Drink (67 page)

Although Pearl wines were representative of the general standard of Australian winemaking at the time, some producers were setting their sights far higher. Foremost among these was Max Schubert of Penfolds in Southern Australia. Schubert believed that Australia was capable of producing a truly great wine that might rival the
premier crus
of Bordeaux. The idea had taken seed in 1950, when Schubert had visited the major growing regions of Europe and had tasted some forty- and fifty-year-old Bordeaux wines that still retained “magnificent bouquet and flavor.” On his return to South Australia, Schubert decided to use Shiraz grapes and fermentation techniques he had learned in France to produce a “big, full-bodied wine, containing maximum extraction of all the components in the grape material used.” Nineteen fifty-one was the year of his first vintage, which was matured in untreated oak hogsheads for eighteen months, then bottled and stored. The process was repeated each year until 1956 when the directors of Penfold, curious to know what kind of wine was filling up its cellars, called for a tasting. Various Australian wine luminaries were invited to Adelaide and all the vintages produced to date were sampled. No one liked any of them. One taster described Grange Hermitage, as the new wine had been named, as
“A concoction of wild fruits and sundry berries with crushed ants predominating”;
while another remarked to its creator,
“Schubert, I congratulate you. A very good, dry port, which no one in their right mind will buy—let alone drink.”

Schubert was instructed to cease production. He disobeyed orders and continued to make smaller quantities clandestinely between 1957 and 1959. Happily, by 1960, the first vintages were beginning to settle down, becoming “less aggressive and more refined,” and official production resumed again in 1960. In 1962 the ’55 vintage won its first gold medal. It collected another fifty-four gold medals in various contests over the next fifteen years, indeed, was only withdrawn from contests so that other vintages of Grange Hermitage could win gold instead. A single bottle of the ’51 now sells for forty-five thousand Australian dollars, and the wine has realized its creator’s dream of making an Australian wine to rival the best of Bordeaux.

33 FLASHBACKS

In the same year that Grange Hermitage won its first gold medal, America elected a glamorous young president, put the first man in space, and its population and economy were booming. The highway construction program instituted by the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, which had pledged twenty-five billion dollars to construct forty-one thousand miles of interstate roads over ten years, was close to completion, enabling Americans to explore their country with unprecedented ease. In this heady domestic atmosphere, where the watchword was optimism, the consumption of alcohol, which had paused for breath at the end of the 1950s, recommenced its upward trend. However, the debate on the pleasures and hazards of drinking was sidelined for much of the 1960s as the national passions for novelty and stimulation spilled over into the field of intoxicants. New rivals to drunkenness emerged as matters for celebration or demonization, besides which getting corned up seemed reassuringly quaint.

The quest for novelty had a prophet, Jack Kerouac, whose ground-breaking novel
On the Road
(1957) unrolls like an excited conversation in a bar. It is a poem to the continent—to freedom of movement—to turn the ignition key and go! It is also gloriously wet, a booze-soaked odyssey back and forth across the republic, a
Sun Also Rises
, grounded on American soil, that acknowledged the debt to Hemingway in the conversational exchanges of its characters. The book represents alcohol as the solvent of melting-pot America. All over the nation, red-necks, intellectuals, black bluesmen, and Mexicans swallow it together in the cauldron of integration. And not only is it the misfits who hum a different tune to mainstream America, but also the ordinary Joes who join in the bacchanalia: “Americans are always drinking in crossroads saloons on Sunday afternoon: They bring their kids; they gabble, and brawl over brews; everything’s fine. Come nightfall the kids start crying and their parents are drunk. They go weaving back to the house. Everywhere in America I’ve been in crossroads saloons drinking with whole families.”

In addition to spontaneity, Kerouac and his fellow Beat writers valued honesty.
On the Road
includes scenes which show that alcohol can debase as well as elevate: “I drank sixty glasses of beer and retired to the toilet, where I wrapped myself around the toilet bowl and went to sleep. During the night at least a hundred seamen and civilians came in and cast their sentient debouchments on me until I was unrecognizably caked. What difference does it make after all? anonymity in the world of men is better than fame in heaven.”

Not only did
On the Road
salute old-fashioned inebriation via alcohol, it also made a bow in the direction of a fast-growing rival—
tea,
i.e., marijuana. While smoking tea had long been a pastime of black urban American communities and had appeared sporadically on the drug lists of socialites, in the late 1950s and early ’60s the habit spread rapidly. Getting high became the new drunk. The experience, however, was qualitatively different. It was quicker: A single marijuana cigarette made its smoker stoned before they’d finished it, whereas a practiced drinker needed half an hour, an empty stomach, and several drinks to achieve the same sense of dislocation. It also had a lighter touch, making people happy, passive, and mildly neurotic. Marijuana lovers were more prone to fits of the giggles than to brawling, and Kerouac noted the differences in effect in his prose.

On the Road
was a bridge over change. Hitherto, pace De Quincey, writers had relied primarily on drunkenness as a device to alter the mental states of their characters. However, from the sixties onward, other drugs were substituted for good old-fashioned John Barleycorn. Marijuana, in particular, received widespread coverage and its style of intoxication was presented as being more cerebral than the howling and primitive state brought on by a bottle of rye. The difference betweenthe two conditions, high or flayed, was emphasized in the movie
Easy Rider
(1969), which chronicles the adventures of two hippies, Billie and Captain America, as they travel to New Orleans on their customized Harley-Davidsons. Arrested in a small town on the specious charge of “parading without a permit,” they meet George, a local attorney, in the cells, who is sleeping off a whiskey binge. While George’s drinking is acceptable in his community, the hippies, despite their peaceful demeanor, are personae non grata on account of their long hair. George befriends them, gets them out of jail, and agrees to accompany them to New Orleans. He tries some weed on the first night on the road and launches into a charming monologue of how he and his cousin saw forty-one UFOs flying in formation over Mexico, and how their alien occupants will bring peace and discipline to the world. Marijuana, it is implied, stimulates the brain in places that alcohol seldom reaches.
⁶⁸

Easy Rider
also features an acid trip. LSD was no longer just a drug for schizophrenics and chronic alcoholics—it had been adopted by hippies as the key to the doors of perception. The headquarters of recreational tripping was San Francisco, the western capital of the Beat empire. Its epicenter, where the hippies gathered, was Haight-Ashbury. Their curious dress and strange behavior drew a host of journalists, including Hunter S. Thompson, who noted their indifference to alcohol: “There are no hippy bars, for instance, and only one restaurant above the level of a diner or lunch counter. This is a reflection of the drug culture, which has no use for booze and regards food as a necessity to be acquired at the least possible expense.” Bemoaning their sobriety, Thompson observed that “prior to the hippy era there were three good Negro-run jazz bars on Haight Street, but they soon went out of style. Who needs jazz, or even beer, when you can sit down on a public curbstone, drop a pill in your mouth, and hear fantastic music for hours at a time in your own head? A cap of good acid costs $5, and for that you can hear the universal symphony, with God singing solo and the Holy Ghost on drums.”

The behavior of the hippies seemed evidence for Dr. Humphry Osmond’s theory that LSD and alcohol did not mix. However, and despite its potential to control alcoholism, acid was outlawed in 1966. Its prohibition was accomplished almost without resistance. The general public perceived it to be a dangerous drug, on a par with other proscribed substances such as heroin and cocaine. While the ban was not an immediate success—by the time Hunter S. Thompson was writing of its ubiquity in the Hashbury, it had been illegal for a year—its use declined, probably from natural causes as much as federal prohibition. Its tendency to make its devotees imitate schizophrenics, especially after repeated use, caused demand to tail away—it was scarcely worth bootlegging. According to Thompson, writing in 1971, the decline was due to a different Zeitgeist in America: “The big market, these days, is in Downers. . . . What sells, today, is whatever Fucks You Up— whatever short circuits your brain and grounds it out for the longest possible time. . . . Uppers are no longer stylish. Methedrine is almost as rare on the 1971 market as pure acid. . . .‘Consciousness Expansion’ went out with LBJ . . . and it is worth noting, historically, that downers came in with Nixon.”

In the event, the dip in the popularity of alcohol among the young, and a general fashion for alternative intoxicants, proved to be temporary. Some had never abandoned booze: Thompson displayed a steadfast devotion to the bottle and, in his novel
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,
argued its utility in mitigating the effects of psychedelic drugs. He also advised new readers that if they wanted to appreciate his style, which he christened
gonzo
journalism, they should inject a half-pint of rum, tequila, or bourbon “straight into the stomach” in order to approach the material in the proper frame of mind. The dominant sentiment in
Fear and Loathing
is pessimism. In contrast to the optimism of
On the Road,
and even
Easy Rider,
both of which hoped to inject new vigor into the American Dream,
Fear and Loathing
was written as its requiem. The psychedelics’ visions for their country had been impractical and unpopular. Many of their icons turned to drink. Jim Morrison, aka the Lizard King, lead singer of the Doors, who once sang about getting high on
The Ed Sullivan Show,
was getting drunk in front of seven thousand fans at the Dinner Key Auditorium in Miami by 1969. Janis Joplin, whose soulful voice had tantalized hippies at the Monterey Festival in 1968 and at Woodstock in ’69, was a diehard fan of Southern Comfort; the same nectar was also the favorite of Ronald C. “Pigpen” McKernan, who augmented it with Thunderbird tonic wine, and who died of his drinking habit in 1973. His tomb was inscribed:

While the hippies were growing their hair, espousing Eastern mysticism and peace, and tripping out on contraband acid, a far larger number of their peer group were having their heads cropped and their bodies disciplined and dressed in uniforms in preparation for a tour with the U.S. armed forces in Vietnam. Between 1964, when America first started sending significant numbers of troops to the country, and 1973, when the last of its forces were withdrawn, over two million Americans served in the Vietnam War. The majority of the combatants were conscripts; their average age was nineteen. Despite their youth, they were provided with a beer ration; indeed, beer was considered to be sufficiently important to their well-being to be helicoptered into battle zones alongside food. The standard issue was two cans per man per day. If possible, a hundred-pound block of ice per platoon was also provided so that the brews could be enjoyed at the right temperature.

Those serving in Vietnam could augment their fighting rations at the post exchanges, or PXs. Lest they overindulge, their purchases of beer were restricted to three cases per month. They were also provided with drinking places. Private soldiers could buy beer, by the can or case, at the EM (enlisted man) clubs, aka malt shops. Two grades of brew were available, regular (costing $2.40/case) and premium ($3.00). Quality was an important issue in Vietnam. The local beer, Ba Mu’o’i Ba, or “33” lager, was nicknamed “tiger’s piss” and considered to be about as drinkable. Some American brands, according to correspondents of the age, were treated with the preservative formaldehyde, to proof them against the agitation and high temperatures they would encounter on military bases. This additive was reputed to make drinkers lightheaded and served as a scapegoat for drunkenness.

The presence of so much alcohol in a war zone, especially on the big firebases, sometimes led to confusion. The journalist Michael Herr recorded visiting one such camp where booze had got the upper hand: “The colonel in command was so drunk that day that he could hardly get his words out, and when he did, it was to say things like, ‘We aim to make good and goddammit sure that if
those guys
try
anything cute
they won’t catch us with our pants down.’ The main mission there was to fire H & I, but one man told us that their record was the worst in the whole Corps, probably the whole country, they’d harassed and interdicted a lot of sleeping civilians . . . even a couple of American patrols, but hardly any Viet Cong.”

Vietnam was a relatively wet war. The tropical climate encouraged the consumption of cold drinks, and intoxication relieved the stress of combat among troops when they were off duty. While some resorted to marijuana, more chose alcohol as their transport to amnesia. Their preference had the tacit support of high command. It was better that fighting men bonded over a few cans or a bottle than that they smoked themselves into introspection and started to question why they were there. Indeed, mass sessions of drunken bonding seem to have been permitted, on appropriate occasions, as being useful to morale. The writer Tim O’Brien pictured one such event—the Christmas festivities at LZ Gator—in
If I Should Die in a Combat Zone: