The key to The Liquor Closet

Every year around the holidays my father received a delivery of liquor. The foyer of the house would suddenly be filled with a dozen cardboard boxes and an afternoon was spent unpacking them and putting bottles of booze in The Liquor Closet.

The Liquor Closet was just off the foyer, next to a coat closet in a small hallway leading to the den. Unlike the coat closet, The Liquor Closet required a key to open its door. The key was kept in a little compartment attached to a wall clock hung over the TV in the den.

For me at twelve years of age, the ritual of filling The Liquor Closet was significant. It was the place where my father kept his booze, and his booze was important to him. He styled himself a New York Businessman. In the 1950s, a New York Businessman meant being a King of the World, and a King of the World drank booze.

My father was not an excessive drinker; he was too much of a control freak to let that happen. He did, however, enjoy a drink and when he’d get home, he’d often pour himself a J&B Scotch on the rocks. First, he’d head upstairs to wash up and change his clothes, and then he’d come into the den where we kids were watching TV, reach up to the wall clock, grab the key and open The Liquor Closet. I’d follow him to get a look inside the sacred chamber where all his booze was organized in rows on shelves.

Like palace guards, each bottle wrapped tightly in cellophane, one shelf was lined with Beefeater Gin. On another, bottles of J&B Scotch were neatly in a row. Bottles of Vodka, Vermouth and various aperitifs were similarly arranged. What looked like an ancient cannon on wooden wheels held a bottle of brandy, and in a decanter was a liquor with flakes of real gold swimming at the bottom. It was fascinating.

The booze was for my parents, but mostly for the big parties they would throw. On those occasions a linen-covered bar table would be set up in the den and my father would hire a tuxedo-clad bartender for the night to mix and serve drinks. We kids had to abandon the den and stay upstairs, where we’d stick our heads through the stairway banister and try to get a peek at the party downstairs.

As the evening drew on, the booze-fueled festivities got progressively louder. From our perch above the stairwell we’d hear waves of laughter, singing and loud voices rising and falling. When it would reach a crescendo sometimes, we’d yell “What’s going on down there!” but heard no reply. By midnight it was quiet, the whole mysterious event over and done with.

I never took a liking to booze, which was for the best since it turns out that alcohol creates havoc with my heart rhythm. My cardiologist is unequivocal; “alcohol is poison,” he says. We have no liquor at our house, and no liquor closet. There is no special key that opens a special door to a shrine devoted to booze. Our kids never witnessed loud drinking parties, and neither of them seem particularly interested in booze.

As we’d fill The Liquor Closet my dad would hand me empty bottles. “Another dead Indian,” he’d say. Naively, I had no idea what he was talking about.