Absinthe in the Afternoon

The big man leaned back in his chair and let out a laugh that began in his belly and after it raced around inside him for a while exploded through his mouth with the force of a thunderstorm. When he had sufficently recovered he leaned forward and grabbed his drink from the table, a whiskey and soda, and took a long pull. A cigar lay in the ashtray to his right with its plume of smoke heading straight up again now that the big man had settled down.

“You kill me Russ. If that story’s true,” he said with a smile, “it’s a better fish tail than the one I wrote.” he glanced at my drink and nodded at it with his chin. “What do you think?”

He had ordered my cocktail for me, an absinthe and champagne. I had had an absinthe drip before but never this. I lifted my glass again and took another sip. “It’s quite a unique combination, Mr. Hemingway, but I must say it’s growing on me,” I answered and took still another sip before returning it to the table.

“Ernest, its Ernest or Papa, if you like, not Mister anything.” He eyed his cigar as if he were about to pick it up but then thought otherwise. “That’s my recipe, you know, they should call it a Papa if it ever catches on. First mixed it up on the Savannah chasing lion’s around. We’d sit by the campfire at night telling tales and mixing together whatever the hell we had. Some crazy ones, I’ll tell ya but that one there, that might have legs.”

“Gotta admit, I think I’ll have another,” I said, as I drained the last of it from my fluted glass.

As if accepting a challenge the big man rubbed his beard while he eyed me up and down and then picked up his whiskey and knocked it back. “Me too! So anyway, this story of yours, I think the hero needs to be tougher, more of a man; troubled maybe, flawed is okay, but a real man, you know? He takes too much shit from folks.”