MAN ABOUT TOWN
TEXT
JACKSON BIKO
ART
MOVIN WERE
STICKING
TO WHISKY
Jackson Biko, is a lover of whisky and
people watching. He likes to walk the
shadows of the city at dusk, picking
conversations of a people spurred by the
night and by their drink.
O
nce upon a time I used
to drink wine. Red wine,
to be precise. I drank it
after I had tried beer with
little success to show for
it but a bad after-taste. Plus beer
tastes like teenage curfew. Wine
offered that reconciliatory half-way;
it had alcohol and yet it tasted not
so bad, especially if you had a dry
red. My only problem was the glass.
It’s well and good when you are on
a dinner table, nursing your glass of
red but when you are out in the club,
amongst folk drinking whisky and
cognacs and champagne, you don’t
want to be the bloke holding the
thin stem. It certainly doesn’t make
the girls want to pinch your biceps
flirtatiously. You aren’t any different
from the guys who drink liqueurs.
Folk will judge you. They suspect that
you are a rookie drinker, who is too
shy to sit with his tonic water and so
decides to get a glass of wine to fit
in. It makes you slightly effeminate.
But I didn’t care. In fact, I cared
about the hangovers more, but
more on that later. When you go
against the grain and your friends
make fun of you, calling you Jacky
(from Jackson), and they ask you if
you want a packet of tampons with
your shiraz and everybody around
the table guffaws and slaps your
back, you sort of know that you have
distinguished yourself. Especially
when you ignore the bullying and go
ahead and ask the waiter if they have
a blend of cabernet sauvignon and
merlot. Drinking wine just wasn’t a
drink for me, it made me stand apart,
alone on this path less trodden by
men. I realised that at some point I
was drinking to prove that I would
not bow to peer pressure. In the
meantime I was always trying out
new drinks to find my “taste.” What
broke the camel’s back eventually
was the wine-induced hangovers.
There is that myth out there that
only bad wine induces a hangover.
It’s a sham.