I went up on a wobbly chair just now to get a bottle off the top shelf in my paint bare cupboard over my cracked kitchen sink.  I have four bottles up there, single malt scotches all, three now, actually.  Each one delicious, each slightly different from all the others.  In those differences the beauty of single malt scotch, an acquired taste, certainly, but a polished little universe for the tasting and savoring of those smoky nuances.   

There is whisky, like in the black and white movies.  The guy goes into the bar, says to the bartender “give me a double,” and the double the bartender pours is the house whisky, usually a blend of various malts and grains, made with all sorts of other ingredients, sometimes tap water.  House whisky is the least expensive bottle of the hard stuff you can buy.   It gives a nasty hangover too, compared to the more refined Scotches I am talking about.  Whisky is not sipped with pauses for smiling appreciation, you toss that fire water back.  It doesn’t necessarily taste terrible, but you’re not drinking this stuff for the flavor but to get a worse taste out of your mouth.

“Give me another one, bartender,” says the drunk loudly.   

“What are you drinking to?” asks the bartender, hesitating to serve the obviously sloshed man.

“My first blow job,” says the drunk sloppily with a wistful smile.  The bartender pours him another.

“Here you go,” he says,  “this one’s on the house.  This is a special day for you.”  The drunk tosses back the shot, waits a few seconds, shakes his head.  

“That’s it,” he gets up unsteadily, “if six shots don’t get the taste out of my mouth the whole bottle ain’t gonna do it.”  

Guy gets on the A train with his four kids at 14th Street.   They’re wearing suits and dresses, like they’re going to church.  The kids immediately start screaming and throwing themselves all around the train.  They are slamming into other passengers and shrieking in people’s ears. climbing on the seats, swinging from the bars.  The father is just sitting there with his head in his hands pretending he doesn’t know the kids as the kids run riot.  

Finally I turn to the guy, after getting kicked again by one of his screaming kids and I say, “do you mind taking care of your out-of-control kids?” and the guy is still looking down.  

“I owe you an apology,” he says.  “I’m sorry and I feel very ashamed of myself.  I should not subject you and everyone else on this train to this, but I can’t control them.  We’re coming back from their mother’s funeral, she was hit by a car yesterday, and none of us know what to do with ourselves.”

So you got a crude guy walks into a bar joke or a vignette providing an illuminating change of perspective, the unnoticed miracle that happens in life once in a while.   Things that once you learn change the whole picture for you, improve your perspective, help resolve painful mysteries.  My father as an infant being whipped in the face by his mother.   The wild children wildly grieving their young mother’s atrocious death.  

That’s the difference between drinking whisky and enjoying fine single malt scotch, a quick, cheap laugh, or a nuanced laugh and something to ponder (even though the second anecdote above was lifted from a wonderful talk I heard a few years ago).

Scotch has to be grown– grain, malt, all other ingredients– distilled, aged and bottled in Scotland, apparently, whereas whisky is whatever you can ferment anywhere to make a brownish tan intoxicant of approximately 50% alcohol.  

I recall a great Scotch tasting not a decade ago, in London.  The occasion was the fiftieth birthday of a guy I’d known since we were seventeen.  I was not the only guest to arrive with a bottle of  fine Scotch, I think I brought Glenmorangie.  There was Laphroaig, Glenlivet, Johnny Walker Black, a few others.   We set them all out on a long table with enough small glasses for everyone.

“Johnny?” we all said, and nodded and tasted the Johnny Walker Black.  It was smooth, it was rich, it was tasty.  We all agreed it was delicious.   Then we tasted the rest in turn, savoring and evaluating each.  It was hard to pick the best, and that was hardly the point, even though I think there was some consensus at the time, which I don’t remember.   If you like a smoky, peat taste to your Scotch you’d probably prefer Laphroaig.  The Glenmorangie aged in the sherry casks was special, I recall, someone else had bought that one, which is the kind I look for once in a while.

But, thinking about it now, those friends, like the last of the 12 year old Macallans I just poured, are all gone.  When I recycle the empty bottle only the memory of drinking it on special occasions over the course of several years will remain, if that.  

Merry Christmas to all, don’t drink and drive.  Don’t drink alone.  Leave the single malts to the experts.  And peace on earth, boys and girls.

My parents saw the world as pretty much black or white.   “Love me, love my dog,” their favorite cousin used to bark, when complaining about assholes who wouldn’t let his Boxer, or later his Husky, come into their houses.  He’d have nothing more to do with people like that. My parents were the same way, dividing the world into kindred souls and people to avoid.  My mother was a bit more flexible, my father quite a bit less, but both drew a strong line.

And so I was left to slowly, haphazardly, learn about nuance, and things besides loyalty and reflex.  I had a lot to learn, and, truthfully, didn’t learn much in my first five decades.  Here’s one just occurred to me, something I wish I’d have learned in time to help me make a living.

When I practiced law I participated in a program that provided paid legal counsel to clients of the NYC Department of Aging.  I represented a few senior citizens in various cases, for a flat fee of maybe $1,000 a case.  The seniors didn’t have to pay, several were very nice, and grateful, a few others were demanding and nuts.  Then there was the octogenarian interior designer who lived on MacDougal Street.

He’d been there for about fifty years, on the top two floors of a now very desirable building in Greenwich Village.   You entered his apartment on the fourth floor and to get to his bedroom, as one imagines others sometimes did back in the day, you climbed a steep flight of dark wooden steps through a door-sized opening cut in the floor of the apartment above.  It was a very nice pad, and rent controlled.  He paid a few hundred dollars for the two apartments.  Each one was now worth at least $2,000 a month to the landlord, if they could get the old interior designer out, close up the floor, put in new fixtures.

His mother had died and, as the only child, he inherited her house in Pennsylvania.  The landlord learned of this and decided to try to evict him on non-primary residence grounds.   They served the eviction papers on him and he freaked out.  I was appointed his lawyer.  It became clear that his landlord was taking a shot in the dark, hoping to scare the skittish old man and buy him off cheaply.  The landlord had no case.   The indicia of primary residence are things like: address for all correspondence, where you vote, the address on your drivers license and passport, ties to the community, the fact that the apartment you rent is your main home and that you are there for the majority of the year.  Every factor was in the old interior decorator’s favor.  The apartment was his primary residence.   The attempt to evict him was a cruel thing to do and he was anxious, angry and beside himself to be hauled into court by his long time landlord.

Once he calmed down, it emerged that for the right price he was prepared to retire to his ancestral home.  The ordinary buy-out is calculated on the difference in rent over five years.  If he paid $400 a month and the landlord would be able to get, say, $4,000 a month, you’d get the difference and multiply it by 60 months, in this case $3,600 X 60 or $216,000.  Every month after that, in perpetuity, the landlord would be collecting gravy.

The landlord’s attorney was a vicious scumbag, the kind of lawyer that gives the profession such a bad smell.   He puffed that the era of six digit buy-outs was long in the past (it was not) and that $50,000 was a fair offer (it was not).   He conducted interrogatories and a deposition, which took me and my client many, many hours to comply with.  I should have put my foot up this lawyer’s ass– beaten him at trial and then told him to pay up if his client wanted the apartment so badly.   I was thinking that way, too.

One evening I sat in the bank with my client waiting for the bank to produce some records we needed to give the landlord’s attorney.   “Can you believe we are sitting here on a Friday night waiting for papers to give to that fucking Jew bastard K___?” he asked me.   I gave a blank look and shook my head.  I am Jewish and don’t like to hear that kind of talk,  In fact, I have so rarely heard it that I am unprepared to respond each time I do.  I tried to let it pass, agreeing that the lawyer was a bad man, but he was determined.

“That fucking filthy, Eastern European kyke…” he hissed, and this time I didn’t look at him at all.

We settled the case for $50,000 and I took a third, my biggest payday as a lawyer, but a fraction of what I should have made.

Rewind in light of nuance and perspective:  I could have said “Jimmy, I share your distaste for K____, he’s an anti-Semite’s caricature of a Jewish lawyer, no question.  But I’m Jewish and that ‘filthy Eastern European kyke’ business doesn’t sit well with me, old boy.   I’d expect a bit more sensitivity from someone who, walking lightly in his loafers in a day when one could be beaten or killed for it, should know what it’s like to be a member of a despised minority.”

I have no doubt he would have taken pains to apologize.  He would have put on a great show of being mortified.  Then I’d shake his clammy hand and we’d vow to take the piece of garbage to the cleaners if he wanted his damned apartment back.

Instead, I said nothing, thought “fuck him” and spited myself by taking a fraction of what we both should have been paid– and letting that filthy Eastern European kyke have his way with us both.   Another proof that I was never cut out to be in business for myself as a lawyer.