The Alky Era

People Who Don't Remember Prohibition tend to think of it in terms of the speakeasy. This is convenient, romantic, and has the advantage that the movies have provided all of us with suitable mental images. What most people don't know is that speakeasy drinking was a comparatively minor part of the drinking picture.

First off, it must be remembered that the 1919-1932 drinkers were earnest. Most of them didn't know it, but they drank to assert their right to untrammeled freedom. When red-necked John Nance Garner was on the loose in Washington, he always put an invitation to a drink in a Prohibition-inspired phrase: "Let's strike a blow for Liberty." Prohibition drinkers drank defiantly, almost proudly. It was no social stigma to have a breath that would burn with a blue flame; indeed, it demonstrated that you were a sterling type, the right sort, one of the best. A lady could fall on her face into the soup at a banquet and not risk being dropped from a single invitation list. There was nothing wrong with getting drunk. People drank to get loaded. That was the idea.

They drank in speakeasies, yes, dismal little dumps, most of them, deadfalls into which you wouldn't send your worst enemy today, but they glowed golden then with the mantle of illegitimacy. The furnishings might be crepe-paper-covered orange crates, but the wonderful conspiratorial sense of being banded together against the law made up for it. The speakeasy was essentially a big-city phenomenon, and all the speaks in existence couldn't have slaked the national thirst if they had tried to. People drank not only in speakeasies, they drank everywhere: in their own homes, in friends' homes, in automobiles on the way to friends' homes and back from them, at every kind of social event from football games to christenings, and, if they were on the right economic level, in their offices. They didn't achieve the wonderful universal state of drunkenness that marked the Americans in Colonial times, when the righteous New Englanders flooded the land with rum, and even ministers of the gospel were frequently gassed beyond recovery by 12 o'clock noon, but they tried.

What did they drink? They drank anything that didn't actually smoke as it was poured. There was one test: is this stuff alcohol? If it was, down the hatch with it, and hang on until the spasms had passed and you could get your jaws apart again. Starting at the top, they drank good liquor: bottled-in-bond, 17-year-old 100 proof bourbon. This was the government stuff, available in drug stores under prescription. Doctors could write 50 prescriptions a month for a pint each. The standard fee for the prescription was the same as the cost of the whiskey at the drug store: $3. No patient could have more than one pint every 20 days, and the label usually read: "2 tbls. in water before every meal." The very rich made deals with their doctors for a book a month. The books would be filled out with false names and turned over to a friendly druggist in exchange for two cases of 24 pints and two extra pints. Smart druggists who happened to be near hospitals bought whole books from young staff doctors for as much as $150 each. They'd fill out the prescription as they sold the whiskey – for $8 a pint. It was superior merchandise, and worth the price, if you had it. Most people didn't.

As time wore on, Yankee ingenuity sprang into the breach, but when the crushing blow of Prohibition first fell, a thirsty man had to place his reliance on sources already available, and if he couldn't afford government-issue whiskey he had to settle for less. If he lived in a town big enough to have an Italian community he could buy homemade wine, white or red, for a dollar a quart. At first it was pretty good stuff, but the demand was great, connoisseurs few, and soon the standard line was barely potable, opaque and sharp on the tongue. A quart would make you stiff as a goat, to cite one of the expressions of the day, and more would make you sick.

In German or Czech neighborhoods beer was available – at least they called it beer; it was beer-colored and had foam on top. It was usually sold in 26-ounce ginger ale bottles, 50 cents each. You didn't drink the whole bottle. You left an inch and a half in the bottom, sediment, mostly yeast culture. Two bottles would put you to sleep.

If you drank the stuff in the house in which you bought it, you drank it in the kitchen usually, standing up if you weren't one of the three or four who could be accommodated at the kitchen table. Sometimes there would be a few little tables set up in the dining room, covered with red checkered tablecloths in imitation of the New York speakeasy.

The "beer-flats" of the great Midwestern cities had another service: spare bedrooms. They were available for private parties, and many included the services of a complaint hostess.

Once in a great while you'd find a place of authentic charm – once in a very great while. Usually it was a road-house. I remember one such in the countryside to the north of Ithaca, N.Y., much favored by the few Cornell students who knew about it. This was a small farm and the genial proprietor made rye whiskey. It was smooth and good, it cost 50 cents a slug, and a dollar was the price for all the fresh bread and crumbly white goat's-milk cheese you wanted. The place was clean and quiet, there were two or three tables on a screened porch and you could sit there on a cool spring evening, looking out over the rolling green hills, and get boiled like a gentleman. I can still taste that rye: it was straw-colored, presumably because it had been but little aged, and to judge from its effect on experienced drinkers, it must have run about 100 proof. It produced a notably mild hangover, and was therefore considered to be of superior quality.

Most whiskey was pretty bad, naturally enough, since it was being made in cellars by ham-handed goons only just bright enough to know the difference between a pint and a quart. In the big cities along the East Coast, and those bordering the Great Lakes, the "just-off-the-boat" myth flourished. A great deal of genuine stuff did come across from Canada, of course, but it was expensive indeed. Labels and bottles, naturally, meant nothing at all. As one bootlegger emeritus told me, "If I got any good stuff I drank it myself." And much of it was used as flavoring for the blended booze that did reach the public.

Gin was popular because it was so easy to make. There were no mysteries about gin. Then as now it was made of alcohol, (continued on page 80)Alky Era(continued from page 47) water and flavoring, and it was ready to drink immediately, with no nonsense about aging. In the early days gin was made by professionals who knew how to flavor it with essence of juniper berry, but later the flavoring was sold in drug stores and anyone could make the stuff. It was not often made in bath tubs because of the nuisance of siphoning out the last couple of bottles and because of the inevitable wastage down the drain. The simplest way to brew up a batch was to fill a gallon jug half with water – distilled water, if you wanted to be fancy – and half with alcohol. Then you added the juniper juice, corked it and rolled it back and forth across the floor a few times for mixing. The molecular action of the alcohol and water made the stuff warm and it was considered the mark of a connoisseur to let it cool to room temperature before drinking it, usually with ice, lemon and ginger ale.

For ambulant social consumption you carried the gin in a pint flask of Brittania metal, which imparted no taste – a tinny flavor would have improved much of the gin, at that – and drank it with setups. A 12-ounce bottle of ginger ale with ice and lemon cost a dollar in the better places, and usually there'd be a cover charge of three dollars or so. Gin was popular because, everything considered, it was safest. If you could be reasonably certain that your alcohol wasn't absolutely deadly, you didn't have much to worry about.

There were other compounds available, though. By 1928, extracts for making rye, bourbon, brandy and even such esoteric potables as anisette were available to the home chemist. All you needed was a source of straight. A and the co-ordination of a chimpanzee. You bought the flavoring at a store – in New York they were called "Cordial Shops" – and added it to the alcohol. In time you learned little tricks. Some people added glycerine to smooth the stuff out. Others used Karo syrup or honey for the same purpose. Simpler drinks were also available: cherry whiskey, for example, rosy with soda-fountain syrup. A popular potion for innocent young ladies was a light mixture of alcohol and water, say 65/35, laced with lemon syrup.

There were malt and hops stores, too, to sell the makings for home brew. The malt came in three-pound cans and the label included a recipe for making ginger snaps. (It was possible, and they were good, too.) The stores also sold crocks, rubber hose, bottles, caps and so on. At first you had to buy yeast and hops separately, but soon they were all combined, and you just dumped the can into a big pan and heated it. Then you put it into a crock with five gallons of water and a pound of sugar. You stirred it for a while and then let nature take over. About a week later you bottled it. You put a spoonful of sugar in each bottle first, for carbonation, and in some areas a magic pill called "Do More" was popular. Sometimes the stuff was good, sometimes it was terrible, but nobody ever threw it away. You drank it.

You could make wine, too. The malt stores sold grape juice in kegs. The kegs carried a dire warning in red: "Do not let this keg stand with the bung open for six weeks. Do not agitate the keg under these conditions. If you do, at the end of six weeks you will have wine and this is illegal." Some people preferred wine bricks, a concentrate of grape juice in solid form. You tossed one into a keg, added water and followed the red-letter formula. Wine bricks cost a dollar and a half and one would make five gallons of wine, to use the term in the loosest fashion.

The necessary alcohol came from everywhere under the sun. The best was government issue, of course, 188 proof. Drug stores had it for prescription-making, and if a bootlegger admitted making his own stuff, instead of getting it right off the boat, he was likely to tell you that his brother worked in a drug store, or that he was a chemist with unlimited access to the real stuff. Drug store alcohol cost $20 a gallon and was the only truly "straight" alky on the market. All other alcohol was cut with water. The alcohol that was delivered to my kitchen in a gallon can every Saturday for years was pure enough, but it tested at less than 100 proof, and cost $5 a gallon.

Most A was "cooked." It was industrial alcohol, paint remover, lacquer solvent or some other deadly poison which had been boiled until the lethal ingredients had largely volatilized. Alky cooking was a very big business, and every big city had illicit plants turning out thousands of gallons a day. Alky cooking was a cottage industry, too. A small still on the stove could convert coarse yellow corn sugar into alcohol neatly and easily. Huge organizations grew up engaged in the business of delivering corn sugar to thousands of homes and apartments, collecting and paying for the finished product a gallon or so at a time. It was a small business, like wine-making, but it gave the women folks a profitable pastime. It solved the question of what to do with Grandma. She could always watch the still.

Amateur distillation of the finished product, finished except for the vital aging process, that is, was largely a rural endeavor because of the resultant odor. If you tried to set up a medium-sized still in the back yard of a city home, somebody would rat on you and the Federals would shortly call. In the provinces you could hope to dissipate the telltale odor in the wide-open spaces. The Southerners were best at it, since they'd been in training since Colonial times. They made corn, and for some reason they packaged it in Mason jars. Many an unrepentant citizen can remember the cool caress of moonshine running into his ears as he tried to drink out of a Mason jar in a speeding Model T. To expedite deliveries, and foil the lurking Feds on the way, the Southern moonshiners developed a kind of Q-ship on wheels: a dismal-looking coupé equipped with a big hairy engine in front and truck springs in the rear, the better to cope with the weight of Mason jars and corn. Accepted practice was to run these formidable voitures over the mountain roads at night and without lights, and as fast as they'd go. I rode passenger, or shotgun, in one of them in Kentucky. I stared through the windshield in sheer horror, immovable, for about five minutes. Then I unscrewed a short jar of the stock and anesthetized myself. I wasn't afraid to die – I just didn't want to know about it.

Most people drank corn practically as soon as it was cool. Wiser men laid it down in charred kegs for a few months. But corn wasn't the only regional moonshine. In the cherry-orchard country of Wisconsin there was something called St. Nazienz, a cousin, twice removed, of cherry brandy. Minnesotans made wheat wine, and New Jersey farmers cooked applejack. There were two kinds of apple: distilled and frozen. The distilled stuff was made like whiskey, by running hard cider through a still. The frozen stuff was easier to produce: you just set a barrel of hard cider outdoors and let it freeze. Then you bored into the center, where the alcohol had concentrated. You drained that off and threw the rest away. The stuff may not have been as palatable as a fine calvados, but it had no less authority.

If you lacked the enterprise to brew up your own booze, and didn't want to patronize the thugs who had it for sale, you could make do quite acceptably with various synthetics openly sold. There were the beef-iron-and-wine tonics, usually 50 percent alcohol. There were flavoring extracts and mouthwashes. You needed kidneys like truck radiators, but you could get loaded, and that, after all, was the prime consideration. Vanilla extract would do until the manufacturers found a way to make it without alcohol, and I have had Listerine high-balls, which are ghastly – although a small bottle of Listerine added to a dish-panful of canned grapefruit juice and alky gave it, for some tastes, a distinctive bouquet. With or without Listerine, grapefruit juice was considered the uni-(concluded on page. 86)Alky Era(continued from page 80) versal solvent and when I was in college no self-respecting fraternity would consider setting up a party without a few hotel-size tins of the stuff on hand. The Dekes used to give their dates something called simply "snow" (maybe this is the origin of "snow job") which was vanilla ice cream beaten up with straight A. Mixed properly you couldn't taste the alcohol, possibly because the cold ice cream dulled the taste buds, and many a dear little girl wildly overestimated her capacity to handle the stuff. And many an all-American boy, if it comes to that.

A word that frightened the uninitiated was "Jake," short for Jamaica ginger, a remedy for stomach ailments. Good Jake ran about 96 percent alcohol – that's 196 proof. It came in four-ounce bottles, each packing the equivalent jolt of perhaps eight contemporary martinis. I've seen people dump four ounces of Jake into a malted milk glass, add ice and Coca-Cola and drink it in 20 minutes. They were very drunk for a short while before they passed out. You could get really stiff on Jake, and by stiff I mean literally rigid. The trouble with Jake was that the government persuaded the makers to poison it, so that more than 30 drops, the prescribed dose to be taken in hot water, would have serious results when taken, in the label term we all knew so well, internally. People began dying from Jake. But good Jake was all right, taken slowly with plenty of cracked ice. The cracked ice was to convince you that your throat was not being burned off in strips.

Toward the end of the great drought, when repeal was almost in sight, most earnest drinkers got down to essentials. They drank ginger ale or Silver Spray or Green River dosed with straight. A, or they drank near-beer that had been "spiked" or "needled." There were a lot of near-beers on the market, some of them pretty good. Kingsbury Pale, for example, was superior. You opened the bottle, filled the neck with alcohol, decanted it into a big glass or a mug. If you preferred to drink it out of the bottle, you used a technique known as "heeling." You put your thumb carefully over the neck of the bottle after you'd added the alcohol, slowly upended it and then struck the bottom a smart jolt with the heel of your shoe, or your date's shoe. The theory was that the shock miraculously mixed the beer and alcohol molecules. It was considered poor form for the bartender to heel the beer before serving it, although some experts contended that the alcohol would destroy any bacteria lurking on his big fat thumb, so what difference did it make? Roadhouse bartenders were not often moved by niceties of this or any other type. When I was in college a favorite gentleman tended bar at a joint called Julie's. He was esteemed because if, after you'd had a few, you accused him of shorting the amount of alcohol he was putting into the bottle, he'd undertake to get rid of you the quickest way: he'd pour out some beer and really load it up. It was a nice arrangement, satisfactory to all. You were shortly dead drunk. This had been your aim, so you were happy, and you were quiet, so the barkeep was happy. It wasn't his alky, he was just a hired hand. And since the alcohol was usually in a big dishpan, it was as easy to put in two jolts as one. Reason for the dishpan was that it was quick to empty in the event of a raid. One movement and it was down the drain, whereas bottles might gurgle long enough for the Feds to grab a sample. Without a sample, they had no case. In the lusher speakeasies elaborate devices were used for this purpose. New York's "21," now one of the nation's most celebrated restaurants, had a complicated arrangement involving a back-bar that tipped, dumping bottles, glasses and all into a chute rigged with sewer-gratings set at an angle. If anything reached the bottom intact it landed on scrap iron.

When Franklin Roosevelt restored sanity to the land with repeal, the kick went out of drinking for a lot of people. Bragging about your hangover was no longer considered smart, and people began to nurse the suspicion that you were a lush instead of just a fun-loving boy. And hangovers produced by legal booze were the palest imitations of the real thing anyway. Only prohibition rotgut could build a hangover that made death seem really and truly an attractive alternative. After all, the stuff was poison by any standard. I've seen medical students spiking beer with laboratory alcohol, its bright blue color advertising its deadliness. I've seen them next morning. They were living, if you could call it that. Actually they were in a borderline state between hangover and total extinction.

The Twenties were mad and gay, to be sure, but in a desperate kind of fashion. The country was awash with bad liquor and everybody drank as if there'd never be any more; but much more liquor is drunk today, I'm sure, and far fewer people, paradoxically, get drunk. And I think they have more fun. In the Twenties the idea was to be gay if it killed you, to raise hell because it was against the law, to have fun because it was the thing to do. It was a kind of ritual snake dance. Some of the historians of the time, with F. Scott Fitzgerald leading the van, have created the legend that the Twenties were an uninterrupted bacchanalia in worship of liquor, sex and money. Liquor there was, but less than now; money there was, but the boom that blew up in 1929 was nothing to the boom of the 40s and 50s, and as for sex, it was popular to be sure; but as I've said, more liquor was drunk in the 40s and 50s, more money was made, and if the truth were known, probably more women, too.

The flapper famed in song and story talked a lot about sex. She talked a lot about emancipation, but she was inclined to prove her newly won free status by trying to drink like a man and dress like one. The shingle bob was a man's hair style, and if she wore short skirts, shapelessness was still her ideal. Her waistline was around her hips, to convince you that she had no hips, and the brassiere of the period was a 10-inch-wide horror called a bandeau, cinched up so tight, if possible, as to leave no telltale bulges at all. A girl built like Sophia Loren or Anita Ekberg was an object of pity. The flapper would kill you with the Charleston and the shag and the bunny hug, but she wasn't interested in proving she was a woman. Usually she was afraid, but she'd die before she'd admit it, so she was one of the great teases of all time. There were some notable exceptions, of course; that there were.

All in all, I don't want the Twenties back. It was a crude, rough and vulgar time, as it had to be with the likes of Al Capone and Dion O'Banion running the show. Still, there were moments. I remember a night in Evanston when the host offered a magnum of honest champagne to the couple who could stay under water longest in the pool. He was considerate of the girls, he had bathing caps for each of them; and he put everybody's clothes carefully away in a locked closet where they could come to no harm. I remember watching two Princetons, stoned to the eyeballs on A and grapefruit juice, fighting a duel with four-foot antique rapiers on a lawn near West-hampton, while the girl who was the root of it stood off to one side, slowly undressing in the moonlight and waiting for the blood-letting to be over. They might have killed each other at that; they were working like blacksmiths, but she stopped it finally by walking between them, taking their swords away and leading them both into the rose garden while the rest of us watched bug-eyed. An unusual girl. I haven't seen anything like that lately, come to think of it. And I remember a place in Madison, Wisconsin, a cool, wood-paneled little speak to which we used to repair around 11 in the morning, having passed up our eight, nine and 10 o'clock classes, and have a few quiet beers until four o'clock came around and we could start on the serious drinking of the night. Sure, there were a few good things to be remembered – if you lived through it all.