Barrett's Mixology: Fog Blasters

By John Prago | Friday, February 11, 2005

Ingredients: bourbon, gin, vodka, rum, Welchade, grapefruit juice, club soda, Collins mix, lemonade, and water.

Stir liquids together in a large urn, allocating approximately 350 ounces of alcohol (to taste) to 800 ounces mixer to 3.4 gallons of water. Best if consumed with friends and acquaintances, as this hardly describes the average personal serving.

I'd spent the autumn of 1982 overseas on the continent, where on the crowded thoroughfares various down-on-their-luck gents would pass out handbills to passersby, advertising the latest specials at the eateries and similar elsenot. Other fellows would stroll around in sandwich-boards promoting similar opportunities. We often discussed how humiliating it would be for these people if they managed to train gorillas or monkeys to fill the same function.

Later, back across the Atlantic, I filled a stint of gainful employment as a secretary, for reasons that are better left unsaid. The place of employment was stultifying, hopelessly inefficient, and unspeakably dull—needless to say, I had joined up with a college bureaucracy, and—sad to say—my job could have easily been filled by one of those can-do British primates.

Still, the expectations of my superiors were so low that I was regularly lauded for ably performing tasks that any normal person could easily do—answering phones, filling appointments, getting work done on time, gradually ferrying papers from one side of the desk to the other, that sort of thing. After completing one such simplicity, I received an e-mail message that read, "Bravo. You are good." I spent several minutes pondering whether or not one of the 'o's was a typo.

I was just some sleazebag trying to pass myself off as a respectable, put-together member of society, and generally succeeding spectacularly—if I do say so myself. By Friday afternoon, though, I had usually had just about enough of the workweek pretense, and stole off into the night looking to get dead-drop drunk. It was usually an easy thing.

One warm evening I found myself in a local establishment that is best again unnamed. The roaring intensity of the event was notable, mainly on account of the stiff concoction served to guests. I understand the circumstances of the evening only in foggy terms, and the fog grew more and more impenetrable with each sip. Soon everything went black in a great galvanizing last hurrah.

Barrett's Mixology: Fog Blasters

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