Either the cocktail recipe book I have is a marvel of misdirection, or most mixed drinks are nasty.
I used to wonder if I might be able to make it as a bartender, though I am not male, jocular, nor do I know any clever tricks involving swirling colorful squirts of spirituous liquors into small expensive combinations. I can flip a mean towel over my shoulder, though, and bellow, “what’ll ya have?” with the best of them.
There was a bartending school on the back side of the second floor of a building one block from my old digs in Arlington; the front, ground floor was occupied by a framing shop and a Papa John’s Pizza delivery hub, and there was a discreet wrought-iron staircase at the back for the booze-mixing students. I glimpsed a class once, the backs of the future barspiders to the window, some scribbling in notebooks as their instructor poured, stirred and shook.
I knew I didn’t have the looks or the leg-muscles for barkeeping, though—standing up for hours and hours, chatting up complete strangers and shepherding them from sobriety into garrulous inebriation—nor the stomach to put up with the loosening inhibitions. But I did want to find out more about drinks, how they were made, of what curious ingredients they were constructed, what went into piquantly-named beverages like the Whiskey Sour and the urbane Metropolitan. I do like margaritas, and there’s one sky-blue concoction I had once when out with some fellow graduate students years ago that I’ve always wanted to reproduce.
But though I may have champagne taste, my pocketbook these days runs more to affording soda water (forget even rotgut beer brews like PBR), and so how was I to go about experimenting mixology at home? Estate sales. Just as estate sales agents price everything from bedroom slippers to bathmats, Old Master paintings to Tinker Toys, they also occasionally sell booze, or the dregs of it. Over the last five months or so, for less than $30 total, I’ve acquired a liquor cabinet that makes me look like I’ve pickled my brain for years—five kinds of whiskey, several rums, Cointreau, Kahlua, some odder liqueurs, all the bottles partially empty. The recipe book I found in a stack of random publications that was being given away.
And so, occasionally, when I’m feeling restless, as last night, I try out different combinations. And they are almost all disgusting. Many taste medicinal, others don’t even ascend to that level of palatability. The kitchen sink drainpipe gets cleaner after such experiments. I don’t feel guilty about simply dumping such undrinkable swill, since it cost me so little. I have also found that whiskey—even the high-end brands--is pretty vile, however you try to disguise it. Kahlua is too sweet to my taste, and crème de menthe is a frightening molasses-slow sludge of deep, evil green. Rum is decent (maybe I’m a pirate at heart), but only in small, slowly-sipped quantities, and gomme syrup is sugar-saturated water that tends to start crystalizing around the edges of its container almost immediately.
I still haven’t found the perfect margarita recipe, which is just as well, because unlike all the aforementioned nixed mixes, I know I like them, and that would be bad for my brain, my bank balance, and my bum (it would expand, and I would sit on it even more than I already do).
It's bucketting down today--the street outside is glittering like a lake in the lights from the parking garage opposite the Bethesda Gallery. Business has been correspondingly slow. We have weepy Alison Krause on the CD player, and I'm sorting through a year's worth of ragged "want" cards from customers with variously legible handwriting. It's the sort of atmosphere that lends itself to critical introspection.
Why is it, when I am trying to galvanize someone I've known for years out of what I consider to be emotional lethargy, I come across like a whining shrew harpy rather than as robust and serious, a solemn force to be reckoned with? [BTW, shrew harpies are like the toy dogs of the harpy family—genuine, grown-up harpies can take the flesh off a man’s bones in a matter of seconds. Shrew harpies are yappy and frequently stepped on.] As anyone who’s been around me for any length of time can tell, I don’t do “cutting” very well (except maybe inadvertently) and here I was attempting to convey in a brutal manner that a (former?) male friend obviously didn’t care a whit about me, as he hadn’t telephoned or called or even emailed but a couple of times in the past year—and in my gut I imagined that maybe if I hurt his feelings, he’d realize what a schmuck he’d been, and (by some irrational logic) also what a catch I was, and actually get around to resuming our previous regular chitchat, walks, meals, etc. So, at the end of our last, brief, telephone exchange I blurted, “I guess we’ll talk soon. Or maybe we won’t, since you are lousy about keeping in touch.” Which is true, but not a statement designed to make a middle-aged man’s heart go pitter-pat. And I certainly sounded like a squeak pig. And so my attempt at force majeure was flat, laughable, and entirely unproductive. I loathe that too-glib phrase “he’s just not that into you,” but it’s applicable in this case. At least I wasn’t emotionally abused or in any other way led down the garden path by the guy in question, so some progress is being made in terms of the quality of my fraught romantic relationships. But I do hate to see such beautiful calf muscles disappear into the sunset; the guy has gorgeous gams. A girl, even a strong-jawed, unglam sort like yours truly, needs exercise-enhanced male pulchritude in the vicinity to keep her spirits up. Maybe I'll slog through the rain to the gym this evening.
