The following article is an excerpt from Marty Beckerman's new book and e-book, "The Heming Way: How to Unleash the Booze-Inhaling, Animal-Slaughtering, War-Glorifying, Hairy-Chested, Retro-Sexual Legend Within... Just Like Papa!", a satirical look at Ernest Hemingway's life and many misguided ideas.
In this age of Mike's Hard Lemonade, Smirnoff Ice, Bacardi Breezers (flavors include pineapple, watermelon, mango, coconut, raspberry, blueberry, and probably estrogen), and other alco-pops marketed to prepubescent girls, it's easy to wonder: why should I drink throat-burning hard liquor when I can instead sip five-proof carbonated fruit juice? Or: why should I put hair on my balls when I'm just going to manscape them anyway?
BECAUSE THAT'S WHAT MEN DO ... THAT'S WHAT MEN HAVE ALWAYS DONE.
But didn't Hemingway love daiquiris? you ask. Didn't Hemingway invent the mojito? Yes, Hemingway loved and invented lots of things -- such as freedom and gravity -- but only Richard Nixon could go to Red China. We must painstakingly follow his example (Hemingway's, not Nixon's) which means earning sufficient masculine credibility to experiment with unmanly pursuits, and thereby make them manly.
Amateurs, unlike aficionados, can't afford to break the rules, because (as Hemingway told the Paris Review) "what amateurs call a style is usually only the unavoidable awkwardnesses in first trying." You may consume a piña colada garnished with maraschino cherries and caramelized strawberries only after surviving trench warfare, the Running of the Bulls, two African safaris, four wives, and thousands upon thousands of piña coladas.
Men don't get loaded for the vitamin C. We get loaded because we have demons. We are dark, broody, and mysterious; we possess inexplicable desires and tempestuous temperaments. We can dull our torment with liquid intoxicants -- as the amputee endures his wretched condition with morphine -- but we cannot erase our misery. Nor would we want to do so, because "to suffer like a man" (like Santiago in "The Old Man and the Sea") makes us men.
Alcohol isn't about expressing this torment. The whole point is burying it deeper, which is why nobody likes a sad drunk. But some inconsiderate people -- specifically, people with vaginas -- cannot help themselves; they have an ounce of schnapps and then weep about their latest breakup (with yet another soul mate) or their backstabbing girl friends (those bitches) or their dead pet (more like toy) or their horrible daddy (the molester).
Whining is for women; whiskey is for men. The only shoulder a man cries on is marinated beef chuck, and the only tears he cries are tears of joy. "You don't want to mix emotions up with a wine," Papa implored in "The Sun Also Rises." "You lose the taste."
The only time Hemingway cried over alcohol: When Congress made it illegal during Prohibition. But he pulled himself together, as a man does always, and traveled to Paris, as a man does seldom. There Papa committed to a life of glorious, full-throttle chemical dependence alongside "The Great Gatsby" author F. Scott Fitzgerald, who said, "First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you." In Fitzgerald's case, the drink took ten thousand drinks and then left him dead in the gutter.
During this time Hemingway composed "The Sun Also Rises," a novel about self-loathing, castrated Jake Barnes, who impresses women with his massive booze consumption, since he can't impress them with a massive anything else. (Original title: "The Junk Never Rises.") The book's characters drank more than a hundred and fifty types of alcohol on nearly eight hundred occasions, just like their creator before lunch. A decade and a half later, at the ripe old age of forty, Hemingway -- who wrote what he knew -- suffered from kidney and liver problems, hypertension, cramps, diabetes, insomnia, bloody urine, and (worst of all) erectile dysfunction. Life penis imitates art penis.
Doctors begged him to cut back from his average of three bottles per day. Hemingway agreed to compromise, reducing his intake to a detox diet of absinthe, whiskey, vodka, wine, gin, tequila, champagne, and beer for breakfast, according to numerous biographies. (You haven't tasted Cinnamon Toast Crunch until you've doused it with Guinness Extra Stout.) Papa even refused to shower, revealed his friend A.E. Hotchner in the memoir "Papa Hemingway," instead demanding "alcohol sponge-baths."
These physical and psychological maladies suggest that imbibing is a bad thing -- with negative consequences -- but Hemingway told us in "The Sun Also Rises": "It seemed out of place to think of consequences during the fiesta." Alcohol takes years off your life, but he told us in "A Farewell to Arms," it "always makes you happy," like a well-marbled steak drenched with blood and butter. (And with bourbon.)
Anything worth doing is more worth doing blitzed ...
The goddamn bible
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