Drinking Adult Beverages In Key West

 

By C.S Gilbert

 

To most visitors and to many locals, Key West embraces a culture of alcohol consumption. Next to water sports comes drinking, if not as sport (and sometimes competition is indeed included) but as entertainment and as accompaniment to entertainment. It’s a party culture, and I generally approve.

 

 

My relationship to alcohol is a little different. I learned to smoke and drink in college because I was too chicken to try the other “adult” indulgences of some of my classmates: Pot and harder drugs, sex and picking up sailors from the Naval base — at Alameda, I think, but they frequented the most interesting bars and roller skating rinks in the S.F. Bay Area. (I tried to like pot, but it just gave me a wicked sore throat; still, I strongly feel it should not be criminalized at all, just regulated and taxed like alcohol.) It turns out I metabolize certain spirits differently that most other people; for most of my life, I never got the least bit tipsy on scotch and/or beer. In fact, I worked my way through graduate school at The Ohio State University (“Columbus: A drinking town with a football problem”) by drinking large, overconfident men under the table.

 

 

My gay drama department pal, David Lile, set up the bet: $25 to the winner, and the loser pays the bar bill. (This was a substantial sum in 1961-62.) We split the winnings down the middle; my rent was $40 a month. I never lost, although two guys drank me to a draw—both in private homes at about 9 a.m. after 10 or 12 hours of competition and conversation. On leaves home from Viet Nam in the early 1970s – he chose to do two tours with Air Force intelligence – my almost brother-in-law, Bob Meeker (his older brother, Don, was killed in the Army in 1965, cause for Bob’s exemption from that assignment, had he chosen to claim it) and I would just stay up all night, just drinking beer and talking.

 

 

One reason for my success is that I never got – still never get – hangovers. I experienced one doozy in 1967 in South Miami after a would-be seducer in a swimming pool enticed me to drink a bunch of different cocktails. I stayed sober enough to drive home to North Kendall Dr. but awakened with a killer headache and flippy stomach. I called him, furious, and demanded he come over and do something. He brought me an Alka-Seltzer, a remedy I’d only heard commercials for, but the “Plop, plop, fizz, fizz” worked. The lesson was “Never mix, never worry,” as Edward Albee so deftly observed in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”

 

 

Then, last month for my 75th birthday, my youngest son gave me a teeth whitening. I was skeptical but very pleased with the results (ask me to smile for you). I was told, however, that I shouldn’t drink tea, coffee or cola or eat foods with intense coloring—soy sauce, mustard, ketchup and the like—for at least 72 hours. They recommended totally clear liquids, even alcohol, so that was three nights without scotch or beer.

 

 

Checking the old liquor cabinet, I found half a big bottle of vodka, some gin still left over from last year’s 72-hour film challenge shoot (the winning “Wait till 3:30”) and of course lots of rum. Lots of friends drink rum. Vodka, tonic and lime was OK but I decided to try gin and tonic with lime (first time since 1959 at Harvard Summer School, but that’s another story) the next night. Not bad at all, but — whoda thunk it? – I woke up with a bit of a headache. Just a wee hangover, but –- so much for the gin. Next night, missing the company of a vacationing friend, I tried her favorite, rum, club soda and lime. It tasted nasty. (The dark rum might have been tastier.) Water was preferable. Then finally, feeling righteous, at happy hour on day four, I was able to return to my mainstay, Scotch on lots of rocks with a twist of lemon and a big, big water back.

 

 

Ahhhhhhhh. Perfection.

 

 

(Columnist’s note: for the next weeks, as I and my trusty 2007 Honda Civic Hybrid, BonnieBlue, wend our way up the northeast coast to visit people I love who haven’t gotten to Key West this year, I’ll be submitting an occasional Culture Vulture on the Wing. I hope it will be as interesting as way back when the daily paper paid me to file theater reviews as Citizen on Broadway. Stay tuned.)

 

 

That’s it for now. Gotta fly!

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