#westvleteren | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

thewestern · 11 months

Text

Chapter 19:2

Whereas in many respects the Phish business plan — or lack thereof — was built to spec on the Grateful Dead’s blueprint, there is one major exception wherein the student became the master. That is Music Festivals, a space in which Phish was a trailblazer. Their jam-flow elders, meanwhile, never quite found their footing with the festival format. But how can this be? After all, the Grateful Dead played the granddaddy of them all — we’re talking about Woodstock here. Well, their by-all-accounts-forgettable set opened with one of the band members electrocuting himself with his guitar. What had happend was, Bear Stanley thought the festival PA system was some amateurish bullshit, so he spent Soundcheck doing some on-the-fly fiddling with the wiring on the amplifiers. And then it started raining. Playing the first few bars of the opening song — a rare Saint Stephen, and perhaps now we know why — Bobby recalled feeling a distinct tingling sensation, right before his rig blew him ten feet back across the fucking stage.

So Woodstock could have gone better, but the boys remained steadfast. Beside, everybody knows the Grateful Dead are a California band. Which is to say these East Coast cats weren’t yet hip to their jive. Naturally, then the question became: what if there were a Woodstock West? Enter: Altamont.

Not much to relitigate, really. Hippie speed freak charges the stage, brandishing a .38 Special. Beer-drunk biker fascist dude stabs him three times in the back. Party’s over.

(It was always Jerry who had the hard-on for those wannabe outlaw assholes. Nobody else in the family wanted them around, picking fights with the men, and copping feels from the women. Not to mention the work they could do on a backstage buffet. But, hey, Garcia insisted, and this was his rodeo. To him, the whole wave they were riding at that time was about Freedom, with a capital fucking f. And they, The Angels, were Freedom Personified, he said. Whatever the hell that means.)

The licensing agreement between Saints Sixtus and Bernardus expired in the early nineties. Both parties would probably have been pleased to extend their symbiotic business arrangement, were it not for those tight asses at the Brotherhood of Holy Brewers. Around that time they were creating an unofficially official industry standard for designating authentic Trappist breweries, as opposed to plain old abbey breweries. It heretofore mandated that all monastic brewing take place in an accredited monastery, to be performed by gen-u-ine monks. So the free ride to total consciousness was over for the everly pious brothers of Saint Sixtus, just as the gravy train had reached its final destination for the contract brewers at Saint Bernardus. Though there were no hard feelings between them. For a fact, Saint Bernardus was allowed to keep the recipes and the famous Sixtus yeast strain, just so long as they gave back the Westvleteren Brewery brand name. They were even allowed to keep the picture of the monk on the bottle. Although they had to take off his little yarmulke and his special tunic. Still looked like any other monk you ever did see. Brown-robed, donut-headed, Friar Tuck-looking mother fucker. On the Christmas Ale label he’s got a little Santa hat to cover up his bald spot.

Mayor Mockingbird (cat) didn’t show much enthusiasm for anything apart from licking himself and torture killing the odd rodent. Brewing, certainly, the kitten did not much care for it. Whenever the hoses turned on, he took off. But, for some reason, that cycloptic little feline loved the forklift. He’d hear it beeping and coming running. Hop on Grace’s lap and lean his little paws up on the steering wheel — Seven and Five. The way Wilhelm II would let Hildy drive on his lap around the dirt roads down on the ranch. Her kid brother Ernie rode shotgun. He was still too small to see over the dash, but he cherished the memory always, as if someday it was still going to be his turn. Hildegard hadn’t thought about it in years. For a fact, she had almost no memory of her father. Not as he lived. Grace, never the sentimentalist herself, nonetheless thought this to be the cutest possible violation of occupational health and safety protocol. She even wanted to get Larry Cat his own little yellow hard hat.

Here’s a thesis: from Amy’s Farm to Big Cypress, Phish pioneered the modern music festival.

But … somewhere in between, was the beginning of the end. He was called Clifford Ball.

Pleased to meet you

Hope you guessed my name

It all started out with the best of intentions, like these things so often do. They were going to Build Something, (Gestures) Out There. Plattsburgh, New York, specifically, would be the place. A short hop and a skip across Lake Champlain from Burlington, their beloved Vermont home. The venue, such as it was: a decommissioned Air Force base. Back in its heyday, about eighteen months before the Altamont Free Festival, a B-52 bomber had took off from right there, on a Hard Head mission, part of Operation Chrome Dome. (Again, what pervert is naming all this stuff?) Before it could reach the edge of Soviet airspace, where it would maintain a perimeter of first-strike capability, a cabin fire sent this Stratofortress into a tailspin, corkscrewing into the icy depths off the coast of Greenland and dumping its ruptured payload of four thermonuclear bombs into the North Star Bay. Anyway, that was thirty fucking years ago. There hasn’t been a Broken Arrow incident since, not counting that shit sandwich in Damascus. (Arkansas, not Syria.) By now the Cold War was ancient history. We were ramping down our strategic defenses. And did anybody think about what effect that would have on the fine people of Plattsburgh? No they did not. Because it would take another thirty years to recover the economic loss wrought by the base closure, per the official estimate of the Clinton County comptroller. But then along comes these four hippie goofballs from across the lake. And damn if they don’t make up the deficit fivefold in a fucking weekend. Seventy thousand concertgoers descend, sextupling the local population. They build their own popup city, complete with campgrounds, food vendors, a town square, provocative art installations, free parking as far as the eye could see and two thousand port-a-toilets. There’s a Clifford Ball Chapel, where two wooks have a tie-dye wedding. No amount of Internet research can confirm whether they’re still married, but you can still watch the ceremony online. The first comment reads: My first Son was conceived at the Clifford Ball. Good times. Quite. Come to think of it, everybody knows how four kids died at Altamont Speedway. (The aforementioned fatal stabbing, plus two victims of a hit-and-run, as well as an LSD-induced drowning in an irrigation ditch, makes four.) However, according to the American Red Cross there were also four babies born that day at the festival. So in terms of net life lost, it was a wash.

The Mick was doing paperwork — POs on the HIHA. He didn’t get to ride the forklift so much anymore, what with all this desk job bullshit, come fallen into his lap. Managing the accounts as they fluttered away like leaves with the changing of the seasons. Considerable fewer stops for Skip, the Newfy’s longtime delivery driver. He was getting up there, though. Probably for the best. Topher SKIP Engel had used to be Hank’s mailman, as well as he was his weed dealer. How about that for convenience? Door-to-door service, before that was the expectation. Nowadays you can get blood or semen — whatever your pleasure — delivered same-day. Anyhow Skip would have held out for that sweet postal service pension were it not for President Pudding-For-Brains implementing mandatory drug screening for all federal employees. Clean piss was much harder to come by back then in the late eighties, so urinalyses were a non-starter. (By the mid-nineties, pee was everywhere. Yellow piss, clear piss, pregnant piss. All kinds.) To hell with it. He had his pastoral ideal of the postman — Charlie Utter, Cliff Calvin, Karl Malone. The old Pony Express. Whatever he was now, it wasn’t that. Not even in the same zip code. By then hardly all they were delivering by the U.S. mail was out-and-out junk. Scams for cash sweepstakes you didn’t stand a snowball’s chance in heck of winning. Catalogs for crap you couldn’t afford unless by some miracle you did. He didn’t want to be a party to the demise of such a storied public institution anyhow.

Well, so it goes how one door closes. Because it just so happened that the Newfy were outgrowing Mary Ellen Moffett’s station wagon, what with the exponential growth of the Distribution Co-op. So Hank made the capital expenditure investment of a new delivery vehicle. And dammit if he didn’t buy a Grumman LLV — a mother fucking mail truck for all you laymen. Not Skip’s old rig, per say, but one just like it. Naturally Hank offered his old buddy the gig driving it, on the condition that he continue to sell to him on the side from his private stash; in addition to being a distributor and retailer of cannabis products, Skip was himself a manufacturer. This in his capacity as a pharmaceutical botanist, which was the term he preferred. After some terse negotiation, Skip accepted. He’d been zig-zagging the state in that POS ever since. (It was a POS, but Hank had his reasons for buying it. Two of them. First: it should come as no surprise that they’re fucking indestructible as a Sherman tank, which is how come they so rarely appear on the auction block. Therefore, if they do go up for sale, you basically have no choice but to buy it. Also, of all commercial vehicles, the mail truck bears the closest passing resemblance to the Space Shuttle, with the sort of snub nose. Hank’d since come around on the whole astronaut thing. The Mick hand painted their ripoff of the NASA insignia with the letters NEWFY swapped in that outer-spacey, red font.) Though he wasn’t a prideful sort, Skip would go on to take immense personal satisfaction in crossing the CDL million-miler rubicon. Even though he would’ve never said so to his colleagues, they all knew how much it meant to him, so there was a little ceremony for him at the bar. Hank hand-made him a medal (a gold medal), and hung it around his neck like Chewbacca. Skip affixed it onto the rearview mirror. The Mick even brewed a commemorative beer to mark the occasion. Two Trips to the Moon and Back. A Belgian-style dubbel. (For those of you wondering, should a prolific grower and smoker of Marijuana have a job driving six thousand pounds of sin up and down the highway … grow up. Skip had the reflexes and the hands-free hygiene routine of a cat. That’s why they called him Whiskers.) Per the American beer writer Jeff Alworth in his reference tome, The Beer Bible (Workman, 2015), the Westvleteren beers brewed at Saint Sixtus remain undoubtedly the most coveted in the world. This is because they refuse to scale their operation to meet demand. There are only two places to get Westvleteren beer — by the glass at the lovely monastery cafe, or by the crate on the loading dock. (Limit one per customer for the latter. No telling if you’ll see a monk driving a forklift. Flowing robes and open-toed shoes would constitute an OSHA double whammy.) Saint Bernardus beers are also quite well renowned in their own right, but they’re distributed all over the world. Not that they’re necessarily easy to find. If you’re curious, best bet for copping is if your town has one of them wine and spirits warehouse superstores, where you get a full-on shopping cart, like you’re doing the supermarket sweep with plastic handles of hard liquor. They might could have Christmas Ale or Abt 12 stocked in the Imports aisle. That, or if there’s a fancy liquor store in the rich neighborhood with the good schools, where the guy behind the register has a goatee and knows about what natural wines pair best with which gamey meats. Just ask him. Never mind. He’ll come out an tell you. Unsolicited. There he is behind you.

Those bougie-ass Bottle Shops, as they’re so called, were always Hank’s bread and butter. Bar accounts were always the harder nut to crack. (First rule of beer distribution: there’s a lot more shelf space than there are bar taps. Allocate your time accordingly.) He’d ride all over with a handheld cooler that he rigged up with a miniature tap, pouring little sampler glasses in tiny red plastic cups abot the size of shot glasses. If they liked the merchandise and the price was right, Skip would step in to fulfill the order. Used to be when the limited edition SKUs would come out, such as Home Invasion Holiday Ale, the most hopeless of the beer dorks — we’re talking the real sickos here — would call ahead to those fancy liquor stores to see who was getting what and when. Then word would get out on the message boards or however else those life forms communicate. Fucking, nerd telepathy. Then they’d all set up camp there, in a strip mall out front of some mom-and-pop wine and spirits store in the middle of the damn afternoon on a workday. Could be dead of winter. Didn’t matter. Was it a bit like a scavenger hunt for grown-ups? (Pokemon Go … to the polls!) Skip would see them sitting there on the curb, Indian style, and think well isn’t that the damnedest thing. They would gawk at him as he rolled the dolly by, mouths even more agape than usual. Did it make him proud to be delivering something so coveted after? No, not really. To reiterate, he wasn’t a prideful man, apart for when he was awarded that gold medal for driving that millionth mile. Fucking a, that was something. Otherwise, he’d deliver horse shit and do it happily. Just so long as it was honest work, as in the shit came direct from the horse’s ass. That, the check cleared and the truck had an AM/FM radio.

#novls of tumblr

0 notes