Elixirs
Danielle Truscott
1.What’s Your Poison?
I first encountered “booze” the summer of 1972, when I was six, and my best friend Jess and I got busy enacting our plan to do in Ms. Blanken — the sourpuss, spiteful recess supervisor at our town summer camp — with a poisoned apple.
We’d recently seen Disney’s Snow White. Death by poison apple was a means fresh in our minds. In school, we were good students, give-the-teacher-an-apple-at-the-end-of-the-year types. Our cover was tight as a drum.
We aimed to poison the apple with one of our “magic” potions: messes whipped up in cavernous ceramic bowls in the Redmond’s kitchen, encouraged by Jess’s Montessori-leaning mother. We had free reign on fridge and most cupboard contents, and specialized in small batches of seldom delicious, largely revolting concoctions. Only two locations held verboten ingredients: Under the Sink and The Living Room Cabinet. Under the Sink was absolute no-fly territory. Mrs. Redmond’s dire admonitions left us fear-stricken: even opening the door implied that some cleaning fluid’s plastic container might suck you in, disintegrate you with deadly chemicals, never to be seen or heard from again.
I sensed something more negotiable about The Living Room Cabinet, an infinitesimal tonal shift in Mrs. Redmond’s warning. Also, I’d recently, typically, secretly leafed through the book of dirty limericks on Dad’s bottom bookshelf at home and unearthed the following: There was a young man named Hughes/Who swore off all kinds of booze. He said, “When I’m muddled/My senses get fuddled/And I pass up too many screws.” The word booze took my fancy. I liked the sound of it. Booze: the word oozed bewitchingly.
Booze was also, clearly, subterranean, nocturnal. Other limericks in that section included curses: dammit, ass, hell, fucks; a word, vagina, that I vaguely understood was the science name for what Mum referred to when she said, “Wipe your tee-dee properly after you’ve been to the loo.” Booze seemed illicit, likely dangerous. Otherwise, why was it connected to so much other taboo language?
As we mixed and chanted in the Redmond’s kitchen to whack Ms. Blanken, inside me the word “booze” made some Joycean sprint to the fact of The Living Room Cabinet in its nearby room. I flashed on a family party somewhere, we kids abruptly ushered out of the “coats” bedroom — a pervasive, sweet-and-sour, antiseptic smell; a man spread atop the pile, limbs and head akimbo as if he’d fallen from a great height, slack-faced, a collapse — the parents tittering darkly. Surely, if booze could take down a grown man in broad daylight, it could poison our apple.
Ensuring her parents were off somewhere upstairs in the house, Jess and I dared. We knelt before the Living Room Cabinet and opened its doors.
It was a wonderland in there. Its smell was old wood, moldery, raw, and sweet. Every size and shape of bottle lived inside: short and voluptuous, columnal and tall, with elongated golden caps and waxy red, flat-topped corks. Some dangled silken tassels. Labels’ calligraphies and characters hinted at mystery. Each bottle held liquid: from bronze to silvery to clear, sunset orange to pomegranate red — one, dazzling emerald green. They reminded me of figurines I’d seen at a yard sale: icons, saints, virgins, bishops, totems, monks. A sunbeam, floating twinkly dust motes, soared through the windows. Kneeling there, I felt we’d come upon a kind of tiny cathedral.
Jess lost our one-two-three-shootout and scampered back to the kitchen for the bowl. I stayed put. I unscrewed the bottle’s cap with the green liquid inside: “Crème de Menthe.” I dipped my finger, put some on my tongue. Strange and delicious. I screwed the top back on. It left no telltale stain on my fingertip like the food colorings we used sometimes, and this spurred me on. I unscrewed a second. Amber, viscous. Dipped. Tasted. This one was awful. Jess returned with the bowl, solemnly holding it out as her eyes urged me to get a move on, and I upended the bottle, poured in slugs of the rank stuff. I closed the cabinet doors and we finished up our wicked work in the kitchen: atop the now booze-infused mix of raisins, Worcestershire sauce, and corn starch, in plopped Clamato juice, gross old Stroganoff bits.
In the end, we abandoned our murderous plan. It wasn’t mercy or self-recrimination that made us nix it. After halving and scooping the apple, and spooning in the boozy poison potion, we saw that the apple, scotch-taped back together, wasn’t fooling anyone. We’d get caught, grounded from actual summer fun.
And so, Ms. Blanken lived to torment us for a few more muggy Connecticut summer weeks.
But I — I had had my own first nip of an elixir that I could tell was magic of a kind.
2. Busen
Fifty years on, I’m happy to divulge, I’ve never again contemplated offing anyone.
My loose intuitions formed around that early exploration were apt. Booze is both a magic elixir and a poison.
Alcohol’s real poisonous side is categorical, and I’ve seen it up close. A family member nearly died from it; acquaintances have died from it. Friends and loved ones for whom it is only, ultimately, a poison, combat it “one day at a time.”
The word “booze,” originally bouse in medieval English, derives from the Dutch busen: to drink to excess. And I’ve certainly busened. I’ve flirted with booze as poison. Nighttime, in a baseball dugout circa 1980, I guzzled rum-and-cream soda in that near-universal teenage drinking trial that prompts appallingly ill-suited mixtures, results in lifelong — or at best long-lived — shudders at even mention of the alcoholic ingredient. Through my share of 80s high school keggers, and college and summer bashes rife with Tequila Sunrise and Sex on the Beach cocktails, I swayed, blurted, made questionable behavioral calls, and became an intimate with the hangover and its colleague, the greasy protein brunch. My young working life boasted its share of after-work and weekend nights, sometimes into mornings, knocking back craft beers, G and Ts, margaritas, or whatever the hour and social setting offered up. As sophistication set in, the late-night New York City “Fellini dinner” replaced these. A worldly set of bon vivant friends swept the afore-mentioned aside with bottles of Chateaux Margaux and its ilk. We drank them with water — but like water, too.
Contrary to what my early lure to booze might peg, the alcoholic gene that swings through the makeups of both my family lines graciously gave me a pass.
But I’ve done what people who busen do. I danced on tabletops. Cackling with girlfriends, I peed in alleys. I puked in a bar bathroom or two; once, somehow, in a coat pocket. I conked out fully clothed in bed to wake bilious and vile. Some lovers’ spats went ways they wouldn’t otherwise have — and it wasn’t on the high road.
3. “Grow beautifully drunk.”
The Living Room Cabinet as cathedral was, however, prescient, for me.
Booze’s epic history links us to religious and spiritual ceremony, communion, community — epiphany, even. I’m not one for the religious tie-ups: Christianity’s red wine/blood of Christ holiness; Kosher wine blessed at Judaism’s Shabbat, and Passover’s ceremonial cup left for Elijah; Eastern Orthodox-blessed vodka or brandy for dead loved one’s graves.
I like the Lower Sonoran Desert’s Papago Indians’ booze-magic take. As their myth goes, the “Elder Brother” deity of this agriculturalist tribe decided to remedy their sparse-rainfall conundrum. He placed drops of his sweat on the ground; therefrom, a saguaro cactus sprouted. E.B. mixed its fruit with water and made wine, to “refresh the thirsty soil.” It rained. From then on, the Papago annually imbibed saguaro wine ceremonially, invoking rain. Anthropologist Ruth Underhill in the 1930s noted, “The young dandies reddened the soles of their feet so that when they fell over, drunk, the beautiful color would show.” The sole reddening reminds me of tucking a red lipstick in my jeans pocket before going out for a night on the town, securing a hairstyle that would stay intact as the night wore on. I’m fairly sure some long-departed Papago youth whispered in my ear his tribe’s mystical saguaro ceremony incantation — “Drink friend. Grow beautifully drunk.”— which I, like he and his long-ago co-carousers, took spiritually, and literally, too.
4. Spell
For some time I’ve enjoyed booze’s quiet, transformative magic. Nowadays I have a glass of something, maybe two, with a friend.
Perhaps it was that young initiation, The Living Room Cabinet’s vessels conjuring otherworldliness with their liquids of stained-glass-window hue, but my favorite drinks date is always for aperitifs, those jewel-brilliant liqueurs. A coral Negroni; a ruby-red Campari; a moon-flaxen Lillet; a Kir Royale, magenta with its champagne’s dash of Crème de Cassis; an Aperol, flame-and-tangerine bold.
There is a shamanic charm in a certain sharing of drinks. Twilight, perhaps; intimate company; secrets decanted; murmured laughter. Expressions lit in chat toward some deeper, more expansive understanding, some closer connection conjured, abracadabra, that very, very particular spell.
Works Cited
G. Legman, The Limerick, Portland House/Random House, 1969
Craig MacAndrew and Robert B. Edgerton, Drunken Comportment, A Social Explanation, Percheron Press, 2003
Danielle Truscott
Danielle, a former poet, journalist, newspaper and book editor, and librarian in Guatemala, currently divides her time between New York City and upstate New York. She is the author of a forthcoming memoir.
