You might be surprised to read this, friend, but I was not always friends with alcohol. Oh, I always wanted to be friends with alcohol, but it took me a long time to find my way in. Much of my wasted youth was spent fighting with alcohol, because I hadn’t yet found my true calling within it (whiskey). There were many evenings wasted drinking lite beer and other, worser things. Worser than lite beer? It’s possible. You just have to dig down into the Jagermeister-level stuff.
The Golden Road
Today I stand before you a disciple in the Church of Whiskey. Sure, I’ll drink anything, especially if it’s free, but whiskey is my first and dearest love. When I was a callow young man, though, I hadn’t yet figured this out, so I experimented, and almost killed all of my friends (and myself) in the process.
See, I knew there was a whole universe of booze out there I hadn’t yet figured out, and I craved that knowledge. I wanted to be that guy who walks into a swanky bar and just orders something very sophisticated and cool, but I was stuck ordering Coors Lite. Once when I was twenty-three and feeling saucy I ordered a Depth Charge without really understanding what is was, and things went … poorly. So I decided I would have to do some research, and I further decided I would do that research via parties that I threw.
This was a mistake.
Party the First: Ti Many Martoonis. My first foray into cocktails was a Martini party. Martinis seem inherently cool. First, the James Bond thing. Second, the sleekness of the drink: Two ingredients, unless you count the olive and possibly the olive juice for a Dirty Martini. It just screamed the sort of drink that grown-ups swilled while discussing, I don’t know, escrow and the Cold War. So I invited everyone over for a Martini party and grabbed some recipes for Martinis from the Internet. I think I had a Dirty Martini, a Chocolate Martini, a classic, and I had some gin on the side just in case some communists showed up and didn’t want vodka.
I woke up on party day sick as a dog. Like, seriously ill. I should have canceled the party and focused on making a last will and testament, but in what may be the worst example of trying an attempted mind over matter, I decided not to cancel. So a couple dozen people showed up, and I mixed up Martinis while on the verge of throwing up for several hours. At one point I actually retired to another room to lie down, because I thought I was about to die.
To this day I can’t abide Martinis or vodka. Or, ironically since it’s a mainstay of the Avery Cates universe, gin.
To say that the Martini experiment was a disaster is being kind to disasters. Although the bitter taste of humiliation saved me, I think, from being lured into a life of vodka-swilling, and thank god. Did my friends all wisely ghost me and refuse all future invitations? They did not. At least, not then. Since then? Sure, I haven’t seen anyone in ages.
The New Year’s Eve Shots Massacree. My next stab at alcohol sophistication came a while later, when I decided to hijack a friend’s NYE party in order to mix up a variety of fanciful shots. Shots are only acceptable when you’re young, in my opinion; the combination of Challenge Accepted! Syndrome and the obvious goal of not actually enjoying what you’re consuming is very on-brand for being young and stupid. And I was very young and very stupid.
My shot menu was disgusting. There was a Bubblegum Shot, which I can tell you right now was both extraordinarily accurate in terms of taste and extraordinarily horrifying in terms of basic human decency. There was also that time-honored Basic Bitch of shots, the Kamikaze. After that things get hazy, because even when you’re young and stupid shots are never meant to be the focus. For god’s sake, they’re designed to get you quickly inebriated so you can then slow down and enjoy yourself.
We … did not do that. The end of the evening looked like a zombie apocalypse movie. To this day I can still taste that Bubblegum shot, and my stomach flips when I think about it.
Did all these terrifying experiences drive me to the homely, Deadwood-esque simplicity of whiskey? Damn right it did. It also serves as the figurative slave leaning in behind me and whispering ‘remember, you are mortal’ every time I walk into a bar and decide that tonight is the night I give Dylan Thomas a run for his money. Because every time I think about drinking a bit too much, I taste bubblegum.