The History of Gin by Jessica Bundschuh

For beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror…

—Rainer Maria Rilke

For my father

I. The JUNIPER BERRIES

Fear’s what quickens me.
To steal juniper berries from heaven,
from the hands of these blueblue
needlelike branchlets, to break

the sticky oil glands, to inhale.
It all begins in terror.
For me, that terror is found here:
a girl waiting, upon waiting—

mother a cold cook, father a waiter.
I am the girl taught relish trays:
families of radish roses, cream herring,
liver pâté, deviled eggs assemble

on a waiting platform, to whisk
away—only orphaned rests return.
My fingers burn from coins
of breaded zucchini, griddle hot.

I am the girl who sets grass fires,
who thieves, who drinks Tabasco
straight up, who coaxes a mother
to shift her attention away

from needy sauces for beef fondue,
dill, mustard, pimiento: they whine
for her devotion—and share
a terror of abandonment,

forgotten cold, without witness.
I am the girl in a windowless cellar
in companionship of Frangelico,
monk bottles of hazelnut liqueur

whose shape I memorize in waiting,
like the girl dispensing chopsticks
at a takeout around the corner.
She opens and closes the door

until she’s shooed to the chair
beside her mother and the register
where she learns to sit still.
I am the girl who adores

the taste of butter gone cold,
for dipping artichoke leaves.
I am the girl who knows
the pulp of romaine in a Caesar

from my father’s tableside-tuxedo
performance, a conductor
in the main lodge dining room
for an appraising audience on all sides.

On a cart my mother prepares his score:
filleted anchovies, ½ a lemon
wrapped in gauze, a dash of sea salt,
an egg, romaine, parmesan, croutons,

and the pepper grinder he lifts
with the flourish of cracking gold.
I want to be the tall woman who orders
Caesar salad for her main course:

Tuesdays she admires my father,
his deft hands squirting lemons with a fury,
liberally pouring out the olive oil.
It begins here: this picture of the girl,

leaning into a gin berry bush,
smelling the aroma of purpled berries
buried in leathery foliage and
born to yield a gamey domestic gin.

With patience, I wait for remnants
—raw silk at the end of a ream—
of what others have left, scraps
bused from groaning dining tables.

This is how I develop an adult taste
for béarnaise, for cold filets of beef,
for hearts of palm, for anticipation,
for neglect. It begins here:

I am the girl who jumps, falls,
and disappears from rooftops
and rock formations, scaly hosts
for an apprenticeship on loss.

I hide among the restaurant’s shrubs
circling lasso-like the Black Canyon
in this mountainous town caught
at the base of the Rockies,

where blue columbines flourish.
I fumble with spicy berries,
hard as pebbles, their waxy chalk
rubs off, a threat to ingest only a few.

Juniper survives neglect,
seasons of bitter winds where
Greek navigators claim both
the Crimean and Anatolian shores:

the cape’s tip, wind swept and rocky,
lush with juniper stranded,
admonishing the vegetation it shelters:
Leave me the steep rock—

leave me the cassia bark, the coriander,
the cardamom—leave me the Black Sea,
its water churning in caves below.
It is my fate to be your wall.

Such is the site where Romanovs
built a palace at Cape Ai-Todor,
shaped like Neptune’s trident.
Here, the wall of Saint Peter looms,

its face a sheer drop in the water.
Here, alone, juniper survives the rough
company of the Romanov uncles:
Sandro, Nikolasha, Peter, Dmitri,

Constantinovich, constitutions
well suited for the dry malt of gin
brought to England by balmy sailors,
survivors returning from Holland.

The Romanovs, though not survivors,
claimed props of survival. The last Tsar
read Sherlock Holmes in English
aloud to his wife and children.

It soothed Nicholas to imagine
a Watson to interpret his adventures,
to polish his faults to a cognac luster,
to tell his story after he’d gone

over the cliff in his enemy’s arms:
Watson, who coiffed even a cocaine
habit into a charming protest
against the monotony of existence.

I am the girl nestling tight
into a Rocky Mountain Juniper,
its lower branches nibbled blunt
by passing deer, an alcove

cropped safe from western wind.
Here, I am the girl who learns
to balance warmth with coldness,
to solve any mystery inductively.

As a detective begins, in observation,
from the particulars of gin berries
I prepare to unfurl and test out
these knotty props of perseverance.

II. THE GIMLET

The Gimlet: 2 ¼ ounces gin; ¾ ounce Rose’s lime juice; stir with cracked ice;  strain into chilled cocktail glass; garnish with lime squeeze.

The first thing to learn about gin—
about any cocktail—is a dictum
from Harry Craddock, the mixologist
at London’s Savoy Hotel:

Quick!, Harry said, Drink it
while it’s laughing at you. Cocktails
offer receptivity: you laugh,
the liquor laughs back.

Start with gimlet’s sour kiss
and syrupy-sweet finish.
When you sit at the polished bar,
peer into your glass and know

you are not alone, never alone.
Nestle in to the craft of its bittered sling.
Let it kiss you, let it take you
in its tutelage of how to prop up

juniper berries and set them to sleep
in pillowy ease above the gin vats;
how oil becomes vapor, melding
with gin. Cocktail aromatherapy.

The basic rule of cocktail-making:
if it doesn’t bite your throat,
it’s too sweet, or too warm. Ice’s
to cocktail as sarsaparilla’s to punch.  

I hate nursing drinks, settled, warm.
Philip Marlowe speed-sips his gimlet:
It was clean and cold and slid down
through the desert parch like a fresh rain.

In the vernacular of film noirs,
those drinking too languidly,
need to Get on with it, or I squirt metal!
I share Marlowe’s cynicism—

the juniper berries taught me
to see the nastiness of the world,
to know the callousness,
and yet uphold a civilized chivalry

of simple lime juice and gin.
Gin is England’s drink, before tea.
The gimlet culled the daily ration
of gin and lime to ward off scurvy

from recruits in the Royal Navy.
Gimlette, the surgeon on board,
diluted the tonic of gin with lime:
gin served neat clouds the mind.

Bombay and Tanqueray, both
bestow their charges reason;
a surgeon’s blade chilled
for a cocktail hour at 6pm sharp,

a cut between day and night, work
and home. Nemesis to the sensible,
sailor-ready gimlet, a martini needs
an extravagant martyr for purity,

like Sherwood Anderson who
died by swallowing the toothpick
lancing his martini olive. Stick to
a gimlet—it beats martini’s hollow.

III. THE MARTINI

The Buñuel Martini: Chill glasses, gin, and shaker the day before; make sure ice is cold (at least minus 20 degrees centigrade); fill shaker with ice and pour in a few drops of Noilly Prat vermouth and half a demitasse spoon of Angustora Bitters; shake and drain, so that the only vermouth and bitters remaining coats the ice and the inside of the shaker; add 3 ounces of English gin; shake and pour into glass; don’t forget the olive; sip carefully—Buñuel martinis have been known to cause hallucinations and fits of manic well-being.

In nostalgic dryness, urban and male,
deemed by Stalin good, but cold on the stomach,
how does a woman drink a martini?

Must she affect a Plathian astringency,
an arrow that flies into the cauldron of morning,
cold, dry, clear? Plath tells us:
                         Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children.
                        Cold as snow breath, it tamps the womb…

A martini’s perfection, where devotees
eke vermouth out of medicine dropper,
can be terrible, sensitive to bruising.

Still, a martini’s spotless veneer
has gothic potential to induce a state of reverie.
Even its chill is generative.

A holy trinity of gin, vermouth and olive.
In a dry martini, light need only
shine through the bottle of Noilly Prat

before it hits the gin. Luis Buñuel called it
an Immaculate Conception—
the generative powers of the Holy Ghost

pierced the virgin’s hymen
like a ray of sunlight through a window—
leaving it unbroken. Whole.

Ah, a woman drinks a martini without
opening her mouth at all!
                         Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children.
It begins with the camera stalled

on the girl inhaling the scent
of juniper berries so filled with essential oil
they burn amber like gasoline.

Why is that moment my beginning?
The camera moves backwards in time,
and I see it is also my mother,

a girl—her mother thought to be dying—
who lives for years in an orphanage,
tears shed nightly on her starched pillow.

In dark Anchorage, she sketches
miracles into her open math book,
her feet in a basin of steaming water,

the cleansing an afternoon ritual
that awakens her. She douses the water
with juniper oil—thus begins her tutelage.

Only with neglect does juniper flourish,
having willed itself since its immaculate birth
to the transformed state of gin.
            Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children

VI. THE GIN PUNCH

The Gin Punch: 1 tablespoon of raspberry syrup, 2 oz. white sugar, 1 wine glass of water, ½ oz. gin, ½ lemon, 2 slices orange, 1 piece of pineapple; fill the tumbler with shaved ice. Shake well and ornament the top with berries in season. Sip through a straw.

Gin is the drink of the dark night.
It’s well known that gin drinkers
are mean—under its spell, you may
be consumed by a thousand envies,
revealing sins with the flair of one
playing pious, to become a listener’s
favorite, while it’s laughing at you.
The rumored inventor of the martini,
Jerry Thomas, believed the relish
for social drinks is universal.
He called himself the Professor―
a public benefactor sharing 86 kinds
of punch, cobblers, juleps, bitters,
cups, slings, and shrubs.

The Professor fell for the beauty
of gum syrup: sugar and water boiled.
A shaman—part conjurer, part juggler—
he concocted batches of the Ching
Ching, the Deadbeat, the Gin Sling,
and the Gin Punch, to applauding
and parched crowds whipped up
at the Paris Exhibition in 1867.
In white tunic and sleeve garters,
he kept two white rats to scratch
his mustache and mount his derby hat.
The Professor was good for elixirs
better than a tonic from the apothecary:
Sacred Liver Pills or Stanley’s Salts of Lemon.

I lived for a decade in the seaport city
where the Professor tended bar in 1853.
The announcement of the Mills House
in Charleston-antebellum bragged
of velvet carpets, rosewood furniture,
a gentleman’s parlor, suited for the hedonist.
Mid-century modern, it needed the Professor’s
liquid antics to nurture those steady
and solitary drinkers hunched over the bar
in pipe hats and swallow-tailed suits.
Early evening, he handed each of his charges
a squat tumbler of ice, a bottle of gin,
and a starched linen napkin for dabbing
the mustache. Such steadiness appeals,

like the verandah railing still a tourist-draw
for the Mills House, living testimony
of where Robert E. Lee stood in 1861,
watching the earthquake-spawned fire
until its proximity forced him to leave
the tired staff who hung wet blankets
from windows, hotel walls merely blackened:
their reward for gritty perseverance.
Fire brings me to my tuxedoed father,
serving a flaming dessert of Bananas Foster
to the tall Tuesday regular fireside, below
a buffalo I thought to be a black dog
hung on the moss rock fireplace, one more
dusty testament to perseverance.

That’s my burden—my gift: surviving
the long dark night, as the Tsar didn’t,
still reading Conan Doyle for distraction.
Take courage. Even here. Holmes-inspired
Empress Alexandria took courage
in jewels she christened her medicines,
pearls the size of choke cherries
hid in cold cream where a thief’s fingers
might stray. They were her Watsons,
freed from tiaras, brooches and pendants.
The word jewel’s a stand-in
for my own silent blueblue companions,
this handful of gin berries or seed pearls
stowed and stolen straight from heaven.

Jessica Bundschuh teaches contemporary poetry at the University of Stuttgart in the department of English Literatures. She has a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and English Literature from the University of Houston. Her work has appeared in the Paris Review, Quarterly West, Poetics Today, and the Columbia Review.