I’m not a drinker. I confine my drinking to sharing a fine white botyrized wine after dinner, or, occasionally, pulling on a bottle of port after a thick steak and an Indy race.

This caffeinated beer, on the other hand, brings back some memories.

When I was in high school we had an Italian prefect, Father Ernest. Father Ernest weighed around 120 lbs, wore only a shortsleeved shirt and dog collar even in the nastiest of weather, and could drink a gallon of beer, and NEVER use the bathroom.

Father ernest got along well with my parents, and spent a lot of time at our home. He’d often bring a special beer or wine with him, as his contribution to a meal- he still had family and friends in Italy (his family home) and they’d send him specific vintages he liked.

He came to America as a Salesian novitiate and learned to speak english in Louisiana. You could barely understand a thing he said.

When I was around 20, he stopped by the house one time to pick some mint- mom grew it beside the pump house. He came back almost a year later, and was carrying a bottle of something that was black as the inside of a cow.

What it started out as, was a pound of freshly roasted coffee beans. This was put into a bottle with a large sprig of mint, and the empty spaces in the bottle were filled with vodka and a mixture of liquers.

One of my first experiences with strong spirits, that was.

Oh, some of you might be thinking Kahlua, and you couldn’t be further from the truth.

This shit was NECTAR. You wanted, nay, needed, more, and more, and more.When the bottle was empty, you shook out the beans, and chewed on them.

You have NO IDEA of the unbridled horror to come.

In the course of many expeditions towards alcoholisim, there is a time when you go to bed, and drift off to sleep, often hanging on for dear life lest the bedspins fling you headlong from the planet.

In the morning, should you be unfortunate enough not to die in the night, you wake up with a head the size and shape of the state of Minnesota.

Father Ernest’s concoction caused a rent in the very fabric of alcoholic space time. There’s a magic moment in every drunk, when one makes the transition from being liquored up and bedspinning, to being sober and hung over. Blissfully, this transition most often takes place in the arms of morpheus.

The caffeine in this mixture prevented sleep, or any kind of rest whatsoever, and I was fully awake at the exact moment that I crossed the gulf between the land of drunkenness to the land of being hung over. And I was alert as I could be, and I looked down into that gulf, and I saw things that would make HP Lovecraft curl up in a ball and suck his thimb, things that Stephen King would be shocked to imagine, things more indescribably horrible, even, than Madeline Allbright, or Janet Reno’s neck wattles.

I never want to experience that again. It aged me thirty thousand years, and turned my hair a sort of a medium brown. Which was different from the previous medium brown in ways that are far too horrible to describe.