The Wet and the Dry

Also by the Author

The Forgiven
Bangkok Days
The Naked Tourist
The Accidental Connoisseur
American Normal
The Poisoned Embrace
Paris Dreambook
Ania Malina

Copyright © 2013 by Lawrence Osborne

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

www.crownpublishing.com

CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Portions of this work were previously published in different form as “Drinking in Islamabad” in
Playboy
(July 2010); and as “Getting a Drink in a Civil War” in
Harper’s
(March 2011).
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Osborne, Lawrence, 1958–
  The wet and the dry : a drinker’s jouney / Lawrence Osborne.
  p. cm.
  1. Drinking customs—Cross-cultural studies. 2. Drinking of alcoholic beverages—Cross-cultural studies. 3. Temperance—
Cross-cultural studies. I. Title.
GT2884.O73 2012
394.1′2—dc23         2012038224

eISBN: 978-0-7704-3689-6

Jacket design by Ben Wiseman
Jacket photograph: (bottle) Armin Zogbaum

v3.1

Live secretly
—
EPICURUS

CONTENTS

Cover

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Copyright

Epigraph

Gin and Tonic

A Glass of Arak in Beirut

Fear and Loathing in the Bekaa

Lunch with Walid Jumblatt

The Ally Pally

England, Your England

The Pure Light of High Summer

New Year’s in Muscat

The Little Water

My Sweet Islamabad

Bars in a Man’s Life

Getting a Drink in a Civil War

Usquebaugh

East into West

Twilight at the Windsor Hotel

About the Author

Gin and Tonic

                                  
In Milan that summer, as the
temperature reached almost ninety-five every day in the deserted streets and squares around my hotel, I forced myself to stop dreaming of the fjords of Norway and the ice hotels of the Arctic Circle and, gritting my teeth, went instead to the lounge where gin and tonics were served to the guests of the Town House Galleria from a moving tray equipped with buckets of ice, lemon rinds, and glass stir-sticks. I liked to go at an hour when I knew the place would be empty, and this movable bar would be for me and me alone. The tall windows would be opened an inch, the gauze curtains flapping, the flowers wilting on the restaurant tables. The drinks trolley had stoppered crystal flagons of unnamed cognac, a bowl of marinated olives, Angostura bitters, and bottles of Fernet. It was like being in a luxury hospital where, because you are paying so much, you are entitled to drink yourself to death privately. You go right ahead, because you are human and drink is sweet.

Fashion magazines stood undisturbed on the coffee table, and in the dining room next door I could hear wealthy Russians cracking open lobster claws with silver tools and commenting ignorantly upon the wines that Europe’s only seven-star hotel offers to its guests. I could hear them say “Sassicaia,” then slap down the list and burst out laughing. It was six hundred euros a bottle. The waiter asked me how I would like my gin and tonic. I said that I take mine three parts tonic to one part gin, Gordon’s, three ice cubes, and a dash of lime rind. The tonic brand is not an issue. The drink comes with a dim music of ice cubes and a perfume that touches the nose like a smell of warmed grass. Ease returns. It is like cold steel in liquid form.

I went to the lounge at six with some regularity, even when I had to give a lecture at the Teatro Dal Verme. One night I was interviewed by a television crew and a radio station, and the gin tasted sweeter, more maddening. I fumbled my sentences until the faces around me changed, and I could sense them asking themselves “Is he one of them?” I sat there and blathered about my latest book, which I could no longer remember, and the glass shook slightly in my hand and the ice cubes rattled. The pretty girls thought it was funny.

“Do you have a special affinity for Milan?”

“I’ve never been here before.”

“Do you always have a gin and tonic at cocktail hour?”

Laughter.

“It’s part of my heritage.”

They thought this was pretty quaint, especially as the glass was still shaking in the hand of a drinker.

“It’s an English drink,” I said. “The national drink.”

They wrote it down. Centuries ago “she” was known on the streets of London as Madame Geneva, a feminine killer.

“Cut,” the director muttered.

I always end up alone with a glass and a wet lip. I sat by the windows with my forty-euro drink and admired the Galleria, the ground floor of which is occupied by a mass of bars and cafés. The architect Giuseppe Mengoni, who built it, fell to his death from the glass dome two days before it was opened in 1877. The ironwork inspired the Eiffel Tower. The cafés were lit, the Prada outlet below the hotel glittering with crystal and mirror. Chinese tourists swarmed around the small mosaic image of a bull at the center of the gallery floor, taking photographs of it. I could see the men in suits on the
terrazze
with glasses of Spritz and Negroni sbagliato and neat Campari. This was collective, merry, out-in-the-open display drinking on wicker chairs, with napkins and service and ice tongs. No one was standing, and no one was falling down. No one was shouting, no one was incontinent. The Italian style of drinking is, as we all know, organized along these lines. Men sit face to face with women and talk to them at a decibel level appropriate to sexual interest. The Galleria was intended originally as a prototype of what we would now call the mall, but it was also a covered and protected space in which to eat and drink. The protocol of the
aperitivo
and the
digestivo
was perfectly suited to its echo-friendly spaces and its allegorical frescoes.

“Other countries drink to get drunk,” Roland Barthes once wrote, “and this is accepted by everyone; in France, drunkenness
is a consequence, never an intention. A drink is felt as the spinning out of a pleasure, not as the necessary cause of an effect which is sought: wine is not only a philter, it is also the leisurely act of drinking.” The same can be said of Italians.

I sipped my watered gin, and as always happens when I “enter” into this drink (I think of drinks as elements that are entered, like bodies of water or locales), my mind tilted its way back to the past, to the England of my childhood that I no longer possessed and that no doubt no longer existed. But why it did this was a complete enigma. As teetotalers so insistently remind those of us for whom drink is the staff of life, the mind itself is a chemical body. We are fated to control it.

Many of the hotel’s guests were rich Arabs, and I would sometimes see them wandering around the restaurant with their children and their masked wives looking for a table. They would pause by the balcony and peer down at the Gucci store and then over the café terraces. Their expression seemed
almost
disdainful. It is the rich Gulf Arabs who are to a great degree the bridge between Europe and the Middle East, but I had the feeling that when they looked down at the tables crowded with multicolored alcoholic beverages, they were nonplussed, aloof. Even in Dubai, where many of them might have been from, people would not openly consume such things in public, in such spectacular spaces defined by such large crowds. It was the publicness and the ease, I think, that made them wrinkle their noses for a moment and pass on, retreating to the family dinner
table laden with bottles of chilled mineral water. But I am guessing.

When we see these wealthy Muslims with their families in our luxury restaurants, we think to ourselves, as likely as not, “They have the money, but they aren’t free. Look at their women. Look at the bottles of chilled mineral water on their table. They can’t drink.”

It is unclear which offends us more, the defacing of the women with the
hijab
(the elegance of the body suggested only by perfectly painted nails or a beautiful ankle) or the soft drinks that stand in for majestic bottles of wine, the water that stands in pathetically for a decent Brunello. We think the interdictions that govern these two things, women and alcohol, are not unconnected. It might be that it is the molecules of alcohol constantly coursing through our blood system day in and day out, night after night, their effect barely noticed most of the time, that makes the occidental feel free, unfettered, and magnificently insolent. He is, to the Muslim’s eye, in a state of constant but unnoticed intoxication, but to himself he is something that commands space and uses time wisely. We are drinkers from late childhood to death, rarely if ever abstinent for the week or so necessary to discharge the last traces of alcohol from our blood.

An unusual liberty. That millionaire from Abu Dhabi could never in his worst social nightmares imagine a Saturday in Bradford. Put him in Dagenham on a weekend night at eleven, and he would not know what planet he was on. When I am in London, I sometimes take the late bus back from London Fields
to Old Street, an experience instantly recognizable from images of Gin Lane. Looking down at the Galleria, he would see no passed-out girls lying in their own vomit, but the cocktails at dusk would not seem like freedom to him either. He would be baffled as to why we think that they do.

A few years before, I was riding buses through Java, much of which is dry. As I moved from town to town in an endless rigmarole of packing and unpacking, sleeping and waking, I began to feel bored and restive, or rather my blood began to thin out from its alcohol high, and I began to feel lighter, more lucid, more weighed down by anxiety.

Exhausted, I stopped for a night in the religious city of Solo, otherwise known as Surakarta. Solo is where the Bali Bombers came from, the place where the fiery religious schools preach jihad against Indonesia’s tourist sector. The Al Qaeda–linked Jemaah Islamiyah group bombed the JW Marriott in Jakarta twice, first in 2003 and then on July 17, 2009. The JW in Jakarta was famous for its flashy, socialite bar. Nineteen dead. In 2002 the same group detonated two bombs inside Paddy’s Pub and the Sari Club in Kuta, Bali, killing 202 people. In 2005 they repeated the stunt at a food court in Kuta and at some
warungs
(small outdoor restaurants often serving beer) at a Western-frequented beach town called Jimbaran. Twenty people were killed, many by shrapnel and ball bearings packed into the explosives. The perpetrators, later executed, called it “justice.”

I stayed in a small lodge and descended into the street at dusk. The atmosphere was already peculiar.

White-robed students walked about a dry city of six hundred thousand while the mosques preached over loudspeakers. I spoke a little Bahasa, so I could make out the word “unclean” in these torrents of verbal passion, and I began to wonder if it was I who was unclean. Unclean for a number of incontrovertible reasons that could not be changed. I walked to a corner and asked a group of students if there was a restaurant I could go to that might, perhaps, serve a beer.