Ed. Note: If, as they say, beer is proof that God loves us, then tequila is proof that Satan is rather fond of us, but in a much different way. This is the last of the pieces I produced during my exceedingly brief tenure as a staff writer for the Fordham Ram. I figured it was a shame that it never saw the light of day, and decided that it’d make a fine filler piece. So if you’re reading this, K and I are both too busy to write something, but too avuncular to risk disappointing our fan.
-W
It’s a fascinating question whence vices come to college students (addressed in last week’s Point/Counterpoint, true believers!), and that question, along with the question of what’s to be done with these vices, drives a nigh-million dollar industry. America’s relationship with alcohol, like its relationship with firearms, has always been frightfully schizophrenic—we had a constitutionally-sanctioned period of national prohibition, during which no one stopped drinking; federal law increased the drinking age to twenty-one, which created a thriving and entirely unchecked industry in the production of falsified state IDs; bootlegging and lechery created the family fortune of one of the most beloved presidents of the last half-century.
But of this million-dollar industry: the endless surveys to which residential students are subjected (“how many drinks do your friends think you think they drink per week?”), the obviously futile efforts of Students Against Destructive Decisions and similar organizations (“you can have fun without alcohol,” says the bored-looking fellow sitting unheeded at a table outside the caf), the fliers posted every September on the walls of Hughes Hall, declaring it a “Dry Dorm”—these attempts are accompanied always by the gall of that special kind of irony reserved for the powerless edicts of uninterested overseers. In case you can’t tell, I think they’re going about it the right way.
In that interest, let me propose a compromise, upon which I believe both the underage population and the body of concerned citizens will agree: undergraduates should stop drinking tequila.
Tequila is, obviously, one of the more vile substances on the planet. At its worst it tastes like motor oil, and at its best it tastes like classy motor oil. Oh, if you pour orange juice and grenadine into it, it looks pretty for a few seconds, but then you stir it. And I have to ask: what substance in the universe is not sweetened by grenadine?
I hear some of you saying “but it’s vile, that’s precisely the point.” But it’s not even the most vile! I’d encourage you to drink pisco, which is sort of like Peruvian rum, but the taste is something I can only compare to the time I made a drink entirely out of Canadian Mist (the Plastic-Bottled Whiskey!) and room-temperature Jägermeister.
I’m not even talking about the swift-flowing stream of defeated utterances like “man, I’m never drinking tequila again,” or “I’ve never been that sick before or since,” or even “and then I vomited pure gold liquid for seventeen hours.” No, a million million perversions can be seen. Like God on the road to Sodom, I’ll ask none to destroy the righteous with the wicked. But if there be ten among you who can say “my life was greatly improved by this bottle of Jose Cuervo,” I shall stand shame-faced. But I don’t think that’s the case. Because, even on the off-chance that you can claim that, if you’re drinking that much tequila, you’re going to over-sleep and miss the meeting. And if you do show up, you’ll rapidly forget why you’re there and indiscriminately try to know me.