Before I started at Rustic my foray into the annals of cocktaildom was confined to a few good classics like the Salty Dog (gin), a dry gin martini, a Tom Collins, and every so often, a really shitty Cosmopolitan. Forget even something as simple and delicious as an old fashioned. The places I worked still muddled bitters, a neon red maraschino cherry, a slice of orange, and a sugar cube with a good splash of soda from the gun. If you guessed the whiskey, yes, it was a few glugs of Jack Daniel’s followed by bar ice.

I had no idea what a cocktail was and I made fun of those who drank them. I was a spirit purist–whiskey alongside beer. Gin and tonics in the summer, maybe a frozen margarita or pina colada on vacation. I vaguely recollect being in Death & Co. one winter night in New York where a friend kept handing me cocktails containing freshly hacked ice chunks, and I made fun of how they were too easy to drink as I downed them in the dim light of the bar.

My philosophy, as a budding degenerate, was that it should either taste like beer or burn the delicate membranes of the throat. Anything in between was poppycock.

I wish I could get a hold of that long haired punk. God, I would beat the living shit out of my twenty year old self and make him cry before forcing a really good negroni down his throat, breaking the glass, and making him chew the shards before tossing his ass in the gutter. Harsh? Yes. Well ok, some of the good qualities were beginning to show through. If anything, I was entertaining, full of lots of misdirected verve, quick to laugh, a hard worker who took almost nothing seriously. Yeah, I guess not much has changed. At some point I hit a bad skid, probably around the time I left New York and had a great degree under my arm and no discipline to do what I had been born to do–be a writer. In Boston I slummed around some of the worst goddam restaurants. Shit, I even tried to be a cook again but realized too late I had been so spoiled by front of the house jobs I could never work that hard again, well, until now. Tonight as I ate dinner with my family, I said “I’m too goddam old to be working this hard,” but that’s life, man. Shit, do I want to get soft sitting on my ass in middle age? Does all the hard work go somewhere or is it just for suckers? Or is the wrong type of hard work for the wrong people always going to kick you in the balls? I don’t have the answers. I do know I’ve come pretty much halfway through it all and the last half is the best one but also the most painful one. Yeah, for you young ones reading this, it gets bad. You see your friends slowly disappear, you go through hard times which harden you even when you say you don’t want them to. Although you’re smarter, tougher, you feel more alone even with people around you because you’re constantly asking yourself what the fuck does it all mean? You try not to think of the sheer insane infinite space of the universe as you’re driving to work, or what exists beyond all of it and why it even matters that people care whether or not you’re driving a Range Rover or a beat up VW. In the long run none of it matters and even your paltry legacy will be gone in two generations unless you’re extremely exceptional. Maybe we’re all just animals that have found some meaning in all this procreation we tell ourselves we’re above, but deep down it’s the only reason we’re here. Love? Love? Shit. Love hurts. It’s the most powerful and painful fucking thing ever. Kurt Vonnegut said there was no such thing as love, that only common decency existed and the closest thing to pure love was rolling on the floor with a golden retriever. I do know love is so powerful it’ll make you do crazy things and then six months later you say to yourself, “What happened? Where did it go?” You can love from afar, you can love many times, you may have never loved and never wanted it. Tell me all the old sayings. “Better to have loved and lost…” I actually don’t think so. I think it’s better to have never experienced the pain of it because the truth is, love is finite. Everything is temporary. If you survive all the way to the end the other one won’t and vice versa. Maybe Romeo and Juliet had something there. But if it’s so bad and so painful then why do we do it? Some so much more than others. Because it’s life It’s inside us. We can’t help ourselves even if the person is wrong. It’s like Ronny says in Moonstruck:

“Love don’t make things nice, it ruins everything! It breaks your heart, it makes things a mess. We, we aren’t here to make things perfect. Snowflakes are perfect, stars are perfect. Not us! Not us! We are here to ruin ourselves and, and to break our hearts and love the wrong people and, and die! I mean that the storybooks are bullshit. Now I want you to come upstairs with me and, and get in my bed!”

Good shit. If you haven’t seen the movie, what are you waiting for?

Sometimes you’ve got to come to terms with the things in your life. I’ve always run away from it all but goddam if my life didn’t change the day I walked into Rustic Canyon and saw Joanna standing there. The blonde hair piled high, the smell of Janie’s Got a Gun wafting off her like the proverbial siren’s song. Destiny right there, love of the most painful and amazing sort waiting for me because of my own idiocy, but I had no idea at the time. I’m real bad with the foresight thing. There’s a chance I dreamt her at one point in my life, felt that hair in my fingers like I did about all of them I suppose, but just chalked it up to having too many late night chicken wings and high percentage beers instead of foretelling the future.

Ah, the power of a beautiful woman. Goddamit. Shit, maybe they’re all just dreams, goddesses who allow us to live because we amuse them.

I’ve been in a relationship with the goddam restaurant like it was a living thing. That delusional shit happens. You actually think it’s some living, breathing monstrosity and maybe it is. It ebbs and flows like life itself. It’s a ship you can get off at anytime and jump to the next. These damn restaurants are pirate ships full of dysfunctional people. Kin to me. So many people I have seen throughout the decades man and I wonder which of them I’ll ever see again if ever or if there is some type of heaven we’ll all be there in a kitchen somewhere busting each other’s balls or if it’ll be somewhere else. Shit, someone said “God sends us meat and the devil the cooks.” Something like that anyway. Cue the Neil Young.

In case you’re wondering, I’m just now putting a little taste of the Zacapa 23 down my gullet.

When I first started at Rustic I was all sorts of fucked up. Totally desperate for the first real time in my life. Three thousand miles away from everyone. No idea what the hell. The money was good and I was soon back on my feet. I was behind a bar again for the first time in quite awhile. It felt more like a kitchen back there than any other bar I had worked. We made all our own shit. We went to the farmer’s market. And yeah, the cocktails tasted real damn good. We got to experiment a lot.

What I didn’t know was while you’re in the throes of R&D, you can really love something and then the next day taste it and ask yourself what the hell happened, that is, if you can even recall the specs….

Anyway…

From what I can remember through the haze of eight years:

Master Blaster

2 oz. Mezcal

2 oz. Watermelon Juice

.5 oz. Grapefruit Juice?

.75 oz. Fresh Lime Juice

.5 oz Some sort of Syrup?

.25 oz. Fresh Ginger Juice

This one never tasted as good as the first time. Does it ever?