My latest trick: in its entirety....
I like bourbon and coffee. More specifically, I like bourbon in coffee. To clarify even further, I’m not talking about Irish Coffee (although I love that too; besides, that’s Irish whiskey) or Spanish Coffee or any of those other cocktail coffees. No sweet cream; no *ugh* Bailey's; no flames; no spices. Nope, bourbon in coffee, that’s it.
Bourbon and coffee. Each, alone, is splendid. Together they are the epitome of simple sensuous decadence, two perfect things that when combined go beyond the event horizon of perfection.
"I take whiskey in my coffee 'cause it's cheaper than a meal
Not too healthy but it helps me to maintain an even keel."
--Whiskey In My Coffee, Stray Bullets
In the vast and dimly lit corridors of my youth, unobscured by the fog of age, there remains a clear memory of my very first taste of one of the simplest yet most profound of tastes: a shot of bourbon in a cup of piping hot coffee.
I can still command the precise feel of that taste memory. It was “Army coffee,” cooked in a battered aluminum percolator on a pot-bellied cast-iron stove, roughly ground and slightly stale from age, pimped with eggshells and a pinch of salt, lightly laced with chicory, and boiled down to a curious semi-sludge of bitter oils, and the bourbon was cheap aldehyde-laden rotgut from the lowest dust-covered grimy shelves of the liquor store. The combination should have been gruesome.
It wasn’t. It was sublime, the first introduction I had into the still not clearly understood mysteries of taste and sensory appreciation. How could such rough ingredients combine to create something as viscerally satisfying as this? How could the burn and bite of bourbon and the bitterly acrid oily reek of bad coffee complement each other so well?
Through all the roads I have taken I have maintained that inherent love of bourbon and coffee, in all its iterations. It was like the old saw about sex, the worst of it was still pretty damned good. Even if you had to wake up with the memory the next day.
My appreciation got better and my standards got higher. Bourbon got better. Coffee definitely got better and better and better. And though few things were constant in life, the combination of the two remained my lodestar and my comfort.
The prolific and talented writer, Lawrence Block, creator among other things of the superb Matt Scudder crime mysteries, wherein Scudder sinks into alcoholism, stays there for a while, then drags himself into sobriety and over gruesome obstacles and even more gruesome people to find a meaningful life, showed his understanding of the magical properties of bourbon and coffee when he had Scudder, in the depths of his addiction and his despair, maintaining himself with his preferred drink.
Easy to consume, for who questions a cup of coffee at any time of day or night? And endless cups are excusable, even acceptable. For Scudder, of course, it was a way of manipulating what people saw, and thought, about him, allowing him to maintain a façade of sobriety with clients who expected, even demanded, a sense of control and responsibility. Besides, he excused himself, he could be drunk and alert at the same time, so that was a bonus, ignoring of course the fact that as he was drinking to forget, to salve his conscience, he was at the same time drinking so he could remember and roil his mind in self pity without surcease, the alcoholic’s idea of endlessly punishing himself.
But that is drinking as a need, to punish and anesthetize, to desensitize the receptors of memory and anguish, to sever the synapses of cause and effect. What of drinking simply to experience and enjoy and appreciate? Ah, bourbon and coffee does that as well.
Take a mug of good coffee. Add a splash of good bourbon whiskey. Okay, maybe just a skosh bit more whiskey; gotta have just a little bite to it. Sip and feel the warmth, two kinds of warmth, the heat of the coffee and the soft mellow glow of the bourbon. Add sugar if you wish; I don’t because I like the pure contrast of coffee and whiskey. Don’t add milk or cream or creamer: that totally changes the combination, alters it to an entirely different thing, blurs the essence of both the bourbon and the coffee.
Just bourbon and coffee. Like a coat from the cold, as Jerry Jeff Walker sang. I bet Jerry Jeff was well acquainted with bourbon in coffee. It makes walking out of the warmth and light into a dark night of heavy rain with a stiff west wind in your face more bearable. Tilt your head forward, lift up your collar, and walk into the wind, because you’re okay, you can handle it, and you have some ways to go before the night is out.
