Scandinavian Heartstrings, in Drop D.

Chapter 7.1 Mama Pickles

Skwisgaar woke with the most gut curdling, ear splitting, mind liquefying, face melting, eye gouging, rectal ripping, skin burning, voice scraping, muscle cramping, BITCH of a hangover. He hadn't felt this shit since his twenty-first birthday when he had dragged 'Smugly Dismissed' out to some Scandi dive bar in San Francisco where they had downed shot after shot of Akvavit because he found it was cheaper over the bar in the United States than back in Sweden off the shelf. He rolled over to the edge of the bed and promptly made a very loud and theatrical business of throwing up.

The acidic, slimy leftovers from his barf hung loosely from his bottom lip as he took a moment to breathe. He didn't bother to hold his hair out of the way and the very tips of it sloshed around in the puddle of sick below. He spat again, groaning in agony, and looked over at the empty bottle of Swedish poison on the floor; well that explained a lot, except for the fact that this wasn't his floor.

"Dood! Did you get any of that in tha fuckin' bucket?" The Midwestern twang bounced over him from somewhere behind his back. Skwisgaar couldn't yet make words of any type and so groaned a non-committal sound and spat again. "Gawd, you're getting yer feckin' hair in it."

Skwisgaar hadn't noticed until Pickles's arm was pressed into his shoulder, pulling his hair back, that he was shirtless. He did a quick mental body scan and realised he was in nothing but his jeans and they were boiling hot. He kicked and flicked the foreign blanket off him awkwardly as his head refused to be moved even a millimetre to either side lest his eyeballs roll right out of their sockets. Every part of him ached and it felt like there must be at least two cups of sand in his blood. Pickles twisted his lion's mane loosely in his palm and rubbed his back as he vomited again, in a very vocal manner, over the side of the bed (he got half of it in the bucket this time).

"I'm fucking dying." He panted.

"Yeh, I'll bet." Pickles responded, patting the man's lungs firmly.

"No, I really think I'm fucking dying."

"I'm really nawt surprised. That stuff is feckin' awful!"

"This is bullshit..." Skwisgaar cut himself off with another small retch of bile.

"That's right, get it all out o' ya." Pickles clucked as Skwisgaar made a few more violent sounds but nothing much more came up.

He seemed to be completely out of all bodily fluids and so tried to roll back over. His head throbbed and his eyes ached so he held one arm over them to block out the daylight peeking in through the curtains. He groaned in gross discontent for a while in that position. Pickles rolled a water bottle at him and the cool feeling on his ribs made him change to a groan of annoyed surprise then annoyed appreciation when he realised what it was. He made the classic mistake of downing as much water as he could only to have it all come back up about two minutes later.

"Oh GODS!!" He rasped, "Please, just fucking kill me!" He added rolling onto his back again and resumed his previous position.

"Looks like ye'll be outta action for a while." Pickles said as he rolled out of bed, tugged on his jeans and lit his first cigarette of the day.

He glanced over at the less than regal looking guitar god and chuckled; that was the girl's side of the bed and was littered with wet spots and dried jizz. Skwisgaar Swigelf was laying in someone else's sultry stains with spew in the ends of his golden locks, sweating like an old Christmas ham and groaning like a woman with period cramps. So even gods could fall to the level of men, huh? Pickles did the only thing he could do in that situation, he picked up his phone and began filming.

"So do you remember much about last night?" Pickles began the commentary for the film.

"No. Fuck off. What the fuck am I doing in here anyway?"