| THE BEAUTY OF ALCOHOL | PAGE 1, 2,
But that first beer of the day -- at sundown in summer or in the winter dark -- is just a start. My tongue prefers variety. I drink at least four different types of beer per session. An ale. A porter. Another ale. A bitter. And so on. The bottles I love are not always easy to get. I can always pick up Checker Cab Blonde Ale, with its distinctive taxi-yellow label, because the stuff is brewed in Chelsea. But I have to take the PATH train beneath the Hudson into Hoboken, N.J., to buy six-packs of Devil Mountain Black Honey Ale, because it isn't licensed to be sold in New York. When I travel cross-country I always bring an extra suitcase so I can lug home exotic beer. You cannot buy Old Rasputin Russian Imperial Stout in New York or New Jersey. It's brewed in Mendocino County, Calif., but I've found bottles in Washington, D.C. More than 100 years ago, Russian brewers developed their own muddy sauce and called it imperial stout. The Samuel Smith Company of England makes an imperial stout, but it tastes like cough syrup. I opened my first bottle of Old Rasputin a little tentatively even as I smiled at the picture of its namesake on the label, the mad priest making the sign of the cross in the air. Then I knocked back a swallow. And smiled like an idiot. The elixir was profoundly smooth. It was the Tolstoy of stouts. No, wait! There was something feminine about its essence. It tasted as beautiful as the face of Greta Garbo in "Anna Karenina" would taste if you covered it with kisses. I took a second sip ... I can go on and on like this about beer. I can tell you how temperature affects the flavor. Even how the shape of the glass does. I can describe the delicious bouquet of a pint of Dogish Head Immort Ale from Delaware. But of course I don't drink Dogish Head Immort Ale for the taste alone. I drink Dogish because it gets me looped. Only then does my 25-hour workday recede. And it's only during the following three or four hours of drinking that existence seems capable of offering taste and joy. Is my life that hard? Sure is. Maybe it's harder than yours. Maybe easier. It doesn't matter. Our pain is no credential here. We're all pilgrims. None of us were intended to have an easy time of it. Drinking isn't for everyone, of course -- but why on earth would anyone want to face a day completely straight or sober? I suppose because in the end alcohol kills the body. I recently saw a doctor because I was applying for life insurance, and I made the mistake of telling that sawbones how much I drink. He looked at me with the disgust of an ax-wielding temperance matron gazing into the interior of a saloon. But not all docs are like this. My best friend is an M.D. who loves the wet stuff himself. It is to the Carry Nation-wannabes that I relate a phone call I received from a fact-checker from the New York Observer. He was calling about a book review in which I alluded to the drowning and cremation of Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1822. I described Lord Byron's retrieving Shelley's intact heart from the ashes. "It wasn't his ticker," the fact-checker told me. "It was his liver." We decided to keep the heart a heart in the review but call the event "mythic." After I hung up, I found myself haunted by the image of a liver so besoaked with alcohol that the damn thing couldn't burn. But then I considered the opposite possibility -- that God had given Shelley such a gloriously strong liver that it was indestructible by flame. So I ask you sour-faced doctors: When they burn this pilgrim's body, will my liver be intact because of blessed strength or because it's been pickled?
Before I exit on that question, picture me strolling with my dog in the
West Village, far from my home. The time is right to pop open a bottle of
Golden Promise Ale from Edinburgh, Scotland. But on a deserted side street
I find that the lip of my plastic claw-shaped bottle opener has been ground
to a nub. It no longer works. The keys to the kingdom are in my hand --
inside this blessed bottle -- but how can I get the damn thing open? Wait.
If you find yourself in similar straits, go to a brick wall. Very carefully
slip the edge of the bottle cap into the mortar and rest it atop a brick.
Then snap the bottle down. Do it quick. The beer will swirl out like
champagne. Stick the bottle in your mouth and let this wet beauty quench
your great thirst.
David Bowman's second novel, "Bunny Modern" (Little,
Brown), will appear in paperback next month. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Become a Salon member. Click here. |
