Beer Quarters
Phillip Hurst
In John Barleycorn, Jack London’s memoir of his love-hate relationship with alcohol, he writes of getting drunk for the first time at age five, when curiosity got the best of him while totting a pail of beer out to his father who was ploughing a field on a hot day. The predictable result was a very sick little boy, and one who swore off alcohol—a promise that held until he discovered red wine a couple of years later. And though we were born a century apart, and while I can’t top London’s precocious drinking, I more than sympathize with his soused five-year-old self.
After all, I got my first bartending gig at the same tender age.
Back in the eighties, my parents owned a little newspaper in rural Illinois and my teenaged brothers were put in charge on the Tuesday nights when the News-Gazette’s husband-and-wife crew toiled past the witching hour to meet the weekly publication deadline. After a hasty dinner, my mother would rinse the dishes while my father glowered at The Wall Street Journal , chain-smoked Pall Malls, and delivered fire-and-brimstone hagiographic soliloquies in praise of his hero, Ronald Reagan. Eventually, however, the time would come and they’d gather purse and briefcase, faux-fur coat and sweat-stained fedora, warn me to mind my big brothers, and head back up to the newspaper office.
Approximately ten minutes later, my brothers’ buddies and girlfriends would roar up to the house in their smoke-belching beaters, cutting ruts in the lawn and hauling in troves of piss-warm Bud, Miller, and Pabst. My mother’s Johnny Mathis LPs would be ripped from the record player and frisbeed across the den, replaced by Iron Maiden and KISS. Beer was iced, shots poured, and the bravest of the brave fired up smokes from my father’s carton of Pall Malls. Finally, everyone would gather around the kitchen table and commence getting illegally, outrageously, borderline eschatologically drunk.
The chief pastime was Beer Quarters. As with all good drinking games, the gist was simple: bounce coins into cups, loser drinks, everybody quickly gets smashed. As the night wore on, coins bounced and splashed into frothy mugs which in turn were drained, filled, quartered, and drained anew. While a novice compared to my brothers (and although my mug was filled with Coca-Cola), I’ll wager I was the finest shooter in all the downstate Illinois kindergarten Beer Quarters circuit. My technique involved standing on a chair to gain the necessary elevation, pinching shut one eye behind my Batman mask, hitching up my utility belt and tossing my cape over one shoulder. Then I’d hold the coin flat between finger and thumb, aiming, measuring, before banging it off the tabletop. As that quarter spun through the smoky air, I’d hold my breath, ready to point at whoever had been picking on me the most and shout, “Chug, asshole!”
But the Caped Crusader’s tutelage didn’t stop there. For instance, he learned how to properly pour a beer, to roll that precious golden liquid down the glass and raise a perfect inch-thick pillow of foamy head. Other duties included emptying ashtrays, changing the TV channel, fetching potato chips, and—most crucially—keeping a lookout for parents come home early. And while I was almost always an eager volunteer, any negligence as to these obligations put me at risk of wet-willies and swirlies and (worst of all) the marvin , which is Midwest parlance for the melvin , a particularly unpleasant variant of the classic wedgie.
Mostly, though, I spent those Tuesday nights in rapt admiration, watching and learning, mimicking the lingo and absorbing all the best moves. Hence, a kid who grew up well-aware of the boons of fermented beverage. Having witnessed my brothers and their friends get sloshed and rowdy and (despite the zits, mullets, and acid-washed jeans) occasionally even laid , the debauchery seemed then—and I confess, most often still seems—pretty darn cool.
What all of this ultimately says about me is an open question, I suppose, but if it’s true that our lives are irrevocably colored by our earliest experiences, that my experience tended to involve watching barley-breathed vulgarians pound cheap suds and arm-wrestle is simply the hand I was dealt. I cannot change this and probably wouldn’t even if I could.
In the decades since, however, this dubious education has proven both useful and dangerous. I suspect it played no small part in my becoming a bartender, for one thing, and it also likely nurtured my Irish proclivities for haunting the opposite side of the oak. But something about the wildness of those Tuesday nights seems also to have imbued in me a hunger for adventure, for new places, new faces, and new experience. A recurring theme in John Barleycorn is London’s distaste for the laboring life he was born into, hence his attendant flights of travel (always arm-in-arm with his titular adviser), and much as with London’s early acquaintance with beer, I can sympathize with that, too. While I didn’t trek the Klondike during the Gold Rush or contract malaria in the Marquesas (let alone become world-famous and filthy-rich), over the years I have managed to drink my way across the immensity of the American West and beyond, my impressions fueled and colored by a host of drinks whose flavors reflected both the character of where I found them and the condition in which they found me. To this day, tasting those nectars takes me back, intensely and at once, to those distant locales where I mixed and poured, read and wrote, lusted after waitresses and shed the most naïve of my preconceptions.
London points out rightly that a strong head for drink, while a source of pride, can also be a great affliction. As such, sobriety is sometimes necessary (and can even be pleasant in strict moderation), but to imbibe knowledgeably and well, to develop one’s capacity to appreciate this most human and humane of traditions, is a deeply civilizing experience. A push back against the encroachment of the humdrum and an instrument by which to lay claim upon the passing hours. A sign, much like a love of literature and a taste for irony, of having lived an authentic life.
So I suppose old Jack London has inspired me, from this seat at the end of youth, to look back and try to distill all that bars and booze have meant both to the boy and young man I was, as well as the guy I’ve become. And yet I find myself both grasping at metaphor and mired up to the liver in paradox: because while our pleasures and consolations tend to go down smoothest on the rocks, so as to linger on the tongue and finish a bit more slowly, it seems inescapable that, abandoned as we find ourselves in this most bewildering and lonesome of worlds, we’re doomed to struggle—and absent a string of bestsellers those struggles are apt to be potent, sour, and inveterate—and so perhaps it’s best to take life’s darker moments neat, with no chaser.
In the end, John Barleycorn is a call for temperance and prohibition, but reading it one gets the sense that London is either unduly blaming alcohol for the inevitable hurts and disappointments of growing older, or paying unconscious lip service to the social movements prevalent at the time. Because though drink nearly killed him more than once and quite possibly hastened his early death, and though in his youth it frittered away his hard-earned money and led him into trouble, he acknowledges that old John Barleycorn was his guide into the rugged world of chesty manhood to which he aspired—a friend and companion (if a dodgy one) that helped show him the path to what would become an authentically unique American life.
Looking back on his sodden days, London acknowledges the enigma of booze, with its echoes of Classical-era tragedy: the higher drink bears you up, the farther there is to fall; and nothing that feels so good and comes so easy comes without a corresponding price. Then again, much the same could said about passionate love or big ambition, the harnessing of a great talent or the plumbing of a deep friendship. There is no honest way around these conditions, I don’t believe, and like the great Hank Williams said, nobody gets out of here alive.
Perhaps, as with Beer Quarters, there comes a time to just close your eyes and chug.
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Phillip Hurst’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in River Teeth, Reed Magazine, Post Road Magazine, Cimarron Review, and The Dr. T J. Eckleburg Review, among other venues. Over the years, he’s worked as a bartender throughout the American West.
