Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: alcohol

  • without spilling a thing

    This beautiful waiter was so caring and funny, he stood for five minutes as a very young guest chose his pizza, then I saw him across the room carrying a fully-laden table with quivering wine glasses, all without spilling a thing. He had flourish and verve but was not show-offy. Afterwards I bailed him up by the register. “We think you have a lot of charisma, a lot of character. My partner reckons you have that gleam in your eye – the gleam of stardom. We think you can do anything you want to with your life. You probably already know this. But in case you didn’t – I wanted to tell you.”

    I thought he might think, who are these people and what do they want from me. I made my companion wait outside in the cold afternoon light so it wouldn’t seem cheesy, like a deputation. The waiter’s face warmed and broadened. As soon as I finished speaking, shyness struck, I ran out of the restaurant. He was still looking after me as I rounded the last corner: “Goodbye! Thank you!” I darted upstairs to the street. “Thank you! Have a wonderful weekend!”

    ~ 2013, Brisbane

  • shriveled bulb of god

    shriveled bulb of god

    My stomach feels like a shrivelled bulb after two martinis, no dinner. Whoever invented alcohol is my god: right now, my god. The last time I had one of those (a martini, a god) was in New York, it was summer then, I came out of the studio where we had been working on the album I’d wanted to make since 1999 and whose songs had been written over fifteen years and it was all so exhausting, so wonderful, on the street a man came past me pedalling his cab, a pedal-cab, like the becaks that used to carry us to the markets when I was a child, in old Batavia. “Take me to a rooftop bar,” I said, and the next twenty minutes were alive with light: those huge buildings shooting up into the sky like terraces, palaces, penthouses’ skeletons, every one stippled with windows alight and the warm evening breeze exciting my cheeks. I was crying with joy. New York! New York! Like Berlin she is one of those cities where on the subway, on the bridge, under the trees you would cry out “New York!” and feel like she hears you. So I found a banquette in the scarlet-lit rooftop bar that was rapidly filling with Manhattenites after work and I told the Spanish bar girl, I like olives, so she made me a martini festooned with skewers, each one so laden with green olives it was as though the glass had greenly exploded. I sat and sipped, turned my pages and sipped. After a while the volume level rose and I drew out the headphones I had bought that day, a remote birthday present from my Australian family, began listening back to the work we had made. Tonight was very different but same, same, same. This Russian bar in my leafy street that I’ve passed several dozen times suddenly beckoned, as if it were a painting of a bar that had come to life. I went in. “Can you make me a dirty martini on Bombay Sapphire?” And she did. The bar was tenderly tended by this woman, in 1950s sailor costume, her hair spooled back with nests of pins behind her ears, the luscious soft sound of the ice cubes as she rattled my drink u and down over her shoulder then poured away all the vermouth down the drain. Apart from the dark-haired girl in a beanie studying at the bar I was then her only customer. The dark-haired girl looked up and said to the bartender, This is so hard. I took my drink by its frost stem and the two of us drifted outside, wicker chairs where in a little while the bartender would come round with her basket, lifting aside the daytime posies of flowers and putting in their place red glass candleholders. I watched the street, where nothing passed. In an hour only two cars, ten pedestrians, five bicycles. The sky has changed, it is settled in a grey now and when I mentioned yesterday “you know at this time of year this means it’s grey for another five months,” the woman clearing my coffee cup said, “Ist das nicht furchtbar!” Isn’t that terrible! Well, yes, it really is. In the balcony opposite, on the first floor, three girl-silhouettes were enjoying their cigarettes. I wished I smoked. Occasionally a yellow leaf sauntered down through the still-warm air and landed on the cobblestones, in the garden bed, on the roof of a vehicle. I have never experiences a Fall before: it is what it is: life falls colourful to the ground. The dark cold skeletons reassert their empire. Winter is arriving, time to get out of here.

    ~ from Berlin via New York City, 2013

  • shriveled bulb of god

    shriveled bulb of god

    My stomach feels like a shrivelled bulb after two martinis, no dinner. Whoever invented alcohol is my god: right now, my god. The last time I had one of those (a martini, a god) was in New York, it was summer then, I came out of the studio where we had been working on the album I’d wanted to make since 1999 and whose songs had been written over fifteen years and it was all so exhausting, so wonderful, on the street a man came past me pedalling his cab, a pedal-cab, like the becaks that used to carry us to the markets when I was a child, in old Batavia. “Take me to a rooftop bar,” I said, and the next twenty minutes were alive with light: those huge buildings shooting up into the sky like terraces, palaces, penthouses’ skeletons, every one stippled with windows alight and the warm evening breeze exciting my cheeks. I was crying with joy. New York! New York! Like Berlin she is one of those cities where on the subway, on the bridge, under the trees you would cry out “New York!” and feel like she hears you. So I found a banquette in the scarlet-lit rooftop bar that was rapidly filling with Manhattenites after work and I told the Spanish bar girl, I like olives, so she made me a martini festooned with skewers, each one so laden with green olives it was as though the glass had greenly exploded. I sat and sipped, turned my pages and sipped. After a while the volume level rose and I drew out the headphones I had bought that day, a remote birthday present from my Australian family, began listening back to the work we had made. Tonight was very different but same, same, same. This Russian bar in my leafy street that I’ve passed several dozen times suddenly beckoned, as if it were a painting of a bar that had come to life. I went in. “Can you make me a dirty martini on Bombay Sapphire?” And she did. The bar was tenderly tended by this woman, in 1950s sailor costume, her hair spooled back with nests of pins behind her ears, the luscious soft sound of the ice cubes as she rattled my drink u and down over her shoulder then poured away all the vermouth down the drain. Apart from the dark-haired girl in a beanie studying at the bar I was then her only customer. The dark-haired girl looked up and said to the bartender, This is so hard. I took my drink by its frost stem and the two of us drifted outside, wicker chairs where in a little while the bartender would come round with her basket, lifting aside the daytime posies of flowers and putting in their place red glass candleholders. I watched the street, where nothing passed. In an hour only two cars, ten pedestrians, five bicycles. The sky has changed, it is settled in a grey now and when I mentioned yesterday “you know at this time of year this means it’s grey for another five months,” the woman clearing my coffee cup said, “Ist das nicht furchtbar!” Isn’t that terrible! Well, yes, it really is. In the balcony opposite, on the first floor, three girl-silhouettes were enjoying their cigarettes. I wished I smoked. Occasionally a yellow leaf sauntered down through the still-warm air and landed on the cobblestones, in the garden bed, on the roof of a vehicle. I have never experiences a Fall before: it is what it is: life falls colourful to the ground. The dark cold skeletons reassert their empire. Winter is arriving, time to get out of here.

    ~ from Berlin via New York City, 2013

  • the pretty wine shop

    Beautiful sunset over Berlin today: pink, stippled like wet sand, and spacious. The man in the wine shop made me laugh. They were listening to Bob Dylan, who is now, would you believe? a Nobel laureate. So I told him: I keep misreading the name of your store. For a long time I translated it to, “Emergency Burgundy.”

    Ah, he told me. We were going to go with that. But then we thought: let’s take that as a given.

  • her wild laugh, like birds

    My date took me to a bar that was open late. We sat round a splendid banquette like pashas. At the table one tier down, a girl sitting with her friends unfurled a really strange laugh.

    It was high and sort of squeaky-grunty, very loud: within moments she had drained the whole place of its attention. People began to smile at each other over her head. A drunk guy tottered up to her, plump like a teddy bear, his arms comically held out, a skewed fishermen. The one that got away was this big.

    “Can I have a hug?” he asked the laughing girl, somberly. She couldn’t speak for squeaking but held up one hand for a high five. “Hug,” he said, nodding, insisting, reasonable. Drunk. So she opened up her arms and hugged him over the table. All the while her maniacal laugh was rising over his shoulder like a series of photos of the moon. Her male friend said, “She’s allergic to you.” Her female friend giggled. The drunk guy straightened and slowly smiled and only even slower realised, a bit hurt, a bit taken aback, “Really?”

    “Nah,” said the girl’s friend. “That’s really her laugh.” The girl’s shoulder’s shook and her honking squeals kept coming. By now everyone was laughing: the cute girl wiping the bar counter, the drunk guy’s drunk friends, my companion and I holding our sides, leaking tears. The hugged, drunken guy turned a sloppy somersault on his way back to his mates: an unforeseeable magical item.

    There was quite a lot of moon left in the high sky on the walk home but now these cold clouds have dulled it over. The exhaustion that comes from laughing too much is not like any other form of tiredness that I know of.

  • the organic drunk

    In the supermarket carrying my two jars of honey, because it’s been nonstop chai masala weather, I fetched up queuing behind a guy in a vinyl blouson jacket who had just unloaded his entire cart. He turned his back on me to demonstrate that there was no way he would be letting me in front of him with my measly two items, just in case I was getting any ideas, and so I turned to the man behind me. There is nothing else to look at in this vast discounter warehouse, next door to the bottle shop which offers tiny toddlers’ shopping carts to educate your kid into alcoholism, a local outlet which sells everything unfresh and also, inexplicably, organic honey.

    So there I was with my organic honey and he started unloading onto the belt long, fresh, green bottles of wine. They looked like stalks of grass, their lovely labelling, and on each the promising word ‘Bio.” Bio in German is pronounced bee-ohh and it means organic. “Wow,” I said, “Biowein. Bei einem solchen Supermarkt ist’s schön, so was zu finden.”

    I think I said, Wow, organic wine. Nice thing to find in a supermarket like this. My German is riddled with infealties and infelicities but I live oblivious, above all that, smiling. He looked rather startled. Unloaded five bottles of wine and one flask of apple juice and now some random stranger has commented on his shopping! I tried again. “Ich bin Australierin. In Australien findet man Biowaren nicht so leicht.” In Australia you don’t find organic products this easily; I’m Australian. A look of compunction crossed his face, streaked with humour. He leaned in. Conspiratorily,

    “Es steck noch Alkohol drin.” There’s still alcohol in it. Ah yes, I said: and also, though – vitamins. I mean… it’s made from fruit.

  • you are like a fresh cranberry

    God, I am so in love right now. Partly because of food and partly because of language.

    We decided I needed to really touch down in Germany, not to be always looking back over my shoulder at sunstruck Queensland. We went for a long walk, through the marshy parks where the back of every sign has stickers and the benches are scribbled over and the leaves already bearing along their spines the shadow of ice that feathered into them in the long night. We went out for breakfast, late enough that it could be called lunch. My partner had tagliatelle but I had a big plate of Deutschness: ragout of wild venison, which I had never tried before, and bread dumplings, which I adore. And dazu einen kleinen Schnapps. To get the heart started.

    They pack down good German bread into a kind of loaf and slice it, and sop it in gravy. It’s so good. Venison it turns out tastes not unlike kangaroo. My second schnapps set everything on fire, the flavours, the light, the two men talking in English at another table, the awful U2 covers, the scenery almost sunlit outside. My plate was decorated with a fan of fresh sliced pear and a few bright red berries. I tasted these, liking their tartness. They have a tough, wrinkling red skin. I said, surprised, “I’ve never eaten a fresh cranberry before, in all my life.” My companion stroked the crook of his finger down the side of my face. “You are like a fresh cranberry,” he said.

    Then, gazing out the big picture windows as I ran my finger round the edge of my white plate and licked off the last of the sauce, he said, musingly, “You know, I can see really why you have such a big culture shock. People here are kind of sloppy. They look poor. They look a bit desperate. Whereas in Brisbane, really everyone is so very well-broomed.” I smiled at my polished white plate. Then we came home across the tiled streets that have been swept clean of their autumbled leaves and when we reached our minute apartment I said, You build the rest of the bed. I’ll just write.

  • wizened neighbour from the woods

    I have here this neighbour whose skin is dark and seamy and white hairs sprout from him like surprise. He is beautiful, he sits quietly, often under a tree in his back yard on the besser block low wall with sometimes a friend sitting by him, sometimes a fat swollen silver bladder of wine from a box of wine lying between them quietly. They are talking and their voices rumble and I had an operation recently, quite recently, which involved a scary general anaesthetic and I remember thinking, when I woke up that morning and the light had sliced the curtains open: if I could do this procedure just lying on his chest, I would feel safe, I would be sure I would survive it.

    I survived it. The man who is my neighbour downhill has survived much more, maybe forty years more than I. He likes his tree. He likes the day. He accepts it I think. I like when his eyes rest on me and he lets me rest his eyes on him and as I pass, trotting down the hill carrying my milk can or that is, my empty coffee mug with curling horns of handles, he says always the same thing every day, slowly: “You should be running down that hill!” When I come back leaning into the slope my coffee steaming in one hand and face gazing down into the asphalt of our very steep hill he says, squeezing a wheezing laugh, “It’s all very well coming down the hill…” Every time I answer him the same. “I should be somersaulting!” “Yeah, it’s the climbing that’s hard.” He said to me one morning, “Girl, what you eating there?” and I opened my hand to show him, crossing the road, holding them out pink and stainy: “Lillypilly. Would you like some?” But the little fruits are gone now, partly because season and partly because greedy girl moved in to the house on the high hill and has had a feed of them, every morning, on her way to buy caffeine.

  • shop where they sell bottles

    I went into the bottleshop and found the most approachable face. A guy from Canada. I told him, I only drink red. Ordinarily it’s cheap. But I want to spend maybe four dollars more and buy a wine that’s gonna make me go: That is why people spend money on wine.

    His eyes lit up. An enthusiast. He asked me what we were eating tonight and what kinds of wines I liked. He guided me down to the back of the shop. Underneath the shelves of botrytis they had an opened box. This, he said, this you will like. It totally over delivers.

    At the counter I got talking with his colleagues about how I was trying to educate my palate. The blonde girl shook her head. That’s a great idea, she said, except… You were happier before? I guessed. She said, brushing his arm, We were just talking about this. How learning to appreciate French champagne ruins your palate for ~

    I interrupted. Ruins your life? Yes! she said, nodding emphatically. Or, I suggested: short bursts of happiness interlarded with long eras of works you don’t want to… Yes, she said, that too.

    Outside the shop the night had ripened like a blue-veined cheese. I passed a heavily-muscled man who wasn’t short but looked it, because of his thickened build. I was dressed in a long wool skirt over my pajama pants and he was wearing gym shorts. As we came towards each other we both tipped our heads back to see the sky, its golden flukes, its beckoning well of pale blue. Its sense of light being backed by the dark, like a painting on velvet.

  • fight for your right to part ways for the night

    My boyfriend and I had a huge fight and I went storming into a bar and ordered a dirty martini. I was wearing a big scarlet onesie with a Danish flag down the back, had jumped out of the car and wasn’t dressed for city life. This blonde girl came up to me, drunk on her swaying heels. “Excuse me. Are you a musician?” I started to laugh. “Is it the ugg boots?”