This dissertation is the result of a question asked me by a lady dude the other day.
“What is mescal?” asked the lady dude. “A whiskey, a brandy, or a cordial?”
“Not any of them,” I answered. “Mescal is a hair transporter.”
The lady dude looked even dizzier than usual, so I went on to explain.
“Mescal is a liquid that knocks the hair off your head and sets it down on your chest.”
“Tell me more,” said the lady seductively, sitting down on her patio.
“Mescal,” I went on, “was discovered by a prospector ’forty years ago in Brewery Gulch. This bird wasn’t prospecting for gold or any commonplace thing like that—he was prospecting for the first umpire for the Arizona-Texas Baseball League. And so he hit the trail far out across the desert where he could find some sunblinded desert rat who wouldn’t be able to lamp a pitched ball or a close decision any too distinctively.
“Now after he had struck out for several days across the cactus, his mouth began to feel like he had swallowed his saddle blanket, and his innards began to feel like they were wrapped in cellophane, and he began to see mirages of the Brewery at the foot of the Gulch—so he figured he needed a drink. And there wasn’t any water around and no sign that it was going to rain until Bisbee’s Fiftieth Jubilee.
“So the prospector decided to boil the sap out of the mescal plants, which were the only things that were growing out on the desert. And after he had got a gallon of this cooked up, he wasn’t so sure about how it was going to set on his stomach. So he figured that he would set it out in a jug and try it out on the buzzards.
“Now in those days buzzards’ heads were black like the rest of their bodies, and they flew in a straight line like other birds, and their stomachs were as tough as a cowpuncher’s hat. But after the buzzards had started to strut around the jug and to guzzle up the liquor the prospector had boiled up, their heads got as red as ripe chili peppers and they began to fly around in great showy circles and those that had lapped up more of the hootch than the rest, would get sick to their stomachs with the usual trimmings. And that is why, to this day, buzzards’ heads are red, and why they soar over the desert in great loops, and why, when disturbed, they are likely to vomit suddenly all over the mesa. But to get back to the story.
“After the buzzards had called it a day, a lizard happened to come along and, putting his nose over the edge of the jug, he took a long snifter of the contents. After a moment of silence, the lizard cut loose with a string of whoops like those a bronc stomper lets loose just before he gets bucked off; and, looking up at the prostrate figure of the thirst-riddled prospector, the lizard picked him up by the arm and, slapping him resoundingly between the shoulders, roared like an outlaw barrel-chested bull.
‘Come on, big boy, let’s start for town.’
“The prospector stumbled towards the jug and put down the rest of the liquor. Then with a note of victory in his husky voice, he shouted back at the lizard.
“You tell ’em, pard. With three drinks of this stuff under my belt I’ll be seeing cockeyed enough to be an umpire myself.”
This is the story of how mescal came to the Southwest. And if I could bang off nifty poetry like Ned White, I would write one of the best folk stories about it of which we waddies could boast.
Stan Adler,
Y Lightning Ranch.
Brewery Gulch Gazette, Bisbee, AZ, September 25, 1931