Barrett's Mixology

By Nicholas S. Desai | Monday, May 9, 2005

Campari and Soda

1 part Campari bitters
1 part club soda

Serve in a highball glass over ice.

During my two-year bender following College, I often found myself in the most curious places for no apparent reason. I would drift in and out of waking life, and, like an infant, I saw each day with fresh eyes. One particular occasion found me stumbling into the Crystal City Hyatt, a monstrous building festooned with glittering atria and boring Death Star ornamentations. Not a 'hotel' in the traditional sense, this Hyatt served as a vessel for all sorts of unsavory conventions and meetings of suited, enterprising dullards and their reluctant accomplices. After surveying the creepily empty lobby, I stepped onto a downward escalator, absorbing the muzak and aching for refreshments. Several receptions were in full swing in the large 'ball-rooms' (had anyone ever really danced in them?) on the lower floors. The physical therapists served (non-alcoholic) punch; the public school bureaucrats, lemonade; environmental lawyers, gritty water; the fiscally-conservative bloggers, arrestingly weak Kool-Aid. The room labeled "Welcome Synergists" I skipped altogether.

I was ready to call the place a desert and move on, but then, on my way to the Men's Room, I spotted a manservant lugging a bottle of some dignified continental liqueur toward a previously unexceptional room. I followed him in and asked the group whether I could join their little wingding. They were a handful of middle-aged-to-old bookish types in dark suits seated around a table covered with a map of the world adorned with plastic markers taken from a Risk set. A phonograph in the corner played Also Sprach Zarathustra. The fellows were warm and gregarious at the outset, offering me a drink and a seat at the table, near the East Siberian Sea. We caroused, talked and partitioned the night away. After a few more deep sips, they promised me, quite cavalierly, 'Oceania,' an offer that I have yet to take up. The conversation drifted from U. Chicago faculty politics and The Public Interest to Trotsky and Nietzsche to something even more arcane. Most departed, and it fell to me and Wolfowitz to vanquish the remaining bottles of Campari. I awoke in that deserted room to the unrelenting whir of vacuum cleaners. Back on the Metro, I decided that I had had a good time and that once I kicked the habit, I would form a secret cabal of my very own.

Barrett's Mixology

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