I finally got around to starting Scott Smith’s The Ruins, but I didn’t get very far; I’ve been nursing a hangover all day and the last thing I wanted to do was read about someone suffering through a hangover (which is exactly what one character is doing early in the book). I haven’t gotten more than forty pages into the book, but so far, it shows promise; Smith does a nice job of describing the setting while keeping things moving at a brisk pace. I remember reading (and not finishing) Smith’s previous novel, A Simple Plan, years ago—I was probably thirteen years old—but it’s been so long since his last book (The Ruins is his first novel in thirteen years) that Smith might as well be a new author to me. In any case, The Ruins is a fun book so far. Hopefully, it stays that way.

As for the weekend booze thing—well, I just couldn’t resist.

The story went this way: [Theodore] Roethke—who taught poetry at the University of Washington and was large, vivacious, and a heavy drinker—was by the pool with Mrs. Bloedel and her daughter one summer afternoon, fixing mint juleps. Mrs. Bloedel went to the main house for towels or a telephone call or something. The daughter followed. When they returned, the poet was floating face down in the water. Three perfect mint juleps sat on a table by the edge of the pool. The family, grieved by the death of their friend, filled in the pool and turned it into a Zen rock garden. There is no plaque.

[...]

He was like Shakespeare’s Falstaff—the guy who commits “the oldest sins in the newest kind of ways”—and who Prince Henry calls “the tutor and the feeder of my riots.” Roethke was the tutor of my riots. Both Falstaff and Roethke preach a gospel of anarchic freedom. Both were heroically exuberant, corpulent, caustic, and drunk. You can sense Roethke’s drinking in his writing—the bump, the rhythm, the rhyming, the jump-cut attention span, the fixation on immediate details and despair about the future—from the first line of “My Papa’s Waltz” to the final chorus of “Gob Music”: “Oh, the slop-pail is the place to think/On the perils of too early drink,/Too early drink, too early drink/Will bring a good man down.” Roethke’s poetry was familiar in its setting but dislocating in its movement, and produced, in my mind, the same thrilling trick of intoxication—making the familiar foreign.

I took my first legal drink in the Blue Moon tavern, mostly because I had heard that Roethke spent many hours draining glasses at its bar. I nervously nosed my way in on a gray winter afternoon and ordered a pint of stout (I was young; I thought I needed beefing up) and turned to my right to find a table. There was a portrait of Roethke hanging on the wall. He was rosy cheeked and round faced, hoisting a glass of dark beer. He’s holding a stout! I’m holding a stout! It was my old friend, there to toast my maiden barroom voyage. At least that’s how I remember it. I haven’t been back to double check. I don’t want to be wrong.