Word: mescal
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...year before. On the Day of the Dead, 1938, she suddenly returns, but it becomes increasingly clear that there is no way that he can respond to her, no way that he can free himself even for a day from the lure of the quasi-hallucinogenic Mexican drink, mescal. Near the end of the day, the consul stumbles away from his wife into the bar which has harbored his deepest depressions and his most hopeless binges. There he meets a group of Mexican fascists who accuse him of spying for the Spanish Loyalists, and then shoot him moments later, half...
More than half a century ago, the noted American neurologist, Weir Mitchell, chewed some of the mescal buttons of the peyote cactus and reported that he felt "as if the unseen millions of the Milky Way were to flow in a sparkling river before my eyes." He predicted "a perilous reign of the mescal habit when this agent becomes attainable." To some, it seems that the perilous reign has begun-not through Mitchell's bitter buttons but through their enormously more powerful relative, lysergic acid diethylamide...
...geography of Dante's inferno was fixed. As a 14th century Florentine, he knew it was somewhere under Tuscany. For Malcolm Lowry, a 20th century mystic, it lay under the volcano that looks down on Cuernavaca in Mexico and inside a bottle of mescal, a drink as hallucinatory, it seems, as mescaline, a drug which is also derived from the maguey cactus...
...Land. But his burly rugger player's build survived both external abuse and the internal erosion of mescal; booze left unbleared a blazing eye. A woman turned up who would (he wrote) "share conditions which make Gorki's Lower Depths look like a drawing-room comedy," and who loved him, tidied his papers, married him, and cosseted his hangovers until he died. She was Margerie Bonner, an actress turned writer, to whose own person and work Lowry remained steadfastly protective (even when she was clearly protecting him). His father's money got him out of Mexico into...
...even swimming the notorious Yellowstone River (" Tis such a suck to it that to sink is a gone fawn skin") with his bunch of cattle. The work was hard, McCauley recalls, but the company was cheerful. After a rugged day on the trail, there was hot grub and mescal liquor to pleasure a person, and down Mexico way there were bullfights too-though it did "look like a man was getting tola-ble low to fight a duel with a bull when he could easy get out of it." Now and then the cowpoke got to a big city...