"The moment, now, had arrived for a Daiquiri," writes Joseph
Hergesheimer in his _San Cristobal de la Habana_. "Seated near the cool
drip of the fountain, where a slight stir of air seemed to ruffle the
fringed mantone of a bronze dancing Andalusian girl, I lingered over the
frigid mixture of Don Bacardi, sugar and a fresh, vivid green lime.
"It was a delicate compound, not so good as I was to discover later at
the Telegrafo, but still a revelation, and I was devoutly thankful to be
sitting at that hour in the Inglaterra with such a drink. It elevated my
contentment to an even higher pitch, and, with a detached amusement, I
recalled the fact that farther north prohibition was now in effect.
Unquestionably the cocktail on my table was a dangerous agent, for it
held in its shallow glass bowl slightly incrusted with undissolved sugar
the power of a contemptuous indifference to fate; it set the mind free
of responsibility; obliterating both memory and to-morrow, it gave the
heart an adventitious feeling of superiority and momentarily vanquished
all the celebrated, the eternal fears."
We wonder what they put into Mr. Hergesheimer's Daiquiri. It seems to us
a rather optimistic and romantic account of the effect of a single
cocktail. One of the reasons why we were reconciled to prohibition was
the fact that we invariably felt cheated whenever we read any loving
essay about rum. In the theater, too, again and again we saw some
character raise a glass to his lips and immediately begin to sing about
young love in May if he happened to be the hero, or fall down a flight
of steps if he were cast as the low comedian. We tried earnestly enough,
but these experiences were never duplicated for us. No songs came to our
lips, nor comic tumbles to our feet. Nor did we ever participate in Mr.
Hergesheimer's "contemptuous indifference to fate." It was not for us in
one cocktail; no, not in many.
Occasionally, it was possible to reach a stage where we became acutely
conscious of the fact that Armenians were being massacred and that
Ireland was not yet free. And later we have known a very persuasive
drowsiness. But as for contempt and a feeling of superiority and a
freedom from the eternal fears, we never found the right bottle. There
was none which opened for us any door of adventure. Once, we remember,
while on our way from the office to Seventy-second Street, we rode in
the subway to Van Cortlandt Park and, upon being told about it, traveled
back to Atlantic Avenue. It was a long ride for a nickel, but it hardly
satisfied us as authentic adventure.
Even the romantic stories of our friends generally seem to us
inadequate. Only to-day A. W. said, "You should have come to the party.
We played a new game called 'adverbs.' You send somebody out of the room
and choose an adverb, and when she comes back you've got to answer all
the questions in the spirit of that adverb. You know rudely, quickly,
cryptically, or anything like that. And then Art did a burlesque of the
second act of _Samson and Delilah_ and Elaine passed out completely, and
every time anybody woke her up she'd say, 'Call me a black and white
ambulance.' You had ought to have come."
We couldn't have added anything to that party. When it came our turn to
answer the questions in the adverb game it would be just our luck to
have the chosen word "gracefully" or "seductively" or something like
that, and probably the burlesque was no good anyhow unless one could get
into the spirit of the thing. That is our traditional failure. Right at
the beginning of a party we realize that it is our duty to get gay and
put ice down people's backs and all that, and it terrifies us. Whenever
a host says "Here, drink some more Scotch and liven up" we have the same
sinking feeling that we used to get when one of our former city editors
wrote in the assignment book opposite our name: "Go up to the zoo and
write me a funny story."
The whole trouble with life so far is that too much of it falls into
assignments. We're not even content to let our holidays just happen.
Instead we mark them down on a calendar, and there they stay as fixed
and set as an execution day. There are times, for instance, when we
feel like turning over a new leaf and leading a better life and giving
up cigarettes, but when we look at the calendar it isn't New Year's at
all, but Fourth of July, and so nothing can be done about it. Columbus
Day or Washington's Birthday generally comes just about the time we've
worked up an enthusiasm for Lincoln, which has to go to waste, and the
only strong impulse we ever had to go out and cut loose was spoiled
because we noticed that everybody we met was wearing a white flower in
his buttonhole and we remembered that it was Mother's Day. There are
even times when we don't want to play cards or travel on railroad trains
or read the newspapers or go to the movies, but these times never
synchronize with Sunday.
When we first took up drinking we hoped that this would be one of the
avenues of escape from schedule and assignment, but it didn't work out.
Even here there were preliminaries and premeditation. First of all, it
was necessary to cultivate a taste for the stuff, but that was only a
beginning. There were still ceremonies to be complied with. Drunkenness
never just descended on anybody like thunderstorm, rain or inspiration.
It was not possible to go to sleep sober and wake up and find that
somehow or other you had become intoxicated during the night. Always an
act of will was required. A fixed determination, "I'm going to get
drunk," must first be set, and then the rum has to be ordered and
poured out and consumed pretty regularly. In fact, we never could look
at a bottle without feeling that the label probably bore the express
direction, "Take ten times every hour until relief is obtained." Even
before the Volstead act liquor was spiritually a prescription rather
than a beverage.
We never had the strength of character to get any good out of it. It's a
fallacy, of course, to think of a chronic drunkard or a chronic anything
as a person of weak will. Indeed, as a matter of fact, his will is so
strong that he has been able to marshal all his energies into one
channel and to make himself thereby a specialist. In all our life we
have never met but two determined men. One took a cold bath every
morning and the other got drunk every night.