A Brief History of Vice
Page 21
According to Ogorevc, the center of salamander brandy production lies in the tiny villages and hamlets surrounding the town of Skofja Loka. (Luckily for Ogorevc, Skofja Loka also happens to be his hometown.) Skofja Loka is about as idyllic a place as I’ve ever been. It’s a small, medieval village surrounded by mighty rolling hills and great green forests. There are many little taverns and restaurants where locals gather at the end of the day to drink the local beer (Lasko) and shoot the proverbial shit.
I spent most of my time in Skofja Loka trawling these little bars with the help of my translator, Neza. The younger folks we talked to had little to say about it. Their knowledge seemed to come solely from the Ogorevc article; many of them had read it, and the rest had at least heard people talking about it. But the older locals had a lot more to say. First off, they clarified that it was not salamander brandy, but salamander schnapps. Brandy is not a popular drink among those from the mountains and hills of Slovenia. But the people in the hinterlands do have a long and abiding tradition of schnapps brewing. Home-distilled schnapps is to rural Slovenia what white lightning is to Appalachia.
One man we spoke with, Ystok, told us he used to own a restaurant in the nearby Poljanska Valley. He claimed that a town in the valley, nicknamed “Clusterfuck” by everyone who didn’t live there, had been the center of production for salamander schnapps. According to him, Clusterfuck had earned its reputation by virtue of being filled with the sort of hillbillies you’d expect to try and drown salamanders for a cheap high. Ystok also told us that we would have trouble finding any salamander schnapps these days: Thanks to government taxes and regulations on the large stills used to make schnapps, it was basically illegal.
Ystok told us the production method he’d heard of involved putting a live salamander in the little closed box (called the “hat”) above the still. The hapless amphibian would be slowly steamed to death, and his poisons would trickle down into the schnapps. One salamander apparently contained enough poison to brew four to five liters of schnapps. He described the resultant brew as “very poisonous.” He told us a (possibly but not certainly apocryphal) tale of one town drunk, a man who could easily drink a bottle of normal schnapps on his own, who was “DONE!” after two glasses of salamander schnapps. Ystok added, “Some people call it a delicacy, but it is not.”
Neza and I had been speaking with Ystok for maybe twenty minutes when several of his friends, all hanging out around the same tavern, realized what we were talking about. They were quick to offer their own opinions on salamander schnapps. One person told us that while normal schnapps is often taken as a digestive (for “stomach issues”) or used as an aperitif before meals, salamander schnapps was primarily used to get “really fucked up.”
A few of the first people in Ljubljana and Skofja Loka I’d asked about salamander schnapps had been adamant that it was just another type of alcoholic beverage. This was consistent with the conclusions Miha Kozorog had drawn: Salamanders were added to the brew by disreputable bootleggers looking to add a little kick, not a hallucinogen. But Ystok and his comrades were adamant that salamander schnapps was a drug, and a potent one at that. I was warned several times that it was “poisonous” and should be diluted with water.
In general, the older people I spoke with were sure it existed and split on whether or not it possessed hallucinogenic qualities. The younger residents I talked to simply knew it existed, and more or less parroted what they’d read in Blaz Ogorevc’s article if they had anything to say at all. Later in the night, at another tiny bar in Skofja Loka, I came across several middle-aged men drinking together. One of them claimed to have tried salamander schnapps himself. He remarked, “You feel dizzy when you drink it.” This was consistent with Ivan Valencic’s hypothesis that salamander schnapps includes some paralytic agent that “takes the legs” out from under a drinker.
I sat drinking with these men for a couple of hours (one of them was the bar owner, and thus the beers were free) and, after a while, the man who claimed to have tried salamander schnapps admitted that he wasn’t sure if what he’d had was the real deal. But he had some relatives nearby, on a farm in the mountains on the way to the village of Clusterfuck, and he told us they might know more.
So the next day we set off in Neza’s car for Clusterfuck and environs, and stopped along the way at this farm. After one of the greatest meals of my life (words cannot do the sausage justice), I interviewed the old farmer. He didn’t know where I could find salamander schnapps, but he did give me some of the most enlightening information of the entire trip. According to him, salamander schnapps was much more common immediately after World War II, when times were tough and a good high was rather hard to find.
He claimed that salamander-infused schnapps simply got you really drunk, and left you with a terrible headache afterward. He confirmed that it had a reputation for “taking the legs” out from under you, and told us of one local drunk who “drank so much . . . that he was petrified.” It was a bitter drink, not at all like normal schnapps. The old farmer also told us of another brewing method: The salamander would be decapitated and hot schnapps would be poured over the severed head. This does make some biological sense: The fire salamander keeps its poison glands on the back of its head.
After lunch and an interview, we drove off into the valley toward the town of Clusterfuck. It started to rain heavily during our drive, and our progress was slow in the winding mountain roads. At one point we passed a grizzled old man rebuilding a scythe, and I had Neza stop the car so we could talk to him. He wound up having a lot to say; he was a fan of Blaz Ogorevc and familiar with the original article on salamander schnapps. But he’d also lived in the region his entire life and had heard another theory about the beverage, which I found fascinating.
Apparently, after World War II local distillers started using a new Italian yeast that fermented faster. The yeast’s name was very similar to the Slovenian word for salamander, and that might be where the myth of salamander schnapps first began. He added that he’d heard quite a few people talk about the drink’s “bad reputation” as a hallucinogenic substance. Like us, he didn’t seem to know the truth.
After another half hour of driving we made it to Clusterfuck at last. It was a surprisingly nice town, given what the name had led us to expect, but we found no traces of salamander schnapps. One man we spoke with told us that “people used to talk about it a lot, but not anymore.” We stopped for consolation beers at a local bar, where a muscular man with a pronounced unibrow told us of a schnapps distiller in the next town who might know something more about the increasingly mythic brew.
We drove to the distillery and, after drinking a delicious glass of honey schnapps and a terrible glass of cumin schnapps, started talking with the owners about schnapps of the salamandered variety. They didn’t make any, of course, but they did posit a new theory for how the beverage had come to be. From what they’d heard, salamanders were attracted to the heat of the still and started crowding around until the brewers “just started putting them in.” They reiterated that salamander schnapps was a drug from an earlier generation, and “probably all the people who tried it are already dead.”
And so my trip to Slovenia came to an end. I’d gathered a lot of fascinating theories and conflicting stories about salamander brandy/schnapps. But I hadn’t actually found any examples of the brew itself. The saga of the salamander-based hallucinogen remains unfinished, perhaps for some bold narceologist of the future. I don’t like to end on this note, presenting another chapter in the long mystery rather than its definitive conclusion.
But the book’s got to end somewhere; here seems as good as any place. Bye!
...
Hah! Just kidding. That bye was a test, and everyone still reading this passed. The fact that I couldn’t find any salamander schnapps in Slovenia just meant that I was going to need to brew a batch myself and try it out. That’s right, I’m about to teach you . . .
Obviously, the “traditional” method of brewing salamander schnapps wasn’t something I was willing to re-create. No book would be worth torturing a small animal to death. But, after mulling it over a bit, I hit on a way to brew my own salamander schnapps without becoming a monster in the attempt. First I’d need:
Ingredients
1 European fire salamander
1 bottle liquor (schnapps, brandy, vodka— it’s all good; during my trip to Slovenia I heard about everything from plums to potatoes being used in “schnapps” making)
1 box vinyl gloves
1 mason jar
Directions
In short, my plan was to buy a fire salamander of my own and milk the poison out of his glands without killing him. I found a place online that would ship a fire salamander directly to my door, and promptly ordered one. I set him up with a name (Mitchfordson II, in honor of a sick hummingbird I’d tried and failed to save earlier that year) and a cage, and gave him three weeks to adjust to his new digs.
Once he was fully settled in, it was time for the milking. I bought vinyl gloves to protect my hands, and in case he had a latex allergy. I conducted ten milking sessions over the course of thirty days. First, I’d rinse the gloves with distilled water to minimize the chances of hurting my little salamander friend, then I’d pick him up from his cage and massage the poison glands on the back of his head until he secreted a little bit.
As soon as there was poison on my gloves, I’d wash them off with vodka into a mason jar.
Magenta Vaughn
I’m not about to claim Mitchfordson II enjoyed being milked for his poison, but he also didn’t seem overly stressed by it: His appetite stayed healthy, and, as of the writing of this book, he lives contentedly in my office terrarium. After thirty days of collection I found myself with about 150 milliliters of salamander schnapps—perhaps the first salamander schnapps outside Slovenia. I simmered it on the stove for a few minutes and then poured it back into the jar.
Magenta Vaughn
Now there was nothing left to do but try it.
Results
I drank all 150 milliliters over the course of twenty minutes. Initially, I didn’t feel any different from being slightly drunk. I finished the jar and, solidly tipsy, decided it was time for bed. It was not a triumphant drunken pass out; I felt as if I’d failed to create anything beyond a glass of dirty vodka.
And then, about an hour later, I woke up to pee. This isn’t an uncommon experience for drunk me, and I hopped up out of bed just sorta expecting my legs to do their normal leg work.
I almost fell flat on my ass.
Now, a shot glass is about 42 milliliters. So I’d drank a bit less than four shots in quick succession: enough to get me drunk, sure, but probably not enough to make me that clumsy an hour or so later. I went to the bathroom, wobbled to the kitchen, drank some water, and headed back to sleep. Maybe it was the salamander vodka, maybe I was just drunker than I expected to be.
But when I woke up the next morning, I still felt a little weird. My stomach hurt, and I felt slightly queasy after breakfast. About an hour after waking up I was at a gas station, filling my car up, when I realized I felt strangely light-headed and fuzzy. A cup of coffee didn’t banish the feeling; my body felt strange, and my coordination was definitely off, for several hours. I didn’t have any kind of profound erotic drug trip, as the legends suggested. But I did feel as if my legs were less steady.
Based on my experiences, I feel as though I can conclusively state that salamander schnapps is not a powerful hallucinogen, as Blaz Ogorevc claimed it to be. However, I will say that the drink seemed to “give more,” as Miha Kozorog put it. It did not create a wildly different experience from drunkenness, but I certainly felt the aftereffects of my drinking much longer than I otherwise would’ve.
In conclusion: Mixing salamander poison with liquor might fuck you up more than liquor alone. But it won’t make you fuck trees.
Conclusion
So, my trip to Slovenia didn’t end with salamander schnapps. I had to make that stuff on my own. But I did wind up stumbling on another prize: glass after glass of homemade liquor. Once people heard I was looking for salamander schnapps, they couldn’t wait to offer me the schnapps they’d brewed themselves.
Most of the homebrewed Slovenian schnapps I had was not . . . great. But it was all different, and the people I met were endearingly passionate about the liquor their grandfathers, etc., had brewed up in the spare bathtub and distilled in the kitchen. Slovenian schnapps, as well as salamander schnapps, is what people who use needlessly smart words call an “autochthonous drug.” Autochthonous just means it’s a local invention; not imported from some other country and culture.
I encountered a lot of autochthonous liquor traditions as I passed through the Baltic states. In Serbia and Bosnia they drink a fruit brandy known as rachiya. People make rachiya out of pears, plums, apples, and basically everything else that ferments. You sip it out of fat-bottomed, long-necked shot glasses. My first introduction to rachiya was in the apartment of a friend’s cousin. It was the cousin’s own plum rachiya; it tasted hot, like burnt sugar and smoke. After several glasses, he pulled out a goat head that was just chilling in his freezer and started eating its brains with a spoon. I got the feeling that this was not an abnormal Friday night for anyone else in the room.
The United States doesn’t have many autochthonous drugs. We’re certainly the country that made substances like LSD and MDMA famous, and we’ve become the world’s number one producer of marijuana, but none of that originates from here. All across the Balkan states, people toast with rachiya, and drink it before meals as an aperitif or over long nights with their friends. You can look back centuries in time and find Balkan people making and drinking rachiya in much the same way, and for the exact same reasons.
We’re awash in craft beer and craft liquors and boutique marijuana today, but these are all the spearheads of new traditions. Prohibition disrupted America’s drinking traditions in the 1920s, so much that breweries are now producing “pre-prohibition” ales in imitation of old recipes. The criminalization of most other narcotics has limited their ability to gain much cultural weight. And that’s a problem.
In chapter 10, I talked about the ability of ritual behavior to limit and moderate drug use. Every vice I’ve written about in this book started out as some sort of ritualized behavior. Sarcasm and trolling offered our ancestors a way to moderate the violent impulses of young men. Prostitution was once a sacred religious duty, the purview of priests rather than pimps.
Behind every vice is an impulse. We can sate those impulses in ways that are healthy, that improve our ability to deal with the world, and that help us grow as people. Or we can sate those impulses in ways that numb us to the world and drive us deeper and deeper away from it. My hope for this book is that it makes you look at the next cigarette you smoke, the next beer you drink, the next hit of whatever you drop at a party as more than just a product to consume. Think of the history behind it. Think of the weight of human ingenuity and invention that had to build up before you could enjoy it as easily and safely as you do.
Enjoy your vices, but respect them, too.
Acknowledgments
Special thanks to my partner, Magenta; to my agent, Byrd Leavell; and to all my wonderful friends (particularly Josh Sargent, David Bell, and Brandon Rainboldt) who let me test experimental re-creations of historical drugs on their bodies. Sorry about the hospital visit, Dave.
Looking for more?
Visit Penguin.com for more about this author and a complete list of their books.
Discover your next great read!
books on Archive.