Make Mine a Double: Why Women Like Us Like to Drink (Or Not)

By Way of Booze and Broccoli

153 stephanie k. hopkins ฀ t By Way of Booze and Broccoli One Woman’s Search for the Great American Dream From up here, nothing of Argia can be seen; some say, “It’s down below there,” and we can only believe them. The place is deserted. At night, putting your ear to the ground, you can sometimes hear a door slam. t Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities Working did to the trouble what gin did to the pain. t Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem West when I think about bars, I think about my dad. And cows. I think about my dad surrounded by cows. It’s one of those tricks of the mind, the way memory presses odd images together and makes them inseparable. I see a glass of scotch—the peaty, single-malt kind, like Laphroaig or Glenlivet, the kind that requires , for those in the know, a certain subtle tightening of the back of the throat to momentarily disengage the taste buds and engage the sense of smell. It’s one of my favorite party tricks: teaching people how to nose scotch. And every time I do it— every time I inhale the pungent fumes through my mouth, up my throat, and into my nose—I see cows. In my mind, they are brown and white and perfectly spotted . They’re chewing that sideways way that cows do. My dad has woken up to the surprise of them. When he went to sleep in his Westfalia van in the middle of the night, in the middle of a field that seemed just a field, after a long, satisfying day of flyfishing , he thought he would wake up early enough to continue his solitary journey west. He didn’t expect cows, and he certainly 154 t s t e p h a n i e k. h o p k i n s didn’t expect so many of them. But there he is, in a sea of them, unable to open the van’s doors or move even an inch. The bar is not far from the field. Or it is very far. In this wide expanse, who can tell distances anymore? It waits for local men, promising ritual and regularity. It waits for outsiders like my dad, as well, offering the comfort of continuity—this could be any bar, with its weathered wood, its dim lighting, the gentle creak of an oak floor—alongside the adventure of the new. Who is the man who enters the bar, backlit sun casting his face in shadow as he opens the door? Maybe he is someone’s father , someone’s husband. But today, he is as I see him, drawn from stories and a young girl’s imagination: fearless explorer of the Wild West, New England schoolteacher turned cowboy, American hero, bovine king. It is over scotch that he tells the story, and it is over beer and whiskey that strangers listen. There is a hush across the bar as he recounts the way he bumped each cow over and over—gently— with his fender for hours, until one by one they inched out of his way. You can hear glasses clink in the wake of the listening, maybe the low hum of sports on tv. Even the bartender leans in to hear this one. Most likely, there’s a joke at the end of the story, not an elaborately plotted one, but a short pun: “And that is why it is best to not kowtow to one’s fears . . .” The man who walked into this bar, in a small town in a big state very far away from where he lives, who has spent the last few weeks traversing river and road without cell phone or gps, is at once soft-spoken and commanding, kind to animals and people alike, though capable of throwing a punch if necessary. He is not afraid to travel alone, nor enter an unknown bar, nor abandon himself to a geography greater than him. He drinks scotch and weaves stories, and he is exactly the kind of man this adolescent girl wanted to be. By Way of Booze and Broccoli t 155 The Boys’ Club Don Draper, self-made advertising man from Mad Men (Matthew Weiner’s series about 1960s Madison Avenue advertising executives and the women who love them, bed them, and try to be them), sips scotch at his desk...