ALCOHOL

by Duane Swierczynski, Marty Beckerman, Tribe, and Brian Lewandowski

Scotched
by Duane Swierczynski

A week before I got married, my fiancee Meredith and I went camping with my father-in-law-to-be and his wife. I knew Dad-in-law was a scotch man, so in an effort to impress him, I purchased a bottle of Laphroaig, one of the finer single-malts. After the womenfolk went to bed, I proudly displayed the bottle. Dad-in-law’s eyes lit up. “Yeah, let’s have a quick one." A quick five or six later, we were both pretty much schnookered. And that’s when my Dad-in-law decided to let me in on a little family secret. That secret promptly burned a hole through even the deep fog of a good scotch drunk, and frightened me down to my very soul.

We had one last one in a strange sort of muted silence, then decided to call it a night. But I couldn’t sleep. The next morning, I grabbed Meredith’s arm.

“Sweetheart,” I said as calmly as possible. “Did you know that your Dad used to break legs for the Mafia?”

Meredith’s laughter could be heard echoing throughout the campsite. Truth was, my Dad-in-law hadn’t so much as broken chicken legs at a Mafia banquet.

That single of bottle of Laphroaig set the tone not only for my marriage, but also my relationship with my father-in-law, for years to come.

Duane Swierczynski is the author of The Wheelman, a crime novel, as well as two books on booze: The Perfect Drink For Every Occasion and The Big Book O' Beer.

***

Booze and Banjos
by Tribe

Bill C. Malone, in his seminal history Country Music, U.S.A., notes the "moral dichotomy" present in country music: "[t]he rural South's reputation as the home of both corn whiskey and Prohibition, and the land of hell-raising good old boys and God-fearing fundamentalists...." Of course, "corn whiskey" and "hell-raising" are just variations on the theme.

And I'll drink to that.

After all, country music reached its stylistic zenith with its influential Honky Tonk branch, and its accompanying ethos of whiskey and women, and lots of it. Aside from the Hank Williams death-wish mythos, Honky Tonk generally called for its adherents to exalt in the race to reach the bottom of the glass.

Just listen to Ernest Tubb "drivin' nails in [his] coffin everytime [he] drink[s] a bottle of booze." He doesn't sing that with even a hint of sadness or regret. He sings it matter of fact, because he's accepted his fate. So he invites us to stomp along with him to the bitter end.

But still, sometimes the booze just isn't enough, as Merle Haggard reminds us in "Tonight the Bottle Let Me Down." Haggard is beyond the joyous fatalism of Tubb's "Drivin' Nails In My Coffin." The whiskey is usually a reliable tool to drown the senses and get her away from Old Hag's mind. Tonight though "the bottle let [him] down and let [her] memory come around...."

Yet, Haggard is drunker than he lets on, because instead of the booze making him forget, it just intensifies the memories. It's not depressing though, as anyone who has ever lived through a drunken sing-a-long to this tune blaring on the jukebox can attest.

Nevertheless, it's not a party for everybody all the time. Johnny Cash shows that in "Sunday Morning Coming Down." All we can feel is pity for Johnny when he wakes up Sunday morning, has his beer breakfast and "fumble[s] through [his] closet and [finds his] cleanest dirty shirt." The pathos expressed here is the most emotionally devastating that can be encountered in popular music.

Women aren't immune to the perils of liquor. If anything, the consequences are more dire. Loretta Lynn realizes that the worst thing for a woman is to be a honky tonk girl. As Lynn sees it "[a]ll he ever gave [her] was a reason to go bad" and she's ashamed at where her heartbreak has led her. She ends "I'm a Honky Tonk Girl" with what are probably the saddest lines in all country music: "So turn that jukebox way up high, and fill my glass up while I cry, I've lost everything in this world, and now I'm a honky tonk girl."

Alcohol and country is by no means a contemporary phenomenon. The links between country music and the desire for mind-altering substances run deeper still, and reach back to America's birth.

One of the oldest, if not the most popular, of the old fiddle tunes that came over from Britain and took root in Appalachia is "Soldier's Joy." While the lyrics don't make a whole lot of sense, there's no mistaking the sensibility behind the phrase "it's twenty-five cents for the morphine, fifteen cents for the beer, twenty-five cents for the morphine, to take me away from here." It's debatable whether "Soldier's Joy" is a reference to army payday or the opiate, but to listen to the Skillet Lickers' raucous 1929 recording, with war whoops and the crazed fiddlin' of Gid Tanner and Clayton McMichen, is to wonder if the extra ten cents for the strong stuff is indeed the cause for jubilation.

It's no wonder the fiddle was always considered the Devil's instrument by the Evangelists.

But the point of the floating lyrics of "Soldier's Joy" isn't so much the availability of morphine as the fact that a cheaper alternative is always available. Judging from the fine time the Skillet Lickers sound like they're having on "Soldier's Joy," not to mention the reputation they cultivated as whiskey-makers and drinkers, it would be no surprise that Gid and the boys were properly stoked by the time they arrived at the studio.

Side by side with the old mountain fiddle tunes an array of banjo tunes developed from the old British-Scot ballads and African-American blues. While the original fiddle tunes are by their nature played fast for dancers and generally intended for revelry, much of the solo banjo music was darker in tone and theme.

There's no better, or more grim example, than Dock Boggs' 1927 recording of "Country Blues." Boggs, described by Greil Marcus as sounding "as if his bones were coming out of his skin every time he opened his mouth," did his own share of moonshining.

"Country Blues" is extraordinary, not only because of the sheer incandescence of Boggs' performance, but for the sordidness of its story. We don't find out until half-way through the tune that the singer is in jail, and a haunted one at that. Before that we hear the story of a weekend of drinking and loose women told in disjointed scenes.

After the singer's revelation of his situation, the remainder of the tune is familiar to any Twelve-Stepper. Dock Boggs nearly incomprehensible mountain ramblings recognize that the only out is death, which he anticipates when he asks the good people to "go dig a hole in the meadow...go dig a hole in the ground."

Even though life might be shit in the here and now, Boggs' knows that things will be better once its all over: "Give me corn bread when I'm hungry, good people, corn whiskey when I'm dry, pretty women a-standing around me, sweet heaven when I die."

A jihadist couldn't wish for better.

I don't know if Homer Simpson is a country music fan. But when he reflects to note that alcohol is "the cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems," believers in the music know exactly where he's coming from.

Tribe's fiction has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Plots With Guns, Thrilling Detective, Plots With Guns: A Noir Anthology, Crimespree Magazine and the Fuck Noir anthology. Tribe maintains the flash fiction site at Flashing In the Gutters.