Damien Galeone

Scholars suggest it was a Wednesday. And, to those outside their inner circle, it was probably a Wednesday like most others. Thirteen guys were meeting for dinner in Jerusalem. Two had been instructed to go to “the city” to meet “a man carrying a jar of water.” This man would then bring them to a house with an upper room furnished and ready for dinner.  

The thirteen of them reclined on pillows and ate food that sat in stone bowls on low tables. They ate lamb, bean stew, olives with a mint-like herb called hyssep. They nibbled on dates, a pistachio and date charoset, unleavened bread, and a fish sauce called tzir. They drank wine. It was probably quite a pleasant evening until the hyssep hit the fan and the course of history was drastically altered.  

The Last Supper is one of the most famous events in all of the world, let alone Christianity. It is trumped perhaps only by the event which occurred two days later. You don’t have to be a Sunday school grad to know the rest of the evening’s events. Jesus brought his twelve disciples to dinner. He washed their feet and then predicted that Judas would betray him. Judas left to alert the Sanhedrin. Jesus then gave a lengthy farewell address during which he talked about love, hate, and that they should probably just split up the bill. He then predicted that Peter would deny him, a charge to which Peter hooted vigorously. Jesus and three of his disciples were captured later in the Garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus was suffering the Agony in the Garden. The rest, as they say, is bitterly contested, world changing, unimaginably divisive history.

So, how is this drunken history?

The better question is – how is it not?

I have spent the last few years miserable about the world. Despite the lessons we should have learned from history, politicians and governments are spreading their fascistic wings. Some politicians are clearly out for themselves and don’t care one lick about the destruction they leave in their wake. In fact, it seems to be their goal. Millions of people in Asia, Russia, Europe, and the United States are telling their governments what they want from them, but instead of listening to these people and trying to make people’s lives better, politicians and governments press forth with nonsensical and outdated notions.

It’s enormously demoralizing to see the direction which many leaders are actively taking their people and countries. They do so with no bases in fact, but rather use their own peddled conspiracy theories and outright lies to instigate and divide. There seems to be no end to this but adding to their own power. These things have made me very depressed.  

This depression was compounded just a day ago, when the republican-led state of Georgia pressed forth legislation to make voting much harder. American republicans have long understood that the more people who vote, the less they get elected. So, instead of expanding their ideas to welcome others in, they have become proficient in the art of cheating. They suppress votes, gerrymander, and make it incredibly difficult to vote via various methods. And now – when they somehow manage to lose after applying their underhanded tactics – they have simply gone to pointing to the other side and shrieking “you rigged the election!” Imagine the gall!

The Georgia GOP is basing their rationale for their voting restrictions on Donald Trump’s claims that an election he got his ass kicked in was stolen from him. Trump has made these claims about every election he’s lost – an Emmy award and the Iowa caucus – when the thief was Ted Cruz, who was probably more distracted by his JFK-killing father and his evidently unattractive wife to do much about it.

Saturday morning is my one blissful day. It’s the one day I eat what I want and work on what I want and watch what I want. I usually wake up late – about 7 – and wander around in my robe sipping coffee and listening to music or passively watching a string of sitcoms. I sit and stretch out in various lounging poses on all of the soft seats in my house – couch, armchair, cat, and I read. I must resemble ancient Greek art. It’s glorious. It’s the one day a week I am at peace, comforted, and work without a to-do list.

This Saturday, I turned on my computer as I let out a leonine yawn. Something was a little off, and so I pushed some buttons but they didn’t do the thing they usually do. I put down my coffee, my face tightened, my brows furrowed. Most grown human adults who don’t spend their days in an orange jumpsuit would keep calm, breath, come around to the issue, and then fix it without much drama.

Instead of this, I opt for instant fury. As my computer resists my fingers’ charms, I lace together a quilt of profanities that would make a nun convert to satanism.

When I was growing up, my father would occasionally embark upon a home DIY project. This was the 80s, so he’d have to go out and buy a book first. Time Life. DIY at Home. Bob Vila. After the book had been bought, his red toolbox and a radio would appear in the room where the project would take place. To some unrelated visitor this would have seemed an innocuous event. But to the residents of our home, it was a clear territorial warning. Something like a shrunken head on a pike that tells one tribe to stay out of another tribe’s turf. Stay Away. A warning, which, had you ever experienced a DIY project in my house, you did not need. It wasn’t until later in life that I realized how my clever mom was. On DIY days, she brought my sisters and my brother to some mall, movie, or excursion.

Sometime in the afternoon on DIY days, the calm of our home would be shattered by the sounds of verbal and vocal (for some of his utterances lied outside of the boundaries of language) disapproval from my father. I had never heard – nor had anyone – the intricacies and complexities of his vulgarities. It was as though he had attended graduate work on the subject. His curses were multilevel and possessed themes, actors, and plots. As the rants developed, subordinate clauses and ellipses introduced minor characters and subplots. At times, I wanted to know how things went for the people he’d introduced into his vulgar world. To this day, whenever I see a Time Life book, I instinctively wince and wonder whatever happened to those characters I had learned about in hiding. In horror.  

In terms of the gift of vulgarity, I have taken the torch. Like Olympic athletes jogging the final obscene lap to light that torch and kick off some vulgar games. But, the thing is, I really don’t want to anymore.

During the pandemic, I have become a fan of Modern Family. If you have watched the antics of the Dunphy family, you know that Phil Dunphy (Ty Burrell) curses in a very unusual and very G-rated manner. Whenever he stubs his toe, trips on a step or realizes a gaff, where the rest of us would shout out a curse or an epithet, he shouts out a G-rated pulse.

Son of Jor-El!

Sweet potato fries!

Chicken in a basket!

Son of a Sacagawea!

John Philip Sousa!

There are studies out there that suggest curses are the linguistic dough of the very intelligent. I was happy to hear this, as it makes the smartest person in just about any room I’m in sans Richard Pryor. But I’m not that smart. And if I am smart, in no way does shouting interlaced multi-syllabic plot-themed vulgarities at my computer’s lock screen make me feel or appear smart to anyone within sight or earshot.

That’s it, I thought, I am giving up cursing.

Day 1.

Before anosmia as a concept exploded around the world, before anosmia became a word in the average person’s lexicon, before anyone even knew what the hell it was, I was there.

My story, like so many others that should never be told, started in the bathroom. About twelve years ago in my Prague 6 flat, I was doing that thing in the bathroom for which people employ books and phones. I shut away the world for a few minutes and let my body slip into its intestinal yoga. I was relaxed.

Far less relaxed was my flatmate, who was so overwhelmed by my activity’s odiferous results that he broke the code of all past and present humanity by offering commentary through the door. Other than desiring to drive a brick into his brain, I suddenly realized that I could not smell anything. I tried. Nothing. I voiced this to him and he assured me, through teary eyes, that he was not wrong. I went into the kitchen and grabbed a can of coffee grounds. Bringing them to my nose, I inhaled deeply. Nothing. Nil. Not a hint.

Huh.

My adventure into anosmia had begun. As has yours, maybe.  

Yesterday I talked to my dad like every Sunday. He asked me what I was making for dinner, grunted and gave a mostly-polite and fully untrue “sounds good” when I said “salmon.” I ranted about yet another lockdown that the Czech Republic is starting Monday. And he was sympathetic, I think. He also may have been reacting to a particularly touching scene in the Boston Legal episode he had playing in the background.

When I asked him what he was doing on Sunday, he said simply: “I’m watching baseball all day.” I was happy that he did not add “your honor” or “objection.”

I was fully jealous. I went to my laptop and found an article instantly whose headline read: Spring Training with Fans. A quick search produced no fewer than six articles directly and positively mentioning fans. Pirates Spring Training: Normalcy, Fans Return in Opening Win, MLB Takes small Step Towards Normalcy as Fans Return to Spring Training Games, etc. etc. etc.     

Two years ago, words like normalcy, fans, and spring training sold out would have been insane commentary for a headline. If you were transported here from 2017, you’d wonder what the hell was wrong with any writer who did so. However, after a year or so of the corona-world, we all get it.  

Last week, I was bemoaning the changes that COVID has wrought upon our daily lives. No bars, no friends, becoming aware of yet two other varieties of Global Asshole (anti-maskers, the new anti-vaxxer, and anti-vaxxers: COVID style).   

Then there’s my blog. I know all three of you wait with bated breath for my Monday installment and I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your continued readership. Especially these days when nothing is happening to me. I used to write about the humor in my daily interactions, but I don’t have those anymore. Oh, I try to banter with Burke, but she knows all of my jokes. All. Every single one. The cat, well, she just bites me if I pester her and I’m trying to avoid emergency rooms. Also, it’s pretty hard to distract anything that can lick its own butt while it’s engaged in that activity.

I used to have loads of student interactions as fodder to blog about. But now my conversations are had over the Zoomisphere with disembodied voices, and where my comments and charming observations echo painfully among the column of white names against black backgrounds where they die in a techno crackle. Alone.

I have attempted to interact with people on my walks in the park. But people are warned about chatting with strange sweating men in parks. And I tried to chat with people at the supermarket. But it’s hard not to be the lunatic in a conversation when you’re caressing a sweet potato. Alas, all of my hopes for light interaction were stifled by isolation and people having good sense.

Thus, I entered a Blue Period.

These days, there’s really only one way to deal with a blue period. Oh, there used to be other ways, most of which revolved around pubs: Beer. Becherovka. Chewing tobacco. A talk with Lee. Singing along with Aneta Langerová. Kebab on the way home. This had a remarkable effect on my blue periods, often because the lobe-shattering headache I was suffering through the next day left no room for dealing with sadness. But now, I am trapped at home and sad about being trapped at home, so I thought it unwise to get drunk while trapped at home.

No, I dealt with this particular blue period by ordering chicken wings.

There are few problems on this planet that can’t be momentarily eased by chicken wings. (For you, not the chicken.) Fifteen stubs of goodness, drenched in sauce, a side of ranch dressing (or blue cheese when I’m feeling traditionalist), carrots and celery. I go to work on them in the one-handed hold method, up one side, down the other, each side getting a dip into ranch dressing, then I split the wing and clean out the meat from in between.

And I get them delivered because I’m socially responsible.

The delivery man calls and I begin my way down. I am wearing my COVID uniform, which is not intentionally monochrome, but happens to consist of all gray from my slippers to my sweats to my T shirt to my cardigan to my my winter hat. It doesn’t bode well for a projection of my mental state. But I don’t care. Wings.

The delivery man is nice, smiling, good-natured. He loves delivering wings. I wish everyone loved their job this much.

“What are you doing inside?!” he shouts. “It’s so nice outside!”

“I was out all day,” I say.

“Sure,” he says as he hands me a bag with three orders of wings in it.

“Ha, ha,” I laugh and hand him a tip. “This is from all of us.” I am including the cat in “all of us.”  

The man thanks me and gets in his car. I want to chat. I want to plead my case. But now I’m holding a bag with 45 legs in it. I watch after the car as it drives off. My next door neighbors smile at me and we all walk into the building.

“Hi,” I say. I am carrying 45 wings in a bag and I am dressed like a human lamppost.

They smile. I foresee banter on the way up to our flats (they live on my floor), but they both stop to get their mail. After all, we all know that the biggest mail haul of the week comes at 6:45 on Saturday evening.

But it doesn’t matter. Wings.   

The sun makes its appearance today. Which is weird because after the last two months I was certain it no longer existed. I reached my blanket out the window to shake out the cat hair and my fur and I realized: holy crap, it’s not bitter cold.

We hadn’t been out much recently. What with new cultural strains of COVID attacking our air streams, and a government incapable of getting us a vaccine. Then there’s the subzero weather and a month of daily snow. Yeah, I wasn’t running outside. Inside there’s socially acceptable sweatpants and warmth. A heater that works well and a TV. It was hard to talk myself into going out.

But with that being said, I knew I needed to see other people. I was forgetting how to converse and last week while talking to a customer service rep, I found that I was asking her a lot of questions that weren’t on our grid. When’s your birthday? She asked me. October, I told her, when’s yours? When she answered April, I went on to ask if she was expecting anything good. When I realized what I was doing I felt a bit embarrassed, but it would have been worse had she not obviously been similarly engaged in the conversation.

Burke has begun speaking in voices. We aren’t 100% sure why, though we surmise that it’s a combination of speaking to Chinese children four hours a day and her voices for the cat. Basically, we were forgetting how to be normal human adults. What would happen next time we were in a pub? We weren’t going to go out and talk to others, but just be near others.

We bundled up, packed a flask of whiskey, hand sanitizer, two masks, and we were on our way. We went to Ladronka, a nearby park where people ski and walk. There’s a pub there and we thought that maybe with a day so sunny they might be selling concessions. We were right. The sky was blue, the sun shone on the snow almost too brilliantly. People were everywhere: cross country skiing, walking, sledding, trekking, and some psychopaths were even jogging. It was like the snowy version of a Monet painting.

I love TV. I do. I know it’s not cool to say, but I really do love TV. Also, what I love about it is all the wrong things to say when you want to sound smart. I love that TV doesn’t make me work for entertainment.

And worse than the cardinal sin of loving TV, I especially love watching TV I have already seen. Gasp. It’s like having an old friend over, but a friend I don’t have to interact with and whose job is to entertain me whenever I look up from my crossword puzzle or reddit or taco. Rewatching TV I have already watched doesn’t demand anything from me. He doesn’t sigh and groan when I converse with someone else and he doesn’t ask me questions. It’s a perfect relationship.  

And to boot, when I watch TV I have already watched, the little dictator in my brain is silent. Mostly. Oh, he pipes up here and there about why I should all-of-a-sudden be too scared to check my email or, paradoxically, to not check my email. But mostly, he’s quiet.

I also love to read books. But with the combined efforts of my phone, my TV, and the little brain dictator, books took a hit. But with the pandemic and the fact that we don’t go outside anymore, there was no way of avoiding my books because, unlike TV and my phone, they hang out on my walls and look at me while I walk around in my pajamas and sing in Johnny Cash’s voice.

Alas, I was at some point forced to recognize that reading had to become part of my life again. How to do this?

In February 1945 the European theater of the biggest and most destructive war in the history of humankind was inching towards its inevitable close. There were millions of military and civilian casualties, Europe was in tatters, the world was exhausted. On the bright side, the Soviet army was fifty miles from Berlin, Germany was just about done, and thus so was the war in Europe. Also, Hollywood would have movie fodder for decades; they just needed Steve McQueen to graduate from high school.  

It was time to come up with a plan for post-war Europe. What would post-war Poland look like? What should be done with Germany? Would newly-liberated European countries be democratic and self-determining? Would there be spheres of political influence throughout Europe? And most importantly, when would Kinder eggs be available?

Meeting to discuss and decide these issues (probably not the Kinder eggs) were the Big Three world leaders – Prime Minister Winston Churchill, President Franklin Roosevelt, and Premier Josef Stalin. So, for eight days starting on February 4^th, the Big Three and their staffs met to decide on the geopolitical face of the world. ‘The Big Three’ is not ‘The Super Four’ because they snubbed French President Charles de Gaulle. None of the Big Three seemed to like or trust him, but at least it didn’t lead to a passive bitterness in French-British and French-American relations for the rest of eternity.

Churchill suggested meeting in Malta or in the Mediterranean, probably hoping to get a tan after five years of bunkers and British weather. Stalin nixed these suggestions claiming his doctor’s orders restricted extensive travel. Plus, he was terrified of flying (and eating food that hadn’t been tasted, and sleeping, and being around other people). So he proposed Yalta, a Crimean resort on the Black Sea. We don’t know if he chose a perfect rhyme to mollify Churchill, but the choice kept Stalin on Soviet soil and forced the others (including a gravely ill President Roosevelt) to travel extensively and uncomfortably. This perhaps gave Stalin the first of many upper-hands. But to be fair, he did formally proclaim Roosevelt the leader of the conference and most of the plenary meetings were held in his building.  

Yalta left a lot to be desired. The mattresses were so thin that people could feel the springs. The bed bugs and lice within the thin mattresses thoroughly enjoyed the British and American steaks trying to sleep on them. And the war-ravaged and bombed-out atmosphere of Yalta led Winston Churchill to mention that they “couldn’t have chosen a worse location if they’d had ten years to plan.” In a more succinct critique, he dubbed the resort “The Riviera of Hades.” The deplorable conditions would not be matched by a civilized society until Britain opened its first Airbnb 64 years later.

Perhaps in part to make up for the poor conditions, Stalin embarked upon a charm offensive. Much of it was bent on impressing his guests with food and hospitality. This included feasts of smoked sturgeon, potatoes, assorted game, and lavish caviar. He also catered to his guests’ every need (besides mattresses). The morning after Roosevelt mentioned that there were no lemons for his afternoon cocktail, a lemon tree appeared outside his door, having been flown in from Georgia.  

Another big part of Stalin’s charm offensive was booze. He wanted to make his guests happy, comfortable, and too numb to notice they were being eaten alive by bugs. Stalin ordered a decanter of vodka to be left in each room. He ordered crates of a strong Armenian brandy (Dvin) to satisfy Sir Winston’s booze-soaked palate. Throughout the eight-day conference, Georgian wine and champagne were plentiful and Stalin made sure they were flowing by making lots of toasts.

How hammered is this history? Well, Stalin was a drinker of sweet Georgian red wines and vodka (you’re not officially allowed to open a gulag in Russia if you don’t like vodka). And Stalin definitely knew his audience. President Roosevelt was well known for his enjoyment of beer, martinis, and high balls. He was also known for his love of entertaining and mixing his (evidently awful) martinis for guests, with gin and a splash of absinthe.   

But this history would be mildly tipsy were it not for Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill. Well before Sir Winston wobbled into his quarters at Yalta, his alcohol intake was the thing of global legend. In fact, while some of it was legend, much of it wasn’t. Churchill was famous for his love of champagne, brandy, whiskey, wine, and port. He was famous for drinking in the morning, day, and night. He was famous for his wit while drinking. He was famous for his drinking stamina. While visiting FDR at the White House, he would keep the President up drinking brandy and smoking cigars into the wee hours in sessions called “Winston Hours” by White House staffers. After Winston had left, it would take Roosevelt three days to recover. Though FDR most probably kept the White House liquor cabinets well-stocked, Winston liked to travel with his own stash. While working as a correspondent for The Morning Post during the Boer War, it’s claimed that he travelled with six cases of wine and spirits meant to fight the boredom (boerdom?) in the down hours. To wit, Winston Churchill could have gone to Yalta alone and spent a week playing Risk by himself and it would still qualify as hammered history.

Stalin may have had ulterior motives for having booze readily available. It’s been argued that Stalin wanted to keep the Americans and the British tipsy to have the sober upper hand in discussions and negotiations. It’s reported that the multitude of toasts he made were with vodka, because vodka looks like water. He would evidently sip the vodka and chug the water. He also bugged the rooms to overhear the British and Americans. But one wonders what useful information might be offered up by those who’ve just drunk twenty shots of vodka and were having a pillow fight with a bedbug.

What exactly happened at Yalta and its results have been debated ever since. Some claim that Roosevelt was grifted by Stalin, who made promises he would later break. It has been called the “sell out at Yalta” in that Churchill and Roosevelt sold out Eastern Europe and Poland to secure a commitment of Soviet troops for the invasion of Japan. But most agree that none of the Big Three walked away completely satisfied from Yalta. In any event, Roosevelt did secure Russian involvement for the war in the Pacific (Russia declared war on Japan on August 8, 1945). He also established the basic principles of the United Nations and did what he could to protect the Grand Alliance. Unfortunately, we know what happened to that alliance over the next four decades.  

Given the legendary status these three men have (and had) attained, it’s possible to forget that they were human. Tiny 5’4 Stalin, pock-marked, paranoid, murderous, his countrymen taking the brunt of European war casualties (because he couldn’t get to them first). He would be dead in eight years. Roosevelt was gravely ill and would be dead in two months. Egotistical Churchill, had seen Britain and the British brutalized by two wars. He would live another twenty years, but would be forced to witness Tuna and Jello Pie, Vegetable and Tuna Jello Wreaths, and other Jello-based culinary nightmares conceived in the fifties. No wonder he drank so much.

So, we can look at Yalta in another way. For eight days in February 1945, with all they’d been through and all the responsibility and heaviness that weighed on their shoulders, maybe The Big Three deserved a week of drinking. It seems a small period of refuge for three of the most beleaguered leaders on earth. Perhaps the only world leader more beleaguered than them was in a bunker 2,147 kilometers away casting longing looks between his Walther PP, a bottle of cyanide tablets, and Eva Braun’s breasts.

In any event, I wonder if they drunk dialed de Gaulle.    

So, what to drink?

If you want to drink like Churchill (first of all drink before breakfast, good luck, and update your CV), you could go with the Armenian (Dvin) brandy that Stalin gave to Churchill at Yalta. ArArAt Brandy has nuances of deep mahogany, a subtle aroma of cloves, and layered notes of deep fruits. It finishes with bright tinges of spice from forest nuts. Plus, it’s 100 proof and got Sir Winston fucked up, so after two shots you’ll be well on your way to handing over Eastern Europe to the closest Russian you can find. If you want to drink vodka to commemorate the Yalta Conference, you had better make it Russian vodka. Go for Stolichnaya or Russian Standard, play a game of Risk, and make lots of toasts. Just check your bottle for bugs.