BILLY BUTTERY

the-how-to:

by Lauren Westerfield

1. First, grow up watching too many old movies. The kind in which tuxedo-clad Cary Grants or Tyrone Powers come home from the club and slip on smoking jackets, then pour themselves a whiskey and soda. Fall in love with these men, their jackets, their decanters and soda bottles of patterned crystal with the antiquated steel spray tops. Ask to drink your apple juice out of a snifter. Receive a slap for your impertinence, then a cookie for your cheek.

2. Get a little older. Grow boobs (small ones). Graduate to James Bond films. Flirt with the idea of martinis, of glamour distilled and served in an upside-down triangle that whispers sex, power, adventure, sex…even before you are quite sure you know what sex really is. Remember next that your grandfather always drank martinis, dirty, with olives, his nose red and swollen and riddled with holes, and remember how incredibly unsexy it was. Go back to your first loves in their smoking jackets and imagine living in a garret apartment in a city somewhere with a rolling bar beside the bookcase. Do your homework. Get good grades.

3. Get in to college, somewhere green and ivy clad and well known. Don’t drink any alcohol whatsoever before you get there, nothing more than that sip of beer your dad offered you once to take the mystery fizz out of those sleek brown bottles in the fridge. Observe that it does, indeed, taste like piss, and leave for soccer practice. Spend your summer nights after senior year at Coldstone Creamery with your friends, at the park or at the movies, only hearing about the parties from a friend of a friend who knew the girl who got drunk and made out with another girl while the water polo boys watched. Go on chaste dates with a boy from your physics class who you felt certain would blossom one day with hidden depth and rakish charm because he was smart and kind and opened doors for you and took you for walks in the rose garden at Heather Farms, and because that was how things worked according to the gospel of Turner Classic Movies and Jane Austen. Embrace your disappointment when this doesn’t happen (which is okay because you didn’t love him) and set your sights on the next four years. Keep telling yourself, as your mother does, that they will be the years that matter, the years that will change your life.

4. Get drunk. Too easily the first time, in the middle of the second semester of your freshman year, on a dizzying cocktail of Miller High Life and nervous excitement, twirling outside Pearsons Hall under the starlight with your new best friend and thinking that you don’t care how bad it tastes if it makes you feel like this. Do it a few more times and then get picky. Put on airs. Get into wine, even though you’re not sure if you really like the flavor (at this point, there is only one flavor; no nuance, no “nose,” no difference between a cabernet and a malbec). Major in English and read lots of modern poetry, and start drinking the way your dead and gone heroes drank — from mason jars and out of coffee cups, in homage, in supplication, in the fervent pursuit of cool.

5. Taste whiskey for the first time, with a boy you like who brings you homemade granola and takes you to the Falls of Lana at midnight and teaches you how to smoke pot (you’ve never smoked anything before; you don’t do a very good job). Make the mistake of thinking that whiskey from a plastic bottle will taste the same as his Cutty Sark on the rocks, by candlelight, and ask him to buy you some (he’s older, with a car, and you only have ten dollars). Get violently sick on said whiskey and wake up to the smell of it, in sticky congealed puddles on your dresser where you poured too many shots the night before. Vow never to drink whiskey again. Keep that promise for two years.

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