Whiskey

I inherited my love of whiskey from my father, who came home from work every evening and walked directly from the front door to our kitchen, where he opened the cabinet over the sink, extracted a bottle of whiskey, and poured himself a drink. It was just like in Mad Men, I swear, except with less sparkling dialog.

In fact, my father worked during the tail-end of that era, an era when it wasn’t unusual for people to have bottles of liquor in their desks and to get pretty soaked at random moments at work, or after work, or before work. So when my father came home from an office party one evening with a comically large (ONE GALLON!) bottle of Seagram’s whisky (with a plastic pump on top that dispensed shots) no one was surprised. This was what passed for normal in the 1970s. Here’s a photo of it to prove these things existed:

(avocado for scale)

I’ve lost the plastic pump, and the bottle is clearly in bad shape, as it has moved with me from place to place for more than 30 years now. For a while I kept pennies in it, and trust me when I say getting the pennies out was not easy.

Why do I have it? I don’t know, really. It’s one of exactly three things of my father’s I’ve kept, the other two being a Playboy shot glass and a signet ring he used to wear (like I said, the 1970s, man). Part of it is that this bottle sat in our kitchen for years, eventually filled with other whiskeys, and it formed the cornerstone of my liquor-siphoning adventures as a teenager. Plus the sheer comical nature of it. ONE GALLON of crap whiskey! What a time to be alive.

I don’t recall the bottle being used at any parties we hosted, but it’s the connective thread in many of my memories because it was always there, always comically large, and always filled to some extent with whisky of questionable quality (the only kind my father drank, sadly). Good times came and went, life changed in ways we neither wanted nor approved of, but the Comically Large Seagram’s Bottle was always there, a Constant. Every now and then I glimpse it in the dark corner of our bedroom and I am comforted by its presence.

The Duchess does not find this bottle amusing, and has tolerated it with the same weary tone she tolerates my stuffed Bill the Cat doll: As evidence that I need adult supervision. But I will never relinquish the Comically Large Seagram’s Bottle. I may be buried with it, honestly.

If you want your own Comically Large Seagram’s Bottle, incredibly, you can buy one.

Note: This little essay is about alcohol, which means a more competent person would have a) written it in time to post on St. Patrick’s Day instead of (checks notes) x days later, and would have somehow arranged to partner with a liquor company that’s been sending him emails about trading free booze for promotion. Instead, here I am drinking on my own dime like a sucker and making terrible decisions like a … well, like a Somers. It’s kind of our brand.

FRIENDOS, we all know that Jeff likes a drink. I went to my doctor recently for my annual checkup, and the standard screening questions took a turn when we came to the part about how many alcoholic drinks do you consume. There was, not gonna lie, an awkward silence that lasted some time. The only saving grace came a day later when my blood test results came back and it was determined that I have the bodily functions of a much younger man. I have the liver function of a robust teenager, in fact. But it was a tense moment.

Now, my love for booze has been part of my personal brand for most of my adult life. It’s a bit hackneyed, sure, and a little Basic. But I believe we all have the right to be a little Basic. Just because a middle-aged man slurping whiskey isn’t exactly hip is no reason not to enjoy it as a persona, dammit, and I will die on that hill.

That being said, The Drink has not always been my friend. In fact, it has occasionally been a humiliating enemy.

THE DEPTH CHARGE

I am an incredibly simple person. I don’t like complexity, and I don’t like actually spending times on things. If lunch can’t be made in under a minute, I don’t want lunch. That’s what you’re dealing with. So it shouldn’t be surprising that I have never trucked with cocktails. If a drink requires preparation beyond a pull tab or a pour, I am not interested.

But! I was once young and foolish, just like you. So there was a brief period when I attempted to be classy and sophisticated and continental, which meant trying out cocktails of different sorts. The idea was to order something with a recipe so I could be very picky about the ingredients and preparation, implying all sorts of life experience I did not, and still do not, have.

There were failed experiments as I resisted my fate as a shot-and-a-beer type. I threw a Martini Party and downloaded several Martini recipes from the Internet, including a Chocolate Martini that yielded … regrettable results. I volunteered one New Year’s Eve to mix up a bunch of different specialty shots, including a Bubblegum Shot that resulted in one of my friends wandering the remnants of the party with a pie-eyed look on his face, draining the dregs of everyone’s drinks until he literally fell over.

But my most humiliating (and therefore best) attempt at cocktails involves something called the Depth Charge, which is not even really a cocktail, adding a nice layer of ridiculousness to this story that is very on-brand.

A Depth Charge is, in theory, a shot of whiskey dropped into a pint of beer. The idea, as it was explained to me, is that you drop in the shot and the chug the beer. Why? I have no idea. I had no idea then, and I have no idea now. Was I trying to impress a girl? Possibly. Does that make this even more humiliating? Definitely.

We were in a dive bar in Manhattan, the sort of place where you avoid going to the bathroom because you’re worried about contracting the Andromeda Strain. I don’t recall how the Depth Charge made its way to my table (which may explain my thought process, or lack thereof), but once it appeared in front of me, it was Challenge: Accepted! time.

I knew I was in trouble within the first few seconds. I dropped the shot glass into the pint glass and everyone looked at me like I was insane, which made me suddenly wonder if I’d fundamentally misunderstood the entire process. I am a man who never admits error, however, so I just lifted the roiling drink and tipped it back to the growing horror of my friends.

Chugging beer has never been a skill set for me, and things went south quickly. Whiskey-infused beer began dripping down my chin, all over me, the table, literally everywhere. I kept going (see above re: Never admitting error) offering a cheery thumb’s up to let everyone know that this was all part of the expected procedure. When I finished there was more beer on the floor than inside me, making the Depth Charge the least-efficient drink ever devised. There was a lengthy period of awkward silence.

I was later banned from that particular bar, for totally related reasons.

The moral of this story? Keep your drinks simple, or your Inner Idiot will seize the opportunity to make you look foolish. Ever since then, I drink my beer and whiskey quite separately, thank you. The results are just as humiliating, usually, but there’s much less mess.