Two Things Nobody Knows about Me
(Except for intelligence agencies, perhaps)
Just so you know, this little exposé wasn’t my idea. Hannah, Pete and San made me do it. I know I’m supposed to list ten obscure factoids, but I took a breather after these two alcohol-themed confessionals, figuring nobody would want to wade through 5000 words of this stuff.
I Was once a Perp
There I was in a Swiss clinker, nabbed after pinching a bottle of whiskey from a supermarket. It wasn’t even top-quality scotch, but to maintain possession of it I led the two plainclothes detectives who followed me from the store in a dramatic foot chase with the bottle jiggling inside my raincoat. They won.
The year was 1997 and I was a superannuated grad student at the University of Zürich. Being a resident alien old enough to have known better, I was foolish to have tried such a stunt, but my unslaked thirst and meager pocketbook overcame that inhibition. So I was interrogated, booked, and led to a cell in the station house to await my fate, hoping that the cops wouldn’t inquire at my university department. Even though I was in good repute there, I feared unending embarrassment should gossip erupt among my colleagues. Even the Swiss have been known to snicker.
My cell was spartan but vermin- and graffiti-free (it was neatnik Switzerland, after all). Contrite, I sat on my bunk fretting over how I would endure my prosecution. After nervously stewing for three hours, I was released with an affordable fine (plus damages for the store I had robbed) and a stern warning not to repeat my offense, but without charge. There were no other legal repercussions that I could discern, but I am sure the incident is still sitting in one or more Swiss dossiers, if not in my FBI file.
I Was a Teenage Moonshiner
By our junior year in our small high school in a Connecticut suburb, most of my male friends were into beer, a taste I had yet to acquire and still fails to thrill me. But if brewskies were unavailable, they would gladly accept vodka. If that was scarce, any sort of cheap wine or nips of Southern Comfort would do. A classmate named Max was the go-to guy for booze and fake IDs. I got one from him that aliased me as an 18-year-old student at a fictional college, too young for me buy in Connecticut. So, I relied on Max (who seemed to have an in at one particular package store) to procure for us.
The budding chemist in me decided to make brandy. All it should take is some cheap wine and a still. A samizdat library book described how such devices were constructed. I already had flasks and vinyl tubing in my home chem lab, and tracked down some of copper that I corkscrewed into a rough helix that I soldered into a galvanized water bucket left over from when we kept chickens. Our old chicken coop served as my moonshine lab, where I distilled a jug of cheap port that Max had procured over a flaming can of Sterno.
What dribbled out from my apparatus was a clear volatile liquid that packed quite a punch. Too impatient to age the liquor for months on end, I bottled up a pint of what was probably 90% grape alcohol and called it Instant Vodka — just add water. My pal John and I mixed it with OJ and consumed it one night at our local drive-in movie theater. As the designated driver, I stopped when I felt a buzz coming on, but John couldn’t get enough, and on the way home he sweetly slurred that I should pull over let him puke. It wasn’t, I was convinced, the quality of the beverage, but the quantity that did him in.
Several weeks hence, at the dinner table, my father remarked, “That’s an interesting setup I came across in the chicken coop. Want to tell me about it?” I ignominiously fessed up (omitting the drive-in caper) hoping I wouldn’t be harshly disciplined. He wanted to know what I had done with my hooch. When I told him my friends had consumed it he expressed regret, saying he would have liked to try some. Cheekily, I offered to brew up a batch for him. He declined, instructing me to leave moon-shining to the professionals. I complied, relieved that this was all I had to pay for violating liquor laws.
The following year, I was off to college in New York City, where the legal drinking age was then 18. Weekends, my buddies and I would belly up to the bar in some local dive. As we were poor, we mostly consumed beer, a beverage I still didn’t particularly like any better then than when it was illicit. I didn’t start drinking in earnest until the pressures of adulthood drove me to it a decade later, and then — as you may have guessed — it was whiskey.
Cheers!
