Life on the road with Agustina Ruiz, Pt II: The harsh realities of being hungover on tour
It was 2023, one of those sticky-hot days where the air itself feels hungover. We were somewhere in New Jersey, and I was puking like there was no tomorrow in the bathroom of a radio station we were about to play, tequila tears streaming down my face.
I was so hungover, Serra Petale made me wear a pigeon hat we found on the floor, and I looked like a pale, Victorian ghost bird.
It was the last day of a long, very fun tour. We’d played Coachella, LA, and many other wild cities, full of long backstage corridors where I always get lost, doors with codes I can never open, hotel ice machines that I absolutely love but never use, a lot of Taco Bell and big buckets of Coca Cola with ice and my classic once-a-day big packet of Lays.
The night before, after our gig at Williamsburg Hall, we went out. My Los Bitchos bandmate, Josefine Jonsson, our US guitar player, RyRy, and my Uruguayan friend Rosie, who’s lived in NYC since forever and is also an incredible photographer.
Rosie and I became instant friends in 2014 when, in one of my trips to NYC with a friend, she took me to Coney Island. We ate cheesy food, and she took film photos of me wearing my mom’s 1990s checkered long shirt that I still wear to this day. Like two girls in an indie movie, we made a silent pact and became good friends. We are millennials, after all.
There are so many tours – like that US one – that I keep close to my heart, one of those moments in life when you know nostalgia will do its magic as soon as they are over and romanticism will creep in and label it as the best time of your life. Another one of those is our tour supporting King Gizzard during a very cold winter in Europe and the UK.
Josefine has always been my partner in crime on tour. She’s one of my favourite friends to party with, but also one of my favourite humans in general. Together, we have the gift to turn an ordinary night into a story you end up talking about for years. Usually, our antics end up like Sailor Moon but with alcohol.
When we went on a European and UK tour with the King Gizzard guys, we had the best time ever. It was probably one of our favourite tours. We instantly became friends. They are the loveliest bunch.
One night after we played, we all decided it was a party night. Serra, Nic, Josefine and I joined the guys at a bar where the drinks were set on fire. Later that night, Josefine and I stayed out drinking. Tequila shots after tequila shots after tequila shots were had, until at some point we decided it was probably time to go back to the hotel.
Somehow, despite checking the Master Tour app – an app that acts like a parent when you are a child and tells you everything you need to do every day step by step – we ended up at the hotel we’d stayed in the year before.
We got into the lobby absolutely smashed and asked the receptionist if we could please have the keys to our rooms, ‘room 405’, we said. He looked at us with pity and told us there wasn’t even a room 405 in the hotel. That’s when we realised: wrong hotel. Wrong year, practically. We apologised about 1,000 times, as good drunks do, and went out to the freezing cold to catch yet another Uber.
We finally made it to the actual hotel, with maybe four hours left before van time. The sleep we did get was interrupted by an alarm screaming ‘Achtung Achtung’ through the corridors. It was so unbearably loud that it genuinely felt like we’d woken up in one of Dante’s circles of hell. Josefine and I woke up, dazed and confused. ’Is the hotel on fire?’ she said. I remember thinking – or maybe even saying it out loud – ‘I’m so tired, just let me die here’.
I threw my ’70s blue jacket and flares over the pink velvet pyjamas my parents gave me for Christmas, and we dragged ourselves downstairs, only to realise two things: the building was not burning, and we had locked ourselves out of the room.
After going through the process of getting a new key, which felt, once again, like we were in one of Dante’s circles of hell, we went to sleep for maybe two more hours. We showered with the glim hope that we’d feel better afterwards. We didn’t. When we got to the van, our tour manager, Al, had bought us Calippos. Bless his heart.
According to Josefine, Calippos are a hangover cure. To be fair, it kind of worked. The cold sweetness froze my brain just enough to wake me up a little bit. I had an orange one. Orange and lemon are my favourite Calippos. They take me back home.
We had a long drive ahead of us, and I think I was still drunk. Actually, no, I was definitely still drunk. I spent most of the drive annoying Serra, asking her if she loved me, if she was going to pre-miss me once the tour was over, even though we were going to see each other that same week for one of our Crouch End walks.
I also asked her whether I should legally change my name to Maria Sexy or maybe just Agustina Bambi. She did not support either option. I love asking those questions to Serra. Sometimes, I call her while we are in the van – even if we are sitting side-by-side. She is so patient, you can see in her eyes that she wants to strangle me sometimes, Bart and Homer Simpson style, but unfortunately for her, I’m just too adorable.
Every tour we have, we drink less and less. We spend less time dragging our bodies from one venue to another, thinking ‘I’m never drinking again’ or ‘why did I poison my body like this’.
Touring is fun, drinking is fun, drinking on tour is fun, but it is also impossible to have both all the time, at the same time, 24/7. When I tell my friends who aren’t in bands that actually we barely party nowadays, I can see their eyes wide open as if not believing me that a tour can be sober, and touring sober is better most of the time, because it’s already trippy enough as it is.
