I’LL GIVE IT A SHOT
Vodka: always the party guest of honour
My father phones to ask if I’ ll be attending his Purim party.
“Purim isn’t for another month,” I say. “Plus, you hate parties. Especially Jewish ones.”
My father has never been one for things religious. Of synagogue, he complains of the hard wooden pews and the incomprehensibility of the Hebrew language. But since my sister has had children and my father has become a grandfather, he’s changed his tune. “I like to see the kids get dressed up,” he says. Purim celebrates our not being murdered by the evil courtier Haman, a man who persecuted Jews in Persia with a gusto and verve that even the Philistines would have considered special.
The last Purim party my father and I attended together was when I was 15. It was at our rabbi’s house and refreshments included hamantash — prune- filled triangular cookies made to symbolize, depending on whose version is to be believed, either Haman’s triangleshaped hat or Haman’s triangle- shaped dirty ears. The idea of eating a pastry made to replicate the salient facial feature of a Jew-hating mass murderer has always struck me as absurd and wrong — something akin to eating little licorice Hitler moustaches. Also on hand was liquor. And plenty of it. Ever since an incident at a Toronto bar mitzvah where my father drank four Tia Marias in a row and taught my teenage cousins some kind of kung fu dance in the entranceway of the synagogue bathroom, my mother made liquor contraband in our home. So when the rabbi started pouring my father shot after shot of Crown Royal, the acceptance he felt from his Jewish brothers was poignant.
An Israeli man seated beside me wearing a cardboard yarmulke that made him look like a counterman at a kosher hotdog joint handed me a plastic cup full of vodka. That night was the first time I ever drank liquor and it was exciting. Booze allowed you to see that the world was really all spirit, that the soul was always just about ready to peep right out.
Drunk for the first time, it felt as if the rabbi’s dining room were being hurled through space, passing planets and, in its way, defending the galaxy. I can remember the evening as only a series of fade- ins and fade- outs: first, we were singing songs and pounding the table; then we were dancing a hora with our hands waving in the air like fun- loving flappers; then someone was telling a very serious story about how Judaism had changed his life while we all drank solemnly from our plastic cups. I remember being told by the Israeli in the cardboard skullcap that getting bar mitzvahed did not make one a man. That it required more than that. That it required vodka. Lots and lots of vodka.
On the way home, I zigzagged down the street, shadow boxing and climbing trees, while my father stumbled along behind me. The next morning, I would experience my very first hangover. I would wake up feeling sick and depressed in a way that would later become a cornerstone of certain times in my life, but right then it felt adult, like the price one paid for a little spirituality. “Will booze be served?” I ask my father. “I shall be in attendance.”