Authors: Tom Robbins

Tags: #Satire

B Is for Beer (11 page)

BOOK: B Is for Beer

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Travel-weary, but excited (well, Gracie, at least, was excited), they were welcomed to a roomy, colonial-style house in between the jungle and the sea. Surrounded by coconut palms, the house had a white stucco facade, a red-tile roof, and heavy brown shutters to hold back hurricane winds and the tropical 118

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sun. There were ceiling fans that kept mosquitoes off-balance and lulled nappers to sleep.

Outdoors, the air seemed as thick and sweet as chocolate cake batter; flavored by spice plants, scented with blossoms, stirred by the wings of neon-feathered birds, purplish bats, and butterflies the size of table-tennis paddles. At first, the Seattle girl took offense at the heat. She actually missed the drizzle—

or did she miss that “Other” that lay between the mist and the murk? (Between the chop and the suey?) It was always cool and dim in the house, however. Gracie especially liked padding barefoot along the ceramic tile floors.

She would have relished walking around birth-naked, but there were too many eyes. From the walls of every room small lizards constantly monitored human activities, and, moreover, Uncle Moe had acquired a parrot. A fat, cherry-lemonade-colored bird, it commanded a perch in the courtyard, occasionally squawking long sentences in Spanish. Within a week, Gracie had taught it to say “hi de ho.” The parrot seemed to enjoy the phrase as much as Gracie, uttering it with such frequency it just about drove everybody nuts.

While her departure had little or nothing to do with the hi-de-hoing parrot, shortly after Gracie and her mom moved 119

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in, Madeline Proust moved out. Her hot romance with Moe Babbano had cooled off (as, kids, hot romances often do), and she ’d come to miss the tortured feet of Seattle. Before departing, she generously offered to sign over the house to Moe. On one condition: he had to shave off his mustache.

She claimed it was for the benefit of society at large, since she, personally, would no longer be exposed to it.

The shaving ceremony was held in the courtyard. Pausing periodically to pronounce lines in Latin that nobody understood, Moe took an hour to scrape the melancholy growth, that electrocuted chickadee, off of his upper lip. “It ’s the end of an era,” he said solemnly. “Mustaches such as this come around once in a generation.” The rest of the party applauded when the terminated whiskers, laid out elaborately in a coconut shell, were buried beneath a jasmine bush.

With Dr. Proust gone and autumn on the way, homeschooling began in earnest for Gracie. Her mother taught her simple arithmetic and how to read and write in English. Uncle Moe instructed her in Spanish vocabulary, in philosophy, poetry, cool jazz, how the stars and planets got their names, and other subjects which, to her mind if not to his, had a hint of the Mystery about them.

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Gracie taught her uncle something, as well. Although Imperial beer was widely available, and the ol’ Moester consumed his share of it (he never once offered Gracie a sip, nor did she request one), he decided to brew some beer of his own. He purchased a sack of malted barley and set about cooking and fermenting it in a shack behind the house. Were it not for Gracie, who offered him helpful tips along the way, he might not have succeeded. Moe was astonished at her knowledge of brewing techniques.

“How do you know all this?” he demanded. Gracie merely shrugged. It did occur to her that of all people, her Uncle Moe would have accepted, understood, maybe even personally related, but when it came to her adventure with the Beer Fairy, her lips were forever zipped. (Should you travel to Costa Rica one of these days and run into a spunky little blonde with guitar-blue eyes, don’t start bugging her about pixies,
poofs
, and pilsners, she ’ll just turn her back and skip away.) For brewing, Moe used collected rainwater from a barrel. The water had run off of the shack’s tar paper roof. As a result, the beer he produced was black as night and had some kind of green moss growing on its surface. Whether it would have pleased the palate of vinegar eels is hard to say, but Moe 121

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declared it quite tasty. On the evenings when he drank it, he invariably saw UFOs.

If you quizzed her, Gracie would have answered that her life in Costa Rica was pretty good. At times, it came close to being glad and dizzy. For her seventh birthday (yes, a whole year had elapsed since fateful Number 6), she failed once again to receive a pink cell phone, and it appeared that she was destined to go through life without one. She didn’t get that puppy, either. But she did get a monkey.

She named the monkey Häagen-Dazs, but since no one present, not even the heavily educated Moe Babbano, could spell Häagen-Dazs, she soon changed its name to Hiccup. The two became rapidly inseparable. At last, the only child had a dance partner.

Out on the veranda, Gracie and Hiccup would perform cheerfully wild boogaloos, largely of Gracie ’s invention, although the monkey did contribute routines of its own.

Children from the area would gather to watch. Normally bashful, they’d sometimes break into giggle fits and shy applause. They’d bring gifts of coffee beans and bananas.

Usually, they’d scatter and hide behind trees whenever Uncle Moe ventured out onto the veranda to join in on bongo drums, 122

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hiding even though Moe wasn’t nearly as funny looking now that his facial hair had gone to mustache heaven. Or mustache hell.

Despite schooling and monkeyshines and trips to the beach, their time passed slowly in the tropics, passing in harmony with the creaky old wooden ceiling fans. Then something momentous occurred; something strange, dramatic, and completely unexpected. Karla and Moe fell in love.

Technically speaking, that isn’t entirely accurate. Karla and Moe didn’t fall in love, Karla and Moe discovered that they’d been secretly in love all along, had been secretly in love for years, had been in love so secretly that they’d kept the secret even from themselves, kept it locked away in the deep velvet vaults of their hearts. Now some force must have jimmied the locks.

(If somebody ever calls you a “weirdo” or a “nut job,” you should consider the possibility that he or she has a secret crush on you.)

In any event, on the eve of the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday, Gracie ’s mommy and uncle were married at a little thatched-roof shrine in the jungle. The groom wore his white suit, which had turned rather yellow from age, and read aloud a poem by 123

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a crazy dead Frenchman. The bride, who’d imprisoned her pretty feet in tight shoes for years, stood beaming in floppy straw sandals. Hiccup the monkey attended in one of Gracie ’s old dresses; the parrot, from the rear of the hut, squawked “hi de ho” incessantly; and, at the appropriate moment, Gracie squealed with such joy she nearly peed in her pants.

So, now you know. There they were. And did they live happily ever after? No, nobody ever does—at least not totally.

But whenever Karla was blindsided by bad days, as most of us are from time to time, she ’d make a point of refusing to take them too seriously, and that, dear reader, is the next best thing to everlasting happiness.

By the most narrow of margins, Costa Rica had elected a conservative president, and though Moe was worried that the enlightened little nation would now be led down the path of relentless, sordid moneygrubbing (which seems to be the principal activity of conservative societies everywhere), he was too wise to let politics spoil his ongoing honeymoon with Karla and with life.

For her part, on those rare occasions when her customary high spirits showed signs of taking a dive, Gracie, sooner or later, 124

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would remind herself of the parting words the Beer Fairy had whispered in her ear.

“We ’ll meet again someday,” the Beer Fairy had prophesied.

“The ordinary world is only the foam on top of the real world, the deeper world—and someday you and I will meet again.”

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

When Uncle Moe refers to Gracie ’s “monkey dance of life” he ’s riffing on a line from Jack Kerouac. I’d love to pour Jack’s ghost a beer—

although in life he seemed to prefer cheap red wine.

Preferences aside, I’m here to roll out a barrel of gratitude to the editorial brain trust on East 53rd Street, most particularly Daniel Halpern, Abigail Holstein, and the legendary David Hershey (with his special knowledge of the interpenetration of realities); a second keg of thanks to Barb Bersche and the talented folks at McSweeney’s; and yet another to the artist Leslie LePere, for whom every pencil, every pen is a baton, a wand, a bottle rocket, a customized ’51 Mercury he drives to town on Saturday nights.

Let me also lift a convivial mug to E. Jean Carroll, Phoebe Larmore, Alexa Robbins, David McCumber, Russ Reising, and Lee Frederick, among a handful of friends who assured me I could when other parties were warning that I couldn’t or shouldn’t, or wouldn’t bloody dare.

—T.R.

Also by Tom Robbins

Another Roadside Attraction

Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

Still Life with Woodpecker

Jitterbug Perfume

Skinny Legs and All

Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas

Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates
Villa Incognito

Wild Ducks Flying Backward

Credits

Cover and interior art © Les LePere Cover Illustrations by Les LePere/Cover design by McSweeney’s

Copyright

B IS FOR BEER. Copyright © 2009 by Tom Robbins. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Adobe Acrobat eBook Reader March 2009

ISBN 978-0-06-176836-1

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