Desk Whiskey

I wrote this well over ten years ago, and it’s been one of my readers’ favorite pieces. People still bring it up when we talk. That’s pleasing, because it was just a little bagatelle, a piece I knocked out one afternoon with a minimum of research, just running down a few good quotes (and there were plenty of good ones; hell, I could have done the whole piece with quotes from Robert S. Parker’s Spenser novels).

It still applies, though I’ll make notes [where things are different today]. The only reason — okay, there are actually two reasons why I don’t have a ‘desk bottle’ these days. First, my desk doesn’t have drawers. I found that I tended to put things in them and never look at them again, so I got a desk without drawers. (So now I pile things up on the top of the desk and never look at them again.) Second, obviously…I’ve got bottles of whiskey all over the place anyway; there are currently over 30 I can reach without even standing up at my chair, so a desk bottle would be redundant!

Please enjoy this resurrected bit of fun.

There's a lot of talk these days of how whiskey's back; back in sales, back in fashion, back in cocktails [obviously, we're now in a situation where whiskey has peaked and is slipping, but…as I said earlier, it’s not going away]. It's great, and it means we can find good whiskey in so many more places, more than just the same five bottles — Jack, Jim, Johnnie, Jameson, and Crown — and almost every town of any size has a specialist bar. Whiskey's on television, it's in the movies, it's all over the gosh-darn Internet of course.

But there's one place where it's not “back” like it was, and that's a shame; the desk drawer.

The bottle in the desk drawer was a staple of hard-boiled fiction, like this:

“He opened his desk drawer and lifted three glasses out of it and a bottle of imported scotch whiskey [sic]. 'You two care for a spot of nerve medicine?' he asked as he began to pour himself a shot from the bottle.” — The Destitute, by T.R. Hawes

“I took the bottle of Dewar's out of my desk drawer and put it on the desk along with a lowball glass. He took a couple of deep breaths as if to steady himself and carefully poured some.” — Sixkill, by Robert B. Parker

It wasn't just private eyes, either.

“Now I moved to the third drawer, the bottom, where hard-boiled detectives keep pistols and hard-boiled editors keep whiskey bottles and hard-boiled reporters keep novel manuscripts.” — Gone Tomorrow, by P.F. Kluge

Why, even my boss back when I was a librarian (it's true; in a former life I was a librarian) at the Armor School Library at Fort Knox kept a bottle of Maker's in the bottom right-hand drawer of his government-issue gray steel desk. Friday afternoons when it got toward quitting time after we'd had a long week of eager-beaver lieutenants and budget-cutting majors, Bill would catch my eye and broadly beckon me into the office.

He'd pull open the drawer, all the way, and reach in behind the hanging files of staff evaluations and loony letters (every library has them), and pull out the bottle and two glasses. “Pull up a chair,” he'd always say, and pour two glasses; no water, no ice, just two stiff pours of Loretto's finest.

We'd discuss the week, or the lieutenants and the majors, or the weather, and relax. We never had more than one, and we didn't do it every week, and once or twice we did it during the week, when things were particularly stressful or rewarding. But the bottle was always there.

I don't believe many people have a desk bottle anymore. Because as much as whiskey is back, it's still not okay to drink it.

I remember telling people I loved landing at the airport in Louisville because folks there didn't giggle when I said “bourbon.” That's not such a problem anymore (some people react with a reflexive “Pappy!”, but I can get past that), but I'll tell you, if you suggest having one drink at lunch...people look at you like you're crazy, and they do giggle.

One drink? Open up the drawer, pull out the bottle — it doesn't have to be anything amazing, because it's going to sit in there, and you don't know who might be in the office — grab two glasses and wipe them out with paper towels, and there you have an oasis in your day. One drink of whiskey.

What happens? You've brought another person into your confidence, you've strengthened a bond with them. There's no harm done, and if the company policy is ironclad on no drinking, well, maybe you're working for the wrong company. You've got a bottle in your desk, you've got something there to steady the brain and nerve the arm. Adults do this, and I believe that if we don't giggle about it, we're less likely to be silly about it.

“...think of Ed Asner, as news director Lou Grant, occasionally pulling a bottle out of the drawer on the Mary Tyler Moore Show in the 1970s. It didn't seem irresponsible at all, did it? It was the way it was in newsrooms.” — March 1939: Before the Madness, by Terry Frei

I am not saying you should start to drink on the job. But there are rituals to work, and there are rituals to whiskey. I’ll get Mr. Venn to draw you a diagram, and we can hang out in the intersection for a while.