"Jeffrey Bernard Was Unwell, and Wonderful."

Twice previously, I've written about Jeffrey Bernard.

Jeffrey Bernard was unwell, but I'm feeling fine, thank you.

Got a Drinking Problem? "Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell."

The third time's bound to be the charm. For those doubting the ability of a reformed alcoholic to write sympathetically about another who never did, Bosley's account is a corrective. Whether there is glamour in drinking oneself to death can be decided by the reader. There was a time when it appealed to me. Now, not very much.

Jeffrey Bernard Was Unwell, and Wonderful, by Deborah Bosley (The Fix)

... His other regular watering hole and second home, The Coach and Horses, was around the corner from the Groucho on Greek Street, and had become something of a destination as people came along hoping to catch a glimpse of the legendary writer and drinker. Jeff had made a career and built his considerable notoriety around a life of excess but he wasn't just some drunk who made people laugh; he wrote with elegance and insight, was a cultured man with considerable knowledge of music and naval history, particularly his hero, Lord Nelson. He was complex and contradictory and though drinking often made him foul-tempered, he was capable of great charm.

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"How to Drink Like a Gentleman", or timeless wisdom about imbibing from H.L. Mencken.

Photo credit: Modern Drunkard

If you're unfamiliar with H.L. Mencken, more's the pity. All those who appreciate and cherish adult libations in their many, varied forms should be card-carrying Menckenites, if for no other reason than his polemics against the prohibitionist instinct in humankind.

Consider this quote.

Teetotalism does not make for human happiness; it makes for the dull, idiotic happiness of the barnyard. The men who do things in the world, the men worthy of admiration and imitation, are men constitutionally incapable of any such pecksniffian stupidity. Their ideal is not a safe life, but a full life; they do not try to follow the canary bird in a cage, but the eagle in the air. And in particular they do not flee from shadows and bugaboos. The alcohol myth is such a bugaboo. The sort of man it scares is the sort of man whose chief mark is that he is scared all the time.

H.L. Mencken, "Alcohol", Damn! A book of Calumny, 1918

Following is the link to an essay of Mencken's that I don't recall reading. First, the introduction and background information.

H.L. Mencken was a columnist for the Baltimore Evening Sun and editor of the American Mercury. This essay was originally published in Liberty Magazine on January 12, 1935.

From 1924 to 1950, Liberty Magazine published the work of such writers and public figures as Greta Garbo, Margaret Sanger, Babe Ruth, and Eleanor Roosevelt. Its weekly circulation reached 3 million. Today, the magazine is largely forgotten, but many of its pieces are being reissued in several collections available on Amazon. The above essay was republished with permission from the collection "Liberty on Drinking."

Enjoy the advice of a master.

How to Drink Like a Gentleman: The Things to Do and the Things Not To, as Learned in 30 Years' Extensive Research, by H.L. Mencken (Gawker)

... The physical and mental effects of alcohol, whether in large doses or small, are very simple. Physically, it slows down all the bodily processes, save maybe digestion, and produces a faint and pleasant drowsiness. And mentally it works in almost the same way. That is, it causes what the psychologists call a raising of the threshold of sensation. The external world retreats a bit, and its challenges become less insistent. The drinker is not so much disturbed as he was by what goes on around him, and so his reaction to it is more friendly and tolerant. And simultaneously he is not so much disturbed as he was by what goes on within his own head, and thus he gathers a sense of contentment and well-being.

On turning pro (1979-2011).

(Originally published in LEO in March, 2009 ... I've added two years to the tally)

This year marks the 32nd year of my professional beer drinking career.

The autumn of 1979 provided a familiar impetus for renouncing amateur status and turning pro. There was a messy breakup, and one morning during the worst of it my car suddenly veered away from the university’s parking lot in the direction of an adjacent package store. I wasn’t carded, and breakfast was two quart bottles of Colt ’45.

There was no looking back – except at those embryonic years of preparation, perpetually trapped in adolescence, but looking enviously at juicy adult privileges just around the corner.

Apart from wee nips taken during childhood from bottles of my father’s Oertels 92, my first real "cold one" was consumed at a junior high school party. Actually, four of us split a single can of Budweiser while hiding in the woods, safe from the prying eyes of the hostess’s parents, ostensibly attaining instant credibility by boasting of beer on our breaths and mimicking the outward appearance of drunkenness.

Later, like so many generations of New Albanians, my gang climbed another rung around the time that our first driver’s licenses were issued. Wheels meant easy access to the bountiful paradise of Louisville’s west end liquor stores, just down Vincennes Street and across the claustrophobic steel lanes of the K & I toll bridge.

Raging acne and social ineptitude precluded my being chosen as the one to go inside Liken’s or the Corner Store. Consequently, I was at the mercy of my companions’ tastes in beer, and this was problematic, because at this early stage of my palatal development the "flavor" of a beer was the single biggest impediment to ingesting its desired alcohol. My friends liked Sterling and Pabst. I didn’t, but they were doing the heavy lifting of acquisition. Being in no position to argue, I learned to adapt by chilling. The colder the beer, the less “flavor” it had, and the more I could drink of it. Accordingly, my mission in life became Styrofoam cooler maintenance – to nurture it, to protect it from harm, and most importantly, to keep it filled with ice.

But in high summer the cans got warm very quickly. Crammed into the back seat of a late model junker, and pulling the tab on an ice-cold can straight from the ice, I managed to down the first frozen gulps before being overwhelmed with the dismaying recognition that in spite of all reasonable precautions, the can still contained rapidly warming Sterling or Pabst.

Chugging made me gag. What to do?

A sufficient interval would pass, enough to encourage a carload’s presumption that the warm and thoroughly vile can in my hand had been emptied, and then the magical time would arrive for throwing it out the window. This called for consummate skill. In the humid still of a hot summer evening, misjudging the distance from the open window of a moving car to the muffled cushion of a grassy rural roadside meant disgrace if a loud "thump" echoed through the valley as the half-full can struck unrelenting pavement.

The verbal abuse to follow was not at all good-natured. After all, hadn’t we driven all the way to Louisville to spend every last dime on beer?

And so it came to pass that in this manner, slumped shamefully in the back seat trying desperately to choke down a warm Sterling, I resolved to become a better beer drinker than all of them. Granted, the precise meaning of “better” remained unclear, but as the others began to plan their careers in physics, cosmetology, and insurance sales, I worked at developing a feel for the generic concept of beer, which I came to understand as light-bodied and usually bastardized when compared to the golden continental lager that inspired it, and a taste for its flavor, or at least those discernable qualities differentiating it from cola and orange juice.

After turning pro, these youthful stumbles were brushed aside in favor of broader experiences. It was hard work to progress from the degradation of Schaefer "Weekender" 30-packs to the sublime pinnacle of Belgian Trappists and American Barley Wines, but at least those swill-soaked years of my youth were not wasted.

Or were they?

Daytime beers are keen.

In the fall of 2007, my beercycling trio concluded a Friday spent peddling from the Czech border southward toward the Danube River. Just after lunch, we rode into a town with a railhead where we intended to board a train and sag into Tulln, situated to the south on the river, but first there was a matter of restorative food and beverage – a bowl of goulash, a beer and post-ride analysis.

We readily located tasty victuals at a local family-run restaurant. There was a friendly waitress willing to tolerate our halting attempts at speaking German, world news on the television and a warm, inviting atmosphere for stew and refreshment. As we ate, three schoolchildren stopped by the bar – for gargantuan ice cream sundaes, and no one batted an eye.

In America, a do-gooder would have called 9-11. Fortunately, we were in Europe.

We paid and rolled down the street to a smaller neighborhood tavern to kill a few more minutes before departure. It was called Rick’s, and the barflies were chatting, smoking and conversing. Sports coverage was on the tube. Two mudcaked workingmen were medicating, and while they may have been kicking back at the conclusion of a long day, I got the impression that their drinks may have constituted break time between ditches.

How many times have I witnessed and enjoyed such a tableau in what I consider my natural habitat, the corner watering hole?

When you’re a tourist, it is a blessing to experience complete detachment from the normal routine, and to have a beer when and where you like while observing the normal everyday routines of others. If the act requires another beer or even three, it doesn’t matter if the ensuing nap takes you through the afternoon.

I thought about these matters last week during the course of an afternoon stroll from my home into the downtown business district of New Albany, which slowly is reviving after a long, moribund period. My path took me past the Bistro New Albany at 2:30 p.m., as Chef Dave and Graham were on break, having a smoke, waiting for the eatery’s dinner reopening at five. I had a beer, and realized that not long ago the choice wouldn’t have been available. It felt better than fine to have just one, then resume the walk and pick up where I’d left off at home.

It felt like a real city for once. Now if we can do something about the death of the passenger train …