Beer Story
By Joel Gunz
Originally appeared in the The Anvil
When I was about five, my stepfather began the decade-and-a-half long process of teaching me how to drink beer. At first, he taught by example. On Sunday nights, as the family settled into the 7:00 ritual of the wildlife TV series Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, Dad would cradle a can of Olympia in his left hand and pry back its tab, bending the aluminum slip into the shape of a cat's tongue.
His drinking technique was methodical and efficient—the work of a US Postal Service veteran. Hoisting the can with the precision and economy, he would balance its rim on his lower lip and let the hay-colored liquid pour neatly into the cavity of his throat. To Dad, backwash was about as alien to his mouth as Swahili.
If he drank the beer from a glass, he would let me take a sip of the foam. Then I would plop down on the floor next to my sisters, resting on the tripod formed by my elbows and chest, to watch Marlin Perkins send his assistant Jim into one absurdly dangerous situation after another. I always wondered how the cameraman got there first and why he never got any credit for it. Perkins’ soothing voice allowed me ample opportunity to let my mind wander and to observe the thin aureole of foam that would cling to my Dad’s upper lip until he licked it away with a move as furtive and quick as a reptile’s.
Some years after that, Dad allowed me to have my own glass. By this time, he had upgraded to Henry Weinhard’s Private Reserve, which was superior to the brands he previously drank because it came in a bottle. He only allowed me about an ounce of the stuff, but he poured it in such a way that the foam head was taller than the actual beer by a factor of about five to one. Still, at age 12, I felt that I was sharing a beer with him, which was cool. Taking the tiniest of siplets, I would nurse that spoonful of beer through the course of an entire dinner, or The Donny and Marie Show.
I had a rather conservative upbringing, my stepfather’s careful regulation of my beer consumption notwithstanding. Our friends, the Harrisons, on the other hand, were much more libertine—a point which I brought up at key moments, such as when I was trying to get permission to do something they would not normally allow me to do. They had two boys about my age, Tim and Rich, who owned motocross bikes, had TVs in their rooms, and were allowed to fart audibly in the house. I wasn’t even allowed to say the word “fart”.
Carl, their father, was a “pull my finger” kind of guy, a self-taught master mechanic who could jerry-rig just about anything that involved steel, grease and internal combustion. He drank Rainier, Hamm’s, Pabst, and Olympia. Actually, he drank whatever was on sale. By the case. And he allowed his boys easily twice as much beer as I got at any age. Our families often went camping together. We’d stay up all hours of the night while the parents crammed around the kitchenette table of the Harrisons’ trailer playing pinochle. Or we’d watch Carl pull out his guitar and try to fake his way through the Buck Owens songbook. I'll never forget the sea of beer cans and bottles lolling around the floor of the camper like dazed armadillos while Carl picked out the chords to “Crazy Arms.” Finally, Tim and Rich and I would sneak out to the woods, or to our tent to debate the virtues of bike parts that they were considering buying (and that I definitely was not); or about the mechanics of sex. Sometimes they would complain that their Dad drank too much. Some years later, Carl came to that conclusion himself, and he hasn’t lifted a bottle since then.
My stepfather continues to have a bottle or two every day. Although he now drinks microbrews—or at least, macrobrews that have a more opaque color and bear labels apparently designed by ex-hippies—his drinking habits remain the same. Each day’s intake—each swallow, in fact—is as precisely measured as the 35 years that he gave the Postal Service. Myself, I like beer, but I can take it or leave it. Maybe that’s because I feel that it is best consumed in accompaniment to the throaty intonations of the host of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom.
