CRAFT by Under My Host® Issue No. 15 Classics | Page 44
WHISKEY RECIPE:
THE OUTLAW
It’s like what that rock and roll monster Bon Jovi said: “I’m a cowboy, on a steel horse I ride / I’m
wanted dead or alive.” Or how Charles Manson’s followers cut a fetus out of that movie star’s still
warm belly. No, not like that at all. More like Bonnie and Clyde falling in love and bank robbing
and being like, “Fuck all y’all and all y’alls motherfucking rules.” It’s like bad guys who are really
good guys on the inside, who can’t help being essentially good but who also have to kill people
sometimes or skin them alive—if and only if the other essentially bad people totally deserve it. Or
maybe it’s not like that. Maybe it’s like Duke Mantee, Bogart’s character in Petrified Forest, finally
letting lose and killing the effeminate poet played by Leslie Howard, who keeps saying, “Kill me,
Duke,” until Duke finally does kill him. It’s like Clint Eastwood on the screen, not the boor he’s
come to play offscreen. It’s like the idea of Jesse James, but not the horror of Jesse James—massa-
cring all those people in Lawrence, Kansas with Bloody Bill Anderson, slaughtering hundreds of
men and boys in cold blood. Or maybe it’s exactly like that.
MAKES 2 COCKTAILS
Black hats, white hats, guitars, peacemakers, gats, tommy guns, heaters, horses, dames, bullwhips,
schoolmarms, horse whips, heroin, Apple products, skateboards, surfboards, waterboards, motor-
cycles, tattoos, the dark web
Whiskey
Bitters
Sweet vermouth
2 cherries
1. Put all the shit on the table and make a Manhattan. Don’t say anything. Ever. Don’t ever
say anything again. If you’re really as bad as you need to be, you’re horrible. And if you’re
not that bad, you’re a pretender. Sorry. You’re stuck. You can’t really be as good as you
want to be if you’re as bad as you want to be. Killing Bon Jovi isn’t an option. Hole up in
your hotel room and wait. Sip your drink. If you make this correctly, it won’t end well,
but cheer up. Someday somebody’ll write a song about you.
*(c)2017 by Kate Lebo and Samuel Ligon. All rights reserved. Excerpted from Pie & Whiskey by permission of Sasquatch Books.