SHOTS

I came home on my last day of work, which was August 31, 2018, after having been out for a celebratory happy hour with some friends from work.  Playing out on the apartment complex’s lawn were my next door neighbors, Mike and Ramona and their two boys, Andy and Dylan.  I announced that it was my last day, something they had known was coming up, but none of us knew exactly when—it could have been any time during that summer.

I said to them, “Well I am now officially retired!” and Mike said, well you are now officially invited to come right upstairs for some shots!”  This is not something we had done before, but I was certainly game. So we adults went upstairs to their apartment while the boys continued to play outside.

Mike ceremoniously brought out three shot glasses, filled them with tequila, cut three slices from a lemon, put the lemon slices across the top of each glass, and then handed us our shots.

I took my lemon slice and squeezed lemon juice into the tequila and Mike looked shocked and said, “Is that how you do it?  You do it like she does,” indicating Ramona, who had also squeezed her lemon juice into her tequila.

This comment was pretty close, if not actually there, to a comment like “You throw like a girl,” but I said, “How do you do it?”  So he demonstrated, quickly gulping down the whole shot at once and then mashing the squeezed, dripping lemon all over his tongue and lips.  Somewhere along the line he had forgotten the part of licking salt from the top of the web of his hand, either before the shot or after, I forget which is supposed to be the order of these steps in the complete tequila ritual.

I said to him, “Well, that’s how you drink it when the tequila is rot-gut, to just get drunk and mask the awful taste, but I know from that bottle of tequila that you gave me last Christmas, you don’t drink rot-gut.”  And it was true, he had given me a damn fine bottle of tequila that had somehow inspired me to do an actual taste test which I had never thought to do before.  Surprisingly (to me), that tequila, just by itself, tasted quite good, no need to mask anything.

Up until Mike’s gift that Christmas, I hadn’t had much experience with tequila at home.  I don’t think my father, who more or less maintained a full bar (having liquor by the case delivered to our house from a liquor store called Beltramos, where he had an account), had even one bottle of tequila in the house.  I am sure for him that whatever experience tequila would have given to him, he would have gotten a better experience, from, say, bourbon or scotch, and maybe gin.  My mother was strictly a vodka person.  My brother, Dave. whose go-to drink is a long island iced tea, eliminates tequila from the formula of four different liquors, doubling, instead, one of the other three, the vodka, I think.  He and his wife love to go out drinking in Las Vegas where they live and it is a trip for me to go into a bar with them, seemingly any bar, and have the bartender see Dave and say, “One ‘Dave’s Tea’ coming up,” which means that he remembers on sight Dave and Dave’s “no tequila” long island tea recipe.

So I had had no experience with tequila at home, but sure, I had had numerous experiences with tequila via the cocktails of margaritas I had had in restaurants!  I don’t think one can live in Southern California very long and go out to Mexican restaurants without having at least one margarita (if not scores of margaritas over the many years), and probably tried even some of the various other fruits, such as strawberry, mango, and who knows what else margaritas, it’s practically de rigueur. Heck, I even had a margarita in Mexico and then suffered through two weeks of one of the worst cases of Montezuma’s Revenge thanks to the chopped-block of ice in my drink.  At any rate, with all these margaritas nobody was having to suck lemon juice in their mouth and lick salt off their hand in order the mask the taste.  The “taste-masking” was baked in the cake, or I should say, in the cocktail.

Which, when I think about it, reverses my attitude about having salt on the rim of the margarita glass. I didn’t particularly care about it one way or the other, but I would most often choose to have the salt because I had assumed that that was the way you were supposed to do it…that to refuse the salt was somehow asking to not have the genuine margarita.  But now that I have realized that the salt feature historically comes from having to get yourself though the task of drinking rot-gut, having salt on the rim of a margarita is actually kind of stupid.  Supposedly in the case of the cocktail, you want the taste!

As an off-topic aside, in my just previous blog entry I discussed Chinese food and how I struggled through eating all that goodness with an inefficient combination of chopsticks and a wide, fat “spoon”.  Chopsticks and that spoon are considered to be the “authentic” way to eat Chinese food and therefore if you are sophisticated and presumably apt enough, you will eat your meal with chopsticks.  However, a couple of years ago, I read that chopsticks are actually an ancient example of Chinese “gun control”—before there were guns.  It wasn’t that the Chinese were so technologically limited that the only eating utensils they could come up with were two sticks and a spoon too wide to fit into your mouth.  Instead, it was that a very unpopular emperor had banned metallic and sometimes quite sharp culinary utensils (such as knives) because they could be used as weapons and for his own safety, he made it a capital offence for the people to eat with anything but impotent devices, namely two weak sticks and a fat spoon. Funny what the ancient derivations are for various habits, and I think it is fun to unpack them.  So, having salt on the rim of a margarita glass is in the same “now useless” category as eating Chinese food with chopsticks.  One can justifiably avoid either one.

A margarita is really one of the easiest drinks to make and to make it even easier, suppose you have a craving for one right now, you might actually already have all the ingredients on hand if you have some minimum kind of a bar. Having the right ingredients for something I want to make always seems to be a problem for me…like I can’t just have something right now, but I have to write out a shopping list and go the grocery store to get the missing ingredients which usually means I can’t have the thing until tomorrow, when nine times out of ten, I won’t even want to have it tomorrow.

For example, I wanted to make some bread yesterday (with my bread maker), and while I actually did have everything I needed for a pretty basic, pedestrian loaf of 100% whole wheat bread, much of what I preferred to have I couldn’t make because I don’t keep on hand evaporated milk or oat bran or corn meal to add to the flour, or any of a variety of other things.  For this, I actually did have all that I needed…except that it ended up that the packet of yeast I had been counting on to use had a “best by date” of…2003.  Sigh. Well, I just didn’t happen to feel like driving to the grocery story just to buy a fresh packet of yeast, and the package didn’t actually say you couldn’t use it after that date, it just cautioned that it might take longer for the dough to rise.

So I went ahead and tried it, and, well, being a bread maker, meaning a machine that has certain timings already programmed in, I don’t think it understood that it should wait around for half a day for the dough to fully rise, so it allowed it to rise about halfway up and then it went on ahead and baked it.  It actually smelled just as wonderful as ever being baked, and it really tasted okay, was just a bit “heavier” than normal, but I had two nice slices of toast this morning with breakfast, so I think it came out okay.  Added to my shopping list, though…more packages of yeast!

But back to our subject, tequila, you probably already know all about this (I’m not trying to present myself as any kind of an expert, but am having fun sharing things that I have recently learned), a margarita is just about the most doable drink there is (short of a martini wherein all you really need is some gin and some olive brine—although if you are a martini drinker or have friends who are, you ought to go ahead and stock a bottle of dry vermouth).  I was surprised to see that all a margarita is (despite all the hoopla of blenders and salt on the rim yes or no or different fruit flavorings and extra shots of Cointreau or Grand Marnier—I’m talking to you, El Torito, but don’t worry, I really love you and even ate there last night, but surprised you by getting a draft Dos XXs dark instead of a margarita) these few things, and what makes it so doable is that there are so many possible substitutions, based on what you like or what you may happen to have on hand at the moment:

2 ounces of tequila (if you don’t have this, then you aren’t going to have a margarita—but any tequila will do)

1 ounce of Triple Sec OR Cointreau OR Grand Marnier (if lacking any of these, in a pinch you could use orange juice and probably add an additional half ounce of tequila)

1 ounce of lime juice (OR lemon juice)

Shake vigorously the above ingredients with cracked ice and pour into a chilled glass.  Probably the easiest way to chill the glass is to swirl the cracked ice in the glass and then put the cracked ice into the cocktail shaker.  You could use a blender instead of the cocktail shaker if you like that way better.

Notice that I left off the salt on the rim, as I explained above (you’re not trying to kill a rot-gut taste). But certainly if you want it, you can have it…for sure you will have salt on hand (right?), and you can pour some out on a plate and then moisten the rim of the glass with the citrus juice and dip the glass upside down onto the plate of salt.  If you wish, you could also go wild and mix into the plate of salt some other things such as sugar, ground pepper, and various other spices, but all that is up to you and your interest in experimentation.

The basic formula is (1) tequila, (2) a sweet orange taste, and (3) a sour taste.  You might have seen that a margarita mix is described as a “sweet and sour” mix.  But a dedicated mix for a particular drink or two is not something that you are apt to have on hand unless you drink a ton of margaritas or are having a large party. Instead of the sweet and sour mix, just get the Triple Sec and always have on hand lime juice.  Both Triple Sec and lime juice are useful mixers for lots of other drinks.

However, it doesn’t have to be Triple Sec…it could be Cointreau, instead, or it could be Grand Marnier. All of those are orange flavored liqueurs (and there are others, as well).  The least expensive of the three is Triple Sec, next comes Cointreau, and most expensive is Grand Marnier.  I have always happened to have on hand Grand Marnier, because I have had friends who especially like that so I made sure I had it on hand for them.  Triple Sec and Cointreau are pretty much the same thing, and either of them is lighter than Grand Marnier, probably more useful for a variety of other cocktail mixing.  Cointreau is a Triple Sec, but has a certain cachet. Since appearances matter and especially with cocktails, I think I would just go with the Cointreau if I were specifically stocking up for margaritas.

The Triple Secs (such as Cointreau) and Grand Marnier aren’t made the same way.  The Triple Secs start out as a sugar beet alcohol that is mixed with sweet and bitter oranges, whereas Grand Marnier is made with cognac and aged with bitter oranges.  I came across a recipe by which a person could make their own triple sec, involving drying cut up sections of oranges and rind and aging them in vodka (shows you how vodka is just a plain distillation of alcohol) and heating it later as part of the process, but as I like the look of liquor bottles, I’d rather have the commercial brands on my bar shelves than have my own homemade concoction in my refrigerator.

All three of these mentioned liqueurs are made in France, which makes me wonder how they got involved in what we think of as a Mexican drink.  Maybe a margarita isn’t the least bit Mexican at all, but the cocktail has hijacked their national liquor!  I know the Mexicans take tequila very seriously (and its not legal to be made at all except in certain approved areas of Mexico)…maybe that’s why the bartender at that otherwise elegant restaurant overlooking a gorgeous view in San Miguel Allende chose to make my margarita with chipped block ice (read, ice that was frozen sewer water) instead of using purified water ice cubes as one would expect…he was punishing the ignorant gringo who was besmirching the reputation of the national liquor.

And the thing is, as much as I like margaritas, there is no reason to drink tequila that way.  You don’t have to mask it, it is pretty amazing all by its lonesome.

I had mentioned way up at the beginning of this piece that Mike’s gift of a fine bottle of tequila led me to have a taste test.  I had been thinking for a while…I am not sure that my thinking is correct…but I believe that cocktails became a “thing” thanks to Prohibition.  I am not sure that prior to Prohibition people generally mixed up their various liquors with various other ingredients the way we do now.  I mean, I am sure that the moonshiners up in Appalachian coves worked to make their product pure and of a certain acceptable taste, and weren’t mixing into it fruit juices and garnishing with a cherry and a paper umbrella. Or think of the British sailors with their half a pint of rum as a daily ration, referred to by Winston Churchill when he said, “The only traditions of the British Navy were run, sodomy, and the lash”, and yes, of course, Churchill didn’t actually say that, but wished he had…but I think the goal must be to not be the person who says things, but be the one whom everybody says said them.   A daily ration of a half pint of rum, that’s a whole eight ounces of pure liquor, I can imagine that that could lead to quite a bit of loss of inhibitions, refusing to work, saying the wrong thing to the wrong person, or slipping into your male neighbor’s bunk at night, perhaps none too gently, could definitely lead to the over-use of the lash, which itself could be administered by some heavily drunken sailor.  I can imagine in such a scene as all that, those tankards of rum weren’t mixed with grenadine, pineapple juice, and orange juice as if they were Bahama Mamas, those sailors drank that rum straight and damn well liked it.  (Okay, to be clear, fruit juices actually were in later years introduced into the rum, but not for the purpose of creating a dainty cocktail, but to lessen the ration somewhat—leading to less lashing!--and as a vitamin-C providing medicine to help combat scurvy, which had become a serious problem for sailors.)

My point is that I am pretty sure various alcohols were meant to be drunk straight as they were, but when the U.S. banned alcohol for thirteen years and it was being made illegally in some gangster’s hidden speakeasy, quality standards were splattered to all hell as if shot by a tommy gun.

One of my grandmothers would regularly give large cocktail parties and her butler was a bartender of such renown in their city that my grandmother was pleased to let him off to mix drinks at the parties of her friends and therefore earn for himself some well-earned additional income, but neither my grandmother nor my grandfather touched a drop of liquor, themselves.  One day I asked her why she never drank any alcohol and she said, “I tasted gin, once, and ewe,” she then made the most nasty, screwed up face, “it was the foulest thing I ever put in my mouth!  I could never understand how anybody could stand to drink such nasty stuff, but so many seem to like it, so I am happy to serve it to them.”  The way she said the word “gin” made me sure that what she had tasted was bathtub gin and it would be so foul that a person couldn’t really stand it without masking the alcohol with various other flavors.  Thus, the cocktail.

But Prohibition is long gone and liquor distillers are able to sell their finest, best tasting wares. I always think of something like scotch, where you can enjoy the variable individual pleasures of independent distillers, such as Glinfiddich, or for those who have their favorite flavor that they want to be reliable, there are the blended brands, such as Chevas Regal.  I saw an amazing documentary once that showed how each year a blended Scotch brand is mixed.  The produce of many different single malts are lined up in a row (there could be something like 20 of them) and a taste expert in the employment of the blended Scotch company will taste each one of the single malts and fashion in his head the correct mixture that will yield the reliable flavor of the blended brand. The formula ratio might be something like five drops of this single malt and one drop of this one and twelve drops of this one and a pint of this one and none of this one, all the way down the line of all 20 or so single malts.  The single malt tastes will vary from year to year, the way wine does in France, or even milk does in England, as I was surprised to discover on the narrow-boating canal boat trip I put together for some family and friends many decades ago.  As we travelled through England and Wales on the canals, the milk in each location tasted different, because it was like the single malt scotch, pure from the individual cows, not all homogenized.

Well, it turns out that tequila has its own special status and treatment, not something to swig down in a hurry in order to just get high on the spirits.  The beginning of the awareness of that for me was a restaurant on West Third Street in Los Angeles, called El Carmen.  I would go to see Rio’s son, Kai, and his daughter, Piper, who would perform in the productions of YADA, Youth Academy of the Dramatic Arts, on West 3^rdStreet, and I would have dinner beforehand at one of the nearby restaurants.  El Carmen is on the same block as the theater, across the street (they have valet parking which is about the only way you are going to do it).  El Carmen’s menu, the vast majority of which is a tequila menu, was something I had never even imagined. I can’t easily reproduce it here, but it is better for you to see it directly, it is well worth looking at:  http://elcarmenla.com/tequilas--el-carmen.html  I won’t count them all, but there are probably more than 400 different bottles of tequila listed there, at prices as low as “$7.00” to as high as “$850.00”, and I have to assume that is the “by the glass” price.  I don’t even know how a person could choose one…just “eeny meenie mine moe”?  To do it intelligently, well, that would have to involve a whole lot of taste testing (a lifetime of it).  

And what’s all this “Blanco”, “Reposado”, “Anejo”, and “Muy Anejo” business?  Well, roughly translated from Spanish to English, those terms mean:

“Blanco” is White, or sometimes called Silver, or Platinum.  This is like the “vodka” of tequila, the pure distilled spirit of the agave plant.  It is not aged.

“Reposado” is Rested or Aged; this is the “blanco” aged in wooden caskets for two to eleven months. During the “time of repose”, the liquor will be getting smoother and picking up flavors from the wood, adding to the complexity of the taste.

“Anejo” is Old or Extra Aged; this is the “blanco” aged in wooden caskets for at least a year.

“Muy Anejo” is Very Old or Ultra Aged; this is aged for more than three years.

The caskets used for aging are usually American or French Oak, and sometimes used bourbon or other whiskey, cognac, or wine caskets are used for the resting, caskets that have themselves taken on flavors from their previous use which are then imparted to the tequila.

As I understand it, beyond the aging issue and how long the liquor was actually aged (eleven months instead of two), filtering has an affect on the quality, smoothness, and taste of the tequila, to the extent that there may be a finer Blanco tequila compared to a Reposado, but in general, one may assume that the quality and the price of the tequila rises from Blanco to Reposado to Anejo to Muy Anejo, although I have noticed some brands that have priced at least their Blanco offerings and their Reposado offerings the same, meaning that in that case it is just a matter of taste, does the drinker prefer the “cleaner” flavor of the Blanco or does the drinker prefer the flavors picked up from the wooden casket while in repose.

All of this is to say that tequila deserves to be enjoyed just by itself, not in a cocktail, but if you want to have a cocktail, how do you handle the blanco, reposado, anejo business?  Using just a margarita as an example, some writers have recommended mixing a blanco tequila with Triple Sec, a reposado tequila with Cointreau, and an anejo tequila with Grand Marnier.  This makes some kind of sense, I guess, but on the other hand, back to the concept that cocktails were designed to mask the harsh flavor of the liquor, why waste money using a reposado or anejo when you would then mask the flavors that those tequilas are featuring?  Shouldn’t you just use the “pure” blanco?

And that’s my actual feeling.  The tequila that Mike had given me for Christmas, now two years ago, was a good quality Blanco, and when I taste-tested all the different kinds of straight liquor I had in the house, which were, in alphabetical order, Bourbon, Gin, Irish Whiskey, Rum, Scotch, Tequila, and Vodka, my order of favorite to least favorite were, very surprising to me, (1) Irish Whiskey, (2) Tequila, (3) Gin, (4) Scotch (5) Bourbon, (6) Rum, (7) Vodka. (I wish I had some Canadian Whiskey to try, too, but I just didn’t.)

What were the surprises? Well, I had always assumed that straight tequila was pure undrinkable except in a cocktail, and this whole blog entry is meant is prove that that is wrong.  To have that come in second best instead of close to last was a surprise. Another surprise, Irish Whiskey coming in at number one.  I had always read, which goes to show that is somebody else’s opinion and one needs to make up their own, that there was no use for Irish Whiskey at all, that there was a race for the bottom as to which was the worst, Irish or Canadian, the writer much preferring Scotch and Bourbon. Well, it turns out that I happened to like Irish the very best of all.  And it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that I would place Canadian somewhere near the top, too.

Gin, well, I always kept thinking of my prohibition-era grandmother and the nasty case that she made at gin.  She should have tried it again after the repeal of Prohibition.  Or got something really good smuggled in from Great Britain.

But you know, the most popular drink in America is the martini, and most martini drinkers are essentially drinking their gin straight.  Oh sure, there may be a touch of dry vermouth, which doesn’t offer very much, and it seems that most martini drinkers pretty much get away with the least amount of vermouth that they can.  The olive, which is supposed to be a garnish, does bring along with it a brine that has a flavor affect, but basically, martinis are pure gin.

On my “recent” cruise (it was now nine months ago, but it was the last trip I took), I spoke for an hour with a charming couple from Switzerland who were both doctors and both aged over 100, they told me!  They were sitting in the bar I liked the best on the ship, the one that had the band playing Brazilian music and had as their singer one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen.  I swear, I could have married her in a second based on her appearance and talent alone (and truth to tell, I was having fun fantasizing about it), but she was a good 45 years younger than I am, so all I could do was clap loudly and appreciatively at her sets and then when took a break, tell each one in the band, including her, how great they were (but I don’t think she knew English).  Anyway, I was doing better with the centenarians.

They were sitting there drinking martinis, so I ordered one for myself and sat down with them to tell them a funny story about my previous experience with martinis when I was in college that had prevented me from drinking them until just recently.  It had to do with a girlfriend of mine and I sitting on my bed in the dorm trying to figure out the correct formula for a martini by trying various amounts of vermouth in the gin.  Every one of our attempts led to failure and we both decided that we simply didn't like martinis.  So all these years I had avoided martinis, but finally about a week before I went on this cruise, I looked up the recipe and found out that our problem had been that we kept putting in too much vermouth and the secret of it was to use very little.  The over a hundred year old woman said, "No, don't put any vermouth in the gin, just a little olive brine, that's the way to do it!"   Anyway, in my taste test, gin was my third favorite.

Scotch I always think of as a “by itself” drink, anyway, as there are virtually no cocktails for it. There is the rusty nail, which is two parts scotch, one part Drambuie, which comes in a very handsome bottle. But Drambuie, itself, is scotch and honey, so you may as well just drink the Drambuie by itself, like nowadays they have these Honey Bourbons, of which I love the Wild Turkey American Honey, but for some reason dislike the Jack Daniels Honey Whiskey (it is all about personal taste).

I scored Scotch higher than I thought it would be, but Bourbon was lower than I had expected. The big surprise was rum, coming in at second to last.  I would have said that rum was my favorite hard liquor, but that is because I like the various rum cocktails best of all cocktails, such as, for example, the Bahama Mamas that I would guzzle down when I was safely in my hotel's bar in Exuma, and therefore not going to be driving anywhere on my rented motor scooter.  So sure, that is rum, but there are also quite a lot of sugar and sweet things.  Rum all by itself, I think I would have given my daily ration to somebody else if I were in somebody’s Navy.  Rum alone was like my grandmother’s feeling of gin…nasty.

Dead last, and I knew it would be last, was vodka.  I guess I would make a terrible Russian.  Yeah, they say it “has no taste”, but I think that is the problem, to me, it just tastes like pure alcohol so it makes me feel like I will go blind or something. Also, it reminds me too much of shot medicine, like in my childhood when I would have to en masse get my polio shots at school in the auditorium filled with screaming, crying children, getting their shots from vicious nurses. The scene was like a cattle slaughter house and the whole room would smell like shot medicine.  All the other kids were good and got a lollypop at the end, but I’d either faint or vomit in the wastebasket, so I never got the lollypop.  Around registering for the draft age, I lost my fear of shots, but the reaction to the smell of shot medicine never left me.

Although both tequila and vodka are supposed to be these “pure” alcohols, I guess tequila doesn’t have the shot medicine smell to me.  Taste testing both Blanco and Reposado by themselves, and then mixed with just Triple Sec, I found that the Triple Sec muted out the flavor of each and seemed to ride nicer with the Blanco.  I didn’t particularly care for the taste of the Reposado when mixed with the Triple Sec; it was like the two tastes interfered with each other instead of merging smoothly the way the Triple Sec did with the Blanco.  So my feeling is that the best idea is to drink by itself any rested tequila that you find that you like, but for mixing, use only a good Blanco.  Anything else is wasting money, I think.

After that one shot with Mike and Ramona, the boys came upstairs from playing and it was time for the boys to have their bath and for Ramona to put them to bed.  So I hung around with Mike for a short time after, and then went home to my apartment next door.

But that wasn’t the end of tequila shots with my next door neighbors, not by a long shot.  A Saturday or two ago, Mike excitedly was banging on my front door, hoping I was home.  I opened the door and he said he wanted me to come over for a tequila shot right now.  He explained that today was his 40^th birthday (kind of an aging crisis) and Ramona had gotten him as a present a $100 bottle of tequila, and other than Ramona, the only other person he wanted to share it with was me. So I was honored, and summoned.  

The hundred dollar bottle was tall and thin and I attempted to read the label so that I could remember what it was, but all I can say is that it must be one of a potential 400 or 500 or more various unique labels of tequila and one priced at a point that I would never spend, myself. I couldn’t even decipher from the label whether it was a reposado or an anejo or what, and anyway, Mike didn’t have the patience for me reading the label, he wanted to pour the shots.

Which he did, just the liquor, no lemon slices or any other flavor masking ritual, he knew this was going to be a delicious shot of tequila.  And boy was it!  Remarkably delicious, and smooth, and complex, and fascinating, all the attributes that are supposed to go along with this level of tequila, which was something you definitely would not use to make a margarita with.  And we did not gulp this down, but sipped and savored it very carefully.

I thought one shot should be enough, but the conversation among the three of us was quite alluring and intimately personal.  Greased or shoe-horned out of the deeper recesses of our individual psyches, we were talking about things, particularly Mike and his life since it was a celebration of his birthday, that people might not normally let themselves talk about, and yet we would think that people should talk about.  This certainly wasn’t a time for stopping the conversation, so after our sipping our first shot, Mike and Ramona poured another shot for themselves and seriously urged me to have another, I went along with them and accepted the second shot.  (They didn’t have to twist my arm.)

The second one seemed to enhance even the affects of the first one, taking us into an even deeper layer of our psyches and removing even at this deeper level any conversational inhibitions and I began to wonder if we continued on and plumbed the next level after that, we would find ourselves in a Carlos Casteneta realm.  What was this we were drinking, liquid peyote?

Both Ramona and I said to Mike that he should not pour a third shot of this $100 bottle of tequila, but for him to keep it for some other important occasion.  So Mike screwed shut the $100 bottle and put it away and poured himself and Ramona a third shot, this time from some “other” bottle.  I said to him that I did not want a third shot, do not give me any more, but he said he wanted us to keep on talking in the vein we had been and so he poured me a third shot anyway.

This third shot, coming from a bottle that definitely was not the $100 one, was not the worst thing I had ever put in my mouth, but pretty darn close.  The difference between this one and the $100 one was immensely evident.  I don’t even think any cocktail or slam-bam ritual with salt and lemon slices could mask the bad taste of this tequila.  I didn’t even go beyond the first couple of sips, saying to Mike that I had said I didn’t want it and now that I have it, I can’t stand to drink it.  After all, our inhibitions were all way down, so I didn’t mind telling him I couldn’t drink this one, he should just pour it out.

Mike was fine with that, and somehow he was able to continue to drink his, but I had by now developed such a hangover, and I don’t get hangovers ever, that I had to go back to my apartment.  I don’t think it was the first two shots that did this, it was just the few sips of the third shot that pushed the whole thing around the corner.  I couldn’t go back to the writing that I had been doing before Mike knocked on my door.  Those two foul sips of that third shot really ruined the rest of the day for me.  

But what we talked about, that was worth it.   We three had really been pulled down into a deeper conversational realm, one very rarely accessed.  This experience left all three of us feeling closer to each other and I have an enhanced respect for the struggles that Mike and Ramona have and what kind of admirable people they really are in how they handle these struggles.  That was not an affect from a bottle of tequila that I ever would have expected!

I expect that my tequila shot days with my neighbors are not over.  I am just going to have to avoid the hangovers, though.  From bliss to killer, it is amazing what kind of journey one can take just by what liquid we sip into our mouth.  For the time being, for me that is going to be strictly water!