How I Learned to Make The Perfect Screwdriver at Age 7
A Father's Day tribute
There is a photo of me at 10, maybe 12, months sitting on my dad’s lap, tasting the head of foam on the glass of beer he is holding up to me. The sweet, slightly rancid smell of fermentation is being lifted to my little face. Tiny bubbles went in my tiny nose, genetic taste buds and receptors awakened as I tasted.
“Ahhhh. There it is!” I am smiling.
Warren has a mischievous grin, his one blue eye completely focused on me.
Seven is considered the ”age of reason” for Catholics, and the time to prepare for your First Holy Communion. When I was seven, Warren taught me to make a perfect screwdriver.
I later wondered if there was a connection between the two or if it was just an impulse. Or maybe I was finally tall enough to reach the bar? Whatever the reason, I was just happy that he gave me his time, taught me something, especially something that was an obviously important part of his daily life. It made me feel important to him. I felt grown up and honored to be trusted to make his drink.
Our bar was a free-standing wooden butler’s cart in the dining room of our house on Castro Street. We had moved into the 1890 Victorian in 1967, when I was two. The bar lived in the alcove between the non-working fireplace and the built-in cabinets for glassware and china.
My dad always kept the ice bucket full. He would get very cranky if he found it empty. I wanted to help. He taught me how to fill the metal ice trays with water from the big porcelain sink in the kitchen with the black and white squared linoleum floor and then place them carefully in the crowded freezer in a little metal hutch reserved just for them.
He lifted me up into the freezer to show me how to check that the ice cubes were frozen all the way. He only had to show me once how to take out the trays and run them under warm water in the sink until the metal lever defrosted enough to pull it back.
CRACK! And all the cubes were released from their cold little beds.
I had to use a step ladder to get them by myself. Alice, our basset hound, would follow me, hoping food might fall from the sky, as I opened the avocado green fridge and grabbed the orange juice.
Mom bought Minute Maid frozen OJ and she would defrost it a little and then let me squeeze the frozen orange turd out of its cardboard tube and mix it with water in the gray, white, and yellow plastic jug with the wide lid. OJ was always in our fridge, along with its mixer sister, cranberry juice, visiting cousin grapefruit juice, and pushy uncle tonic water.
Soda water was kept on the bar, in a big rechargeable seltzer bottle with an air compressor cartridge that looked to me like a little bomb. Also on the bar were a bottle opener, a couple chopsticks for drink stirrers, a citrus knife, and a double-sided 1-shot/2-shot jigger. Dad never used the jigger. He showed me how to make drinks without it.
“It’s all eyeball,” he told me.
My green eyeballs were level with his empty glass on the bar.
“See, first, you take the highball glass and fill it with ice.”
I loved using the little metal scooper, which felt big and cold in my small hands, to move ice cubes from the ice bucket into his glass. I filled the ice almost all the way to the top, as instructed.
“Then pour the vodka until it’s even with the ice.”
I use the stool from the kitchen so I can be tall enough to lift the Smirnoff vodka bottle high enough (I put one hand on the bottom and one on the neck) to pour until the ice is barely covered.
“Then add the juice on top…”
I use two hands to pour a thin layer of orange juice at the top of the glass.
“Perfect. Now, give it a quick stir with a chopstick and voilà!”
He takes a big sip and passes the glass to me.
“Taste it! Good job beast!”
I smile and he smiles and gives me a hug before heading with his glass to his favorite reading chair in the living room, where there is a stack of newspapers and magazines waiting for him.
Sometimes I try to get his attention while he’s reading. He tolerates me sitting on his lap while he reads. I stroke his beard bristles and play with his eyepatch tie and sing “Daddy has a typewriter, daddy has a typewriter.” He doesn’t like it when I bite the newspaper wall between me and his face and tear it down.
He could drink 15-30 perfect screwdrivers a day, starting at breakfast. Figure there are about 3 jiggers in each drink and each jigger is 1.5 ounces. Fifteen of those would be about 68 ounces, or roughly two quarts of vodka. And this was before recycling! It was all in a day’s work.
This is an excerpt from The Muckraker’s Daughter1, my memoir about me and my father’s shared love of drink, ink, & Catholicism.
On submission with Pete Mulvihill of The Watermark Agency.
What a compelling narrative, Pia!
Your story is deeply troubling (especially by modern-day standards) but not bitter, and your affection for your father comes through clearly. Not an easy trick.
Great details as well! I remember those frozen orange juice turds! When did they stop making them? I don't remember the last time I saw one. I used to love to dig into them with a spoon and eat them like ice cream even though I knew I'd yet yelled at.
Touching and troubling in equal measure. My father, also alcoholic, was terribly impressed when he dropped in on neighbors and their young daughter mixed him a drink. Alcoholism lived in this house too. A child mixing cocktails gave addiction the veneer of affectionate civility. I wish you well with your memoir and look forward to more.