A pitcher of gin and tonic
IDES, n. It’s the ides of March today. We don’t really say “ides” in English outside the phrase “ides of March.” The word comes from Latin idus, which means the fifteenth day of a thirty-one day month, and beyond that we don’t know much about it. Maybe it comes from Etruscan. We know almost nothing about Etruscan, so I don’t run into it very often in dictionary entries. I genuinely do love to see it.
Other months also have ides, technically: May, July, and October. (Correction: a friend just told me that all the months have ides, but for 31-day months, the ides is the 15th day, and for other months, it’s the 13th.) Back when anybody would have regularly spoken of the ides of July, they would have called that month “Quintilis,” since in those days it hadn’t yet been renamed in honor of the guy who famously got killed on the ides of March.
This is the moment in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar when the warning comes.
This newsletter could go in the direction of talking about arrogant, short-sighted, dictatorial leaders and the ends they meet, but these days you can get that kind of thing anywhere. And dire warnings, too, those are everywhere. Unlike Caesar, I’m listening to the soothsayers and staying the fuck home, but I don’t want to talk about that.
What I actually want to talk about, when I talk about the ides of March, is my friend Mike.
First, I have to explain Mike. It’s not possible to explain a whole person, so I’ll just have to give you some highlights. We met in grad school in Madison, Wisconsin, where he was in the same chemistry department research group as J (who wasn’t my husband at the time, but a boyfriend of a mere five years—a long time ago!). Mike was a chemist, but unlike a lot of the science grad students I met, Mike didn’t think it was useless for me to get a doctorate studying French literature. (Hashtag #NotAllScientists, of course, but #YesAllHumanists have been told our studies are useless, often to our faces, alas.)
This was because Mike loved the liberal arts. Mike would have said it to you just like that, “the liberal arts.” Like me, he’d grown up on a college campus. He’d done a “victory lap” extra year of college on scholarship and he’d spent it studying poetry instead of chemistry. He loved talking about poetry and reciting it. I’ll always associate “Glass” by Robert Francis with him. He wrote poetry, too. There was a sonnet on the subject of quantum dots that I remember, given to one of the other group members who researched them. I wouldn’t know what a quantum dot was except that Mike once wrote a sonnet about them.
This makes Mike sound very intellectual, which is accurate, but he also loved football and videogames and drinking and general zany fun. I am lukewarm at best on most of those list items, but Mike was hilarious and charismatic and I sat through a whole Super Bowl for him once. He was from Massachusetts and took a lot of shit for being a Patriots fan in Wisconsin. (Just like with the quantum dots, I only really know what that means thanks to friendship with Mike.) Every time we joked that he was an East Coast elitist, he would correct us: “That’s East Coast elite.”
Mike both attended and hosted a lot of parties, notably one where we were only allowed to play hip hop from before 1996. J is not a dancer, so when “Gin and Juice” came on, I hit the floor with Mike. J and I left that party early, as we left every party early, being disinclined toward hangovers. Every time J did this, a few hours later he’d get a voicemail in which Mike spontaneously reworked a famous poem (“Two roads diverged…”) to roast J for bailing on another amazing night.
Anyway, with or without juice, gin makes me think of Mike. He claimed that once, when he was out with other friends, a bartender—at The Church Key in Madison—had allowed him to order “a pitcher of gin and tonic.” The story was always told with great emphasis on the word pitcher. It had been cheap and abundant and materialized out of the chaos of the night like magic. A pitcher of gin and tonic from heaven.
There are two kinds of bars in the world: ones with sticky floors and ones with non-sticky floors. This is not a value judgment, it’s just the truth. The Church Key, being on University Avenue in a college town, is a sticky-floor bar. (It still exists, I just checked.)
One night, possibly his birthday but I may be misremembering, Mike insisted that we return to The Church Key and relive the glory of the pitcher. He seemed to know even then that it was a doomed prospect. Miracles cannot be repeated on command. If we couldn’t get that pitcher, he said, we were outta there.
We were all both amused and bemused, but we went along with it. Okay, we thought, so Mike wants to go to The Church Key. It wasn’t like we never went there for drinks. A group of us traipsed over there. A few of us got a table and some menus.
Mike walked up to the bar and ordered a pitcher of gin and tonic.
The bartender stared in puzzlement. That wasn’t on the drink list. They didn’t serve anything like that.
Mike was immovable on the subject. Yes, they did. It had happened. He had borne witness to the miracle. He wanted gin, and tonic, and he wanted them both in a pitcher.
Eventually she said, “I could make you four gin-and-tonics and you could pour them into a pitcher?”
Absolutely not. Mike turned around and told us that we couldn’t stay there. No pitcher, no purchase. It didn’t matter to him that we could have gin and tonic in glasses at The Church Key, or that nowhere else was going to serve us exactly what he wanted; if The Church Key wouldn’t serve us a pitcher, we simply could not stay. He uprooted us from our table and marched us right out the door and as soon as we were on University Avenue, we all burst out laughing.
This story is well-worn for me now. Like a stretched-out sweater, I’ve retold it so many times that it’s lost some of its shape. Was it Mike’s birthday? Who all was there? And like that sweater, this story probably mostly has appeal for me—and anyone else who was there, or who knew Mike. But I’m gonna keep it. I’ll never get another one like it.
In addition to gin and tonic and/or juice, I also think about Mike when I think about the ides of March. (There it is, at last, the word of the week.) That’s because the infamous date of Julius Caesar’s death also happened to be Mike’s birthday. March 15th, if you want to be no fun about it.
Madison is the capital of Wisconsin. Mike’s apartment was on the east side of the city. From campus, you had to walk by the capitol building to get there. The building looks like the one in Washington—symmetrical, white, domed, lotta steps. In Shakespeare’s version of the events of the ides of March, Caesar is betrayed and assassinated on the steps of the capitol building.
In all versions of events, Caesar gets stabbed.
On Mike’s birthday, as he and a group of friends were about to pass the steps of the capitol en route to his apartment, he made everyone stop and hand over their weapons. Nobody was carrying weapons, of course, but Mike was committed to the bit. Just like he walked right out of The Church Key when they couldn’t produce the miraculous pitcher, he stood there until everyone handed over their keys and pocket knives, which he then kept until the danger was past.
Because he was being wary of the ides of March.
I have a few goofy stories like this, but I wish I had more. It’s been ten years since Mike passed away very suddenly from a heart problem. I miss him, but it’s also good to talk about him. It makes me happy to share these funny memories. I don’t know how he’d feel about being commemorated in this newsletter where I mostly write about romance novels—I was reading romance when we were friends, but it wasn’t something I talked about, especially not with men—but I want to believe I could have convinced him to respect the genre, even if he didn’t read it himself. When Mike’s friends and family were cleaning out his room, they found notebooks of handwritten essays on movies he’d seen, so I know he liked to write about pop culture. He probably would have written a great newsletter, but instead I’ve written this one for him.
Mike would have been thirty-five years old today. Obviously, J and I are making a pitcher of gin and tonic—and not going anywhere near the steps of the capitol.
A gin and tonic not in a pitcher. I still drank it.
I barely read any books at all this long, panicky week, and certainly no Capital-R Romance, but in small-r romance, this week I did finish
Polaris Rising (m/f, both cis and het, sci-fi) by Jessie Mihalik. I love a competent and unapologetic woman, and Ada von Hasenberg can pilot a spaceship, hack a computer, shoot an attacker, hike across an unforgiving planet, infiltrate a prison to break her man out, and navigate the social and political complexities of her own ultra-powerful family and their rivals. She does all of those things and more, often rashly and to the frustration of everyone around her, especially Marcus Loch, the taciturn, glowering criminal she finds herself imprisoned with when the book opens. They free themselves by working together and the book is non-stop action from there, with a nice, slowly developing lust-then-trust romance balanced with the sci-fi plot. This book definitely sets up large-scale conflict that will play out in the rest of the series, and I’m intrigued by Ada’s sisters, obvious future protagonists.
A tiny warning: I was put off by the exchange where the villain tells Ada “[henchmen will kill the supporting characters, but Loch] is mine” and she responds “I don’t think he swings that way.” I would have shrugged this dialogue off if there were some actual queer characters on the page, but as far as I can tell, there weren’t. “Joke implying the villain is gay” is not my preferred way to acknowledge that queerness exists in the imagined world of a book. Other content warnings: violence, murder, female protagonist is threatened with forced marriage/rape/pregnancy, female protagonist’s father is emotionally abusive, a supporting character has an abusive partner.
In things that are neither Romance nor romance, I am in the middle of Tamsyn Muir’s lesbian-necromancers-in-space SFF novel, Gideon the Ninth, and I have (shh) put my ereader in airplane mode, lest the library try to wrest it from my (cold, undead) digital grip before I am finished. I am a hundred pages in and it is marvelous. More on that once I make it to the end.
I have also read 8 million articles about COVID-19, from first-person accounts of medical professionals in Italy who are doing wartime triage to graph-filled analyses comparing our present moment to when the Spanish flu struck Philadelphia and Saint Louis in 1918 to discussions of what, exactly, “social distancing” means. I’m not going to link them; I assume you, too, are overwhelmed.
Like most of us, I’ve never lived through anything like this moment. But I remember in 2009, hearing about “swine flu” (H1N1) on the news and paying very little attention to it. And then in January of 2010, I was sitting in a bar in New York City watching people pass by outside. I can no longer tell you what part of Manhattan I was in, but I can still feel the prickle in my throat and the fatigue that dropped onto me like a weight. I looked down from my view of the street—the translucent gold cocktail on the black tabletop, the perfect twist of orange resting in the glass—and thought with sudden clarity, “I had better enjoy this moment because I am not going to feel good for days.”
(I got better.)
I hope as few of us as possible have that realization this time. If we’re not going to MoMA and trying on a dozen different things we can’t afford in high-end consignment stores, we’ll be in better shape to avoid this virus, and we’ll be helping everyone who does get sick by not overburdening our hospitals.
Also, if you are stuck at home and feeling lonely or bored and want to talk, the comments on this post are open! Tell us about what weird words you’ve seen recently, or what you’ve been reading, or anything you want.
I wish you all the least anxious and chaotic week possible, from an appropriately remote distance. Beware the Ides of March.
