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Authors: Craig Ferguson
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knew that. It spooked me how close I came to starring in my own neighborhood ghost story.
I still have dreams where I see the driver’s face.
9
Eldorado
W illiam Blake wrote that “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,” and I suppose for me this turned out to be sort of true, although in my case I wouldn’t call it a palace, more a studio apartment. Or maybe just a cabin of understanding rather than wisdom. If I had known just how convoluted and scary the journey to my little shed of enlightenment would be, I don’t think I would have embarked on it in the first place. Not that I had any idea that’s what I was doing. I just wanted to live in America and be cool and have adventures.
It began with Eldorado. Not the lost city of gold. Another one.
Eldorado, affectionately known as El-D, was a cheap fortified wine favored by low-end derelicts in Scotland in the 1970s and eighties. It was imported from South Africa in a flagrant disregard of the antiapartheid embargo. Not that many people who drank El-D really concerned themselves with the injustices of the political situation in the deep south of the Dark Continent. Anyone who drank El-D on a regular basis was dealing with a whole mountain of trouble closer to home, generally known as chronic alcoholism. El-D and its lessromantically named competitors, Four Crown and Scotsmac (“The Bam’s Dram”), were dark, sherrylike wines laced with cheap rum, and they had the approximate octane rating of aviation gasoline. Buckfast, a similar rocket fuel from Buckfast Abbey in England, was another brand but kind of off limits for my clique since it was made by monks, and monks are, of course, Catholic. I myself have drunk Buckfast, though, and if Catholics have been drinking this stuff throughout history, that would certainly go a long way toward explaining the luminosity of some saintly visions.
All of these so-called wines tasted absolutely fucking terrible—like syrupy-sweet cough medicine—but no one was drinking them for their flavor or how nicely they complemented a fine Camembert. They were drunk straight from the bottle to “get the job done.” The Scots are born engineers, even in matters of intoxication.
Eldorado, then, was my baptism by fire, the wretched preamble to my life as an active alcoholic. Stuart Calhoun and I were fourteen when we first observed the Friday-night tradition of drinking alcohol in the woods behind the school before heading off to the local YMCA disco—Cumbernauld’s Studio 54 for the teenage fast set—and since the legal drinking age in Scotland is eighteen we obviously needed an older confederate to make the purchase for us. We wanted three cans of lager and a bottle of Woodpecker hard cider.
Enter Sandy Calhoun.
Stuart’s by-then legal older brother agreed, for a small fee, to be our buyer. We met him early on Friday night, about six p.m., just enough time for us to run home from school, take a bath, put on our ridiculous seventies trousers and our plastic-and-rubber platform shoes, and head out.
We both smelled of acne cream, hair gel, and way too much Brut aftershave when we connected with Sandy outside of Templeton’s, the only supermarket in a twenty-mile radius. Templeton’s had a wine and spirits section, off limits to us but not to Sandy. He tookour cash and we waited outside in the gloomy drizzle. In Scotland it gets dark about four p.m. in the winter.
We waited for what seemed like an hour but was probably closer to five minutes before Sandy returned with the “kerryoot.” Kerryoot is Scottish slang for, literally, “carryout” food or drink purchased in one place and then carried out to be consumed elsewhere, although it almost always means alcohol and you would be very unwelcome at most house parties if you did not arrive with a kerryoot. Our kerryoot that night was not the beer and cider we asked for. Sandy gave some flimsy story about none being available, so he got us a bottle of El-D
I still have dreams where I see the driver’s face.
9
Eldorado
W illiam Blake wrote that “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,” and I suppose for me this turned out to be sort of true, although in my case I wouldn’t call it a palace, more a studio apartment. Or maybe just a cabin of understanding rather than wisdom. If I had known just how convoluted and scary the journey to my little shed of enlightenment would be, I don’t think I would have embarked on it in the first place. Not that I had any idea that’s what I was doing. I just wanted to live in America and be cool and have adventures.
It began with Eldorado. Not the lost city of gold. Another one.
Eldorado, affectionately known as El-D, was a cheap fortified wine favored by low-end derelicts in Scotland in the 1970s and eighties. It was imported from South Africa in a flagrant disregard of the antiapartheid embargo. Not that many people who drank El-D really concerned themselves with the injustices of the political situation in the deep south of the Dark Continent. Anyone who drank El-D on a regular basis was dealing with a whole mountain of trouble closer to home, generally known as chronic alcoholism. El-D and its lessromantically named competitors, Four Crown and Scotsmac (“The Bam’s Dram”), were dark, sherrylike wines laced with cheap rum, and they had the approximate octane rating of aviation gasoline. Buckfast, a similar rocket fuel from Buckfast Abbey in England, was another brand but kind of off limits for my clique since it was made by monks, and monks are, of course, Catholic. I myself have drunk Buckfast, though, and if Catholics have been drinking this stuff throughout history, that would certainly go a long way toward explaining the luminosity of some saintly visions.
All of these so-called wines tasted absolutely fucking terrible—like syrupy-sweet cough medicine—but no one was drinking them for their flavor or how nicely they complemented a fine Camembert. They were drunk straight from the bottle to “get the job done.” The Scots are born engineers, even in matters of intoxication.
Eldorado, then, was my baptism by fire, the wretched preamble to my life as an active alcoholic. Stuart Calhoun and I were fourteen when we first observed the Friday-night tradition of drinking alcohol in the woods behind the school before heading off to the local YMCA disco—Cumbernauld’s Studio 54 for the teenage fast set—and since the legal drinking age in Scotland is eighteen we obviously needed an older confederate to make the purchase for us. We wanted three cans of lager and a bottle of Woodpecker hard cider.
Enter Sandy Calhoun.
Stuart’s by-then legal older brother agreed, for a small fee, to be our buyer. We met him early on Friday night, about six p.m., just enough time for us to run home from school, take a bath, put on our ridiculous seventies trousers and our plastic-and-rubber platform shoes, and head out.
We both smelled of acne cream, hair gel, and way too much Brut aftershave when we connected with Sandy outside of Templeton’s, the only supermarket in a twenty-mile radius. Templeton’s had a wine and spirits section, off limits to us but not to Sandy. He tookour cash and we waited outside in the gloomy drizzle. In Scotland it gets dark about four p.m. in the winter.
We waited for what seemed like an hour but was probably closer to five minutes before Sandy returned with the “kerryoot.” Kerryoot is Scottish slang for, literally, “carryout” food or drink purchased in one place and then carried out to be consumed elsewhere, although it almost always means alcohol and you would be very unwelcome at most house parties if you did not arrive with a kerryoot. Our kerryoot that night was not the beer and cider we asked for. Sandy gave some flimsy story about none being available, so he got us a bottle of El-D
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