Mixology

“Education” by Molly Phalan

Jamie Mulligan hung her award for Canada’s Best Bartender next to the impressive row of single malt whisky bottles. Her boss Bobby Pale, the owner of Halifax Nights, had blasted out her win on all the social media, and expected the hole-in-the-wall tavern between the Citadel and the docks to explode with new patrons. Jamie knew better. But the title of this year’s Master Bartender was enough for her, for now. It justified the long slide out of Dalhousie University and into a profession her parents still considered questionable.

She actually preferred the title “mixologist” rather than bartender, and since that admittedly pretentious title had caught on in recent years she felt justified in putting it on her resume. In her mind it connected the job with her high school chemistry class, which she now remembered as her favorite, even though she had majored in Communications during her short tenure at Dalhousie. As far as the competitions for “exhibition flair,” with choreography and musical routines, she dismissed them as showy nonsense, but she had been forced to learn some “working flair” for many of the big bartending prizes. Of course, they were not big monetary prizes. They barely covered her expenses to travel to Toronto or Montreal for the competitions. But the honors, especially this one, were the reward. Or rather, they were confirmations of the feeling she had inside, of her mastery of the craft, of her passion for the art and science of mixing drinks.

She had first felt this passion when, working late one night, she had invented the “Javelin.” It was really just a gin and tonic with lime and crushed lavender in the correct proportion. It was the name that had caught on, the combination of “gin” and “lavender.” The “Gint” that followed was not so well-received. Nevertheless, she had become hooked by the process of creating new drinks, and had gone on to great success inventing signature cocktails for Halifax Nights. She had also branched out, or rather back, and become a leading expert on drinks of Canada’s colonial period, like hot flip. This was the perfect drink to demonstrate “working flair,” because it actually required two dramatic steps. She half-filled one extra-large mug with strong but not bitter ale mixed with molasses and rum, then added cream and two uncooked eggs. This alone received gasps from the audience. She sloshed the first mug back and forth with another large tankard until the mixture frothed. And then, as the piece de resistance, she took a red hot poker, called a “hottle” or “loggerhead,” out of the oven and shoved the end of it into the mug. It burned the molasses, cooked the eggs, and bubbled the liquid, giving a unique, if slightly bitter taste. After grating nutmeg over the top, she would serve it to the amazed customer or contest judge, and hope that the person liked the rather burnt flavor as much as the Canadians of the 1700s did.

Halifax Nights was not the most expensive or high-class bar in Nova Scotia, but it was certainly not the worst. With a long marble bar and beautiful maple walls and furniture, it was probably the best bar in the province fifty years earlier, under a much less dramatic name. The wood was now a bit worse for wear, and the dramatic name hid a very ordinary tavern rather than a nightclub, which was sometimes the expectation of incoming patrons. Two years previously the bar began offering more “modern” English Pub fare, which at first decreased Jamie’s role, since most people just wanted beer with their truffle-dusted Scotch Egg. But after she had won the all-Nova Scotia award last year, she had convinced the ecstatic Bobby to put her most demanded specialty cocktails on a small flip menu at each square table. “Flip on the flip,” he had chortled with glee.

And now Jamie had achieved her dream, though she still toyed the idea of competing with bartenders in the States or England. Of course, she would continue to experiment with new cocktails, and work on perfecting the old ones. Her latest experiments involved some of the new breeds of flavored vodka and Labrador tea. She wiped off the marble bar absently, running through combinations in her head. Polish bisongrass vodka might work. She wrote it into her small notebook for future orders.

“Give me a spot, love.” The heavy wooden door creaked on its hinges as one of her regulars came in, an older man with a white mustache and tweeds straight out of a BBC period piece.

“Evening, Ben.”

“That’s Sir Ben to you, love,” he joked. “Now, what have you been working on?”

Ben often acted as her tester, having a nearly impeccable sense of taste when it came to liquor. He was one person, at least, that did come to Halifax Nights specifically for her creations.

“Nothing today.” She unsuccessfully tried to draw his attention to the award. “But I can whip something up just for you.”

“That would be great.”

Jamie turned to the giant chemistry set, kept well-stocked with imported wonders from all over the world. Her fingers tingled with the joy of this moment, when the creativity of her job began to bubble like hot flip. There was nothing, and soon there would be something. Something new. She pulled out agave syrup, white Cuban rum, liquorice bitters, grapefruit, and a bottle of sriracha from one of the tables, and got to work.

A few minutes later Ben sipped her attempt. “It’s all right,” he said. “Not bad. Won’t be winning any competitions with this, though.”

Jamie smiled. He had noticed.

When her shift was over at 2 a.m., she put on her parka and hunched out into the wind. It was still autumn, but the nights had already dropped below freezing and the leaves whipped in the wind swirling off the North Atlantic. She trudged back to her apartment building through empty streets, taking the elevator, opening the door, and getting her face licked by her big white husky, Edmund. She grabbed the leash. “Let me catch my breath, buddy,” she chuckled.

After another twenty minutes in the bitter air, watching Edmund frisking around the North Common, she collapsed on her futon in the studio apartment with a happy dog curled by her side. Nothing on the telly at this hour, but she needed to calm down before sleep, so she went to her egg-crate shelves of books and picked one out, Master Barkeeps of the British Isles. When she had first fallen into the profession seven years ago she had learned from other bartenders, of course, but had also began studying privately, throwing herself into the subject in a way she never had in college classes. Now she had over two hundred books on the art and science of serving alcoholic beverages, many full of notations and recorded successes and failures. Flipping through Master Barkeeps, she found her favorite chapter and began to read, sliding the back of the futon down to make the bed, pulling up a comforter and hugging Edmund.

Just before noon she woke, ground coffee beans, and a set a percolator on the stove. While it hissed and popped she took Edmund out, grabbed a croissant at the local bakery and returned to the apartment. She had four hours before her shift, and spent them practicing yoga and brewing several pots of Labrador tea, which she poured into lidded mason jars and packed into a duffel bag. She took Edmund on a longer walk, down past her old digs at Dalhousie, where he played in the leaves and drew excited admiration from the students. After chasing a squirrel, he fell in love with a passing Labradoodle. A male Labradoodle. She chuckled, but as the other dog returned Edmund’s affections, she sighed a little. No one ever went home with the bartender, but sometimes she wished they did.

Back at the small apartment she dressed in a standard all-black outfit, complete with skirt, and examined herself in the mirror. Hot, she thought, and then pulled on her black runners with orthotic pads. Not so hot. But practical. And no one could see her feet anyway. She put on her parka, hugged Edmund, and slouched outside and around the citadel toward Halifax Nights.

She had been there for three hours, pushing her Labrador tea-vodka concoction on likely patrons when a small man in a Canadian oil company uniform crashed through the front door and onto a bar stool, sending a pint glass skittering to the floor. A waitress, Imogene, looked at him uneasily, and mimed a cell phone call to Jamie. She shrugged and held up a finger to signal wait. The oil company man began talking happily to the older man next to him, a serious-looking government official of some sort in a three-piece suit. Jamie turned to other customers, not wanting to encourage the already drunk man, but he soon stage-coughed and leaned across the bar. “A nice big glass of Canadian Club, my dear. Neat.”

She winced. Blended whisky. And nothing to do with it but pour it in the glass. She served the man, then several others, until he leaned across again.

“Another, and one for my friend here.” He clapped an arm around the government official, who Jamie had seen before at the bar but didn’t know well, a quiet regular.

Jamie nodded but took her time getting the drinks. The suit had been drinking steadily since 5:30, and had only eaten a plate of cod fritters. Who knows what Mr. Uniform had had before he arrived. She hated this. Hated it. Why couldn’t people have more self-control? Why was this man’s problem her responsibility? Luckily, she didn’t have to do the heavy lifting, because they shared a bouncer with three other bars on the block. He usually kept his post at Charley’s Point, a more likely candidate for rough housing and sloppy drunks, complete with damaged chairs and gouges in one wall. Jamie got Imogene’s attention with a wave of one hand, and nodded when she took out a cell phone. After seven years she could sense the impending explosion. Only a matter of time.

The enormous bouncer, Frank, sidled in a few minutes later, and sat by the door. Soon enough, the dialogue rose to a volume at which Jamie couldn’t stop hearing it, and neither could anyone else. “Quebec is terrible, man. I been there, and the people are just unfriendly as hell. We should just push all those Frenchies into the St. Lawrence. They don’t want to be here, anyway.”

She casually walked up to the two men. “We can’t have that in here, guys.”

Uniform looked at her in shock. “I can’t speak my mind?”

“No, no, just keep it down.”

The Suit nodded and sat back. Uniform looked at her quizzically through tired eyes. She walked back to the other end of the bar and drew another patron a lager.

The two men were a quiet for about a minute before the voices rose again.

“I can’t say I’m with you on all this, my friend.” Suit waved his drink dramatically.

Uniform peered at him, and knocked his drink on the marble. “You know what? You look a little bit French yourself, my friend.”

“Well,” Suit raised his voice even louder. “My mother is from the Gaspésie, actually.”

“Oh, man, I can’t believe it. Fooled again. I thought you people didn’t want to speak English.” Uniform squeezed his eyes shut and stood up shakily. “Why does it always have to be so difficult?”

“Listen, guys, I’m cutting you off now. Maybe you can take this discussion elsewhere.”

“Why don’t you take yourself to hell,” the oil man told her sharply.

The tavern went dead quiet, as if taking a long breath. A couple of regulars in the back, Royal Canadian Navy men, stood up. Jamie bit her lip.

“You Newfies. All stupid as dirt.” Suit stepped off his stool, turning toward the bathroom.

With a cry Uniform stepped toward him, knocking his glass to the floor, but Frank was ready. He stood up and interposed himself between the two. Uniform looked up in surprise and tried to push the bouncer out of the way, but Frank easily caught him and swung him to the floor. The man kicked out, knocking over a chair and clipping the bouncer’s leg. Wincing in pain, Frank pinned the man’s right hand behind his back and sat on him. “Calm down, buddy, and then we’ll get you home.”

She glanced at the other customers’ shocked faces, noting a Quebecois couple at the window table, and though she knew better, decided to try to defuse the situation before the man was out the door. “Nothing to see here, folks,” she joked. “Just a little dose of poison with your evening meal.”

“Oh, you little French bitch!” Uniform struggled a bit, but seemed to know he was outmatched. “You’re just like all the rest.”

“Irish-Canadian, actually,” Jamie snapped automatically. “Ten generations.”

“Ten generations of bitches!”

Frank jumped up and in one swift move dragged the man out by his arms. The door swung shut, but abuse continued to leak through the walls. The official in the three-piece came back from the bathroom and looked keenly at Jamie. He was drunk, perhaps, but not as drunk as she had thought.

What is it?” She sighed. “What can I get you, I mean? On the house.”

The man sat down on his stool, his face impassive. “More poison, of course.”

“What’s that?” she asked. “You don’t mean-”

”I like that word a lot, yes I do, but it was used incorrectly. Isn’t it more accurate to say that that young man there has been poisoned. So, I’d like some of that, please.”

“He was drunk already…”

I’m speaking abstractly. Or is it concretely? This…” He held up the uniformed man’s last glass. “…is poison, sure enough. Actual poison. And your job is to make that poison taste good.” He sat down on the stool again. “So, give me some sweet, sweet poison, and be snappy.”

A few of the other patrons gaped at him, but the rest had already turned back to their small plates and beers. Jamie stood, staring blankly, wondering whether to call Frank back inside. Dully, she mixed the cocktail she had made for the official earlier in the night, a colonial “Rattle-skull,” dark porter mixed with rum, lime juice, and nutmeg.

“Thank you,” he said, sipping it. “That’s good stuff. I don’t mean to make you uncomfortable.” He held both his hands up in the air theatrically. “But you are good at this.”

“Thanks,” she muttered.

“Good at poisoning, I mean.”

She nodded to Imogene to get Frank, whom she could see through the front window bundling the uniformed man into a taxi.

“My brother was poisoned by this stuff, by someone like you, and now I am slowly dying, too. And that young man, he is already on his way. It’s astonishing how this stuff is legal.” He peered at the greenish liquid in his glass. “Astonishing.”

Frank and Imogene were conferring by the door and watching the man. But he was calm, his voice was not loud, and he was a regular at the bar. Frank sat down to watch, and Imogene went back to work carrying small plates out of the kitchen and clearing the empty tables.

“Have you ever seen someone get the shakes? Jaundice? Kidney failure? Me, either. My brother got drunk and crashed his truck into a bog on Cape Breton Island.”

“So, technically, the poison didn’t kill him,” Jamie joked, trying to lighten the man’s mood, defuse the bomb set earlier by the uniformed drunk.

“Technically, technically. That’s right. Technically there are no laws against what we are doing here. But technically you are poisoning me, and all these other fine gentlefolks. Technically.” He stood up, and Frank did, too. The man glared at him. “And you, sir, are here to make sure that once we are full of poison, like rats, your job is to throw us into the garbage.”

Jamie turned away, brushed her face with a hand, and walked into the ladies’ room. When she came back the man and Frank were both gone, and a couple at the far end of the bar was waving for the bill.

In the weeks that followed Jamie couldn’t shake this incident. Not the uniformed man – she was used to that sort of problem. But she obsessed over her one-sided conversation with the suit, arguing with the man clearly and righteously every night, scoring all the points. She talked about the enjoyment of life, which was ruined by the few chemically dependent folks in a world that makes those chemicals available. That alcohol only brought out the good or bad character that was already there. It was a necessity in a hard world. It was medicinal. She cited Ernest Hemingway, saying that a fine beverage was useful to change thinking, a way to end the day. She discoursed on how the rise of civilization had coincided with the rise of fermented beverages, how they were as necessary as water or bread. But after all those imaginary conversations, that word: poison. It was too powerful, too precise. It went right through her.

At the bar she served drinks robotically, often flinching when they were gulped down quickly. She even started a fight with Bobby that would have meant the end of a less qualified employee. “Take a few days and cool off,” he told her, pointing at the award. “This is the only reason I’m not throwing you out.” She looked for comfort in her books, and when they didn’t help she ordered new ones. One appeared in a brown package left by the postal service at her apartment door: Master Poisoners of the Middle Ages. Despite the promising title, it was a slow read. Edmund gave her plenty of comfort, but she really needed someone to talk to, or rather someone to talk back to her. She tried calling her parents in Yarmouth, but they told her what they always told her, to re-enroll at Dalhousie. She told them she couldn’t, because she had failed out, and they tried to ignore this, but finally pled with her to apply to other universities, maybe in New Brunswick? Toronto? The States?

Finally, almost a month after the incident, she brought it up, hesitantly, to her best customer, who was sitting in his usual spot at the end of the marble bar, sipping her newly perfected Labrador tea, lemon, and vodka mixture, tentatively called Labrodka.

“What do you think, Ben? Is this all an elaborate scheme to feed people poison?” She tried to chuckle to make the comment sound like a joke, but her voice caught in her throat and she looked around at the other customers nervously, as if she had admitted some terrible secret.

Ben raised his glass and peered at it. “There’s no scheme. It’s clearly poison.”

“What? You think?”

“But who said a little poison isn’t good for us? Isn’t it exactly what we need sometimes?” He smiled and smoothed his white mustache. “Everyone needs to die a little in order to really live.”

She turned away with a forced chuckle. This was merely a version of the Hemingway defense. But later that evening she acknowledged that it also harmonized with the philosophy of one group of religious zealots she had read about in Master Poisoners of the Middle Ages: kill in order to save. She continued to mull over Ben’s words, mixing them together with the words of the official, with her own beliefs and needs, creating a new combination, a new philosophy.

A few nights later a young couple slid onto the stools at the end of the bar. They held hands, and Jamie caught snatches of a conversation about a possible house in Clayton Park. She watched the pair out of the corner of her eye, and then turned to her giant chemistry set. Her hands felt for bottles, seeming to smell the right combinations through the skin. One of her latest simple syrup mixes went into a bit of Chambord, jumped into a small glass of mescal, and swirled into a larger glass of pisco, which was in turn corkscrewed by a spiral of sour lime juice, and adorned with two plump sour cherries.

She put the drinks in front of the couple, who looked up in surprise.

“It’s always good to see young love.” Jamie smiled, her eyes glinting in the low light. “On the house.”

Eric Lehman is the author or editor of seventeen books, including The Quotable New Englander, A History of Connecticut Food, The Foundation of Summer, A History of Connecticut Wine, Connecticut Town Greens, and Afoot in Connecticut: Journeys in Natural History, nominated for the Pushcart Prize. His biography of Charles Stratton, Becoming Tom Thumb, won the Henry Russell Hitchcock Award from the Victorian Society of America, and was chosen as one of the American Library Association's outstanding university press books of the year. His revolutionary history Homegrown Terror: Benedict Arnold and the Burning of New London was a finalist in two categories of the Next Gen Indie Book Awards, and was used in a question on Jeopardy. And his novella, Shadows of Paris, was the Novella of the Year from the Next Gen Indie Book Awards, a Silver Medal for Romance from the Foreword Review Indie Book Awards, and a finalist for the Connecticut Book Award.