I was thinking about beer tonight. Well, I wasn’t until the football game came on and after the 67th beer ad came on, I started thinking about beer.
Back in the late eighties my friend and I used to go down to Ensenada and buy a case of Coronas for $4 bucks have to leave a deposit of $5 bucks for the glass (yes, the beer cost more than the bottles!). Then Groupo Modelo invented Cinco de Mayo for the gringos and showed beautiful ocean views of picturesque beaches and everything changed. Now Corona is the fourth best selling beer in the world.
Until those ads aired everyone thought that if you drank a few Budweisers eventually you’d make Corona. After those ads Corona became a “premium” beer and the domestic price for a six pack rose from $3.99 to $7.99 in just a few years.
¡Ay, caramba!
One time, while buying beer in Mexico, the vendador looked both ways, smiled, and pulled a bottle of clear liquid from under the counter. Inside the bottle was an piece of cactus.
The bottle was unmarked and when I asked what it was the guy replied, “Is goood!”
So… of course, we bought the bottle.
Later that night we were sitting around the campfire drinking a few beers and playing cribbage. In cribbage, you have to do some basic math in order to play the game.
My friend asked if I wanted a shot of that clear stuff we bought earlier in the day. “Sure,” I said. “Let’s open the bottle.”
When we opened it, our eyes teared and we choked. “Sweet Jesus!,” he exclaimed. “This stuff smells like turpentine!” There was a slight pause as he wiped his eyes. “Where the hell is the shot glass?”
We both took a shot and within minutes our game play slowed down and we were helping each other count the cards.
“Hey! I don’t think that is right. Two plus two isn’t twenty two. I think it’s… Sunday… no, purple.”
And then I noticed that the moon seemed brighter and the colors in the fire were more vivid and intense.
“You want another shot?” my friend asked. And he poured another round. “Here.”
We continued with our game and all of a sudden, both of us at once, looked up at each other and said in unison, “Did you just feel that?!”
The horizon tipped about thirty degrees and it seemed as if the sun had come out again.
“You mean, the earth just tilting?”
“Yeah,” he said. “You saw it too?”
“Yeah.”
“I think we ought to go back to the Coronas,” he said as he laid down his last two cards out of turn. “I think that’s thirty one.”
I laughed for what seemed like twenty minutes. “You idiot. That’s not thirty one… that’s a black jack and I think we’re playing, what, Go Fish?”
We poured out the bottle of home brew and drank cheap Mexican beer the rest of the night.
Leave a Reply