Barrett's Mixology

By Emily Ghods | Thursday, September 27, 2007

California Merlot

Fill your wine glass to the brim, and drink alone.

He said I slurred my words. I bent my eyes up at him and then back down at my knife slicing through carrots. Mr. Elocution, my boyfriend, was, he believed, a Superhero who would, at the appropriate moment, relieve the world of evil and its facilitator, cheap California merlot. “It’s a fantastic job, isn’t it?” I kept my eyes sharpened on the cutting board and the carrot slices falling like soldiers off the blade of my knife. He couldn’t save them. “gib’me the peppers.” I reconsidered. “Please.” I was feeling guilty. “Give me the peppers please,” I thumped the refrain deliberately, and deliberately too pinched his thumb as I plucked the peppers from his burly hand and slid my rusty knife through the saucy red of the first pepper. I wasn’t always a mean drunk and very nearly trampled one foot on the other, measuring my own behavior against superman—the prohibitionist hero singularly committed to the non-fermentation of the fruit of the vine, and yet the very same dickship that made me drown myself in its juice when he was off breaking the balls of villainy. I was dizzy, but the tip-tip-tap of my knife forced my breath into the orchestra of the scene. He walked over to my side of the counter, staring at my shoulders, and I didn’t resist when he slid his fingers along my spine, up and down. As he pressed, I dug into the snapping peppers with more intensity. “You smell like the stem of a dying flower—green-wood,” he said as I turned to face him, my eyes still on the ground, my feet now on top of his, and the knife still in my hand. When he pushed his lugubrious body on mine, my lifeless limbs collapsed under his weight and the knife fell out of my hand, point down into my sandal. I wasn’t going any where, so I impressed my body against his even harder. I did not realize then what I know now: that peppers and tannins are a mercurial mix for a romantic, an intoxicating burn not to be competed with—hot, here, and high. He pushed me away and asked me if I had had a drink that night. I lied and he lived to fight another day.

Barrett's Mixology

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