It’s Just the Liquor Talking
Like most American boys, I had my first taste of alcohol while I was still in high school. My dad gave me a half-glass of wine with dinner. It wasn’t particularly good (I later learned that I just don’t like his taste in wine, but I get ahead of myself), so I shrugged it off and went back to my room. I looked at my bed for a moment, fell over into it, and woke up fourteen hours later.
So… yeah. I’m pretty sensitive to alcohol. I didn’t touch it again for another three and a half years.
Again, like many American boys, I had my second drink (and the first one I actually enjoyed) with my girlfriend. Her name was Jacqueline, my tiny little half-French girl. One way or another she had a little flask of her father’s cognac, some French white wine distilled into its purest essence and aged, longer than both of us put together, until the barrels stained it dark, rich amber. We were sitting in a park when she offered it to me, in one of those shady, private clearings, sealed away from the world, just the two of us watching the light dapple against our skin and clothes, talking about nothing in particular. It was stronger than wine by a long shot, and I felt it at the first swallow, felt myself relax, felt myself go mellow, placid and vulnerable, but it felt right in a way that my father’s wine did not. It was warm and spicy, smooth and sweetly addictive, a small, refined pleasure that slipped inside before I could notice, melting down my throat and coiling its vapors up into the root of my brain, leaving fingerprints across my soul.
Something – well, it didn’t quite click; it really just slid gently and effortlessly into place – something past the really conscious reaches of my mind. Cognac was the perfect drink for her, the perfect accent to the way she felt, comfortable and deeply intoxicating, perfect to just hold and cradle in my hands. She nuzzled up and we spent an hour passing the flask back and forth, lounging, lazy, breathing in each other, the earth and the plants, as we murmured our quiet thoughts. We didn’t do anything more, really; I don’t think we needed to. It was a gesture of trust, like a kiss along the jaw, all at once sex and not-sex, naked and not-naked, sweet and vulnerable more than anything I’d ever felt before.
Alcohol meant something. By the end of summer, Jackie and I broke up, still on the best of terms, but the moment stayed with me, this private, transcendent sort of experience, this intimate sort of space where you could slow time to a crawl. I learned to listen, learned to hear the thoughts in the glass, the attitudes and subtexts that it could hold. I can’t control it. It comes out of this primitive, sensory part of the brain, the part where smell and taste and touch and trust and love feel a little fuzzy around the edges, where alcohol blurs the line just a little bit more. It’s sex and not-sex, the lightest touch of falling in love, baser than instinct, more sacred than God.
You’ll have to excuse me if I wander a little. As I’ve said, I’m a little sensitive. Cognac’s a thoughtful kind of drink.
Later my friend Jen asked if I was going to ask her out or just consider it until she moved away, so I dated her until our time ran up. She didn’t like cognac, really. It didn’t suit her; she said she really wasn’t that kind of girl. Jen was the kind of girl who looks an awful lot like an unspeakably pretty boy, six feet tall in her bare feet, her hair buzzed shorter than mine. Scotch whisky suited her better, without water or ice, thick with the taste of smoke and peat. She dragged me out with her friends, made me drink with her until I wobbled unsteadily in my shoes, then caught me tight against walls and called me uke. It was a kick in the teeth, a sharp, sudden jolt that bled into a hot, enjoyable sort of rush, excitingly uncomfortable in its own way. We went to her friends’ apartments to drink, five or six of us at a time, for music and mayhem and small, cathartic confessions, staring at each other over the rims of our tumblers. A glass of Scotch was challenge and desire, agony and love, a whisper of boy-hard muscle under girl-soft skin, ink-black twill and glittering silver studs.
Sometimes we went to bars for the same, but we took the booths, shrinking the world down until it held the table and nobody else, maybe people we invited in to join us. Scotch was… not savage, just feral, confident and proud, almost too strong for me to handle. It made sense.
She taught me about beer, too, about its sharp, clean taste and its lightly bitter finish, the earthy taste of barley and wheat laced with hops. We drank it on her balcony, watching the sun set over San Francisco, or watching movies, just us, a dozen of her friends, whoever we felt comfortable drinking around. I think people matched their beers, too, bottles or cans, bock or dopplebock or pilsner, Corona or Guinness, microbrews and imports. Jen made fun of me for my choices, bottles of light, gentle Tsingtao next to her dark, grainy Munich beers, the taste of hops so strong in hers that mine were like water beside them. Beer is a casual thing, a picnic thing, a campfire thing, a thing for drawing just a little closer, never so sweet or dear as something stronger.
Wine I had to learn for myself, even with a friend who liked to make suggestions. Wine doesn’t keep the way liquor does, and it’s much more expensive than beer, so it took a while for me to find my bearings. I didn’t like so much the sweet, unpolished wines my father drank, but vibrant, moody reds with long, mellow tannins and the rounded bite of oak, wines that stayed in my mouth long after I swallowed, fading off into long, lingering memories that died with a single breath. They bled into my food, accented and changed its character. They had to go with food; I’m not sure why. Wine is a drink to share at the table, a drink to bring food together, some kind of primitive ritual of community, some personal introduction, just beyond the personal circle. I pair mine by tradition, darker wines with darker meats, light, clear whites with fish, but my friends like to mix them as they please, and it makes sense, somehow.
In Vino, Veritas, they say. In more than one way, it’s true.
This idea captivates me as I get older, this compounded observation built on the sheer power of memory, that a glass reflects its owner, somehow, that there are pairings made for people, just as much as pairings made for food. Amaretto is a guilty rapture, Hyptnotiq some vaguely distasteful kind of sin. Limoncello is cute, disarmingly sunny, Blavod a midnight, whispered memory. I can play with this idea forever, and some compulsion tells me to. When people drink around me, their glasses whisper to me, even through the masks of society and station, through the distance of instinctive politesse, even though I know it might be wrong. They tell me a little about their owners, and I listen, enchanted. It’s a subtle judgement I can’t control, but I don’t really mind.
It’s just the liquor talking.
There’s so much of this that rings true for me. You know how to capture a moment, A. Better than anyone else I’ve ever known. Very, very beautiful.
Those are the same sort of wines that I can’t resist, myself.