The Water Into Whiskey

I’m not sure how other children hold on to the memory of a noncustodial parent. My father left us when we were so young, that it’s hard to remember any real attachment. So there isn’t much weight to his loss, and 25 years of not hearing from the man almost makes you feel like you were brought into this world immaculately. Of course, I know that’s not true. I would never have made the water into wine, for one thing. Tequila, more than likely. Or bourbon. You would be at church, and during the communion, you’d take a shot of Maker’s Mark. Attendance would skyrocket. That’s neither here nor there (Though where does that leave it? If it’s neither here nor is it there? Is there a place between here and there?)

Whiskey. The man liked whiskey. When he left, he hawked everything he could, save for an old oak whiskey barrel. It had been converted, not so tackily for the 70s, mind you, into a sort of toy box. The top of the barrel was fitted with a hinge, so that you could open it for your toys. There was still a nickel spigot screwed into the bottom that taught my toes endless midnight lessons about watching where you step.

It was the one link. So I kept it, even into adulthood. When I brought Alex back from Romania, it was probably the only thing of mine, few possessions that I had, that she didn’t absolutely adore. It may have had something to do with how I was using it. I kept it in the living room, next to the futon/couch/bed/desk/table/ironingboard, and used it to store spent beer cans, which in those days in Columbia fetched a nickel apiece when you returned them. I was 22.

The entire building was infested with roaches. It gets squeamish here, so be forewarned.

You should know this about me. I like bugs. I’m still very much a 5 year child who takes immeasurable pleasure capturing little creatures, examining them under the oversized plastic magnifying glass, and re-releasing them into the wild. I imagine they return to their families, wide-eyed with stories of being kidnapped by the superterrestrials and anally probed before their miraculous releases.

For the record, no creature has ever been probed in such a manner while under my protection.

Back to the roaches. I cannot bear to step on them. But my marching orders in those days were to exterminate, kill and destroy anything with the fool sense to share our conjugal spaces. I cannot bear to step on them, as I said, so I employed two weapons, neither of which were fear or surprise. The first was common household bug spray. This was fine for the hard to reach spaces, for allowing the creatures to crawl away and die later, away from the public view.

The second was a 6 inch barbecue lighter. Simply place the business end of the lighter near the little bug and pull the trigger. They perished almost immediately, almost mercifully.

One day they discovered my dad’s whiskey barrel. Oh, what men have in common with the creepy crawlies of the world. They adored the nearly spent beer cans, a few drops going a long way for the tiny insects. Alex and I watched TV together, this back in 1995, the last time we had cable, provided free of charge by the university. But we also watched steady traffic from the kitchen to the bottom of the whiskey barrel.

Feeling Alex’s disappointed gaze upon me, I opened the top of the whiskey barrel and unleashed a steady spray of aerosolized poison. At least 30 seconds worth. I closed the latch. That, should be that.

Twenty minutes later, the traffic unabated, I started to grow a little angry with the insects. Why wouldn’t they just die already? One stood just outside the bottom of the barrel, seeming to taunt me. “Your poison has no effect on us, my friend,” his antennae were signaling.

I reached for the barbecue lighter.

I pointed the end of the lighter against the head of the little creature at the bottom of the barrel. Which I had filled to the brim with all sorts of deadly inflammables. I pulled the trigger.

Those of you who have accidentally fired off your 12 gauge shotguns in the bedroom while cleaning them before the next day’s hunt will appreciate what happened next. It was literally, and I suppose figuratively, as though a roach bomb had gone off in our apartment. The Mother of All Roach Bombs. The blast blew me back a full meter, where I landed at Alex’s feet, both ears filled with an overwhelming tintinnabulation. Alex looked upon me, horrified. A haze filled the room.

I checked myself, sure that I would find puncture wounds filled with oaken splinters. But somehow, I had been spared. My father’s whiskey barrel held. The blast had blown the top of the barrel completely off, launching it vertically and actually halfway through the ceiling. The top then fell and landed on the floor, bringing with it a cloud of drywall dust.

“They win,” I remember saying. Alex said that I had something on my face. At first I thought they were wounds, but it was actually the remains of several bugs who, in fact, hadn’t won.

The next day, had you walked by our apartment, you would have seen a whiskey barrel sitting on the porch, ready to be carted off to the dumpster, completely unaware that this was the last bond that held me to my father. It nearly killed me. It was somehow strong enough to save my life.