Gin-Soaked Olive: Historical perspective on our blog's name

A while back, I decided that fruity drinks were nice and beer suited me well, but I’d better figure a way around my distaste for the hard stuff. Life can throw you some curve and knuckleballs, but when you take a fastball in the ovary, it is embarrassing to saddle up to a bar and bark, “Bud Light!” Or worse, “Malibu baybreeze! Make it a Double!!” I tried Whiskey and Tequila, but I might as well have been 6 years old trying to stomach a plate of lima beans- so much involuntary gagging.

There was a bar across the street from my first apartment that I frequented on occasion late at night. It wasn’t very popular, so it was a good place to drink alone when say- you are confronting the finality of death and making your slow way through the stages of grief while trying to mull over life’s frivolous questions: Am I really gay? How could I have gone to church all those years and not been horrified about the vilification of homosexuals? Can people really “love you” like they claim and vote against your political/personal interests? How long will I be able to stay in a job where my primary function is to try to beat life and heat back into people until it is time to zip them into body bags?

I decided to teach myself to like gin martinis because it became clear that I needed a more efficient path to intoxication. The strategy to my success was the olive. The olive is the perfect garnish: salty and often stuffed with something sweet.

I spent some time pondering the cocktail onion. What in the crazed hell is that all about? Even in my well-earned melancholy, I couldn’t do it. If the Gin Martini is the drink of someone who is dabbling in self hatred, the Gibson is for someone with truly nothing to live for. I’m not going to lie. It was a process. In the early days, my ratio was one olive per sip. Order “extra olives” and you’re lucky to get three or four. I twirled imaginary long, curly, blonde hair and batted my blues at the bartenders, “Could I have extra, extra, EXTRA olives?”

I learned a neat trick from a college friend, Bill, who dangled a $20 note in front of a skinny waiter and said in his most charming tone, “This is for you. There is more where that came from. She really likes olives. It is my hope that we stay here drinking all night and she never has to ask for an olive again.” Did I mention Bill had done a little bartending himself? We did stay all night, our table dotted with highball glasses overflowing with olives when we left; twenty dollar bills spilling out of our waiter’s packed pockets. I tried to hook up with Bill that night as a show of my appreciation and drunkenness. In my memory, he rebuffed my advances by swishing one hip, extending a limp wrist and lisping out the reasons we shouldn’t be intimate. But that is a strange memory since I know he doesn’t have a lisp or any limp things on him.

By the time I met Katy, I had learned to like the cold gin and the olives became what they were meant to be: a garnish. It was lucky timing because my “extra olives” became a staple in her bar diet and an essential piece of our courting ritual. She knew I was falling for her as the number of olives I kept for myself decreased while the number I offered to her increased. Gin-soaked olives are kind of like training wheels, getting you ready for the next big thing. Pessimists, and/or those that fear alcoholism might see my olives as the façade of something healthy that pulls you into something unhealthy. But I prefer to think of them as the unexpected nugget of salty flavor that eases you into and through the raw acidity and ironies of life.