In Honor of Hemingway's Birthday

“Don't you drink? I notice you speak slightingly of the bottle. I have drunk since I was fifteen and few things have given me more pleasure. When you work hard all day with your head and know you must work again the next day what else can change your ideas and make them run on a different plane like whisky? When you are cold and wet what else can warm you? Before an attack who can say anything that gives you the momentary well-being that rum does?... Modern life, too, is often a mechanical oppression and liquor is the only mechanical relief. " _Ernest Hemingway, Postscript to letter to Ivan Kashkin (19 August 1935); published in Ernest Hemingway : Selected Letters 1917-1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

It was hot last Monday. I’d spent all day outside and when I got home I had to shower off the sweat, tempera paint and creek water. The sun was still hard, intensified by rush-hour exhaust as I walked up the block and down thirteen steps into dark, cool Quarry House Tavern. On half-price burger night, you can’t afford not to go, and my god, it makes a Monday, especially a Monday when the next weekend seems totally unachievable.

I took a table in the red back room, a long reach to the jukebox on one side and the bar on the other. I was the first customer back there, and as I sat waiting for Laura and drinking my cold Stone IPA, I watched the tavern door swing open over and over, reflected in a beer mirror. Laura came in and I ordered her amber while the door kept swinging and the place filled up around us. The beer, the people, the mixed rhythms of simultaneous conversations and a flux of waitstaff –in with trays of bottles and pints, out with fluttering tickets—brightened and animated the whole bar.

Laura ordered mushroom and swiss, me, pico de gallo and pepperjack. It was a compromise, you see, because I couldn’t decide between the two, and though Laura kind of wanted grilled onions and provolone, she relented. She called for a refill on the amber and I tried a Wolaver’s IPA (which I liked loads better than the Stone) and we each played the jukebox. I remember “Whipping Post” sounding particularly fine, and Laura played “Gotta Be Starting Something,” even though I’d opined that tribute time was over. When the song came on, every hipster that passed us looking for a table picked up its groove and chattered about Michael Jackson.

In the ladies’ room, that low-ceilinged sanctuary behind the stacks of beer boxes and the rockabilly stage, I took a break between beers and lingered to read the grafitti on the yellow walls. Some dipshit misquoted Hemingway. She wrote, “Wouldn’t it be nice if it were true,” and maybe even spelled Hemingway wrong. I came back to the table vowing to return with a Sharpie and deliver a memorable lesson.

The burgers arrived, steaming with that grilled meat smell that tickles something deep in your brainstem and triggers lusty salivation. On the side, mixed greens with a thick homemade blue cheese, so good we’d later smuggle home an extra cup. And the meat, grass-fed, organic, three-quarters of an inch thick with a skin of good grill char and pink straight through – it just yielded to tooth and slaver. Juices of the meat and the toppings came layered and reached balance while I chewed. My stomach received it well and peace spread from there. We toasted to our neighborhood bar, and to the best burger anywhere, every single time.

The sun set as we walked the block home. Upstairs, we turned on some music and got loose. I suppose we talked of the usual things: work is hard; money is tight; time is precious. But, as is often the case when one’s belly is full of good meat and one’s spirit is high on good ale, our talk turned to travels, pleasures, loves. I poured two shots of Mount Gay into souvenir shotglasses –probably recent acquisitions like Memphis, Asheville—and raised another toast to summer, this summer, lived full from the Mississippi Delta up to Michigan and back, a toast to the potential still left in the last third.

“To summer,” I said. “There will come a day when it never has to end.”

And Laura, clinking up, said, “'Isn’t it pretty to think so?'”