not know. Or care about. For instance, all Scotch malt whisky is produced in a pot still, a distillation of barley. Starch in barley is converted to sugar by virtue of a controlled germination, a process arrested in a peat kiln. Now you have malt. Malt is ground into grist and mixed with hot water in a mash tun, and the sweet liquid, the wort, is drawn off into a fermenting vat. This is now the wash. The wash is distilled into low wines and these are redistilled into raw whisky, the middle distillate with the foreshots and feints removed. It becomes Scotch when it has aged in oak for a minimum of three years. Unblended and the product of a single distillery, it is a single malt. These are the basics.
My dad favours Highland malt although he wouldn’t care to say why. He could not even tell you he specifically likes Speyside whisky. He would not want to discuss it much less hear about why it is different from Islay malt. Okay.
Something else I want to tell my dad. When the whisky is maturing for eight, twelve, fifteen, seventeen, twenty-one years, what this really means is the liquid is concentrating, breathing in the sea and the river and the heather and iodine and breathing out water, esters and alcohol into the atmosphere. In Cognac, the French call this evaporation la part des anges. The angels’ share. I love this idea. I also think it is only fair, because they must have to share a lot of worse things in the thinning ozone and I hope there are a lot of angels gathering over the Highlands, especially Speyside, over Islay and the Orkney Islands and Campbeltown and the Lowlands. I know they have cousins hovering over Cognac and Ténarèze in Armagnac and the Vallée d’Auge, where calvados is made, even wherever the marc is distilled in the wine regions, Champagne and Burgundy. In Cognac, the wine warehouse where old cognac is stored is called le paradis. A lot of angels lurk there and I wish them well.
My dad tips back the last sip of malt. He is ready to go, although I have not finished my drink. That’s okay. I have all my life to drink at my leisure and right now I am with my dad and these are good times and I want to stick with him, go when he goes, go where he goes. At heart, I am not the Doc at all, I am Joey and he is Shane and he is definitely the man to follow.
‘Let’s go. Finished?’
No. ‘Yup,’ I say, rising quickly. We saunter out.
I remember another time, another bar. Dad has Mum on one arm and me on the other. It is late and we are having a nightcap at the Ritz. I like this word ‘nightcap’, putting a cap on the night, tipping your brim at the daytime. There goes another day. Let’s call it a day.
Dad is a bit sloshed and it makes him merry and a bit unpredictable. I sense high jinks. A couple is leaving the Ritz bar as we approach it and they want to greet my dad but he has no time for them, he does not like these people. They begin to say something and there is a look that comes over them. Appeasement, ingratiation. My dad barks at them, ‘Ruff!’ Just like a dog. His hair musses even more. Mum and I fight to quell hilarity. What my dad has done is the equivalent of reaching for his six-shooter, of fluttering his trigger fingers over the holster at his hip. He is a cowboy, don’t they know that? We leave them in our wake, frozen with their mouths agape.
It is great being with my dad. These are good times I am looking back on. I wonder if they will come again soon. Some days, I doubt it. I just don’t see it. Like today, on the way to find a herbal remedy for depression with my dad looking at me suspiciously in the mirror and me fighting the silverfish in my veins and the ferocious urge to throw up all over his posh new car, which is littered, nevertheless, with Visa slips and tomato stalks and empty envelopes. The man can’t help it, he marks his territory out and I, today, these days, am the intruder. Get off my land. Come back when you are well, when you are a cowboy again and can roam with me. I don’t know you now.
Do not cry, Jem, I say to myself. Come on now, do not be a baby. Do not be a girl.
Besides looking back on good times and trying to fathom them, I write my book in my head. It is a survival book, a book of rules. It won’t be long but it will be very useful. Here is rule number one.
1. NEVER LEAVE YOUR GLASSES ON THE FLOOR.
I have discovered there is no loophole to this rule. Even if you say to yourself, okay, I have just set my specs on the floor. I see myself do it, I etch it on my memory. No way I’ll step on them or kick them across the floor. Then it happens. The phone rings and you jump right on top of them or you nap for a minute and shake awake suddenly and swivel your body off the sofa, landing your feet back on the floor. Right onto the specs, goddamnit. So that’s rule number one. Never leave your glasses on the floor. Thank you.
2. NEVER LEAVE YOUR WINEGLASS ON THE FLOOR.
Same potential disasters as above.
When we left the bar that day with our shopping bags, my dad said, ‘Let’s call home. Just in case. We don’t want to have to go out again.’
My dad has seen enough of the world and he has one vision in his mind. It is of a big sofa with a tomato snack by his side and a mess of newspapers all around him. Soon Mum will call out to him, Darling! Supper. Ah, the best moment of the day.
Right now, though, what my dad really wants to do is to chuckle over the fact we could not find truffle butter. When Mum wrote this down on our list he was gleeful. He thought this was hilarious and he was pretty determined to be right about this item not existing out there in the western world as he knows it. In the two places we tried, he made me ask for it, truffle butter being two words too girly for him to utter. At the first shop, he even waited outside, only coming in after it was clear my request had not been met. We laughed.
Before we get to lord it over Mum, my dad has to tackle the public-telephone situation.
‘Jem,’ he says, serious now, ‘we’ll try this one.’
I sigh with anticipation. This will be fun.
He pushes on the door of the nearest booth, meeting resistance.
‘Hey!’ he says. There is a lot of resistance to my dad out there in the physical world. He figures the door business out and drops a coin in after scanning all the instructions wildly and deciding to ignore them. The phone machine swallows the coin and that’s it, no joy. He thumps the machine about three times.
‘Goddamnit!’
I reach in and press coin return and check the slot. ‘Let’s try another one, Dad.’
In the next booth, I can see through the window that he is doing a lot of crazy thumping and is prepared to jump ship. I open the door and reach through the mayhem to press the button under the coin slot, right near the instruction that reads, Press after each coin entered.
‘Oh,’ he says and dials home. He looks back at me in exhilaration. He is about to reveal to Mum the sheer folly of her shopping mission. He can’t wait.
3. GIVE INSTRUCTIONS A CHANCE.
Instructions are sometimes written for those with below expected mental capacity. For instance, on a package of plasters, I read in step two, ‘Apply plaster.’ On a tube of skin salve, ‘Apply a little cream.’ Well, why not? But some instructions are useful. On page one of my video-machine booklet, it says, ‘To reduce the risk of fire or shock hazard, do not expose this equipment to rain.’ I do not know who would watch their TV and video out in a field when it is raining but never mind, this is important information for those people who are tempted. ‘Do not exceed the stated dose.’ This, I find, is important news. I remember a time, in dark days, when I was not Joey or the Doc and I was riding in cars on the way to health shops in search of herbal remedies for depression, yes, I remember a time when this was a vital instruction
