It’s Sunday night and I’m sitting at a bar in Quincy Market, slurping down raw oysters and a beer while I wait for my buddy Mithridates VI of Pontus to emerge from the mouth of the Sumner Tunnel, the most convenient means of egress from the World of the Dead to Boston, City of the Undead. Mithridates and I are getting together at my request; I check in with him whenever I feel the need to tap his world-class life-hacking skills.
“Almost there, there was a line at the toll gate to hell.”
Like most people of a literary bent, I first encountered Mith in a college English class, reading A.E. Housman’s poem Terence, This is Stupid Stuff. Mith is the king who samples all the poisons of the earth and thereby develops immunities to them. When his enemies put arsenic and strychnine in his cup at a banquet he downs the stuff no problem and lives to a ripe old age. His wisdom is timely in the Time of the Coronavirus, with or without the obligatory lime.
I have followed the guy’s example ever since, ingesting unpleasant and even dangerous substances in an effort to steel myself against the vicissitudes of the human condition. Take, for example, these oysters; actually, you can only have one, I can’t afford more than a half dozen at current market prices. These slimy little critters have been known to kill much larger creatures–viz., Homo sapiens–by a sort of culinary jiu jitsu. No one else in my family will eat them, and they–my family, not the oysters–are beset by all manner of insecurities, while I coast blissfully along, inoculated against the trials and tribulations of modern life, urging them (in the immortal words of Foster McGuire, my 8th grade coach) to suck up their guts and play football instead of whining.
The Salty Dog, Quincy Market
I check my watch and decide to pace myself, since my tolerance for alcohol has declined over the years. I sip from the tall glass of water that my wife and I always order when we’re out for drinks, having learned–not to go all Jesse Jackson on you–that constant hydration is key if you want to avoid inebriation.
I hear a commotion at the door–a disturbance to be expected when you try to valet park a chariot–and Mith makes his way through the public house to gawking stares. Bostonians used to think they lived in the Hub of the Universe, Oliver Wendell Holmes’ boosterish nickname for the Home of the Bean and the Cod, but a quick check of Wikipedia–your go-to source for incorrect information–finds four other burgs that now claim the same title: Grayslake, Illinois; Goldsboro, Maryland; Boswell, Indiana; and Copetown, Ontario. That downgrade in status means we’re impressed with just about any celebrity who passes through town, and a man generally regarded as the greatest ruler of the Kingdom of Pontus commands almost as much respect from locals as a placekick holder for the New England Patriots, even if they don’t know where Pontus is, or was.
“Great to see you, sorry I’m late.”
“Hi, sorry I’m late,” he says as he takes a seat at the bar I’ve saved for him.
“Five more minutes and I would have had to let an unattached woman sit there.”
He punches me on the arm–we go way back, to 135 B.C., Eastern Daylight Time–and this sort of mindless jock joshing is par for the course when we get together.
“What’ll ya have?” I ask him.
“Do you still have Happy Hour in Massachusetts?”
“Nope–not since 1984.”
“So Orwell’s dystopian vision of the future was right, huh?”
“I guess.”
“Too bad,” he says with a sly smile. “This is going to get expensive–for you.”
I groan audibly, knowing what’s going to happen next. A waitress appears, flashes the Mith-Man her $5 tip smile, and asks what he’d like.
“My drinks have arrived–where are yours?”
“Let’s see,” he says, eyeing the expensive stuff on the top shelf. “You’d better get a pad of paper,” he says, and she reaches in her apron with a bemused look on her face. “I think I’ll start with a single-malt Scotch, Glenfiddich if you’ve got it. Then I’ll have a gin and tonic, Tanqueray, please.
“Ok,” she says, then turns to get the drinks as she says “We’re closing soon–pandemic and all that . . .”
“Hold on, there’s more,” he says. “I think I’ll wash those down with a light and a regular beer chaser . . .”
“You want to mix them?”
“No, two bottles–for two drinks.”
“Oh, I see,” she says, but she doesn’t; one eyebrow arches ceiling-ward in an involuntary expression of concern.
“So a Lightship, and a Sam Adams Summer Ale.”
“Gotcha,” she says, and again turns to prepare the order.
“Then I’ll have a bottle of Malbec, and when I’m done, I’ll have a bottle of tawny port. And put it on this guy’s tab.”
“Wow,” the waitress says. You can almost hear her mental adding machine crunching the numbers to compute her tip on what will be a bar bill for the ages. “I guess I’ve got my work cut out for me,” she says with a smile.
“You ever heard of Brendan Behan?” I say as she starts to line glasses up on the bar.
“Can’t say that I have,” Mith replies.
Brendan Behan
“Irish playwright. They said he had a thirst that could cast a shadow.”
“That’s a pretty good line. We’re talking the shadow of one man?”
“Yeah.”
“Piker,” Mith says, as he sniffs the bouquet from the Glenfiddich, “I can do a shadow of five, maybe six of your grass-fed cattle or offensive linemen.”
“Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference.”
“Well, over the teeth and through the gums, look out stomach–here it comes.”
Despite the frat boy enthusiasm, Mith sips the Scotch slowly–and try saying that five times fast. The guy who, as Appian put it, vexed the whole world, seems remarkably at peace with himself.
“So how do you do it?” I ask in a rare moment of sincerity.
“Do what?”
“Let’s see,” I say, adopting a humdrum demeanor, as if I’m making a grocery list for a boring mid-week meal. “Your father was poisoned at a banquet and your mother and younger brother took over the throne. Your mom plotted against you and you went into hiding. You returned from self-imposed exile and were hailed as king by the people of–what’s the name of the place again?”
“Pontus,” he snaps, then with a look of umbrage, adds “I don’t have to take that from a guy who grew up in a county seat in central Missouri.”
“Point taken,” I say, as I try to catch the waitress’s eye to order another glass of wine. “Then you throw your mom and your little brother in jail and they die there.”
“You’re being too kind,” he says, as he takes a sip. “I executed my brother, then I married my sixteen-year-old sister.”
“To keep things in the family, right?”
“It’s so hard to meet nice girls.”
“And you’re a busy guy, right?”
“You got it. So what did you want to see me about?” Mith asks as he moves on to his G&T.
“I’ve been wondering whether I should be broadcasting your madman’s method to a healthy lifestyle.”
“You mean sample potentially harmful things in order to become immune to them?”
“Yeah–we’ve got a health crisis goin’ on here.”
“Well, what controlled substances did you take when you were young and stupid?”
“Uh, it’s actually easier to list the ones I didn’t try.”
“Okay, whatever.”
“Let’s see–mescaline, psilocybin, peyote, airplane glue.”
“That’s it?”
Model Car Science, The New Yorker of the glue and spray paint set.
“I needed the glue, I was into model cars.”
“You just weren’t any good at making them–right?”
“On the nosey.”
“Well,” he said as he moved on to his two beers, taking the “light” one first, “it worked for me, and it worked for you, right?”
“Yeah.”
“So what’s the worst that could happen?”
“I don’t know–drug overdose, chronic alcoholism, a life of poverty, mental illness, that sort of thing.”
He purses his lips and nods his head. “I see where you’re going,” he said, as he moves on to his “heavy” beer. “Well, as Socrates said in Plato’s Apology, the unexamined life is not worth living–unless you can hold your liquor.”
“I don’t think that’s how it goes,” I said.
“I know–but it would look great on a t-shirt.”