Boozehound - Jason Wilson [4]
CHAPTER 1
THE OMBIBULOUS ME
THEY TALK OF MY DRINKING BUT NEVER MY THIRST.
—Scottish proverb
THE FIRST LIQUOR I EVER EXPERIENCED, as a teenager, was sambuca—the anise liqueur often served after dinner in Italian restaurants, with three coffee beans for good luck. The only reason for this is because, in our house, a lonely bottle of sambuca sat at the back of our kitchen pantry, hidden behind the hodgepodge bottles of Chivas Regal, Canadian Club, and VO. My parents didn’t drink whiskey—they were the type of baby boomers who as young adults had eschewed spirits and cocktails for the pleasures of wine—and so they likely kept those bottles on hand solely for guests who liked whiskey. As for why sambuca lurked in a dark corner of our shelf, I have never discovered an explanation. We are not Italian-Americans. It’s not as if my parents were jet-setting in Portofino (more like Ocean City, New Jersey). And we’d never hosted a foreign exchange student. Perhaps it was a gift from a guest, someone who believed that my parents might enjoy a bracing, licorice-tasting after-dinner spirit? In that case, it was one of the most misguided gifts of all time.
However, since this bottle of sambuca sat totally untouched and unmonitored, it ended up being the perfect liquor for a sixteen-year-old boy and his friends. My parents were occasionally out to dinner, and so after the police had broken up a keg party in the woods or on the eleventh hole of the local golf course and we were suddenly out of Milwaukee’s Best, my friends and I would find ourselves rummaging deep in my family’s pantry for our now-favorite Italian digestivo.
If we’d had any choice, I doubt sambuca would have been at the top of the list. After all, most American kids grow up calling red Twizzlers “licorice” and picking around the black jelly beans in the jar. My friends thought sambuca was gross, and we mainly drank it in shots. But I kind of liked it. Or at least I pretended to like it. I don’t mean to suggest that I had esoteric tastes as a teenager. In reality, I was a rube who subsisted on Gatorade and Ho Hos, gagged on mustard, and scraped the onions or mushrooms off any dish served with them. But I had seen La Dolce Vita on VCR tape, and I took on an air of sambuca connoisseurship as if I’d just returned from café life on the Via Veneto, splashing in the Trevi Fountain with Anita Ekberg, and now had a Vespa parked in the garage next to our riding mower.
The reason was quite simple: L., a certain Valkyrie-like girl who’d recently moved to our neighborhood and started hanging out with us. Her mother had an accent, and everyone said they were “European.” They had a last name that seemed vaguely Scandinavian or, as some in the neighborhood called it, “sort of Aryan.” But who knows where they came from. Regardless, the stunning blond-haired, blue-eyed L. was clearly different from most of the Jersey girls who went to high school with me. I was smitten, and had spent an entire summer trying to convince her to fall in love with me, but had remained squarely in the friend zone.
Still, I was on the lookout for ways to impress her. One autumn night, a group of us fled a busted party on the golf course. “Sambuca, anyone?” I suggested. Among our friends, L. and I walked to my house, cozily arm-in-arm in the crisp fall air. On that night, I decided to make my move.
The sambuca bottle had one of those plastic pourer spouts. After so much usage—since we didn’t really know how to use it properly and never wiped it off—a sugary crust