Melissa Goodnight

This weekend Jackson is away with marching band, which means we need to fill our weekend in adventurous, albeit not-too-fun ways. If we do something too fun, he will be pissy that we did it, but if we do something “lame” he will relentlessly make fun of us. It’s a lose-lose. So really the only thing we can do is get hammered.

We don’t keep liquor in the house, so when we have a hankering we either go to a restaurant or stop by the liquor store for small-ish bottles, here I’m talking about 200ml or something adjacent, not “airplane bottles” though I always end up with a couple of those because they are just so damn cute.

We usually pull up to the old standby “Retail Liquor Buy Here Stop In This is the Place of Your Dreams” store on the other side of The Perimeter. It’s like five minutes from our house and it’s near Willie’s Mexican Cantina, who as you know has FiRe! (as Jackson says) burritos.

But, I dunno, ever since that guy got stabbed, I’ve avoided that whole area after 10:00 pm. Besides, Willie’s closes at 10:00, so what’s the point of potentially putting yourself in harm’s way if you can’t get a FiRe! burrito?

Which is to say that last night we went to Strong Water, a bougie liquor store just across the Gwinnett County line. Gwinnett County has all the most bougie things and honestly, it’s un-fucking-fair. We deserve bougie in DeKalb County without having to drive to Chamblee or (gasp) Decatur. Anyway, Strong Water is a ten-minute drive from our house, so I put a bra on, even though the whole point of going to the liquor store and not to a restaurant was the fact that I didn’t want to “wear a goddamn bra all night.”

We went because I had a hankering for gin and Jerimiah for Jameson.

When we walked in there was an adorable young man, who couldn’t have been more than 22 years old, offering vodka tastings. At first I was all when did liquor stores start giving samples like they’re GD Sam’s Club, you know? Then I remembered that I took a gig once, years ago, as a sample girl at a liquor store for my friend’s husband who was a liquor distributor. He asked me to come to Macadoodles, the bougiest liquor spot in Branson, Missouri, and offer wine samples all afternoon. I said yes because he told me he was bringing like 30 cases of wine and whatever was left over I could take home. Y’all. You. All. I had soooo much wine at home! For like two weeks…

I politely declined the offerings of the adorable little one because vodka sends me into a blind rage wherein I’m liable to look up my 7th grade math teacher on Facebook and give her a piece of my mind. Jerimiah also politely declined citing, “Vodka before midnight and after college just feels wrong.”

After we declined the sampling, which I’m just now realizing is to upsell and also to make you feel all warm and tingly so you buy a shit ton of liquor, we both stood in awe of the long, packed shelves, the clean floors, the attentive staff, and the overall organization. They have liquor sorted by type and then again by price and brand. There are clearly marked signs and all the lights in the store are turned on and properly working. There was no smell of vomit or piss and you didn’t have to keep walking to the window to check on your car. There was rap playing on the speakers, but it was easy-listening rap, like Nelly’s “Country Grammar.” We were, in one sense, home. But in another more real sense, we were very confused and we had no idea how to act.

This elevated feeling coerced me into saying that we should buy a nice digestif. I said the word “digestif” too and Jerimiah was all, “Why not just say after-dinner drinks?” and I was all, “Because I’m fucking sophisticated!”

So we made our way into the “Cordial” aisle, which was full of such wonders as, full bottles of Hennessy, not the ones that someone opened and took a swig from so the store had to deeply discount it and put in a Kroger shopping cart with a bike lock on the wheels. (Did the liquor store steal the Kroger cart? They had to have, right? Like Kroger doesn’t sell their carts, right?) There was also EJ Brandy, Remi Martin, and a Tasmanian Cognac that was so expensive I wanted to buy it just to put it on the Gram.

After much debate on the difference between cognac and brandy, and a couple of photo shoots wherein I held Courvoisier bottles to my lips and whispered, “Pass the Courvoisier, pass the Courvoisier, pass the Courvoisier…” Jerimiah chose Grand Marnier because he’s uppity and because we figured that little hint of orange would make us feel, I dunno, whisked away to a tropical paradise, which is what we really wanted to do this weekend but couldn’t because Jackson would be all, “You were whisked away to a tropical paradise without me?!”

During Jerimiah’s mad-Googling of digestifs, he mentioned Port and Sherry, so we made our way over to the extensive wine section. But we more so glided over while we sung along with Kendrick Lamar and begged each other, “Bitch, don’t kill my vibe, bitch, don’t kill my vibe…”

In the wine section, they had already filtered out the “cheap” brands, which were in a whole other section and made me feel like I was Sarah Jessica Parker in the Bloomingdale’s Shoe Department, but also reminded me of the SNL skit about Moet & Chandon, which Jerimiah would not let me buy citing, “Why the hell would anyone need to spend that much money on champagne?” I reminded him that the male porn star, V.I.Penis said it was the best and he asked me to not speak so loudly.

I settled on a bottle of Tawny Port, which I have never tried, even though I do own one of those adorable little Sherry glasses that I immediately knew I would drink from. But I only have one glass, so I took it as a sign that the Port was mine and mine alone.

When I sat the bottle on the counter, the cashier was all, “Oh, this is the best one! It pairs well with cheesecake or really any kind of dessert. Also with a cheese tray.” And I looked at Jerimiah and his eyes were pleading with me not to ask my next question which was, “Fantastic! But how does it pair with leftover chicken wings that you’ve stuck in the microwave, but not for too long because you are hungry, so they are still slightly cold in the middle, but you know, they are tolerable?”

So, I didn’t ask.

In the end we spent $100 at Strong Water, then an additional $100 at Publix where we stopped to buy cheese and honestly, going up the road to Blue Ribbon Grill and ordering a gin martini and a Jameson neat would have been a hell of a lot cheaper. But that pesky bra.

M.