RUM RUNNERS AND JOHNNY WALKERS

Dec 07, 2009 Features / Columnists, Tony Deyal column

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Talk is cheap unless you have a cellular phone.  Talk also comes in different categories and varieties.  People who want hard talk would normally find it on “Viagra News” or go to Tiger Woods’s house and eavesdrop.  Those who want fat talk, can try “Prevention” magazine or “Liposuction News”.
If you want old talk, Parliament is the place to go – any Parliament anywhere in the world.  “Gun” talk in the Caribbean has nothing to do with the NRA (National Rifle Association) but can be procured anywhere.  From the smallest child to the oldest adult, anyone will give you “gun” talk.  Just make a mistake and say something they don’t like or do something, anything, sometimes as non-threatening as saying “Good Morning” and you will get your fill of gun talk.
However, I just discovered that if you’re looking for “Rum” talk, the place to go is not the village bar or the fisherman’s pub, but the New York Times.
Before “Rambo” there was what in Trinidad we called “Rum-bo” – a habitual drinker whose taste for personal hygiene and family life had been destroyed by alcohol. “Rummy” was not just a card game but a way of life for most of the adult males in the village in which I lived.  Men preferred penury to giving up their alcoholic past- and present-times.  Families were living harum-scarum lifestyles.
However, as Trinidad prospered – especially during the oil boom of the Seventies – rum was not good enough and most Trini drinkers turned to Scotch Whisky.  Mr. J. Walker (known to his many friends as “Johnny”) became both a household word and spirit.  Old Parr and his brood were imported by the millions.
Seagrams came in by the kilograms.  The three Glens- Fiddich, Livet and Morangie – prospered and invited others of their kind to come to TNT.  Since they were single they attracted a lot of attention from middle-class people.
During my student days in Canada, I decided to limit my choice of strong drink to rum.  This was as much a posture as a gesture.  I was the Old Oak tree in the jungle of below Parrs.  I was Captain Morgan in the swampland of malt, hops and peat moss.  I had a truly Caribbean perspective.  I saw the moon in Eclipse and dreamt of El Dorado.
While all my contemporaries saw the world in Black&White, I viewed it through a rum glass darkly, redly or whitely depending on my mood.
One Christmas in the early-70s I decided to come home and spread some joy with my buddies. The tradition in the village in which I lived was that we would go from house to house, a joyous band merrily celebrating the alcoholidays.  My friend and neighbour, Tavi, made it a point to buy a bottle of rum because he knew I was coming.
Most of my other friends had bought rum to put in the ponche-de-crème and in the black cake but undiluted there was no way it would touch their lips.  “You mad or what?” was the reply when the host asked me what I was drinking and I replied “Rum on the rocks.”  It made everybody uncomfortable.
“Rum, boy?  Rum does give you bad, bad headache.  When I drink rum I feel like if mih head going to bus’.”
Then for a while in the 80s, rum enjoyed a brief revival.  Time were hard and many regular drinkers found that you could get the buzz faster and cheaper by drinking rum.  However, as the good times rolled again, Old Parr and his parrdners returned to town.  Black was back and Blue.  Now it is not just red, but well read in the New York Times.
According to the “Times Digest” rum goes down very well and is enjoying a revival in the big Apple and elsewhere.  In an article headlined “In Several Cocktails, Rum Stages a Rebellion”, the Times claims, “A small rum rebellion may be getting under way in the cocktail world…
The rebels are inspired by the staggering variety of well-crafted sugar cane distillates on the market.  Nearly as staggering are the bargains some of those bottles represent, compared with high-end whiskies and brandies.  The boom coincides with a dawning recognition that mid-century tropical drinks, many of them based on rum, constitute a rich and nearly untapped vein of American mixology.”
The prose is as staggering as the rum.
Audrey Saunders who founded a “watering hole” called the Pegu Club acknowledged, “We were all too snobbish four years ago.  Now it’s a different story.  Now it’s like ‘Oh, I miss that girlfriend. You know what? Those were fun times.”  Audrey owns the Tar Pit which specializes in a drink called the Night Marcher which is a “latter day Zombie” blended from two kinds of high-potency rum with green Chartreuse, hot sauce and lime juice.
Dry ice vapour scented with nutmeg drifts from the top of the mug.”  This will make my father and his friends turn around in their graves faster than a particle in the Hadron collider.  They took their drinks the hard way- shot of rum followed by a glass of water.  The day my father nearly choked to death was when he took his shot of strong white (Puncheon) rum and chased it with what he thought was water but turned out to be another bottle of overproof rum.
My days of drinking in dingy bars with concrete floors and shaky iron-legged tables from which you could watch the flies on the sticky paper traps hanging above do not equip me for the new world in which “Rum, on the other hand…can be blended into drinks that are modeled on the Manhattan and are every bit as complex, like the Carlo Sud and the Chadburn at Smuggler’s Cove…rum is forever associated with torches, waterfalls, puffer fish lanterns, grass skirts and outrigger canoes.”
This makes me so thirsty that I must go and get a rum drink- now where did I leave my outrigger canoe?  Maybe I can hitch a ride on a passing puffer fish.
*Tony Deyal was last seen in a grass skirt with a torch in one hand, a Night Marcher in his other hand, riding a puffer fish and going over a waterfall in search of his old friend, Carlo Sud who is visiting his buddy Chadburn at Smuggler’s Cove.

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