The Whiskey Monologues

Jameson just doesn’t burn like tequila. It doesn’t give you that just got punched in the stomach feeling vodka achieves. A welcome comfort to the cheap beer and inferior hard liquor (which is all of them in her opinion) she’s been putting up with. Beer is for drunk fucking, keeps you just sober enough to remain coherent to do the deed, and drunk enough to forget you shouldn’t be doing it at all. Jameson, however, is for drinking, savoring rather, let it seep into your veins and blur the lines the pot couldn’t cure. Let it keep you company as you roam these lonely Texas streets and explore the meaning of liquid courage.

It’s the Cajun in her bones that keeps her going now, a raw thirst for life that can only be quenched by the Irish whiskey in her blood. The future is a luxury for those who can afford it and she’s low on cash so she stumbles around obliviously in the present. The clock reads 6am as she pours her first shot of the day. At least it’s noon in Ireland. She swishes her whiskey and prepares for that familiar sting in her nose and the warming numbness to take her in its loving arms.

Submitted by Living the high li(f)e.

AN EXTRACT FROM “THE INVISIBLE THREAD”

The last time Fionn, Matthew and I were together before the plan reached its climax, we sat drinking in my kitchen until the wee small hours. There was a bottle of eighteen-year Talisker whisky being saved for a special occasion like this. Matthew didn’t know this was a special occasion, but it was a watershed in our relationship.

A drink like that is something to be enjoyed amongst the most intimate of groups you see, ones who know already the thoughts swirling in each other’s heads. But I alone knew what they were thinking, asleep and awake their thoughts trawled through me. Fionn thought he knew my mind, but I knew he was slipping. Matthew knew nothing. In my trance I was the one in control. I was in control of it all. It was me who I poured the drink. Just with ice, mind; you have two options: ice or neat. Anything fancier than that and you don’t deserve a whisky.

I was silent for most of the night, listening to the babble that Fionn had perfected which kept Matthew onside. Fionn was the honeypot, the football trivia, the vapid jokes. He was overly familiar and slipping. Matthew was the sycophant, the easy-to-amuse petty scheme-boy. I cut in, brash.

“Is there anything you regret?”

They both lost their place in whatever conversation was simmering along. Fionn stared deliberately at me while I avoided his eyes; Matthew was still whisky-hearted, mouth halfway through some inane story. For the first time that night the only sound was the dull dunts of ice on ice in our glasses. It’s good to cut into small talk, silence like this is better than fucking small talk. And you know what he says?

“Well, I’ll regret this in the mornin’, eh?”

Matthew was being fucking funny again. His whiny fucking screech was hilarious as per. I hope you’re bright enough to stay away from the whine of petty men. And stay away from people who confuse small talk for conversation.

Aye, well, I don’t move a muscle, just keep my eyes on Matthew across the wee table, and I see Fionn’s moved his suspicion from me to the cunt too. Matthew fades a bit, maybe is thinking that when I’m drunk I get a bit faux-serious so he clunks towards a diplomatic response. Crinkles his eyes a wee smidge like a smarmy bastard and bites his bottom lip. I come within a hair’s breadth of flipping the table when he finally speaks.

“I don’t believe… in regret” this wee worm says. “What we should dae is just dae what we want. And you shoulnae be dain it if yer the sort of cunt that regrets stuff. Regret’s fir cunts who dinnae enjoy their life, and Catholics.”

And I say to him “Is it not guilt that’s for Catholics?” and he goes “Well a dinnae have guilt either, dae a? A’ve made aw ma decisions masel. A’ve done them aw cause I wanted tae. Nothin to be guilty about if it wis you that chose tae dae them, eh?”

Wee guy will never know he nailed the nails into his own coffin. I drained my glass and left them the bottle.

Submitted by Cal McDonald.

The alcohol crept its way down our throats slowly, calmly. No, the alcohol jumped down our throats eagerly, one drink after another. I burned my insides with straight vodka and chased it with a forty. The lyrics to the song we were listening to didn’t make any sense. They weren’t words, just letters jumbled together to make sounds. I think that was due to my level of intoxication, but I can’t be sure. After a few slurred conversations, several hits on a cheaply loaded joint, and another dose or two of Four Loko, our minds were so blissfully clouded. We were fucked up in such a good way.
  

I was too young to be there, stumbling through the apartment, completely obliterated. We were all technically “too young.” But, that’s the thing. We were too young to notice, too young to care, and all that we knew was which drink settled best in the morning.

Submitted by Deus Ex Machina.

FOR NOW

WHISKEY DREAMS

I’ve had men look at me like that, but never quite the way you do. I wear my tall boots and raglan shirts and sway around at some shitty dive with whiskey in one hand and a beer in the other. You follow me with your eyes, one hand hooked under my hemline, fingertips like a whisper across my skin. I smile and lick the last bits from the shot glass rim, stubbornly claiming that Uncle Jack is my best friend and tastes like candy. It reminds you of the tootsie rolls you always keep in your jacket pocket for your sweet tooth, just like my late great-grandfather. And I like that about you.

I like that about us: that we’re simple people with classic vices that prefer to paint our perspectives in hues of nostalgia. Because we live our city lives with our college degrees, but we both prefer to discuss the possibility of fucking in the bathroom. And how it’s too cold to try the alley. We’re respectable people but we were born in the wrong time: we’ve got these white trash roots and a weakness for folk tunes. You tell me you want to take me in a field beneath river birch trees, so I wear sundresses to the show despite the winter weather just so I can watch you struggle to keep your distance. It’s lust that glazes your eyes, but they smolder like that because when you look at me you can see your dreams of farmhouses in North Carolina and springtime spent on front porches. And I see the same scenes when I look at you.

You want me, but you want all of me.

Submitted by Amateur Cartography.

WHISKEY SOUR, PLEASE.

We talked about troubles over cocktails and doubles. Ongoing in her case, long past in mine. Poor kid thought the bastard in question was some diamond in the rough, as if good intentions and ample compromise was enough to make any asshole change their stripes. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that, no, sorry, you’re best off without him.

I did, however, buy her another drink.  

Submitted by McKinney Can’t Write.

Because the night is too long,
but the whiskey tastes good,
and the star I wished on last night
moved to someone else’s sky
(that could mean the wish is coming true,
but I’m giving up until the next comet…)

The back porch is quiet,
but the rain is getting loud.
I should go in where it’s dry,
but this drowns out unrelenting thoughts and lets me just pretend.
Drinking in the rain somehow makes sense.

Visions of our life and that wondering smile
and one brief moment of touch are replaying, repeating, and reminding me why
this whiskey tastes good and I’m still in the rain.

Submitted by sjs.

SLUR

You were drinking from a glass that was made in France, but I didn’t know it at the time. I just sat on the floor by your feet, trying to forget history. Our history. 

But it’s near to impossible, you know. It’s been years of this, the on and off romance, the  nights of drinking ourselves numb in different bars after hours of vicious verbal sparring. We are so wrong for each other, yet you’re the only one I trust. Out of all the people who love and support me every day of my life, I only have faith in you. Why? Because I know you will never, ever change. I can always count on you to fuck things up for me when I’m finally doing better. I’m addicted to the way you tear my life apart each time I crawl back to you. 

And here I am again tonight, already regretting the fact that I made the call, but reveling in the familiarity of the moment nonetheless. When we drink together, we sink down to the same level, onto the only common ground we still have. I understand you inebriated in a way I’ll never understand you sober, and the same goes for you. This is simply us; this is what we do.

I’m comforted by the silence that seeps over me, but then your words slice through it. You slur me a series of stories from your recent travels in Europe but I can’t focus, can’t follow. Paris sounds like a dream, Rome like wind chimes, then Barcelona whirls by like a bullet. I look up at you but I’m not listening, I’m wondering who the hell you are now, who is this person I once claimed to know?

You trail off at some point and start to run your fingers through my hair. You know I don’t like when you do that but you do it anyway. I want to ask you to stop but I know if I try to speak now the spell will be broken, and the tentative peace between us will shatter once again. So I keep my mouth shut except to allow for the flow of whiskey between my lips and I let the night roll on.

Submitted by Ana.

EAST

I can’t even pretend that’s why I was drinking, I was at the bar when I got the text. But it gave me more of a reason than I’ve left the house today. I was celebrating being outside by drinking, but I’d left the house purely to drink. That’s what it had come to. Everyone keeps telling me it’s up to me, that I have a choice in the matter. “No hard feelings.” That’s what he said…in the text. Among other things. As soon as I’d received it the bartender knew something was up. Outside for a cigarette, back to my seat…”Can I get you anything?”

I tried to pretend that I was deliberating, picked up the menu… cut the bullshit. “You’re cheapest double whiskey and your cheapest shot of something else, preferably strong.” He smiled knowingly and set about getting me my drinks. I checked my watch, two in the afternoon. So here I am, a week past 19. Nothing to my name but the money in my pocket. No job. No partner. No home to speak of. No family that want me around, as of today. No choice in the matter. But I’m not complaining. I’m not miserable, or sad. I have my friends. I have my drinks. I poured the shot-rum, into the whiskey, downed it and left.

Said my goodbyes and started walking.

Submitted by Tea And Two Slices.