by Mark Bailey
From “Scott in Thorns,” 1962
The Drunk. He is the stranger who annoys your party as you’re leaving “21.” He has no name. He appears from nowhere and reels off in the direction of nothing. He talks to himself.
The Drunken Bum. Same as The Drunk, except that he asks for money, or falls down, or both. He curses.
The Souse. He drinks the way other men play cards or bet on horses. He always stands at the bar, and will not sit in a booth. He has the lowdown on everything, and loves to talk about his wife, and sports. The more he drinks the shrewder he becomes, and he is a hard man to roll, to cheat at cards, or to lure into the badger game. He could find his way home blindfolded on the darkest night of the year. He loves to sing in a male quartet.
Tennessee Williams
“Life is as much a merry tavern as a sad hotel.”
If you received a phone call, “Baby, I don’t know where I am. I’m at the Sheraton,” then you would know Tennessee was in his cups again. In strange towns, after a night of carousing, he would forget his hotel name and insist he was at the Sheraton. His brain soaked with gin, he became certain every hotel outside of New Orleans or New York was named Sheraton. Sometimes he would ask what city he was in. As when he ended up in Indianapolis, having left for Minneapolis. He died at New York’s Hotel Elysee, drunk. He tried to open a medicine bottle with his teeth and choked on the cap.
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1911–1983. Playwright and short-story writer. Williams achieved critical success with The Glass Menagerie, winner of the Drama Critics Circle Award. Of his more than fifty plays, his best-known work remains A Streetcar Named Desire. The play was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and introduced Marlon Brando to the world. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof won him another Pulitzer.
RAMOS FIZZ
A Williams favorite, the Ramos Fizz hails from New Orleans, the city he so loved. Invented in the early 1900s by the Ramos Brothers, the drink is unusually difficult to make. It is not just the obscure orange flower water: you must shake the cocktail very hard for a full three minutes. At the famous Ramos bar, a platoon of muscled bartenders would shake and pass all the way down the line. For Williams, it must have been as much fun to watch it made as it was to drink it.
2 oz. gin
1 oz. heavy cream
½ oz. lemon juice
½ oz. lime juice
1 oz. simple syrup
5 drops orange flower water
1 egg white
Splash of club soda
Pour all ingredients (except club soda) into a cocktail shaker filled with ice cubes. Shake hard for three full minutes. Strain into a chilled highball glass (no ice). Add splash of club soda.
From Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, 1954
BIG DADDY: I sure in hell don’t know what you’re talking about, but it disturbs me.
BRICK: It’s just a mechanical thing.
BIG DADDY: What is a mechanical thing?
BRICK: This click that I get in my head that makes me peaceful. I got to drink till I get it. It’s just a mechanical thing, something like a—like a—like a—
BIG DADDY: Like a—
BRICK: Switch clicking off in my head, turning the hot light off and the cool light on and—(He looks up, smiling sadly.)
—all of a sudden there’s—peace!
Edmund Wilson
“I’m afraid that if I had a little more money, I’d decide to spend all the rest of my life drinking beer.”
Words and booze, essentials to the drinking writer, were celebrated by Wilson in his remarkable “Lexicon of Prohibition.” Loaded to the muzzle, over the bay, fried to the hat, lathered, scrooched, spifflicated—over a hundred contemporary terms for drunkenness. His was an age of “fierce protracted drinking,” parties where upon midnight the guests, slopped to the ears, broke phonograph records over each other’s heads. Wilson and his wife in fact had their own particular lexicon. In the Wilson household, currency was expressed in terms of bottles of scotch, as in “Come on, Edmund, let’s have the lawn mower repaired; it’s only ten bottles of Johnnie Walker.”
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1895–1972. Critic and essayist. Wilson wrote for Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and The New Republic, but is perhaps best known for the writers he helped to launch: Dos Passos, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Nabokov. His major works include Axel’s Castle, The Wound and the Bow, and Patriotic Gore.
WHITE RUSSIAN
Wilson’s magnum opus, To the Finland Station, is a sweeping study of the Russian Revolution. Initially in praise of the Soviet Union and the revolutionary dream, Wilson soon reversed himself. We like to think it was the White Russian that did it.
1½ oz. vodka
1½ oz. coffee liqueur
¾ oz. heavy cream
Pour first vodka and then liqueur into an Old-Fashioned glass filled with ice cubes. Stir gently. Pour the cream over the back of a bar spoon so as to float it on top.
The White Russian can also be served straight up in a cocktail glass.
From I Thought of Daisy, 1953
WITH AN IMPULSE OF IRRITATION, I broke in upon the imbecile with the drums, interrupting him in a loud clear voice and inquiring whether he knew the time. “I don’t know the time,” he replied, with his abstracted fatuous smile. “But,” he added, after a moment, when he had come to the end of a spasm of drumming, “I’ve got something else that’s just as good!” He produced a pint flask from his back pocket: “And a darn sight better!” he added. He offered me a drink, which I accepted. I sat down on a chair beside him. “This is something,” he further observed, after taking a swig himself, “that makes time unnecessary!” He had the conviction of quiet humor of a very stupid person. “If you carry a little flask,” he continued, after a brief pause—he had begun softly drumming again—“you don’t need to carry a watch!”
Thomas Wolfe
“Other men taste—I swallow the whole.”
Like many a hard-drinking man, Wolfe could be his own worst enemy. One time, eager to enter his latest short novel in a Scribner’s Magazine contest, he dashed off to see his editor, the famous Maxwell Perkins. The two men talked until the office closed and then at a bar in Grand Central Station. When Perkins’s train was announced, Wolfe walked him onboard, his legs now wobbling. Wolfe talked and talked until the train started moving, at which point he raced to the door and jumped. He fell, smack on the platform, stunned. The emergency cord was pulled, while Perkins and the other passengers stared down in horror. Wolfe apparently had bruised his arm and severed a vein. It would be impossible for him to finish the novel in time for the contest.
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1900–1938. Novelist and short-story writer. Wolfe’s long and sprawling autobiographical novels were much admired by the next generation of writers, Jack Kerouac among them. Look Homeward Angel, his first book, brought early success. His last two novels, The Web and the Rock and You Can’t Go Home Again were published posthumously.
ROB ROY
A great cocktail for scotch drinkers like Wolfe, the Rob Roy is simply a Manhattan with scotch instead of rye. It has a bit more of a bite—but then so did Wolfe. He was known to actually bite large chunks of glass out of his tumblers and chew on them.
2 oz. blended scotch
1 oz. sweet vermouth
2 dashes of Angostura bitters
Maraschino cherry
Pour scotch, vermouth, and bitters into a mixing glass filled with ice cubes. Stir well. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with cherry.
If made with ½ ounce of sweet vermouth and ½ ounce dry, the drink becomes an Affinity Cocktail.
From “No Door,” 1934
I NEVER SAW HIM DRUNK, and yet I think that he was never sober: he was one of those men who have drunk themselves past any hope of drunkenness, who are soaked through to the bone with alcohol, saturated, tanned, weathered in it so completely that it could never be distilled out of their blood again. Yes, even in this terrible excess one felt a kind of grim control—the c
ontrol of a man who is enslaved by the very thing that he controls, the control of the opium eater who cannot leave his drug but measures out his dose with a cold calculation, and finds the limit of his capacity, and stops there, day by day.
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