She got in a taxi and disappeared into the traffic.
I hailed another and went back to Suan Plu Soi 6, Sathorn Road. I had the impression, or rather the intuition, that the Regency Inn Hotel still had something to tell me. Again I walked around before making up my mind to enter; if someone saw me, I thought, they might alert the true criminals (“but this isn’t going to be a crime story”).
This time, the young man I had seen before wasn’t at the reception desk. Instead, there was a woman my age, so I asked her if I could see room 301, which was still free. She handed over the keys. As I went in, I saw myself reflected in the closet mirror. I sat for a while on the bed, without thinking of anything specific. There was nothing new, only the dense air. This was all so unfair. Something dark seemed to be making its way through the air, without seeing reason, without listening to the words of a young man who had already known, before arriving here, what it was to suffer and be very alone.
I went back to my hotel and locked myself in my room. I wanted to read, to think, even to forget. To prepare myself for the following encounter. The next day I would go early to Bangkwang.
The time had come to start listening to him.
13. INTER-NETA’S MONOLOGUES
On days like these, dear internauts, I feel the need to do something intimate, to expose another small corner of my mind to your eyes. I’m going to talk to you about the liquid of purity and madness. The most important creation of the soul in alcoholic terms. Can anyone guess? You’re not even warm. Because it’s a drink that’s served very cold.
Like so many things in the world and in life, gin was invented in the seventeenth century (some say 1550, who is right?) by a distinguished member of the medical profession, the Dutchman Franciscus Sylvius de le Boë, and as he was a physician its original use — as you can imagine — was very different than the one we give it today: it was a diuretic. It helped us take a leak. De le Boë’s ambitious idea was to relieve constipation and stomachaches according to some, gallstones and liver complaints according to others, with a mixture of distilled barley, rye, and corn, and in order to increase its potency he added berries of juniper (French: genièvre; Dutch: genever) to the brew.
Did Shakespeare drink it? If De le Boë did indeed invent it in 1550, then old Will would have been in time. It’s highly unlikely that he never suffered from constipation or needed to provoke urination.
John Cheever wrote: “A lonely man is a lonesome thing, a stone, a bone, a stick, a receptacle for Gilbey’s gin, a stooped figure sitting at the edge of a hotel bed, heaving copious sighs like the autumn wind.”
When the recipe crossed the English Channel and reached the British Isles, at the time of William of Orange — who was Dutch, like Rembrandt and van Gogh and Rip Van Winkle and Heineken beer — the legend was born that the name genever came from Guinevere, the wife of King Arthur of the Round Table, an intelligent woman generous with her private parts, who cuckolded the king with Lancelot of the Lake. (I would have done the same, with a name like that!)
By the way, do you know why the Swiss don’t drink whiskey?
Because they have a lake of gin (Lake Geneva, get it?).
Before then, the English used to get plastered — what a crude word that is, how much more refined is se soûlaient la gueule—on pear liqueurs and French wines, but the closing of trade with France led to authorization being given for the distilling of grains native to the British Isles. When it comes to binges and benders, you have to be independent.
Gin was a “smash hit.” Two and a half million gallons in 1690, five million in 1727, and twenty-one million ten years later. With a population of six and a half million, that makes, let’s see, three and a half gallons a head per year! Not bad. Alarmed, in 1736 Parliament passed the Gin Act, levying high taxes on sales, thus restoring order and saying: “We’re Protestants! We have to defer gratification!”
The English say, with their English sense of humor: “There’s always someone trying to stop us from getting drunk,” but the producers continued bottling the stuff secretly and consumption increased. Bernard Shaw would say much later: “Alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life.”
In 1742, there were twelve thousand arrests. Faced with this landslide of prisoners — drunks sleeping it off in prison cells — Parliament lowered the taxes. Life is short and drink is long and plentiful. The producers went back to making legal gin, of excellent quality. The first to have a registered name, in 1749, was Booth’s, the oldest distillery in England.
As Frank Sinatra says: “Alcohol may be man’s worst enemy, but the Bible says love your enemy.”
It was normal to drink it without ice. Sometimes with a little sugar. Lord Byron said that gin and water was the origin of his inspiration. In a grim period it was recognized as the drink (not bitter but sweet) of the lower classes. Charles Dickens, being a puritan, denounced the “gin palaces.” Prime Minister Gladstone tried to limit its sale to certain bars and lost his seat. “I was buried under a torrent of gin,” he said.
The favorite son of gin is the dry martini, which takes us to the other side of the Atlantic.
Humphrey Bogart’s last words were: “I should never have switched from Scotch to martinis.” They were his doom, as they were for many elegant drunks with their tuxedos and their cigarette cases. A martini in the hand was a symbol of success in the country where success matters. We are in the United States, friends.
Someone once said that the martini was the only American invention as perfect as the sonnet. Is that possible? At the Tehran conference of 1943, President Roosevelt gave it to Stalin to try. Stalin looked at the glass, drank it cautiously, looked at his advisers, then licked his mustache and asked for more. Later, Nikita Khrushchev would say that the martini was the true “lethal weapon” of the United States.
“When I get to heaven I am going to ask St. Peter to take me to the man who invented the dry martini,” wrote William Buckley. “Just so I can say thanks.”
Who was that man? Not an easy question to answer.
There are three hypotheses. The “San Francisco theory” attributes it to the bartender Jerry Thomas, born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1825, who worked in the bar of the Hotel Occidental in San Francisco. In 1862 he published his Bartenders’ Guide, in which he includes inventions such as the Tom & Jerry and the Blue Blazer. Et voilà! In a later edition, in 1887 there appears a new cocktail called the Martinez. Martinez was a town in California and, according to the legend, Thomas made it for a man who was on his way to Martinez. “Very well, friend, this is a new drink I’ve just invented for your journey,” he said. Martinez became Martine, and then Martini.
But the citizens of Martinez have their own theory (the “Martinez theory”). It’s this: in about 1870 there was a bar owned by a Frenchman named Jules Richelieu, who had moved there from New Orleans. On one occasion a miner came in and asked for a whiskey. Richelieu filled his hip flask, but the man, on trying it, spat it out and cursed. Ashamed, the Frenchman is supposed to have said: “Wait, I’d like you to try something different.” He made a mixture and served it in a glass with an olive. The miner tried it, smiled, drank it all down in one go, and asked Richelieu: “What is it?” Richelieu replied: “It’s a Martinez cocktail.”
The final hypothesis (the “New York theory”) is that of a mysterious bartender named Martini di Arma di Taggia, an Italian immigrant, who worked in the bar of the now-defunct Knickerbocker Hotel in New York (on 42nd and Broadway). According to this version it was invented in 1912, and became popular because it was the favorite drink of John D. Rockefeller, a hypothesis supported by one of the best known experts on cocktails, the Englishman John Doxat, author of The World of Drinks and Drinking (1971).