by Dave Barry
Unlike The Who, I couldn’t afford a new amplifier, and playing an unamplified electric guitar is like strumming on a picnic table, so I sold my jazzmaster and got a cheap acoustic guitar, which I diddled around on for 16
years. It was fine for “Kum By Yah,” but ill-suited for “My Baby Does the Hanky Panky.” So there’s been this void n my life, which I’ve tried to fill by having a career, but I see now I was kidding myself.
So recently, Ms. magazine sent me a check for $800 for an article I wrote about sex. This seemed like such a bizarre way to get hold of $800 that I figured I should do something special with it, so I thought about it, and what came to mind is—this is the scary part of the story, coming up now—a new sofa. Our primary living-room sofa looks like a buffalo that has been dead for some time, and I thought: “Maybe we should get a nicer sofa.” Which is when I felt the snake of adulthood slithering around my leg.
So I said to my wife: “I am going to take this money and buy an electric guitar.” And she said—I believe I married her in anticipation of this moment—”Fine.”
I have never been so happy. My amplifier has a knob called overdrive, which, if you turn it all the way up to 10, makes it so that all you have to do is touch a string to make a noise that would destroy a greenhouse. My wife and son and dog spend more time back in the bedroom these days. Out in the living room, I put the Paul Butterfield Blues Band on the stereo, and when they do “Got My Mojo Workin’,” I play the guitar solo at the same time Mike Bloomfield does. I am not as accurate as he is in terms of hitting the desired notes, but you can hear me better because I have “overdrive.”
I bet I know what you’re thinking: You’re thinking my electric guitar is a Midlife Crisis Object that I bought in the Midlife Crisis Store filled with middle-aged guys who wear jogging shoes and claim they love Bruce Springsteen but really think he’s merely adequate. And you may be right. I don’t care if you are. To me, my guitar is a wonderful thing. It’s a Gibson, with the
classic old electric-guitar shape. It looks like a modernistic oar, which you could use, in a pinch, to row against the current in the River of Life, or at least stay even with it for a while.
Ye Olde Humor Columne
We need to do something about this national tendency to try to make new things look like they are old.
First off, we should enact an “e” tax. Government agents would roam the country looking for stores whose names contained any word that ended in an unnecessary “e,” such as “shoppe” or “olde,” and the owners of these stores would be taxed at a flat rate of $50,000 per year per “e.” We should also consider an additional $50,000 “ye” tax, so that the owner of a store called “Ye Olde Shoppe” would have to fork over $150,000 a year. In extreme cases, such as “Ye Olde Barne Shoppe,” the owner would simply be taken outside and shot.
We also need some kind of law about the number of inappropriate objects you can hang on walls in restaurants. I am especially concerned here about the restaurants that have sprung up in shopping complexes everywhere to provide young urban professionals with a place to go for margaritas and potato skins. You know the restaurants I mean: they always have names like Flanagan’s, Hanrahan’s, O’Toole’s, or O’Reilley’s, as if the owner were a genial red-faced Irish bartender, when in fact it is probably 14 absentee proctologists in need of tax shelter.
You have probably noticed that inevitably the walls in these places are covered with objects we do not ordinarily attach to walls, such as barber poles, traffic lights, washboards, street signs, and farm implements. This decor scheme is presumably intended to create an atmosphere of relaxed old-fashioned funkiness, but in fact it creates an atmosphere of great weirdness. It is as if a young urban professional with telekinetic powers, the kind Sissy Spacek exhibited in the movie Caine, got really tanked up on margaritas one night and decided to embed an entire flea market in the wall.
I think it’s too much. I think we need to pass a law stating that the only objects that may be hung on restaurant walls are those that God intended to be hung on restaurant walls, such as pictures, mirrors, and the heads of deceased animals. Any restaurant caught violating this law would have to get rid of its phony Irish-bartender name and adopt a name that clearly reflected its actual ownership. (“Say, let’s go get some potato skins at Fourteen Absentee Proctologists in Need of Tax Shelter.”)
And I suppose it goes without saying that anybody caught manufacturing “collectible” plates, mugs, or figurines of any kind should be shipped directly to Devil’s Island.
Now I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: “Dave, I hear what you’re saying, but wouldn’t laws such as these constitute unwarranted government interference in the private sector?”
The answer is: Yes, they would. But unwarranted government interference in the private sector is a small price to pay if it draws the government away from its efforts to revitalize decaying urban areas. The government inevitably tries to do this by installing 60 billion new red bricks and several dozen vaguely old-fashioned street lights in an effort to create a look I would call “Sort of Colonial or Something.”
The government did this to a town right near where I used to live, West Chester, Pennsylvania. This is a nice little old town, with a lot of nice little old houses, but about 10 years ago some of the downtown merchants started getting really upset because they were losing business to the “shopping malls,” a phrase the merchants always say in the same tone of voice you might use to say “Nazi Germany.” Now, as a consumer, I would argue that the reason most of us were going to the shopping malls was that the downtown
stores tended to have window displays that had not been changed since the Truman administration, featuring crepe paper faded to the color of old oatmeal, accented by the occasional dead insect. And the actual merchandise in these stores was not the kind you would go out of your way to purchase or even accept as gifts. We are talking, for example, about clothing so dowdy that it could not be used even to clean up after a pet.
What I am saying is that the problem with the downtown West Chester stores, from this consumer’s point of view, was that they didn’t have much that anybody would want to buy. From the merchants’ point of view, however, the problem was that the entire downtown needed to be Revitalized, and they nagged the local government for years until finally it applied for a federal grant of God knows how many million dollars, which was used to rip up the streets for several years, so as to discourage the few remaining West Chester shoppers. When they finally got it all together again, the new revitalized West Chester consisted of mostly the same old stores, only in front of them were (surprise!) red brick sidewalks garnished with vaguely old-fashioned streetlights. The whole effect was definitely Sort Of Colonial or Something, and some shoppers even stopped by to take a look at it on their way to the mall.
I gather this process has been repeated in a great many towns around the country, and it seems to me that it’s a tremendous waste of federal time and effort that could otherwise be spent getting rid of the extra “e.” I urge those of you who agree with me to write letters to your congresspersons, unless you use that stationery with the “old-fashioned” ragged edges, in which case I urge you to go to your local Flanagan’s and impale yourself on one of the farm implements.
A Boy And His Hobby
Recently, I began to feel this void in my life, even after meals, and I said to myself: “Dave, all you do with your spare time is sit around and drink beer. You need a hobby.” So I got a hobby. I make beer.
I never could get into the traditional hobbies, like religion or stamp collecting. I mean, the way you collect stamps is: Every week or so the Postal Service dreams up a new stamp to mark National Peat Bog Awareness Month, or whatever, and you rush down and clog the Post Office lines to buy a batch of these stamps, but instead of putting them to a useful purpose such as mailing toxic spiders to the Publisher’s Clearing House, you take them home and just sort of have them. Am I right? Have I left any moments
of drama out of this action sequence? And then the biggest thrill, as I understand it, the real payoff, comes when you get lucky and collect a stamp on which the Postal Service has made a mistake, such as instead of “Peat Bog” it prints “Beat Pog,” which causes stamp collectors to just about wet their polyester pants, right?
So for many years I had no hobby. When I would fill out questionnaires and they would ask what my hobbies were, I would put “narcotics,” which was of course a totally false humorous joke. And then one day my editor took me to a store where they sell beer-making equipment. Other writers, they have editors who inspire them to new heights of literary achievement, but the two major contributions my editor has made to my artistic development are (1) teaching me to juggle and (2) taking me to his beer-making store where a person named Craig gave me free samples until he could get hold of my Visa card.
But I’m glad I got into beer-making, because the beer sold here in the United States is sweet and watery and lacking in taste and overcarbonated and just generally the lamest, wimpiest beer in the entire known world. All the other nations are drinking Ray Charles beer, and we are drinking Barry Manilow. This is why American TV beer commercials are so ludicrously masculine. It’s a classic case of overcompensation. You may have seen, for example, the Budweiser or Miller commercial where some big hairy men are standing around on the side of a river when a barge breaks loose and starts drifting out of control. Now real men, men who drink real beer, would have enough confidence in their own masculinity to say: “Don’t worry; it’s probably insured.”
But the men in the commercial feel this compulsion to go racing off on a tugboat and capture the barge with big hairy ropes, after which they make excited masculine hand gestures at each other to indicate they have done a task requiring absolute gallons of testosterone. Then they go to a bar where they drink Miller or Budweiser and continue to reassure themselves that they are truly a collection of major stud horses, which is why you don’t see any women around. The women have grown weary of listening to the men say: “Hey! We sure rescued THAT barge, didn’t we?!” And: “You think it’s easy, to rescue a barge? Well, it’s NOT!” and, much later at night: “Hey! Let’s go let the barge loose again!” So the women have all gone off in search of men who make their own beer.
Some of you may be reluctant to make your own beer because you’ve heard stories to the effect that it’s difficult to make, or it’s illegal, or it makes you go blind. Let me assure you that these are falsehoods, especially the part about making you go bleof nisdc dsdfsdfkQ$$%”%.
Ha ha! just a little tasteless humor there, designed to elicit angry letters from liberals. The truth is, homemade beer is perfectly safe, unless the bottle explodes. We’ll have more on that if space permits. Also it’s completely legal to make beer at home. In fact, as I read the current federal tax laws—I use a strobe light—if you make your own beer, you can take a tax credit of up to $4,000, provided you claim you spent it on insulation!
And it’s very easy to make your own beer: You just mix your ingredients and stride briskly away. (You may of course vary this recipe to suit your own personal taste.) Your two main ingredients are (1) a can of beer ingredients that you get from Craig or an equivalent person, and (2) yeast. Yeast is a wonderful little plant or animal that, despite the fact that it has only one cell, has figured out how to convert sugar to alcohol. This was a far greater accomplishment than anything we can attribute to giant complex multicelled organisms such as, for example, the Secretary of Transportation.
After the little yeasts are done converting your ingredients into beer, they die horrible deaths by the millions. You shouldn’t feel bad about this. Bear in mind this is yeast we’re talking about, and there’s plenty more available, out on the enormous yeast ranches of the Southwest. For now, your job is to siphon your beer into bottles. This is the tricky part, because what can happen is the phone rings and you get involved in a lengthy conversation during which your son, who is 4-1/2, gets hold of the hose and spews premature beer, called “wort,” all over the kitchen and himself, and you become the target of an investigation by child welfare authorities because yours is the only child who comes to preschool smelling like a fraternity carpet.
But that’s the only real drawback I have found, and the beer tastes delicious, except of course on those rare occasions when it explodes. Which leads us to another advantage: if yOu make your own beer, you no longer need to worry about running out if we have a nuclear war of sufficient severity to close the commercial breweries.
Daze Of Wine And Roses
I have never gotten into wine. I’m a beer man. What I like about beer is you basically just drink it, then you order another one. You don’t sniff at it, or hold it up to the light and slosh it around, and above all you don’t drone on and on about it, the way people do with wine. Your beer drinker tends to be a straightforward, decent, friendly, down-to-earth person who enjoys talking about the importance of relief pitching, whereas your serious wine fancier tends to be an insufferable snot.
I realize I am generalizing here, but, as is often the case when I generalize, I don’t care.
Nevertheless, I decided recently to try to learn more about the wine community. Specifically, I engaged the services of a rental tuxedo and attended the Grand Finale of the First Annual French Wine Sommelier Contest in America, which was held at the famous Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York. For the benefit of those of you with plastic slipcovers, I should explain that a “sommelier” is a wine steward, the dignified person who comes up to you at expensive restaurants, hands you the wine list, and says “Excellent choice, sir,” when you point to French writing that, translated, says “Sales Tax Included.”
Several hundred wine-oriented people were on hand for the sommelier competition. First we mingled and drank champagne, then we sat down to eat dinner and watch the competition. I found it immensely entertaining,
especially after the champagne, because for one thing many of the speakers were actual French persons who spoke with comical accents, which I suspect they practiced in their hotel rooms (“Zees epeetomizes zee role av zee sommelier sroo-out eestory ...” etc.) Also we in the audience got to drink just gallons of wine. At least I did. My policy with wine is very similar to my policy with beer, which is just pretty much drink it and look around for more. The people at my table, on the other hand, leaned more toward the slosh-and-sniff approach, where you don’t so much drink the wine as you frown and then make a thoughtful remark about it such as you might make about a job applicant (“I find it ambitious, but somewhat strident.” Or: “It’s lucid, yes, but almost Episcopalian in its predictability.”) As it happened, I was sitting next to a French person named Mary, and I asked her if people in France carry on this way about wine. “No,” she said, “they just drink it. They’re more used to it.”
There were 12 sommeliers from around the country in the contest; they got there by winning regional competitions, and earlier in the day they had taken a written exam with questions like: “Which of the following appellations belong to the Savoie region? (a) Crepy; (b) Seyssel; (c) Arbois; (d) Etoile; (e) Ripple.” (I’m just kidding about the Ripple, of course. The Savoie region would not use Ripple as an insecticide.)
The first event of the evening competition was a blind tasting, where the sommeliers had to identify a mystery wine. We in the audience got to try it, too. It was a wine that I would describe as yellow in color, and everybody at my table agreed it was awful. “Much too woody,” said one person. “Heavily oxidized,” said another. “Bat urine,” I offered. The others felt this was a tad harsh. I was the only one who finished my glass.
Next we got a nonmystery wine, red in color, with a French name, and I thought it was swell, gulped it right down, but one of the wine writers at my table got upset because it was a 1979, and the program said we were supposed to get a 1978. If you can imagine. So we got some 1978, and it was swell, too. “They’re both credible,” said the wine writer, “but there’s a great differen
ce in character.” I was the only one who laughed, although I think Mary sort of wanted to.
The highlight of the evening was the Harmony of Wine and Food event, where the sommelier contestants were given a menu where the actual nature of the food was disguised via French words (“Crochets sur le Pont en Voiture,” etc.), and they had to select a wine for each of the five courses. This is where a sommelier has to be really good, because if he is going to talk an actual paying customer into spending as much money on wine for one meal as it would cost to purchase a half-dozen state legislators for a year, he has to say something more than, “A lotta people like this here char donnay.”
Well, these sommeliers were good. They were into the Harmony of Wine and Food, and they expressed firm views. They would say things like: “I felt the (name of French wine) would have the richness to deal with the foie gras,” or “My feeling about Roquefort is that ...” I thought it was fabulous entertainment, and at least two people at my table asked how I came to be invited.
Anyway, as the Harmony event dragged on, a major issue developed concerning the salad. The salad was Lamb’s Lettuce with—you are going to be shocked when I tell you this—Walnut Vinaigrette. A lot of people in the audience felt that this was a major screw-up, or “gaffe,” on the part of the contest organizers, because of course vinaigrette is just going to fight any wine you try to marry it with. “I strongly disagree with the salad dressing,” is how one wine writer at my table put it, and I could tell she meant it.