I have always thought of March as a supreme drinking month. It is still cold and yet spring is beginning to show in its glorious return. It is a grand month for beer drinkers, a demographic I count myself among, as both the winter and spring styles are both accessible and acceptable choices. Not that I've ever worried about being "acceptable."
And really, is there anything better than a really good maibock on that first sixty degree day? The sun is bright, the wind slightly chill and you have nothing at all to do.
With this fiction in mind let us go ahead and begin the week with a front list/back list that will pay homage to one of mankind's more noble pursuits.
From The Front List - Define Drunk
Drunk: The Definitive Drinker’s Dictionary by Paul Dickson. Illustrated by Paul Rea. Melville House Publishing. Reference. Hardcover. ISBN: 9781933633756. $19.95.
Defendant: I was drunk as a judge when I committed the offense.
Judge: The expression is “sober as a judge.” Don’t you mean “drunk as a lord”?
Defendant: Yes, my lord.
Explanation of the expression, jober as a sudge from Drunk by Paul Dickson
Your initial reaction will be one of underestimating Dickson’s book. After reading the introduction and soaking in the first few entries, your next move will be to find a chair to sit in while you turn page after page, trying to commit to memory this supreme achievement of dipsography (I may have made up that word).
These two things completed you will of course have to go out and get yourself as drunk as forty billy goats. In which case you’d better have hands like rocks and a chin for eating punches.
Colorful post today, as you can see.
Dickson’s book is impressive and I suppose any listing of nearly three-thousand synonyms is going to be at least that. The subject matter is naturally what elevates this list to the sublime. Or to the SoCo and lime. Snare hit please. No? Whatever.
Paul Dickson, when not editing for Dover Publications or the Merriam-Webster Dictionary is known best for his books on Baseball and his record breaking lists of synonyms for being stonkered. Err… I mean drunk.
Record setting as in the Guinness Book Of World Records, of which he has entered and broken his own record setting list of sodden verbiage three times. The most updated of these registries contained in Drunk. The exact figure is 2,964 synonyms. It’s enough to make you go Baltic.
To “go Baltic” is a term, interestingly enough, that hails from Scotland. It refers to the lifestyle indulged by Scottish fisherman while working in Mediterranean waters. Needless to say it involves drinking, or to get drunk as a sailor, if you will.
Here are some of my favorites used in sentences.
For a belligerent drunk:
“In armor” or “In his armor.”
Be careful talking to Jesse; he’s in his armor again.
For the clumsy, uncoordinated drunk.
“Cut leg.”
Don’t let Jesse go out the front door because he’s got a cut leg and the cops will see him a mile away.
For the passed out drunk.
“Stiff as a carp.”
I found Jesse in the bathroom, stiff as a carp.
For the drunk who’s back at it.
“Gone to the Devil.”
Jesse’s gone to the devil with his fuzzy tool belt.
I added the last part and yes, I have a friend named Jesse who is a notorious drunk. In any case you can see the entertainment value, let alone utility, of this reference work.
One of my favorite terms is absent from the list, or perhaps I’ve merely missed it in another form. In any case I’d like to humbly submit it for review here.
“With John Barleycorn.”
As in: “They went out with John Barleycorn.”
John Barleycorn being a demigod or demonic presence that represents both the harvest and production of alcohol. He is most notably rendered in the Robert Burns poem bearing his namesake and the Jack London memoir, which also is stamped by his name. The latter of which contains the above expression and many other charming ways to explain alcoholism as a disease.
All this talk is making me want to go get... How does the expression go? Ah. Hammered.
From The Back List - For The Lost and Lonely
The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley. Fiction. Vintage Crime. Trade Paperback. ISBN: 0394759893. $12.95.
How's this for an opening paragraph.
When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.
C.W. Sughrue is the private eye tracking down wayward novelist and sometime poet Abraham Trahearne. Fireball Roberts is not a nickname nor is the term bulldog a reference to anything other than the hirsute canine often associated with the British.
You can add to the above scene two roustabouts and a immense black tom cat who once upon a time was the Cassanova of Rosie's bar (the dusty shack where this all takes place). Again, by tom cat it is being communicated that the character is in fact feline and ostentatiously confident.
This is no fable however. Crumley is definitely not crafting post modern stories where a talking cat assists our down but not out private eye as he searches through a complex and impenetrable technocracy. No. Crumley writes it straight, even if it is somewhat fanciful.
That's what both makes The Last Good Kiss so charming and disturbing. The maudlin sentimentality of Crumley's drunks denotes an author that believes in moral fundamentals that bend but should not be broken. It is precisely because the "good" people in Crumley's story successfully navigate the thin red line between immoral depravity and decent living that we as the reader get a more profound sense of the cruelty and ignoble truth that exists in the "bad."
This is not so easy to do.
C.W. Sughrue is the perfect noir protagonist to navigate a sun bleached crime story that involves as much of Bukowski's dissipation as it does Chandler's slick operators. Sughrue hails from Montana, is hard drinking and listens to Willie Nelson as he drifts from job to job, mostly finding people who don't want to be found. He's one part Texas Ranger and two parts out-of-work roughneck.
Crime fiction, like all genre writing, is about creating a feeling, an emotion. A good crime story is like a good joke. You see where it's going but need to hear how the teller ties it off. The feeling is in how you feel about the man telling the joke.
In Crumley's case you have a man who you believe 100%, even if you know the tale is tall and involves anthropomorphic bulldogs and tom cats with insatiable appetites. It is with this in mind that you'll want to take some preparatory steps before indulging.
Before you pick up a copy you'll want to buy a case of Piels or something honest like that. After reading the book you'll want to have a couple beers on your back porch and indulge yourself, just once, in a romantic crumpling up and tossing of a can or two into your backyard.
You can pick them up in the morning. After the world of C.W. Sughrue and Fireball subsides.
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