by Mark Bailey
MOJITO
Hemingway is associated with any number of cocktails, but perhaps none more so than the Mojito. The drink was invented at La Bodeguita del Medio in Havana, Cuba, where Hemingway drank them. So did Brigitte Bardot, Nat King Cole, Jimmy Durante, Erroll Flynn, and countless others.
6 fresh mint sprigs
1 oz. lime juice
¾ oz. simple syrup
2 oz. light rum
Lime wedge
Crush 5 mint sprigs into the bottom of a chilled highball glass. Pour in lime juice, simple syrup, and rum. Fill glass with crushed ice. Garnish with lime wedge and remaining mint sprig. Sometimes a splash of club soda is added.
From “The Three-Day Blow,” 1925
“I’M A LITTLE DRUNK NOW,” Nick said.
“You aren’t drunk,” Bill said. . . . Bill poured the glass half full of whiskey.
“Put in your own water,” he said. “There’s just one more shot.”
“Got any more?” Nick asked.
“There’s plenty more, but Dad only likes me to drink what’s open.”
“Sure,” said Nick.
“He says opening bottles is what makes drunkards,” Bill explained.
“That’s right,” said Nick. He was impressed. He had never thought of that before. He always thought it was solitary drinking that made drunkards.
Chester Himes
“Lock up a white woman and a black man in an apartment in the United States with a bottle of whiskey, and what you’ll get is a violent, tragicomic story.”
Newly arrived in Paris and thirsty from his travels, Himes and his friend Richard Wright were en route to a cocktail party when they were interrupted by a call from James Baldwin. Apparently, Baldwin, who had been publicly criticizing Wright’s work, now wanted to borrow money from him. It would be a famous showdown. At Café Deux Magots, the two authors went at each other while Himes went at the bottle. After hours at the table, drunk and bored, Himes finally wobbled off. Much more interested in a piss and a pillow, he left the two greatest living African American writers to work it out on their own.
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1909–1984. Novelist. Considered on a par with Hammett and Chandler, Himes’s black detective series featuring Gravedigger Jones and Coffin Ed strongly influenced American crime writing. Largely unrecognized by American readers, he became a permanent expatriate based in Paris. Cotton Comes to Harlem is his most famous work.
TOM COLLINS
It may be strange for a southern writer in Paris to be drinking gin, but then Himes liked a Tom Collins. Essentially a Gin Fizz, it is a cool drink whoever and wherever you are.
2 oz. gin
¾ oz. lemon juice
¾ oz. simple syrup
Top with club soda
Orange slice
Maraschino cherry
Pour gin, lemon juice, and simple syrup into a cocktail shaker filled with ice cubes. Shake briefly. Strain into a chilled Collins glass filled with ice cubes. Top with club soda and stir gently. Garnish with orange slice and cherry. Serve with two straws.
From A Rage in Harlem, 1965
“I’M GOIN’ TO HELP YOU FIND YOUR GAL, BRUZZ,” he whispered confidentially. “After all, you is my twin brother.”
He took a small bottle from his gown and handed it to Jackson. “Have a little taste.”
Jackson shook his head.
“Go ahead and take a taste,” Goldy urged irritably. “If the dead ain’t already got your soul after all you done last night, you is saved. Take a good taste. We’re going out and look for that stud and your gal, and you is goin’ to need all the courage you can get.”
James Jones
“It is a far, far better thing than we have ever done to be disciples of Bacchus rather than of Christ.”
In Paris, Jones, James Baldwin, and William Styron would gather at Jones’s house and drink well into the night. On one particular evening, they decided to go out on the town. When the sun came up, Baldwin folded, but Jones and Styron kept drinking. Noon found the two writers in the Ritz Bar, still hard at it. By three o’clock, after almost twenty hours of drinking, they decided to return to Jones’s place. “We went into the house,” Styron recalled, “and the first thing I heard was a huge crash.” Apparently, Jones’s wife, Gloria, had hurled a large metal teapot at them—missing Jones’s head by only an inch.
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1921–1977. Novelist. Jones’s most famous works were inspired by his experiences in the Pacific during World War II. From Here to Eternity, which won the National Book Award, centers around the Pearl Harbor attack; Some Came Running concerns a veteran’s life after the war; and The Thin Red Line is about the Battle of Guadalcanal.
SINGAPORE SLING
During his tour of duty in the South Pacific, Jones undoubtedly felt worlds away from Singapore’s elegant Raffles Hotel, but that is where the Singapore Sling was invented. According to lore, barman Ngiam Tong Boon was asked by visiting luminaries to create a cocktail that celebrated the natural resources of the region. The original recipe, long lost, has been replaced by countless variations, ours included.
1½ oz. gin
¾ oz. Cointreau
1 oz. lemon juice
1½ oz. pineapple juice
Top with club soda
¼ oz. Benedictine
½ oz. cherry brandy
Orange slice
Maraschino cherry
Pour gin, Cointreau, lemon and pineapple juice into a cocktail shaker filled with ice cubes. Shake well. Strain into a Collins glass filled with ice cubes. Top with club soda. Drizzle in brandy, then pour Benedictine over the back of a bar spoon so as to float it on top. Garnish with orange slice and cherry. Serve with two straws.
From From Here to Eternity, 1957
“WHAT KIND OF DRINK DO YOU WANT, Sergeant?”
“I dont care,” he said. “Any drink’ll do.”
“You dont want a drink,” Karen Holmes said. “You dont really want a drink. What you really want is this,” she said, looking down at her own body and moving her hands out sideways like a sinner at the altar. “Thats what you really want. Isnt it? Thats what you all want. All all of you ever want.”
Warden felt a shiver of fear run down his spine. What the hell is this, Milton? “Yes,” he said, “Thats what I really want. But I’ll take a drink too,” he said.
Jack Kerouac
“Don’t drink to get drunk. Drink to enjoy life.”
Before going on the road, Kerouac went off to sea. A young man with a thirst for adventure, he signed up for the U.S. Navy. Waiting for the qualifying exam, Kerouac ended up in Boston on a bender. He inexplicably joined the Coast Guard and then was sworn in as a marine later that same day. Realizing he was technically a member of three branches of the armed services, Kerouac did the only sensible thing—drank more. He eventually passed out at a seamen’s bar and in the morning found himself on the SS Dorchester bound for Greenland. At some point in all of this he had called his parents and told them that he would be home “a little late.” He was now a merchant marine, carrying a small bag of clothes and books. Although the navy would later diagnose Kerouac a “Schizoid Personality” and discharge him, he continued to drink like a seaman for the rest of his life.
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1922–1969. Novelist and poet. Kerouac coined the term “Beat Generation” for a movement of kindred souls who wanted to break free of 1950s conventions. His best-known novel, On the Road, brought him instant fame, and his work went on to inspire a great many writers, including Bob Dylan, Hunter S. Thompson, and Ken Kesey.
MARGARITA
Kerouac had a great love for Mexico, for “the good old saloons of real Mexico where there were girls at a peso a dance and raw tequila.” Tequila, of course, being the country’s national beverage, made from the indigenous blue agave plant. “On the road!!” Kerouac wrote. “But on! Mexico calls me.” One sip of a Margarita and it will be calling you too.
1½ oz. silver tequila
1 oz. Cointreau
½ oz. lime juice
Coarse salt
Lime wedge
Rub the rim of a chilled cocktail glass with lime wedge and press into a plate of salt. Pour all ingredients into a cocktail shaker filled with ice cubes. Shake well. Strain into the cocktail glass. Garnish with lime wedge.
The Margarita can also be served on the rocks in an Old-Fashioned glass.
From On the Road, 1955
WHAT I NEEDED—WHAT TERRY NEEDED, TOO—was a drink, so we bought a quart of California port for thirty-five cents and went to the railroad yards to drink. We found a place where hobos had drawn up crates to sit over fires. We sat there and drank the wine. On our left were the freight cars, sad and sooty red beneath the moon; straight ahead the lights and airport pokers of Bakersfield proper; to our right a tremendous aluminum Quonset warehouse. Ah, it was a fine night, a warm night, a wine-drinking night, a moony night, and a night to hug your girl and talk and spit and be heavengoing.
Ring Lardner
“A person that said that drinking in the U.S. was still in its infancy would be just about hitting the nail on the hammer.”
A drinker’s drinker, Lardner was legendary for his stamina. As a young sportswriter in Chicago, he once arrived at the paper too loaded to write. To protect his job, a co-worker put him into a taxicab and sent him home. Imagine the surprise when Lardner showed up at the office only a few hours later. Having once again toured the bars of Chicago, he was drunk out of his mind and the taxicab’s meter had reached $130. Years later, at the Friar’s Club in New York, Lardner would set perhaps his personal record—he drank for sixty hours straight.
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1885–1933. Sports columnist, short-story writer, and playwright. Lardner’s epistolary columns about baseball became the collection You Know Me, Al. His first book of short stories, How to Write Short Stories (with Samples), brought him critical success. June Moon, a play written with George S. Kaufman, was his only Broadway hit.
MANHATTAN
A Manhattan is a Martini for whiskey drinkers, and Lardner certainly was one. The cocktail was first served at a party at the Manhattan Club in the 1874. Legend has it that Lady Randolph Churchill (Winston’s mother) took the first sip and lifted her glass, toasting, “To the Manhattan.”
2 oz. rye, bourbon or Canadian whiskey
1 oz. sweet vermouth
2 dashes of Angostura bitters
Maraschino cherry
Pour whiskey, vermouth, and bitters into a mixing glass filled with ice cubes. Stir well. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with cherry.
From “The Love Nest,” 1926
“IS THIS REALLY SUCH WONDERFUL BOURBON? I think I’ll just take a sip of it and see what it’s like. It can’t hurt me if it’s so good. Do you think so, Mr. Bartlett?”
“I don’t believe so.”
“Well then, I’m going to taste it and if it hurts me it’s your fault.”
Celia poured a whiskey glass two-thirds full and drained it at a gulp.
“It is good, isn’t it?” she said. “Of course I’m not much of a judge as I don’t care for whiskey and Lou won’t let me drink it. But he’s raved so about this Bourbon that I did want to see what it was like. You won’t tell on me, will you, Mr. Bartlett?”
“Not I!”
“I wonder how it would be in a high-ball. Let’s you and I have just one.”
Sinclair Lewis
“What’s the use of winning the Nobel Prize if it doesn’t even get you into speakeasies?”
In the late 1930s, a chance meeting took place between two of the literati’s most notorious nuisance drunks. This was in the bathroom of the “21” Club. At one urinal was Lewis, who was known for hurling insults and mimicry and, often, quite spontaneously passing out; at the other urinal, John O’Hara, known not for passing out but punching out. Apparently, Lewis had previously written some disparaging comments about O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra. Recognizing Lewis, O’Hara immediately launched into a tirade, but before it could come to blows, the Nobel Prize winner zipped up and scampered out the door.
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1885–1951. Novelist and playwright. Lewis wrote popular satires of middle-class American life. Main Street, his sixth novel, brought him recognition. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Arrowsmith, but refused the honor. In 1930, he became the first American to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.
BELLINI
The Bellini was invented at Harry’s Bar in Venice, a regular watering hole for Lewis when he was traveling abroad. Famous barman Giuseppe Cipriani came up with the cocktail during peach season. The warm hue reminded him of the paintings by fifteenth-century Italian artist Giovanni Bellini and thus the name.
2 oz. peach nectar
Champagne
Pour peach nectar into a chilled champagne flute. Fill with champagne. Stir.
Sometimes a dash of lemon juice is added. If you are fortunate enough to be using fresh white peaches instead of nectar, crush the peaches in the bottom of the glass and add a dash of simple syrup.
From Babbitt, 1922
THROUGH A FROTH OF MERRIMENT he brought the shining promise, the mighty tray of glasses with the cloudy yellow cocktails in the glass pitcher in the center. The men babbled, “Oh, gosh, have a look!” and “This gets me right where I live!” and “Let me at it!” But Chum Frink, a traveled man and not unused to woes, was stricken by the thought that the potion might be merely fruit-juice with a little neutral spirits. He looked timorous as Babbitt, a moist and ecstatic almoner, held out a glass, but as he tasted it he piped, “Oh, man, let me dream on! It ain’t true, but don’t waken me! Jus’ lemme slumber!”
Jack London
“I was always willing to drink when any one was around. I drank by myself when no one was around.”
Not content to just write about adventure, London frequently courted danger, especially when drunk. Sometimes the danger was nature, as when he staggered down an Oakland wharf, made for a sloop and lost his footing. Swept along by the current, he gazed drunkenly at the gaslights of San Francisco and thought this might be the end. Muscles all but frozen and cramping, London was saved by a Greek fisherman. Other times the danger was man, as when docked in Yokohama. There, London drank sake night and day for a week, until finally the Japanese police chased him off. Forced to dive into the harbor, he swam safely back to the boat. That time he was officially registered as drowned.
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1876–1916. Novelist and short-story writer. London wrote more than fifty novels. His Alaskan adventure stories brought him a wide audience and commercial success; they include The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and Burning Daylight, as well as the remarkable short story “To Build a Fire.”
BACARDI COCKTAIL
Seamen love their rum. London, who was at turns an oyster pirate, deep-sea sailor, hobo, and gold prospector, seems to have had an unquenchable thirst for all drinks. This cocktail is such a lovely deep red color perhaps the old seaman’s adage should be changed from red sky at night to “Bacardi Cocktail at night, sailors’ delight . . . “
2 oz. Bacardi light rum
¾ oz. grenadine
1 oz. lime juice
Pour all ingredients into a cocktail shaker filled with ice cubes. Shake well. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass.
From The Sea-Wolf, 1904
WOLF LARSEN TOOK THE DISTRIBUTION of the whiskey off my hands, and the bottles began to make their appearance while I worked over the fresh batch of wounded men in the forecastle. I had seen whiskey drunk, such as whiskey and soda by the men of the clubs, but never as these men drank it, from pannikins and mugs, and from the bottles—great brimming drinks, each one of which was in itself a debauch. But they did not stop at one or two. They drank and drank, and ever the bottles slipped forward and they drank more.
Everybody drank; the wounded drank; Oofty-Oofty, who helped me, drank. Only Louis refrained, no more than cautiously wetting h
is lips with the liquor, though he joined in the revels with an abandon equal to that of most of them. It was a saturnalia. In loud voices they shouted over the day’s fighting, wrangled about details, or waxed affecionate and made friends with the men whom they had fought.
Robert Lowell
“My poem possesses and obsesses—like whiskey, that other inspirer.”
Although more temperate than Jean Stafford, his first wife, Lowell still enjoyed the not infrequent binge. The only problem was that alcohol had the potential to make him drunk out of his mind (literally). One such occasion happened in Buenos Aires. In short order, he enraged the U.S. ambassador by bringing communists to dinner. He tweaked an Argentine general who, it turned out, was the country’s president in waiting. He called the cultural attaché illiterate, and on the main boulevard, stripped naked and hopped onto a statue of a horse. When they finally found Lowell he was drinking and arm-wrestling with the radical Spanish poet Rafael Alberti. It took six paramedics to stuff him into a straitjacket.
