Salon Wanderlust | Absinthe makes the heart grow

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Seduced and sated in Costa Rica
By J. Kingston Pierce
From morphos and macaws to coatimundi and poison-arrow frogs, this tiny Central American country offers a mind-altering overabundance of wildlife
(04/21/98)
Running with the bulls
By Andrew Taber
Horny tradition: Dodging pissed-off bovines in southern France
(04/20/98)
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By Brent Gregston
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(04/17/98)
Mondo Weirdo
An unforgettable introduction to Beijing
(04/16/98)
On Guatemala's Gringo Circuit
By Doug Fine
Volcanoes, videos and voluptuous backpackers
(04/15/98)

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__ABSINTHE MAKES THE HEART GROW .|. PAGE 2 OF 2

I pause before imbibing. Everything about absinthe, after all, is sinister. It proved the undoing of so many artists and writers that the best book on the subject -- Barnaby Conrad III's excellent 1995 work, "Absinthe: History in a Bottle" -- eventually starts to read like an obituary page. It's distilled from the grayish-green leaves of a shrub called wormwood -- in Russia, the plant is ominously called chernobyl -- and in large doses, its active ingredient, thujone, is a convulsive poison. Even absinthe's Greek name, apsinthion, means "undrinkable." However, it was also one of the most popular aperitifs in fin-de-siècle France, the subject of a painting by Manet, a sculpture by Picasso and innumerable anecdotes by Hemingway. A favorite among the women at Parisian bars such as the Nouvelle-Athènes and the Café du Rat Mort, absinthe even made it to the New World, where Mark Twain and Walt Whitman drank it in New Orleans' Old Absinthe House. But the dead-eyed regard of actress Ellen Andrée, the barfly in Degas' 1876 painting "L'Absinthe," had always haunted me, and the more I look, the more the small groups huddled conspiratorially around the other tables at the Marsella resemble the doomed characters out of Emile Zola's "L'Assomoir." I imagine myself embarking on a long slide into debauchery, followed by months of hydrotherapy -- a belle époque cure for alcoholics, which consisted of purges and a half-hourly soaking with cold water -- in some Gothic asylum.
Suppressing a sensation of vertigo, I drink. And then I smile. Not at all bad -- reminiscent of pastis, the licorice-flavored French aperitif, but with a slightly bitter undertone. Loosening up, I start trading anecdotes with my drinking companions about our worst debauches. The Belgian wins hands down -- naturally -- with his sad saga of three bottles of red wine, abrupt eviction from the restaurant where he'd consumed them and his subsequent awakening to a curious sound: the slick hiss of car tires whipping past his ear in the gutter he'd chosen for his bed. Mary looks at the rapidly dwindling level of my glass and says with some concern: "You might want to slow down. This is brain damage stuff." I, however, am eager to test Wilde's description of absinthe's effects: "After the first glass, you see things as you wish they were. After the second glass, you see things as they are not. Finally you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world."
In fact, as I finish my glass, the Bar Marsella is suddenly looking like the most wonderful place on God's earth. When I walked in, I had been pretty sure that I was surrounded by nothing more than particularly hip backpackers, but suddenly the people at the next table begin to look strangely fascinating. They must be artists, I think to myself. And, as I work on another glass, the second phase of Wilde's dictum begins to kick in: I start to see things as they aren't. Isn't that woman -- the one with her arm around the red-headed guy with the goatee -- staring at me through her half-lidded eyes?
My eyes, too, are playing tricks on me: When I focus on an ashtray or a beer spigot, the center of my field of vision becomes unusually clear, but the periphery looks watery, indistinct. Objects seem to be surrounded by yellowish haloes, as in a Van Gogh painting (the Dutch artist was on an absinthe bender for much of his career, including the binge in which he ran at Paul Gauguin with a razor and then cut off the tip of his own ear). The overall effect is of wearing a pair of ill-fitting goggles in the bottom of a filthy -- but surprisingly comfortable -- aquarium.
Just as I'm beginning to think this bar would be a great place to live -- like, for the next few decades -- the owner starts to lower the metal curtains. In spite of this clear intimation of closing time, a couple of local roustabouts slip in and start insistently ordering wine. The bartender's repeated yelling of "Tancat!" seems to have no effect, and I consider getting up and helping to explain to these uncouth gentlemen that our host is employing the Catalan word for "closed." However, remembering my Canadian friends' warning about absinthe's tendency to lead to fistfights -- and noticing that the woman at the next table has somehow vaporized -- I instead suggest to Mary and Henri that we take our custom elsewhere.
Henri begs off, the combined effects of hard liquor and two days of driving with the French having taken their toll, but Mary and I continue our crawl through the Barrio Chino. Most of the rest of the madrugada (not surprisingly, the Spanish have a single word for the early hours of the morning) is a blur. We wander past the Franco-era prostitutes of Carrer d'en Robador, anarchist cafes and the inevitable piles of street-corner refuse giving off fascinating, unidentifiable odors. We stop at a nightclub called El Cangrejo, where a transvestite of the stature of the late Divine is performing beneath a sheep dog-sized wig. We poke our heads into the Bar Pastís, a temple of francophilia where the jukebox has been playing Edith Piaf since the '40s; the London Bar, where people come to worship swinging England; and finally the Bar Kentucky, which is what an American tavern might look like if Antonio Gaudí was hired as a decorator. A barman who calls himself Pinocchio -- he explains his sobriquet with a gesture to his bent nose -- serves us our last absinthes of the night, and Mary and I ferry our drinks to the end of the mobile home-length bar.
As taxi drivers and prostitutes squeeze past us, we clink glasses, toasting what's left of Barcelona's rapidly gentrifying Barrio Chino. On this night, I won't make it to Wilde's ultimate phase of absinthism (it would take at least five more glasses), the one in which one's surroundings reveal themselves in all their horror. In the Kentucky, on the contrary, the seediness continues to look glamorous. I remember all those who had succumbed to the allure of the Green Fairy: among them, Toulouse-Lautrec, who carried absinthe around Montmartre cabarets in a hollow cane, and Alfred Jarry, the playwright who dyed his face and hands green, toted pistols on his absinthe binges and died at the age of 34. With the opaline, nerve-damaging muse in hand, I drink to squandered talent and beautiful corpses. But I'm really drinking to danger -- and to the grateful realization that, in this world in which people are increasingly protected from themselves, there are still places left where we are free to choose our own poison.
SALON | April 22, 1998
Taras Grescoe has written for numerous publications, including Wired, Islands, Saveur, the Independent and the Times of London. He lives in Montreal.


T A B L E_T A L K What are the must-see sights in Great Britain? Discuss your favorites in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y Seduced and sated in Costa Rica By J. Kingston Pierce From morphos and macaws to coatimundi and poison-arrow frogs, this tiny Central American country offers a mind-altering overabundance of wildlife (04/21/98) Running with the bulls By Andrew Taber Horny tradition: Dodging pissed-off bovines in southern France (04/20/98) Road Warrior By Brent Gregston Frankfurt: Where to eat, stay and play (04/17/98) Mondo Weirdo An unforgettable introduction to Beijing (04/16/98) On Guatemala's Gringo Circuit By Doug Fine Volcanoes, videos and voluptuous backpackers (04/15/98) Your virtual travel agency - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Browse the Feature archives		__ABSINTHE MAKES THE HEART GROW .\|. PAGE 2 OF 2 I pause before imbibing. Everything about absinthe, after all, is sinister. It proved the undoing of so many artists and writers that the best book on the subject -- Barnaby Conrad III's excellent 1995 work, "Absinthe: History in a Bottle" -- eventually starts to read like an obituary page. It's distilled from the grayish-green leaves of a shrub called wormwood -- in Russia, the plant is ominously called chernobyl -- and in large doses, its active ingredient, thujone, is a convulsive poison. Even absinthe's Greek name, apsinthion, means "undrinkable." However, it was also one of the most popular aperitifs in fin-de-siècle France, the subject of a painting by Manet, a sculpture by Picasso and innumerable anecdotes by Hemingway. A favorite among the women at Parisian bars such as the Nouvelle-Athènes and the Café du Rat Mort, absinthe even made it to the New World, where Mark Twain and Walt Whitman drank it in New Orleans' Old Absinthe House. But the dead-eyed regard of actress Ellen Andrée, the barfly in Degas' 1876 painting "L'Absinthe," had always haunted me, and the more I look, the more the small groups huddled conspiratorially around the other tables at the Marsella resemble the doomed characters out of Emile Zola's "L'Assomoir." I imagine myself embarking on a long slide into debauchery, followed by months of hydrotherapy -- a belle époque cure for alcoholics, which consisted of purges and a half-hourly soaking with cold water -- in some Gothic asylum. Suppressing a sensation of vertigo, I drink. And then I smile. Not at all bad -- reminiscent of pastis, the licorice-flavored French aperitif, but with a slightly bitter undertone. Loosening up, I start trading anecdotes with my drinking companions about our worst debauches. The Belgian wins hands down -- naturally -- with his sad saga of three bottles of red wine, abrupt eviction from the restaurant where he'd consumed them and his subsequent awakening to a curious sound: the slick hiss of car tires whipping past his ear in the gutter he'd chosen for his bed. Mary looks at the rapidly dwindling level of my glass and says with some concern: "You might want to slow down. This is brain damage stuff." I, however, am eager to test Wilde's description of absinthe's effects: "After the first glass, you see things as you wish they were. After the second glass, you see things as they are not. Finally you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world." In fact, as I finish my glass, the Bar Marsella is suddenly looking like the most wonderful place on God's earth. When I walked in, I had been pretty sure that I was surrounded by nothing more than particularly hip backpackers, but suddenly the people at the next table begin to look strangely fascinating. They must be artists, I think to myself. And, as I work on another glass, the second phase of Wilde's dictum begins to kick in: I start to see things as they aren't. Isn't that woman -- the one with her arm around the red-headed guy with the goatee -- staring at me through her half-lidded eyes? My eyes, too, are playing tricks on me: When I focus on an ashtray or a beer spigot, the center of my field of vision becomes unusually clear, but the periphery looks watery, indistinct. Objects seem to be surrounded by yellowish haloes, as in a Van Gogh painting (the Dutch artist was on an absinthe bender for much of his career, including the binge in which he ran at Paul Gauguin with a razor and then cut off the tip of his own ear). The overall effect is of wearing a pair of ill-fitting goggles in the bottom of a filthy -- but surprisingly comfortable -- aquarium. Just as I'm beginning to think this bar would be a great place to live -- like, for the next few decades -- the owner starts to lower the metal curtains. In spite of this clear intimation of closing time, a couple of local roustabouts slip in and start insistently ordering wine. The bartender's repeated yelling of "Tancat!" seems to have no effect, and I consider getting up and helping to explain to these uncouth gentlemen that our host is employing the Catalan word for "closed." However, remembering my Canadian friends' warning about absinthe's tendency to lead to fistfights -- and noticing that the woman at the next table has somehow vaporized -- I instead suggest to Mary and Henri that we take our custom elsewhere. Henri begs off, the combined effects of hard liquor and two days of driving with the French having taken their toll, but Mary and I continue our crawl through the Barrio Chino. Most of the rest of the madrugada (not surprisingly, the Spanish have a single word for the early hours of the morning) is a blur. We wander past the Franco-era prostitutes of Carrer d'en Robador, anarchist cafes and the inevitable piles of street-corner refuse giving off fascinating, unidentifiable odors. We stop at a nightclub called El Cangrejo, where a transvestite of the stature of the late Divine is performing beneath a sheep dog-sized wig. We poke our heads into the Bar Pastís, a temple of francophilia where the jukebox has been playing Edith Piaf since the '40s; the London Bar, where people come to worship swinging England; and finally the Bar Kentucky, which is what an American tavern might look like if Antonio Gaudí was hired as a decorator. A barman who calls himself Pinocchio -- he explains his sobriquet with a gesture to his bent nose -- serves us our last absinthes of the night, and Mary and I ferry our drinks to the end of the mobile home-length bar. As taxi drivers and prostitutes squeeze past us, we clink glasses, toasting what's left of Barcelona's rapidly gentrifying Barrio Chino. On this night, I won't make it to Wilde's ultimate phase of absinthism (it would take at least five more glasses), the one in which one's surroundings reveal themselves in all their horror. In the Kentucky, on the contrary, the seediness continues to look glamorous. I remember all those who had succumbed to the allure of the Green Fairy: among them, Toulouse-Lautrec, who carried absinthe around Montmartre cabarets in a hollow cane, and Alfred Jarry, the playwright who dyed his face and hands green, toted pistols on his absinthe binges and died at the age of 34. With the opaline, nerve-damaging muse in hand, I drink to squandered talent and beautiful corpses. But I'm really drinking to danger -- and to the grateful realization that, in this world in which people are increasingly protected from themselves, there are still places left where we are free to choose our own poison. SALON \| April 22, 1998 Taras Grescoe has written for numerous publications, including Wired, Islands, Saveur, the Independent and the Times of London. He lives in Montreal.