Free The Poisoner's Handbook by Deborah Blum Page B

two dollars a bottle. “The speakeasies are a remarkable feature of the new American life,” wrote one fascinated British visitor.
    Every time you go for a drink there is adventure. I suppose it adds to one’s pleasure to change into a pirate or a dark character entering a smuggler’s cave. You go to locked and chained doors. Eyes are considering you through peepholes in the wooden walls . . . You sign your name in a book and receive a mysterious-looking card with only a number on it. And you are admitted to a back-parlour bar with a long row of loquacious drinkers. There may be a red signal light which can be operated from the door in case of a revenue officer or police demanding entrance.

    When the light flashed over the front door, the patrons fled out the back.
    By summer’s end, a bare half-year into the new amendment, New York officials were already worrying about enforcement. In August a Brooklyn magistrate presided over the trial of a burglar who had broken into a supposedly closed saloon and spent a night guzzling its gin supplies. The judge vented his frustration: “Prohibition is a joke. It has deprived the poor workingman of his beer and it has flooded the country with rat poison.” Police department chemists, analyzing the so-called gin in the Brooklyn bar and around the city, reported that much of it was industrial alcohol, redistilled to try to remove the wood alcohol content. The redistilling was not notably successful. The poisonous alcohol remained, and there was more: the chemists had detected traces of kerosene and mercury and disinfectants, including Lysol and carbolic acid, in the beverages. “Drinkers are taking long chances on their health,” warned the police commissioner, “if not their lives.”
     
     
    BUT FOR THE new speakeasy devotees, the risk was part of the fun. Sometimes it was all the fun. It was amusing and exotic, as the British writer noted, to spend time in the dim light and hot jazz of some hidden corner, to experiment with the strange liquids that appeared at the table. Another groggy patron wrote, about a night of clubbing: the bartender “brought me some Benedictine and the bottle was right. But the liqueur was curious—transparent at the top of the glass, yellowish in the middle and brown at the base . . . Oh, what dreams seemed to result from drinking it . . . That is the bane of speakeasy life. You ring up your friend the next morning to find out whether he is still alive.”
    At the underground clubs, inventive bartenders enjoyed new respect for disguising the taste of the day’s alcohol. They created a new generation of cocktails heavy on fruit juices and liqueurs to mix with the bathtub gin, bright and spicy additions to cover the raw sting of the spirits. There was the Bennett Cocktail (gin, lime juice, bitters), the Bee’s Knees (gin, honey, lemon juice), the Gin Fizz (gin, lemon juice, sugar, seltzer water), and the Southside (lemon juice, sugar syrup, mint leaves, gin, seltzer water).
    At least, those were the kind of drinks served at the city’s classier joints—say Jack and Charlie’s 21, on 52nd Street. Or Belle Guinan’s El Fay Club on West 45th, where the hostess gleamed like a candelabrum and the house band played “The Prisoner’s Song” when dry agents were spotted in the crowd. Down in the Bowery, as the police could tell you, the drink of choice was a cloudy cocktail called Smoke, made by mixing water and fuel alcohol. Smoke joints were tucked into the back of paint stores, drugstores, and markets, among the dry goods and the stacked cans. The drink was blessedly cheap—fifteen cents a glass—and just about pure methyl alcohol.
    In a bad season, Smoke deaths in the Bowery averaged one a day. Government agents trying to hunt down suppliers of the poor man’s cocktail swore that it was served right from cans stenciled with the word POISON—and that people didn’t care. They just gambled that it wouldn’t kill them and drank it