B Is for Beer

  B Is for Beer

  Tom Robbins

  This one is for Blini.

  Contents

  1

  Have you ever wondered why your daddy likes beer so…

  2

  At Sunday school the next morning, Gracie took a seat…

  3

  Have you ever felt—or imagined—that there is more than one…

  4

  If it is the ambition of every Pop-Tart to be…

  5

  “Technically speaking,” explained Uncle Moe, “it was not a beer…

  6

  The week passed as slowly as a snowman’s gas. Each…

  7

  For better or for worse, lots of kids these days…

  8

  A disco ball after an earthquake? Let’s get serious, kids.

  9

  Glug glug glug. The golden liquid was so cold it…

  10

  Tasting the stale barf in her mouth, Gracie was pretty…

  11

  For a scary moment, Gracie was sure her skull was…

  12

  “Can you guess where we are?” asked the Beer Fairy.

  13

  It’s rather obvious that Gracie and the Beer Fairy were…

  14

  Uncle Moe had told Gracie that once in a strange,…

  15

  It was nice to be outdoors again. The day remained…

  16

  As the shrieking maiden, wild-eyed and bloody-kneed, neared the summit…

  17

  “Suppose, for example,” said the fairy, who was increasingly showing…

  18

  Well, boys and girls, assuming you’ve been paying attention, you…

  Acknowledgements

  Other Books by Tom Robbins

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  Have you ever wondered why your daddy likes beer so much? Have you wondered, before you fall asleep at night, why he sometimes acts kind of “funny” after he’s been drinking beer? Maybe you’ve even wondered where beer comes from, because you’re pretty sure it isn’t from a cow. Well, Gracie Perkel wondered those same things.

  “Mommy,” Gracie asked one afternoon, “what’s that stuff Daddy drinks?”

  “You mean coffee, sweetie?”

  “Not coffee. Ick! That other stuff that’s yellow and looks like pee-pee.”

  “Gracie!”

  “You say pee-pee.”

  “Well, when I’m talking about potty time I might. But I don’t say it about somebody’s beverage.”

  Gracie giggled. Her mother, who was busy loading clothes in the washer, suggested without looking up, “I believe, dear, you’re talking about beer.”

  “Oh!” squealed Gracie. “That’s right. Beer. That stuff that’s always on TV.” She deepened her voice. “‘Better tasting!’ ‘Less filling!’ ‘Better tasting!’ ‘Less filling!’” She giggled again. “Is it kinda like Pepsi for silly old men?”

  Mrs. Perkel smiled, but it was such a weak, wimpy smile a kitten could have knocked it halfway to Milwaukee. She paused in her work to stare out of the laundry room window. The clouds themselves looked like a big pile of dirty laundry. That was not unusual because, you see, the Perkel family lived in Seattle.

  Do you know about drizzle, that thin, soft rain that could be mistaken for a mean case of witch measles? Seattle is the world headquarters of drizzle, and in autumn it leaves a damp gray rash on everything, as though the city were a baby that had been left too long in a wet diaper and then rolled in newspaper. When there is also a biting wind, as there was this day, Seattle people sometimes feel like they’re trapped in a bad Chinese restaurant; one of those drafty, cheaply lit places where the waiters are gruff, the noodles soggy, the walls a little too green, and although there’s a mysterious poem inside every fortune cookie, tea is invariably spilt on your best sweater. Mrs. Perkel must have been feeling that way, for she sighed at the limp pork dumplings (or were they wadded Pampers?) in the sky and said to Gracie, “If you want to know about beer you should go ask your father.”

  Never mind that she was wearing fluffy fuzzy bunny slippers, Gracie still tiptoed into the den. Her daddy was watching football on their new flat plasma screen, and if the University of Washington was losing again, he’d be in a grumpy mood. Uh-oh. She overheard a naughty word. UW was losing. Gracie was relieved, however, when she noticed that Uncle Moe had dropped by to watch the game and, of course, to mooch a few beers from her dad.

  Uncle Moe didn’t take sports very seriously. He called himself a philosopher, if you know what that is. He’d graduated from about a dozen colleges, seldom ever seemed to work, and had traveled just about every place a person could go without getting his head chopped off. Mrs. Perkel said he was a “nut job,” but Gracie liked him. It didn’t bother her that he had a face like a sinkful of last night’s dinner dishes or that his mustache resembled a dead sparrow.

  Timidly, Gracie tapped Mr. Perkel on the elbow. Her voice was shy and squeaky when she asked, “Daddy, can I please taste your beer?”

  “No way,” her father snorted over his shoulder. His eyes never left the screen. “Beer’s for grown-ups.”

  Gracie turned toward Uncle Moe, who grinned and beckoned her over, as she had suspected he might. Uncle Moe extended his can—and just like that, behind her daddy’s back, little Gracie Perkel took her first sip of beer.

  “Ick!” She made a face. “It’s bitter.”

  “The better to quench your thirst, my dear.”

  “What makes it bitter, Uncle Moe?”

  “Well, it’s made from hops.”

  Gracie made another face. “You mean them jumpy bugs that…?

  “No, pumpkin, beer isn’t extracted from grasshoppers. Nor hop toads, either. A hop is some funky vegetable that even vegans won’t eat. Farmers dry the flowers of this plant and call them ‘hops.’ I should mention that only the female hop plants are used in making beer, which may be why men are so attracted to it. It’s a mating instinct.”

  “Moe!”

  The uncle ignored Gracie’s father. “In any event,” he went on, “when brewers combine hops with yeast and grain and water, and allow the mixture to ferment—to rot—it magically produces an elixir so gassy with blue-collar cheer, so regal with glints of gold, so titillating with potential mischief, so triumphantly refreshing, that it seizes the soul and thrusts it” toward that ethereal plateau where, to paraphrase Baudelaire, all human whimsies float and merge.”

  “Don’t be talking that crap to her. She’s five years old.”

  “Almost six,” chimed Gracie.

  “In Italy and France, a child Gracie’s age could walk into an establishment, order a beer, and be served.”

  “Yeah, well those people are crazy.”

  “Perhaps so—but there’s far fewer alcohol problems in their countries than in safe and sane America.”

  Mr. Perkel muttered something vague before focusing his frown on UW’s latest boo-boo. Uncle Moe removed another beer from the cooler, holding it up for Gracie to admire. “Beer was invented by the ancient Egyptians,” he said.

  “The ones who made the mummies?”

  “Exactly, although I don’t believe there’s any connection. At least I hope not. The point is, the Egyptians could have invented lemonade—but they chose to invent beer instead.”

  While Gracie thought this over, Uncle Moe pulled the metal tab on the top of his beer can. There was a snap, followed by a spritzy hiss and a small discharge of foam. Uncle Moe took a long drink, wiped foam from his tragic mustache, and said, “Speaking of inventions, did you know that the tin can was invented in 1811, but can openers weren’t invented until 1855? It’s a fact. During
the forty-four years in between, hungry citizens had to access their pork ’n’ beans with a hammer and chisel. They were pretty lucky, don’t you think, that in those days beer didn’t come in cans?”

  At that moment there was a time-out on the football field and Mr. Perkel got up to go to the bathroom. You yourself may have noticed that beer causes big strong men to piddle like puppies.

  “Have you heard of Julia Child, the famous cook? When she moved to Paris in 1948, she brought along a case of American beer. Her French maid had never seen beer in cans before, and she tried to flush the empties down the toilet. Naturally, it overflowed. Took a plumber nearly three days to unclog the pipes.”

  Gracie laughed. She looked at the empty cans lying around the den, thinking that flushing them down the toilet might be a funny trick to play on her daddy. Or would it? She’d have to think about it some more.

  Once again, Uncle Moe passed his beer to Gracie. She hesitated, but being an adventurous little girl, she eventually took another swallow. Although she didn’t say “ick,” it didn’t taste any better than the first time.

  “Your pediatrician isn’t likely to mention this—unless he’s Irish, of course—but beer does have some nutritional value. The Chinese word for beer means ‘liquid bread.’” Uncle Moe paused to drink. “Even the most wretched macrobrew contains a six-pack of vitamins: thiamine, riboflavin, pantothenic acid, pyridoxine, biotin, and…oh yes, cyanocobalamin. Can you say cyanocobalamin?”

  “Cyno…cyho…cyoballyman…cy…”

  “Okay, close enough. Presumably, they’re each a member of the vitamin B family but precisely what health benefits those little jawbreakers provide I haven’t a clue.”

  Gracie didn’t care what benefits they provided. As far as she was concerned, vitamins were even ickier than beer.

  “I’ll tell you what,” said Uncle Moe, almost in a whisper. “On Monday we’ll inform your mother that I’m taking you to Woodland Park. Instead, we’ll secretly ride the bus out to the Redhook brewery. We’ll go on their tour and you can see for yourself exactly how beer is made. Most educational, my dear, most educational. After the tour, I’ll sneak you into the taproom and we’ll watch the bartender water the monkeys. It’s better than the zoo.”

  Practically burping with excitement (or was it the beer?), Gracie skipped out of the den. Her birthday was so darn slow in coming she feared she was likely to be a teenager before she could ever turn six, but now she had something right away to look forward to.

  2

  At Sunday school the next morning, Gracie took a seat in the rear of the classroom. If she could, she always sat toward the back because she had a sensitive nose and the teacher’s breath was so bad it could paralyze a rattlesnake. Gracie was not really paying attention, was in fact kind of dozing off, fantasizing about the pink cell phone and the puppy she wanted for her birthday, when she thought she heard the teacher say something about the ancient Egyptians.

  Gracie hit the Pause button on her daydream machine and looked up just as the teacher asked, “Why, class, do you suppose that ol’ Pharaoh, the king of Egypt, commanded all Israelite boy babies to be drowned in the river?”

  Fully awake now, Gracie believed she might have the answer. She raised her hand. “To keep ’em from growing up and drinking all the Egypt’s beer,” she said brightly.

  The teacher gave her a very long, very strange look before going on to answer the question herself, all the while exhaling fumes that would have parted the Red Sea and saved Moses the trouble. Later, out on the church steps, the teacher drew Mrs. Perkel aside and talked to her in a low voice, directing occasional glances at Gracie.

  After Sunday lunch, which Gracie and her mom ate alone, Mr. Perkel being off playing golf with his buddies, she was sent to her room. Jail time. She didn’t mind much because she often spent afternoons in her room, listening to music (and sometimes dancing: she had a lot of really great moves in her repertoire), but that day she was troubled by the uneasy feeling that she was going to be more severely punished when her daddy came home from the golf course. (You know what the game of golf is, don’t you? It’s basketball for people who can’t jump and chess for people who can’t think.) To make matters worse, she had no idea what she had done wrong.

  As it turned out, however, the family drove to Picora’s for a pizza early that evening, and not one word was uttered about Gracie’s behavior. Maybe the Sunday school teacher’s breath had frozen the memory section of Mrs. Perkel’s brain.

  In any case, Gracie, relieved, fell asleep that night with a secret smile because in the morning she and Uncle Moe were going off on an adventure. And because she wasn’t a baby Israelite boy in ancient Egypt.

  3

  Have you ever felt—or imagined—that there is more than one world? Does it sometimes seem to you that there is the familiar world you wake up in every morning and another world to the right or the left of this one, just out of reach, where interesting things (some wonderful, some rather creepy) are occurring that you can’t quite describe or put your finger on: a world where your Hello Kitty ticktock clock refuses to obey rules of time, where mommies and daddies don’t work all day; where trees, certain rocks, and maybe even shoes live secret lives of their own? You never talk about this sensation or even think about it too much because it has a fragrance of silliness about it, but once in a great while, such as when you’re lying in bed or walking down an exceptionally dark street, doesn’t it seem almost too real to be denied?

  Well, that famous Seattle drizzle, the ceaseless thin gray rain that we described before, the mist that can soften and even erase the lines that separate one shape from another, that very same penetrating drizzle has the ability to melt the shadow between Our World and the Other World. At least, some people think so, although to be truthful, most of those people are old Indians, hippies, mushroom hunters, or children such as Gracie Perkel.

  Monday morning turned out to be especially drizzly, needled with a silent, spidery rain that was almost as thick as fog. Normally, on such a damp, dark day, Gracie might have stared out of her bedroom window, alert for signs of angels, Sasquatch, mossy-haired spooks, magic gods, or half-invisible wild fox spirits. Today, however, she bounced immediately from bed—and you know the reason why.

  She padded into the bathroom, splashed water on her face, took what she called a “speed poop” (barely two grunts), and swiped a toothbrush across her gums so quickly it didn’t even tickle any bacteria, let alone kill them. Then, still in her jam-jams, she slid down the bannister and skipped to the breakfast table, already tasting the strawberry Pop-Tart on her tongue.

  There was really no need to rush around in that manner. Gracie was well aware that Uncle Moe never rolled out of bed before ten a.m. Uncle Moe believed early rising was an unhealthy practice, harmful to both the nerves and the liver. Nevertheless, she was too anxious to dawdle. Recently she’d been a bit bored with her life (her kindergarten was only in session Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays), so the prospect of an excursion with the so-called family nut job had thrilled her more than might seem logical.

  Brurble-urbel-urbel! Gracie had just lifted a freshly filled milk glass to her lips when the telephone brubled. Mrs. Perkel answered the kitchen wall phone, saying, rather sarcastically, “Well, well, if it isn’t the ol’ philosopher.” There was a pause. Gracie held the milk glass in place without drinking. “Gee, that’s too bad,” her mom said then, with what struck Gracie as a certain lack of sincerity. “Very sorry to hear that.”

  The arm that held the milk glass was frozen in place. What could possibly be the matter? No amount of rain would cause Uncle Moe to delay or cancel their plans. To Uncle Moe, who often boasted that he owned neither a slicker nor an umbrella, a rainy day was merely another cause for celebration.

  “Okay, I’ll give her the sad news,” Mrs. Perkel said. She hung up and turned to Gracie. “I’m afraid Moe won’t be taking you to the park today, honey. He hurt his foot and has to see a doctor.”

 
; “Oh.” Gracie set the glass down without having taken a sip. So disappointed was she that she nearly forgot her manners. Finally, after a long moment, she asked in a concerned but faint little voice, “How did he hurt his foot?”

  Planting her hands on her hips, Mrs. Perkel shook her head from side to side and smiled. “He dropped a beer can on it,” she said.

  4

  If it is the ambition of every Pop-Tart to be eaten and enjoyed, there was one in the Perkel household that was destined to exist in vain. Gracie left the table without touching a single bite of breakfast. Back to her room she scurried, closed the door, and flopped onto the bed. So deeply did she bury her face in the white pillowcase you might have believed that above the neck she was one of those Egyptian mummies (though of Egypt we should probably say no more). Soon her pillow was as soaked as if it had been left out in the yard.