From The Boys' and Girls' Little Book of Alcohol, an eBook available for kindle, nook, and iBooks; if you like what you read here, buy the friggin' book! It's less than a cab ride for three blocks!
Chapter 8
Wormwood: We
Need It Like We Need Holes in Our Heads
But perhaps we do
need holes in our heads. If the human need for alcoholic intoxication, pot
highs, coke flights, pain killer mini-vacations, and heroin escapes are any
indication, we need to carve out those chunks of our brains that make us
unhappy—metaphorically at least. I mean, nobody—least of all me—is advocating
driving nails into our craniums. (Leave lobotomies to the experts—that’s my
motto.) But I believe we should have the right to eliminate those portions of
our brains that keep us in emotional squalor, send us into inexplicable crying
jags, ruin our days and nights with pointless encounters with drab reality
(feh!), and keep us miserable when we could be floating on a cloud of bliss,
however temporary. Reality is overrated. Way.
Absinthe
provides the perfect solution. It’s an herbal concoction—and nobody objects to herbs
these days, judging by what they put in shampoos and organic deodorants—that the
makers then improve greatly by storing it in wormwood. Spoilsports of the past,
the usual array of fun-busters like temperance leagues and concerned scientists
for the welfare of humans and similar groups of misguided meddlers succeeded in
outlawing absinthe in the United States, forcing only the most renegade travelers
to risk arrest and prosecution by buying it in what used to be known as
Czechoslovakia and stuffing it in particularly stinky underwear and bringing in
clandestinely through customs.
In
2007 absinthe was finally made legal again to import into the United States,
and those of us who had waited for so long to sample the notorious
brain-ruining substance were at last free to do so. Some of us wasted no time
wasting our brain cells.
Absinthe
can be used in cocktails such as the Sazerac, as in the accompanying story
chapter, but it also has its own druggy ritual to give it that extra dose of
either attraction or mortification, depending on your attraction or opposition
to drugs—I’m specifically thinking of crack and heroin here, folks, so this
does require taking a potentially very
unpopular stand; none of that wishy-washy “grass is okay” bullshit here.
There
are two main methods for turning absinthe into a druggy ritual. In the old
fashioned method, known as la méthode française, a slotted
spoon is placed on a glass in which a certain amount of absinthe has been
poured, and a sugar cube is placed on the slotted spoon. You then drip ice
water over the sugar cube until the glass contains approximately 1 part absinthe
to 3 to 5 parts water. The absinthe clouds as the water mixes with it, just
like the greatest drug ever invented, the
now-impossible-to-procure-under-any-circumstances paregoric. (Note: If anyone
has a source for paregoric, no matter how extra-legal, please find me on the
internet and contact me at once!) It’s fussy and fun and you get to play with
your drink—you and your absinthe-drinking pals sit hunched over your drinks as
though you’re preparing crack balls or highballs or jimcracks or whatever
they’re called—all of which lend a highly disreputable quality to the
proceedings.
But
a newer, even more faux-dangerous ritual has developed among absinthe
connoisseurs. La méthode de bohème does la méthode française one better by involving fire. Now we’re really talking crackballs! Theoretically,
if you’re not careful, it could blow up in your face; this adds a truly
frightening element to the ritual—shades of Richard Pryor. We begin with the
same slotted spoon bit, but this time the sugar cube is soaked in Absinthe and
set on fire. Before the fire burns out the spoon is flipped over and hopefully
the whole glass of Absinthe goes up in flames. You then dump in a bit of water
to cloud the drink and extinguish the fire. Unfortunately, as dramatic as this
method may be, most of the alcohol is burned away, so I say phooey.
For my money, the best way to enjoy
boring a hole in your head with wormwood-based Absinthe is to drink it
straight. It’s such a pretty color (the gay take on the subject), and if you
get a little morose as one is prone to do having had too much Absinthe, just
remember the immortal words of Scarlett O’Hara: tomorrow is another drink.
