Every dysfunctional character in the novels of Chuck Palahniuk,

Angostura Bitters

Angostura Bitters

Why can’t I get enough Chuck Palahniuk? I am in touch with my masculinity as much as any other ex-New Yorker (don’t mess with me suburbia and rurality!). And while corporations piss me off with their lack-of-culpability shenanigans, these last years have shown that a corporation’s own worst enemy isn’t the free market or anarchists, but itself. I have never felt the need to make huge, intentional strides towards my own mortality (via gangbang or otherwise), nor have I considered myself a pawn in some quasi-Wicker Man (Not The Bees!) conspiracy. And I most certainly haven’t found a way to go back in time to kill myself to make me stronger (wha-?). But that doesn’t keep me from curling up with each new book he writes, and bathing in the lurid details of lives I’ll never lead. And so I see all of Chuck’s characters lining up at a bar and not ordering something that tastes good, a drink that would placate and satisfy not only with its alcohol content, but with its masterful preparation and perfect balance of flavors. No, I see them ordering only that which tastes awful, and will be sure to induce a hangover. Even as Americans shun bitter flavors, and embrace sickening sweetness, so do Chuck’s people shun comfort and embrace pain.

Montresor, “The Cask of Amontillado,” by Edgar Allan Poe

Scottish Armada

If you toasted your vengeance several nights a week for fifty years, it might drive you mad—granting, of course, that immuring your enemy in the family crypt a half century ago might itself be a sign of madness. Montresor has grown tired of the Amontillado he bought in order to lure the unwitting Fortunato to his death, so now he mixes it with fresh grapefruit, homemade grenadine, and Scotch. And going against the common wisdom, Montresor finds that revenge is a dish best served hot, and remembered on the rocks.

Smilla Qaavigaaq Jaspersen, “Smilla’s Sense of Snow,” by Peter Hoeg

Frozen Siberian

There is nothing more terrifying to a fine bartender than the whir of a blender battering away at ice cubes. Yet there is nothing more calming to Smilla than being around water that has fallen to the freezing point—and drinking. Smilla wants something comforting and familiar while shuttling between Greenland and Denmark, an outsider caught in the purgatory between two cultures. In this cocktail I have Kahlua and a layer of half-whipped cream on top; the recipe for comfort is complete.

And now for the familiar. It is my theory that vodka runs through the veins of the natives of frozen lands (see under: Boris Yeltsin). So I introduce the mother’s milk of the frozen tundra and cut the sweetness of the Kahlua. The ice cannot be simply cubes: no, we need to destroy the ice in a blender with the vodka and Kahlua, remake it into something new. For Smilla, taking the ice in, feeling it in her mouth, and learning all she can from it as it dissolves is a common pastime, and one that will prove useful in her search for an artifact that some people consider worthy of murder.

Douglas Kerchek, “The Smoker,” from “Kissing in Manhattan,” David Schickler

Spanish Flip

When you marry into a family that seems to have it all together, their rituals in place, and the roles they play worn as comfortably as an old coat, it’s hard to find your place. For poor Douglas to wed into the Bonner clan, he’ll need to get used to about as much freedom as an iron maiden affords. But he knows that they’re a brandy family, that they enjoy the special mixing of spirits and citrus that is a cocktail (specifically, a well-made Sidecar), and that their penthouse, in the Preëmption apartment building on the Upper West Side, needs a little of the street let in.

Start with Spanish brandy instead of the French stuff, then add some lemon and simple syrup so you have a solid foundation. But replace the Cointreau with a bit of the Caribbean’s allspice-flavored pimento dram, dark rhum, and a few dashes of Trinidadian Angostura bitters, plus the white of one egg. Why add protein to a cocktail? For the frothy head and the amazing mouth feel it provides.

I think that Douglas wants to put his own stamp on this brandy family, to enjoy a cocktail that reflects Manhattan more accurately, and to impress them with the vigor he applies to shaking his take on a classic flip.

Sherman McCoy, “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” Thomas Wolfe

Martini

In the interest of turning over a new leaf and starting the year right, let us take Mr. McCoy as a prime example of redemption. Sherman was lost to the decadence of the 80’s, the shallow quest for more money, of building that perfect house of cards. If we look to that other perfect example of the 80’s, “Cocktail,” then we see that people’s drinking habits were every bit as vacuous as their lifestyles. But by the end of the book he had rediscovered his soul. Now, well into the new millenium and given that Wall Street is yet again an empty suburb of card houses, we drink more cold vodka than anything else. So let us pull in from the frippery of the end of last century and the lack of flavor of our vodka swilling new millneium and split the difference. Embrace the juniper! Embrace the dry vermouth! Throw in a lemon twist or some olives and let us, like Sherman, take back our soul. Soul, in this instance, equals flavor with substance and spirits with flavor. Remember: cold vodka does not, and never will, a martini make.