A couple of years back, my co-author Eunice and I started work on a new erotic novel, told in two parallel narrative streams: odd-numbered chapters taking place in Buffalo, New York in the present day, and even-numbered chapters taking place in London in 1871. The even-numbered chapters follow a Victorian doctor struggling to find a cure for furor uterinus, the formal name for “nymphomania;” the even-numbered chapters, a group of college friends who find his diaries and decide to replicate his experiments for…more entertaining purposes.
This is an essay about being experimented upon in a bar, not about writing. I’m getting to that, I promise.
Anyway, the novel, which we abandoned for a while and have recently returned to (with the assistance of my wife and my Talespinner), includes this passage:
“Is this another sitting room?” Jason said.
“I think it’s a parlor,” Leigh said.
“What’s the difference between a sitting room and a parlor?” Jason said.
Olivia glanced around the posh, elaborately decorated room, its windows just as large as the ones in the master bedroom. Several couches, a large comfortable chair, and a tête-à-tête all lurked beneath white shrouds. “One’s more formal?” she guessed. “What’s that thing?” She opened what looked like a large cabinet built into the wall, to find a shaft with cables running down into darkness.
“Dumbwaiter!” Leigh said. “For bringing things up. Brandy, cognac, cigars…” She tugged on a chain dangling from a lever in the wall next to the dumbwaiter. A distant bell tinkled. Leigh giggled. “I say, old chap, do be a sport and bring up the cognac.”
“What’s cognac?” David said.
“Little fish eggs in a tin?” Natalie hazarded.
“That’s caviar,” Leigh said. “Cognac is whisky for snooty people.”
Now, those of you familiar with cognac will know that it is not, in fact, whiskey for snooty people, it’s brandy for snooty people.
I am not familiar with cognac, but that’s okay because the characters are also not familiar with cognac, so it’s cool that they get it wrong.
That’s the setup. The story I mean to relay here is utterly different.
So I’m currently in Orlando, helping my wife get her RV ready for a cross-country trip. She lives across the street from a small neighborhood bar which the three of us—me, my wife, and her boyfriend—visited a few days back.
Three things struck me immediately when we walked in:
- We were literally the only people in the place besides the bartender;
- The bartender looked exactly, and I mean exactly, the way I imagine the character Natalie from the novel, to the point I turned to Joreth and said “holy shit, it’s Natalie!”; and
- The house special that day was a cognac drink.
So naturally, I ordered the cognac drink (as did Joreth’s boyfriend); and naturally, that led to an entire conversation about cognac, which, as I pointed out already, is not whiskey for snooty people, it’s brandy for snooty people.
The special drink, which the bartender (whose name, as it turns out, was not actually Natalie, which is good because had it been, I’d’ve been quite convinced I’d fallen through a dimensional rift into a fictional world) had never made before, was a rather complex thing whose making involves, among other things, a blowtorch.
“It’s an experiment!” not-Natalie chirped as she got out the blowtorch.
I do not, Gentle Reader, understand the purpose of the blowtorch. I mean, I do, it exists to apply fire to things, but I’m not sure what role they play in making a drink. She stripped the peel off an orange, cut it into strips, sprinkled it with cinnamon and…um, sugar, I think?, slipped it into the glass, sprinkled more cinnamon on it, and…
I will confess that I am not generally an alcohol connisseur. I can’t tell a Scotch single-malt from a dry gin. But believe me when I say, Gentle Reader, that drink was delicious.
10/10, would recommend being experimented upon by a character from a novel again.