The Putting Down of the Mint Julep

matthew gavin frank

                      The Putting Down
                      of the Mint Julep

T    his sort of sipping has nothing to do with the martini, or anything
     as astringent as olive, resinous as juniper. This is drink as barrel, as
honey, as toothpaste. This is how we satiate our nervous hearts, prepare
to kiss our lovers and nephews, as we watch the round, oaken feet of
such muscular animals pounding our earth, compacting everything we
walk on and take inside us, with hardly a whinny.

Your uncle muddles three leaves of spearmint with two pinches of white
sugar into the bottom of a rosy rocks glass, using a miniature Ebonite
International bowling pin, the toy he received as a trophy for twenty-five
years of “striking” service at the bowling ball factory in Hopkinsville. He
twists the essential oils from the mint leaves, the menthol and menthone
streaking the sides of the glass, then pours more than a splash of bourbon,
less than a splash of water, and mutters into the burly tobacco field of
his chest hair, anticipating his first sip of the morning, “Turkey . . .
turkey . . . ”

Uncle curses the horses on television. Tells them they’ll soon be
lunchmeat in Lexington. Out the window, you watch the tobacco leaves
brighten from what Uncle calls off-white to yellow. You wonder what it is
that makes a color off. Uncle swallows the last of his julep and burps, cleanly.

You wonder if there’s something wrong with the light here. Those horses
on television look reflective. The tobacco leaves shrivel, the air does the
curing. The earth here seems to howl, as if pressed of its own juice, as if
giving itself to the muddler. It is the light that does the crushing.

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Uncle says it is the light that makes things taste good, that releases the
flavors in things. He says, in spearmint, is the spear. Before he makes
his second drink, he mutters something about the hierarchy of violence.
How, here, to puncture a thing is to release its flavor.

He mutters something about fighting back.

Another name for the mint julep: the mint smash.

Uncle talks himself back from his hangover with racehorse deaths.
Ruffian, he says, 1975. Sesamoids in her right foreleg snapped. Went on
running. Pulverized her bones, tendons. Went on running. Ripped the skin
off her fetlock. Ligaments trailing behind like a bridal train. The jockey—
Vasquez—desperately trying to pull up. It was the sound of it, he later
said. The hoof flapping about. Useless. At the end of it, all this thrashing,
this spinning in circles. They tried to cast her, but she kept knocking the
cast against her good legs, smashing those, too. All that was left was the
gun. Dumb motherfucker went on running, Uncle says, stirring the julep
with his good pinky, his fingertip reddening, the mint oozing its oils,
heaving like seaweed, and ripped herself open to win. Boy, he says, you
should have seen it.

Uncle knows he’s supposed to sip his julep from a silver cup, or one
made of pewter. He’s supposed to hold the cup only from its bottom, to
allow the cold bourbon and water, the ice cube or two, to grow frost on
the vessel’s sides. He knows this even as he blows bubbles into the rocks
glass, grasping it desperately with all of his hands, muttering something
about the aunt you never met, and how heat is better, heat is better.
How he will make his juleps smooth as a bowling ball. How, at bottle’s
end, he will turn this entire living room into goddamn Pro Shop Gold.

The word julep derives from the Persian golab, meaning rose water. Early
versions of the drink saw rose petals, rather than mint leaves, muddled
with sugar at the bottom of the glass. On the television, it looks as if
Uncle’s horse will win, then lose. Either way, he says, stirring cube to
cube with the toy bowling pin, I’m drinking a fucking corsage.

He tells you about the man from Louisville who wanted a rose embedded
in his bowling ball. You should have seen his sunglasses, Uncle says.

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Rhinestones and shit. You’re about to say something about all that glitters,
about how beautiful it is—the way the light catches his glass, the ice
there, the tobacco shadows on the sheetrock, inspiring the mint leaves
to lift themselves from their suspension, give themselves to this man’s
mouth. Uncle breathes deep of the julep. He tells you that glass is too
clean, that he misses the smell of plastic.

Uncle knows: there’s more folkloric romance inherent in the mint leaf
than in the rose. In this way, we are trying to coax a kind of love from
the drink whose own name resists it.

The mint julep should be sipped in a dark, cool room, or while stepping
carefully down a spiral staircase, and the splash of water should be
a splash of limestone water, and the sugar should be loaf sugar, and the
ice crushed, and the mint should be young, and laid over the coffin of
ice until muddled, and, before the muddling, the drinker—anticipatory,
discerning—should test the softness of the foliage against his, or her, ear.

Here, we listen to the mint for its youthful cooing, before smearing its
guts over pewter.

In the compound fracture, so many broken things. The sound of it . . .

The silver cup, Uncle says, should have a copper core to keep the julep
frozen and frothy. He takes off his undershirt. The tobacco outside—
like his third drink, like his skin, like all things copper, eventually—
goes green.

Uncle thumbs through Blood-Horse magazine, then uses it as
a coaster. Old Rosebud, he says, 1922. A windy day. Couldn’t tell if those
were the tendons blowing, or some awful head of hair . . .

Uncle says the julep makes the man. The more the mint, the more
feminized the drink, but the more the mint, the more likely the drinking
man is to be kissed. It’s your classic dilemma, he says, as he tries in vain
to use the bowling pin as a telescope, staring beyond the television
and the silent horses chewing at their bits, staring beyond all things
Kentucky—its number-one status in production of non-alfalfa hay, its
bluegrass and cardinals and tulip trees and goldenrods, and all things

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capable of muddling birds and petals and leaves and lawn—factories that
produce bowling balls with names like Dyno-Thane and PowerHouse
and Hammer, strong things thrown by good Kentucky men to knock
other strong things down; balls your uncle gave his fingertips to; balls
he made of wood, then rubber, then plastic, then urethane, then reactive
urethane, then particle, then epoxy. Balls whose cores should never be
muddled from them, balls who, in your uncle’s hands, become oddly
sentient—the mint predicting the kiss—remembering the original sport,
when human skulls were used as pins.

Uncle stirs his julep with the toy, and you think of the stuff inside his
head, your head, as eminently crushable.

When he misplaces the toy, he uses the last good fingertip he has left.
That pinky. Then: Dark Mirage. 1969. Raced only twice. It was the fetlock
joint that went. The cannon bone exploded. The ligaments of the pastern
rolling up like a window shade. He looks at his left thumb, the way it
hangs there, sips his julep, silently curses the bowling ball. You know
he’ll soon start speaking of euthanasia, and all death we call good.

It’s easy to forget that to muddle means to confuse, to make indistinct.
You suppose that crushing something likely confuses it.

Here, in the pulverizing of a thing, is that thing’s best expression. We
think of our own bodies. How else to let the sweetness out?

And Uncle, like the state that refreshes itself with bourbon aged in wood,
with the sort of mint that allows the nation’s highest concentration of
deer, and turkeys, and coalfields to scatter, to disappear into tobacco
fields and the cave behind the pins, pulls the blanket over his head . . .

. . . beyond all things Kentucky—its Mammoth Cave, named, Uncle
reminds you, for yet another giant extinct thing.

That Kentucky derives from the Iroquois word for meadowlands is quaint
enough. That the Cherokee called the land a dark and bloody ground
compels your uncle to lose himself in the muddling.

You know your uncle can only wish he had a bone named for

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a cannon. What else can he do but crush some skinny leaves until, in
his mouth, they are allowed to refresh, until he believes he is strong, or
strong enough.

The pastern bone of the horse is the thing in nature most anatomically
homologous to the largest bones in the human finger. Uncle probably
wishes he had a knuckle left to crack.

Go for Wand. 1990. Leading by a head when her right cannon bone openly
fractured. Threw the jockey—fuckin’ Randy Romero—then limped across
the finish line. Right into the winner’s circle. They say she broke her leg just
as she passed the flagpole that they buried Ruffian under. How crazy is that?
Because she was screaming, they euthanized her right then and there. Right
in the fuckin’ winner’s circle. Because she was screaming, he muted the TV,
listened only to his own mouth slurp at the ice cubes as they buried her
in the middle of the fuckin’ infield, and the wind took a banner bearing
her name into the air, and the crowd held—just held—their plastic cups.

The tobacco whips, and that thing you feel in your chest communes
with the thing we all feel in our chests, and we imagine the sound of it
as a bone breaking at full speed, as pins crashing against pins, as a skull,
like pottery, smashing against epoxy, as Uncle hushing himself as he
whispers, lustily, to the glass bottom.

In sugar and alcohol and mint is not the toothpaste we expect, but that
doesn’t mean our clean-seeming mouths are illusory.

Illusory: the putting of a bone back together. The expectation of velocity,
of a mane becoming a blur. The mint as an expression of affection. The
small sipping. Uncle’s voice growing smaller. The handshake he once
called the firmest in Christian County. The living room through the glass
bottom. All recovery.

Dulcify. 1979. Crushed Pelvis. Mummify. 2005. Foreleg. Lamb Chop.
’64. Broken body is all they said. Cryptcloser. Ha. 2000. Fell past the wire.
Crushed shoulder. White Skies. ’55. A bullet horse, they called her. A tobacco
eater, because she was bought by some tobacco farmer outside Lexington,
I can’t remember the name. Compound fracture. Right hind cannon bone.
Couldn’t get to the volume fast enough. Who could predict these things?

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Anyhow, you should have heard the ripping sound. That’s the important
thing . . .

Here, like the sip before the swallow, the ripping precedes the scream.

We inherit this sweetness into our mouths, our bodies onto these
couches. We inherit these shadows on the wall, the wind that allows
them movement. We stay inside with our juleps and curse the weather,
though there’s not a cloud in the sky.

. . . George Washington. 2007. Ankle. Crushed ankle.

We close our eyes. We sleep it off. We have crushed things inside us. We
have things inside us waiting to be crushed. We dream of horses. We name
them after forefathers. We can’t tell if they’re cheering or screaming. So,
we keep running. In this kind of wind, bullet can mean so many things.
In this kind, we are the things we try to outrun.

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