For a few summers when I was a kid, I spent nearly every day in my grandmother’s Long Island bar and grill. Local barflies played checkers with me and taught me how to play chess. They’d clock my Spider-Man comics and talk about their own favorite childhood superheroes, pick songs I’d never heard on the juke box and spin long monologues about them, share their war stories—literal and figurative.
It was at that bar, shortly after my grandmother opened the doors in the late morning, that I saw my first bloody mary.
As a kid, even a kid from a family of hard drinkers, the entire world of cocktails seemed totally bizarre to me. My mother and my grandfather would occasionally give me a little sip of something they were drinking just to laugh at the awful faces I made. Why would they drink this stuff when Hawaiian Punch and Capri-Sun were available to them? But I’d never in my life seen something as strange and disturbing as tomato juice, vodka, lemon, spices, hot sauce, and Worcestershire…