The first time I drank gin 
I thought it must be hair tonic. 
My brother swiped the bottle 
from a guy whose father owned 
a drug store that sold booze 
in those ancient, honorable days 
when we acknowledged the stuff 
was a drug. Three of us passed 
the bottle around, each tasting 
with disbelief. People paid 
for this? People had to have 
it, the way we had to have 
the women we never got near. 
(Actually they were girls, but 
never mind, the important fact 
was their impenetrability. ) 
Leo, the third foolish partner, 
suggested my brother should have 
swiped Canadian whiskey or brandy, 
but Eddie defended his choice 
on the grounds of the expressions 
“gin house” and “gin lane,” both 
of which indicated the preeminence 
of gin in the world of drinking, 
a world we were entering without 
understanding how difficult 
exit might be. Maybe the bliss 
that came with drinking came 
only after a certain period 
of apprenticeship. Eddie likened 
it to the holy man’s self-flagellation 
to experience the fullness of faith. 
(He was very well read for a kid 
of fourteen in the public schools. ) 
So we dug in and passed the bottle 
around a second time and then a third, 
in the silence each of us expecting 
some transformation. “You get used 
to it,” Leo said. “You don’t 
like it but you get used to it.” 
I know now that brain cells 
were dying for no earthly purpose, 
that three boys were becoming 
increasingly despiritualized 
even as they took into themselves 
these spirits, but I thought then 
I was at last sharing the world 
with the movie stars, that before 
long I would be shaving because 
I needed to, that hair would 
sprout across the flat prairie 
of my chest and plunge even 
to my groin, that first girls 
and then women would be drawn 
to my qualities. Amazingly, later 
some of this took place, but 
first the bottle had to be 
emptied, and then the three boys 
had to empty themselves of all 
they had so painfully taken in 
and by means even more painful 
as they bowed by turns over 
the eye of the toilet bowl 
to discharge their shame. Ahead 
lay cigarettes, the futility 
of guaranteed programs of 
exercise, the elaborate lies 
of conquest no one believed, 
forms of sexual torture and 
rejection undreamed of. Ahead 
lay our fifteenth birthdays, 
acne, deodorants, crabs, salves, 
butch haircuts, draft registration, 
the military and political victories 
of Dwight Eisenhower, who brought us 
Richard Nixon with wife and dog. 
Any wonder we tried gin.

Baking With Booze: Maker’s Mark gingerbread cookies with Bourbon cinnamon glaze

paulftompkins:

Hey, you know what? I say, Go for it. Name your cocktails some crazy-ass thing. Make people say the full name every time. I endorse. (Taken with Instagram)

slaughterhouse90210:

“I wanted to try this new drink. That’s all we do, isn’t it: look at things and try new drinks?”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Complete Short Stories