Bad Moonshine & Laudanum

The jug was cut with wood alcohol, and it's a slow assassin: hours of blinding headache and heaving, then the terrifying part, the lamplight smokes, the room greys, and your sight narrows like a wick being turned down. The doctor forces bicarbonate and good whiskey, the old counter-poison, and won't promise the dark isn't permanent.

• Blind or near it, led by the elbow, world gone to smoke
• Violently ill through 1 whole day
• If sight returns at all, it comes back over 7 days, dim at the edges, or it doesn't
• /me turns toward the lamp and asks, too quietly, whether it's lit

Recovery 7 days tell you what's left, some men get the light back, some buy a cane.·Doctor, urgently

A smaller pull of the same poison jug: the crushing headache, the heaves, and then a day when the world goes to grey smoke and doubled lamplight. The doctor doses you with soda and honest whiskey, fighting fire with cleaner fire, and your sight crawls back over days, dim at dusk and last at the edges.

• Near-blind for 2 days, led around, hands out for furniture
• Vision blurred and doubled through 5 days, no shooting, no riding point
• Crushing headaches at intervals for 3 days
• /me squints at a face two feet away, working out who it belongs to

Recovery 5 days from smoke to clear, you'll never touch an unlabeled jug again.·Doctor, urgently

The laudanum drops got away from you and the bottle doesn't apologize: pinpoint pupils, blue lips, and breathing gone slow as a funeral drum. Your friends do the only thing that works, strong coffee down your throat and your boots on the floor, walking you up and down all night, slapping you awake with wet towels every time the sleep reaches up.

• Walked all night by relays of increasingly exhausted friends
• A wet-towel slap count you'll hear about for weeks
• Fog-headed and fragile for 2 days after
• The bottle gets confiscated publicly, the argument about it is a scene

Recovery The night decides, then 3 days of cotton-headed shame, the doc talks atropine and habits.·Doctor, urgently

Three days dry, jail, sickbed, or an empty pocket, and the whiskey's absence turns on you harder than the whiskey ever did. Your hands shake like aspen leaves, the sweats soak your shirt by noon, and by the second night there are snakes working along the rafters that nobody else will admit to seeing. The doctor calls it delirium tremens and means it as a death sentence dodged, not a joke.

• Visible tremors for 3 days, spilled coffee, fumbled buttons, no card tricks
• Night terrors and phantoms for 2 nights, describe what you see
• Watched round the clock, the era knew men died of this
• /me follows something along the ceiling with wide eyes that nobody else can find

Recovery 4 days through the storm with tapered doses and watching, alone, men don't always come out.·Doctor, urgently

The batch was run through lead coils and something in it has gotten into your strings: your feet slap when you walk, high-stepping and floppy like a marionette with a drunk puppeteer. Jake leg, the barflies call it, and they clear a path when you come through. It fades, this time.

• The slapping, high-stepped gait for 4 days, unmistakable across a street
• Weak grip, dropped cards, fumbled reins for 3 days
• Barflies diagnose you on sight and name the still that did it

Recovery 5 days walking it out, a second helping of that still's work might make it permanent.·Doctor required

The moonshine carried the taste of the radiator it was run through, and now your gut knows it too: cramps that fold you double, a mouth full of metal, and a grey misery that sits on you like wet snow. The doctor prescribes milk by the quart, bismuth, and a signed oath against that particular still.

• Gut cramps doubling you over for 2 days
• A metallic taste that ruins food and coffee for 3 days
• On the milk cure, a quart a day, publicly, to the camp's amusement

Recovery 4 days of milk and misery, the still gets your testimony.·Doctor required

You wake in a hayloft eleven miles from where you started, wearing one boot and somebody else's hat, with ink stains on your fingers and no memory past the third toast. Somebody rolled you onto your side in the night, you were found face down and breathing wrong, so you owe your life to a stranger and possibly your signature to another one.

• An entire day unaccounted for, others hold pieces of it you'll pay to hear
• Ink on your fingers and no idea what you signed, a hook waiting to fire
• Hungover to the bone for 1 day
• /me studies the ink stains on their fingers like they might spell out what happened

Recovery A day for the head, the paperwork may take considerably longer.·Doctor required

You miscounted the drops, tired, sore, and generous with yourself, and slept twelve hours like a felled tree, breathing slow enough to scare whoever checked on you. They couldn't wake you till noon, and the doc's lecture afterward peels paint. The vial gets a new home on a high shelf that isn't yours.

• Unrousable half a day, whoever found you gets to describe it
• Wobbly and thick-tongued till evening
• The dosing lecture, delivered publicly, with the vial held up as evidence

Recovery 2 days to clear the fog, the trust takes longer to refill than the vial.·Doctor required

Not poison, just quantity, but what quantity. Your skull has been reshod from the inside, daylight is a personal attack, and the smell of frying bacon nearly finishes what the whiskey started. You spend the day moving like a man balancing a full bucket on his head.

• Flinch at light and noise for 1 day, hold conversations in a murmur
• No appetite till sundown, then a sudden ravenous one
• Move slow and careful all day, sudden turns are punished

Recovery A day and a half, the second half spent swearing it off.·Doctor advised

The morning after the bender, your hands have developed opinions of their own, a tremor fine enough to ripple coffee and coarse enough to be seen across a card table. It steadies with food, time, and, to your private alarm, with the first drink of the day, which you notice yourself reaching for earlier than you used to.

• Visible hand tremor for 2 days, no delicate work, cards held low
• The first-drink steadiness is a hook, play the quiet alarm of it
• Sweaty and short-fused through the mornings

Recovery 2 days to steady, the reaching-earlier part is yours to wrestle.·Doctor advised

The bad jug left you a souvenir: a day of doubled vision, two campfires where one burns, two faces on every friend. You navigate by closing one eye like a sailor sighting land, and everyone within earshot has suggestions about which of the two things to grab.

• Double vision for 1 day, no shooting, no riding faster than a walk
• One eye squinted shut for most tasks, pirate jokes are inevitable
• A headache behind the eyes into the second day
• /me reaches carefully for the left-hand one of the two coffee cups, and misses both

Recovery 2 days as the two worlds slide back into one.·Doctor advised

The night is patchwork, cards, toasts, a man with a waxed mustache and a document, and the morning brings a thick head plus a stranger at the door claiming you shook hands on something. There's ink under your thumbnail supporting his version. Your head clears in a day; the deal may not.

• Thick-headed for 1 day
• The mystery agreement hangs over you, a plot hook with your name signed to it
• The man with the waxed mustache knows things about last night that you don't

Recovery A day for the head, consult someone lettered about the rest.·Doctor advised

The bottom-shelf jug was cut with something the barkeep won't name, and your gut spends a day and a half in open revolt: cramps, sour sweat, and a taste like a burned harness that no amount of coffee will cover.

• Gut cramps and queasiness for 2 days, broth and crackers
• A sour-sweat smell you're aware of and others confirm
• The offending saloon is dead to you, loudly

Recovery 2 days of blandness and grudges.·Doctor advised

A proper hangover, nothing worse: your head rings like a struck bell till noon, at which point coffee, fried grease, and stubbornness carry the day. You perform your suffering at breakfast for sympathy that does not come.

• Wincing and slow till noon
• Breakfast theatrics, ignored by all
• Fine by afternoon and pretending it was nothing

Recovery Gone by noon with grease and coffee.·No doctor needed

Queasy, penitent, and philosophical, the morning finds you composing your farewell to liquor with the solemnity of a man drafting a will. The camp has heard this speech four times and mouths along with the good parts. By Saturday the will is contested.

• A queasy morning of loud repentance
• The camp recites your swearing-off speech with you, let them
• Delicate stomach for 1 day

Recovery A day for the gut, the vow's lifespan is a separate wager.·No doctor needed

A mild morning-after: sensitive to light, allergic to sudden noises, and moving with the careful grace of a man carrying nitroglycerin. Dark spectacles haven't reached your price range, so you make do with a hat brim pulled low and a seat facing away from the window.

• Hat brim low, voice low, till noon
• Flinch once, visibly, at a slammed door
• Restored by afternoon coffee

Recovery Gone by afternoon.·No doctor needed

Someone's granddad's cure gets forced on you at breakfast, a raw egg, vinegar, pepper, and a mystery dash from an unlabeled bottle. It is disgusting beyond description, and it works, or at least the horror of it renders the hangover irrelevant. You're upright by mid-morning either way.

• The cure's aftertaste haunts you till lunch
• Obligated to endorse the recipe now, it has believers
• Fully functional by mid-morning

Recovery Cured by mid-morning, scarred at breakfast.·No doctor needed

The same jug that folded two bigger men into their bedrolls left you standing at the fire with a mug of coffee, watching the wreckage. You feel fine. Suspiciously fine. Fine enough that the survivors demand to know your secret, and 'clean living' gets the biggest laugh of the month.

• Untouched while better men suffer, hold court about it
• Drafted to fetch water and sympathy for the fallen
• Your liver is toasted by name at the next round

Recovery Nothing to recover, pour yourself another.·No doctor needed

An hour before the bad batch made its rounds, you swapped your share to a mule skinner for a plug of tobacco, pure luck dressed as thrift. Now the tent rows are full of groaning men who drank your portion, and you're smoking your profit with the tenderest conscience money can buy.

• Entirely well, richer by one tobacco plug
• The mule skinner wants a word when he recovers, that's a scene coming
• Your thrift is retold as wisdom and you don't correct it

Recovery Nothing needed, though diplomacy with the mule skinner is advised.·No doctor needed

There were two jugs in the crate that night, one honest, one poison, and by pure dumb providence you drank from the right one straight till dawn while the bad jug worked its way down the bar. You wake clear-eyed among the fallen, holding last night's winnings and a bill of sale for a mule named Clarence that you apparently won fair. The story alone is worth drinks for a year, and Clarence turns out to be a good mule.

• No hangover at all, wake up singing among the groaning
• One mule, Clarence, documentation in hand, provenance disputed but signed
• The tale of the two jugs buys you drinks for months
• /me pats Clarence's neck and shows the bill of sale to anyone who doubts

Recovery Nothing but a mule to stable.·No doctor needed