There we were, me, my wife, my wife’s boyfriend, in Atlanta for a long weekend. “Hey, my contact is supposed to be here,” my wife’s boyfriend said. “If I can get hold of him, he can really hook you up. He always has the best shit, like, you wouldn’t believe.”
I will admit to some skepticism. I’ve been promised the best shit before, only to be disappointed; there’s a lot of product out there on the street that’s just not what it’s cracked up to be. But my wife’s boyfriend insisted that his man always came through. “You’ll see,” he said. “I just need to get ahold of him. He can be a little difficult to reach sometimes. Kinda goes with the territory. Once you sample his product, you’ll see. He only deals the good stuff.”
A few days and several phone calls later, he finally managed to make contact with his dude. We set up a meet that afternoon in an Atlanta hotel. “I gotta get some cash, man,” my wife’s boyfriend said. “We need to hurry, he doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”
Now, you would think that two people armed with an ATM-finding app in the heart of a city the size of Atlanta would have no difficulty with this. You’d think that, and you’d be so very, very wrong.
We found the first ATM tucked in a small atrium behind locked doors that would not open. The second was out of order. With increasing desperation, we roamed the harsh streets of Atlanta in search of a magic machine that might turn bits of data into rectangles of linen paper, painfully aware of every long minute that ticked by, separating us from the promise of the good stuff.
At last, on our third try, he hit pay…um. Not paydirt, exactly. Pay machine? An ATM that functioned as it should? Anyway, we succeeded in our first objective and, refreshed from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune by this small taste of victory, we made for the hotel where his connection allegedly awaited, no doubt with growing impatience.
I will confess, Gentle Reader, to a certain degree of nervousness when at last we arrived at a nondescript hotel door beyond which my wife’s boyfriend’s dealer allegedly awaited. The door opened instantly at his knock, to reveal a rather burly bearded man who looks like the prototype of every deranged character ever to appear in Hollywood:
Like this, but with a vaguely Scottish beard and an even more maniacal laugh
He escorted us in, still laughing in a way that distinctly said “too late now.” A woman sat on the bed, from which she said “Sit! Sit! I don’t bite, unless you want me to.”
My wife’s boyfriend sat, shrugged, and offered her his arm, which she bit. Beside him, a tuft of brilliantly colored hair extended from beneath the covers. “Don’t mind her,” the man said, ”that’s my girlfriend.”
Ah yes, the man. The man with the good stuff. The man so reliably able to hook one up with the best of the best that my wife’s boyfriend makes an effort to connect with him whenever he’s in Atlanta.
I have not yet mentioned the man.
The man sat beside the small table you always find in hotel rooms, the little wee thing that you never see anywhere except hotels, the table that somehow screams “I belong in a hotel room and nowhere else on earth” even though you can’t quite put your finger on why.
He sat there amidst a huge pile of small vials and little plastic bottles full of precursors, carefully mixing and pouring. I watched with, I must admit, no small measure of fascination, because while I do have a passing familiarity with armchair chemistry, I’ve never seen the synthesis process before. “Come in, come in!” he boomed. “I have some samples if you want a taste.”
By this point, Gentle Reader, I wanted a taste very much indeed, oh yes I did.
He handed me a tiny plastic cup and oh, if I live to be a thousand years old, practicing the craft of writing for all that time, I will come to the end of my existence with perhaps one one-hundredth of the eloquence I would need to express to you how exemplary, how blissful, how euphoric that little taste was.
The man laughed. “That expression, right there, that is why I do what I do,” he said.
Never have I tasted before, and never do I hope to taste again, such a magnificent, such a heavenly small-batch artesinal spiced rum.
I have sampled spiced rums all across this globe, from Colorado to Belgium to Iceland to the United Kingdom (the place so known for its rums that they were once used as a medium of exchange, because if there’s one thing that history teaches us, it’s that if you have something that tastes good, the United Kingdom will build a slave empire to get it), and never have I ever tasted anything that danced upon my taste buds like a half-dressed woman in black fishnets at a goth club in so divine a fashion.
