarrassing became, as I grew older, funny and eventually a source of some pride. I made peace with the unpredictable dragon that lived in my guts. I came to see that by its very outrageous and embarrassing nature my puking had crystallized a series of ‘moments’. I could remember where I was every time I’d vomited, the puke itself acid-etching the occasion into my memory. Better still, it had forced me into uncharacteristic acts of provocateurism. I am cowardly by nature, and while I endorse the idea of dissent I’ve never had the chutzpah to really do anything about it. But now I realized that all this time, without really meaning to, I had been challenging the status quo, I had been doing something different, and I was thankful. I was like the Tourettic who one day wakes up and decides he really does want to tell everyone to fuck off - he means everything he says.

By an act of will I decided to savour every embarrassment, every disgrace my puking had incurred. As a first step, I decided to catalogue some of my greatest, most embarrassing pukes.

he Latin Puke

Age: About fifteen.
Location: Latin Class, last day of term.
Details: I was feeling ropey, and it had been touch and go all morning whether I’d actually vomit. It was one of those listless last day lessons where you’re just passing the time with some barely educational exercise, like Latin hangman. A classmate went over to put a piece of paper in the bin - something caught his attention, and with a wry expression he picked out an empty Special Brew can. The sight alone was enough to set me off. I remember I said, “I need to use the toilet” - and then I clapped my hand over my mouth. This was a mistake. Constricted like a hosepipe, the puke geysered out from between my finger tips at a pressure of pounds per square inch.

The Column of Vomit

Age: About sixteen
Location: A flat somewhere near the Post Office tower
Details: It had been a Bacardi binge and I’d forgotten to drink any water the night before so, rather desperately, when I got up I knocked back about ten glasses hoping to rehydrate my body. I wasn’t more than a few steps out of the door when the entire stomach full of water rushed up and out in a single roaring torrent. A friend who was there later described it as a “column of vomit”.

Puking with the Publicist

Age: Twenty seven
Location: In the car of the publicist for Weird Weekends on my way to a photo shoot.
Details: I’d already thrown up once when the publicist came to pick me up. She’d brought a collection of reviews of the series in a plastic bag. We were a little late, so she was driving fast. I began feeling queasy. I took the cuttings out of the bag. Suddenly, the publicist got a call on her mobile. It was someone at the BBC inquiring after me. “Yes, he’s been working very hard,” the publicist said as I heaved into the plastic bag. “He’s done some radio and lots more interview requests are coming in.” I heaved again. When we arrived at the photo studio, the publicist didn’t want to stink up her car, so I carried the plastic bag full of sick with me, as though it were an attach?� case.

The publicist puke was the last in the series. I felt pretty good about them, and more importantly I felt they represented a progression. My puking was getting better. I don’t mean in terms of power or volume or consistency, but in terms of panache. I did a short presentation about some of my pukes as part of the Clerkenwell Literary Festival and showed slides of me re-enacting some of the pukes described above. I started to think of my puking as a work in progress.

And then, a few days after the presentation a strange thing happened. I was driving back from a wedding in Surrey. With me in the car were my girlfriend Susanna, my friend Joe, and his girlfriend Annabel. We were motoring along the A3 at about fifty miles an hour. I’d had a bit to drink the night before and was feeling a little bit queasy and suddenly without warning I blurted my guts onto the steering wheel and onto my trousers and seat. Someone said, “Good God!” and Annabel wretched empathetically. I said something like, “Sorry about that” and kept driving. I had flecks of sick all around my mouth - all I’d had that day were a coke and a coffee and a couple of aspirin so it wasn’t like chunky soup. The mixture had been in my stomach not much more than an hour, but that short residency had transformed it into something rich and strange. It was definitely puke.

I felt agitated but also relieved and refreshed. “Shouldn’t we pull over?” someone said. In some versions of the story it is alleged that I was accelerating towards the car in front, but I dispute this. “I think we’re all right,” I said. “I don’t want to pull over onto the hard shoulder. Let’s wait for a turn off.”

I was aware that the other passengers in the car were discombobulated. I don’t say that I was proud to have sick on my face and lap, but I was aware that it was different and interesting. I think I felt slightly cool. We found a turn off a mile or two down the road. Susanna and I got out and bought some kitchen paper and cleaned up most of the puke. As the sense of confusion lifted, Joe joked that it was too bad that this last puke had happened too late to be included in my presentation in Clerkenwell. I agreed, but when I thought about it later in the day I realized that, really, the presentation was beside the point; what mattered was my attitude. And I concluded that this was probably my best piece yet.