(I apologize for asking you to read for ten minutes without pictures. Technical difficulties. )
I’m laying here on the couch, mildly stoned on OxyContin and, blissfully, nearly pain free. Seems like a good time to write.
I wrote those two lines, and not much else, five days ago. This is the third time I’ve revisited them and I haven’t added anything of substance. And yet, the lines are still true. I am thoughtful, and I might still be comprehensible. Let’s see what’s bubbling away below the surface tonight.
A Teenage Wine Story
This would have been 1980, and I would have been 18 years old. Kansas was the place, so at 18, I could legally drink 3.2% abv beer. You had to be 21 to buy wine, spirits, and stronger beer. Bars only sold 3.2 beer, and were 18 and over. Private clubs sold everything else, but you had to be 21, and you had to have a membership card. It was an unwieldy mess, and played hell with the tourists and business travelers. Everyone went to the eighteen bars anyway, that’s where all the fun was. Well, that’s where I was anyway. I think that might be enough of a legalistic alcoholic setup. Let’s move on to the girl.
I can remember almost everything about her, except her name. I imagine that must make some of you think I didn’t really care about her, but it’s more a matter of memory than emotion. I did care, as much as the time and place permitted. It was Kansas in 1980, and I was 18, and full of whatever 18 year old man-boys are full of, everything except brains I suppose. I met her at the Merry-go-Round, a bar that deserves its own story, in the 18 country section, and asked her for a dance. She gave me two, and then kissed me. She had dark hair and olive skin, and in hindsight, she probably tasted like a twenty year old Hermitage. Try as I might, kisses were all I ever got, and that first one was by far the best. Like a fastball right down the middle, I only got an infield single, but I just knew if I got another chance, I could hit it out of the park. Well, crude analogies aside, for about six months I loved and lusted after this girl. I never had a chance, but I spent all the time, energy and money I had in pursuit regardless. I used every trick at a moral kid’s disposal, or at least within my patience, and then, somewhere in there I just gave up. This story happened when I was still in pursuit.
We mostly drank cheap beer, it was legal, it got you drunk, and it was, well, cheap. Those were the days of quarter draws and buck and a quarter pitchers. The only goal was to become inebriated, there was no funding for things like taste and quality. I made three bucks an hour pumping gas and selling cigarettes, and the concept of disposable income did not exist. But I was in lust with a classy girl, and I was getting desperate. Enter the wine.
I did say this was a story about wine. This one was sparkling, sweet, and almond flavored. Yes, almond flavored. I know, I know, but I had tasted it once and it wasn’t half bad. My current overload of education tells me it was mass produced, forced carbonated, finely tuned for sensory overload, and cheap, in the worst possible meaning of that word. My 18 year old self knew I could buy a lot of beer for the 3.50 price tag, I was looking to impress. I should also point out the illegal nature of my possession of this elixir. As well as the 5-0 beer to go with it. In for a penny, in for a pound.
Wyandotte County Lake is a perfect place to while away a summer day, fishing, playing baseball, getting drunk (they allowed alcohol back then, maybe still), hiking, making out with your girlfriend, trying to water ski. I had a lot of fine sunny memories of the place. My plan was to turn some of that memory into a romantic outing for two. After dark. In March.
I’m sure the park patrol saw us coming in the main entrance, but they didn’t catch up to us until we had set up our makeshift picnic, popped the sparkling and poured. We had left our open beers on the dash of the car. We must have looked pretty awkward in the headlights of the patrolman’s car, trying to toast with trembling hands in the frigid late winter wind off the lake. Some quick explanations from the officer; off season, closed at dusk, gotta move on… yes sir, on our way sir. Doing the headlight walk back to the car, and a seemingly endless drive back to the park entrance with said officer close behind. There were two of them actually, and I’m sure they had a great time imagining me squirming at the wheel. They let me get right to the entrance before the flashing lights came on.
They wanted that bottle of sparkling of course.
“You’re too young to have that bottle.”
“Could I put it in the trunk?”
“Nah, the beer’s ok (the 5-0 beers that were open on the dashboard) but you better give us the wine.”
I handed it over and we went our separate ways. Soon afterwards, the girl and I did the same. It was an embarrassing moment, not THE most embarrassing moment with this particular girl, that would come months after we stopped dating, but it was right up there. And I was out that bottle of Champagne.
This is typically the time in writing where I try to remember if I had an original point. Here’s one I was trying to get my thoughts around, any person’s idea of what makes a “fine wine” is changed and warped by the lens through which they view it. My current self knows this was swill. That brief taste of what the cops didn’t take was pretty damn good in memory, though, lingering a little on our very proper goodnight kiss (but not THE kiss). We bring to the wine table all our life experiences, foibles, partisanships, the works, and I can never recapture those nascent oenophilic awakenings. Wine is ever changing because we are ever changing. And vice versa. And so on.
Here’s a possible non sequitur. Years ago, we were on the east side of Seneca and we passed Hazlitt. We had never been, but we’d heard a lot about a certain cat, and we were curious. After all, “most-popular” is often used interchangeably with “best” and, well, I really don’t want to go into that. We stopped. We tasted. We liked the wines, and were not appalled by the Cat. By every marker I know of, it is a quality wine. I understand why it is sold by the millions, it is a commendable success story. There were lots of other wines, both delicious and contemplative, we left with a bottle of the solera sherry, which appealed more to our palates. One more thing, there was a group of about five or six people at the other end of the tasting bar chanting “Red Cat, Red Cat, it’s an aphrodisiac!”. Who’s to say which of us was getting the best experience. I am interested in whether these two lines of thought can function together in the tasting rooms of the Finger Lakes, as they seem to be doing with the Aficionados group. There’s a lot of traffic out there on the wine trails, lots of people looking for lots of different things. You might meet someone just starting out the journey, or an old pro, trying desperately to hang onto the emotional attachment that wine creates in us. Most likely, it’ll be someone in between. Try to listen to the stories, they won’t be like yours, that’s what makes it interesting.
Human beings love to categorize, prioritize, label, grade, and otherwise try to attach names and hierarchies to ideas. I suspect it’s a question of power and control, but let’s not fall in that pit at the moment. We give everything a hierarchy, an importance, that defines each situation to us. It’s the ability to function in that construct of civilization that defines us. We don’t say mental health anymore (it actually was “mental hygiene” for awhile at the old VA, made me feel a little dirty), we say behavioral health now. I don’t always agree with language changes, but this is an accurate one. We don’t study someone’s brain directly (most of the time) we observe their behavior. To a certain extent, we have to fit in, in the here and now, otherwise, they take us away, to a there and then, where we have no control. I think my point is that we assign each thing a hierarchy in our minds. For about six months, this woman was right at the top of my tree, had there been social media at the time, I suspect it would have turned to obsession. I splurged for the price of a case of beer, for a single bottle of this hopefully effective elixir. I know that the sensitivities of modern times might take offense at someone plying alcohol to a woman, hoping for sex. I note this, as someone who is trying to reconcile myself with the past I was raised in, and the present that I live in. There was no evil intent, just hormones, you’ll just have to trust me on this. But look at the messy trail male hormones have left through history…
Hmm, did I say mildly stoned? Well, this is a couple days later and I’m back on non opioids and reading this gibberish with some attempt at editing. Do I leave the rawness of the original addled script? Or try to bring some sanity to it all, at risk of losing the edge? Probably something in between. To sum up, there was a time when cheap wine could seem very exotic to me, enough to possibly get the girl. I look back on that as a way of reminding myself that we’re all at different stages of this comedy of life. I’m trying not to lose empathy in my educational journey, I guess I’m trying to turn this wine education into a scavenger hunt for the humanity in all of us. Especially in myself. If that’s too lofty, maybe I just learned that I should have traded that bottle of almond sparkling in for a magnum of Red Cat. I hear it’s an aphrodisiac.
Cheers and kindness,
Jerry