Pappyland

by Wright Thompson

  “If someone would have told you in 1988 that you were going to have the most sought after and deified bourbon in the world, you would have looked at them like they were smoking crack.”

  He laughed.

  “Nah,” he said. “We were just trying to make a bank payment next week.”

  “How close did you come really?” I asked.

  He told me a story.

  “Wequetonsing, where we were tonight,” he said. “I remember one summer walking down there, probably mideighties, when I used to buy whiskey from Wild Turkey, Old Boone distillation that they were putting in Wild Turkey, and Wild Turkey said, ‘Nope, we can’t sell you any more whiskey this year.’ I remember walking down that sidewalk towards the lake to our rental house, which is on the left, one house off the lake, most beautiful views. Beautiful deck, looking out towards the harbor and I’m going okay, ‘This is the last summer I’m coming up here. I’m done.’”

  “What happened?”

  “I guess something came available,” he said. “It was scary.”

  There was a lesson in there somewhere, about stubbornness or confidence or belief. He said he didn’t ever think about hitting it big, or if he was letting his father and grandfather down. The daily struggle of keeping it open kept existential fears at bay. “I was gonna ride this thing into the grave,” he said, “because it was all I knew how to do. I was spending. Thankfully I had a bunch of stock my dad had given me and I just kept kind of spending that to keep it alive.”

  21

  THAT NIGHT IN MICHIGAN, the sun slid down on another perfect day, and I couldn’t even really tell you what we did besides get a sandwich and some chips and a few beers, and ride out on a boat on a lake that looks like glass, and come back to the house to brainstorm what at the butcher shop might taste good on the grill, and whether or not we can get ourselves together enough to make peach ice cream. Sonia had flown up to hang out, too. It was a perfect evening.

  But first, a cocktail. These were vital decisions.

  “Thinking about what I want to put in my body,” Julian said.

  The weather was perfect, maybe a little too hot but nothing a sunset and some booze wouldn’t cure. Julian wore shorts and a turquoise shirt.

  “I’m thinking about a margarita and I’m thinking about making a Vanhattan,” he said.

  “I always want a Vanhattan,” I told him.

  A Vanhattan is his personal riff on a Manhattan.

  “I don’t want you to open a bottle just for—”

  “I’m not opening nothing,” he interrupted, and then went over to the kitchen, looking for fruit. “I think we got an orange at the grocery.”

  “What’s in a Vanhattan?” I asked as he started to mix.

  “It’s half rye, half bourbon,” he said.

  When he said rye, he meant the Van Winkle rye. And when he said bourbon, he meant Pappy. The bar was on the wall near the grill. He poured from feel; he didn’t need jiggers.

  “Carpano Antica vermouth,” he said.

  He spooned in juice from a jar of Luxardo cherries.

  “How much?”

  “About two teaspoons,” he said. “Just kind of do it to taste. It’s about the same with the Carpano Antica.”

  He reached for a small bottle on the bar. A few steps were left before cocktail hour could commence. “Two or three shakes of orange bitters or blood orange bitters, which is what I made it with the first time, which is about the same thing but a little more intense,” he said. “And a twist of orange that really sets it off.”

  He finished mixing the drinks and handed me one and kept one for himself. We both had a sip.

  “They go down real easy,” he said.

  Arthur Alexander played on the stereo. We didn’t talk much. We didn’t really talk at all. There was nothing that needed to be said. He smiled. “See, I want another one of those but it’s straight whiskey,” he said. “This is kind of like lemonade to me, it just goes down kind of nice, sweet, and fast. Very dangerous.”

  “I think you should have another one.”

  “I think I probably should, too.”

  Julian pulled out a bottle of wine, a Spanish Meritage, made from Monastrell and Syrah variety of grapes, aged in Pappy Van Winkle barrels with their good friend Dan Phillips. The color of the wine was this beautiful almost unnaturally bright red. The land where these grapes are born sits by the Segura River, bracketed by two mountain ranges in a part of Spain settled by the Moors. We went outside and threw the ball with his dog. Sissy chopped three cloves of garlic for the polenta and added some bacon grease to the greens cooking on the stove. They grew the greens themselves. Sonia and Sissy talked about jewelry. Julian put on “Purple Rain” and turned up the volume. Something about the melancholy fat guitar chords made it feel like a cosmic sibling to bourbon. Julian disappeared to his liquor cabinet and came back with tumblers of bourbon on the rocks with a lemon twist. He wanted me to guess what was in the glass, and after I fumbled around, he smiled.

  “I put a twist of lemon in it,” he said. “It makes it better. I’m not sure you’ve ever had that. Did you like this? It’s Maker’s Mark made in the late eighties.”

  “How much Maker’s Mark from the late eighties do you have?”

  “A bottle and a half in there and my buddy down the road has about a bottle of it,” he said. “We found it in a house that we rented years ago, while we were building this house. They had bottles and bottles of Maker’s Mark in there, and I tasted an open bottle and I looked at the bottom and it said 1992 or something, which was when the bottle was made, so it was made in the eighties and it’s just so beyond what they’re making now. I bought a couple of bottles from the owner.”

  “Did they change the recipe?” Sonia asked.

  “Oh yeah, they did,” Julian said. “There are so few bottles like these left on earth.”

  This was their life. A perfect drink, poured from a found bottle of old-school Maker’s Mark. The seductive Van Winkle thing is really a series of mostly replicable actions and details and moments. You could live this life if you wanted. That’s real peace, I think. They love each other. It’s impossible to miss, in the way Sissy looks at him across a table after all these years, in the way he always takes the juiciest or best piece of anything he grills and brings it to her on a fork. He’s got a telescope powerful enough to see the rings on Saturn. Pointing it up at the sky gives him a limitless feeling. She tends a vegetable garden. Sometimes she’ll cut flowers. Both of them read books. Sissy likes to paddle her kayak and do Pilates. Julian swims out to the buoy where he keeps their boat and motors around the lake. Growing up with their own kids, their boat was known to everyone as The Gofasterdaddy. All the children in the neighborhood wanted Mr. Julian to pull them in an inner tube. Now their grandkids smile from pictures hanging all over the house.

  Long ago Sissy decided no bunk beds for the kids. They’re a bitch to make up, she says. Julian got a full-size urinal installed, with a brass bar above it in case anyone gets a little wobbly. There’s also a marble shelf for a cocktail. He knows a knife-maker who works with Damascus steel. He makes his own Kahlua. Sissy plays mah-jongg. Julian listens to Alan Jackson. Once their triplets all got arrested for Walking Under the Influence. They thought that was hilarious. The paper printed the infraction: CARRIE AND LOUISE AND CHENAULT VAN WINKLE FROM LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY WERE ARRESTED.

  Both of them love the willow trees. Bikes hang from the ceiling and walls of the garage. Everyone travels the town by bike. Julian’s wrecked at least twice. “Embarrassing,” he said, smiling. “Overserved. One night I was looking at the moon and the town had just put up those big speed machines that had your speed on it, eight feet tall, only it was turned off. I nailed that thing. I have a scar here where it looks like I had lung surgery. Broke a rib, I’m sure, maybe a couple of them. Big scar, and just embarrassing. I’ve had a couple of
them, but it’s part of the game. . . .”

  We sat out on the porch under the light of flickering candles. The music filtered through the air.

  What became clear in Michigan was that Julian and Sissy have become the fully realized version of themselves through success. That’s actually rare. I profile famous and successful athletes for a living and almost no one understands that success is merely a currency to spend on one big purchase. Do you use it to try to get more success? To maintain the attention and bright lights? Or do you buy a life with it? The kind of life most people really want. I wanted what they have, wanted to organize the next act of my life, the one that moved finally past my youthful dreams and the rage and ambition that come shaped and fueled by my most broken and insecure self. The same questions from earlier returned. What does a man owe his father? What does he owe his younger self? Does a man lose whatever is left of his spirit when the last Stitzel-Weller is gone?

  “Is anybody sitting on a huge supply?” I asked.

  “Not anymore,” he said.

  “When will the last barrel be bottled?”

  “It may have already been bottled,” he said.

  22

  SONIA AND I LEFT THE VAN WINKLES and headed north toward Lake Superior, the tires making a rumbling noise on the highway. We rode in silence, looking at the roadside diners and thinking. The coming baby changed all our calculus, and I found myself no longer trying to escape but now moving with just as much urgency toward a home where I could leave the running behind. I thought of the Chief Joseph quote: I will fight no more forever. Our destination was a small town in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and the waterfront compound owned by my friend and mentor Rick Telander.

  I had an important question to ask.

  Sonia’s pregnancy was progressing perfectly, the doctors assured us, but we still felt anxious and uncertain, and as long as we didn’t tell a lot of people, or didn’t start planning for a birth, or outfitting our house for a third human who would be living there, then we were somehow protected against heartbreak. There’d been so much of that—I still cannot shake the twenty-four hours surrounding a miscarriage in Paris—and so, after such a long and oftentimes bleak journey, we wanted to protect this miracle of a baby girl, whom we’d decided to name Wallace after my grandfather—my mom’s dad, William Wallace McKenzie.

  I wanted Rick to be Wallace’s godfather.

  There was a chain at work here. I first met Rick at the Super Bowl in Atlanta. He was a famous writer, formerly of Sports Illustrated and now of the Chicago Sun-Times. His most famous book is a classic called Heaven Is a Playground. My friends Seth, Justin, Steve, and I had somehow managed to get credentials to cover the game for our student newspaper. Seth, who started and fueled our magazine story obsession, knew about Rick before I did. He’s the one who recognized Rick, and over that week, we drank with him and played pickup basketball with him. I kept in touch. Rick was the first person to really believe in me. He taught valuable writing lessons. In one, he used the second version of Bruce Springsteen’s “Hungry Heart.”

  I met her in a Kingstown bar

  We fell in love I knew it had to end

  We took what we had and we ripped it apart

  Now here I am down in Kingstown again

  There are thirty-five words in those lyrics. Four have more than one syllable. And yet the verse tells a huge arc of human desire and loneliness and loss. That’s writing, he said. Be simple, blunt, and profound. The lessons opened the songbook to me. Springsteen’s characters in his songs struggled with the same fears and obstacles as I do. So I listened to those records over and over again. Darkness on the Edge of Town became my origin document at a critical moment in my career. The stories on that recording center around familiar characters in the Springsteen universe, but they all feel autobiographical to me given what I know of the professional and creative challenges Bruce faced in that part of his life. The album Born to Run had taken the musical world by force—he’d famously been on the cover of Time and Newsweek at the same time—and yet his contract kept him from cashing in and controlling his own ship. He went to war, fighting for his freedom while risking this fragile embryo of a career. He had no way to look decades into the future to see what lay in store for him. He risked his dream to actually own his dream, and for three years, he couldn’t record or release any music; left to write the songs on Darkness and stew. To me, it’s a record about trying to protect a dream while confronted with a growing wall of reality that says the dream is dead—and worse: useless, pathetic, impossible.

  Men walk through these gates with death in their eyes. Some folks are born into a good life. Other folks, they just get it any way anyhow. You’re born into this life paying for the sins of somebody else’s past. You’re born with nothing and better off that way. Soon as you’ve got something they send someone to try and take it away. You inherit the sins, you inherit the flames. Some guys they just give up living and start dying little by little, piece by piece. You wake up in the night with a fear so real. I’m caught in a cross fire that I don’t understand. Sometimes I feel so weak I just want to explode. When we found the things we loved, they were crushed and dying in the dirt. I packed my bags and I’m heading straight into the storm. Gonna be a twister to blow everything down that ain’t got the faith to stand its ground. Everybody’s got a hunger, a hunger they can’t resist. Poor man wanna be rich. Rich man wanna be king. I’ve been working real hard, trying to get my hands clean. Let the broken hearts stand as the price you’ve gotta pay. Tonight I’ll be on that hill ’cause I can’t stop. I’ll be there on time and I’ll pay the cost.

  Those themes never left Springsteen’s music or his life. He has said his goal with his own family was to avoid the pain inflicted on him by his father, to be, as he put it, an ancestor in their lives and not a ghost. He wanted to walk by their side and guide and protect, not grasp their ankles and pull them back down. That feels like a choice to me. You decide the story to tell about yourself—the myth that enables you to strive and hope to be your best self. My father, then, is an ancestor, not a ghost. Willie Morris is an ancestor, not a ghost, and Rick Telander is, like the other important men in my life, also an ancestor and not a ghost. All our influences—mentors and novelists and songwriters—walk with us on the road, not offering advice so much as helping us to unlock the best of ourselves that hides in places we can’t otherwise find. That’s the work of adulthood. Sorting out the good and bad within. That’s the conflict I kept running into: Myth is both the deliverance and the curse. We tell ourselves a story to survive and then that story consumes us, destroys us. The mask eats the face. That’s an Updike quote that my friend Scott told me, and I’ve been using it ever since to talk about the athletes I profile.

  23

  I WAS BORN IN A MASK, the monk and philosopher Thomas Merton wrote. He lived and wrote in a monastery in Kentucky, and while I worked on understanding Julian and saw the miracle of our daughter coming into existence, I also began to read lots of Merton, trying to make sense of how my need to run was being replaced by a desire to stay. All my running felt like a mask. Bourbon, especially status-cult bourbon, is a mask, too. It’s something put on to hide or amplify. Pappy isn’t my mask, but I definitely wear them. ESPN is a mask. A book on The New York Times bestseller list is a mask. Merton is aiming his critique at himself and at everyone who has ever strived for anything. And what is Pappy if not the result of striving sold mostly to strivers? Our being is not to be enriched by activity and experience as such. Everything depends on the quality of our acts and our experiences. . . . We are so obsessed with doing that we have no time and no imagination left for being.

  Ontonagon, Michigan, is a remote dive-bar town. Places of community, communion, and shit-kicking rumbles upon occasion. Newcomers get made immediately. All the bars have great signs. Neon soothes loneliness. We made our way down dark roads until we found the Telander compound. That’s what it
is, too. A main house, on the beach. A stand-alone sauna. A big barn with his woodshop and a bunk room upstairs. A few small houses for his grown children to stay when they come to visit. We turn into the drive. The house is full of Telanders, who welcome us into their big, beautiful, strange tribe.

  Sonia was only in her second trimester. The pregnancy was new. I don’t think she fully believed. I know I didn’t. The memory of her miscarriage scarred us both. I will never forget her walking out of the doctor’s office at the American Hospital of Paris on Boulevard Victor Hugo and just shaking her head. I cried ugly tears on our balcony that day and neither of us thought we’d ever get to have a family of our own. At the Telanders, she bonded with Rick’s daughters and played games and ate food and listened to stories and told stories. Rick played the guitar. We all sang. Every so often, I’d look over to see Sonia relaxed for the first time in as long as I could remember. Sitting in the Telander compound, we first started to believe.

  She saw what Rick had built for his kids and grandkids. Later she told me that a clear and powerful thought came to her then, as she tried to hope our family into being while surrounded by this big, beautiful family created by Rick and Judy. She loved the big “Telander Beach Club” flag and the pinewood interior that glowed in the amber. Green lights ringed the front porch and the house sounded like music and laughter.

  “So this is what it means,” she said and I understood. We build a life to share, to pass on, so that some idea of us can live in our children and grandchildren, so that we might live forever and they might never be alone. Sonia and I both felt so hopeful for those few days, finally seeing how it might all manifest for us, if we would just allow ourselves to believe. A place like this is a defiant stand against loneliness, against the idea that we should enter and leave this world as solitary beings. She felt at the Telanders the same feeling I felt when I first walked into Julian and Sissy’s Michigan house, when the absence of a large, loud family didn’t mean that the spirits of those people didn’t exist as real and sturdy as the beams and walls. . . .