“Bourbon,” my cousin has just argued, in one word heightening both the appeal and the repulsiveness of moving to Louisville to work with her in a building bourbon built. I have never been to Louisville. Nor has my cup ever troubled in running over with that exquisite potable, and I wonder if that fact has any relevance to my being an aimless, broke 25-year-old grad-school dropout back at home.
I pause, look down, and rattle the atrophied cubes in my tumbler.
“Whiskey business,” I say, no less serious for the pun’s inanity.
Whiskey, potion I’ve come to love and hate, champion and decry. Whiskey, formula for joy and sadness, sanity and madness. Whiskey, patron of the loftiest good and the basest wickedness. Whiskey in sickness, whiskey in health. This Catholic boy’s fall from grace. This agnostic’s reason to believe.
Whiskey, both opposed and advocated in alcohol legalization proceedings by young Mississippi politician Noah Sweat in 1952, as follows:
“If when you say whiskey you mean the devil’s brew, the poison scourge, the bloody monster, that defiles innocence, dethrones reason, destroys the home, creates misery and poverty, yea, literally takes the bread from the mouths of little children; if you mean the evil drink that topples the Christian man and woman from the pinnacle of righteous, gracious living into the bottomless pit of degradation, and despair, and shame and helplessness, and hopelessness, then certainly I am against it.
But; If when you say whiskey you mean the oil of conversation, the philosophic wine, the ale that is consumed when good fellows get together, that puts a song in their hearts and laughter on their lips, and the warm glow of contentment in their eyes; if you mean Christmas cheer; if you mean the stimulating drink that puts the spring in the old gentleman’s step on a frosty, crispy morning; if you mean the drink which enables a man to magnify his joy, and his happiness, and to forget, if only for a little while, life’s great tragedies, and heartaches, and sorrows; if you mean that drink, the sale of which pours into our treasuries untold millions of dollars, which are used to provide tender care for our little crippled children, our blind, our deaf, our dumb, our pitiful aged and infirm; to build highways and hospitals and schools, then certainly I am for it.”
The next month I’m arriving in Louisville late at night. I’m moving uncertainly toward the Highlands on Bardstown Road, perforated double yellows strewn across four lanes, electric green arrows and red Xs overhead. My first moment of confusion.
Across from the house in which I am to live for the next six bipolar months, a green light shines like a beacon from the corner. Shenanigans. This night and every night after it, through an uncharacteristically snowy Louisville winter, Shenanigans-goers will holler me to sleep, uproariously laugh me to sleep, lament me to sleep, fight me to sleep and once, notably, have sex against the side of the house me to sleep. I have a culprit in mind. And her name is…
“Bourbon?”
“Maker’s,” I say. “Neat.”
Weekend one, Nachbar. Standing next to me is Antoinette (not her real name), a magnetic Louisville native three years younger. She is also a coworker of my ex-girlfriend, with whom closure is elusive after a complicated year. (When I told my ex I’d be moving to Louisville, she replied with genuine worry: “You’re gonna be all excited, in a new city, and you’re gonna meet some girl.”)
Both she and Antoinette live where I met them, in a college town 100 miles north. I e-mailed Antoinette my first night in Louisville, knowing she visits home regularly.
Is my intent to invite trouble? No, no, of course not. She’s just going to show me around, introduce me to some folks. We’re friends. And anyway, Antoinette says, “I love Louis” (not his real name). I know, I say. What would you like to drink? Whatever you’re having.
A few bourbons later, we kiss on adjacent barstools. We find our way, somehow, to a speakeasy. We part after sunrise. We reconvene later that day, walk around Cherokee, heads aswim, and agree that we shouldn’t do that again. We say farewell. Later I think about irrevocability over a generous pour of Woodford Reserve. If it can’t be taken back, I think, what reason is there not to do it again?
I talk to my ex on Monday. “You went out with Antoinette?” “Yes.” “She and her friends are crazy! You’d tell me if you’d been with another girl, wouldn’t you?”
“Of course.”
“So nothing happened?”
“…No.”
“Are you sure?”
“…Yes.”
Antoinette returns subsequent weekends, and we return to Nachbar. (One weekend she comes with Louis, we kiss in front of him, and he doesn’t seem to care.) The amount of bourbon I consume founds a persuasive argument for why I shouldn’t have to pay income tax this year. And, maybe, for why I should quit drinking bourbon. But who in his right mind would do something like that, at a time like this, in a place like Louisville? Yes, exactly, who in his right mind. Like the fish-out-of-water narrator Paul Kemp in Hunter S. Thompson’s “The Rum Diary”, “I [feel] a tremendous distance between me and everything real.”
Weekdays at the building bourbon built I answer phones and smile at visitors. I take news clippings. I take interest in bands, books, films, and ambitious urban renewal projects. I take orders. I take smoke breaks. Bourbon effectively pays my keep and, like clockwork, I give a lion’s share of it right back. Sometimes I roam the streets after work and familiarize myself with the city. One night on Bardstown Road a voice aimed at me from a white SUV yells, “Nice pants, faggot!”
Once, with reservations, I leave Louisville to visit Antoinette where she lives. My ex is, not coincidentally, elsewhere.
The way is iced over. Cars drive as slugs slither. Accidents cause further slowing. Too much time to think. I finally arrive and we go to a party. Familiar faces. Too many familiar faces. Such a small town. What if word were to get back to the ex? Outside, kissing me, Antoinette rethinks, pulls back. “We shouldn’t do that here, should we?”
“You mean, right here, against the vinyl siding?”
“No, I mean, here.”
Here. Reality.
“Would you like something to drink?”
“Bourbon.”
Days later my ex calls me. “Antoinette and Louis broke up,” she says. I think: respond with nonchalance, as though everything is normal. “Huh,” I say. “Is she okay?” I succeed in conveying an utter lack of concern. Our conversation ends after my ex says “I love you so much,” and I reply, “I love you too,” consummating myself a liar.
“HAHAHAHAHA,” the crew at Shenanigans says when I try to sleep later. “AARRGHAHHHARGHHGHHHRHGHH.”
And I hear: “A poor excuse for catharsis is nevertheless cathartic.”
I wake up and spike my coffee.
At night my phone rings. The ex. I answer. A pregnant pause follows, not unlike the quiet that intervenes between a far-off lightning strike and earth-shaking thunder.
She tells me a rejected courtier of hers has gotten wind of my betrayal. Moral enforcer, he has dutifully divulged to her all wrongdoing.
After her ensuing stream of unadulterated anger, sadness, and vitriol, I think it will be a miracle if we ever speak again.
Later, Antoinette calls. Whatever this has been, she says, is over. And I am, like that, eviscerated of the women in my life.
I learn within hours that Nachbar is far less enchanting if visited alone. That bourbon is bitter if drunk without company. That it is a failure if it has contributed to my apartness from people I could have done better than take from. As I sit at a back-patio picnic table thinking about these things, a very drunk young man apparently pondering his own questions begins to talk to me. “I don’t have a problem with anyone, man,” he says. “If you’re into guys, whatever, I don’t have a problem with that. The way I see it, bro, live and let live.”
It would be reasonable if by now you’ve begun to think this story is not a Louisville story at all. It could be about anywhere, you might think, and Kentucky being the home of bourbon is merely a convenient frame for this self-involved narrative.
Fair enough. Yet, I submit to you, Louisville native or transplant or visitor, that there is something unusual going on here. A quality I cannot recall having been so pronounced anywhere else I’ve lived, from my hometown to a handful of the biggest and most diverse of American cities. It’s a feeling.
And perhaps the best way I can describe it is thus: Louisville strikes me as simultaneously, viscerally, possessed of opposing moralities. Devil on one shoulder, angel on the other. As though the city is a living description of one of the region’s most famous and lucrative exports.
Granted, for such a claim there can be no empirical evidence, no metrics for proof or comparison, and, after all, is not human nature itself a constant war between binary
impulses? Does that war not play out every day in every peopled place on this vast and varied planet? And anyway, can’t you get bourbon lots of places?
But think about the idea, if you will, during the next Derby. Maybe you’ll go. Maybe you’ll be bedecked in a fancy suit, dress, hat. Maybe you won’t. Whatever your level of participation: Consider gentility and the indecency it implies, exposes, and contrasts. Consider money in its abundance and lack. Consider fullness, hunger, excess and scarcity. Consider the spectrum of “good.” Consider what you and others think and say and do.
Consider bourbon. Is it creating misery and poverty, or is it putting a song in the heart?
I suppose the answer to that question is one word. Yes.
– A creative reimagination of reality by Patrick Bourland
Illustration by Ryan Davis
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