Category Archives: Drinking

The Eternal Struggle

“Women are always right and they are never more right then when they are wrong and you try to convince of this.” – Pascha Ray After Sandy I visited my friend Richard Sweet in Brighton Beach. They hadn’t suffered from the huricane floods. I showed up on time, for his Ukrainian wife and he were […]

EVERYDAY DRINKING by Kingsley Amis

Not everyone is cut out to be a drinker. It’s an exacting devotion. Appreciation and dedication are not to be found at TGIFs or mall beer joints, unless the serious drinker has no other choice, since everyone knows that drinking alone is a serious indication of alcoholism. As long as there’s one other living person […]

BAD BOY DRIVING by Peter Nolan Smith

In the fall of 1973 my college comrade Paul Deseret and I worked at the Hi-Hat Lounge in Brighton. The pay for busboys wasn’t much, but the girls were young, the drinks were cheap, and we could sell quaaludes and mescaline at the bar. Neither of them were the best available in Boston, but we […]

GLATT BACCHUS by Peter Nolan Smith

These days most people in America survive from paycheck to paycheck and New York’s Diamond District has been feeling the pinch, so that my bosses Richie Boy and his father Manny couldn’t offer me a place behind the counter upon my return from the Orient. “It’s brutal out there.” Manny always kvetched about business, but […]

Na zda-ró-vye Nyet

Soviet Russia attempted three times to curtail alcohol consumption. The last temperance movement was in 1985-1987 under Mikhail Gorbachev. Vodka and other spirits were rationed throughout the USSR and public drunkenness was punished by prison time. The loss of tax revenue was in the hundreds of billions of rubles and this economic shortfall led to […]